Rick Beato: Greatest Guitarists of All Time, History & Future of Music | Lex Fridman Podcast #492

Summary

In this conversation, music educator and producer Rick Beato joins Lex Fridman to explore the mechanics, history, and profound emotional impact of music. Beato shares his belief that music is a sophisticated language best learned through early exposure, citing his son Dylan’s perfect pitch as a result of “high-information music” (such as Bach and complex jazz) played during infancy. They discuss the technical evolution of guitar playing, from the rhythmic innovations of Jimi Hendrix and the two-fingered virtuosity of Django Reinhardt to the “Gilmour effect,” where David Gilmour’s melodic phrasing and unique tone prioritize soul and space over technical speed. Beato emphasizes that while musical theory is essential, the physical “haptic” connection to an instrument and the initial joy of learning songs are the true drivers of long-term mastery.

The discussion shifts to the creative processes of legendary artists and the elusive “magic” found in iconic recordings. Beato provides insights into the improvisational genius of Miles Davis—who famously avoided rehearsals to capture raw “flow”—and the rapid songwriting abilities of Elton John. The conversation also touches on the tragic brilliance of Beethoven, who composed his Ninth Symphony while deaf, using his internal “perfect pitch” to hear complex orchestrations. Beato and Fridman reflect on how certain musical moments, like the drum break in Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” or the melancholy lyrics of Pearl Jam’s “Black,” connect with the human psyche by channeling loneliness, hope, and the “comfort of being sad.”

Finally, Beato addresses the modern musical landscape, specifically the rise of AI-generated music and the complexities of the digital business model. While acknowledging AI’s utility as an idea generator, Beato dismisses fully AI-created tracks as “boring slop” that lacks the authentic human “edge” and soulful imperfection listeners crave. He also discusses his ongoing battle with YouTube’s copyright system, advocating for fair use to protect educational content and musical celebration. Ultimately, Beato’s journey—transitioning from a behind-the-scenes producer to a legendary YouTube educator in his 50s—serves as a testament to the value of lifelong craft mastery and the enduring power of music as the essential soundtrack to the human experience.

Highlights

”Every Child Is Born with Perfect Pitch”

“Every child is born with perfect pitch and they start to lose the ability around nine months. They start out as citizens of the world, they have the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all 6,500 languages spoken on earth.” — Rick Beato, 9:00

yt-dlp --download-sections "*9:00-10:00" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SJiTwbSI58" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "perfect-pitch-theory.mp4"

”Thought Is the Enemy of Flow”

“He wanted people to just feel it, play it. Thought is the enemy of flow, as Vinnie Colaiuta told me.” — Rick Beato, 42:20

yt-dlp --download-sections "*42:20-43:10" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SJiTwbSI58" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "thought-enemy-of-flow.mp4"

”Metallica in Moscow: 1.5 Million People”

“This is their historic performance in Moscow in September of ‘91. This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed.” — Lex Fridman, 1:33:10

yt-dlp --download-sections "*1:33:10-1:34:10" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SJiTwbSI58" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "metallica-moscow.mp4"

”Beethoven Conducted His Ninth Symphony Deaf”

“You know, I didn’t really know the personal side about Beethoven until I saw this movie called Immortal Beloved… He went deaf before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony… he had to be turned around at the world premiere to see that the audience was applauding because he couldn’t hear them.” — Rick Beato, 1:36:03

yt-dlp --download-sections "*1:36:00-1:37:00" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SJiTwbSI58" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "beethoven-deaf.mp4"

”AI Music Is Fundamentally Boring”

“That’s why I’m not gonna use AI, Lex, is for that reason, because to me it’s just boring and when I use it it’s just like… It’s fundamentally boring.” — Rick Beato & Lex Fridman, 1:53:50

yt-dlp --download-sections "*1:53:50-1:54:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SJiTwbSI58" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "ai-music-boring.mp4"

”Somebody’s Gotta Be Successful, So Why Not You?”

“Somebody’s gotta be successful, so why can’t it be you? That was my… when I started my channel, I said, ‘I can do this.’” — Rick Beato, 2:24:00

yt-dlp --download-sections "*2:24:00-2:24:45" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SJiTwbSI58" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "somebody-gotta-be-successful.mp4"

Key Points

• First Guitar Solo Learned (0:44) - Rick learned Hey Joe by Hendrix, figuring out the E minor pentatonic scale by ear; his mom played rhythm chords so his brother John wouldn’t fight with him
• Django Reinhardt and Gypsy Jazz (4:57) - Django played incredibly fast lines with only two functioning fingers after a fire; everything he played was improvised
• Bebop Jazz Explained (6:28) - Charlie Parker and others created a more sophisticated musical language than the big band era; Rick’s non-musician father loved bebop records
• Perfect Pitch Theory (9:00) - Rick believes all babies are born with perfect pitch potential; prenatal and early exposure to high-information music develops it before the window closes around 9 months
• Learning Guitar Advice (15:23) - Start with beginner chords in first position, practice every day even just 10 minutes, learn songs first before theory
• Dylan’s Perfect Pitch Video (22:42) - The viral video of Dylan identifying complex polychords that launched Rick’s YouTube channel with 80 million views; he had a mouthful of candy while doing it
• Discovering Dylan’s Perfect Pitch (24:23) - At age two, Dylan sang back notes on FaceTime; by age four, he could identify the key of the Star Wars theme as B-flat; Rick taught him note names in five minutes
• High-Information Music for Babies (30:00) - Rick played Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Turkish pianist Aydin Esen’s music for Dylan starting at 15 weeks prenatally; engaged the social brain by making eye contact during listening
• Joe Pass and Virtuoso (32:00) - Rick spent months learning Joe Pass’s album Virtuoso by ear after his dad gave it to him in 10th grade; the struggle of figuring out chord inversions was essential to learning
• Miles Davis as Greatest Bandleader (38:13) - Miles was at the forefront of every major jazz style from Birth of the Cool to Bitches Brew; never rehearsed, believing thought is the enemy of flow
• Ron Carter on Recording with Miles (41:08) - Ron Carter told Rick they’d never rehearse; he’d just see a microphone appear in his bass amp and realize they were recording
• Flea’s Jazz Roots (42:30) - Flea’s stepfather was a jazz bass player; Flea grew up with jam sessions and is heavily influenced by bebop; the bass is the most important instrument because wrong notes are immediately noticed
• Greatest Guitar Solos (45:22) - Comfortably Numb as number one (on that day); also Hey Joe, Stairway to Heaven, Kid Charlemagne by Larry Carlton, Ice Cream Man by Van Halen
• David Gilmour’s Gear and Process (48:15) - Gilmour still uses the exact same equipment from the original Pink Floyd recordings; runs Pro Tools himself at home with no engineer; sometimes used an old Zoom 9030 modeling unit
• Recognizing Guitarists from One Note (59:37) - B.B. King, Brian May, Hendrix, Mark Knopfler can all be identified from a single note; Rick plans a video testing this
• Fluid vs. Crystallized Intelligence (1:13:00) - Peak creative output for rock musicians happens before age 30; the Beatles wrote three incredible albums in one year; Billy Corgan said the secret is dissonance (7ths and 9ths over chords)
• Elton John’s Songwriting (1:19:04) - Elton reads lyrics first and writes music to them in 15 minutes, the reverse of 99% of songwriters; there’s a video of him doing this live
• Metallica’s Moscow Concert (1:33:10) - Likely 1.5 million people before the Soviet Union collapsed; Metallica at the very top of their game meeting a civilization collapsing
• Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1:36:00) - Beethoven went deaf before writing his greatest work; had to be turned around at the premiere to see the standing ovation; plus Napoleon broke his heart
• Bach as Greatest Composer (1:42:42) - Every famous songwriter is influenced by Bach; he had 20 kids, lost parents by 10, wrote the most complex music in history
• AI in Music (1:47:48) - AI tools like Suno can generate decent songs but Rick’s kids instantly recognize it as AI and find it boring; musicians will use AI as an idea generator but it lacks soul
• Sabrina Carpenter Song Breakdown (1:59:18) - Modern hits have 10-11 credited songwriters and borrow melodies from older songs; Rick questions how this qualifies for Song of the Year
• YouTube Copyright Battles (2:03:00) - Labels would claim 100% of revenue from a 1-hour video for playing a 10-second clip; Rick hired a lawyer who won all claims
• Spotify Changed Music (2:08:00) - Music became a commodity; play counts create herd mentality; algorithm limits discovery compared to old radio DJs
• 100 Amplifiers (2:17:47) - Rick owns about 100 real amplifiers because each one does one thing really well; uses Neural DSP for amp sims; John Mayer just did a plugin with them
• Starting YouTube at 55 (2:24:00) - Rick’s theory: somebody’s gotta be successful, so why not you; the Dylan video was an accident; he taught himself video editing, interviewing, and thumbnails

Mentions

Companies

• YouTube (2:03:00) - Platform for Rick’s music education channel; copyright Content ID system discussed extensively
• Spotify (2:08:00) - Streaming platform that commodified music; shows play counts which creates herd mentality
• Apple/Apple Music (2:14:49) - Rick is Mac-only for music production
• Universal Music Group (UMG) (2:03:00) - One of the major labels claiming YouTube revenue
• Warner Music Group (WMG) (2:03:00) - Major label involved in copyright claims
• Suno (1:47:48) - AI music generation tool Rick tested extensively
• Neural DSP (2:17:14) - Amp simulation company; Rick did a video at their headquarters in Helsinki
• Perplexity (4:45) - Lex uses it to look up Django Reinhardt during the interview

Products & Technologies

• Pro Tools (2:14:49) - Industry standard DAW; Rick’s primary recording software
• Ableton Live (2:14:49) - DAW that Lex finds powerful but overwhelming
• Logic Pro (2:14:49) - Apple’s DAW; Billie Eilish and Finneas use it
• Neural DSP Amp Sims (2:17:14) - Digital amp modeling; John Mayer just did a plugin with them
• Bias FX (2:22:46) - Amp sim Lex uses (and is slightly embarrassed about)
• Gibson Les Paul (2:21:00) - Rick’s signature guitar is a double-cut Les Paul
• Fender Stratocaster (2:22:22) - Lex’s guitar; American Strat he fell in love with at first sight
• Zoom 9030 (49:55) - Old ’90s modeling unit David Gilmour sometimes used for recording instead of a real amp

People

• Rick Beato (0:00) - Music educator, producer, YouTube creator with millions of subscribers
• Dylan Beato (22:42) - Rick’s son with perfect pitch; the viral video subject at age eight
• Jimi Hendrix (0:44) - Referenced throughout as one of the greatest guitarists; Hey Joe was Rick’s first solo learned
• Django Reinhardt (4:57) - Gypsy jazz pioneer who played with two burned fingers
• Charlie Parker (6:28) - Main figure of early bebop jazz
• Miles Davis (38:13) - Greatest bandleader in jazz; started with Birth of the Cool, ended with Bitches Brew
• David Gilmour (45:22) - Pink Floyd guitarist; Rick interviewed him twice; still uses original gear
• Joe Pass (32:00) - Greatest bebop and solo guitar player; his album Virtuoso transformed Rick’s playing
• Ron Carter (41:08) - Jazz bassist who played on 2,200 recordings; told Rick about recording with Miles
• Mark Knopfler (59:15) - Dire Straits guitarist; Rick says he gets the most beautiful sound from one note
• Flea (42:30) - Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist; stepfather was a jazz musician; heavily influenced by bebop
• Elton John (1:19:04) - Met Rick at a recording studio; writes music to lyrics in 15 minutes
• James Hetfield (1:22:18) - Metallica frontman; master of downpicking technique
• Tom Waits (1:27:23) - Rick’s dream interview guest; brilliant songwriter
• Beethoven (1:36:00) - Composed Ninth Symphony while deaf; Napoleon broke his heart
• Bach (1:42:42) - Greatest composer of all time according to Rick; had 20 kids, lost parents by 10
• John Mayer (2:22:46) - Rick has known him since he got signed; just did a Neural DSP plugin
• Freddie Mercury (1:32:18) - Probably the number one greatest rock frontman of all time
• Rick Rubin (1:03:42) - Producer Rick has interviewed; can discuss records across multiple artists
• Brian May (59:15) - Queen guitarist; incredibly melodic tone
• Kurt Cobain (1:14:37) - Part of the 27 Club; wrote “I find it hard, it’s hard to find, the comfort of being sad”
• Eddie Vedder (1:33:47) - Pearl Jam frontman; one of the greatest vocalists
• Billy Corgan (1:27:23) - Told Rick the secret is dissonance — using 7ths and 9ths over chords
• Patricia Kuhl (9:08) - Language researcher whose TED talk on “the linguistic genius of babies” inspired Rick’s perfect pitch theory
• Vinnie Colaiuta (42:20) - Drummer who told Rick “thought is the enemy of flow”

Surprising Quotes

“I have 100 amplifiers. Real amplifiers. Everything does one thing really well. I’m down to 100. I can get by with probably 75.” — Rick Beato, 2:17:47

“Somebody’s gotta be successful, so why can’t it be you? That was my… when I started my channel, I said, ‘I can do this.’” — Rick Beato, 2:24:00

“Eric Clapton was married for a decade to Patti Boyd, the same woman that George Harrison was in love with. And that this woman was the inspiration for so many legendary songs, including Layla and Something.” — Rick Beato, 1:05:09

“Miles was always about — thought is the enemy of flow. Ron Carter told me they’d never rehearse. Miles would just put charts on the stand and say go. Maybe I’d see a microphone in my bass amp. I’d see it, and I was like, ‘Oh, we’re recording.’” — Rick Beato, 41:08

“He went deaf before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, one of the greatest compositions of all time. He had to be turned around at the world premiere to see that the audience was applauding because he couldn’t hear them.” — Rick Beato, 1:36:03

Transcript

Lex Fridman: 0:00 The following is a conversation with Rick Beato, legendary music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter, and a true multi-instrument musician playing guitar, bass, cello, and piano. Rick with his incredible YouTube channel celebrates great musicians and musical ideas and helps millions of people including me fall in love with great music all over again. This is a Lex Fridman podcast, to support it please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here’s Rick Beato. You had I think an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music journey. I heard somewhere that one of the things that made you fall in love with music was listening to guitar solos, some epic guitar solos. What’s an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually, musically where you’re like ‘Wow, there’s magic in this’?

Rick Beato: 1:01 Well, the first solo that I learned was Hey Joe. It was actually a good beginner song, you know, when I first started playing the guitar because it has pretty simple chords, right? So it’s like E, C, G, D, A. And I learned the solo and I figured out this like ‘Oh see it’s this pentatonic scale, E minor pentatonic scale’. I didn’t know that’s what it was called but I learned this thing and it’s like whoa he’s just in this one shape here.

Lex Fridman: 1:21 Mm-hmm.

Rick Beato: 1:22 Now there was no, you couldn’t go look anything up. You just if you could figure out the notes, you noticed that there was a little pattern to it. And then I, I got so obsessed with it and I showed my younger brother John who started playing guitar right at the same time I did. So I was 14, he was 11. And I would play rhythm for him for five minutes while he would solo over Hey Joe. And then as soon as I’d start soloing, he’d throw the guitar down and then we’d get in a fight.

Lex Fridman: 1:53 Mm-hmm.

Rick Beato: 1:54 And so my mom eventually was like, ‘What is going on here?’ and I was like ‘John won’t play rhythm. John won’t play rhythm for me.’ She’s like ‘Okay, I’ll play rhythm for you. What are the chords?’ And I was like ‘Okay it’s like E, the C, G, D, A.’ And so my mom would literally play rhythm for 20 minutes while I’d play.

Lex Fridman: 2:09 #parenting. That’s amazing.

Rick Beato: 2:11 I when I look back on it now, my mom’s been gone for 10 years now and when I look back on it it’s like my god my parents were so cool. We should mention that Hey Joe and Hendrix in general is kind of known for the rhythm not being simple rhythm just the chords that you mentioned. It’s what you do with those chords. It’s almost improvisation on the rhythm side. He did all those really cool chord fragments, uh riffs and things like that that’s just part of his, that’s the Hendrix style. What do you think? I mean many people put Hendrix as the greatest guitarist of all time. What do you think is part of that?

Lex Fridman: 2:58 Please

Rick Beato: 3:00 You know, I I make lists.

Lex Fridman: 3:02 You do. If you somehow don’t know who Rick Beato is, go on YouTube right now and watch your excellent interviews with musicians, watch your breakdown analysis of different songs, and watch your top 20 lists where you’re very opinionated, sometimes very openly critical about certain kinds of songs. It’s fun. Opinions are fun.

Rick Beato: 3:27 But they do change, Lex, from day to day, you know. Like I, but anytime I I do a list, if I do 20, I like to do 20 because that gives me some leeway to throw in— I have to throw in something that is so weird that people, you know, something that a lot of people won’t know just to have it on there so I can at least introduce a pretty… I’ll put somebody like a Allan Holdsworth, who’s a famous fusion guitar player. I’ll throw in one of his solos or something, just some oddball solo in there just so that people as they’re listening down the list will get exposed to something they would not necessarily get exposed to.

Lex Fridman: 4:06 Yeah, a lot of variety, but Hendrix, did you show up here today, Rick, trying to tell me that Hendrix is not up there? I’m just getting that vibe right now.

Rick Beato: 4:17 No, I’m not. I would… but I don’t want it to say greatest, you know. You can say well, there are people that inspired Jimi Hendrix, Charlie Christian, older guitar players, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt were the first two really big, and probably and Andrés Segovia were three of the giants of the 20th century as far as guitar influences for most of the players that were to follow.

Lex Fridman: 4:45 So here on Perplexity, Django Reinhardt was of course a jazz guitarist and composer active mainly in France, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in jazz history.

