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

Lex Fridman · 2026-03-01

<https://lexfridman.podhood.com/debe6ee6-c81f-4160-8ad1-ddb34ee6e59a>

Lex Fridman and Rick Beato explore Beato's musical journey, from learning guitar solos like Hey Joe to his son Dylan's perfect pitch and his legendary interviews with David Gilmour and other icons. Beato argues that bebop and Bach underpin great music, shares his top guitar solos, and critiques AI-generated music as fundamentally boring, while championing authenticity and the struggle of learning. The episode also delves into the business of music, copyright battles, and the evolution of music production.

## Key moments

- **[0:00] Guitar Solos**
  - [1:08] Rick Beato says the first guitar solo he learned was 'Hey Joe', and his mother played rhythm guitar for him when his brother wouldn't.
  - [2:53] Rick Beato attributes Jimi Hendrix's unique style to his use of chord fragments, riffs, and improvisation.
  - [4:07] Rick Beato says Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and Andrés Segovia were the giants of early 20th-century guitar.
- **[4:27] Jazz Roots**
  - [4:54] Django Reinhardt lost the use of his ring and pinky fingers in a fire but still played incredibly fast lines with two fingers.
  - [5:47] Rick Beato describes Django Reinhardt's music as fully improvised and the foundation of modern 'gypsy jazz'.
  - [6:29] Rick Beato explains that bebop was developed by Charlie Parker and featured fast tempos, angular lines, and chromaticism over standard chord progressions.
  - [7:47] Rick Beato says hearing bebop as a child is like learning a language, making it easier to master later in life.
  - [8:53] Rick Beato theorizes that all children are born with perfect pitch but lose the ability around nine months when they become culturally bound listeners.
  - [9:22] According to language researcher Patricia Kuhl, babies can learn to recognize phonemes of any language if exposed to social interaction before nine months.
- **[10:27] Perfect Pitch**
  - [10:46] Perfect pitch is the ability to identify any note without a reference tone; Rick Beato's son Dylan can name any note or chord instantly.
  - [11:06] Relative pitch is learning to identify notes relative to a reference and is more useful for musicians than perfect pitch.
  - [12:18] Ear training starts with practicing intervals, both melodic and harmonic, and can show progress within a couple of months of daily practice.
  - [13:59] Relative pitch helps musicians figure out chord progressions and learn solos by ear, and it must be taught alongside music theory.
  - [15:02] Rick Beato recommends beginners learn open chords and strumming patterns first, focusing on finger placement to avoid muting strings.
- **[15:04] Learning Guitar**
  - [16:12] The hardest part of learning guitar is making micro-adjustments so that open strings ring clearly, a skill that becomes automatic with practice.
  - [17:27] To produce a clean sound when bending notes, guitarists must use enough flesh on the fingertip and mute adjacent strings with the index finger.
  - [18:29] Jimi Hendrix's habit of wearing his guitar low forced him to adapt his thumb position, which also helped mute lower strings.
  - [19:29] Learning an instrument develops the brain; the micro-adjustments required become automatic and improve coordination.
  - [19:54] The initial finger pain from playing guitar only lasts a week or two, and it's not a reason to be discouraged.
  - [20:45] After basic chords, guitarists can explore single-note playing, riffs, and hybrid picking, depending on the style they want to learn.
- **[38:34] Jazz Greats**
  - [38:42] According to Rick Beato, Miles Davis was the greatest innovator in jazz history, leading every major style from bebop to fusion.
  - [39:32] Miles Davis' '50s quintet with John Coltrane and '60s quintet with Herbie Hancock produced some of the most important jazz records ever.
  - [41:18] Bassist Ron Carter told Rick Beato that Miles Davis never rehearsed with his band and often didn't tell them they were being recorded, preferring spontaneity.
  - [42:31] Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers was heavily influenced by jazz because his stepfather was a jazz bass player who hosted jam sessions at home.
  - [43:41] Flea's intensity and slapping technique, as demonstrated in his interview with Rick Beato, reflect a fierce dedication to practice.
  - [45:00] Rick Beato considers the bass the most important instrument because the note it plays defines the quality of the chord and gives the bass player great power.
- **[45:08] Greatest Solos**
  - [45:26] Rick Beato names Comfortably Numb as his top guitar solo, but he chose the less-discussed first solo to highlight its equal greatness.
  - [46:14] David Gilmour's genius lies in his incredible melodic sense, the flow of his ideas, and his use of space, much like a spoken phrase.
  - [46:43] When Rick Beato played Comfortably Numb for David Gilmour, Gilmour's face showed he was re-experiencing the solo as if hearing it for the first time.
  - [47:34] David Gilmour's signature tone comes from a sophisticated analog setup including a Binson Echo unit and a Hiwatt amp, kept in pristine condition for decades.
  - [48:38] Contrary to purist expectations, David Gilmour sometimes records solos through a 1990s Zoom 9030 modeler because he gets used to the sound and doesn't want to re-record.
  - [50:22] Rick Beato never prepares for interviews, relying on his curiosity and playing songs to jog the guest's memory, which brings their past recordings to life.
- **[1:14:23] Rock Legends**
  - [1:15:39] Rick Beato notes that virtually every famous singer from Nat King Cole to Kurt Cobain was a heavy smoker, and the raspiness it added became part of their vocal identity.
  - [1:16:52] The dopamine high of performing to huge crowds creates a difficult crash, leading many musicians to abuse substances, though Rick Beato does not advocate drugs as a creativity tool.
  - [1:19:21] Elton John once walked into Rick Beato's recording session to introduce himself as a fan of the band Jump, Little Children, and invited them to watch him write a song in 15 minutes with Bernie Taupin.
  - [1:20:52] Elton John composes by looking at Bernie Taupin's lyrics for 15 minutes and immediately writing the music, as captured in a YouTube video where he creates 'Tiny Dancer' on the spot.
  - [1:22:22] Metallica's down-picking style, crucial to their sound, is so physically taxing that Rick Beato can no longer do it, and he suspects smartphone swiping has damaged the thumb joint.
  - [1:23:27] Kirk Hammett, known for his structured metal solos, is at heart an improviser who crafts his parts from jams and fragments, blending soulful melodies with heavy riffs.
- **[1:45:40] AI Music**
  - [1:46:31] AI tools like Suno can generate convincing songs from text prompts, but Rick Beato found that the best results come when a human crafts the lyrics and selects from many generations.
  - [1:47:57] AI-generated music is quickly recognizable as 'slop' by young ears, and listeners crave authenticity; Lex Fridman says knowing AI is involved makes him tune out.
  - [1:49:04] Rick Beato's children can instantly detect AI music, even from another room, by the unnatural ringing in the vocal reverb, though quality is improving rapidly.
  - [1:50:48] Rick Beato's daughter Layla slowly started questioning whether songs were AI, and after hearing a soloed vocal, admitted it was 'very hard to tell' from a human.
  - [1:51:50] AI-generated lyrics currently lack soul and novelty, but they can serve as idea generators for human musicians who then refine and re-perform the parts.
  - [1:53:17] Rick Beato finds using AI for music creation boring and prefers the physical act of playing instruments; he uses AI only periodically to test its progress.
- **[1:59:13] Music Business**
  - [2:00:44] Doechii's 'Anxiety' uses the melody from Gotye's 2011 hit, which Rick Beato criticizes as unfair for a 'best song' award when the creator didn't build the track from scratch.
  - [2:02:42] Taylor Swift's discipline of rarely having more than two co-writers sets her apart in modern pop, earning Rick Beato's respect as a true singer-songwriter.
  - [2:04:17] Rick Beato has been in a constant battle with YouTube's content ID system; for years, using even short clips of music would result in his videos being blocked or demonetized.
  - [2:06:10] Rick Beato hired a lawyer who successfully fought 4,000 content ID claims, and he encourages other YouTubers to assert their fair use rights instead of accepting easy money.
  - [2:07:11] Major labels used AI to scan large channels first for copyright claims, but YouTubers historically never fought back, allowing the practice to become rampant.
- **[2:08:27] Spotify & Gear**
  - [2:08:47] Spotify treats music as a commodity, making discovery easy but often pigeonholing listeners with algorithms, unlike the old radio days when program directors introduced unexpected new bands.
  - [2:10:10] Spotify's view counts are valuable for analyzing popularity, but the streaming service's low payouts and lumping podcasts with music revenue are contentious issues.
  - [2:11:46] When interviewing mixers, Rick Beato plays original WAV files from 20-year-old CD rips instead of Spotify's remastered versions, and listeners notice the superior sound quality.
  - [2:14:05] Rick Beato uses Pro Tools, Logic, and Ableton but always returns to Pro Tools because he became an expert in it when a major label gave him a G3 Mac and Digi 001 interface.
  - [2:16:04] For recording, the best DAW is the one you master; Billie Eilish and Finneas use Logic, while Rick Beato's deep Pro Tools expertise makes him most efficient.
  - [2:17:17] Rick Beato owns about 100 guitar amplifiers because each one does one thing uniquely well; he keeps them all set up with mics for instant access to specific tones.
- **[2:30:02] Friendship**
  - [2:30:44] Rick Beato lives by the motto 'never waste a friendship', maintaining close contact with siblings, college friends, and people from every era of his life.
  - [2:31:37] Music serves as the soundtrack of life, and for Lex Fridman, nothing compares to the feeling of being moved by a song, whether it's hope, sadness, or the energy of Rage Against the Machine while working out.

## Speakers

- **Lex Fridman** (host)
- **Dylan Beato** (guest)
- **Elton John** (guest)
- **Rick Beato** (guest)

## Topics

Music

## Mentioned

Fender (company), Gibson (company), Guild (company), Martin (company), Neural DSP (company), PRS (company), Ableton (product), Axe-FX (product), ChatGPT (product), Claude (product), Eleven Labs Music (product), Helix (product), Kemper (product), Logic (product), Pro Tools (product), Spotify (product), Suno (product), Udio (product), YouTube (product), iZotope RX (product)

## Transcript

### Guitar Solos

**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, uh, listening to guitar solos, some epic guitar solos. Uh, what's an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually, uh, musically, where you're like, "Wow, there's magic in this"?

**Rick Beato** [1:08]
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.

**Lex Fridman** [1:22]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:22]
And I learned the solo, and I figured out this, like, 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. 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, then we'd get in a fight.

**Lex Fridman** [2:02]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [2:03]
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, what are the chords?" And J-

**Lex Fridman** [2:17]
That's awesome

**Rick Beato** [2:17]
... and I was like, "Okay, it's like E, C, G, D, A."

**Lex Fridman** [2:21]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [2:21]
And so my mom would literally play rhythm for 20 minutes while I'd play.

**Lex Fridman** [2:26]
#parenting.

**Rick Beato** [2:27]
That's amazing. I, when I, when I look back on it now, my mom's been gone for 10 years now. When I look back on it, it's like, my God, my parents were so cool.

**Lex Fridman** [2:36]
We should mention that Hey Joe, and Hendrix in general, is kinda known for the rhythm not being simple rhythm, just the chords that you mentioned.

**Rick Beato** [2:44]
Right.

**Lex Fridman** [2:44]
It's what you do with those chords. It's almost improvisation on the rhythm side.

**Rick Beato** [2:48]
He did all this really cool chord fragments, uh, riffs and things like that that's just part of his, that's the Hendrix style.

**Lex Fridman** [2:55]
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?

**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, uh, watch your top 20 lists where you're very opinionated, sometimes very, uh, openly critical about certain kinds of song. It's fun. Opinions are fun.

**Rick Beato** [3:27]
But they do change, Lex, from day to day. You know, like I-

**Lex Fridman** [3:31]
Yeah, exactly

**Rick Beato** [3:31]
... but when, anytime I, I do a list, if I do 20, I like to do 20 because that gives me some leeway to, uh, to throw in. I have to throw in something that is so weird that people, you know, s- uh, something that a lot of people won't know, just to have it on there so I can at least introduce a pr- You know, I'll put somebody like a, Allan Holdsworth, who's a famous fusion guitar player.

Uh, I'll throw in one of his solos or something. Just some, 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** [4:05]
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 just am getting that vibe right now.

**Rick Beato** [4:17]
No, I'm not. I, I, but I don't want to, to say greatest. You know, you, you can say, well, there, there are people that, that inspired Jimi Hendrix.

**Lex Fridman** [4:26]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [4:27]
Charlie Christian, older guitar players. Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt were the first two really big, and probably, and Andrés Segovia were, were three of the giants of the 20th century as far as guitar influences for most of the players that were to follow.

### Jazz Roots

**Lex Fridman** [4:44]
So here, going to 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** [4:55]
So Django was, um, well, there's a huge movement right now, gypsy jazz movement as they call it-

**Lex Fridman** [5:02]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [5:02]
... that is, um, 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, uh, third and fourth finger, so his, 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** [5:45]
That...

What is that? So that's gypsy jazz.

**Rick Beato** [5:49]
That's gypsy jazz, yeah.

Him, Stephane Grappelli is a violinist that played with him a lot.

**Lex Fridman** [5:59]
How much of this is, uh, improvisation?

**Rick Beato** [6:01]
Everything he's doing there is impro- improvised.

**Lex Fridman** [6:08]
Feels so free.

**Rick Beato** [6:09]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [6:12]
And fun, like swing. And then that leads to, uh, you said pre-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** [6:29]
Well, after the s- 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, the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions-

**Lex Fridman** [6:54]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [6:54]
... that, that they would use as vehicles to improvise over. A lot of them were A-A-B-A 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 n- notes.

**Lex Fridman** [7:25]
Chromatic notes are just notes next to each other on the-

**Rick Beato** [7:27]
Next to each other, yeah

**Lex Fridman** [7:28]
... on the fretboard.

**Rick Beato** [7:29]
I like to think of as connecting notes.

**Lex Fridman** [7:30]
Connecting. You're putting in more notes than are supposed to be there, and so doing, creating some interesting texture.

**Rick Beato** [7:37]
Yeah, so that is one of the most difficult styles to master.

**Lex Fridman** [7:42]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [7:42]
Because all these things are a language.

**Lex Fridman** [7:44]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [7:44]
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-

**Lex Fridman** [8:11]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [8:12]
... 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.

So I think it's very similar to learning languages, which kinda is like my theory on perfect pitch, that every child is born with perfect pitch and they start to lose the ability around nine months.

**Lex Fridman** [9:05]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [9:06]
When people become culturally bound listeners, when babies do. They start out as citizens of the world. You know, they can, they have the pho- the, the neural pathways to hear the sounds, the phonemes of all 6,500 languages spoken on Earth.

**Lex Fridman** [9:23]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [9:24]
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.

**Lex Fridman** [9:40]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [9:40]
I saw this in 2010, this lecture that she did, like a TED Talk, and she talks about this, that kids, they did a, 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 the sounds, the phonemes of that language even later on.

**Lex Fridman** [10:05]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [10:05]
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."

**Lex Fridman** [10:25]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [10:26]
'Cause that's the only way I could explain it.

### Perfect Pitch

**Lex Fridman** [10:28]
We're gonna return to Joe Pass. We gotta go to Dylan. You mentioned Dylan. I guess it's in part one of the origin stories of, uh, 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** [10:46]
It's ability to identify any note without a reference tone. So, um, you can play, it doesn't matter how quickly they are, that they can per- a person with perfect pitch can hear a note and immediately identify it, or a collection of notes.

**Lex Fridman** [11:03]
And taking a tangent upon a tangent, you also have a course on ear training.

**Rick Beato** [11:06]
Yes, but my course is for relative pitch-

**Lex Fridman** [11:09]
Relative

**Rick Beato** [11:09]
... not to be confused with perfect pitch.

**Lex Fridman** [11:10]
Is it fair to say that relative pitch, as far as the thing you would learn, is more useful-

**Rick Beato** [11:15]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [11:15]
... for musicians?

**Rick Beato** [11:16]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [11:16]
Can you explain the difference between the two?

**Rick Beato** [11:18]
Relative pitch is basically learning how to identify pitches relative to a, 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.

**Lex Fridman** [11:38]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [11:38]
So once you're given a reference note, you can use relative pitch to, to identify the relative nature from one pitch to another.

**Lex Fridman** [11:46]
And of course, intervals make up scales, and intervals make up chords.

**Rick Beato** [11:51]
Chords. Yep.

**Lex Fridman** [11:52]
And so that if you develop, to any degree, uh, relative pitch, you can understand, you can hear the music better.

