创作直觉、打破规则与超越理性的创造力哲学

Rick Rubin: Jay-Z wrote in a way that no one else wrote. All the other rappers that I worked with spent a lot of time writing lyrics. And I never saw Jay write lyrics. And when I played him the beat for 99 Problems, he said, "Okay, just keep playing it over and over again."

Rick Rubin: And he sat in the back of the room. You could hear him mumbling or humming. After 20 or 30 minutes, he's like, "Okay, I got it." And ran into the other room and did the first verse. He did, let's say, three takes. And then he came in, he listened to him. He's like, "Oh, yeah. I think the second one's good." It just happens in his mind.

Steven Bartlett: And then this big list of people that you've worked with. I mean, it's just this unbelievable list. Jay-Z and Kanye, Adele, Justin Timberlake, and Mick Jagger and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Why do you think these people call you?

Rick Rubin: Because I've been making things for 40 years and I started making music as a hobby. It ended up taking on a life of its own and becoming a business. And that list, they're not special. I would say they're ordinary people who made a decision. I think of Eminem as a good example. Eminem is someone who's always writing because he wants to be the best he could possibly be and he's insanely obsessive about that.

Steven Bartlett: It appears that some people are just like inherently more creative than others.

Rick Rubin: Well, creativity is beaten out of us over the course of our lives. We go to school, we're taught to follow rules. The rules are not there to help us. The rules are there to control us. We're not taught to be free creative thinkers. So, I'm suggesting we break free and express ourselves freely.

Steven Bartlett: How?

Rick Rubin: Well, all of the best things involve risk. It's only through the risk that the greatness is shown. And so something needs to die. That lifestyle in that moment, that career path, that relationship, that's what needs to die.

Steven Bartlett: Is there a step one in that direction for people that want to hit the reset button? In your early 30s, you had a depressive episode yourself.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. The first one I'll say is... Yeah. It was really a tough time. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. Started having panic attacks and couldn't sleep and got really sick and it felt like I was shot with a poison arrow.

Steven Bartlett: Take me into that part of your life. So, um, here is a strange fact. Most of the people watching this right now, about 58% of you aren't yet subscribed to this channel. Statistically, that is probably you. So, could I ask you a small favor? If this channel has ever given you any value at all, please could you do me a favor and hit the subscribe button. It costs nothing. It helps us more than you could know. And the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the more we can invest in the guests and the production. So, thank you so much. And I hope you enjoy this episode.

Steven Bartlett: I'm going to start Rick where my curiosity is. Yes. How do you sort of self-categorize or self-identify in terms of like your profession?

Rick Rubin: I would say I'm involved in art and creativity.

Steven Bartlett: And what is your involvement in art and creativity?

Rick Rubin: Might be as a coach. It might be as a collaborator. It might come up in a film project or it might come up in someone who has a startup who wants to talk about what are the creative solutions. Any problem that we have or anything we want to get better at, there's usually a creative path to improve or at least to test to see if there are other ways around. Often the accepted version of how to move forward is another limitation.

Steven Bartlett: I'm very curious about your principles as it relates to finding the solution, whether that's in business or whether it's in music. And I'm really interested in if there's any similarities in the process of finding a solution because I'm an entrepreneur. I guess I'm a podcaster as well. I do investments all day every day. I'm in the pursuit of a solution to a problem, a people problem, a creative problem. Do you have any high-level principles that are broadly applicable irrespective of the type of problem you're solving?

Rick Rubin: I'll tell you an interesting one. A word I've been thinking about lately is indefensible. Indefensible is a funny word because it's a really pejorative word. It's a strong pejorative. If something is indefensible, it's not just bad. Indefensible is really extreme.

Rick Rubin: I'm thinking that in making art, indefensible is actually a good thing. Maybe not only a good thing, maybe a necessary thing. That you take things to the extreme that are indefensible. I can't tell you why. I can't tell you why because it's beyond reason.

Rick Rubin: So, I'm in that camp of reason is a tiny sliver of how decisions get made. And I would be much more in the camp of intuition or maybe some sort of a guidance from the universe. Openness to being guided by something more, the creative force of the universe. You could call it God. I call it God. You're not required to.

Steven Bartlett: What art that you've been involved in creating would you define in the moment as being indefensible?

Rick Rubin: A little over a year ago there was a meme about vibe coding. The way it started was if something new happened. A guy named Andrej Karpathy coined the term vibe coding. I didn't know what it was. That same day that he coined the term and tweeted about it, someone put a picture of me wearing headphones with my eyes closed, hand on a mouse. And that image became associated with vibe coding.