Rick Beato: 4:57 So Django was… well, there’s a huge movement right now, Gypsy jazz movement as they call it, that is kind of built around the style of music that he played back in the early 20th century. One of the things about Django is that he was in a fire and he had two of his third and fourth finger, so his ring finger and pinky were essentially melted together. He had no use of them, although he could use them while he was chording, but a lot of these incredibly fast lines, he’s just playing with two fingers. And it’s amazing.

Lex Fridman: 5:44 That… what is that? So that’s Gypsy jazz?

Rick Beato: 5:49 That’s Gypsy jazz, yeah. Him, Stéphane Grappelli was a violinist that played with him a lot.

Lex Fridman: 5:54 How much of this is uh improvised?

Rick Beato: 6:00 Improvisation. Everything he’s doing there is improvised.

Lex Fridman: 6:03 It feels so free.

Rick Beato: 6:07 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 6:08 And fun, like swing. And then that leads to, uh, you said, bebop. So bebop was a kind of jazz that was also influential on you and your own life journey, and it’s this complicated, legendary kind of jazz that was very influential on the music that followed. So what—what was bebop?

Rick Beato: 6:28 Well, after the—the big bands were happening in the, you know, from the 20s through the 40s, uh, small—people would go out and play in small groups that they would tour with. And Charlie Parker, who’s really kind of the—one of the main figures of early bebop, really developed the language of it. Usually, the music that they’re playing over are standard chord progressions that—that they would use as vehicles to improvise over. A lot of them were AABA form. And Charlie Parker created this, uh, language of improvisation that was far more sophisticated than the swing players of the big band era. You know, think of people like Benny Goodman, uh, of that era. They would have really fast-tempo songs, angular lines, chromaticism, things like that, chromatic notes.

Lex Fridman: 7:25 Chromatic notes are just notes next to each other on a—on the fretboard?

Rick Beato: 7:27 I like to think of it as connecting notes.

Lex Fridman: 7:31 Connecting. You’re putting in more notes than are supposed to be there and in so doing creating some interesting texture.

Rick Beato: 7:35 Yeah, so that is one of the most difficult styles to master. Because all these things are a language—blues playing, they’re all just languages, right? It’s like—just like you’d learn any type of language. Um, my dad loved bebop. Now, when I was a little kid and he’s listening to these bebop records, whether it’s Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie or Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass—great jazz guitar player—I’m just hearing this stuff. I don’t know any different. My dad was not a musician, but for some reason he liked incredibly sophisticated music that was very technical. And, um, I just heard it and just was like, ‘Oh yeah, okay, cool,’ and not realizing that it was developing my ear. Because I really—bebop is one of the hardest to improvise in that style, in that language of bebop. It’s very difficult to do. And hearing it as a kid is one of the things that I think enables you, just like languages, enables you to learn it as opposed to somebody that’s never been exposed to it and tries to learn it as a teenager. I think it’s very similar to learning languages, which is kind of like my theory on perfect pitch, that every— Every child is born with perfect pitch and they start to lose the ability around nine months.

Lex Fridman: 9:04 Mhm.

Rick Beato: 9:05 When people become culturally bound listeners, when babies do.

Lex Fridman: 9:07 Mhm.

Rick Beato: 9:08 They start out as citizens of the world, you know, they have the phone the the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all 6500 languages spoken on earth. But then around nine months they begin to lose that ability and they when they become these culturally bound listeners. There’s a great YouTube video with this woman Patricia Kuhl, she’s a language researcher. And I watched this, the linguistic genius of babies. I saw this in 2010, this lecture that she did, like a TED talk. And she talks about this, that kids, they did an experiment, they exposed kids to Mandarin three times a week for 25-minute sessions, just a person speaking Mandarin to these babies. And they were able to recognize this sounds, the phonemes of that language even later on. And when I realized that my son Dylan had perfect pitch, I thought, why does Dylan have perfect pitch, but no one in my family had ever had perfect pitch? And I thought, well, it must be because of the things I exposed to him prenatally and then in the first nine months of his life, because that’s the only way I could explain it.

Lex Fridman: 10:28 We’re going to return to Joe Pass, we’ve got to go to Dylan. You mentioned Dylan, I guess that’s in part one of the origin stories of you putting out videos into the world is the early videos you did with Dylan, set of videos on his perfect pitch. And for people who don’t know, maybe you can speak to what perfect pitch means.

Rick Beato: 10:47 It’s the ability to identify any note without a reference tone. So um, you can play, it doesn’t matter how quickly they are, that a person with perfect pitch can hear a note and immediately identify it, or collection of notes.

Lex Fridman: 11:06 And taking a tangent upon a tangent, you also have a course on ear training.

Rick Beato: 11:15 Yes, but my course is for relative pitch, not to be confused with perfect pitch.

Lex Fridman: 11:20 Is it fair to say that relative pitch, as far as the thing you would learn, is more useful for musicians?

Rick Beato: 11:24 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 11:25 Can you explain the difference between the two?

Rick Beato: 11:27 Relative pitch is basically learning how to identify pitches relative to a stated tonic or something that you’ve heard, or just relative to each other. If you hear a note and then you hear another note after it, you can recognize, let’s say it’s a minor third interval. So if you’re on the note A, the next note would be C. So once you’re given a reference note, you can use relative pitch to identify the relative nature from one pitch to another. And of course intervals make up scales and intervals make up chords. And so that if you develop it to any degree, relative pitch, you can understand, you can start to understand what’s going on.

Lex Fridman: 12:00 You hear the music better.

Rick Beato: 12:01 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 12:01 So what does it take, since we’re taking a tangent on a tangent, what’s a TL;DR on the course before people go out and sign up?

Rick Beato: 12:13 It’s just practice, basically. You start with intervals, typically with small intervals like minor second, major second. So a minor second would be a half step, major second would be a whole step.

Lex Fridman: 12:23 Are you listening to the tone one after the other or to them together?

Rick Beato: 12:26 Both. So played separately it’s called melodic intervals, right? Like a melody. And harmonic intervals are played like a harmony, together. So you have to be able to identify them both ways.

Lex Fridman: 12:38 What’s an early journey, like will give people a preview of what they should, like what does that look like? What does practice look like?

Rick Beato: 12:44 Well, my course, it will play you an interval and then you identify it by clicking on whether it’s, you know, a major third or minor third or major sixth or minor sixth or perfect fifth or tritone, whatever it is, and it will teach you gradually over time how to recognize all the intervals.

Lex Fridman: 13:05 So you listen to a melodic interval or harmonic interval. How quickly does the ear in the various age groups that we humans are in, how quickly does the ear learn the different intervals? Is it a week, two weeks, a month, two months, five years?

Rick Beato: 13:25 I think you’d do it pretty quickly. Within, you know, if you practice, within a couple months, you can really make a lot of progress on it if you practice daily.

Lex Fridman: 13:34 What benefit does it have to you as a musician in general?

Rick Beato: 13:38 Well, it’s great if you want to hear a chord progression, if you’re trying to figure out a song, and you can say, oh, that’s going from the six minor chord to the four major to the five major to the one major. And you can just identify it immediately. And then you figure out what the first chord is, then you know what the rest of the chords are because they’re in relation to whatever that first chord is. And for learning solos, for example, or learning melodies, being able to sound something out.

Lex Fridman: 14:04 Now do you recommend people couple that with music theory in terms of education, the education journey?

Rick Beato: 14:11 They have to be taught together because these terms are really music theory, right? Those intervals: major second, minor second, major third, minor third, perfect fourth. So as you’re doing that, and then once you learn the intervals, the 12 intervals in an octave, then you learn them both melodically and harmonically, so played together and separate. Then you learn chords. And so then you learn to identify major, minor, diminished, augmented, suspended chords, things like that. Well, you’re basically learning music theory at the same time with that. Because learning music theory is just the name of things in music.

Lex Fridman: 14:50 So there’s the sound of things, there’s the name of things, and then there’s the haptic, like playing the thing probably. So playing chords, playing scales, you have… a course on scales and on chords.

Rick Beato: 15:01 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 15:02 Okay, since we’re doing the tangent, let’s go. How do you recommend people - there’s a bunch of people listening to this that are curious about how they can start in playing guitar, maybe even playing piano, maybe playing other instruments, although guitar of course is the greatest instrument of all time.

Rick Beato: 15:18 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman: 15:19 What are the early steps of that journey? What do you recommend people do in general?

Rick Beato: 15:23 Well, if you’re a beginner, uh, getting a good beginner guitar course and learning first of all the open chords in first position. A lot of songs can be played that way, a lot of old songs can be played that way, maybe not new modern songs necessarily.

Lex Fridman: 15:40 So learning a few chords and with an eye towards maybe playing a song?

Rick Beato: 15:44 Yeah, with an eye towards you learn, you learn the chord shapes and you learn how to strum basic patterns to begin with. I think the first thing for learning guitar is actually how to position your fingers so that you don’t mute strings that you don’t want to mute.

Lex Fridman: 15:58 Oh, yeah.

Rick Beato: 15:59 Yeah, that’s the hardest thing for people to do basically is to get their fingers arched to where they - if you’re playing a C major chord, your index finger’s on the first fret of the B string and you have to have that open E string ringing there. And it’s hard for people to make those micro, micro-adjustments. You take it for granted, Lex, you’ve been playing guitar for I don’t know how many years, forever, right?

Lex Fridman: 16:23 Forever, yeah.

Rick Beato: 16:24 And you don’t even think about stuff like that when you’re playing a guitar solo. Every little thing that you do, if you’re playing your ‘Comfortably Numb’ guitar solo, you have to out of mid-air strike the string that your finger’s on to play the note. And these are all fine adjustments that you’re doing.

Lex Fridman: 16:36 I’m just a hobbyist, recreational player, but wow, you’re taking me all the way back. You’re right. It’s the haptic, the physical aspect of it is really tricky. ‘Comfortably Numb’ is a good example, but if you do lead, you have to get a super clean sound. Now that’s both when you’re playing fast, you want it to be super precise, but when you play slow, when you have one note and you’re holding it and you’re bending it, it better be really clean. And for that, it’s I guess you have to really place the finger in the right place, plus there’s the, well, there’s the calluses so it doesn’t hurt and then the positioning of the string on the curvature of the finger, where does it fall, like how much do you bend the finger?

Rick Beato: 17:24 You have to have enough of flesh on it to actually raise the, raise the string in pitch. Otherwise it - yeah, cause you’re lifting it with part of a flesh. And of course, you have to decide, depends how OCD you are, do you want to be like the perfect, the proper musician or do you want to do a Hendrix, uh, so the thumb over the top?

Lex Fridman: 17:46 Way over the top, yes.

Rick Beato: 17:47 And so, like, your, if you have a fretboard here, I think the more like classical guitarists, the very proper, perfect perpendicular alignment of their fingers-

Lex Fridman: 18:00 the fingertips to the fretboard versus like Hendrix’s like fuck it, you nerds, I’m going to do it. With the messiness is part of the magic. Of course like B.B. King is also kind of messy looking in terms of his positioning of the fingers, but his tone is incredibly clean.

Rick Beato: 18:22 Yeah, super clean.

Lex Fridman: 18:23 So like that teaches you that maybe any position can converge towards a super clean tone, you just have to figure it out.

Rick Beato: 18:30 I think a lot of it has to do with how they wear their guitars. If you wear your guitar low, if you’re Hendrix and you’re wearing your guitar… if you’re wearing it lower then you can’t get your fingers on top of it like that. And the thumb acts as a way to mute the lower strings from ringing if you’re playing through a loud amplifier. So there’s so many other micro-adjustments when you’re playing leads because you have to kind of mute the other strings so they don’t ring out. If you’re playing the first note and Comfortably Numb in the solo at the end, and you’re at the ninth fret of the G string and you bend that. If you bend that G string and you accidentally hit the B string under it, you don’t want that ringing. So you have to kind of angle your index finger so it mutes that. So all these micro-adjustments that you don’t even think about, I mean you’re not thinking about that like when you’re playing it. You’ve done it so many times that these things are just part of your brain. That’s why this is such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments.

Lex Fridman: 19:38 And of course you have to solve that puzzle, must be really frustrating in the beginning, like holding a chord.

Rick Beato: 19:45 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 19:46 Like all of them and it hurts too, right, doing an acoustic guitar?

Rick Beato: 19:50 Not for that long though. For like a week, a couple weeks. I don’t want to discourage anyone, you know, it’s actually pretty easy to learn basic stuff.

Lex Fridman: 20:00 Right, right, but the pain is temporary I guess is the point I’m trying to make.

Rick Beato: 20:05 It is.

Lex Fridman: 20:06 Uh, so what else? So the physical component, play a few chords, where does the journey continue if you’re learning guitar?

Rick Beato: 20:13 Well then it’s like if you play electric guitar then you get into single note playing and stuff like that. That’s where it gets, to me, where it gets really fun. You know, you have single note playing that with riffs, if you think of Back in Black, right, that has a riff embedded in the actual melody. Or many songs that have riffs, the Hendrix stuff that has chordal riffs and you’re moving up the neck and involving all the fingers and things like that. So there’s… it really depends on what styles you want to play.

Lex Fridman: 20:44 So you’re thinking about song learning. So different components of song learning, so riffs in songs, lead in songs…

Rick Beato: 20:52 And then you have finger picking, if you have Stairway to Heaven, songs like that, how about wanting to learn that then involves finger picking because you have… to isolate certain notes of the chord and play two together, you know, and multiple times.

Lex Fridman: 21:07 There’s a few crossroads you get to select things, uh so I guess you’re speaking to the fact that there’s a, if you’re a righty, there’s a right hand that you can use your fingers or you can use a pick.

Rick Beato: 21:18 Correct.

Lex Fridman: 21:19 And it’s a choice you make.

Rick Beato: 21:20 And sometimes you use both. Cause in Stairway to Heaven, you’re using the fingers at the beginning, or fingers and pick, hybrid they call it hybrid picking, and then later on you’re using the pick, the flat pick, the picking patterns.

Lex Fridman: 21:34 On the music theory front, do you recommend people learn scales and chords and like the theory of it?

Rick Beato: 21:41 Uh, pro- later on I would say, I wouldn’t say necessarily right- right off the bat.

Lex Fridman: 21:46 Mhm.

Rick Beato: 21:46 I think, I think learning songs is the- is the first thing that you should do because you want to keep people motivated.

Lex Fridman: 21:51 So you get them to like fall in love with music and playing. All right. And that takes a few- a couple months? Three months?

Rick Beato: 21:58 Depends on how motivated they are. Heh.

Lex Fridman: 22:00 So you recommend practicing what, every day?

Rick Beato: 22:03 Every day. My son Dylan when he started learning the guitar a couple years ago, I said, it’s better to practice 10 minutes a day, seven days a week than to practice one day for an hour, which is roughly the same amount of time.

Lex Fridman: 22:21 Yeah, but it usually turns into something longer. But otherwise, like if your busy life, you know, taking a day off, that day turns into a week, and then a week turns into a month, and all of a sudden you haven’t touched the instrument for months.

Rick Beato: 22:34 Which is why I leave my guitar on a stand all the time. So that if I walk by it and I’m like, okay I’ll just pick it up for a second and then that second turns into 10 minutes, an hour, two hours.

Lex Fridman: 22:44 All right, we gotta talk about this Dylan video. So this might be one of the earliest-

Rick Beato: 22:48 That’s the first one. That’s the first video on the channel. It was- it was actually before the channel because this actually blew up on Facebook and then I put it on YouTube after.

Lex Fridman: 22:58 Uh, so if it’s okay-

Rick Beato: 23:00 Okay Dylan, we’re gonna do the hardest ear training test of all time. Are you ready? Ready.

Lex Fridman: 23:07 Oh.

Rick Beato: 23:08 Now I just a quick backstory on this. I made this for my friend Shane’s wife who wanted to see because Shane was a- a friend that I was producing and he was there and Dylan had come down the day- in the day and I said, oh check this out and I played this stuff. He’s like, that’s amazing can you make a video so I can show my wife? And I was on the way to a school board meeting because I was on the school board at Dylan’s school and I said, hey Dylan come downstairs I wanna make this video take one minute just do the- do this thing for my friend Shane. And he’s like, I don’t want to. And I said, come on it’ll take one minute. I don’t want to. So I said to my wife I’m like, Nina would you tell Dylan to come downstairs I want to do this video take one minute. She’s like, yeah. Dylan go downstairs. And he had a- he has a mouthful of candy there because he was eating candy. So if you look at him, he He literally has a mouthful of candy while he’s doing this.

Lex Fridman: 24:02 And we should say on Facebook it went quite viral.

Rick Beato: 24:07 Yeah, it got I don’t know, 80 million views, something like that. It had like 250,000 comments, something like that. Insane.

Lex Fridman: 24:16 How old is Dylan here?

Rick Beato: 24:17 He’s eight. Eight years old. Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 24:19 Can you actually give some more backstory about how you discovered that Dylan has perfect pitch?

Rick Beato: 24:23 So, when Dylan was about two, I was doing a FaceTime with my brother John and I was like ‘check this out John’ and I played the Stone in Love Neil Schon solo from Journey and I was like ‘check this out’ and Dylan would sing along and my my son my brother John was like ‘wow Dylan can sing all the notes’ and I was like ‘yeah’ then I played Black Dog, Zeppelin and Dylan would sing that and I was like ‘Dylan’s got a good ear’ then John and I were like ‘well we have good ears too so we probably maybe we could have done that we were that age’ so a couple more years goes by well he was about three and a half and I’m in the car and I’m like ‘Dylan sing the Star Wars theme’ and he sings it and I’m like ‘that’s in the right key’ and I checked I played it on my phone I was like ‘oh my gosh’ then I ask him ‘sing the Superman theme’ because we’d been listening to John Williams soundtracks the week before and he sings that and that was in the right key and I ask him another song so I turn the car around go back to the studio I go to the piano hit the note B-flat and Dylan says ‘Star Wars’ Star Wars starts on a big B-flat major chord but it’s the note B-flat is the main one that you hear and then I played the note G and he goes ‘Superman’ and that’s the first note in the trumpet part of the of the Superman theme and then I realized that he had perfect pitch and then in five minutes I taught him the name of the 12 notes which he already knew but he just didn’t know the names.

