Podbit · The a16z Show
Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash did three sessions with the world's best musicians. None of them were as compelling as John sitting in Rubin's living room with an acoustic guitar. The mistake was thinking they were making demos — they were making the record.
Where this was said
At 55:00 · chapter starts 54:10
Rubin circles back to the question of AI's true potential with a concrete case study. AlphaGo beat the world's best Go player not by playing like a human expert but by making a move that looked, to human commentators, like a mistake — something completely outside the culture of the game, even if within the rules. [1] — Rick Rubin "AlphaGo beat the world Go champion with a move no human would make — a move commentators initially called a mistake. When we train AI to on…" 51:00 When the grandmaster saw the move, he got up and left the room. The commentators called it an error. It was, in fact, the winning move. Rubin's point: if the AI had been trained to only do what humans do, it never would have found that move. The lesson he draws for the broader AI industry is provocative — by training AI through RLHF to mirror human values and human behavior, we may be systematically preventing it from finding the equivalent of AlphaGo's unthinkable move in every other domain. Capping the machine at human performance is not a safety feature; it's a ceiling.
Reggae didn't emerge from thin air — it was built layer by layer from mento in the 1940s, ska in the late 1950s, and rocksteady in the mid-1960s. Each stage absorbed new influences, from transistor radios picking up Miami R&B to the distinctive 2-and-4 rhythmic accent that defines the genre.
Before hip-hop existed, Jamaican DJs were already doing it. Electricity spreading across Jamaica enabled mobile 'sound systems,' and DJs developed toasting — speaking and singing over recorded music — a tradition that DJ Kool Herc brought from Kingston to the Bronx at age 12.
Joe Higgs is reggae's great unsung hero. This Kingston musician took teenage Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer under his wing and taught them how to sing, write songs, and make music — at a time when most artists would have focused on their own careers. Without him, the Wailers probably just would have sucked.
Reggae archivist Roger Steffens' analogy says it all: Bob Marley was reggae's Martin Luther King Jr., making the music universally palatable; Peter Tosh was its Malcolm X, inserting fierce militant political energy. Together, they gave the Wailers a depth no single voice could achieve alone.
King Tubby built his own hardware from cast-off recording gear to strip vocals and create dubbed-out instrumental reggae — essentially inventing electronic music in Kingston before Kraftwerk did it in Germany. The dubplate he created became the raw material for DJs to toast over, seeding hip-hop.
Two days before the 1976 Smile Jamaica anti-violence concert, gunmen shot Bob Marley in the chest and shoulder, shot Rita Marley, and wounded two others. He showed up and played anyway. The concert had already drawn accusations that Marley was a tool of the PNP government — a charge that frustrated him deeply.
Peter Tosh's killer was a man Tosh had taken in after prison, giving him shelter and food. The man repaid that generosity by holding Tosh hostage, torturing him for money, and shooting him in the head. It is one of the most brutal betrayals in music history.
The Windrush Generation brought Caribbean music to London after World War II, and reggae's 2-and-4 rhythm lodged itself deep in British culture — giving birth to ska bands like The Specials, pop acts like UB40, and even punk. Johnny Rotten was a reggae fan, and Public Image Limited has the dub influence to prove it.
Reggaetón didn't come from nowhere. It emerged from underground Spanish-language reggae-rap scenes in Panama and Puerto Rico, drawing directly on Jamaican reggae's rhythms and attitude. The line from Kingston to Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance is a straight one.
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