**Rick Beato** [12:02]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [12:03]
So what, what does it take, uh, since we're taking a tangent on a tangent, what's, uh, what does it take to train your ear? What's, uh, a TLDR on the course before people go out and sign up?

**Rick Beato** [12:14]
It's just practice, basically. You start with intervals, typically with small intervals, like minor second, major second. So minor second would be a half step, major second would be a whole step.

**Lex Fridman** [12:24]
Are you listening to the tone one after the other or two of them together?

**Rick Beato** [12:27]
Both. So played separately it's called melodic intervals, right, like a melody.

**Lex Fridman** [12:31]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [12:32]
And harmonic intervals are played like a harmony together. So you have to be able to identify them both, both ways.

**Lex Fridman** [12:38]
What's an early journey? Like, we'll give people a preview of what they should... Like, what does that look like? What does, what does practice look like?

**Rick Beato** [12:45]
Well, my course, it will play you an interval, and then you identify it by clicking on whether it's-

**Lex Fridman** [12:51]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [12:51]
... you know, a major third or minor third, or major sixth or minor sixth or perfect fifth or tritone, whatever it is. And, and it will teach you gradually, over time, how to recognize all the intervals.

**Lex Fridman** [13:03]
So you listen to a melodic interval or a harmonic interval. H- 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, uh, a week, two weeks, a month, two months, five years?

**Rick Beato** [13:23]
I think you'd do it pretty quickly. Within, you know... If you practice within a couple months, you can, you can really make, um, a lot of progress on it, if you practice daily.

**Lex Fridman** [13:33]
What benefit does it have to, uh, to you as a musician in general?

**Rick Beato** [13:37]
Well, it's great if you wanna hear a chord progression, if you're trying to figure out a song, and you can say, "Oh, that's going from the vi minor chord to the IV major to the V major to the I major."

**Lex Fridman** [13:47]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [13:47]
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, 'cause 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** [14:02]
Now, do you recommend people couple that with, uh, music theory, uh, in ter- in terms of education, the, the education journey?

**Rick Beato** [14:10]
They have to be taught together because these terms are really music theory, right?

**Lex Fridman** [14:14]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [14:15]
The, those intervals, major second, minor second, major third, minor third, perfect fourth. So as you're doing that, and then you, once you learn the intervals, the 12 intervals in an octave, then you, you learn them both melodically and harmonically, so played together and separate. Then you learn chords.

**Lex Fridman** [14:35]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [14:35]
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. 'Cause learning... Music theory is just the name of things in music.

**Lex Fridman** [14:49]
So there's the sound of things.

**Rick Beato** [14:51]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [14:52]
There's the name of things, and then there's the haptic, like playing the thing-

**Rick Beato** [14:57]
Right

**Lex Fridman** [14:57]
... probably. So playing chords, playing scales. You have, I believe, a course on scales and on chords.

**Rick Beato** [15:02]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [15:03]
Okay, since we're doing- ... a tangent, let's go. How do you recommend people... There's a bunch of people listening to this that are curious about, uh, how they can start in playing guitar, maybe even playing piano, and may- maybe playing other instruments. Although guitar, of course, is the greatest instrument of all time.

### Learning Guitar

**Rick Beato** [15:19]
Absolutely.

**Lex Fridman** [15:20]
What are the early steps to that journey? What, 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. Uh, 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** [15:39]
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, you don't mute strings that you don't want to mute.

**Lex Fridman** [16:00]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [16:00]
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.

**Lex Fridman** [16:18]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [16:18]
You've been playing guitar for I don't know how many years. Forever, right?

**Lex Fridman** [16:22]
Forever, yeah.

**Rick Beato** [16:23]
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-

**Lex Fridman** [16:32]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [16:32]
... you have to, out of midair, strike the string that your finger's on to play the note, and these are all fine adjustments that you're doing.

**Lex Fridman** [16:39]
I'm, I'm just a hobbyist recreational player, but it, it... 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, 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.

**Rick Beato** [17:06]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [17:07]
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-

**Rick Beato** [17:20]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [17:21]
... of the finger. Where does it fall? Like, how much do you bend the finger?

**Rick Beato** [17:25]
You have to have enough of flesh on it to actually raise the, raise the string and pitch.

**Lex Fridman** [17:30]
Yeah, yeah.

**Rick Beato** [17:31]
Otherwise it-

**Lex Fridman** [17:32]
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 wanna be, like, the perfect, the proper musician, or do you wanna do a Hendrix, uh, so the thumb over the top?

**Rick Beato** [17:47]
Way over the top, yes.

**Lex Fridman** [17:48]
And so, like, you, if, if you have a fretboard here, I think the more, like, classical guitarists, the very proper, perfect, uh, perpendicular alignment of the, the fingertips to the fretboard, versus, like, Hendrix is like, "Fuck it." You nerds. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it. With the messiness is part of the magic. Of course, like BB King is also kinda messy looking in terms of his positioning of the fingers, but his tone is incredibly clean.

**Rick Beato** [18:23]
Yes. 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-

**Lex Fridman** [18:38]
That's true

**Rick Beato** [18:38]
... if you're wearing it lower, lower, then you s- you can't get your fingers on top of it like-

**Lex Fridman** [18:46]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [18:46]
... that. And the thumb acts as, 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, 'cause you have to kinda mute the other strings that are... so they don't ring out.

**Lex Fridman** [19:01]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [19:01]
If you're pl- playing the first note in Comfortably Numb in the solo at the end, and you're at the ninth fret of the G string and you bend that-

**Lex Fridman** [19:09]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [19:10]
... if you bend that G string and you accidentally hit the B string under it-

**Lex Fridman** [19:14]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [19:14]
... you don't want that ringing, so you have to kind of angle your fi- index finger so it-

**Lex Fridman** [19:18]
To mute

**Rick Beato** [19:19]
... to mute that.

**Lex Fridman** [19:20]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [19:20]
So all these micro adjustments that you don't even think about, I mean, you're not thinking about that, Lex, when you're playing it. You've done it so many times that these things are just part of your, of your brain. That's why this is such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments.

**Lex Fridman** [19:37]
And of course, you have to solve that puzzle. It must be really frustrating in the beginning, like holding a chord.

**Rick Beato** [19:43]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [19:44]
Like all of them... And it hurts too, right?

**Rick Beato** [19:47]
It does hurt.

**Lex Fridman** [19:47]
If you're doing acoustic guitar.

**Rick Beato** [19:48]
Not for that long, though. For like a week.

**Lex Fridman** [19:51]
Couple, couple... Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [19:52]
Couple weeks.

**Lex Fridman** [19:53]
Couple-

**Rick Beato** [19:55]
I don't wanna discourage anyone. You know, it's, it's actually pretty easy to learn basic stuff.

**Lex Fridman** [20:00]
Right. But the, the pain is temporary, I guess is the point I'm trying to make.

**Rick Beato** [20:03]
It is.

**Lex Fridman** [20:05]
Uh, so, so what else? So the physical component, play a few chords. Where does the journey continue if you're learning guitar?

**Rick Beato** [20:12]
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 w- with riffs, if you think of Back in Black, right? That has a, a riff embedded in the, in the actual melody, or many songs that have riffs.

The Hendrix stuff that has chordal riffs-

**Lex Fridman** [20:35]
Mm

**Rick Beato** [20:35]
... and you're moving up the neck and, and, uh, involving all the fingers and things like that. So there's... It really depends on what you wanna, what styles you wanna play.

**Lex Fridman** [20:45]
So you're thinking about song learning, so different components of song learning, so riffs in songs, lead in songs.

**Rick Beato** [20:53]
And then you have finger picking, if you have Stairway to Heaven, songs like that. How about wanting to learn that? That involves finger picking, because the, you have to isolate certain notes of the chord and play two at, together, you know, and multiple times.

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

**Rick Beato** [21:19]
Correct.

**Lex Fridman** [21:19]
And that's a choice you make.

**Rick Beato** [21:21]
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 to flat pick the picking patterns.

**Lex Fridman** [21:35]
On the music theory front, do you recommend people learn scales and chords and like the theory of it?

**Rick Beato** [21:40]
Uh, pro- later on, I would say. I wouldn't say necessarily right, right off the bat.

**Lex Fridman** [21:45]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [21:46]
I think, I think learning songs is the, is the first thing that you should do, 'cause it, you wanna keep people motivated.

**Lex Fridman** [21:52]
So you get them to like fall in love with music and playing.

**Rick Beato** [21:56]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [21:56]
All right. And that takes a f- couple months, three months?

**Rick Beato** [22:00]
Depends on how motivated they are.

**Lex Fridman** [22:02]
So you recommend practicing, what, every day?

**Rick Beato** [22:04]
Every day. My son Dylan, when he started learning the guitar 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."

**Lex Fridman** [22:18]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [22:18]
Which is roughly the same amount of time.

**Lex Fridman** [22:19]
Yeah. But it usually turns into something longer. But o- otherwise, like if you're a 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** [22:33]
Which is why I leave my guitar on a stand all the time, so that if I walk by it and I'm like, "Oh, okay, I'll just pick it up for a second," then that second turns into 10 minutes and 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.

**Lex Fridman** [22:49]
That's the first video on the channel.

**Rick Beato** [22:51]
It was, it was b- actually before the channel, 'cause this actually blew up on Facebook.

**Lex Fridman** [22:55]
Facebook.

**Rick Beato** [22:55]
And then I put it on YouTube after.

**Lex Fridman** [22:59]
Uh, so if it's okay.

**Rick Beato** [23:01]
Yeah. Okay, Dylan. We're gonna do the hardest ear training test of all time. Are you ready?

**Dylan Beato** [23:07]
Ready.

**Rick Beato** [23:08]
All right.

**Lex Fridman** [23:08]
Oh.

**Rick Beato** [23:10]
Now, I, just a quick backstory on this.

**Lex Fridman** [23:13]
Yeah, absolutely.

**Rick Beato** [23:13]
I made this for my friend Shane's wife, who wanted to see... 'Cause Shane, that was a g- 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 and 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, 'cause I was on the school board at Dylan's school.

**Lex Fridman** [23:35]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [23:36]
And I said, "Hey, Dylan, come downstairs. I wanna make this video. It'll take one minute. Just need to do this thing for my friend Shane." And he's like, "I don't want to." And I said, "Come on, this'll take one minute." "I don't want to." So I said to my wife, I'm like, "Ne- would you tell Dylan to come downstairs?

I wanna do this video. It'll take one minute."

**Lex Fridman** [23:53]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [23:53]
She's like, "It... Dylan, go downstairs." And he had, he has a mouth full of candy there, 'cause he was eating candy. So if you look at him, he's, he's, he's literally has a mouth full of candy while he's doing this.

**Lex Fridman** [24:04]
And we should say, on Facebook, it went quite viral.

**Rick Beato** [24:08]
Yeah. Like 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.

**Lex Fridman** [24:18]
Eight years old.

**Rick Beato** [24:19]
Yeah.

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

**Rick Beato** [24:23]
So when Dylan was about two, he... I was doing a FaceTime with my brother John and, and I was, I was like, "Check this out, John," and I played the Stone in Love, Neil Schon's solo from Journey. And, and I was like, "Check this out." And Dylan would sing along. And, and my son- my brother John was like, "Wow, Dylan can sing all the notes."

And I was like, "Yeah." And then I played Black Dog, Zeppelin-

**Lex Fridman** [24:46]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [24:46]
... and Dylan would sing that. And it's like, Dylan's got a good ear. And then John and I were like, "Well, we have good ears, too, so this... We pr- maybe we coulda done that when 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.

I was 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 play it on my phone. I was like, "Oh, my gosh." And then I ask him, "Play, sing the Superman theme," 'cause 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, I go back to the studio, I go to the piano, I hit the note B flat, and Dylan says, "Star Wars." Star Wars starts on a big B flat major chord-

**Lex Fridman** [25:29]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [25:29]
... 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-

**Lex Fridman** [25:37]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [25:37]
... of the Superman theme. And then I realized that he had per- perfect pitch, and then in five minutes I taught him the name of the 12 notes.

**Lex Fridman** [25:43]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [25:44]
Which he already knew, but he just didn't know the names.

**Lex Fridman** [25:46]
Oh, so you just associate the, the names to-

**Rick Beato** [25:48]
Yeah

**Lex Fridman** [25:48]
... the thing he kn- What do you think is this, in his mind, 'cause it's not just individual notes. He can, like, hear everything.

**Rick Beato** [25:55]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [25:56]
What is that?

**Rick Beato** [25:56]
He doesn't see colors. He just says every note sounds completely different.

**Lex Fridman** [26:02]
Wow. Like you said, maybe it's a language thing.

**Rick Beato** [26:06]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [26:07]
'Cause it really is a... He just learned the language.

**Rick Beato** [26:10]
Yeah, the language.

**Lex Fridman** [26:11]
There's-

**Rick Beato** [26:11]
It's like, it's like perfect, um, n- it's like native music f- fluency, if you think of it like that.

**Lex Fridman** [26:17]
So let's, let's listen to some of this.

**Rick Beato** [26:18]
Turn around. Here we go. As fast as you can, we're gonna start with single notes, then we're gonna do some intervals, then chords. Okay, here we go.

**Dylan Beato** [26:26]
A. C sharp. B flat. C. B. A flat.

**Rick Beato** [26:31]
Okay, good. Two notes at once. Here we go.

**Dylan Beato** [26:33]
C flat.

**Rick Beato** [26:34]
Great. How about this?

**Dylan Beato** [26:37]
B flat, A.

**Rick Beato** [26:37]
Great. What about this?

**Dylan Beato** [26:40]
E flat, A flat.

**Rick Beato** [26:42]
Great.

**Lex Fridman** [26:42]
This is incredible.

**Rick Beato** [26:43]
Um.

**Dylan Beato** [26:47]
C, B flat.

**Rick Beato** [26:48]
And then how about this?

**Dylan Beato** [26:50]
E flat.

**Rick Beato** [26:51]
What is it?

**Dylan Beato** [26:52]
E, E flat.

**Rick Beato** [26:53]
Correct. He's, uh, he's annoyed. He is annoyed.

**Lex Fridman** [26:58]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [26:59]
The, the part of this, when I play these q- next chords are, that's really, I think, why the video went so viral, the next part of this-

**Lex Fridman** [27:06]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [27:06]
... where I play these super complex polychords. Okay, I'm gonna do some polychords for you. These are really gonna be hard. You ready? What's this?

**Dylan Beato** [27:14]
C augmented over D flat augmented.

**Rick Beato** [27:16]
Okay, sing a B flat.

**Dylan Beato** [27:20]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [27:22]
Very good. What's this chord?

**Dylan Beato** [27:29]
Uh, A flat. Oh, A flat major over A major.

**Rick Beato** [27:34]
Great. Sing an F sharp.

**Dylan Beato** [27:37]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [27:37]
Excellent. What's this chord?

**Dylan Beato** [27:42]
A minor over D flat major.

**Rick Beato** [27:44]
Great. What's this chord?

**Dylan Beato** [27:50]
E add nine over F major.

**Rick Beato** [27:52]
That was- E add nine over F major, so I had to look at my hand to make sure that that's what it was.

**Lex Fridman** [27:55]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [27:55]
'Cause they're all in inversions.

**Lex Fridman** [27:57]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [27:58]
So I think the reason that this went so viral is that the more that someone knew about music, the more that they shared the video, because these polychords. So the people that were the best musicians were, like, were, would, looked at it and was like, "Oh my God," you know, "It's C augmented over D flat augmented."

**Lex Fridman** [28:18]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [28:19]
Um, and the, the second chord was A flat major over A major, but they're both in inversion, right? So it was like a, a first inversion A flat major chord, first inversion A major chord. And then, uh, A minor over D flat major, and then E add nine over F major. And for an eight year o- I mean, for anyone-

**Lex Fridman** [28:38]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [28:39]
... plus they're all close voiced, they're all just right next to each other.