Lex Fridman: 25:46 So he just associates the names to the things he knows. What do you think is in his mind? Because it’s not just individual notes. He can like hear everything. What is that?

Rick Beato: 25:58 He doesn’t see colors, he just says every note sounds completely different.

Lex Fridman: 26:03 Wow. Like you said, maybe it’s a language thing.

Rick Beato: 26:07 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 26:08 There really is a he just learned the language.

Rick Beato: 26:11 Yeah, the language. Just like it’s perfect, it’s like native music fluency if you think of it like that.

Lex Fridman: 26:18 So let’s listen to some of this.

Rick Beato: 26:22 Better out. Here we go. As fast as you can. We’re going to start with single notes, then we’re going to do some intervals, then chords. Okay, here we go. A. E-flat. B-flat. C. G. A-flat. Okay good. Two notes at once. Here we go. B-flat, F.

Lex Fridman: 26:43 This is incredible.

Rick Beato: 26:44 Great. How about this? G-flat, A. Great. What about this? E-flat, A-flat.

Lex Fridman: 26:52 Wow.

Rick Beato: 26:52 Great. This? C, B-flat. And then how about this? E, E-flat. What is it? E, E-flat. Correct.

Lex Fridman: 27:00 This is incredible.

Rick Beato: 27:00 When I play these next chords, that’s really I think why the video went so viral, the next part of this where I play these super complex polychords. Oh, he’s annoyed. He is annoyed. Yeah. But the part of this… Okay, I’m going to do some polychords for you. These are really going to be hard. You ready? What’s this? C augmented over D-flat augmented. Okay, sing a B-flat. Hmm. Very good. What’s this chord? A-flat major over A major. Great. Sing an F-sharp. Hmm. Excellent. What’s this chord? A minor over D-flat major. Great. What’s this chord? E add 9 over F major. Excellent. E add 9 over F major. So I had to look at my hand to make sure that’s what it was, because they’re all in inversion. So I think the reason that this went so viral is that the more that someone knew about music, the more they shared the video, because these polychords, so the people that were the best musicians were like, oh my god, he’s C augmented over D-flat augmented, and the second chord was A-flat major over A major, but they were both in inversion, right? So it was like first inversion A-flat major chord, first inversion A major chord, and then A minor over D-flat major, and then E add 9 over F major. And for an eight-year-old, I mean for anyone, plus they’re all closed voiced. They’re all just right next to each other. It’s not like, you know, where you can hear them clear. It’s all in the mid-range of the piano. So you have to really listen and he has to dissect each one, like what are the notes being played there, and what is the theory, because he’s actually using music theory to dissect them.

Lex Fridman: 28:58 It must be in his brain, those components of the chords all sound different, like very clearly different.

Rick Beato: 29:06 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 29:07 It’s truly incredible. The human mind’s incredible. And so you’re saying like some part of that is the things you hear in the first few months of life?

Rick Beato: 29:18 I did a thing where I played what I call high information music. High information music would be Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, fugues, anything Bach. And I would play the Well-Tempered Clavier and I would play… I have a friend who’s a Turkish pianist who’s one of the greatest improvisers I’ve ever heard, his name’s Aydın Esen. And I would play Aydın’s improvisations for Dylan, had very sophisticated harmony and linear things in it. And Keith Jarrett and mainly jazz, classical, and modern classical music. And then we would play, listen to rock music once he was born. I’m talking on my wife’s stomach. before Dylan was born. Starting at 15 weeks for 30 minutes a night. And then when Dylan was born, I would sit with him for an hour every morning and listen to music and I would look at him. In order for this—for them to hear these phonemes apparently and develop this language or get the language acquisition has to involve the social brain. So when kids look at you, when a baby’s looking at you, they’re looking at your mouth and they’re getting social cues from from that and this is also another component of saying, ‘Oh, this is where this word stops or starts and stops, these are how this—the phonemes are separated from one another, these are how they’re connected.’ So I believe that all kids are born with perfect pitch and then around nine months they begin to lose it. If you don’t engage their social brain making these pitches know—I never played pitches for Dylan and said, ‘This is a C, this is a B flat, this is a G.’ I just played complex high-information music for him.

Lex Fridman: 31:07 And that applies maybe even more generally to high-information language.

Rick Beato: 31:09 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 31:10 And it starts before they’re born. I think I—I saw some—some of these incredible scientists that work on the neuroscience, the neurobiology, the psychology of language in early life, I think a big part is the in the mother’s stomach, you’re listening to the mother speak.

Rick Beato: 31:29 Yes, that’s right.

Lex Fridman: 31:30 So like that’s—that’s how on the language side you’re picking up the language already.

Rick Beato: 31:34 That’s right. And you’re picking up the musical language. So native music fluency you could call it. So if the mother’s sitting back and listening to Bach and some bebop jazz, you have a—you have a pretty good chance.

Lex Fridman: 31:51 Much better chance. Okay. All right. So as we unwind our way back, Joe Pass and bebop, you were—funny enough talking about what is bebop jazz and—and people like Joe Pass and in your own life your dad was somehow listening to that kind of incredibly complex and sophisticated music.

Rick Beato: 32:16 But wasn’t a musician, which is very weird. I—we never—my—I have six siblings and we could never figure out why dad liked really sophisticated jazz. We just took it for granted at that time.

Lex Fridman: 32:32 Yeah, just took it for granted.

Rick Beato: 32:34 Yeah, just took it for granted and my dad passed away in 2004 and we never really talked about that, but he and I used to listen to music together all the time. He’d—we’d put on a record, I sit on one side of the room, he’d sit on the other, and not say a word, listen through the whole side A. I’d go flip it over, listen to side B, never say a word, and then get up and go do stuff. And we did that all the time.

Lex Fridman: 32:51 And so the first time you impressed your dad was with a Joe Pass song, right? And by the way, we have to go to the song because… People must have forgot because people just think you’re like a good communicator or something. They don’t realize how good you are at guitar, how good you are at actually a lot of instruments, but guitar especially. And there’s this video, the greatest guitar solo, period. Uh, can you give me some context for this particular intricate, complicated solo? Who’s Joe Pass?

Rick Beato: 33:30 Joe Pass was a jazz guitarist. He lived from 1929 to 1994, and he was one of the greatest bebop players and solo guitar players. So he made a record that this is off of called Virtuoso in 1973 that my dad gave me for Christmas when I was in 10th grade. And he said, and this is not like my dad, my dad worked for the railroad, he was very, you know, few words spoken, born in 1919. He said, ‘If you ever learn to play guitar like this, you’ve accomplished something with your life.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ So this record stayed unopened until about March after Christmas. And one day I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll open it up’ and I put it on, I start listening to it. And uh, I was like, ‘Whoa, this is kind of cool.’ And so I said, ‘I think I can figure out some of this stuff.’ So I figured out this thing.

Lex Fridman: 34:25 Is it by ear mostly?

Rick Beato: 34:26 Yeah, just by ear. I didn’t know any of the chords or anything. If you’re going to listen to a little bit here, you go back to that Brother to Brother Gino Vannelli thing with Carlos Rios playing, that stuff is incredibly hard. This, I’m starting, I don’t know any of these chords. So I start out… I don’t even know what that chord is, but I figured it out… I just… and it’s weird, I mean, look at that weird chord.

Lex Fridman: 34:49 So you were just finding like playing around with putting your fingers on the various positions?

Rick Beato: 34:53 Right, but trying every combination of fingers. I’d never played that chord, it’s a weird looking chord. Yeah, and but I kept moving my fingers around until I heard to where it sounded like, ‘oh, that’s it definitely.’ And I looked at my hand and was like ‘what is that?’ I had no idea what it was.

Lex Fridman: 35:08 So you were connected to the sound, you were really connected to the music. Yeah. And so that’s why you can hear, it’s not necessarily… did you even… you didn’t have perfect pitch?

Rick Beato: 35:18 No, and not even relative pitch. No, I did not. No, I didn’t know anything about intervals. I didn’t know anything about music theory, anything. This is all just…

Lex Fridman: 35:27 You were just like playing around with different shapes, that’s amazing.

Rick Beato: 35:29 That’s right. I mean, look at that weird bar there… But then you get into these things… So that stuff there I could figure out… And then this… That stuff I could figure out, and then these things here… Those are just inversions of… But I didn’t know that. I had heard Joe play that on the record, this… Last night I listened to it a bunch of times and I started…

Lex Fridman: 36:02 So you just replay over and over and over and over and you’re like trying to replicate it.

Rick Beato: 36:07 Yes, and I’m memorizing every different chord shape. All chord shapes that I’ve never played before.

Lex Fridman: 36:12 Would you recommend people do something like that on a really complicated song?

Rick Beato: 36:16 Yeah, but there’s so many YouTube videos that you can go and just learn it without having to—yes, I would recommend.

Lex Fridman: 36:24 I feel like the struggle, the struggle’s where it’s at. This is true for education in general. People, like there’s all these educators that try to make learning easier and more fun and all that kind of stuff, great, wonderful, but part of the thing is the struggle.

Rick Beato: 36:41 Absolutely. But yeah let’s start hearing there’s—you’re nuts! I heard licks like that all over this, so I knew that that was… And then these licks here… He plays a lot of ideas like that, that’s basically a C9 chord and the top notes of it. So all these are just inversions of of the same chord. So if I could play that, then it’s just figuring out the single notes, okay? So… Okay, so if you just take this first part here, when he goes… So this intro part…

Lex Fridman: 37:40 You make it sound so simple when you break it down. And and by the way, Joe Pass, incredible guitar player, like this is obviously…

Rick Beato: 37:46 And he improvised all this. He could have played it like that, but you know the first… Those are the individual notes. But that’s hard. Maybe he’s playing it like that. That sounds more realistic.

Lex Fridman: 38:09 The amount of different genres that you are able to replicate is just incredible.

Rick Beato: 38:12 This is just taking the needle, moving it there, then going back a little—oh there—and then by the end the record was so scratched it was uh—but it was worth it when I played it for my dad, he couldn’t believe. I mean he didn’t say ‘that’s amazing’, he was just like ‘hmm, pretty good’.

Lex Fridman: 38:35 So what was the role of bebop jazz in the history of music? It seems like it was influential on your life, another guy you had an incredible interview with—Flea. People should go listen to that one, it’s a great conversation. One of the things that surprised me is just how many musical genres influenced Flea.

Rick Beato: 38:44 That’s right.

Lex Fridman: 38:47 And the guy showed up in a Miles Davis t-shirt. Bebop.

Rick Beato: 38:52 Miles Davis played with Charlie Parker when he was 18 years old.

Lex Fridman: 39:00 old, and that’s Charlie Parker was really his mentor. Can you explain to me why with many of the folks you’ve interviewed uh and in general out there in the in the world of jazz all roads lead to Miles Davis why he’s such an influential figure.

Rick Beato: 39:17 Because he was the greatest innovator in history of jazz. He was at the forefront of all these different styles of jazz. I mean he started as a bebop player and then he you had records like the birth of cool and modal jazz and hard bop and records like Bitches Brew where he started to I guess you would call fusion you start to get these records. You had two main groups of Miles Davis you had the Miles Davis 50s quintet and the Miles Davis 60s quintet. Now Miles made records with many people but the 50s quintet had John Coltrane in it had I mean had different piano players could be Wynton Kelly but Paul Chambers on the bass Philly Joe Jones on the drums um and that particular group was uh made just incredibly important records. And then he had his 60s group which was Herbie Hancock on the piano Ron Carter on the bass Tony Williams on the drums and Wayne Shorter on the saxophone and they made all these incredibly important records.

Lex Fridman: 40:26 I forget who said it uh interview with you but they talked about like Miles Davis uh his music feeling like I think it I think toes hanging over the cliff or something like this meaning like there’s always a risk there’s a danger that you’re willing to make to fuck it all up live and that feeling is what creates the the aliveness of the music. Like can you speak to that just the creating in the music the feeling like you’re on the edge like you’re challenging the possibilities of what can happen and that it all can go to shit and because of that it feels alive.

Rick Beato: 41:08 Well when I interviewed Ron Carter that played in in Miles’s 60s quintet I asked Ron because Ron did records he played bass on 2200 recordings famous records and I said did you guys ever rehearse with Miles? No. Never. I said so what would you do? He goes we just show up at the studio and he’d have the charts put them on the stand and and we would just roll. And I said would you listen to it after? No. And I said well what about your what about the live records that you did at when you’d record at clubs and things like that? He goes we never knew that we were recording. He goes maybe I’d see an a microphone a different kind of microphone in my bass amp he goes then months later a record would come out and I’d see and I was on it and it would be a live record. We took it down to the union and say I played on this record so he can get paid for it, but he said we didn’t even know we were recording. Yeah, so Miles was always about, you know, don’t think about it, just just play.

Lex Fridman: 42:12 That’s crazy.

Rick Beato: 42:15 That was on purpose. That was done on purpose, not to not to do the rehearsals, not not none of that. Yeah, he wanted people to just feel it, play it. Thought is the enemy of flow, as Vinnie Colaiuta told me.

Lex Fridman: 42:30 Thought is the enemy of flow. How do you make sense that Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is influenced by bebop jazz?

Rick Beato: 42:39 So his stepfather was a jazz bass player and his… when his parents got divorced, he was born in Australia and then they moved to to New York, then his parents got divorced and his mom married his stepfather, who was a jazz jazz musician, and they then they used to have jam sessions at their place. And Flea loved it. It was kind of like my upbringing with my dad playing jazz all the time. And once it once it gets inside you, it’s just there. And uh and so he is heavily influenced by jazz musicians.

Lex Fridman: 43:23 Yeah, his impression which is hilarious. I mean, he’s a character, his whole physical way of being is a character. And his impression of just upright bass is just fun to watch, his whole…

Rick Beato: 43:31 His intensity when he picked up his bass during the interview, it… he’s an intense guy, and funny, and, you know, really emotional. And he picks up his bass and there’s a fierceness that you immediately feel. And he starts, he talks about how he practices, and then when he starts doing slapping stuff, he gets… he’s so into it and I’m just sitting there going, ‘whoa, wow’.

Lex Fridman: 43:56 Yeah, he talked about his practicing routine with you and one of the things he’s like, ‘I have to practice my slap’.

Rick Beato: 44:02 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 44:03 No, there’s differences in the structure of the different bands, but usually like the bassist has a vibe to them. I don’t know if we can put words to exactly what that is, the kind of energy that drives a band.

Rick Beato: 44:15 To me, the bass is one of the only instruments that when you play a bad note, everybody notices. I started on the bass as a kid.

Lex Fridman: 44:24 Oh, interesting. But you also play drums, you also play…

Rick Beato: 44:27 Yeah, but my first instrument was the cello in third grade, and then I switched to the bass in sixth grade, and I majored… my undergrad degree was in classical bass. So I… I always think of myself as a bass player first, and I always think the bass is the most important instrument.

Lex Fridman: 44:46 Strong words.

Rick Beato: 44:47 Because as much as I love to play the guitar, and I love to play the guitar more than anything, I think, but the bass really defines what the quality of the chord is, because you can put the root in there, you can put the third of the chord in the bass, you can… for the fifth in there. You can play a lot of notes and whatever you play in the base kind of defines what kind of chord it is. So the bass player has a lot of power.

Lex Fridman: 45:08 I have to go back to our the beginning of our conversation. What what do you think are some of the great solos of all time? Can we can we put a few in the consideration? You have a great list on the top 20 rock guitar solos of all time.

Rick Beato: 45:22 Yes, so I put Comfortably Numb as my favorite, as my top one.

Lex Fridman: 45:26 On that day, right?

Rick Beato: 45:27 On that day. Right. Now, the day later, I would have said it’s the second solo. But I did the first solo because because nobody talks about that solo. And that solo is equally great. And when David Gilmour when I played it for him and we talked about it in my interview with him, it was just to watch his face when he listened to it was incredible. I mean, I’m thinking to myself, it’s like I’m sitting with David Gilmour and he’s listening to Comfortably Numb and he’s hearing it. He’s played it a million times live. But how many times has he gone back and listened to it on the record? Probably not for a long time. And then he’s hearing and he’s like, oh.

Lex Fridman: 46:05 Maybe you just don’t look back when you do great things, you don’t look back.

Rick Beato: 46:09 Miles never looked back. He never wanted to hear the old stuff. He always moved on.

Lex Fridman: 46:14 There was this funny moment, uh, where you you made a video why David Gilmour will never be on the channel and then you ended up, of course, interviewing him twice. He’s one of the greatest guitar players of all time. What do you think is at the core of his genius?

Rick Beato: 46:25 He has just an incredible melodic sense. He knows how phrases should be put together. There’s a flow to his ideas that I think is just incredible. It’s the same with Hendrix. This flow of how one idea leads to the next, how there’s space between them. It’s just like speaking.

Lex Fridman: 46:42 That’s what I read about uh Miles Davis was he was very good at understanding tempo and the value of silence.

Rick Beato: 46:48 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 46:49 Uh and I think I think David Gilmour doesn’t always play fast.

Rick Beato: 46:53 Right.

Lex Fridman: 46:53 But he does a lot with less.

Rick Beato: 46:55 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 46:56 And then uh some of that is also on the more technical side, probably the tone of the I mean he’s one of the most uniquely recognizable tones in all of music.

