Hey, this is the moment. I'm Brian Koppelman. Thanks for listening. This is one of the most exciting days of doing this podcast.

My guest today is little Stephen Van Zant. I'll just say a true creative hero of mine and someone who's just always used his art for the exact right reasons someone who's just the throughline of your career has meant just a ton to me man.

And so thanks for doing this.

I know you don't do a lot of these interviews and your time is precious.

Oh my pleasure, man.

My pleasure.

Good to see you.

So let's get into it.

One word that really comes to mind when I think your work is purpose like mission and like do you

know what I mean by that like yeah i give i give entire speeches telling people to live with purpose

yeah i mean before i found your speech to Rutgers this morning,

but I wrote this down before I read it.

And I said, you know, how have you refined or restated this idea of mission and purpose

over the years and how has it been kind of a North Star for you?

Well, you know, you start off with the, you know, with the songwriting thing, I guess is where it starts because

you're, you know, you're trying trying to analyze what we're trying to do

baby I think every artist is trying to turn art into science you know basically

right that's our thing right you know and of course we're never going to succeed because there's always that little

intangible, okay?

So I always tell people, you know, work on that craft, craft, craft, craft, craft,

craft, the art will take care of itself, okay? But there is that little intangible when it comes to trying to tell people, you know, how to do things, you know.

And when I decided when it came to songwriting, I said, know when you sit down you know if you don't have an idea you know it's really

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