Rick Rubin: Had nothing to do with me. I saw it. I didn't know what it meant. But then over the next few days, friends started sending me hundreds of this image associated with vibe coding in all different ways. And I thought, hm, now the old me, pre-Creative Act me would have laughed and moved on with my life.

Rick Rubin: And one of the things that I learned through working on The Creative Act, one of the things it talks about a lot is we're given information all the time around us. There are all these opportunities or invitations being made all the time. In the past, if someone told me about a movie that sounded like I didn't want to see it, that doesn't sound like it's for me, I would ignore it. But if two or three people say you might want to see this movie, even if it's not interesting to me, it's almost like the universe, too much energy behind this. So this was an example of a lot of energy coming towards me relating to vibe coding. I don't know what it is.

Rick Rubin: And I thought, okay, how do I participate? If I want to participate in this thing that's going on, an experiment, creative experiment. And I thought, okay, I'm going to write a joke tweet related to vibe coding. I thought about it and came up with tools will come, tools will go, only the vibe coder remains. And typically the tweets get 10,000, 20,000 views. I look the next day and this joke tweet has a million and a half views.

Rick Rubin: It's like something's going on. It was an indefensible act. There was no reason for me to do it. But I'm feeling this energy coming at me from all of these different directions. I participate. I answer the invitation. Comes back, there's interest. Said, hm, what would be the next step? And the next step is, well, I still don't really know what vibe coding is, maybe I'll write a book about vibe coding. I put aside all of my real work, my professional work to dedicate myself to this book on vibe coding.

Rick Rubin: And again, I couldn't explain it. I couldn't tell you why. I can't say it was a good idea, none of those things. I was following a calling, feeling like I was being invited to participate in this thing, and this is the way that I could answer the call. So I did.

Steven Bartlett: In so many parts of our life, we might get that invitation to participate in something that is none of our business.

Rick Rubin: Yes. All the time.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah. And we usually say no because it's not what's on our business card. It's not what we've done in the past. And we are, you know, the more successful we become, the more narrow we become in many respects.

Rick Rubin: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: I'm thinking about this idea of like how one resists their label so they can capitalize on all the callings or you know, so they don't miss...

Rick Rubin: Yeah, important. Any label that you put on yourself or that's put...

Rick Rubin: ...on you makes you smaller. No label supply. No label supply. We are beyond labels.

Interviewer: It's tempting though, isn't it? Because labels are nice shortcuts at cocktail parties.

Rick Rubin: There are also no shortcuts, and I hope you don't spend too... and shaming cocktail parties.

Interviewer: No, I don't. Don't worry. I'm guessing what goes on there.

Interviewer: Okay. So, that's interesting. This idea of sometimes following the indefensible.

Rick Rubin: Well, if you feel a call, even if it doesn't make sense... If you, for an artist to write a song and you really feel like, this is really meaningful to me. I think no one's going to like it, but I really feel it. I can't defend it. That's the best thing you can do.

If you make something where you think, "This is for everyone or they're going to love it," it's too easy. The most interesting things are challenging. It's challenging to you. It's challenging to the people who see it. The things that are revolutionary. Most of the things that I've fallen in love with over my life creatively, art, when I first see it often or first hear it, I might not like it at first because it's too much or I don't have any context for it. The true revolutionary works, we don't have context for.

Interviewer: It appears to me, Rick, that sometimes things that are more of the same do bigger numbers. So I've been thinking about maybe for a period of time I was thinking about two artists. One of them is Drake who, listen, makes great music, makes hits, everybody loves them. They come out, we dance in the clubs to them, etc. Then I was thinking about, I think a record that you worked on with Kanye, Yeezus.

Rick Rubin: Mhm.

Interviewer: And I remember where I was when I first heard that as a huge Kanye fan. I thought, here we go. I'm going to get more College Dropout. Here we go. And I put it on and I was like, what the... is this?

Interviewer: But then I loved it. And in my little group of six...

Rick Rubin: How long did it take?

Interviewer: A while.

Rick Rubin: A while.

Interviewer: It took a while. I mean, you know, with Drake's stuff, I tend to like it on first listen, but with that Yeezus album, I had to really persevere, and then I thought it was genius because it was a new paradigm. Um, you worked on that album.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. And that's a good example of like, it was a sort of an anti-hip hop album, and that was done intentionally. And it definitely... we went as far as we could into an indefensible realm.

Interviewer: But what about the numbers? What about the sales? What about the record label?

Rick Rubin: Is it an important album to you now?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Rick Rubin: Okay. Did its job.