Rick Beato: 47:02 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 47:03 What do you understand about what it takes to shape the tone that is David Gilmour?

Rick Beato: 47:07 He has a very sophisticated setup for his tone. And and that was one of the things when I went to his studio and I said to him, so David, is there anything I’m not supposed to see here? I mean he never sits down and shows people his gear and he laughed about it. But there I am sitting there right next to all these pedals that and I and I asked his tech Phil, I said, are these the same ones he used on the records? He’s like, yeah. And his tech’s been with him for like 50 years. And I mean the exact same ones. He keeps once, yes. It’s hard to- it’s hard to imagine that those things- of course though, he’s just kept it. Yeah, this is his Binson Echorec that he played through and this is this, you know, these are all the same effects pedals and-

Lex Fridman: 48:15 Wait, is this the same Hiwatt amp?

Rick Beato: 48:17 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 48:18 Is this the same…

Rick Beato: 48:19 Yes. Yeah, he gets some new stuff, but- but they keep all their own gear and it’s- I mean, he did sell- he did sell his guitars for charity, but like he has a black Strat that is a- it’s a signature version that’s an exact copy of his old one. So to him, it sounds exactly the same, plays the same.

Lex Fridman: 48:40 Well, of course they converge towards that kind of hardware, but there’s so many tiny details over the years. You see the final result of it, but there’s a journey there of exploring. And of course he’s not- I guess he’s not doing any soft- like no emulation, no amp…

Rick Beato: 48:56 He does do emulation actually. He does- he has this thing- And this is- I asked him in the first interview about this. There’s a little rack thing that I had heard that he used, but I asked him for sure. It’s called the Zoom 9030. I put out a short where he talks about it. I said, ‘So that- that Zoom 9030, is that a real thing? Because I’ve read about it.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah.’ And he talks about how when he’s sitting there recording on his own- And he runs Pro Tools himself, and so he’ll be sitting there, there’s no one there to help him. He’s like, ‘I’ll just plug into this thing and then I’ll play a solo with this modeler.’ It’s a kind of 90s modeling, early modeling thing. And he’ll play a solo, and then after a while, you hear the solo and it’s like, ‘Well, I’m not going to replay that, that sounds great. You get used to the sound of it and that’s what it is.’ So people always talk about, ‘Oh, well he couldn’t have used that, he’s recording through an amp because it sounds great.’ And then he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, so that’s what I use.’ And then I have the video of it right there and it has his presets DG1 and DG2 and, you know, whatever.

Lex Fridman: 50:06 What’s your process for preparing for interviews like that? You’ve done a few legendary people.

Rick Beato: 50:11 I never prepare for interviews.

Lex Fridman: 50:14 Because…

Rick Beato: 50:16 Because I ask people things that I’m interested in knowing.

Lex Fridman: 50:19 So just letting your curiosity just pull- pull you forward.

Rick Beato: 50:22 Yes. And I can think of a hundred questions to ask David Gilmour. And but I always ask my questions based on what they say to me. So, but I do make a playlist of songs that I want to talk about.

Lex Fridman: 50:34 Mhm.

Rick Beato: 50:35 So that kind of guides me is that, because I want to make sure that I- there’s specific things that I need to play to so that you can jog his memory. Because anytime you play something that somebody recorded even 50 years ago, they’ll remember- if they don’t remember the exact specifics, they- that- that brings it to life to them again and- they can kind of piece together some aspects about it and they can really talk, he can talk about the phrasing and the, you know, the kind of melodic direction of things like that.

Lex Fridman: 51:12 So there’s a lot of tiny details that go into a particular song, whether it’s on the production or how it’s played or how it’s composed, all that kind of stuff. And you don’t know what those are ahead of time.

Rick Beato: 51:21 No.

Lex Fridman: 51:22 You just know the song and you just are looking to jog their memory and maybe your own curiosity of like, how did you do this or how did what this sound or that? You make it look easy, but you have to have a depth of knowledge. You’re saying you don’t prepare.

Rick Beato: 51:40 I have an incredibly good memory. That’s what it is. It’s that I can remember when records came out, who produced them, where they recorded them, who was the engineer, what songs are on it. And not only that, but the people I’m interviewing know that I can play all the parts of all the instruments because I’ve done breakdowns of their songs, which is why I get the interviews with them in the first place, really.

Lex Fridman: 52:10 But the actual like, the skill of the interview, the thing you’re not saying, the preparation is the you young listening to bebop, it’s the background knowledge, it’s the soul carrying with you being able to radiate the love of the soul of music.

Rick Beato: 52:28 I will say this, Lex, that the other thing is that most of these people have a really good sense of humor. When I was, when the first time I interviewed David in New York, my brother John came along and he is a massive David Gilmour fan, that’s his biggest influence as a guitar player. And so he said, ‘You’re interviewing David Gilmour? Well, I’m coming.’ I was like, ‘Alright, come on, come on down.’ So my brother John’s standing about five feet away. And John is a sales guy, but great guitar player, so John’s like, ‘This is David, this is my brother John. David, great to meet you, buddy!’ And you know, John’s like, he’s just a sales guy. And so during the interview, I said, ‘Hey John, what was I gonna ask David? Oh, ask about the Gilmour effect. Oh yeah, that’s right.’ And the Gilmour effect is my thing that I say in the comment section when people say anytime anybody plays anything technical, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great, but I much prefer David Gilmour.’ And so I always call it the Gilmour effect. Anytime I have like Yngwie Malmsteen, anybody that plays that has chops in an interview, the negative comments are always, ‘Well, I prefer David Gilmour.’ And I said that, I told David that, he’s like, ‘Well, maybe they should keep their opinions to themselves.’

Lex Fridman: 53:44 Yeah, a lot of these folks have really wonderful personalities with a trusted person to be able to reveal that personality. So Comfortably Numb at the top on that day, what else was up there?

Rick Beato: 53:54 Stairway to Heaven, Hey Joe, what in that list, your top Hendrix? Solo is Hey Joe. It’s the first guitar solo I ever learned, so I had to put it on there. So I don’t I don’t necessarily do these by I do those in in kind of how how important they are to me and and my development. So there is always a biographical component to these lists. Number three was Kid Charlemagne, a Steely Dan solo, Larry Carlton, amazing solo, extremely difficult to figure out. Probably there’s two solos on the list that are just about are very that one I can play. Oh well there’s a few solos that are very hard to play. Stone in Love by Journey by Neal Schon is very hard to play, some of the licks. The uh there’s a song there’s a solo by a guitarist Carlos Rios that people don’t know, it’s uh Brother to Brother, a Gino Vannelli song, but it’s extremely hard to play and figure out. And uh that people don’t know the solo. So I put it on my list because I knew a lot of people were going to watch it and they’re going to know what this solo is.

Lex Fridman: 55:01 For me the sentimental one, my my first solo is Mr. Crowley, Randy Rhoads. I like the musicality of Mr. Crowley, that there is a melodic component to it. You’re playing really fast, but there’s a there’s a melody to it. And also there’s like a legendary nature to the the the brief time we had the we had Randy Rhoads. He’s probably one of the greatest guitarists ever.

Rick Beato: 55:23 56 to 82 I think, terrible.

Lex Fridman: 55:29 Uh absolute brilliant guitarist, had his own style. We should say he’s the guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne in the band.

Rick Beato: 55:36 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 55:37 And uh that Mr. Crowley solo is a is a great solo, great solo. And um he’s incredibly influential as a guitar player uh too for metal guitar players and um I love Randy Rhoads.

Rick Beato: 55:54 Uh another guy, so one of my favorites is uh Mark Knopfler.

Lex Fridman: 55:58 Yes.

Rick Beato: 55:59 And I did have Mark Knopfler on my list, Sultans of Swing.

Lex Fridman: 56:03 That’s right, you did.

Rick Beato: 56:04 Now, I had it high on the list and I’ll tell you why. I would have had it lower because it’s one of the early ones because I wanted people to be like, okay, oh this is a serious list. So Rick’s going to talk about serious stuff, so um and Rick’s going to play along with all these things. So I wanted to kind of state that at the beginning of the video. I mean I made the video in one day to do 20 solos. I think I played 19 of them, but the Heart solo that I had on there, Nancy Wilson, I uh I played the video of. And I tried to get a couple of my friends to play the Ice Cream Man Van Halen solo. So I called Dweezil Zappa and I was like, Dweezil, can you play the Ice Cream Man solo? I’m making a video about it. He’s like, oh I’d have to practice that. And then I called my friend Phil X. is amazing guitar player and that and he’s like no I’d have to practice that. It’s like come on man can’t let me play ice cream man the opening lick of ice cream man that he plays is very hard to play because it’s an incredibly long stretch and it hurt my fingers to do and Eddie would turn his guitar up like this to play and plus it’s a tricky it’s just a tricky rhythm and and it’s such a big stretch I was like man I can’t that hurts my hand.

Lex Fridman: 57:27 I just love that that’s the Van Halen solo you have in the top 20.

Rick Beato: 57:33 See I have to do some… yeah yeah there’s so many Van Halen my god it could be I could pick 25 different Van Halen solos. But to me I mean there really is nobody like Mark Knopfler like I mean there’s this unique guitarist there’s something about his tone speaking of Gilmore there’s just the tone the care the timing of the notes his improvisation like the live performances of Sultans of Swing this has been actually going like somewhat viral around recent recently his pretty old live performance of Sultans of Swing for me Brothers in Arms these kind of soulful mournful type of solos he does really really well also the interesting instrumentation of Romeo and Juliet just so many just I mean

Lex Fridman: 58:29 it’s truly one of the greats

Rick Beato: 58:31 Now obviously the intro to Money for Nothing is one of the greatest almost impossible to recreate that because of the sound is so unique and his it’s just improvised it’s so cool

Lex Fridman: 58:47 Yeah

Rick Beato: 58:47 There’s certain songs like uh Europa by Santana Santana can have that tone too that Mark Knopfler makes me really just how clean it is. I think he beats BB King in my book on terms of cleanness of just pure beauty of a single note. Like a power of a single note I don’t know anybody who beats Mark Knopfler.

Lex Fridman: 59:10 Well that thing about being able to recognize somebody from a note.

Rick Beato: 59:14 Yeah. Yeah you know when I hear Brian May I can immediately recognize it’s Brian May incredibly melodic the tone that he has Gilmore Hendrix everyone that we’re talking about Van Halen it’s just they have that one note it’s oh I know who that is and that’s that’s why we’re talking about them.

Lex Fridman: 59:35 It’d be funny that’d be a good video.

Rick Beato: 59:37 BB King you hear one note.

Lex Fridman: 59:40 As a test of like how quickly can you recognize just a solo starts playing.

Rick Beato: 59:45 That’s a great… I’m gonna make that video tomorrow. Lex you see the day after tomorrow you’ll see it.

Lex Fridman: 59:51 I would love to see that.

Rick Beato: 59:52 Can you can you recognize these players by one note? By one note. I think it’s I think we’re being a little too aggressive with that. at the beginning like two or three or four or five.

Lex Fridman: 1:00:02 No no no.

Rick Beato: 1:00:02 I guarantee it. So, I was going to do a video last week where I was going to play songs in reverse, okay? See if you can recognize these songs in reverse. And I had my two assistants come in. It’s like, do you know what song that is? They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s Adele.’ Like, what? And then they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s Nirvana.’ Instantly they could recognize it. I was like, well, it’s not worth making. Yeah, it’s so obvious. You hear the tone of the voice backwards, forwards, it doesn’t matter. You know who it is.

Lex Fridman: 1:00:26 Okay.

Rick Beato: 1:00:27 So it’s about the tone. Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 1:00:29 How could you possibly know from a single note? It’s… I guess Van Halen you can.

Rick Beato: 1:00:36 One note of a B.B. King’s vibrato you could know. I’m going to… what I’ll do is I would separate the guitars, I’ll use… I can actually separate the tracks and I’ll just play one note.

Lex Fridman: 1:00:47 You think you could, from a single vibrato, you can know it’s B.B. King?

Rick Beato: 1:00:51 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 1:00:51 Well we’ll see. Put it on record, I’m skeptical. But I’m gonna… I’ll do 20 of them. Can you recognize these guitarists from a single note? Could you recognize Stevie Ray Vaughan versus Eric Clapton?

Rick Beato: 1:01:05 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 1:01:06 All right. You might be right. You might be right. And now back to my conversation with Rick Beato. What do you think is the best Eric Clapton song? One of the things we haven’t mentioned so far is the importance of lyrics and maybe meaning of the song and what it represents. So in that sense, Tears in Heaven.

Rick Beato: 1:01:58 Well, the story behind that is, is heartbreaking.

Lex Fridman: 1:02:03 And then, I personally really love the sound of Wonderful Tonight. That’s a great song. That’s one of my favorite Clapton songs. And I, as I was like listening to it, just doing a whole personal journey introspection, knowing that I’m going to talk to Rick Beato, I was listening to just a bunch of songs. And I learned, as a bit of a thing that I didn’t know the stories behind the music, but I learned that Eric Clapton was married for a decade… to the same woman that George Harrison was married to, and that this woman was the muse, the inspiration for… like so many of the legendary songs of rock, including Wonderful Tonight, including Layla, and including George Harrison’s Something.

Rick Beato: 1:02:57 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman: 1:02:58 Legendary songs.

Rick Beato: 1:02:59 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 1:03:00 Also, the same woman, is she the greatest muse in rock history? Probably yes. This is great. Uh, so in your interviews of musicians and producers, I think the thing you’re ultimately fascinated by is their whole the process, the the recording, the production, the songwriting, the different elements of the process. So, uh, are there examples of different things that stand out to you from the all the interviews you’ve done? And uh by the way, all the recording and production you’ve done yourself. So on the recording front, on the production front, on the songwriting process front, just things that uh pop into memory.

Rick Beato: 1:03:42 When I’ve interviewed the the guys that are the producers, like Rick Rubin, Daniel Lanois, Brendan O’Brien, Butch Vig, the thing about producers as opposed to people that are musicians, if you’re in a musician, even if you’re David Gilmour, you you do a record and then you tour and then you do another record maybe years go by. But producers are working on multiple records, you know, sometimes at a time, like Rick Rubin could be working on multiple records and and the variety of things that they do, you can talk to, I mean I can talk to Rick about the Chili Peppers and I can talk to him about Johnny Cash, I can talk to him about Tom Petty and all these records that I love and there’s just so many interesting stories that I mean these interviews could go on for for days with with Rick and the variety of records that he worked on. And uh and there’s so much knowledge to be gained for me at least and I think that the craft of production and recording engineering is something that is not well documented, um, especially since there’s no there’s so few studios nowadays where there used to be a mentorship thing where you’d go and you’d work as an assistant engineer and you’d work your way up. I interviewed a guy named Ken Scott that uh worked with the Beatles. I interviewed him at Abbey Road Studios just two months ago. And he started as a tape op when he was 16, he started on the uh Hard Day’s Night record with the Beatles. And he worked his way up and he said the first time he ever recorded an orchestra was he recorded I am the Walrus, the orchestra part. He set up the mics and I asked him, I said so where was the band? Standing right behind me, the Beatles, right behind him, the guy I’m interviewing at Abbey Road recorded I am the Walrus there. I mean he recorded many Beatles songs and and he was 18 years old and the I mean I just can’t I can’t even fathom that. We they have a little cafe in the basement of Abbey Road and I said did the Beatles come in here? He goes oh yeah they come in here and get coffee and I remember when they got two microwaves that uh like the first microwaves in 1965 and they were amazed.

Lex Fridman: 1:06:00 Badam and and it’s hard to imagine that I’m talking to people that worked on these historic records. But, you know, they all start with a blank tape or an empty hard drive and then you eventually fill them up with this music that you can- you can never imagine it not existing like Stairway to Heaven or whatever it is.

Rick Beato: 1:06:23 Yeah. It’s funny like looking back, even probably for them, just to realize they’ve created that magic is hard to believe.

Lex Fridman: 1:06:31 Yeah. Because you look at the blank thing and then magic comes out and you don’t even- you don’t even understand how you- you don’t understand, probably a lot of these artists don’t understand where that came from. They’re channeling some deeper thing.

Rick Beato: 1:06:46 When I interviewed Brian May, he told me- I can’t remember if this was if we talked about it on camera or not, but we talked about Bohemian Rhapsody. And at the very end there was a thing where he was depressing his whammy bar a little bit and it sounds like the piano is out of tune. I never noticed it before he mentioned this to me. And he said it always bothered him. And the- there’s always something about these songs that bothers people. Even these songs- right? There’s always little things and they sit and they hear it and they’re like, ‘Oh man, I wish I’d bent up a little higher on that’ or whatever. I mean, that- there’s certain moments in songs that are just unlike anything else and Bohemian Rhapsody when Freddie Mercury is ‘sometimes wish I’d never been born at all’ and then the guitar comes in, I mean, there’s just nothing like that.

Lex Fridman: 1:07:43 That was that- I don’t even know. I mean that whole thing and you’ve done videos on it, it’s an incredibly complicated composition. It’s crazy that a popular song, popular rock song could be this operatic, so complicated.

Rick Beato: 1:07:59 The other thing akin to that moment is Phil Collins with In the Air Tonight, the drum bridge. [Drum sounds]. Yeah. Yeah. What is that? I don’t- I don’t understand how you can create that. What is that? Why is that so magical? Why is that so singular inside a particular song and in rock history period? Like these moments… I don’t- musically I don’t understand how you create them because it might be bigger than musical, it might be cultural, all a bunch of different elements and plus it’s him… I’ve seen live performances where he has a headset, he does- there’s something… he’s like a telemarketer or something, this whole vibe and look to him, he doesn’t look like a rock star, but he is.