**Lex Fridman** [28:42]
Yeah, yeah.

**Rick Beato** [28:43]
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, and you have to di- he has to dissect each one. Like, what are the notes being played there, and, and what is, like, what's the theory? 'Cause he's actually-

**Lex Fridman** [28:58]
Mm

**Rick Beato** [28:58]
... using music theory-

**Lex Fridman** [28:59]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [28:59]
... to dissect them.

**Lex Fridman** [29:01]
It must be, in his brain, those components of the chords all sound different, like very-

**Rick Beato** [29:06]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [29:06]
... clearly different.

**Rick Beato** [29:08]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [29:09]
It's truly incredible. The human mind is incredible. And so you're, 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, I played what I call high information music.

**Lex Fridman** [29:22]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [29:22]
High information music would be Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, fugues. Y- An- Anything Bach.

**Lex Fridman** [29:31]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [29:32]
And I would play The Well-Tempered Clavier, and I would play... I have a, a friend who, Turkish pianist, who's one of the greatest improvisers I've ever heard. His name's Aydin Esen. And I would play Aydin's improvisations for Dylan. It had very sophisticated harmony and linear things in it. And Keith Jarrett, and, um, ma- mainly jazz, classical, and modern classical music.

And then, then we would play, listen to rock music once he was born. I'm talking on my wife's stomach before Dylan was born.

**Lex Fridman** [30:01]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [30:02]
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-

**Lex Fridman** [30:11]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [30:12]
... and I would look at him. In order for this, uh, for them to Hear these phonemes apparently and develop this language or get the, the language as- acquisition has to involve the social brain.

**Lex Fridman** [30:26]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [30:26]
So when kids look at you, you're-- when a, 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, uh, uh, "This is where this word stops or starts and stops. These are how the s- 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-"

**Lex Fridman** [31:01]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [31:01]
... this is a G." I just played complex-

**Lex Fridman** [31:04]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [31:04]
... high-information music for him and, and played with him.

**Lex Fridman** [31:08]
And that applies maybe even more generally to high-information language.

**Rick Beato** [31:12]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [31:13]
And it starts before they're born. I think I, I, I saw some, some of the, these incredible scientists that work on the neuroscience, the neurobiology, the psychology of language in early life. I think a big part is y- in the m- mother's stomach, you're listening to the mother speak.

**Rick Beato** [31:34]
Yes. That's right.

**Lex Fridman** [31:35]
So, like, that's, that's how on the language side you're picking up the language already.

**Rick Beato** [31:40]
That's right. And you're picking up the music- musical language.

**Lex Fridman** [31:43]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [31:43]
So native music fluency you could call it.

**Lex Fridman** [31:46]
So if the mother's sitting back and listening to Bach and some bebop jazz, you have a, you have a pretty good chance.

**Rick Beato** [31:55]
Much better chance.

**Lex Fridman** [31:56]
Okay. All right. So that, as we unwind ba- our way back, uh, Joe Pass and, uh, bebop, you were s- you were funny enough talking about, uh, what is bebop jazz and, and, uh, be- 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-

**Lex Fridman** [32:18]
Wasn't a musician

**Rick Beato** [32:18]
... which is very weird. I s- we never-- My, I have six siblings, and we could never figure out why Dad liked really sophisticated jazz.

**Lex Fridman** [32:27]
Well, you just took it for granted at that time.

**Rick Beato** [32:28]
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 put, we'd put on a record. I'd 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.

**Lex Fridman** [32:48]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [32:49]
And then get up and go do stuff. And we did that all the time.

**Lex Fridman** [32:53]
And so the first time you impressed your dad was with the Joe Pass song, right?

**Rick Beato** [32:58]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [32:58]
And by the way, we have to go to this song 'cause, uh, people must have forgot 'cause, uh, r- peop- people just think you're, uh, um, like a good communicator or something. They, they don't realize how good you are at guitar, how good you are 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** [33:29]
Joe Pass was a 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 le- record sta- was 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 kinda cool."

**Lex Fridman** [34:17]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [34:17]
And so I said, "I think I can figure out some of this stuff." So I figured out this thing.

**Lex Fridman** [34:24]
Is it by, by ear mostly?

**Rick Beato** [34:26]
Yeah, just by ear. I didn't know any of the chords or anything.

**Lex Fridman** [34:28]
If we can listen to a little bit here.

**Rick Beato** [34:30]
If you go back to that Brother Bro- 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 out I--

I just-- And it's weird. I mean, look at that weird bar.

**Lex Fridman** [34:46]
So you were just finding, um, like playing around with putting your fingers-

**Rick Beato** [34:51]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [34:51]
... on the various positions.

**Rick Beato** [34:53]
Right. Trying every combination of fingers. I'd never played that chord. It's a weird-looking chord.

**Lex Fridman** [34:57]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [34:58]
And but I kept-- I moved my fingers around till I heard to where it sounded like, "Oh, that's it, definitely."

**Lex Fridman** [35:04]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [35:04]
And I looked at my hand and was like, "What is that?" Had no idea what it was.

**Lex Fridman** [35:08]
So you were connected to the s- You were really connected to the music.

**Rick Beato** [35:11]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [35:13]
The-- And so that, that's why you can hear-- It's not necessarily-- Did you even-- You, you didn't have perfect pitch.

**Rick Beato** [35:18]
No.

**Lex Fridman** [35:18]
You-- And not even relative pitch.

**Rick Beato** [35:20]
No, I did not.

**Lex Fridman** [35:21]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [35:21]
No. I didn't know anything about intervals. I didn't know anything about music theory, anything. This is all just-

**Lex Fridman** [35:26]
Yeah. You're just, like, playing around-

**Rick Beato** [35:27]
... playing

**Lex Fridman** [35:27]
... with different shapes. That's amazing.

**Rick Beato** [35:28]
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 an... But I didn't know that.

**Lex Fridman** [35:57]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [35:58]
I'd heard Joe play that on the record. This is the last song on there. I'd listen 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 had never played before.

**Lex Fridman** [36:13]
Would you recommend people do something like that on a really complicated song?

**Rick Beato** [36:17]
Yeah, but there's so many YouTube videos that you can go and just learn it without having to Yes. Yeah, I would recommend

**Lex Fridman** [36:24]
I feel like the struggle-

**Rick Beato** [36:26]
The struggle is where it's at

**Lex Fridman** [36:27]
... 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.

**Lex Fridman** [36:42]
But yeah, let's, uh-

**Rick Beato** [36:43]
You start hearing there's

**Lex Fridman** [36:46]
You're nuts.

**Rick Beato** [36:50]
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, this intro part is-

**Lex Fridman** [37:38]
You make it sound so simple when you break it down. And, and by, by the way, Joe Pass, incredible guitar player, like this is obvious.

And he improvised all this.

**Rick Beato** [37:47]
He could have played it like this.

**Lex Fridman** [37:48]
Yeah. But, you know, the first

was the individual notes. We'll do that.

**Rick Beato** [37:55]
Ooh, that's hard. Maybe just play it like that. That sounds more, more realistic.

**Lex Fridman** [38:09]
The amount of, uh, different genres that you're able to replicate is just incredible.

**Rick Beato** [38:14]
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, um, but it was worth it. When I played it-

**Lex Fridman** [38:28]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [38:28]
... for my dad-

**Lex Fridman** [38:29]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [38:29]
... he couldn't belie- I mean, he didn't say, "That's amazing." He was just like, "Hmm, pretty good."

### Jazz Greats

**Lex Fridman** [38:35]
So what was the role of bebop jazz in the history of music? It seems like it was influential in your life. Uh, another guy you had an incredible interview with, uh, 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, and the guy showed up in a Miles Davis-

**Rick Beato** [38:54]
That's right

**Lex Fridman** [38:54]
... T-shirt. And-

**Rick Beato** [38:55]
Bebop

**Lex Fridman** [38:56]
... and

**Rick Beato** [38:57]
Miles Davis played with Charlie Parker-

**Lex Fridman** [38:58]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [38:59]
... when he was 18 years old, and that's, he was, Charlie Parker was really his mentor.

**Lex Fridman** [39:04]
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 the 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, he had records like The Birth, Birth of Cool and Modal Jazz and, um, 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.

**Lex Fridman** [39:50]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [39:51]
Now, Miles made records with many people, but the '50s quintet had John Coltrane in it, had, I mean, it had different piano players, could, Wynton Kelly, but Paul Chambers in the bass, Philly Joe Jones in the drums. Um, and that particular group was, uh, made just incredibly important records. And then he had his s- '60s group, which was, uh, 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, in, uh, interview with you, but they talked about, like, uh, Miles Davis, um, his music feeling like, I think, uh, 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 m- make to fuck it all up live, and that feeling is what creates the f- the aliveness of the music.

Like, can you speak to that, just the, the creating in the music, the feeling like you're on the edge, like you're challenging the possibilities of what can happen and, uh, it all can go to shit, and because of that, it feels alive?

**Rick Beato** [41:10]
Well, when I interviewed Ron Carter that played in, in, uh, Miles's '60s quintet, I asked Ron, 'cause Ron did s- records, he played bass on two, 2,200 recording, famous records. And I said, "Did you guys ever rehearse with Miles?" "No. Never." I said, "So you, what, what would you do?" He goes, "We'd just show up at the studio, and he'd have the charts, put them on the stand, and, and we would we'd just roll."

**Lex Fridman** [41:38]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [41:38]
And I said, "Would you listen to it after?" "No."

And I said, "Well, what about your, what about the, 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 a, a microphone, a different kind of microphone on my bass amp." He goes, "Then months later, the, a record would come out, and I'd see, and I was on it, and I would take it down to the union and say, 'I played on this record,' so you get paid for it."

But he said, "We didn't even know we were recording."

**Lex Fridman** [42:07]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [42:07]
So Miles was always about, you know, don't think about it, just, just play.

**Lex Fridman** [42:14]
That's crazy. That was on purpose. That was done on purpose-

**Rick Beato** [42:18]
Yeah

**Lex Fridman** [42:18]
... not to, not to do the rehearsals, not, n- none of that.

**Rick Beato** [42:20]
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** [42:38]
So his stepfather was a jazz bass player.

**Lex Fridman** [42:42]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [42:43]
And his, uh... When his parents got divorced, his... 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 musicians, and they, then they used to have jam sessions at their place, and Flea loved it. It was kind of like my upbr- bringing with my dad playing jazz all the time.

And once, once it gets inside you, it's just there. And, uh, and so he is heavily influenced by jazz musicians.

**Lex Fridman** [43:19]
Yeah, his impression was just hilarious. I mean, he's a character. His whole physical way of being is a character, and h- his impression of just upright bass is just f- it's fun to watch, his whole-

**Rick Beato** [43:28]
His intensity, when he picked up his bass during the interview, it... He's an intense guy, and funny and, uh, you know, really, um, emotional and, um, and he picks up his bass, and there's a fierceness that you immediately feel, and he starts, he talks about how he pr- practices, and then when he starts doing the slapping stuff, he gets...

He's so into it and, 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 the slap." And-

**Rick Beato** [44:01]
Yeah

**Lex Fridman** [44:01]
... now, there's differences in the structure of the different bands, but usually, like, the, the bassist has a vibe to them.

**Rick Beato** [44:08]
Mm.

**Lex Fridman** [44:08]
I don't know if we can put words to exactly what that is. There's a kind of energy that drives the band.

**Rick Beato** [44:14]
To me, the bass is one of the only instruments that when you play a bad note, everybody notices. I started on the bass-

**Lex Fridman** [44:22]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [44:23]
... as a kid.

**Lex Fridman** [44:24]
Oh, interesting.

**Rick Beato** [44:25]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [44:25]
But you also play drums. You also play-

**Rick Beato** [44:27]
Yeah, but my first instrument was the cello in third grade.

**Lex Fridman** [44:30]
Oh.

**Rick Beato** [44:30]
And then I switched to the bass in sixth grade, and my, I majored, my undergrad degree is 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 because-

**Lex Fridman** [44:46]
Strong words.

**Rick Beato** [44:46]
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. 'Cause you can put the root in there. You can put the third of the chord in the bass. You can put the fifth in there.

You can play a lot of notes, and whatever you play in the bass kinda defines what kinda chord it is. So the bass player has a lot of power.

### Greatest Solos

**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 into consideration? You have a great list on, uh, top 20 rock guitar solos of all time.

**Rick Beato** [45:23]
Yeah, so I put Comfortably Numb as my favorite, as my top one.

**Lex Fridman** [45:26]
Yeah, on that day, right?

**Rick Beato** [45:27]
On that day.

**Lex Fridman** [45:28]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [45:29]
Right. Now, the day later, I would've said it's the second solo.

**Lex Fridman** [45:35]
Okay.

**Rick Beato** [45:35]
But I did the first solo because, because nobody talks about that solo.

**Lex Fridman** [45:39]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [45:39]
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?"

**Lex Fridman** [46:07]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [46:08]
Probably not for a long time, and then he's hearing it, and he's like, "Ooh."

**Lex Fridman** [46:11]
Maybe you just don't look back. When you do great things, you don't look back.

**Rick Beato** [46:14]
Miles never looked back. He never wanted to hear the old stuff. He always moved on.

**Lex Fridman** [46:18]
There was this funny moment, um, where you, where 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** [46:34]
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, how one idea leads to the next, how there's space between them. It's just like speaking.

**Lex Fridman** [46:57]
That's what I read about, uh, Miles Davis, is he was very good at understanding tempo and the value of silence.

**Rick Beato** [47:05]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [47:06]
Uh, and I think, I think David Gilmour doesn't always play fast.

**Rick Beato** [47:12]
Right.

**Lex Fridman** [47:12]
But he does a lot with less.

**Rick Beato** [47:15]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [47:15]
And, 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** [47:26]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [47:27]
What do you understand about what it takes to shape the tone that is David Gilmour?

**Rick Beato** [47:31]
He has a very sophisticated setup-

**Lex Fridman** [47:33]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [47:33]
... 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-

**Lex Fridman** [47:42]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [47:42]
... people his gear, and he laughed about it.

**Lex Fridman** [47:44]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [47:45]
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 are the same ones he used on the records?" He's like, "Yeah." His tech has been with him for, like, 50 years, and I mean, the exact ones? Yes. So it's just hard to, it's hard to imagine that those things still...

Of course, though, they, he's just kept it. Yeah, this is his, his Binson Echo that he played through, and this is this, you know, th- these are all the same effects pedals, and the... Wait, is this the same Hiwatt amp? Yeah. Is this the same... Yes. Yeah, you get some new stuff, but, uh, but they keep all their own gear, and that's, uh...

I mean, he's did s- he does sell his guitars for charity, but, like, he has a black Strat that is a, it's a signature version. It's, like, the exact copy of his old one.

**Lex Fridman** [48:35]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [48:35]
So to him, it's, it sounds exactly the same, plays the same.

**Lex Fridman** [48:39]
Well, of course, they converge towards that kinda- ... hardware, but there's so many tiny details over the years. You see the final result of it, but there's a, there's a journey there of, of exploring. And of course he's not, I guess he's not doing any soft, like no emulation, no amp.

**Rick Beato** [48:57]
He does do emulation, actually. He does. He has this thing... Th- 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.

**Lex Fridman** [49:10]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [49:11]
I put out a short where he talks about it. I said, "So that, that Zoom 9030, is that a real thing? 'Cause 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, he runs Pro Tools himself, and, and so he'll be sitting there. There's no one there to help him.

And he's like, "I'll just plug into this thing," and then he'll play a solo with this model. It's like a kind of '90s modeling, early modeling thing.

**Lex Fridman** [49:37]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [49:37]
And he'll play a solo, and then after a while you hear the solo, and it's like, well, I'm not gonna 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, and... 'Cause it sounds great.

And, uh, and then he's like, "Yeah, yeah, so that's what I use." And then I have, I have the video of it right there, and it has his presets, DG1 and DG2 and, you know, whatever.

**Lex Fridman** [50:03]
What's your process for preparing for interviews like that? You've done a few legendary people.

**Rick Beato** [50:09]
I never prepare for interviews because I ask people things that I'm interested in knowing.

**Lex Fridman** [50:18]
So just letting your curiosity just pull, pull you forward.

**Rick Beato** [50:21]
Yes. And I can think of 100 questions to ask David Gilmore. And, but I always ask my questions based on what they say to me.

**Lex Fridman** [50:28]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [50:29]
So, but I do make a playlist of songs that I want to talk about.

**Lex Fridman** [50:33]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [50:34]
So that kind of guides me, is that, 'cause I wanna make sure that I-

**Lex Fridman** [50:38]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [50:39]
... there's p- specific things that I need to play to, so that you can jog his memory.

