In the first ~15 minutes of this episode, @bpoppenheimer tells the story of how he learned to "look for clues" from @RickRubin. It's one of my favorite ideas, and is a peek behind the curtain of the "magic" that underpins a creative force like Rick. People joke about Rick and wonder what he really does. As Billy notes, Rick has a remarkable "process" that is much more than meets the eye. When Rick embarks on a creative project, he starts with the clue-gathering phase. He doesn't force an output. He opens himself up to simply noticing. His creativity isn't genius inspiration so much as it is a constant attunement to interesting things, stories, formats. He's always looking for what he calls clues. Little hints that might be combined and remixed into something that feels completely new when the rest of us get to enjoy it. It's a perfect example of how Steve Jobs talks about creativity: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.