Lex Fridman: 1:08:49 Those are hooks when you think about it, right? It’s- it’s as much of a hook as any- as the chorus of the song or any song. That drum thing is something that people wait for and they air drum to it, everybody air drums to it.

Rick Beato: 1:09:00 to it. And it is a hook and those are hard to create. Those are, those moments are really hard to create and usually they’re done by accident.

Lex Fridman: 1:09:10 Yes, it’s hard. If you chase it, you’re not going to get it.

Rick Beato: 1:09:12 Yeah. And your conversation with Sting…

Lex Fridman: 1:09:16 He said something about how modern music is simpler, more minimalist and the bridge is gone, I think he said. And he said he thought that the bridge is therapy.

Rick Beato: 1:09:33 Yes! It’s like a chance for you to reflect, I guess, on the verse before the chorus comes in.

Lex Fridman: 1:09:41 Right. It changed my view of the bridge, I suppose, the therapeutic nature of it, at least lyrically. You think he’s onto something, the value of the bridge?

Rick Beato: 1:09:51 The bridge is a place, I think, where you can kind of change the frame of reference of a song. You can probably do anything, I guess. Lennon used to, he would have some kind of biting lyrics, like… ‘We Can Work It Out’. So McCartney writes the, you know, ‘Try to see it my way, do I have to keep on talking till I can’t go on?’ And then, but the bridge is very Lennon: ‘Life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friend. I’ve always thought that it’s a crime, so I will ask you once again.’ It’s very, you know, very Lennon-esque. This was really a kind of a real collaboration between the two of those. This is where different parts of the band can clash in interesting ways. I mean, the Beatles are the epitome of that. Such like each individual Beatle is a great talent in their own right.

Lex Fridman: 1:10:45 How were the Beatles able to create some of the greatest songs of all time all before they turned 30 years old?

Rick Beato: 1:10:54 I have never been able to figure that out. But I have a theory that because PA systems were so bad back then, and the Beatles, people screamed so loudly that the Beatles thought, okay, we don’t need, we can’t tour anymore because we can’t even hear ourselves. So we’re just going to be a studio band. And maybe because of, we have all these great late Beatles records are from 1966 on, just because they had bad PA systems. And they had no monitors. You know, they’re in Shea Stadium, people are screaming so loudly they can’t hear themselves, they’re like, okay, forget this, we can’t tour. We’ll just make studio records. So that’s what they did. And in that one year, like from August 6, 1965, they put out Help!. Then in December 3, they put out Rubber Soul of ‘65. Then August 5, they put out Revolver. So within 365 days, they put out three 14, I think 14-song records. So they wrote and recorded three incredible… supremely important records. So they were in the studio, it’s like working out. They’re practicing their craft every day, writing songs, trying to outdo the other ones. And so you had the perfect thing of four supremely talented musicians, songwriters, singers, and then the best producer you could possibly have, George Martin. And it was just a perfect storm. I think that when I would talk to friends that would just play in local clubs and they’d play four-hour sets five nights a week and they never lost their voices because they’re always working those muscles. And same with the Beatles, they were always in the studio singing every single day, doing takes, and I think that that was part of it at least.

Lex Fridman: 1:12:51 But you also have this theory that, you know, that the greatest productivity that musicians have is before they turn 30. That the greatest sort of creative genius that can come out of the human mind musically is before the age of 30.

Rick Beato: 1:13:00 Well, I think it’s the same in mathematics as well. You have this fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence up until you’re about, you know, in your late 20s, 30 years old, and then crystallized, so you’re using the crystallized is you’re using your life experience to to write things. So you’ll find that composers, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, wrote their most important works at the end of their lives. Beethoven, the late string quartets, the Ninth Symphony, things like that. So they have a whole lifetime of experience that lead up to this and there’s not they’re not improvising. But things for improvising, writing pop songs and that, I think when your mind is really most active and your brain processing speed is at its pinnacle, that this is my theory, that people can come up with those kind of ideas. Same with improvising. I think that most jazz improvisers, not all, but most do their best improvising before age 30.

Lex Fridman: 1:14:14 Creating something new, yes, truly novel, that requires youth. That’s just a theory, though, but it seems to apply. What do you think about the 27 club? A bunch of the music greats died at 27. Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse,

Rick Beato: 1:14:28 Kurt Cobain.

Lex Fridman: 1:14:29 Kurt Cobain, of course. A big part of music history is linked to drug history. LSD, coke, heroin, weed, smoking.

Rick Beato: 1:14:40 Smoking, smoking. I think about this a lot. If you go back and you watch videos, the Beatles, any of their movies, they’re smoking all the time. The Get Back documentary, they’re Smoking constantly, go watch any of the MTV Unplugged Nirvana, Kurt Cobain is smoking every second that he’s not playing, he’s smoking. Every singer smoked, every musician smoked. Nowadays, I asked my son Dylan, Dylan does anybody smoke at his high school? He’s like ‘smoke, nobody smokes’, he thought it was an absurd question. And that was part of culture.

Lex Fridman: 1:15:24 Yeah, it was for everybody, I mean that was a big transformation over the past 20 years that just everybody stopped smoking.

Rick Beato: 1:15:30 But I don’t think smoking has the kind of hard negative effect that we’re talking about. I mean, I almost would rather have them smoke than some of the other hard drugs, maybe smoking distracts them from the hard, I mean heroin and coke, I mean those things really, and alcohol unfortunately can be easily abused.

Lex Fridman: 1:15:58 It seems like it’s a, this dopamine thing of getting on stage and being adored by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the high of that and then the comedown after is really hard life for just even your biologically of like how do you deal with that? You have to be able to control the roller coaster of your mind and of course drugs would be a part of that. And you think everything is allowed and everything is possible, and then there’s also culture depending on who you hang out with that certain kinds of categories of drugs are good for your creativity and so naturally you start to abuse those drugs. I don’t know, I think it’s really interesting the role that drugs have played in the history of music, they have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive muses, inspirations for some of these folks.

Rick Beato: 1:16:59 Oh, absolutely. Now, would we want to, you know, advocate people doing things like that to boost their creativity? Well I wouldn’t, but just like smoking, which I think improved people’s voices. I mean really, the raspiness of it, this is the reason that so many of these, virtually every famous singer no matter what genre of music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked. Nat King Cole, Miles Davis too, Miles smoked everything, Miles did well, Miles was a heroin addict too. I mean so many jazz musicians.

Lex Fridman: 1:17:47 Well Miles had a sound to him, you’re right, I mean smoking must play a gigantic role to that, adding some complexity to the voice, some richness to the voice. Yeah, Nat King Cole, he smoked…

Rick Beato: 1:18:00 I think four packs a day he died of lung cancer. Lot of heavy smokers though, singers. Frank Sinatra heavy smoker. McCartney was a heavy smoker, Lennon, all those guys smoked.

Lex Fridman: 1:18:13 Yeah, it’s hard to know chicken or the egg, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend doing drugs as a way to get better at music.

Rick Beato: 1:18:19 No, no.

Lex Fridman: 1:18:23 But, you know, it does seem to go hand in hand. And some of it has to do with the period, with the time period, with the place, because sometimes it’s part of the culture. The drug use, like you’re saying, smoking, if you’re smoking now, that’s going to be a very different experience than smoking 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago. It’s a different, different vibe. So sometimes the drug is a deep integrated part of the culture versus an actual chemical substance. The 60s, right? They’re out on—I don’t know, they were on everything in the 60s.

Rick Beato: 1:18:56 Yeah. I mean it has to account for something, Lex.

Lex Fridman: 1:19:03 On songwriting front, you mentioned a story about Elton John recording. So he’s one of the legendary songwriters, but yeah, you’ve met him and you know something about the process of his—

Rick Beato: 1:19:14 Yeah, cause he was recording in a studio in Atlanta that I was working with a band that I was producing. And he was in—I was in Studio B, he was in Studio A. And this band that I was working with, they were called Jump Little Children. And so he had his assistant come in and ask, ‘Hey, is this, are you guys Jump Little Children?’ ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And then all of a sudden, I couldn’t see out into the live room, Elton walked into the thing and we were getting ready to track. And I’m pressing the button, ‘Yo, where are you guys? What’s up? I thought we were going to start this.’ And no one’s responding, I can hear talking, it’s like, what’s going on, where are they? Then all of a sudden they come back in the studio and they were stunned. I said ‘Where were you guys?’ ‘Elton John just walked into our session and he said he’s a big fan, he said to come over when we’re done and hang out in Studio A.’ So we did and he was there with Bernie Taupin and they were working on a song. And we talked, we were there for an hour and he was talking about recording two records a year and then they’d go on tour and they’d write and record the whole record in two weeks. So Bernie would give him lyrics, Elton would go out and spend 15 minutes writing all the melody, he’d look at his lyrics—and he was doing that that day, Bernie was there and they had a lyric sheet up on the piano and Elton would go out and they’d just, ‘Okay, just record this’ and Elton would sit there and play and come up with the song in 15 minutes or so. There’s a great version of I think Tiny Dancer where Elton is coming up with it on—it’s on YouTube—and he’s just coming up with the music right there and then the band, ‘Okay here’s how it goes’ and they record it right then and they move on to the next song. It’s really incredible.

Lex Fridman: 1:20:53 That’s it, yeah.

Rick Beato: 1:20:55 So this is one that I’ve sort of done the other day with Tiny Dancer. It’s about Bernie’s girlfriend. So I just sort of ran it through and put the two verses together, then a middle-eight, then a chorus, and back to the verse sort of thing. It’s very easy… it happens very quickly. It sounds long but it sort of starts off… Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band. Pirate’s smile, pretty eyes, you’ll marry a music man.

Lex Fridman: 1:21:35 Okay. I mean it’s really amazing that he just… he’s looking at just the lyrics.

Rick Beato: 1:21:38 Yeah, and it’s one of the… he’s one of the very few people that has the lyrics first and writes the music to it, which to me is far more difficult. 99% of songwriters write the music first and then they put the melody and lyrics to the finished backing track.

Lex Fridman: 1:21:57 And maybe they write like lyrics… they write like nonsense words kind of thing. And then they figure out from there. Yeah, that’s I mean I don’t know what the skill that is exactly. But that’s incredible. I mean in that process he makes it his own.

Rick Beato: 1:22:04 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 1:22:05 Okay. Uh, you had an amazing interview with Kirk Hammett. I’m a huge Metallica fan.

Rick Beato: 1:22:09 Same here.

Lex Fridman: 1:22:11 Uh, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that from that conversation.

Rick Beato: 1:22:17 Uh, one is the distinction between heavy metal and hard rock, which is very interesting. Of course Metallica went through their own evolution. They had many periods. I mean they’ve been around 40 years, over 40 years.

Lex Fridman: 1:22:29 Crazy.

Rick Beato: 1:22:31 The other thing is the down picking, which was interesting. Which is creating that really distinct sound. James and Kirk’s the down… the down picking. I used to be able to do that. I just can’t do that anymore. It hurts my thumb to do it. I think honestly, I’ve thought a lot about it. It’s like why does it… why is it so painful? Why is it so hard? It’s from swiping with your thumb on phones. And I think it affects that basal joint there and I’m like…

Lex Fridman: 1:23:00 I love your theories.

Rick Beato: 1:23:02 I’m serious! I think that that’s actually right. Because I’m thinking like why does that hurt so much to do that, all the downstrokes and stuff. It’s like it’s gotta be something. It’s like yeah, it’s from swiping with a phone.

Lex Fridman: 1:23:13 The other thing that came through is, uh, that he’s an improvisor at heart. And that I think clashes with this kind of rigid structure that metal is.

Rick Beato: 1:23:22 So there’s a really soulful melodic aspect to him. And he gave a lot of props to James Hetfield for just being a great composer, being a great musician and writer of riffs, of rhythm.

Lex Fridman: 1:23:34 The improvisation part of it you don’t think of because they have… because you have the finished songs that you listen to.

Rick Beato: 1:23:45 But those songs are born out of improvisations, of jams, of little fragments of ideas and then they craft them. into these masterpieces. I also mentioned that this is weird that I didn’t know that Hendrix was used different gauge strings.

Lex Fridman: 1:24:09 Yeah, he was the one that talked about that, wasn’t he?

Rick Beato: 1:24:11 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 1:24:13 Yeah, that was really interesting. See, these are the things I like to learn from these interviews with these people. I’m like, what? How have I never heard of that?

Rick Beato: 1:24:23 It’s like it’s one of the ways you can find uniqueness of sound is by trying different things that are not I mean I guess Zappa was really good at this, right? Like completely breaking out of what you’re supposed to do, the ways you’re supposed to do them and doing it completely differently. You often ask musicians what their perfect song is. First of all, it’s a interesting question.

Lex Fridman: 1:24:46 What is a perfect song? Like once surprised me is Hans Zimmer said God Only Knows by the Beach Boys. I was surprised by that too, but I thought it was like, yeah, okay, that’s a perfect song for sure. The first interview I ever did was with Peter Frampton in 2018. And I asked him in that interview what’s a perfect song, and he said Whiter Shade of Pale, and I was like, oh, that’s a great song. And then I thought, I’m going to ask that to people just to see what they… Now people are prepared if I ask that.

Rick Beato: 1:25:08 But it’s like they’re willing to go out on a limb and say it. Like if you ask me, I don’t even know. I guess you just say it, whatever, right? Like what would I even say? What’s a perfect song? Yeah, I would go… see, I feel the pressure, right? Because the problem is, the reality is it changes day by day, like minute by minute. I… yeah, I would probably… I’m sorry, but I would have to go Mark Knopfler and I would probably go is it really cheesy to say the obvious thing, is I would go Sultans of Swing? Even though like I’m tempted to say Europa, but then like

Lex Fridman: 1:25:44 Sultans of Swing hits on so many levels because it’s got a great melody, great lyrics, and then multiple great guitar solos. And it has such a unique sound to it. The other thing is that it sounds very different from other Dire Straits songs. I mean this is like early Dire Straits Strat tone, and then you think of like Money for Nothing is a Les Paul and it’s a totally different kind of vibe than him playing on Sultans of Swing. But that song’s amazing.

Rick Beato: 1:26:07 Plus it’s about music.

Lex Fridman: 1:26:10 Yes.

Rick Beato: 1:26:11 So it’s like there’s a meta aspect to it. But then there’s also like we’re talking about this guitar stuff, but Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah. I mean Leonard Cohen in general, like these songwriters that go super simple on guitar. And they are just… what’s that called? Singer-songwriter type. I told you off mic one of my maybe THE music guest that’s a dream guest is Tom Waits. I want

Lex Fridman: 1:27:00 It’s talks of Tom Waits for a very long time. And I’ve gone through different periods of… you’ve met me at a point of my life where I’ve given up on it a little bit.

Rick Beato: 1:27:11 That’s when it’s going to happen, Lex. Once you give up on it, it’s going to happen.

Lex Fridman: 1:27:15 Yeah. Yeah. Uh…

Rick Beato: 1:27:19 Tom Waits won’t be on your podcast.

Lex Fridman: 1:27:23 Exactly, exactly. This is my… this is my moment. Tom, come here. Let’s do it. I want to see it. I’m such a… fan of like this absolute artistry on the… on the musical front which Tom Waits has, but I’m a… I’m a sucker for great lyrics. Lyrics to me is such a big part of great songs. And… and he’s another example, he has a song called… Martha. It’s about a love story that didn’t work out and it’s an older man calling the woman that he was in love with, and basically reminiscing about like… you know, thinking about like what… what would have happened if it worked out, that kind of thing. And then, you know, I loved that song for a long time and… you know, at some point I found out that he wrote that when he was in his early 20s. And you realize similar with the Beatles, like the… these guys somehow were able to capture the human condition so masterfully and they’re kids. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it.

Rick Beato: 1:28:05 I can’t speak for Tom Waits, but in the Beatles’ case, they went to Hamburg, they spent time on their own, they played cover gigs that were eight hours long and they lived…

Lex Fridman: 1:28:14 Yeah, they’ve lived.

Rick Beato: 1:28:15 They lived life. It’s not like, not like kids today. Now you’re on a porch.

Lex Fridman: 1:28:21 You also had an amazing interview with Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins. Uh, he is definitively one of my favorite musicians. I love Billy. You asked him an interesting question about how he creates this melancholy feeling that permeates a lot of his songs, and he jokingly said that the secret is all about the seventh and then the ninth. Uh, so like musically, chord-wise, what do you think about that? You think he’s onto something?

Rick Beato: 1:28:39 He’s talking a little music theory there. Yeah, yeah. Seventh and ninth over the chord that he’s playing. So if you’re playing a C chord, he’s singing a B would be the seventh, D would be the ninth, and he does use a lot of those notes. But almost all these people that we’re talking… no, all these people that we’re talking about use these notes, and this is why their songs… I, and when I interviewed Sting, I called them surprise tones, and Sting’s like, I like the way you used the word surprise. Notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they’re playing, but then that creates emotion. Dissonance equals emotion. And that’s what I like. I want music to depress me.

Lex Fridman: 1:29:09 Yeah, what is that? I don’t know. The… but melancholy and I think you articulated it in other interviews is not actually that depressing. There’s something about that melancholy feeling that is somehow the other side of the coin of happiness. It’s a kind of longing.

Rick Beato: 1:30:14 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 1:30:15 There’s a hopefulness to it, that aloneness that you feel… I mean that’s actually like one of the intimate connections you have with music is when you’re alone.