**Lex Fridman** [50:46]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [50:47]
'Cause 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 a- again.

**Lex Fridman** [51:00]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [51:00]
And they can, 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** [51:13]
So there's a lot of tiny details that go into a particular song, whether it's in the production or how it's played or how, how it's composed, all that kind of stuff, and you don't know what those are ahead of time.

**Rick Beato** [51:23]
No.

**Lex Fridman** [51:23]
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 did 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** [51:39]
I have an incredibly good memory.

**Lex Fridman** [51:42]
Exactly.

**Rick Beato** [51:42]
That's, that's what it is, is that I can remember when records came out, who produced them, where they recorded them, who was the engineer, what the s- what songs are on it. And not only that, but the, the people I'm interviewing know that I can play all the parts-

**Lex Fridman** [51:58]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [51:59]
... of all the instruments, 'cause I've done breakdowns of their songs, which is why I get the interviews with them in the first place, really.

**Lex Fridman** [52:06]
But the actual, like, the skill of the interview, the thing you're not saying, the preparation, is the you young listening to bebop.

**Rick Beato** [52:14]
That's right.

**Lex Fridman** [52:15]
It's the, it's the background know- it's the soul carrying with you, being able to radiate the love of the soul of music.

**Rick Beato** [52:25]
I will say this, Lex, is that the, the other thing is that most of these people have a really good sense of humor.

**Lex Fridman** [52:32]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [52:33]
When I was, when, the first time I interviewed David in New York, my brother John came along, and he is a massive David Gilmore fan. That's his biggest influence as a guitar player. And so he said, "You're interviewing David Gilmore? Oh, I'm wa- I'm coming." I was like, "All right. Come on. Come on down." So, so my brother John's standing about five feet away, and John is a sales guy, but he, great guitar player.

So John's like... I was like, "This is John. This is, David, this is my brother John." "David, great to meet you, buddy." And, you know, J- John's like a, so he's a sales guy. And, and, uh, so during the interview, I, I said, I was like, "Hey, John, what was I gonna ask David? Oh, ask him about the Gilmore Effect."

"Oh, yeah, that's right." And, and the Gilmore Effect is my thing that I say in the comments section when people say, anytime anybody plays anything technical, "Oh, yeah, that's great, but I much prefer David Gilmore." And, uh, so I always call it the Gilmore Effect. Anytime I have, like, Yngwie Malmsteen-

**Lex Fridman** [53:29]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [53:29]
... anybody that play, that has chops-

**Lex Fridman** [53:30]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [53:31]
... that I interview, the, the, the negative comments are always, "Well, I prefer David Gilmore."

**Lex Fridman** [53:36]
Yeah. Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [53:37]
And I s- I said that. I s- I told David that. He's like, "Well, they, maybe they should keep their, uh, opinions to themselves."

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

**Rick Beato** [53:54]
Stairway to Heaven. Hey Joe.

**Lex Fridman** [53:57]
What, in that list, your top Hendrix solo was Hey Joe.

**Rick Beato** [54:02]
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 kind of how, how important they are to me and, and my development.

**Lex Fridman** [54:12]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [54:12]
So there, there's 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.

**Lex Fridman** [54:25]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [54:26]
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 Neil Shawn, Neil Schon is v- very hard to play some licks. Um, the, um- There's a song, uh, 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 ex- very hard to play and figure out. And, um, that people don't know the solo, so I put it on my list 'cause I knew that a lot of people are gonna watch it and they're gonna 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, there's a melody to it. And also, there's, like, a legendary nature to the, the, the, the brief time we had to, we had Randy Rhoads.

**Rick Beato** [55:20]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [55:20]
It's, it's probably one of the greatest guitarists ever.

**Rick Beato** [55:23]
'56 to '82, I think. Terrible. Um, he was, um, um, absolute brilliant guitarist, had his own style.

**Lex Fridman** [55:34]
We should say he was the guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, the band.

**Rick Beato** [55:38]
Yeah. And, uh, that Mr. Crowley solo is a, is a great solo. Great solo. And, um, he's incredibly influential as a guitar player, um, to, for metal guitar players and, um, I love Randy Rhoads.

**Lex Fridman** [55:54]
Uh, another guy, so one of my favorites is, uh, Mark Knopfler.

**Rick Beato** [56:00]
Yes, and I did have Mark Knopfler on my list. Sultans of Swing.

**Lex Fridman** [56:04]
That's right, you did have Sult-

**Rick Beato** [56:04]
Now, I had it high on the list, and I'll tell you why.

**Lex Fridman** [56:07]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [56:08]
I would have had it, had it lower, 'cause it's one of the early ones, 'cause I want people to be like, "Okay, oh, this is a serious list, so Rick's gonna talk about serious stuff." So, um-

**Lex Fridman** [56:18]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [56:19]
... and Rick's gonna 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-

**Lex Fridman** [56:41]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [56:42]
... Nancy Wilson, I, uh, I played the video of. And I tried to get a couple of my friends to play the, um, Ice Cream Man, Van Halen solo.

**Lex Fridman** [56:51]
Yeah, which is-

**Rick Beato** [56:51]
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, who's an amazing guitar player, and I, and he's like, "No, I'd have to practice that." I was like, "Come on, man.

Can't somebody play Ice Cream Man?" The opening lick of Ice Cream Man that he plays is very hard to play, 'cause it's an incredibly long stretch.

**Lex Fridman** [57:13]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [57:13]
And it hurt my fingers to do, and Eddie would turn his guitar up like this to pl- to play. And plus it's a tricky... It just, it's a tricky rhythm, and, and it's such a big stretch. It's like, man, I can't. That hurts my hand.

**Lex Fridman** [57:29]
I just love that that's the Van Halen solo you have at the top 20.

**Rick Beato** [57:34]
See, I have to do some-

**Lex Fridman** [57:36]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Rick Beato** [57:36]
There's so many Van Halen. My God, it could be, there, I could pick 25 different Van Halen solos.

**Lex Fridman** [57:43]
But to me, I mean, there really is nobody like Mark Knopfler. I mean, there's, he's a unique guitarist. There's something about his tone. Speaking of Gilmore, there's just the tone, the care, the timing of the notes.

**Rick Beato** [58:00]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [58:00]
His improvisation, like the live performances of Sultans of Swing that's been actually going, like, somewhat viral around, uh, a rec- recently, his, his, uh, pretty old live performance of, um, Sultans of Swing. For me, Brothers in Arms.

**Rick Beato** [58:18]
Great.

**Lex Fridman** [58:18]
These kind of soulful, mournful type of solos he does really, really well. Also, the interesting instrumentation of, uh, Romeo and Juliet.

**Rick Beato** [58:28]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [58:28]
Just so, so many, it's, uh, truly one of the greats.

**Rick Beato** [58:32]
Now, obviously the intro to Money for Nothing is, 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** [58:46]
Yeah. There's certain songs like, um, Europa by Santana. Santana can have that tone too.

**Rick Beato** [58:52]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [58:52]
That Mark Knopfler makes me really, just how clean it is. I think he beats BB King in my book on, in terms of the 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.

**Rick Beato** [59:09]
Well, that thing about being able to recognize somebody from a note.

**Lex Fridman** [59:14]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [59:15]
You know?

**Lex Fridman** [59:15]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [59:16]
When I hear Brian May, I can immediately recognize it's Brian May. S- incredibly melodic, the tone that he has. Gilmore, Hendrix, e- 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]
That'd be funny. That'd be a good, uh, video.

**Rick Beato** [59:37]
BB King, you hear one note.

**Lex Fridman** [59:39]
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-

**Lex Fridman** [59:47]
... from one note

**Rick Beato** [59:47]
... tomorrow. Lex, you'll s-

**Lex Fridman** [59:49]
I don't know

**Rick Beato** [59:49]
... the day after tomorrow you'll see it.

**Lex Fridman** [59:52]
I would love to see that.

**Rick Beato** [59:53]
Can you s- can you recognize these players by one note?

**Lex Fridman** [59:56]
By one note.

**Rick Beato** [59:57]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [59:57]
I think it's, I think we're being a little too aggressive with that. I think you need, like, two or three or four or five notes.

**Rick Beato** [1:00:03]
No, no, no. I guarantee you. So I, I was gonna do a video last week where I was gonna play s- uh, songs in reverse, okay?

**Lex Fridman** [1:00:10]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:00:10]
And 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? Or then they're like, "Oh, that's, that's Nirvana." Instantly they could recognize. It's like, well, that's not worth making. I said, "Yeah, it's so obvious." You hear the tone of the voice backwards, forwards, doesn't matter.

You know who it is.

**Lex Fridman** [1:00:27]
Oh, interesting. Okay. So it's about the tone.

**Rick Beato** [1:00:29]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:00:30]
How could you possibly know the, from a single note? It's, uh, I guess Van Halen you can.

**Rick Beato** [1:00:36]
One note of, of BB King's vibrato you could know.

I'm gonna, I, what I'll do is I would separate the guitars. I'll u- I, I can actually separate the tracks, and I would just play one note.

**Lex Fridman** [1:00:48]
You think you can, from a, a single vibrato you can know it's BB King?

**Rick Beato** [1:00:51]
Yes. Well, we'll see

**Lex Fridman** [1:00:53]
Put it on record, I'm skeptical.

**Rick Beato** [1:00:55]
I'm gonna do, I'll do twen- 20 of them. Can you recognize these guitarists from a single note?

**Lex Fridman** [1:01:00]
Could you recognize Stevie Ray Vaughan?

**Rick Beato** [1:01:01]
Absolutely.

**Lex Fridman** [1:01:02]
Versus

Eric Clapton?

**Rick Beato** [1:01:06]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:01:07]
All right. You might be right. He might be right. Quick 30-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. We've got Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, BetterHelp for mental health, LMNT for electrolytes, Fin for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration.

Choose wisely, my friends. 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-

**Rick Beato** [1:01:56]
Mm-hmm

**Lex Fridman** [1:01:56]
... and what it represents. So in that sense, "Tears in Heaven."

**Rick Beato** [1:02:00]
Well, the story be- behind that is, is, uh, heartbreaking.

**Lex Fridman** [1:02:03]
And then I personally really love the sound of "Wonderful Tonight."

**Rick Beato** [1:02:08]
That's a great song. That's one of my favorite Clapton songs.

**Lex Fridman** [1:02:11]
And I, as I was, like, listening to it, just doing a whole personal journey introspection, knowing that I'm gonna talk to Rick Beato, I was listening to just a bunch of songs. And I, I learned, it's embarrassing that I didn't know the, the, the stories behind the music, but I, I learned that Eric Clapton was married for ten- for a decade to the same woman that George Harrison was married to.

**Rick Beato** [1:02:40]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:02:40]
And that this woman was the muse, the inspiration for, for, like, so many of the legendary songs of rock-

**Rick Beato** [1:02:52]
Mm-hmm

**Lex Fridman** [1:02:52]
... including, well, "Wonderful Tonight," including "Layla"-

**Rick Beato** [1:02:55]
Mm-hmm

**Lex Fridman** [1:02:56]
... and including George Harrison's "Something."

**Rick Beato** [1:02:59]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:02:59]
Legendary song also. The same woman. Is she the greatest muse in rock history?

**Rick Beato** [1:03:05]
Probably, yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:03:06]
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, 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 all, 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** [1:03:43]
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 mu- in a musician, even if you're David Gilmour, you're, 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 y- you know, sometimes at a time. 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, um, and there's so much knowledge to be gained, for me at least, and I think that, 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 go and you work as an assistant engineer-

**Lex Fridman** [1:05:03]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:05:03]
... and you work your way up. I interviewed a guy named Ken Scott that, uh, worked with The Beatles. I interviewed him at Abbey Road Studios. This was 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.

**Lex Fridman** [1:05:27]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:05:27]
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'd 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 by them.

And, uh, 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've eventually fill them up with this music that you can't, you can never imagine it not existing, like "Stairway to Heaven" or whatever it is.

**Lex Fridman** [1:06:24]
Yeah. It's funny, like, looking back, even probably for them, just to realize they've created that magic is hard to believe.

**Rick Beato** [1:06:31]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:06:31]
'Cause you're looking at a blank thing, and then magic comes out, and you don't even, you don't even understand. Uh, you don't even 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 even 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 f- there's always something about these songs that bothers people.

**Lex Fridman** [1:07:14]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:07:15]
Even these songs, even-

**Lex Fridman** [1:07:16]
These little things. Yeah, yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:07:17]
Right. There's always little things-

**Lex Fridman** [1:07:19]
Yeah, yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:07:19]
... and they, 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.

**Lex Fridman** [1:07:24]
I mean, that, that, there's certain moments in songs that are just unlike anything else. On Bohemian Rhapsody, when Freddie Mercury, "S- sometimes wish I'd never been born at all."

**Rick Beato** [1:07:38]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:07:39]
And then guitar comes in. I mean, there's just nothing like that.

**Rick Beato** [1:07:43]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:07:43]
That was ... That ... I don't even know. I mean, that, that whole thing, and you've done videos on it, it's an incredibly complicated composition. It's, it's crazy that a popular song, popular rock song could be this g- operatic, so complicated. The other thing akin to that moment is, uh, Phil Collins with, uh, In the Air Tonight, the drum bridge.

**Rick Beato** [1:08:06]
Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

**Lex Fridman** [1:08:08]
Yeah. Yeah. Man, what is that? I can't listen ... 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 know ... Musically, I don't understand how you create them, 'cause it might be m- bigger than musical.

It might be cultural, all, a bunch of different elements. And p- plus it's him, Phil, with ... Like, I've seen him live before, where he has, like, a headset and does, just sh- something. He's like a telemarketer or something. Like- ... his whole vibe and look to him. He's n- doesn't look like a rock star, but he is.

**Rick Beato** [1:08:48]
Those are hooks when you think about it, right? It's, like, 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, 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]
Yeah, so it's hard. If you chase it, you're not gonna get it.

**Rick Beato** [1:09:13]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:09:14]
In your conversation with Sting,

he said something about, um, how modern music is simpler, uh, more minimalistic, and the bridge is gone, I think he said.

**Rick Beato** [1:09:28]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:09:28]
And he said he thought that the bridge is therapy.

**Rick Beato** [1:09:33]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:09:34]
It's like a chance for you to reflect, I guess, on the verse-

**Rick Beato** [1:09:38]
Right

**Lex Fridman** [1:09:38]
... before the chorus comes in.

**Rick Beato** [1:09:39]
That's right.

**Lex Fridman** [1:09:40]
It changed my view of the bridge, I suppose, is the therapeutic nature of it, at least lyrically. Um, you think he's onto something?

**Rick Beato** [1:09:47]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:09:47]
The value of the bridge?

**Rick Beato** [1:09:48]
The b- bridge is a place, I think, where you can kind of change the frame of reference of a song.

**Lex Fridman** [1:09:55]
You could probably do anything, I guess.

**Rick Beato** [1:09:57]
Lennon used to, he would have some kind of biting lyrics. Like, um,

We Can Work It Out, so McCartney writes the, you know, "Try to see it my way. Do I have to keep on going 'til 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'll ask you once again."

I mean, it's very, you know, very Lennon-esque. This is, that was really a, kind of a, a col- real collaboration between the two of those.

**Lex Fridman** [1:10:30]
This is where different parts of the band can clash-

**Rick Beato** [1:10:33]
Yeah

**Lex Fridman** [1:10:33]
... in interesting ways. I mean, The Beatles are the epitome of that, such ... Like, each individual Beatle is a, a great talent in their own right.

**Rick Beato** [1:10:42]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:10:43]
How were The Beatles able to create some of the greatest songs of all time, all before th- they turned 30 years old?

**Rick Beato** [1:10:51]
I have never been able to figure that out, but I have a theory that- Because P-

**Lex Fridman** [1:10:58]
I have a theory

**Rick Beato** [1:10:59]
... because PA systems were so bad back then- ... and The Beatles, people screamed so loudly that The Beatles thought, "Okay, we don't, we don't need ... We can't tour anymore, 'cause we can't even hear ourselves. So we're just gonna be a studio band." And maybe be- c- because of, we have all these great late Beatles records.

They're from 1966 on, just because they had bad PA systems.

**Lex Fridman** [1:11:24]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:11:25]
And they had no monitors. You know, they're in Shea Stadium.

