Rick Rubin on AI, Creativity, and The Way of Code

**Rick Rubin** (0:00)
So many people I know who use AI, ask it questions and think that the results that they get back is the answer. And it seems like people are more interested in getting an answer that can allow them to stop thinking about the question than really finding out what the real answer is. I'm so interested in what AI really can know based on what is and not what we tell it we think it is.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:26)
For our summer replay series, we're bringing back one of our favorite conversations from the past year. As AI becomes part of more creative work, one question keeps resurfacing. What still belongs uniquely to humans?
Few people have spent more time thinking about creativity than legendary music producer Rick Rubin. In this conversation, Rick joins Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Anjney Midha, and me to discuss The Way of Code, AI as a creative tool, vibe coding, and why technology may change how we create without changing where great ideas come from. The discussion ranges from music and entrepreneurship to philosophy, consciousness, and the importance of staying true to your own creative instincts.

**Marc Andreessen** (1:18)
The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investors in any A16z fund. Please note that A16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

**Ben Horowitz** (1:46)
We are here today to discuss Rick's new album, The Way of Code. Rick, what is The Way of Code?

**Rick Rubin** (1:53)
The Way of Code is a book about vibe coding. And it's a book about vibe coding by way of a 3000-year-old spiritual text called The Dao De Jing written by Lao Tzu. It's interesting the idea of a 3000-year-old wisdom teaching combined with cutting edge technology.
That's what The Way of Code is. And the subtitle is The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding. And I like the idea of The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding, considering the term vibe coding is maybe ten weeks old. I feel we now have the timeless art of something ten weeks old is interesting to me.

**Ben Horowitz** (2:31)
It's weird to hear you call it a book, because when you first sent me the link and I started reading it, it felt like I was using software. So why do you call it a book versus a website or an app or the many other things you could have described it as?

**Rick Rubin** (2:48)
Well, I wrote it as a book. It started as a book. And then I invited Jack Clark onto the Tetragrammaton podcast. And I had just finished the book.
And after the podcast, I said, I wrote this book. Do you want to check it out? And he looked at it and he said, hmm, I feel like there's a way we could do something with this, build it into a website and have a way to demonstrate vibe coding within the website. So that's how the website came about.

**Ben Horowitz** (3:15)
Ah, gotcha. Well, it feels kind of poetic for it to be vibe coding and have built-in vibe coding with each verse.

**Rick Rubin** (3:25)
The idea of originally the anthropic people said, could you give us a list of prompts to create the art? And I said, I think the art would be best created using the text of the book to create the art and then we can give it mods to modify the art and we'll suggest some mods, but you can also make up your own mods. So you can say, I want it to look like it was painted by Cezanne, or I want it to look like it's melting, or I want it to look like what's the Nordic version look like and it'll do those things, or what's the Technicolor version, or make it spin fast, or make it spin slow. You can ask it to make whatever changes you'd like it to.

**Ben Horowitz** (4:09)
My head was exploding when I saw this because it felt like watching the art of remixing music, which I've heard Ben talk about many, many times before as the heart and soul of hip hop, right, sampling. That's the first thing that it evoked for me when I read this. Is that where the idea came from?

**Rick Rubin** (4:28)
All art is a version of sampling and remixing. It doesn't start from zero. We feed back based on what's coming at us.
That's what all artists do. So remixing is kind of what all art is. We know it very specifically in the hip hop world. But that's really when the Beatles listen to Roy Orbison and wrote Please, Please Me based on Roy Orbison's Please song, that was remixing. It's always been that.