Rick Beato: 1:30:23 There’s I think there’s a social way of listening to music which maybe a concert and so on, but there’s this… There’s nothing like you’re alone in a car driving, listening to like, whatever it is, Bruce Springsteen… I think Louis C.K. has a bit about that, and was it Bruce Springsteen? where he sometimes has to pull over to the side of the road and just weep or something like this. It’s just there’s something about that, sometimes a song just connects with you and I don’t know… nothing like a melancholy song could do that. It… you think about like, maybe things you regret or how life could have worked out, and sometimes it’s not even about… it’s not even real. It just connects something to the… in the soul, the uneasiness that we all feel, maybe the loneliness we all feel that underpins so much of the human condition and it just connects with that. I don’t know what that is. There’s a Kurt Cobain lyric, it was on the In Utero record from the song Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle. The chorus part is, ‘I miss the comfort of being sad.’ And I was like, yes. I miss the comfort in being sad. I was like, yeah, that’s it right there.

Lex Fridman: 1:31:36 In terms of love songs, I somehow I find powerful a kind of desperation. So like I’ve always connected with Pearl Jam’s Black.

Rick Beato: 1:32:02 Oh, amazing.

Lex Fridman: 1:32:03 is… that line is… a friend of mine was going through a breakup so I was listening and he’s the one who introduced me to Pearl Jam during that that whole period, uh, when Pearl Jam was huge, uh, with Ten.

Rick Beato: 1:32:12 is that line is, uh, ‘Someday… someday you’ll have a beautiful life, you know someday you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky, why, why, why can’t it be, can’t it be mine?’ Oh my God, that…

Lex Fridman: 1:32:19 Yeah.

Rick Beato: 1:32:20 blows me away, that’s an amazing line.

Lex Fridman: 1:32:22 Well yeah, and the delivery is incredible on it too. Eddie Vedder’s one of the great frontmen of all time. And that whole period, that whole moment in history, uh, of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder that captured… that was the 90s, that was one side of the 90s that just this singular moment in history. Uh, who do you think are the great frontmen in history of music?

Rick Beato: 1:32:44 Freddy Mercury, Robert Plant.

Lex Fridman: 1:32:46 Freddy Mercury number one probably.

Rick Beato: 1:32:48 Steven Tyler, Jim Morrison.

Lex Fridman: 1:32:51 Jim Morrison for myself, yeah.

Rick Beato: 1:32:53 Roger Daltrey.

Lex Fridman: 1:32:57 Well, we have to say, I have to say, we have to say, James…

Rick Beato: 1:33:00 Hetfield, James Hetfield. I mean, there’s nothing… I have… I mean, I have to talk to you about this. I have… I mean, it’s just the greatest… I think the greatest concert of all time.

Lex Fridman: 1:33:10 This is… their historic performance in Moscow in September of ‘91. This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed.

Rick Beato: 1:33:19 Plus, which you mentioned, AC/DC and Pantera… were there too.

Lex Fridman: 1:33:23 Mhm.

Rick Beato: 1:33:23 And about 1.6 million people were there. Now, by the way, there’s like some kind of reporting that it was a half a million people, 500,000 people. Somewhere I’ve seen statements like that. That’s a ridiculously inaccurate statement. So, it’s a free concert. So any official counts… don’t count. It’s… it’s definitely over a million. It’s very likely to be 1.5, 1.6 million people.

Lex Fridman: 1:33:47 And this moment in history that I think they channeled. It’s like whenever great music… the Metallica was firing on all cylinders at the very top of their game and they meet this moment of history and this place in history that was a defining part of the 20th century collapsing and you have these people who are… for a moment through music are able to escape the fear, the anger they feel, the all of it. There was also political, social, cultural moment meeting the musical moment. And the setlist, I was just… I listened to it several times…

Rick Beato: 1:34:21 Mhm.

Lex Fridman: 1:34:22 Over the past few days just taking myself back into that moment in time. Listen to this setlist: Enter Sandman, Creeping Death, Harvester of Sorrow, Fade to Black, Sad But True, Master of Puppets, Seek and Destroy, For Whom the Bell Tolls, One, and Whiplash. Look at that! How’s that? That just…

Rick Beato: 1:34:49 Get the fuck out of here. This is amazing. That’s my kind of set right there.

Lex Fridman: 1:34:54 I don’t know if you could think of anything that could beat that.

Rick Beato: 1:34:56 I think the guys in the band would say that too. That was… I mean, they were really at their at their peak. The Black Album had just come out then and… that must have been so… so exciting.

Lex Fridman: 1:35:11 I mean, Woodstock was big. There’s certain moments in time when they really, really meet the moment. Are you a fan of live… live like big?

Rick Beato: 1:35:19 I used to be, but at this point…

Lex Fridman: 1:35:22 Yeah.

Rick Beato: 1:35:23 I’d much rather see people play in small clubs and… or go to the… I’d like to listen in the studio. Go to the studio even.

Lex Fridman: 1:35:37 I generally almost entirely agree with you. I just think that there’s these historic moments. But you don’t know which are going to be which.

Rick Beato: 1:35:46 But you making the concert free, it’s just all of it together, plus Pantera and AC/DC.

Lex Fridman: 1:35:51 The other which actually is a legitimate thing you’ve mentioned is… as one of the greatest concerts of all time… His Beethoven’s world premiere of Ninth Symphony.

Rick Beato: 1:36:03 You know, I didn’t really know the personal side about Beethoven until I saw this movie called Immortal Beloved, which is an excellent movie with Gary Oldman. It’s really just a masterful celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he’s written. But then I realized, like, this early as many, many, just a couple decades ago now, that, you know, he went deaf before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, which is why they consider it to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, the greatest symphonies of all time. He went deaf, couldn’t hear anything before he even started writing it. And so there’s that famous story of him in that world premiere of having to be turned around because he can’t hear the people applauding. So he has to be turned around to see that people are actually clapping. I mean, there’s just this whole tragic element plus the meaning of the symphony that ends in this beautiful Ode to Joy. The symphony itself is a kind of, it starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of peace and brotherly unity and a call, I guess, a call for that, a reaching for that, for that peace. And it’s a, there’s a tragic element to it again connected to history, which is it was post-Napoleonic Wars…

Lex Fridman: 1:37:18 Mhm.

Rick Beato: 1:37:19 …and before the American Civil War. So like you’re in this, in this middle, this respite from, from war, calling for peace, not knowing that truly horrific wars are coming. So you have the American Civil War and you have, of course, the two World Wars coming. So this, all of it together. And the fact that he’s conducting deaf, and you wrote this whole thing deaf. I was reading a lot about his process, and you just edits and edits and edits and edits. So the fact that he had to edit in his head is just insane.

Lex Fridman: 1:38:07 I mean, Beethoven was sick all the time too. I mean, a lot of people were sick all the time, it was very common. What would motivate you to write music, this beautiful music that you can never actually hear except for in your head, right? Like, why? The amount of time it takes to write, to write a 35-minute, 40-minute piece, all the parts, you gotta hear all the orchestration in your head, you’re editing, you’re doing all these things. Where do you get the motivation when you can’t hear the actual finished work? One, and people would say, well, he hears it in his head. But what kind of enjoyment is it? You want to hear the orchestra. I mean, it’s really profound that he, that he…

Rick Beato: 1:39:00 was inspired to do this. There’s a thing called the Heiligenstadt Testament that he wrote, it was a letter to his brothers in from 1802. I think they found it in his desk after Beethoven died. And he felt a sense of shame and humiliation because of his hearing loss and he said that he was afflicted with this thing where him of all people that someone standing next to him could hear a flute that he could not hear or a shepherd singing in the field and he could not hear this. And and of all the people why him where hearing played such an important part, another person that would have had to have had perfect pitch because you could never do this if you didn’t have perfect pitch

Lex Fridman: 1:39:44 Mhm.

Rick Beato: 1:39:45 which I think all these great composers for the most part, Brahms didn’t from what I know but all the rest of them for sure had perfect pitch so they could hear these things in their head and that’s how they composed.

Lex Fridman: 1:39:54 I mean you love sound and music. What do you think it was like gradually losing your hearing for Beethoven?

Rick Beato: 1:40:06 It must have been terrible. I mean just terrible. I mean I’ve heard things where he had to have a stick in his mouth and put it on the soundboard of the piano and you could feel the vibrations in his skull and things like that. Desperately trying to, yeah. I just— But also there’s what is it that he’s able to write like one of the greatest symphonies ever while deaf. So there’s something about that we mentioned darkness but torment that he’s going through and ultimately Ode to Joy, like not a cynical thing but a call for the positive.

Lex Fridman: 1:40:55 Yeah. Yeah. That’s, I think—

Rick Beato: 1:40:59 I’ve devoted many many hours thinking about that. And plus Napoleon broke his heart because he was a supporter of Napoleon because Napoleon was supposed to represent the French Revolution, this hopeful future of no more kings, no more monarchs, no more authoritarian regimes and Napoleon ended up becoming essentially king, becoming the authoritarian and Beethoven sort of famously was critical of that. Nevertheless, I think maintained a fascination with Napoleon throughout his life but sort of a kind of more sophisticated complex view of human nature and human civilization. So becoming more cynical, like seeing more clearly that the world disappoints you, the dreams get shattered and through that is able to still do this call for the hopeful future.

Lex Fridman: 1:41:56 All right, so okay, so Beethoven one of the greats. For sure, like basically everybody I know how to play the first movement of Moonlight Sonata, but I always avoided the third movement because I was like, I’m never be good enough.

Rick Beato: 1:42:11 Never say never, Lex.

Lex Fridman: 1:42:14 One of these days. Maybe. You know it would be great if Tom Waits writes me an email and says, I only talk to people that can play the third movement. That’s it. That’d be a dream come true.

Rick Beato: 1:42:27 There you go. That’s motivation. That’s your dragon or whatever, you have to have a prince and rescue the princess. My dragon is the third movement of Moonlight Sonata. Okay.

Lex Fridman: 1:42:36 Uh, you often highlight the importance of Bach. In fact, so many of your guests…

Rick Beato: 1:42:42 Every famous songwriter’s influenced by Bach. They are. The greatest composer of all time, the greatest musician of all time. Even Sting and Dominic Miller said they go to Bach even for like practice every day. People talk about Bach was not known other than in the places he lived, Eisenach he was born in, Leipzig he spent many years. But Bach was known to great musicians. It was difficult to find manuscripts, but there was a premiere of the St. Matthew Passion that Mendelssohn had done in 17 and 1829. It was on March 11th, I believe. He had a manuscript because uh his father and mother collected manuscripts and he got a manuscript of this piece. I think he was 20 years old and and they had a performance of it in Berlin. And Beethoven, Mozart, they studied the Well-Tempered Clavier, the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier. But Bach wrote profoundly beautiful music and some of the most complex contrapuntal music that I don’t think anyone has ever done like that. Extremely bright guy. Had 20 kids, only 10 survived till adulthood. Lost both his parents when he was nine, within nine months of each other. Went to live with an older brother.

Lex Fridman: 1:43:55 Extremely productive. Yes. I think from all the music teachers I’ve ever had, I understood the importance of studying Bach. He didn’t write Master of Puppets, but he wrote some great, powerful music.

Rick Beato: 1:44:22 Well put. Well put.

Lex Fridman: 1:44:24 I I try to educate the aforementioned music teachers of the brilliance of the Master of Puppets. Sometimes a good riff is greater than any musical composition.

Rick Beato: 1:44:44 I agree. I go back and I play Master of Puppets every time I’m trying out a new amplifier. That’s my go-to.

Lex Fridman: 1:44:54 So like the stereotypical guitar store when you come in…

Rick Beato: 1:45:00 I’ll play Master of Puppets. I’ll play Master of Puppets. I’ll play… I have to play some heavy riff and so usually it will default to some Metallica or something like that. Or I’ll play Alice in Chains or I usually… a lot of times I’ll go and I’ll do drop D something or play Tool. I usually would do something, do some drop tuning thing and it’s always got to be some type of metal that I’ll test to see if the bottom end’s tight on the amp and stuff. So yes.

Lex Fridman: 1:45:28 All right. We have to talk about this a little bit. You made a bunch of videos about it. There was a moment in time, it still goes on, but there was a moment where it’s really people are freaking out about the use of AI in music. Uh, so there’s these I would say incredible apps, uh, like Suno, Udio, 11 Labs Music is also great. They can generate basically text to song, full song from a text prompt. And uh, a lot of people started freaking out just based on how good it is. And so you start to immediately imagine how this is going to transform music and it’s going to replace musicians and all that kind of stuff. Uh, it is legitimately nerve-racking because these are early versions so you don’t know where it goes. But in your intuition now, you’ve been thinking about this, you made a bunch of videos, now like being able to reflect, okay everybody chill, calm down.

Rick Beato: 1:46:14 So if you write a prompt in Suno and it spits out a song, which I’ve done, I’ve done, made a bunch of videos in this. I made up a fake artist, Eli Mercer in this video, then I did a thing for CBS News, I made up this fake artist, Sadie Winter, and came up with this song ‘Walking Away’. Well, the computer, the program came up with it.

Lex Fridman: 1:46:45 There is some creativity in a process. So in this particular thing, the process is you generate an image.

Rick Beato: 1:46:50 I did in ChatGPT the image, then I went to Claude and I wrote the lyrics because Claude’s way better at lyrics than Suno is. Suno’s bad at lyrics. At least right now. So I… so I did… I created the lyrics in Claude and then I imported the lyrics into Suno. And I had great results with the songs that I came up… that it came up with. I always have to qualify that. But then I started thinking about this. People freak out about this. Oh, this is bad, this is bad. And then I was like, no, who are going to be the ones that are going to benefit from AI? Well, the people that are already great songwriters because you have to be able to recognize when it spits out something good versus when it spits out something that’s not that good. And every other song… I’ve probably created 130 song ideas out of which there’s three good ones.

Lex Fridman: 1:47:41 And there’s a thing that’s happening where people’s ear very quickly is becoming attuned to AI slop.

Rick Beato: 1:47:47 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 1:47:48 And that’s actually quite fascinating. Like for example, there’s this viral clip going around of an AI-based like a soul jazz remix of songs like 50 Cent Many Men. And I think it is… Super impressive, and it’s a different pipeline actually, it’s a tricky pipeline how to pull that off and I think a lot of the creativity in that, even that kind of remixing is in the pipeline of how you actually do that. Because there’s actually a lot of manual stuff in that pipeline. Uh, but I think ironically, it’s very cool at first, but when you listen to it for a while, you understand that this is AI slop.

Rick Beato: 1:48:27 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 1:48:27 For soul remix, it- it actually lacks soul. But it made me think of like when I listen to soul or blues, I think I really want in that case to know, I don’t want AI BB King, I want the real BB King. And I- if I- if I know if any AI is involved in the BB King process, I’m tuning out.

Rick Beato: 1:48:54 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 1:48:55 And I don’t think I’m being a curmudgeonly old dude in that, I think we humans want authenticity.

Rick Beato: 1:49:06 So when- when AI, when I first started making these AI videos, it started back in 2023, I made my first one. And I would take my phone, come up in the kitchen, I’d play a song and my- my youngest and Dylan, my youngest Leyla, and I have three kids, and my oldest Dylan, as soon as I play it, ‘Why are you listening to AI?’ and I was like, oh my god, instantly! And I was like, ‘How do you know?’ ‘Oh it has this ringing sound in the thing.’ So it took me probably about four or five days to figure out okay, what are they hearing that I’m not hearing? So I did it, I separated all the parts and what they’re hearing was the artifacts that are in the vocal reverb that- that sent- that were- uh, that made incomplete, it just couldn’t do the ambiences correctly, right? Because it’s trained on, a lot of these AI programs are trained on very low bit- bit rate MP3s, right? So they feed all this stuff in there, so they’re getting really inferior information on the- in the training process, whereas now, when they make these deals with the major labels, they’ll get the multitracks and they’ll get high-quality wave files to train from, right? And whoever opts in, they get the solo vocal tracks, you know, if Ed Sheeran wants to do it or Drake or whoever wants to give their voice to it, let it do its thing and then get their royalties from it. I’m not saying that any- any of them are doing it, I’m just giving an example. But every time that I would do it, I could be down the hall and I would play something on my phone just to see if they’d- ‘Why are you listening to AI?’ Oh, they could instantly tell. Then eventually it started getting better, and then it’d be like, ‘Is this AI?’ I’d be in the car with Leyla coming back from Taekwondo practice and she’s like, ‘Is this AI?’ Why does it sound like AI? ‘Sounds like it could be AI.’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, it’s AI.’ She’s like, ‘Oh, it’s getting better.’ This song for um it was an NPR interview I created a song with a fake artist and the song was called Neon Ghosts and I played it for Leila in the car she’s like… Can you separate the tracks? I said yeah I have them separated back home. Okay I want to go down and hear it. So we go down to the studio and I play it for her and she listens to the soloed vocal and she said… Wow this is really really realistic. This is very hard to tell even with a soloed vocal.

Lex Fridman: 1:51:27 I think the room for creativity right now for humans is lyrics. It seems like the lyrics that are being generated they lack soul somehow and I don’t know the words correctly. I mean they can be incredibly sophisticated but there’s some something the edge is not there. Some kind of edge that you we want in our lyrics some kind of surprise but not cringe or not cliche but something truly novel in the lyrics. But that if that’s the case it’s kind of sad that um that that’s where the creativity has to come from but not from the music because then if we can create very realistic music that sounds really damn good where’s the role of the musician there?

Rick Beato: 1:52:31 I think the role of the musician is that in in actually if they use AI to assist them in coming up with ideas like as a creation tool then the musician some of the stuff is just not high quality sonically high quality. So the musician goes in and redoes stuff and changes things and adds parts and then they actually do music production and maybe they re-sing the parts and they change the stuff and then it’s just basically like an idea generator and I think that that’s a great use of AI is for that.