**Lex Fridman** [1:11:29]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:11:29]
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, then August 5, they put out Revolver.

So within s- 365 days, they put out three 14, I think 14-song records. So they wrote and recorded three incredibly important records. So they were in the studio. It's like working out.

**Lex Fridman** [1:12:05]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [1:12:05]
They're practicing their craft every day, writing songs, trying to outdo the other ones. And so you had the, the perfect thing of, of four supremely talented musicians, songwriters, singers, and then the best producer you could possibly have, George Martin, and, and it was just a perfect storm. I think that, uh, 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.

**Lex Fridman** [1:12:40]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:12:40]
And same with The Beatles. They were always in the studio singing every single day, doing takes, and, and I think that that was part of it, at least.

**Lex Fridman** [1:12:52]
But you also have this theory that, uh, you know, that- The greatest productivity that musicians have is before they turn 30. The br- the greatest sort of creative genius that can come out of the human mind musically is before the age of 30.

**Rick Beato** [1:13:10]
Well, I think it's the same in mathematics as well.

**Lex Fridman** [1:13:12]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:13:12]
That y- you have this fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence.

**Lex Fridman** [1:13:16]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:13:17]
Fluid intelligence up until you're about, you know, in your late 20s-

**Lex Fridman** [1:13:20]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:13:20]
... 30 years old, and then crystallized, so you're using-- The crystallize is you're l- using your life experience to, to write things. So you'll find that, 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 just my theory-

**Lex Fridman** [1:14:02]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:14:02]
... that people can, uh, 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 the age 30.

**Lex Fridman** [1:14:14]
Creating something new.

**Rick Beato** [1:14:15]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:14:16]
Truly novel that, that requires youth.

It's just a theory, though, but it seems to apply. What do you think about, uh, the, the 27 Club? A bunch of the music greats died at 27. Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse.

### Rock Legends

**Rick Beato** [1:14:34]
Kurt Cobain.

**Lex Fridman** [1:14:35]
Kurt Cobain, of course. A, a big part of music history is linked to drug history.

**Rick Beato** [1:14:41]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:14:43]
Y- LSD, coke, heroin, weed.

**Rick Beato** [1:14:49]
Smoking.

**Lex Fridman** [1:14:50]
Smoking.

**Rick Beato** [1:14:51]
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.

**Lex Fridman** [1:14:58]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:14:59]
The Get Back documentary, they're smoking constantly. Go watch any of the MTV Unpluggeds, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is smoking every second that he's not playing, he's smoking. Every singer smoked. Every musician smoked.

**Lex Fridman** [1:15:12]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:15:13]
Nowadays, I ask my son Dylan, "Dylan, does anybody smoke at his high school?" He's like-

**Lex Fridman** [1:15:17]
Mm

**Rick Beato** [1:15:17]
... "Smoke? Nobody smokes." He's, he's think- it was an absurd question. And that was part of culture.

**Lex Fridman** [1:15:25]
Yeah, it was for everybody. I mean, that was, that was a big transformation o- over the past 20 years, and just everybody stopped smoking. But I don't think smoking has the kinda 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, those things really, and alcohol, unfortunately-

**Rick Beato** [1:15:50]
Mm-hmm

**Lex Fridman** [1:15:51]
... can be easily abused, I think. It seems like it's a r- m- the, the life of a musician, this dopamine thing of getting on stage and be, being adored by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the high of that, and then the come down after, is really hard life for just even neurobiologically of, like, how do you deal with that?

You have to be able to control the rollercoaster of your mind, and of course, drugs will 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.

**Rick Beato** [1:16:37]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:16:38]
And so naturally start to abuse those drugs. I don't know. I think, uh, I think th- I think it's really interesting the role that drugs have played in the, in the history of music. They have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive, uh, muses, inspirations for some of these folks.

**Rick Beato** [1:17:03]
Oh, absolutely. Now, would we want to, you know, advocate people doing things like that to boost their creativity?

**Lex Fridman** [1:17:13]
No.

**Rick Beato** [1:17:13]
Well, I wouldn't, but just like smoking, which I think improved people's voices. Uh, I mean, really, the raspiness of it-

**Lex Fridman** [1:17:23]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:17:24]
... this is the reason that the, the, that so many of these, uh, virtually every famous singer-

**Lex Fridman** [1:17:30]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:17:31]
... no matter what genre of music, jazz, soul, rock, they all smoked. Nat King Cole.

**Lex Fridman** [1:17:38]
Yeah, yeah. Miles Davis, too?

**Rick Beato** [1:17:40]
Miles smo- everybody smoked. Miles did-- Well, Miles w- was a heroin addict, too. I mean-

**Lex Fridman** [1:17:45]
Yeah, yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:17:45]
... so many jazz musicians.

**Lex Fridman** [1:17:47]
But Miles had a sound to him. You, you're right. I mean, smoking must, must play a gigantic role to that, adding some complexity to the voice.

**Rick Beato** [1:17:56]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:17:57]
Yeah, some richness to the voice.

**Rick Beato** [1:17:58]
Nat King Cole, he s- he smoked, I think, four packs a day. He died of lung cancer. Um, lot of heavy smokers, those singers.

**Lex Fridman** [1:18:08]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:18:08]
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 the chicken or the egg, but I certainly wouldn't recommend doing drugs as a way to get better at music.

**Rick Beato** [1:18:20]
No. No.

**Lex Fridman** [1:18:24]
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, with the place, 'cause sometimes it's part of the culture, the druggies, like you're saying, smoking. If you're smoking now, that's gonna 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-- 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, you know?

**Lex Fridman** [1:19:04]
Uh, on the songwriting front, you mentioned, uh, 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, um-

**Rick Beato** [1:19:17]
Yeah, 'cause he was recording in a studio in Atlanta that I was working with the 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, I'm pressing the button. "Yo, where are, where are you guys? What's up? I thought we were gonna start this." And no one's responding. I can hear talking. It's like, "What?

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, and hang out in Studio A." So, so we did, and he was there with Bernie Taupin.

They were working on a song, and he-- we talked there for, 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 on, and they'd just re- "Okay, just record this," and Elton would sit there and, and play and come up with the song-

**Lex Fridman** [1:20:36]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:20:36]
... in 15 minutes or so.

**Lex Fridman** [1:20:38]
Yeah, that's crazy.

**Rick Beato** [1:20:39]
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. Then they move on to the next song.

**Lex Fridman** [1:20:53]
Yeah, it's genius.

**Rick Beato** [1:20:53]
I mean, it's really incredible.

**Lex Fridman** [1:20:54]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:20:55]
That's it, yeah.

**Elton John** [1:20:56]
There's one here that I've sort of done the other day with "Tiny Dancer," which is about Bernie's girlfriend. So I just sort of ran it through and then put two verses together, then a middle eight, then a chorus, and then back to the sort of verse sort of thing. It's, it's a very-- It happens very quickly. It sounds long, but it sort of, it, it sort of starts off...

Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band.

Heart of mine, pretty eye. You're married.

**Lex Fridman** [1:21:35]
Okay.

**Rick Beato** [1:21:36]
I mean, it's really amazing that he just-

**Lex Fridman** [1:21:38]
Yeah. He's looking at just the lyrics.

**Rick Beato** [1:21:40]
Yeah, and it's one of the v- 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.

**Lex Fridman** [1:21:49]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:21:49]
99% of songwriters write the music first-

**Lex Fridman** [1:21:53]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:21:53]
... and then they put the melody and lyrics to the finished backing track.

**Lex Fridman** [1:21:58]
And maybe they write, like, lyrics. They write, like, uh, nonsense words-

**Rick Beato** [1:22:03]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [1:22:03]
... kind of thing, and then they figure out from there. Yeah, that's-- I mean, I don't know what skill that is exactly. That's incredible. I mean, in that process, he makes it his own.

**Rick Beato** [1:22:16]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:22:17]
Okay. Uh, you had an amazing interview with, uh, Kirk Hammett. I'm a huge Metallica fan.

**Rick Beato** [1:22:23]
Same here.

**Lex Fridman** [1:22:26]
Uh, there's a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that from that conversation. Uh, one is the distinction between heavy metal and hard rock-

**Rick Beato** [1:22:34]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [1:22:34]
... which is very interesting. Of course, Metallica went through their own evolution. They had many periods. I mean, they've been around 40 years.

**Rick Beato** [1:22:43]
Over 40 years, yeah. Crazy.

**Lex Fridman** [1:22:45]
The other thing is the down picking, which was interesting, which is creating that really distinct sound.

**Rick Beato** [1:22:52]
James and Kirk's, the, the, the down, the down picking, I used to be able to do that. I just can't do that anymore. It hurts my thumb-

**Lex Fridman** [1:23:01]
Mm

**Rick Beato** [1:23:01]
... to, to do it. I think, honestly, I, I 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.

**Lex Fridman** [1:23:09]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [1:23:10]
And I think it affects that basal joint there, and I'm just like- No, I'm serious.

**Lex Fridman** [1:23:14]
Love your theories.

**Rick Beato** [1:23:15]
I think that that's actually right, 'cause I'm thinking like, "Why does that hurt so much to do that, all the downstrokes and stuff?" It's like, gotta be something. It's like, yeah, it's from, from swiping with a phone.

**Lex Fridman** [1:23:24]
The other thing that came through is, um, that he's a improviser at heart.

**Rick Beato** [1:23:28]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:23:28]
And that, I think, clashes with this kind of rigid structure that metal is. So there's a real soulful, melodic aspect to him. And he gave a lot of props to, uh, James Hetfield for just being a great composer, being a great musician and writer of riffs, of rhythm.

**Rick Beato** [1:23:45]
The improvisation part of it you don't think of 'cause they, they, 'cause you have the finished songs that you listen to, but those songs are born out of improvisations, of jams, of little fragments of, of ideas, and-

**Lex Fridman** [1:23:58]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:23:59]
... then they craft them into these masterpieces.

**Lex Fridman** [1:24:04]
Also, you mentioned that this is weird that I didn't know that Hendrix was, used different gauges, strings.

**Rick Beato** [1:24:11]
Yeah. He was the one that talked about that-

**Lex Fridman** [1:24:12]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:24:12]
... wasn't he?

**Lex Fridman** [1:24:13]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:24:13]
Yeah. That was really interesting. See, these are the things that I like to learn from, uh, from these interviews with these people. I was like, "What? Why have I never heard of that?"

**Lex Fridman** [1:24:24]
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?

**Rick Beato** [1:24:32]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:24:33]
Completely breaking out of w- what you're supposed to do, the ways you're supposed to do them, and doing it completely differently. Uh, you often ask musicians what their perfect song is. First of all, that's a interesting question.

**Rick Beato** [1:24:46]
What is a perfect song?

**Lex Fridman** [1:24:48]
Like, one surprised me is Hans Zimmer said, "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys.

**Rick Beato** [1:24:52]
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, "Ooh, that's a great song." And Then I thought, "I'm gonna ask that to people just to see what they..."

Now people are prepared if I ask that

**Lex Fridman** [1:25:15]
But it's like they're willing to go out on a limb and say it.

**Rick Beato** [1:25:18]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:25:18]
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.

**Rick Beato** [1:25:30]
Right?

**Lex Fridman** [1:25:30]
Bec- 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, is it really cheesy to say the obvious thing? I would go "Sultans of Swing," even though, like, I'm tempted to say "Europa," but then, like-

**Rick Beato** [1:25:58]
"Sultans of Swing" hits on so many levels-

**Lex Fridman** [1:26:01]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:26:01]
... 'cause it's got a great melody, great lyrics, and then multiple great guitar solos.

**Lex Fridman** [1:26:08]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:26:08]
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-

**Lex Fridman** [1:26:15]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:26:15]
... like early Dire Straits Strat tone, and then you think of, like, "Money for Nothing" as a Les Paul, and it's a totally different kind of vibe than him playing on, on "Sultans of Swing," but that song's amazing.

**Lex Fridman** [1:26:27]
Plus, it, it's about music.

**Rick Beato** [1:26:29]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:26:30]
So it's like there's a, there's a meta aspect to it. But th- and 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.

**Rick Beato** [1:26:43]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:26:44]
And they, it's just, uh, what's that called? Singer-songwriter type. Uh, I told you off-mic, uh, one of my, maybe the music guest that's a dream guest is Tom Waits. I've wanted to talk to Tom Waits for a very long time, and I've gone through different periods of ... You've met me at a point in my life where I've given up on it, on it a little bit.

And I was telling you-

**Rick Beato** [1:27:12]
That's when it's gonna happen, Lex.

**Lex Fridman** [1:27:13]
Okay.

**Rick Beato** [1:27:14]
Once you give up on it, it's gonna happen.

**Lex Fridman** [1:27:17]
Yeah. Yeah. Um-

**Rick Beato** [1:27:20]
Why Tom Waits won't be on your podcast.

**Lex Fridman** [1:27:23]
Exactly. Exactly, dude. This is, this is my, this is my moment.

**Rick Beato** [1:27:27]
Tom, come, come here. Let's do it. I wanna see it.

**Lex Fridman** [1:27:32]
I, I'm such a, a fan of, like, the Zappa-like 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, uh, "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, ti- you know, thinking about, like, what, what would've happened if it worked out, that kind of thing.

And then, you know, I loved that song for a long time, and, you know, uh, at, 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 s- these guys- ... somehow are able to capture the human condition so masterfully, and they're kids.

**Rick Beato** [1:28:26]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:28:27]
This, I don't get it. I don't understand it.

**Rick Beato** [1:28:29]
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 li- lived-

**Lex Fridman** [1:28:40]
Yeah, they've lived.

**Rick Beato** [1:28:41]
They lived life.

**Lex Fridman** [1:28:42]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:28:43]
It's not like, not like kids today.

**Lex Fridman** [1:28:46]
Now you're on a porch. Uh, you also had, uh, an amazing interview with Billy Corgan of-

**Rick Beato** [1:28:54]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [1:28:54]
... Smashing Pumpkins. Uh, he is definitively one of my favorite musicians.

**Rick Beato** [1:28:59]
I love Billy.

**Lex Fridman** [1:29:00]
You asked him an interesting question about how he creates, um, this melancholy feeling that permeates a lot of his songs, and he jokingly said that, uh, the secret is all about the seventh and the n- and the ninth. Um, so, like, musically, chord-wise, what do you think about that? You think he's onto something?

**Rick Beato** [1:29:19]
He's talking a little music theory there.

**Lex Fridman** [1:29:21]
Yeah, yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:29:21]
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 use the word surprise." Notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they're playing, and, but, and that creates emotion. Dissonance equals emotion. And that's, that's what I like. I want music to be, to depress me.

**Lex Fridman** [1:29:59]
Yeah, what is that? I don't know. The, the, m- but melancholy, and I think you articulated in that interview, is it's not e- uh, actually that depressing. There's something about that melancholy feeling that is somehow the other side of the coin of happiness.

**Rick Beato** [1:30:13]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:30:14]
There's a kind of longing.

**Rick Beato** [1:30:15]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:30:17]
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. There's, I think there's a social way of listening to music when maybe a concert and so on, but there's this, there's nothing like you're alone in the car driving, listening to, like, whatever it is, Bruce Springsteen.

Uh, well, I think Louis C.K. has a bit about that. Was it Bruce Springsteen? But he's sometimes has to pull over to the side of the road and just weep or th- or something like this. It's, it's just n- there's some, there's something about that. Sometimes a song just connects with you, and I don't know, it mel- nothing like a melancholy song can do that.

It, you think about, like,

s- maybe things you regret or how life could've worked out, and sometimes it's not even about, like, it's, it's not even real. It just connects something to the, in the soul, the, the uneasiness that we all feel, maybe the loneliness we all feel that underpins so much of the human condition. It just connects with that. I don't know what that is.

**Rick Beato** [1:31:17]
There's a Kurt Cobain lyric, it was on the In Utero record from the song "Frances Farmer." The chorus part is, "I miss the comfort of being sad." And I was like, "Yes." "There's a comfort in being sad" I was like, "Yeah, that's it right there."

**Lex Fridman** [1:31:36]
In terms of love songs, f- somehow I find powerful a kinda desperation. So like I, I've always connected with Pearl Jam's Black.