Lex Fridman: 1:53:14 But but see if you do that does it make you sad that you don’t necessarily need to learn instruments? So basically you can I mean you could think of it as a different kind of instrument but you can write lyrics you can hum the melody you can just hum parts you know and then and do A B kind of thing this kind of rhythm this kind of and stitch them together and never actually have your fingers on a guitar or fingers on a drumstick.

Rick Beato: 1:53:50 That’s why I’m not gonna use AI Lex is for that reason because to me it’s just boring and I when I use it it’s just like eh. But I I used it for about a month or so just because I was making videos and I was trying to see how it’s advancing every every three or four months I’ll I’ll sit down and I’ll see whatever new versions they have and I’ll write some songs write some songs I’ll prompt some songs and see what they come up with and see if they’re improving on the things but ultimately I don’t find it interesting to to use.

Lex Fridman: 1:53:59 I hear you. You’re a bit old school.

Rick Beato: 1:54:01 I’m a… yeah.

Lex Fridman: 1:54:02 I’m trying to think about the future. And I think it’s still even in the future also going to be boring. I think there’s something fundamentally boring about it. And I’ve been trying to figure it out. So for example, I use it a lot for more and more and more for programming. So for building stuff. And there it’s not about the final output is not the code, the output is what the code creates. And there it’s extremely useful, not- doesn’t matter if it’s boring or not, it’s useful. But when the final output is the thing that the AI creates, which it would be in music, then there is something about us that just like we know there is something boring about it.

Rick Beato: 1:54:44 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 1:54:45 We want to celebrate and see the thing that’s hard to create. And if AI can just text-to-song generate a top ten hit, we’ll- we’ll quickly lose value for that, I think. And so we’ll want raw, like raw. Whatever shape that raw takes, I wouldn’t say raw talent, but that raw talent of any kind. And perhaps it would make me a little bit sad, but that’s also- also awesome. Perhaps the new kind of raw talent that civilization is asking for is how to make great TikToks. Maybe that’s what raw talent looks like. It makes me a little bit sad because I’m a huge fan of long form. Uh, but that also, creating TikToks and- is- is also talent.

Rick Beato: 1:55:32 It’s- it is a talent, absolutely. Um, when I see anything that’s AI-generated, I instantly recognize it. Any video, I’m like, boring, boring, boring. And my kids do the same thing. They just have no interest in engaging with it. As soon as they recognize it, and they can spot it a mile away, and they’re just like, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring. And then they kind of dis- then they don’t even want to engage with the social media platforms, which is- which is a danger, which I think they need to crack down on the AI slop. YouTube’s done a pretty good job on it, but it’s hard to- it’s hard to stay on the- it’s getting- it gets flooded with so much of this stuff. It’s so easy to create and put up there. And to just be in the- the whack-a-mole thing where you’re just trying to get rid of it all is…

Lex Fridman: 1:56:19 It’s fundamentally like- it’s fundamentally boring.

Rick Beato: 1:56:24 Boring.

Lex Fridman: 1:56:25 I think boring’s a really good-

Rick Beato: 1:56:27 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 1:56:28 And it’s- and it’s annoying to have to flip through the AI slop.

Rick Beato: 1:56:31 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 1:56:32 But I think actually as a civilization, it’s just inspiring for authenticity. Because you want to be real and- and being raw, which I, you know, one of the things I like about podcast is people just shooting shit and just being themselves in the long form versus overproduced. Because I think AI is making people realize that AI is good at being overproduced.

Rick Beato: 1:56:59 Right.

Lex Fridman: 1:57:00 Or… Let’s get that covered.

Rick Beato: 1:57:01 Yeah, even artists because you’re saying like, yeah, they’ll use it as tools. Part of me thinks like, not really. Like, I think, I see, I think they’ll quickly, this kind of process of generating a bunch of different options and choosing the one you like the most, I think is a really frustrating process for artists. And I think, I think AI will definitely be used extremely effectively as a very fine-grained tool in the image domain, it’s editing images. But not like macro editing, but very specific kind of editing that Photoshop is increasingly integrated in. I mentioned to you offline, so the whole iZotope RX group of software that does a lot of the denoising, de-reverb, all the de-, removing the wind, all that, they integrate machine learning extremely effectively.

Lex Fridman: 1:58:01 Yes.

Rick Beato: 1:58:03 Also working with audio in different kinds of ways. There’s a bunch of different other programs that do that. Maybe for like B-roll footage and same thing on the audio, if you just need a little audio to create a feeling of a scene. Yeah, might be used there in that kind of way. But truly original stuff? I’ve saved videos where I’m doing speaking over music, for example, in an interview. Somebody’s playing and we have two- dialogue, two people speaking and laughs, but it’s, but there’s so much bleed coming from the person playing that you can’t hear what we’re saying. And then we’ll split out the voice for that section, the two voices, separate them, and then take the music and separate that stuff, and so it’s really helpful for things like that.

Lex Fridman: 1:59:18 So you have this video breaking down Sabrina Carpenter’s song ‘Slim Pickins’ and you use it as an example of building up people’s intuition about the music business and how the music production for these popular songs is being done these days; who’s doing the songwriting, how’s it being done and all that kind of stuff. I was wondering if you could speak to that.

Rick Beato: 1:59:44 In that particular song, Jack Antonoff, who was one of the writers, Amy Allen, Sabrina Carpenter, said in some awards thing that there’s an old guy on YouTube that said that Sabrina had very little to do with the song. And so he said in this clip… …you being the old guy.

Lex Fridman: 2:00:01 Me being the old guy.

Rick Beato: 2:00:01 That- well Sabrina really was the- she’s amazing and she’s the one that wrote everything of the songs. Like, so my response is like, well why are you guys even included on the songwriting then?

Lex Fridman: 2:00:13 So one of the things you highlight is a lot of people are included on the list of songwriters.

Rick Beato: 2:00:20 Yeah. 10 people, 11 people, I mean, you know, like, why are the song- why is Song of the Year have songs that are interpolation? Meaning that they have melodies from other songs in their interpolation. They used to call it stealing. And then, um, you have songs that are- you sample for the whole thing, like the Doja song that’s out right now. And I’ve said, look, she took a Gotye song and basically took off his melody and she created her own melody over it. It’s like, well, it saves time. You don’t have to go actually create a track, you just can sing over someone else’s song that was already successful.

Lex Fridman: 2:00:59 Yeah, you pointing that out, this ‘song anxiety’ broke my brain.

Rick Beato: 2:01:03 I mean, it’s so absurd. It’s… yeah, it feels unfair. It’s a good song, but it was also a good song before, and it was before that it was also a good song. Right. 2011, or the Luis Fonfari, 1967. Um, so why is that considered to be in the top songs of the year? It’s like, come on, you can’t find another song that’s not based on that? That’s ridiculous. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman: 2:01:31 And Doja’s got some really good songs on her record.

Rick Beato: 2:01:34 Yeah, but why are these the ones that are coming to the top, right? This is interesting.

Lex Fridman: 2:01:36 Hey, that might just be a criticism of the machinery of the business that- that drives them. It’s not necessarily… like a lot of these folks are really good musicians. First of all, I think a lot of them are also good… like the actual songs they make to the top are good. I’m a big fan of Bruno Mars. He’s a great songwriter, and he’s a great musician all around. You know, he’s Michael Jackson reincarnated in many ways.

Rick Beato: 2:02:00 Super, super talented guy.

Lex Fridman: 2:02:03 Incredible, right?

Rick Beato: 2:02:03 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 2:02:03 Um, you mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother write a lot of the songs.

Rick Beato: 2:02:08 So good. Yeah, super talented.

Lex Fridman: 2:02:09 I mean, Taylor Swift is unlike anything… I mean, that’s a historic figure in music. But she’s fundamentally, at least originally, a singer-songwriter. Yes. So that’s a… I mean, I’m sorry, but that is a, like, of the kind of music that Rick Beato gives props to, she’s the… she carries the flame forward.

Rick Beato: 2:02:41 She works on her own songs, absolutely. And she… but she never has more than two co-writers on things.

Lex Fridman: 2:02:48 You want to take a quick bathroom break?

Rick Beato: 2:02:50 Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 2:02:50 Okay. I have to ask you about this complexity that you’re facing on a basically daily basis. I think it’s a challenge a lot of YouTube folks… experience, but you’re just so viscerally experiencing it because a lot of what you do in your channel is celebrate music broadly. And so as part of that process, you have to sometimes show clips of music. And I think all of that falls under fair use quite obviously. And so you get all these YouTube copyright claims and for folks who don’t know, if you get three, three of those, it’s those, each one of those can be a strike on the channel and it can take down your channel. And you get some insane amount. You said you got like, I think I had a similar thing on my Rick Rubin episode, like 30, I think you said 13?

Rick Beato: 2:03:40 Yeah, 13.

Lex Fridman: 2:03:41 Yeah, 13. So what, can you just speak to this whole thing? You’ve been in a constant battle, WMG, UMG, all the, all the three-letter name record label, right? The music business people. So what, what’s the story there?

Rick Beato: 2:03:54 Well, this has been going on since the beginning of my channel and I’ve made videos periodically. When I first started, it was just instant blocks. So you’d never know back in, I started, it’ll be 10 years in June. So when I’d play music in a video, YouTubers were not playing music in videos because they didn’t, because of the Content ID things and the takedowns and stuff. So I would play music and I would just see what happens. And then you’d get a Content ID claim or you’d realize that people were quote unquote blockers, and I came up with that term, that they would block your video, take down your video. And I realized at first it was like anything Guns N’ Roses, which is still the case, Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC, I mean many bands, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin. And then, and then something happened. There, there was that guy on the skateboard on TikTok that had the Ocean Spray thing and he was listening to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.

Lex Fridman: 2:04:41 Yep.

Rick Beato: 2:04:42 And that blew up and became a number one song again. And the labels then realized, I mean, I’d made many videos about, about why this is wrong and it should be fair use and everything. Well, because of that, the labels were like, oh, maybe we should rethink this. Then they just started demonetizing videos. And demonetize means they get all the money you make.

Lex Fridman: 2:05:04 Yeah.

Rick Beato: 2:05:05 In a one-hour video, if you, if you use 20 seconds of a clip,

Lex Fridman: 2:05:11 Yeah.

Rick Beato: 2:05:12 they get all the money. Okay. So I hired a lawyer finally after the Rick Rubin video, because I thought it was ridiculous. I go over to, to Tuscany, I interview Rick at his house and, and I hired a, hired a lawyer to fight this, who I’m going to have on my channel. I don’t want to say who it is, but he’s another YouTuber.

Lex Fridman: 2:05:40 Oh, you, you’re going to do like a public interview with him?

Rick Beato: 2:05:45 I’m doing an interview with him, yes.

Lex Fridman: 2:05:47 Awesome.

Rick Beato: 2:05:48 I talked to him today about it actually.

Lex Fridman: 2:05:51 I can’t wait. Yeah, that’d be great.

Rick Beato: 2:06:00 Great. So he said you should fight these because every single one of them is fair use. And he went through my my entire cat… I have 2100 videos. And he’s fought 4000 content ID claims and won every single one of them. 4000. That’s a lot. I mean, when I do top 20 guitar solos, there’s 20 content ID claims, you know? It’s and it can be either from the sound recording if I use that, or if I just play it, it can be from the publisher.

Lex Fridman: 2:06:36 That’s amazing. So is there, I mean, that’s still he’s still a lawyer, still work. Does that, is there a hopeful thing you can say about the future of copyright?

Rick Beato: 2:06:50 Yeah, fight these content ID claims. If it’s fair use, if you’re not just playing the song and listening to it and because a lot of the stuff that reaction videos or whatever they’re not where they play the whole song. I mean, I’m using these things and I’m talking a lot of the times it’s in interviews or it’s in I’m breaking down a solo and there’s a…

Lex Fridman: 2:07:08 Yeah, see that’s an obvious one, but even reaction videos, right?

Rick Beato: 2:07:13 Yeah, even reaction videos, yes, absolutely.

Lex Fridman: 2:07:16 Those are more borderline. Yeah. But I don’t know, I love those videos.

Rick Beato: 2:07:21 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman: 2:07:23 Like when a person is just sitting there and listening to it and they’re like, you know, like a like a voice teacher is listening to a vocal performance.

Rick Beato: 2:07:31 Yeah, but those are breakdowns.

Lex Fridman: 2:07:33 Yeah, those are breakdowns. Yeah.

Rick Beato: 2:07:34 I think that the content ID stuff that was happening with these major labels, they would hire third parties that would go out, use AI and go and anytime they detect anything, they always go to the biggest channels first to get the most views. Makes sense and stuff. And and they would claim everything that they could. And historically, YouTubers never would fight back. They were like, oh, this is easy money. YouTubers never fight back and at these things

Lex Fridman: 2:07:59 because they’re afraid to have their channels taken down.

Rick Beato: 2:08:01 Yep.

Lex Fridman: 2:08:01 So Rick Beato said hold my beer.

Rick Beato: 2:08:03 There you go. So I mean it’s important. I mean it took me years though, Lex. I didn’t I’ve been doing this, so I so I’ve been doing it for one year now and I’m nine years, almost 10 years into my channel. So it took me that long.

Lex Fridman: 2:08:18 I mean, hopefully it there’s a ripple effect also. It’s not just your situation. Hopefully you don’t have to deal with this for much longer.

Rick Beato: 2:08:25 Right.

Lex Fridman: 2:08:26 How’s Spotify changed music?

Rick Beato: 2:08:30 Sometimes people highlight the fact that the change in nature of music in that it’s the scarcity is not there. But it also allows it it’s like every kind of music is available and so fast and so easy. It’s easy to explore.

Lex Fridman: 2:08:44 It’s a commodity. It’s like turning on a water faucet. Do you think there’s just some good to it? I mean, there’s a lot of good to that, right? Have you, did you go through that whole process? I still remember where I had to basically throw away the albums.

Rick Beato: 2:09:00 I never did that.

Lex Fridman: 2:09:02 Well, if you if you down uploaded them into your computer…

Rick Beato: 2:09:05 Yeah, so there’s that two-step process. One, there’s like the hard albums, CDs for me.

Lex Fridman: 2:09:12 Okay, CD, yeah.

Rick Beato: 2:09:14 And then and then you upload them into your computer when you save them. And then you, uh, how do you put it?

Lex Fridman: 2:09:24 Allegedly a friend of yours pirates some extra songs.

Rick Beato: 2:09:28 Yep, and then put some on the computer. So you have but you have your stash on the computer, you’re like, this is my finely selected stash of greatness. Uh, sometimes organized by album, sometimes not. And then the big moment for me, that was really difficult to do, really difficult to do is throw away that stash. Because and switch to Spotify.

Lex Fridman: 2:09:52 Mhm.

Rick Beato: 2:09:52 Switch to streaming. And basically rebuild the stash of playlists and all this kind of stuff. And it was heartbreaking because… So much love and effort went into that, both the CD, the the stashing of the CD and the stashing of the MP3s in the computer. And then in Spotify it just seems just effortless. But it helped me discover all kinds of artists I’d never would have discovered otherwise. And Pandora I used a lot, Pandora is more uh prioritizing on the discovery part versus organization part. And that was really wonderful.

Lex Fridman: 2:10:30 So, one of the things that I, I’ll start with the positive that I like about Spotify is that they show view count, they show play counts. Whether they’re real or not that’s another question, but but they show how many plays songs have. And that’s how the charts are based.

Rick Beato: 2:10:44 Does that give you signal that something is listened to a billion times? Does that mean something to you?

Lex Fridman: 2:10:51 Well yeah, it means that that it’s a popular song, but that’s a massive hit. That’s very few songs that have a billion billion plays. Now the downside of Spotify is the way that they… pay their artists. Now they’ve lumped in podcasts with that that are getting a cut of this this streaming with the with the music. Um, and you know the search and discovery… I mean there’s there’s… there’s benefits of algorithms and there’s negative things of algorithms. Algorithms happen to kind of a lot many times pigeonhole people into listening to the same genre of music all the time and not expanding… their you know the discovery of of of new music where that you might hear on the radio back in the day where program directors would play things that they like, right? And you might hear some, ‘oh what is that? Oh that’s a new Soundgarden record’ or something, ‘whoa I like that. I’m going to go check that out’ and you know something that you might not have heard or something odd. Like, one thing I really love doing on Spotify is you can you can have radio. Yeah, meaning like you give a few… it’s similar to Pandora, like you can… Okay, this is going to reveal a little too much about myself, but usually when I go work out, I’ll listen to something like Rage Against the Machine radio. I’m sorry, and you’ve…

Rick Beato: 2:12:17 What else would you listen to?

Lex Fridman: 2:12:18 I need motivation. Classical music? I don’t know. But yeah, it’s pretty good because it recommends a bunch of other stuff I wouldn’t even know. Some of it I know obviously, but akin to the Rage Against the Machine-y type thing, it recommends a bunch of artists and it’s like, ‘Oh holy shit, that’s awesome.’ So I don’t know, that discovery works really well. So some of it is a technology thing. But that experience is fundamentally more vibrant than I had previously with my stash. That I would just keep a stash and I would listen to the same record over and over and over and over. But yeah, what’s lost is the… I’m sure you love this, but listening through the Led Zeppelin records, just driving in a car and listening to the whole thing all the way through. Yeah, that’s lost.

Rick Beato: 2:13:00 So I have my old iTunes library from 2005 that I… that I’ve saved the CDs that I uploaded into my computer. Anytime I do… there… I play songs on my… when I’m doing an interview, I always play wave files I put them in. And it’s funny that when I interview a mixer, I interviewed this mixing engineer Andy Wallace, and people comment, ‘Wow, that song sounded amazing in your interview!’ Well, not only are they great mixes that he did, but I’m using wave files in there and people notice the difference. And these are wave files from, you know, original encoding, not remastered things that Spotify keeps doing and adding a bunch more top end and things like that. That these are… these are actually the original wave files from off the CD that I ripped 20 years ago.

Lex Fridman: 2:13:36 What’s your current… and people are really curious about that… so what’s your current stack? What are the tools you use? What’s your DAW? What’s the audio interface? What are the mics?

Rick Beato: 2:13:42 So I use Pro Tools for the most part, but I also use Logic and Ableton. I’ve got all those.

Lex Fridman: 2:13:48 So you’re mostly on a Mac?

Rick Beato: 2:13:49 I’m only on a Mac. Only on a Mac.

Lex Fridman: 2:13:52 I’m only the opposite.

Rick Beato: 2:13:54 Although we have multiple PCs because my kids use PCs just to rebel. They do it for gaming. They like to game.

Lex Fridman: 2:14:03 Right, that’s true. But like in terms of editing, I hate how good Mac is at just integrating… the hardware and the software just work well together both on the video…

Rick Beato: 2:14:11 If I didn’t have a Mac, honestly, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. Because I got a G3 that’s the only good thing that a major label did for me is when my band was on… UMG and they bought a… they bought me a G3 and a… and an SM7 and Pro Tools Digi 001, the first prosumer Pro Tools thing. And I learned how to use Pro Tools. And that allowed me to learn how to edit video and become a record producer. So I gotta give it… give it to Max for that.

Lex Fridman: 2:15:22 So Pro Tools, I mean that’s still the standard?

Rick Beato: 2:15:25 That’s kind of the industry standard, yeah.

Lex Fridman: 2:15:27 I gotta ask you because I know I’ve never used Pro Tools. I’ve used, again, I’m a caveman. I’ve used the Reaper, I’ve used Studio One, that’s recently I’ve used that. And for the most time, I’ve used Ableton Live. I feel like I’m using 1% of the power of the tool. Like Ableton Live makes me feel like I’m literally just pressing the record button.

Rick Beato: 2:15:51 Ableton’s amazing. It really is.

Lex Fridman: 2:15:53 It is. But I feel like it’s, I mean it’s designed for people that are doing like all kinds of MIDI stuff and like looping and the… what is it, the push buttons with the beats and the… I sound, I sound really out of touch. But it’s just, the power is incredible. Also, it’s I think it’s not just for recording, it’s also for live performances.

Rick Beato: 2:16:19 Yes.

Lex Fridman: 2:16:21 So this is why Studio One has been a little bit nicer for me because it’s simpler, made for recording more so.

Rick Beato: 2:16:29 Any DAW that you get used to, Lex, that’s… just use anything. And you have to become a master at the things if you want to be a recording engineer or producer, you you become an expert. A lot of the, you know, Phineas and Billie Eilish, I think that they use Logic, that’s their DAW that they like to use. And Logic, you know, a lot of pros use Logic. You know, I I fire up Logic every couple days and I use it for things. I have it on my laptop here and I I have Pro Tools and Logic on my laptop. I use both. I use Pro Tools mostly though.

Lex Fridman: 2:17:03 So Pro Tools is that’s where you feel like at home.

Rick Beato: 2:17:06 I’m an… I’m an expert in Pro Tools.

Lex Fridman: 2:17:08 Are you using any… emulation, any amp sims or it’s all real amps?

Rick Beato: 2:17:14 No, I use amp sims. On my laptop here when I travel and things like that, I use… Neural DSP, which I just did a video at their headquarters in Helsinki. And their… CEO Doug Castro is a is a friend of mine. I actually talked to him today as a matter of fact. And I have a Kemper amp sim, you know, modeler. I have an Axe-FX. I’ve got a Helix. I pretty much have all these things. But for me, I can I have a hundred amps in my studio. So and I have mics set up all the time in cabinets and stuff.

Lex Fridman: 2:17:46 What do you mean?

Rick Beato: 2:17:47 I have 100 amplifiers. Real amplifiers.

Lex Fridman: 2:17:50 Real?

Rick Beato: 2:17:51 Real. Yeah.

Lex Fridman: 2:17:52 Wait, sorry. A hundred?

Rick Beato: 2:17:54 I have 100, yeah. About 100. Maybe 95.

Lex Fridman: 2:17:57 How do… how does one go get to that?

Rick Beato: 2:18:00 level. Collecting and being up to 64 in in April, so.

Lex Fridman: 2:18:07 So you just don’t let go.

Rick Beato: 2:18:08 I don’t let go, no.

Lex Fridman: 2:18:09 Why would you get to a hundred? Like is it is it a tone difference that you know the tone…

Rick Beato: 2:18:11 Yes. So everything it does one thing really well.

Lex Fridman: 2:18:15 Uh-huh.

Rick Beato: 2:18:16 And so it’d be like, okay, so I have this Marshall JCM800 that’s modded that that does this one thing, it’s got these great mids and it’s good for this kind of a tune. So I will pull that out. Then it’s like, no, I need more of like a scooped metal tune sound that’s more like Metallica or Dream Theater something, so I’m gonna pull out my Mesa Mesa Boogie. Or I need a I need something that’s chimey that’s more like Brian May or like the Edge. I’m gonna pull out my Vox AC30. So everything and and that’s that’s why I have so many amps because they all do every amp I have does one thing really well. If it doesn’t do it well, I get rid of it.

Lex Fridman: 2:18:46 I’ve and I’m

Rick Beato: 2:18:47 and I’m down to a hundred.

Lex Fridman: 2:18:48 Down to a hundred. It’s only a hundred. Uh

Rick Beato: 2:18:51 I could get by with probably 75.

Lex Fridman: 2:18:54 Come on, but you then you really run the risk of not having just the right amp. But you’re using emulation, so that’s that’s great. I mean, and then there’s the other side of it, which is the guitar. I told you offline, I think having multiple guitars is cheating, but whatever, nobody agrees with me on this. I only have like one I do have some side pieces,

Rick Beato: 2:19:09 but the one main

Lex Fridman: 2:19:13 the greatest guitar.

Rick Beato: 2:19:14 A Strat?

Lex Fridman: 2:19:15 A Strat.

Rick Beato: 2:19:16 A Strat, yes. American Strat.

Lex Fridman: 2:19:16 I said I would never do this, but I was in a guitar store, I lived next to a guitar store in Cambridge and one day I would always stop by, I don’t know why, I just just to look at the guitars, like I don’t really know why exactly, just to be in the aura of these great instruments. And I saw they brought in this American Strat that had these different shades of it was like a silver

Rick Beato: 2:19:31 Mhm.

Lex Fridman: 2:19:32 and I just I’ve never had this feeling. They talk about love at first sight. I just fell in love with a guitar. Can you just speak to the kind of guitars you have and you love?

Rick Beato: 2:19:42 I pretty much have mainly old school guitars, right? So I have Gibsons, I have Fenders, I have PRS guitars, and then I have

Lex Fridman: 2:19:52 Mhm.

Rick Beato: 2:19:53 I have two Gibson acoustics. I have a 1957 Country and Western that I’ve had for probably 30 some odd years. It’s a great guitar. And then I have a J-45 Gibson and I have a Martin D-28. So I only have three nice acoustics and then I have a Guild 12 string and I have a Guild Nashville tuned guitar. The low strings are up the octave, so the E, A and D and G are up the octave. That’s Nashville tuning, six string though. Like basically what David Gilmour plays Comfortably Numb in my video. He plays a Nashville tune, but with one variation: the low E is up two octaves. So um, he, he demonstrates actually the, how he wrote Comfortably Numb, the chorus part of it was with this particular guitar that he’s playing in the video.

Lex Fridman: 2:21:21 What can you say about like the different feels that the guitars, the acoustics have? Like, how do you know which one to pull out?

Rick Beato: 2:21:30 It depends on the kind of part that I’m playing. If I want something with really tight midrange with not, that doesn’t have a lot of low, low bass, this particular old Gibson that I have, the ‘57, I will pull that out. It’s got very balanced strings and uh, like you know, midrange. It doesn’t have a lot of, it doesn’t have a booming bottom end, booming low E string or anything or A string. So it depends on what, what kind of sound I’m looking for.

Lex Fridman: 2:21:58 It’s more about sound versus feel?

Rick Beato: 2:22:02 Yeah. All my guitars play equally well. I have them all set up to where they play well. Um, I have a signature Gibson guitar that I’ve had for five years now.

Lex Fridman: 2:22:14 When you say Gibson, Gibson Les Paul?

Rick Beato: 2:22:17 Gibson, it’s a double-cut Les Paul Special, yeah, with P90 pickups.

Lex Fridman: 2:22:21 I don’t know what double cut means, but it sounds impressive.

Rick Beato: 2:22:23 That means two cut, cut two, uh, yeah, as opposed to a Les Paul that has one cut. So it’s a Les Paul Special that has two. I have it over there, my signature guitar. When you play this you’re gonna be like, “Oh my god, this is butter.”

Lex Fridman: 2:22:41 And what amp do you play through? Do you play through an amp sim or do you have, what do you have, like a…

Rick Beato: 2:22:46 This is gonna be embarrassing… yeah, yeah, I use Bias FX, I’m sorry. Lex, I, I use amp sims too, so I just got the new John Mayer Neural DSP plugin today that I have not tried out. He did a modeling of all his amplifiers that Neural DSP did and um, it sounds great. John played it, it sounds just like his amps.

Lex Fridman: 2:23:08 Yeah, John is incredible. I’ve been fortunate enough to have dinner with him a couple of times and outside of being an incredible musician, he’s also conversationally just…

Rick Beato: 2:23:18 Yes. I’ve known John since he lived in Atlanta, but when he got signed, and I knew John from way back then, probably in the early 2000s.

Lex Fridman: 2:23:26 I think he doesn’t get enough credit. Like, he’s one of the greatest living guitarists.

Rick Beato: 2:23:33 He’s a fantastic guitar player. Absolutely.

Lex Fridman: 2:23:35 And a celebrator, if that’s a word, of great guitar playing.

Rick Beato: 2:23:38 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman: 2:23:40 By way of advice, you started your YouTube channel in your mid-50s and found incredible success. You’ve had essentially multiple careers. Is there some wisdom you can extract from that?

Rick Beato: 2:24:00 Somebody’s gotta be successful, so why can’t it be you? That was… that was… [laughter]… That was my… when I started my channel, I mean, I didn’t start it—it started by accident with the Dylan video—and really so many people reached out to me, I started it six months after that viral video. So many people wrote to me, “Can you teach me this?” Pro musicians, well-known ones that you’d who you’d know. “Can you teach me this?” I can’t teach you what Dylan did, but I can… I can teach you relative pitch, develop your ear that way. But then I had conservatories writing to me about this stuff from all over the world: “How did you teach Dylan this?” Because we made about four different videos, and they got more and more sophisticated. And so I thought, okay, I’ll make some YouTube videos and explain this stuff. This is really why I started, so I didn’t have to keep… I couldn’t answer the emails, there were so many of them, so I just started making videos on how to train your ear and music theory. And that’s really how I started my channel. And my wife was like, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m making YouTube videos.” “Why?” “So I don’t have to keep telling people how I did this stuff.” And then all of a sudden, you know, a few… I had 4,000 subscribers the first month, another 4,000, then hit 100,000 after a year, and then six months later 200,000, then three months later 300,000. So…

Lex Fridman: 2:25:19 I think there… one thing that should be said that in modern culture for young people, a lot of them will see YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and they kind of want to be famous. They want to get the clicks and the views and so on and that’s the thing they chase and optimize. I think the thing that you’re leaving unstated perhaps is that you spent many years pursuing the mastery of a craft, and there’s a lot of value to getting good at something.

Rick Beato: 2:25:59 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman: 2:26:00 Offline… you can actually reveal your journey online, but the thing you’re chasing is not fame, it’s getting good at something. And I think actually what happens is even if the thing you get good at is not the thing that you become famous for—if that’s the thing you’re… that ends up happening—it’s still like getting good at one thing kind of somehow relates to getting good at another thing. Somehow they’ll lead you to get better at getting better at the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. But if you’re just chasing fame and trying to figure out, “how do I do the viral thing?” or so on, it just seems to… you might actually get there, but it’ll be unfulfilling and not long-lasting.

Rick Beato: 2:26:52 My theory of my channel’s always been make videos on things I’m interested in and at first I thought oh nobody’s gonna watch an old white-haired guy on YouTube.

Lex Fridman: 2:26:57 Yeah.

Rick Beato: 2:26:58 That was kind of my thing. Well, that was not… Correct. Um… And then it was like, we’ll just make videos on stuff I’m interested in. Just so happens that other people are interested in the same things I’m interested in and keep learning. And I, when I produced bands, I never let them take my picture ever. I never let them record me in the studio. There’s virtually no pictures of any band I ever produced. So from 1999 to 2015, when that Dylan video came out, no one took my picture. There were no pictures of me on the internet.

Lex Fridman: 2:27:32 You were fully behind the camera kind of guy. I mean, like, no.

Rick Beato: 2:27:37 No. No pictures. No… no pictures with people. Hey, can we take a picture? I said, no, I don’t take pictures with people.

Lex Fridman: 2:27:43 And now you’re like, you’re the talent. You’re the face. No, I mean, but the… again, the thing you were leaving on stage there is… is like you spent a lot of years teaching music. Like, really exploring music, trying a music career of like, trying to create, trying to produce, trying to be a musician and all these… not just trying. Like, getting extremely good at it. I just… I think in modern culture, there’s a sense you want to skip that part. I want to be famous. I want to, you know, this. And that is a thing that’s not going to be in most cases effective as a primary thing to chase.

Rick Beato: 2:28:31 So, I have an undergrad in classical bass, I have a masters from New England Conservatory in jazz guitar. Then I taught college for… I taught jazz studies for five years from 87 to 92. Then I got a publishing deal, my first publishing deal in 1992 with PolyGram Publishing. And then I became a producer when I was 37, having no idea how to engineer. I taught myself engineering. And then YouTube, I taught myself how to edit video.

Lex Fridman: 2:29:00 And then you taught yourself how to interview.

Rick Beato: 2:29:02 And I taught myself to interview. I’d never done an interview before. And it was like, interviewer? What?

Lex Fridman: 2:29:06 You haven’t just done that, you’ve taught yourself not how to do just YouTube, but YouTube Shorts.

Rick Beato: 2:29:11 Yes. Different, totally different thing. Totally different skill.

Lex Fridman: 2:29:15 And then not just YouTube, but like, how to be like a… there’s a… because you’re both a YouTuber and like a musician who posts stuff on YouTube. YouTuber means like, you’re thinking about stuff like thumbnails and…

Rick Beato: 2:29:30 Which I make my own thumbnails. I’ve always made my own thumbnails.

Lex Fridman: 2:29:33 By the way, before I forget, I think I… I speak for the entirety of the internet thanking you for how you introduce your videos and how you close them. Because you… there’s a big part of YouTube where people have a 30-minute introduction to a five-minute video. You just go straight in. That’s really wonderful. That’s… I mean, on all fronts. I mean, I suppose it has to do with the production skill that you have. Of understanding cutting cutting the fat. Yep, yep, cutting cutting the fluff, cutting the bullshit. I’ll just get straight to the core of the thing. I’ve heard you talk about maintaining friendships for a long time. You said never waste a friendship. Can you elaborate on that?

Rick Beato: 2:30:15 Yeah. That’s one of my things is that I really value the time I’ve spent with people, friendships and keeping in touch with people. I talk to each one of my siblings multiple times a week. I talk to my sisters probably every night, my two sisters. Um, I I have friends from college, I get friends from growing up, I have friends from, you know, both colleges I went to, I have friends from all different eras of my life that I keep in touch with and visit whenever I can.

Lex Fridman: 2:30:46 And you mostly met some incredible humans and incredibly weird and interesting humans throughout your life.

Rick Beato: 2:30:52 Mhm.

Lex Fridman: 2:30:54 So it’s worth it, the effort to to connect and reconnect.

Rick Beato: 2:30:59 I mean it’s pretty much everything in life. No- nothing means it anything more than the friendships that you make in your in your family.

Lex Fridman: 2:31:05 Yeah, what’s the point of this whole thing, right?

Rick Beato: 2:31:07 That’s right.

Lex Fridman: 2:31:08 What’s the role of music in uh in the human experience?

Rick Beato: 2:31:14 Well hopefully to enlighten people and to create the soundtrack of their life.

Lex Fridman: 2:31:19 It is, right? Yeah. Music music does something. I’ll get sometimes when I’m alone I’ll listen listen to a song and there’s nothing quite like a song that makes me truly feel, like feel alive. And whatever that is, sadness or hope or excitement or um when I’m working out, listening to Rage Against the Machine, like protest. Or as I was listening to the Metallica, the I was re-listening to the set that they played in in Moscow, just hyped. Like truly hyped. I was pacing listening to it.

Rick Beato: 2:31:59 And there’s nothing like that.

Lex Fridman: 2:32:01 I’ve never found anything. And I don’t know what that is in the human psyche that’s that, but I’m so glad we found it. We humans created instruments that can vibrate strings and together create harmonies and melodies and and ones that reverberate through generations and they carry that. It’s one of the greatest things that humans ever did.

Rick Beato: 2:32:30 Creating music.

Lex Fridman: 2:32:32 And all of that led up to you, some guy being listened to by millions of people on the internet. This is all a simulation Rick. And I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time, like I told you, this is crazy to meet you.

Rick Beato: 2:32:49 Same Lex.

Lex Fridman: 2:32:50 Thank you for everything you do for the world, for celebrating music, for helping us discover and rediscover some of the incredible musicians and songs that have been-

Rick Beato: 2:33:00 created over the over the decades over the centuries. Thank you for being who you are and thank you for talking today.

Lex Fridman: 2:33:07 Thanks, I appreciate it. And now, let me leave you with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche, as I often do: “Without music, life would be a mistake.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.