**Rick Beato** [1:31:45]
Oh, amazing.

**Lex Fridman** [1:31:46]
Like the, uh, that line... There's a, a friend of mine was going through a breakup, so I was listening, uh, and he, he's the one that introduced me to Pearl Jam during that, that whole period, uh, when Pearl Jam was huge, uh, with Ten, is, is that line is, uh, s- someday-

**Rick Beato** [1:32:03]
Someday you, 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?

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:13]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:32:13]
Oh my God, that-

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:15]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:32:16]
... blows me away. That's an amazing line.

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:19]
Well, yeah. Eddie Ved-

**Rick Beato** [1:32:20]
The delivery is incredible-

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:22]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:32:22]
... on it, too.

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:22]
Eddie Vedder, one of the great frontmen of all time.

**Rick Beato** [1:32:25]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:25]
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. Um, who, who do you think are the great frontmen in, uh, history of music?

**Rick Beato** [1:32:45]
Freddy Mercury, Robert Plant.

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:47]
Freddy Mercury number one probably.

**Rick Beato** [1:32:49]
Steven Tyler.

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:50]
Jim Morrison.

**Rick Beato** [1:32:51]
Jim Morrison.

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:52]
I would put myself.

**Rick Beato** [1:32:52]
Yeah. Roger Daltrey. Um-

**Lex Fridman** [1:32:56]
Well, we have to say, I have to say, we have to say James Hetfield.

**Rick Beato** [1:33:01]
James Hetfield.

**Lex Fridman** [1:33:02]
I mean, there's nothing... I ha- I mean, I have to talk to you about this. I have, I mean, this is the greatest, I think the greatest concert of all time. This is, uh, their historic performance in Moscow in, um, September of '91. This is shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. Plus we should mention AC/DC and Pantera-

**Rick Beato** [1:33:23]
Mm-hmm

**Lex Fridman** [1:33:23]
... were there too. And about 1.6 million people were there. Now, by the way, there's like some kinda reporting that there was a half a million people, 500,000 people. There's somewhere I've seen statements like that. That's a ridiculously inaccurate statement. So it's a free concert, so any official counts d- don't count. It's, uh, it's, it's definitely over a million.

It's, it's very likely to be 1.5, 1.6 million people. 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 in history and this place in history that was a, a defining part of the 20th century collapsing.

And you have these people who are, um, for a moment through music are able to escape the fear, the anger they feel, the all of it. There was also a political, social, cultural moment meeting the musical moment, and the, the setlist, I was just, I was, uh, uh, I listened to this several times over the past few days just taking myself back into that moment in time.

Listen to the 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 is that-

**Rick Beato** [1:34:50]
That's-

**Lex Fridman** [1:34:50]
That just-

**Rick Beato** [1:34:52]
That's my kinda set

**Lex Fridman** [1:34:53]
... get the fuck outta here.

**Rick Beato** [1:34:54]
That's-

**Lex Fridman** [1:34:54]
This is amazing. This is-

**Rick Beato** [1:34:55]
That's my kinda set right there.

**Lex Fridman** [1:34:57]
I don't know if you could think of anything that could beat that.

**Rick Beato** [1:35:00]
I think that 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** [1:35:13]
I mean, Woodstock was big. There's, there's certain moments in time when they really, really meet the moment. Are you a fan of, uh, live, live like big-

**Rick Beato** [1:35:21]
I used to be, but at this point-

**Lex Fridman** [1:35:24]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:35:25]
... I can't, uh, you know.

I'd much rather see people play in small clubs-

**Lex Fridman** [1:35:31]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:35:31]
... and/or go to the, I'd like to listen in the studio. Go to the studio even.

**Lex Fridman** [1:35:38]
I generally almost entirely agree with you. I just think that there's these historic moments, but you don't know-

**Rick Beato** [1:35:43]
Oh, yeah

**Lex Fridman** [1:35:43]
... which are gonna be which. But you're making the concert free, it's just all of it to get, plus Pantera and AC/DC. The other, which actually is a legitimate thing you've mentioned, is, uh, as one of the greatest concerts of all time, is Beethoven's, uh, world premiere of Ninth Symphony. You know, I didn't really know the personal side of Beethoven until I saw this movie called Immortal Beloved.

It's an excellent movie with, uh-

**Rick Beato** [1:36:13]
Gary Oldman

**Lex Fridman** [1:36:14]
... Gary Oldman.

**Rick Beato** [1:36:14]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:36:14]
Just a really, it's a masterful, uh, 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 is early, this is many, many, this is a couple decades ago now, that, you know, he went deaf. Before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, which is widely considered 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 people applauding, so he has to, uh, be turned around to see that people are actually clapping. I mean, there's just this whole tragic element, plus the, the meaning of the symphony, uh, that ends in this beautiful, uh, "Ode to Joy," the symphony itself is a kinda, it starts with the chaos and conflict and ends with this celebration of

peace and brotherly unity and a ca- I guess a call for that, a reaching for that, for that peace. And it's a, and there's a tragic element to it, again, connected to history, which is it was post-Napoleonic Wars-

**Rick Beato** [1:37:34]
Mm-hmm

**Lex Fridman** [1:37:34]
... and before the American Civil War. So like y- you're in this, in this middle This respite from, from war, calling for peace, not knowing that, uh, truly horrific wars are coming. So you have the, the American Civil War, and you have the, of course, the two world wars coming. So this-- all of it together, and the fact that he's conducting deaf, and he wrote this whole thing deaf.

I was reading a lot about his process, and he just edits and edits and edits and edits. So the fact that he had to edit in his head is just insane.

**Rick Beato** [1:38:08]
I mean, he-- Beethoven was sick all the time too. I mean, there-- 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?

**Lex Fridman** [1:38:25]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:38:25]
Right? Like, why-- The amount of time it takes to write to write a thirty-five minute, forty 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, hears it in his head."

But what kind of enjoyment is it? You wanna hear the orchestra-- I mean, it's really profound that he, that, that he 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 Eighteen Oh-Two. 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 s- a shepherd singing in the field that-- and he could not hear this.

And, and of all the people, why him, where hearing played such an important part? Another person that ha- would've had to have had perfect pitch, 'cause you could never do this-

**Lex Fridman** [1:39:44]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:39:45]
... if you didn't have perfect pitch, 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** [1:39:58]
I mean, you love sound and music. What do you think it was like gradually losing y- your hearing for Beethoven?

**Rick Beato** [1:40:09]
It must have been terrible. I mean, I just--

Terrible. I mean, I've heard things where he had to-- would have a stick in his mouth and, and put it on the soundboard of the piano, and he could feel the vib- vibrations in his skull and things like that. And-

**Lex Fridman** [1:40:26]
Yeah, desperately trying to-

**Rick Beato** [1:40:28]
Yeah. I just-

**Lex Fridman** [1:40:31]
But also, there's-- what is, what is that that he's able to write,

like, one of the greatest symphonies ever while deaf? So there, 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.

**Rick Beato** [1:40:51]
Right.

**Lex Fridman** [1:40:52]
But a call for the positive.

**Rick Beato** [1:40:56]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:40:57]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [1:40:57]
That's, that's, uh-- I, I, I've devoted many, many hours thinking about that.

**Lex Fridman** [1:41:04]
And plus, Napoleon broke his heart, because he was a supporter of Napoleon.

**Rick Beato** [1:41:09]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:41:09]
Because Napoleon was supposed to represent the French Revolution, this, this hopeful future of no more kings, no more monarchs, no more authoritarian regimes. And Napoleon ended up becoming essentially king.

**Rick Beato** [1:41:22]
Right.

**Lex Fridman** [1:41:23]
Uh, becoming an authoritarian. And Be- Beethoven, um, sort of f-famously was critical of that. Nevertheless, m- 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. 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 'cause I was like, "I'll never be good enough." Never. Never. But I need to-

**Rick Beato** [1:42:14]
Never say never, Lex

**Lex Fridman** [1:42:15]
... one of these days, maybe. You know what'd be great? If Tom Waits writes me an email that says, "I only talk to people that can play the third movement."

**Rick Beato** [1:42:24]
Play the third movement.

**Lex Fridman** [1:42:24]
That's it. That'd be, that'd be a dream come true.

**Rick Beato** [1:42:27]
There you go.

**Lex Fridman** [1:42:27]
He'd be like, "For this."

**Rick Beato** [1:42:28]
That's motivation.

**Lex Fridman** [1:42:29]
"That's my dragon," or whatever you do. You have to have a prince and rescue the princess. My dragon is the third movement of "Moonlight Sonata." Okay. Uh, you often highlight the importance of Bach. In fact, so many of your guests-

**Rick Beato** [1:42:42]
Every famous songwriter is influenced by Bach. It-- They are. The greatest composer of all time, the greatest musician of all time.

**Lex Fridman** [1:42:50]
Even Sting and, uh, Dominic Miller said they go to Bach even for, like, practice.

**Rick Beato** [1:42:55]
Every day. People talk about Bach was not known other than in his p- places he lived. Eisenach, he was born. In Leipzig, he spent many years. Uh, 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 Seventeen-- in Eighteen Twenty-Nine.

It was on March 11th, I believe. He had a manuscript because, uh, his father and mother collected manuscripts.

**Lex Fridman** [1:43:30]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:43:31]
And he got a manuscript of this piece, and he-- I think he was 20 years old, and, and they had a performance of it in Berlin And Beethoven, Mozart, I studied The Well-Tempered Clavier, the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier. But, um, 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, 10 of them-- 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** [1:44:11]
And extremely productive.

**Rick Beato** [1:44:13]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:44:13]
I saw. I, yeah, I think, uh, from all the music teachers I've ever had, I, I, I understood the importance of studying Bach.

**Rick Beato** [1:44:23]
He didn't write Master of Puppets, but he wrote some great, powerful music.

**Lex Fridman** [1:44:29]
Well put. Well put. I, I, I try to, um, educate the aforementioned music teachers of the brilliance of the Master of the Puppets. Uh, sometimes a good riff is greater than any, any musical composition, so.

**Rick Beato** [1:44:45]
I, 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** [1:44:53]
That's your go-to. So like, so the, the, the stereotypical, like, guitar store, when you come in, you're playing Master of Puppets.

**Rick Beato** [1:45:01]
I'll play Master of Puppets. I, I will play-- I have to play some heavy riff.

**Lex Fridman** [1:45:05]
Hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:45:05]
And so usually it will default to some Metallica or something like that. Or I'll play Alice in Chains or... I do usually-- Like a lot of times I'll go and I'll do drop D something or play Tool.

**Lex Fridman** [1:45:16]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:45:17]
I usually will do something, do, do some drop tuning thing. And it's, it's always gotta be some, some type of metal that I'll test to see if the, 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, there was a moment in time, it still goes on, but there was a moment where it was really people were freaking out about the use of AI in music.

### AI Music

**Rick Beato** [1:45:40]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:45:41]
Uh, so there's these, I would say, incredible apps, uh, like Suno, UDO. Eleven Labs Music is also great. It can generate basically text to song, full song from a text prompt. And, uh, a lot of people start freaking out just by- based on how good it is.

**Rick Beato** [1:46:02]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:46:02]
And so you start to immediately imagine how this is going to transform music, and you're going to replace musicians and all that kind of stuff. Uh, it, it is legitimately nerve-wracking because these are early versions, so you don't know where it goes. But i- 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** [1:46:23]
So if you write a s- a prompt in Suno and it spits out a song, which I've did, 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 Winters, and came up with this song, Walking Away.

Well, the compu- the program came up with it.

**Lex Fridman** [1:46:42]
There is some creativity in a process. So in this particular thing, the process is you generate an image.

**Rick Beato** [1:46:49]
I did it in ChatGPT, the image.

**Lex Fridman** [1:46:50]
The image.

**Rick Beato** [1:46:50]
Then I went to, then I went to Claude and I wrote the lyrics, 'cause Claude's way better at lyrics-

**Lex Fridman** [1:46:55]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:46:56]
... than Suno is. Suno's bad at lyrics, at least right now. So I re- 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 I started thinking about this.

People freak out about this. "Oh, this is bad, this is bad." And then I thought, I was like, "No, who are p- gonna be the ones that are gonna benefit from AI?" Well, the people that are already great songwriters. Because you have to recog- be able to recognize when it spits out something good versus when it spits out something that's not that good.

**Lex Fridman** [1:47:30]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:47:30]
And every other song, I, I've probably created 130 song ideas, out of which there's three good ones.

**Lex Fridman** [1:47:38]
And there's a thing that's happening where people's ear very quickly is, is becoming attuned to AI slop.

**Rick Beato** [1:47:46]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:47:47]
And that's actually quite fascinating. Like for example, um, one of the things, 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.

**Rick Beato** [1:48:02]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:48:02]
It's a tricky pipeline to how to pull that off, and I think a lot of the creativity in that, even that kind of remixing, is in the pipeline that, of, 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 at, for a while, you understand that this is AI slop.

**Rick Beato** [1:48:28]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:48:28]
For a 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 a AI B.B. King. I want the real B.B. King. A- and I, if I d- if I know if any AI is involved in the B.B.

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 curmudgeonly old dude in that. I think we humans want authenticity.

**Rick Beato** [1:49:04]
So when, when AI-- When I s- 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, and I'd play a song. And th- my, my youngest and Dylan, my youngest, Layla, and I have three kids, and my oldest, Dylan. Soon as I play it, "Why are you listening to AI?" And it's like, "Oh my God, instantly." It's 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 s- that were, uh, that made incomplete-

**Lex Fridman** [1:49:52]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [1:49:52]
It just couldn't do the ambiances correctly, right? 'Cause it's trained on... A lot of these AI programs are trained on very low bit- bitrate, uh, MP3s, right? So they feed all this stuff in there, so they're getting really inferior information on the tr- 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 WAV files to train f- 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.

**Lex Fridman** [1:50:28]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [1:50:28]
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'll like, "Why are you listening to AI?" Oh, they can instantly tell. Then eventually it started getting better, and then, and then it'd be like, "Is this AI?"

I'd be in the car with Layla 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."

**Lex Fridman** [1:50:59]
Hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:51:00]
And then I did this song for, um, it was an NPR interview. I created a song with a fake artist, and the song was called Neon Ghost, and I played it for Layla in the car. She's like, "Can you separate the tracks?" I said, "Yeah, I have them separated back home." "Okay, I wanna go down and hear it."

So we go down to the studio and, and I play it for her, and she listens to the soloed vocal, and she said, "Wow, this is really realistic."

**Lex Fridman** [1:51:24]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:51:24]
"This is very hard to tell, even with the soloed vocal."

**Lex Fridman** [1:51:27]
I, I think the room for creativity right now for h- humans is lyrics. It seems like the lyrics that are being generated, they lack soul somehow.

**Rick Beato** [1:51:39]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:51:39]
Not so I don't know the words correctly.

**Rick Beato** [1:51:41]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:51:41]
I mean, they can be incredibly sophisticated, but there's so- 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. Some- something truly novel in the lyrics. The, but, 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 v- very realistic music that sounds really damn good, where's the role of the musician there?

**Rick Beato** [1:52:21]
I think the role of the musician is that in, in actually... If they use AI to assist them in coming up with ideas, think of, uh, as a creation tool, then the musician... Like, some of the stuff is just not high quality, sonically high quality.

**Lex Fridman** [1:52:37]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [1:52:37]
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, 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** [1:52:54]
But, but see, if you do that, does it make you sad that you don't necessarily need to learn instruments? So b- basically you can, I mean, you can think of it as a different kind of instrument, but you can write lyrics, you can hum the melody, you can just hum parts.

**Rick Beato** [1:53:13]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:53:14]
You know? And then, and then 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, or fingers on a drum stick.

**Rick Beato** [1:53:26]
That's why I'm not gonna use AI, Lex, is for that reason, because to me it's just boring, and I-

**Lex Fridman** [1:53:34]
Yeah, it is

**Rick Beato** [1:53:34]
... when I use it, it's just like, eh. But I, I used it for about a month or so just 'cause I was making videos-

**Lex Fridman** [1:53:40]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:53:40]
... and I was trying to see how it's advancing. Every, every three or four months I'll, I'll, I'll sit down and I'll see whatever new versions they have-

**Lex Fridman** [1:53:47]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:53:48]
... 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** [1:54:02]
I'm old school.

**Lex Fridman** [1:54:03]
So am I.

**Rick Beato** [1:54:03]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:54:04]
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-

**Rick Beato** [1:54:11]
I agree

**Lex Fridman** [1:54:11]
... fundamentally boring about it, and I've been trying to figure it out for... So for example, I use it a lot for more, more, more for programming, so for building stuff, and there it's not about... The, the final output is not the code. The output is what the code creates. And there it's extremely useful, not, it doesn't matter if it's boring or not, it's useful.

But when the final output is the thing that AI creates, which it would be in, in music, then there's something about us that just, like, we know we-- there is something boring about it.

**Rick Beato** [1:54:46]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [1:54:46]
We want to celebrate and see the thing that's hard to create, and if AI can just text a song, generate a top 10 hit, we, we, we'll q- quickly lose value for that, I think. And so we'll want raw, like raw. Whatever, whatever shape that raw takes, I wanna say raw talent, but that raw talent of any kind.

And per- perhaps it would make me a little bit sad, but that's also awesome. Perhaps the new kind of raw talent that civilization is asking for is how to make, uh, 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.

**Rick Beato** [1:55:32]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [1:55:33]
Uh, but that, that also, creating TikToks and sh- is, is also talent.

**Rick Beato** [1:55:39]
It's a, it is a talent, absolutely. Um, when I see anything that's AI generated, I instantly recognize it. Any video, I'm like, "Ugh, 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-

**Lex Fridman** [1:55:54]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:55:55]
And they're just like boring, boring, boring-

**Lex Fridman** [1:55:57]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:55:57]
... boring, boring. And then they kind of dis- then they, they don't even wanna 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 o- on it, but, um, it's hard to, it's hard to stay on this... It's get- 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, um, in the whack-a-mole thing where you're just ch- ch- trying to get rid of it all is, is, is, uh-

**Lex Fridman** [1:56:28]
Yeah, fu- fundamentally, like, it's fundamentally boring. I think boring-

**Rick Beato** [1:56:31]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [1:56:31]
... is a really good-

**Rick Beato** [1:56:32]
It's boring

**Lex Fridman** [1:56:32]
... and it's, and it's annoying to have to, uh, flip through the AI slop.

**Rick Beato** [1:56:37]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [1:56:38]
But I think actually as a civilization, it's just inspiring for authenticity 'cause you wanna be real, ra- And being raw, which I, you know, one of the things I like about podcasts is people just shooting shit and just being themselves in, in a long form versus overproduced. 'Cause I think AI is making people realize that AI is good at being overproduced.

**Rick Beato** [1:56:59]
Right.

**Lex Fridman** [1:56:59]
So there'll be more-

**Rick Beato** [1:57:01]
That's got that covered.

**Lex Fridman** [1:57:02]
Yeah. Even artists, 'cause you're saying like, yeah, they'll use it as tools. Part of me thinks like, not really. Like I, I think, I think, I think they'll quickly, this kind of process of generating a bunch of different options, uh, and choosing the one you like the most, I think is a really frustrating process for artists. And it, I, I think it, I think AI will, will definitely be used extremely effectively as a very, uh, fine-grained tool, um, in the image domain.

It's editing images, but not like macro editing, but very specific kind of editing that photo- Photoshop has increasingly integrated in. Uh, I mentioned to you offline, so the whole, um, uh, iZotope RX group of software that does a lot of the denoising-

**Rick Beato** [1:57:53]
Yep

**Lex Fridman** [1:57:53]
... de- all, all the de- removing the wind, all the... They, they integrate machine learning extremely effectively-

**Rick Beato** [1:58:00]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [1:58:00]
... for working with audio in different kinds of ways. There's a bunch of different o- other programs that do that. Maybe for like B-roll footage and, uh, same thing on the audio, if you just need a little audio to create a feeling of a scene, yeah, it might be used there in that kind of way. But truly original stuff, eh.

**Rick Beato** [1:58:21]
I've saved videos where I'm doing, speaking over music, for example, i- in an interview. Somebody's playing and, and we have two dialo- two people speaking in lavs, but it's, but there's so much bleed coming from the person playing-

**Lex Fridman** [1:58:34]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [1:58:34]
... 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-

**Lex Fridman** [1:58:40]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [1:58:40]
... and then take the music and separate that stuff. And so it's really helpful for things like that.

**Lex Fridman** [1:58:46]
And now once again, quick 30-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. We got Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks, BetterHelp for mental health, LMNT for electrolytes, Fin for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration.

Choose wisely, my friends. And now back to my conversation with Rick Beato. So you have this video breaking down Sabrina Carpenter's song "Manchild," and you use that as an example of building up people's intuition about the, the music business and how the music production for these popular songs is being done these days, who's doing the songwriting, how is it being done, uh, and all that kind of...

### Music Business

**Lex Fridman** [1:59:43]
I, I was wondering if you could speak to that.

**Rick Beato** [1:59:45]
In that particular song, uh, 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 says that Sabrina had very little to do with the song. And so he said in this clip-

**Lex Fridman** [2:00:01]
You being the old guy

**Rick Beato** [2:00:01]
... me being the old guy, that, well, Sabrina really was the... She's amazing, and she's the one that wrote everything of, in the song. It's like, so my response is like, "Well, why are you guys even included on the songwriting then?"

**Lex Fridman** [2:00:15]
So one of the things you highlight is a lot of people are, are included on the list of, uh, songwriters.

**Rick Beato** [2:00:22]
Yeah. 10 people-

**Lex Fridman** [2:00:23]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [2:00:23]
... 11 people. I mean, you know. Like, why are the song, why does 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, use samples for the whole thing, like the Doechii song that's out right now.

And I 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's, I mean, it saves time for ... You don't have to actually create a track. You just can sing over someone else's song that was already successful.

**Lex Fridman** [2:01:00]
Yeah, you pointing that out in the song "Anxiety" broke my brain.

**Rick Beato** [2:01:04]
I mean, it's so absurd.

**Lex Fridman** [2:01:05]
It, yeah, that feels unfair. It feels... It's a good song, but it wa- it was also a good song before, and it was, before that it was also a good song.

**Rick Beato** [2:01:15]
Right, 2011 or Louis Bonfa in 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.

**Lex Fridman** [2:01:32]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [2:01:33]
And, and Doechii has some really good songs-

**Lex Fridman** [2:01:35]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [2:01:35]
... on her record. And-

**Lex Fridman** [2:01:36]
Yeah, but why are these the ones that are coming to the top, right?

**Rick Beato** [2:01:39]
Well, yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:01:39]
This is interesting. I, that, that, that might be just a criticism of the machinery of the business that-

**Rick Beato** [2:01:44]
Absolutely

**Lex Fridman** [2:01:45]
... that, that drives them. It's not necessarily... Like, a lot of these folks are really good musicians. W- First of all, I think a lot of them are also good, like, the actual songs that make it to the top are good. I'm, I'm a big fan of Bruno Mars, so he's a great songwriter. And he's a great musician all around.

**Rick Beato** [2:02:04]
Absolutely.

**Lex Fridman** [2:02:05]
You know, this is Michael Jackson in- uh, reincarnated. I mean, he's-

**Rick Beato** [2:02:08]
Super, super talented guy

**Lex Fridman** [2:02:09]
... incredible, right?

**Rick Beato** [2:02:10]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [2:02:11]
Um, you mentioned Billie Eilish and her brother write a lot of the songs.

**Rick Beato** [2:02:15]
So good. Yeah. Super talented.

**Lex Fridman** [2:02:17]
I mean, Taylor Swift is unlike anything. I mean, that's a historic figure in music, but she's a fundamentally, at least originally, a singer-songwriter.

**Rick Beato** [2:02:27]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [2:02:28]
So that's a... I mean, that, I mean, I'm sorry, but that, that is a like of the kind of music that Rick Beato, uh, gives props to. She's the... She carries the flame forward.

**Rick Beato** [2:02:42]
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 wanna take a quick bathroom break?

**Rick Beato** [2:02:49]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:02:49]
Okay. I have to ask you about this complexity that you're facing on a basically daily basis.

I think, uh, it's the 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, uh, copyright claims, and for folks who don't know, if you get three, three of those, it's- th- th- each one of those can be a strike on the channel and could take down your channel, and you, you get some insane amount. You said you got like, uh... I, I think I had a similar thing on my Rick Rubin episode, like thir- these, I think you said 13.

**Rick Beato** [2:03:39]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:03:39]
Up to 13. So what, can you just speak to this whole thing? You've been in a constant battle, WMG, UMG, all the, all, all-

**Rick Beato** [2:03:48]
All the, all the three letter name-

**Lex Fridman** [2:03:50]
All the s-

**Rick Beato** [2:03:50]
... record labels, right?

**Lex Fridman** [2:03:52]
The, the music business people. So what, what's the story there?

**Rick Beato** [2:03:55]
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 never knew back in, I started, it'll be 10 years in June. So when I'd play music in a video, v- YouTubers were not playing music in videos because they didn't, because the, the content ID things and the takedowns and stuff.

So I would play music, and I would just see what happens. And then you get a content ID claim re- or you 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, 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, um, Led Zeppelin, and then, and then something happened.

There, the, there was that guy on the skateboard on TikTok that had the Ocean Spray th- thing and, and he was listening-

**Lex Fridman** [2:04:54]
Uh-huh

**Rick Beato** [2:04:54]
... to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.

**Lex Fridman** [2:04:56]
Yep.

**Rick Beato** [2:04:56]
And that blew up and became a number one song again. And the labels then realized, I mean, I had 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, "Ooh, maybe we should rethink this." And then they just started demonetizing videos.

**Lex Fridman** [2:05:16]
Demonetize means they get all the money and you make-

**Rick Beato** [2:05:18]
They get all the money. In a one-hour video, if they, if you use 20 seconds of a clip-

**Lex Fridman** [2:05:23]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [2:05:24]
... they get all the money.

**Lex Fridman** [2:05:25]
Yep.

**Rick Beato** [2:05:25]
Okay? So I hired a lawyer finally after the Rick Rubin video, 'cause I thought it was ridiculous. I go over to, to, to Tuscany. I interview Rick at his house and, and, uh, I hire a l- hired a lawyer to fight this, who I'm gonna have on my channel. I don't wanna say who it is, but he's another YouTuber.

**Lex Fridman** [2:05:47]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [2:05:48]
And, uh, he, uh, had approached me a couple years ago and, uh, and it's not cheap to do.

**Lex Fridman** [2:05:53]
Oh, you, you're gonna do like a public interview with him?

**Rick Beato** [2:05:55]
I'm gonna do an interview with him.

**Lex Fridman** [2:05:56]
Awesome.

**Rick Beato** [2:05:56]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [2:05:57]
Awesome.

**Rick Beato** [2:05:57]
I talked to him today about it, actually.

**Lex Fridman** [2:05:59]
I can't wait.

**Rick Beato** [2:05:59]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:06:00]
That'd be great.

**Rick Beato** [2:06:01]
So he said, "You should fight these, 'cause every single one of them is fair use." And he went through my, my, um, entire catalog. I have 2,100 videos, and he's fought 4,000 content ID claims and won every single one of them.

**Lex Fridman** [2:06:18]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [2:06:19]
4,000. 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's either, 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.

**Rick Beato** [2:06:37]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:06:38]
So is there... I mean, that's, it's still, he's still a lawyer, still work. Does that... Is there a hopeful thing you can say about the future of-

**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, 'cause a lot of stuff that are reaction videos or whatever that are 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.

**Rick Beato** [2:07:09]
You know?

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:09]
See, that's an obvious one, but even reaction videos, right?

**Rick Beato** [2:07:12]
Yeah. Even reaction videos.

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:13]
But those are-

**Rick Beato** [2:07:13]
Yes, absolutely

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:14]
... uh, those are more borderline.

**Rick Beato** [2:07:16]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:18]
But I don't know. I love those videos.

**Rick Beato** [2:07:21]
Absolutely.

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:22]
Like, when a person's just sitting there and listening to it and they're like, you know, like a, like a voice teacher is listening to a, a vocal performance and like-

**Rick Beato** [2:07:29]
Yeah, but those are breakdowns.

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:31]
Yeah, those are breakdowns. Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [2:07:32]
I think that the content ID stuff that was happening with these m- major labels, they would hire third parties-

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:39]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [2:07:39]
... that would go out, use AI, and go and, um, anytime they detect anything, they always go to the biggest channels first to get the most views. It makes sense and stuff.

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:48]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [2:07:48]
And-

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:48]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [2:07:49]
... and they would claim everything that they could, and historically YouTubers never would fight back. They were like, "Oh, this is easy money."

**Lex Fridman** [2:07:56]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [2:07:56]
YouTubers never fight back and, at these things because they're afraid to have their channels taken down.

**Lex Fridman** [2:08:02]
Yep. Thank you.

**Rick Beato** [2:08:03]
So-

**Lex Fridman** [2:08:04]
Rick Beato said, "Hold my beer."

**Rick Beato** [2:08:06]
There you go

**Lex Fridman** [2:08:06]
So, I mean, I mean, it's important. So you-

**Rick Beato** [2:08:07]
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 year, um, 10 years into my channel. So it took me that long.

**Lex Fridman** [2:08:18]
I mean, hopefully it, uh, there's a ripple effect also.

**Rick Beato** [2:08:21]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:08:21]
It's not just your situation. Hopefully you don't have to deal with this for much longer.

**Rick Beato** [2:08:26]
Right.

### Spotify & Gear

**Lex Fridman** [2:08:27]
Um, how has Spotify changed music? S- sometimes we highlight the fact that the change in nature of music and that it's, um, the scarcity's not there. But it also allows it, it's like every kind of music is available, and it's so fast and it's so easy. It's easy to explore.

**Rick Beato** [2:08:44]
It's a commodity. It's like turning on a water faucet.

**Lex Fridman** [2:08:47]
Do you think there's-

**Rick Beato** [2:08:48]
I guess you could go like that

**Lex Fridman** [2:08:48]
... there's some good to-- I mean, there's a lot of good to that, right?

**Rick Beato** [2:08:52]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:08:53]
W- w- Have you-- Did you go through that whole pro-- I, I j- I still remember where I had to basically throw away the albums. I never did that.

**Rick Beato** [2:09:02]
When after you, after you d- upload them into your computer?

**Lex Fridman** [2:09:06]
Y- yeah, so there's that two-step process. One, there's like the hard albums, CDs for me.

**Rick Beato** [2:09:14]
Yeah. Okay. Yep.

**Lex Fridman** [2:09:14]
CDs. Yeah. And then, and then you upload them into your computer.

**Rick Beato** [2:09:17]
Yep.

**Lex Fridman** [2:09:17]
And you save them, and then you, uh... How do you put it? Allegedly a friend of yours pirates some extra songs-

**Rick Beato** [2:09:28]
Yep

**Lex Fridman** [2:09:29]
... and then puts them on the computer. So you h- 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 the big moment for me that was really difficult to do, really difficult to do, is throw away that stash bec- and switch to Spotify.

**Rick Beato** [2:09:51]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [2:09:52]
Switch to streaming, and basically rebuild the stash of playlists and all this kind of stuff, and it, it was heartbreaking 'cause so much love and effort went into that, both the CD, the s- 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 never would've discovered otherwise, and Pandora I use a lot.

Pandora is more, um, uh, prioritizing on the discovery part versus the organization part, and that was really wonderful.

**Rick Beato** [2:10:30]
So one of the things I, 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.

**Lex Fridman** [2:10:43]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [2:10:43]
And that's how the charts are based.

**Lex Fridman** [2:10:45]
Does that give you signal that something is listened to a billion times? Does that mean something to you?

**Rick Beato** [2:10:50]
Yeah, it means that, that it's a popular song. Well, 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 the s- the streaming with the, with the music. Um, and, you know, the search and discovery, I mean, there's, there's a, there's benefits of algorithms, and there's negative things of algorithms.

Al- algorithms happen to kind of a lot, many times pigeonhole people into s- listening to the same genre of music all the time and not expanding their, you know, um, 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 liked, right?

And you might hear something, "Ooh, what is that?" "Oh, that's a new Soundgarden record," or s- You know, like, "Whoa, I like that. I'm gonna go buy, check that out," you know, something that you might not have heard or something odd.

**Lex Fridman** [2:11:55]
Like, o- one thing I really love doing on, uh, Spotify is you can, you can have radio.

**Rick Beato** [2:12:00]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:12:01]
Meaning, like, you have a few-- It's similar to Pandora. Like, you can...

Okay, this is gonna 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. I need-

**Rick Beato** [2:12:18]
What else would you listen to?

**Lex Fridman** [2:12:19]
I d- I need motivation. Classical music? I don't know. Um, but yeah, it's pretty good 'cause it recommends a bunch of other stuff I w- I wouldn't even know. S- some of it I know, obviously, but s- uh, akin to the, similar to the Rage Against the Machine-y type thing.

**Rick Beato** [2:12:34]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [2:12:34]
It recommends a bunch of artists, and it's like, "Oh, w- holy shit. That's awesome." So I don't know. That, that discovery works really well. So s- some of it is a technology thing. Um, but that experience is f- 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, the, what's lost is the, the... I'm sure you love, 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** [2:13:10]
So I have my old iTunes libraries from 2005-

**Lex Fridman** [2:13:14]
Oh, nice

**Rick Beato** [2:13:15]
... that I li- that I, that I have saved, the, the CDs that I uploaded into my computer.

**Lex Fridman** [2:13:20]
Yeah.

**Rick Beato** [2:13:22]
Anytime I do the-- I play songs on my, um-- When I'm doing an interview, I always play WAV 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, the songs sounded amazing on here." Well, not only are they great mixes that he did, but I'm using WAV files in there, and people notice the...

And these are r- WAV files from, from, you know, original encoding, not, not remastered things that Spotify keeps doing-

**Lex Fridman** [2:13:56]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [2:13:57]
... and adding a much more top end and things like that, that these are the-

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:00]
Oh, sure

**Rick Beato** [2:14:01]
... these are actually the, the original WAV files from off the CD that I ripped 20 years ago

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:09]
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** [2:14:18]
So I use Pro Tools-

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:20]
Pro Tools

**Rick Beato** [2:14:20]
... for the most part, but I also use Logic-

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:23]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [2:14:23]
... uh, and Ableton. I've got all, I've got all those.

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:25]
So you're mostly on a Mac?

**Rick Beato** [2:14:27]
I'm only on a Mac.

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:28]
Only on a Mac.

**Rick Beato** [2:14:29]
Only on a Mac.

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:30]
I'm only the opposite.

**Rick Beato** [2:14:31]
Although we have multiple PCs, 'cause my kids use PCs.

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:36]
Yeah, just to rebel.

**Rick Beato** [2:14:37]
They do it for gaming. They like to game.

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:39]
Right. That's true. I... But, like, in terms of editing, I hate how, how good Mac is-

**Rick Beato** [2:14:46]
So good

**Lex Fridman** [2:14:46]
... at just integrating... The, the hardware and the software just work well together, both on the video end-

**Rick Beato** [2:14:50]
If I didn't have a Mac, honestly, I wouldn't be talking to you right now. Because I got a G3 that... So the only good thing that a major label did for me is when, when my band was on UMG and they bought a, um, 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 Macs for that.

**Lex Fridman** [2:15:23]
So Pro Tools, I mean, that's still the s- the standard.

**Rick Beato** [2:15:25]
That's, that's kind of the industry standard, yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:15:27]
I gotta ask you, 'cause I know I've never used Pro Tools. I've used... Again, I'm a caveman. I've used, uh, Reaper. I've used Studio One. That's recently I've used that. And-

**Rick Beato** [2:15:38]
Yeah

**Lex Fridman** [2:15:38]
... for the most time, I've used Ableton Live. I feel like I'm using 1% of the power of the tool.

**Rick Beato** [2:15:44]
Mm-hmm.

**Lex Fridman** [2:15:46]
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.

**Rick Beato** [2:15:54]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:15:54]
But I feel like the... I- I mean, it's designed for people that are doing, like, all kinds of MIDI stuff and, like, looping and the, the, the, the, what is it? The push buttons with the, with the beats and the... It's, it's... I mean, I sound, I sound really out of touch, but there... 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** [2:16:19]
So this is why Studio One has been a little bit nicer for me, because it's simpler, made for, uh, recording more so.

**Rick Beato** [2:16:28]
Any DAW that you get used to, Lex, that's-

**Lex Fridman** [2:16:32]
Just use anything

**Rick Beato** [2:16:33]
... using it, yeah. And, and-

**Lex Fridman** [2:16:35]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [2:16:35]
... you have to become a master at the things. If you wanna be a recording engineer or producer, you, you become an expert. A lot of the, you know, Finneas 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, I fire up Logic every couple days and I use it for things.

I have, 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** [2:17:00]
But Pro Tools, that's where you feel like at home.

**Rick Beato** [2:17:03]
Yeah. I'm an, I'm an expert in Pro Tools.

**Lex Fridman** [2:17:06]
Are you using any, uh, emulation, any amp sims, or it's all real amps?

**Rick Beato** [2:17:12]
No, I use amp sims. On my laptop here, when I travel and things like that, I use, um, Neural DSP, which I just did a video at their headquarters in Helsinki.

**Lex Fridman** [2:17:21]
Mm-hmm.

**Rick Beato** [2:17:22]
And their, um, the 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, a 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 100 amps in my studio, so, and I have mics set up all the time on cabinets and stuff.

**Lex Fridman** [2:17:47]
Wait, 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]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:17:51]
Wait, sorry, 100?

**Rick Beato** [2:17:52]
I have 100, yeah. About 100, maybe 95.

**Lex Fridman** [2:17:57]
How do, how does one go get to that level?

**Rick Beato** [2:18:01]
Collecting and being... I'll be 64 in, uh, in April, so.

**Lex Fridman** [2:18:05]
So you just don't let go.

**Rick Beato** [2:18:07]
I don't let go, no.

**Lex Fridman** [2:18:08]
Why would you get to 100? Like, is it, is it tone difference that you-

**Rick Beato** [2:18:13]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [2:18:13]
... so you know the tone difference?

**Rick Beato** [2:18:13]
So everything 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 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, ta- sound that's more like Metallica or Dream Theater or something, so oh, I'm gonna pull out my, my, uh, Mesa, Mesa Boogie," or, "I need a, uh, 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 well, do it well, I get rid of it. And I've, and I'm down to 100.

**Lex Fridman** [2:19:01]
Down to 100. So only 100.

**Rick Beato** [2:19:03]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:19:04]
Uh, but it-

**Rick Beato** [2:19:04]
I can get by with probably 75.

**Lex Fridman** [2:19:07]
Come on. But you- then you're really running the risk of not having just the right amp. But you're using emulation, so it's, that's, that's great. I mean, on that, but th- there's the other side of it, which is the guitar.

I told you offline, I think having multiple guitars is cheating, but whatever. N- nobody agrees with me on this. I only have, like, one... I, I do have some side pieces, um, but m- one main.

**Rick Beato** [2:19:33]
The Strat?

**Lex Fridman** [2:19:33]
The greatest guitar.

**Rick Beato** [2:19:33]
What do you play?

**Lex Fridman** [2:19:34]
The Strat, yeah.

**Rick Beato** [2:19:34]
The Strat, yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:19:34]
American Strat. I said I would never do this, but I was in a guitar store. I live 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 s- th- they, they brought in this American Strat that had these different shades of, it was like a silver.

And I just, I've never had this feeling. They talk about love at first sight. I just fell in love with the guitar. Can you just speak to the kind of guitars you have and you love?

**Rick Beato** [2:20:14]
I pretty much have Mainly, uh, old school guitars, right? So I have Gibsons, I have Fenders, I have PRS guitars, and then I have, I have two Gibson acoustics. I have a, a 1957 Country 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 I have a Guild 12 string and I have a Guild, um, Nashville tuned guitar. So the low strings are up, 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 on 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... And this is how he wrote Comfortably Numb. The, the chorus-

**Lex Fridman** [2:21:17]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [2:21:17]
... part of it was with this particular guitar that he's playing in the video.

**Lex Fridman** [2:21:22]
What can you say about like the different, uh, feels that the guitars, the, the acoustics have? Like what, how do you know which one to pu- pull out?

**Rick Beato** [2:21:31]
It depends on the kinda part that I'm playing. If I want something with really tight mid-range 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, mid-range. Doesn't have a lot... It doesn't have a booming bottom end, booming low E string-

**Lex Fridman** [2:21:53]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [2:21:53]
... or anything, or A string. So it depends on what, what kinda sound I'm looking for. If I'm-

**Lex Fridman** [2:21:59]
So it's more about sound versus feel?

**Rick Beato** [2:22:01]
Yeah. All my guitars play equally well.

**Lex Fridman** [2:22:04]
Okay.

**Rick Beato** [2:22:04]
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** [2:22:13]
When you say Gibson, Gibson Les Paul?

**Rick Beato** [2:22:15]
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 sounds impressive.

**Rick Beato** [2:22:22]
That means two cut cut. Two, um-

**Lex Fridman** [2:22:24]
Oh.

**Rick Beato** [2:22:25]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:22:25]
Cool.

**Rick Beato** [2:22:25]
As opposed to a Les Paul that has one cut. So it's a Les Paul Special with, that has two. I have it over there. My signature guitar.

**Lex Fridman** [2:22:32]
That's the-

**Rick Beato** [2:22:33]
Yeah

**Lex Fridman** [2:22:33]
... that's the... All right, nice.

**Rick Beato** [2:22:34]
Yeah. When you play this you're gonna be like, "Oh my God, this is butter."

**Lex Fridman** [2:22:38]
No I'm... Again, I said it's cheating. I don't-

**Rick Beato** [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-

**Lex Fridman** [2:22:45]
This is gonna be embar-... Yeah, yeah. I use Bias FX. I'm sorry.

**Rick Beato** [2:22:50]
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 the-

**Lex Fridman** [2:23:01]
Mm-hmm

**Rick Beato** [2:23:01]
... that Neural DSP did and, um, it sounds great. John played it. It sounds just like his amps.

**Lex Fridman** [2:23:07]
Yeah, John is incredible.

**Rick Beato** [2:23:08]
John's great.

**Lex Fridman** [2:23:09]
I've been fortunate enough to have dinner with him a, two times and, uh, outside of being an incredible musician he's also conversationally just-

**Rick Beato** [2:23:17]
Yes. I've known John since he wa- He, 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** [2:23:32]
He's a fantastic guitar player

**Lex Fridman** [2:23:34]
... in the world.

**Rick Beato** [2:23:34]
Absolutely.

**Lex Fridman** [2:23:35]
And a celebrator, if that's a word, of great guitar playing.

**Rick Beato** [2:23:39]
Absolutely.

**Lex Fridman** [2:23:41]
By way of advice, you started, uh, your YouTube channel in your mid-50s and found incredible success. You've, you've had essentially multiple careers. Um, is there some wisdom you can extract from that?

**Rick Beato** [2:23:57]
So my, my theory is that

somebody's gotta be successful so why can't it be you? That was, that was

... That's, that was my... When I started my channel, I mean I didn't start it to, it started by accident with the Dylan video and, um, 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 would, 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, uh, the... I had conservatories writing to me about this stuff from all over the world. "How did you teach Dylan this?" 'Cause we made about four different videos and they got more and more sophisticated.

And, um, so I thought, "Okay, I'll make some YouTube videos and explain this stuff." This is, that's 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, 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, few, I had 4,000 subscribers the first month and another 4,000, then hit 100,000 after a year and then six months later 200,000 and three months later 300,000 and so.

**Lex Fridman** [2:25:27]
I think there, o- 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 kinda wanna be famous. They wanna 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 spend 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, uh, fame. It's getting good at s- 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, uh, that ends up happening. It's still like getting good at one thing kinda somehow relates to getting good at another thing. Somehow that'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** [2:26:47]
My theory of my channel has 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 kinda my thing. Well, that was not correct. Um,

and then it's like, we'll just make videos on stuff I'm interested in. It just so happens that other people are, are interested in the same things I'm interested in, and keep learning. And I-- when I produce bands, I never let them take my picture, ever, and n-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 I-- December 2015, when that Dylan video came out, no one took my picture. There were no pictures of me on the internet.

**Lex Fridman** [2:27:33]
You're a fully behind-the-camera kinda guy-

**Rick Beato** [2:27:36]
Yes

**Lex Fridman** [2:27:36]
... meaning, like, no-

**Rick Beato** [2:27:38]
No. No pictures, no, no pictures with people. "Hey, can we take a picture?" I said, "Not into pictures with people."

**Lex Fridman** [2:27:45]
And now you're, like- ... you're the talent. You're the face.

No, I mean, but the th- again, the thing you're leaving unstated there is, is, like, you spent a lot of years, you know, 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 being e- getting extremely good at it.

I just, I think in modern culture, there's a sense you wanna s-skip that part. "I wanna be famous. I wanna," you know, this. And, uh, that is a thing that's not, you know, going to be m-in most cases effective, uh, as a primary thing to chase.

**Rick Beato** [2:28:31]
So w-I have an undergrad in classical bass. I have a master's from New England Conservatory in jazz guitar. Then I taught college for-- I taught jazz studies for five years-

**Lex Fridman** [2:28:41]
Yeah. Yes

**Rick Beato** [2:28:41]
... from '87 to '92. Then I got a publishing deal, my first publishing deal, in 1992-

**Lex Fridman** [2:28:47]
Yeah

**Rick Beato** [2:28:47]
... with PolyGram Publishing. And then I became a producer when I was 37, n-having no idea how to engineer. I taught myself engineering. And then YouTube, I taught myself how to edit videos.

**Lex Fridman** [2:28:59]
And then you taught yourself how to interview.

**Rick Beato** [2:29:01]
And I taught myself how to interview. I'd never done an interview before. Never was, like, an interviewer. What?

**Lex Fridman** [2:29:05]
You haven't just done that. You've taught yourself not how to do Y- just YouTube, but YouTube Shorts.

**Rick Beato** [2:29:11]
Yes.

**Lex Fridman** [2:29:12]
Different, totally different thing.

**Rick Beato** [2:29:14]
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-- 'Cause y-you're both a YouTuber and, and, like, a musician who posts stuff on YouTube. YouTuber means, like, you're thinking about stuff like thumbnails and-

**Rick Beato** [2:29:31]
Which I make my own thumbnails. I've always made my own thumbnails.

**Lex Fridman** [2:29:35]
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. 'Cause you-- This, this is a big part of YouTube, where people have a 30-minute introduction to, to a five-minute video. You just go straight in. That's really wonderful. That's-- I mean, uh, and on all fronts.

I mean, I, I suppose that has to do with the production skill that you have of understanding, cutting, cutting the fat.

### Friendship

**Rick Beato** [2:30:02]
To making a song.

**Lex Fridman** [2:30:03]
Yep. Yeah, cutting, cutting the fluff, cutting the bullshit out. 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 v-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.

**Lex Fridman** [2:30:28]
Mm.

**Rick Beato** [2:30:28]
I talk to my sisters probably every night, my two sisters. Um, I, I have friends from college. I got friends from growing up. I have friends from, you know, both colleges I went to. I have friends from all different eras in my life that I keep in touch with and visit whenever I can and-

**Lex Fridman** [2:30:47]
And you must have met some incredible humans, and incredibly weird and interesting humans, throughout your life.

**Rick Beato** [2:30:52]
Mm-hmm.

**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, uh, pretty much everything in life. N-nothing means, uh, anything more than the friendships that you make and your, and your family.

**Lex Fridman** [2:31:06]
Yeah, what's the point of this whole thing, right?

**Rick Beato** [2:31:08]
That's right.

**Lex Fridman** [2:31:10]
What's the role of music in, uh, in the human experience?

**Rick Beato** [2:31:15]
Well, hopefully to enlighten people and to create the soundtrack of their life.

**Lex Fridman** [2:31:20]
It is, right?

**Rick Beato** [2:31:21]
Yeah.

**Lex Fridman** [2:31:22]
Music, music does something. I'll, 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, in 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, like, pacing listening to it. And there's nothing like that.

**Rick Beato** [2:32:05]
I've never found anything.

**Lex Fridman** [2:32:07]
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, a-and ones that reverberate through generations, and they carry that.

**Rick Beato** [2:32:27]
It's one of the greatest things that humans ever did, 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. Uh-

**Rick Beato** [2:32:48]
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 created over the, over the decade, over the centuries. Um, thank you for being who you are, and thank you for talking today.

**Rick Beato** [2:33:07]
Thanks. I appreciate it.

**Lex Fridman** [2:33:09]
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Beato. To support this podcast, 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, 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.

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