Interviewer: Those near-term incentives though. Listen, we need Drake. We need you to make another...

Rick Rubin: We never consider near-term incentive ever at any point in time. Never once. Never a consideration. It doesn't exist. We're making things forever. We're making things that are truly personal to us. And if it's truly personal to us, if someone doesn't get it, that's they just don't get it yet. Or maybe they'll never get it. And it's fine because I know this is my diary entry. Can someone else read your diary entry and tell you it's wrong, it's not good enough, or it's not true? It's not how you see the world.

Everything we make is a diary entry. Everything we make is our personal true expression. The reason we're saying it is to show you see it like that. We see it like this or I see it like this. This is how I see it. And with that information, you can see it's like, ah, I never considered that before. There's more. The world is bigger than I thought. It's not just more the same. It's not just more numbers.

And it's also the... the more numbers game is a shorter term game. I remember I made an album with Linkin Park who at the time were probably one of the biggest bands in the world and they had made three albums that were I would say stylistically very similar. They were rap rock and they were... there was this... there was a rap rock movement. Korn, I guess. Rage Against the Machine was first, Korn, Limp Bizkit, all these bands. And Linkin Park was probably the last of that wave of music. And they were wildly successful doing that music.

And when we started working together, there was a choice. We could continue and do the next in that same style which the audience would love and it would be easy to do, or we could be true to where the band was in this moment of time, 10 years after they started, about probably 8, 10 years after they started, and be free to find the new sound, the next sound. And when we did that, probably half of the audience didn't like it and half of the audience loved it, and new people came along, and they set themselves up to have a much longer career of making the things that they wanted to make. Whereas they were already on the tail end of a genre that had they made another one, maybe it would have been... it probably would have been, you know, as successful as what they had done. But long-term the genre was dying.

Interviewer: Mhm.

Rick Rubin: Again, none of this was thought about at the time. Another example I think of is Radiohead's Kid A. I remember when Kid A came out, I didn't like it at all. I loved The Bends and OK Computer. They were my favorite band. And then they made this album Kid A. And it was totally different and it really alienated me. And today that might be my favorite Radiohead album. It feels like a risk. Yes. But that's... all of the best things involve risk.

Interviewer: Because I'm sure you've also got examples where someone followed that thesis of listening to what they wanted to make or doing it for themselves and not thinking too much about the audience and it didn't work.

Rick Rubin: Of course.

Interviewer: And they could have just made, you know, a hit and paid off their mortgage and...

Rick Rubin: Yeah, it's not so interesting. I know it's not so interesting to me. I think that's... it's a different game. That's the, you know, that's the investment commerce game and I'm in the art game. It's just a different thing. There's nothing wrong with that other game. It's just not my game.

Interviewer: Which one leads to more success over the long term? Defined by, let's say, if we define success in this context, by the subjective opinion of people that that was good and money.

Rick Rubin: All I can say is that I've been making things for 40 years. I have never done it the way you're suggesting. I have always taken the risk. I've always made my favorite thing. I've always supported the artists in making their favorite thing, and luckily a lot of revolutionary things have happened from that, and I would say things that probably inspired other artists to be more free and more true and more honest and take bigger risks to make something more interesting, made the world more interesting place.

Interviewer: Why do you think these people call you? I think it's probably different for different artists. Why did Jay-Z call you?

Rick Rubin: The time that I first met Jay was when he was making The Black Album and he wanted to... he was planning on retiring and this was going to be his swan song. His final album. The Black Album was the Jay-Z's last album. Turned out not to be, but that was the plan. And he asked his 10 favorite producers to each make one track with them. And ours was called 99 Problems. And it was a really fun experience to make.

Interviewer: I mean, what an iconic record that is. What was your contribution to that record? Everybody knows that record.

Rick Rubin: Everybody.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Rick Rubin: We created the track and we played it for Jay and he liked it and then he wrote the words and rapped on top of it.

Interviewer: So you produced the music.

Rick Rubin: Made the music.

Interviewer: I read that you gave him direction in terms of the lyrics as well.

Rick Rubin: When my friend Chris Rock had the idea of... Ice-T had a song called 99 Problems that was the opposite. It was "I have 99 problems and a ... ain't one", and then it's a story about the girls.

Interviewer: Mhm.

Rick Rubin: And Chris said, you know, "99 Problems" would be a great hook and it doesn't have to be about the girls. And then I suggested to Jay, make it about the problems. And then that's what it was.

Interviewer: And business people, startups, they seek your advice as well. Entrepreneurs...

Rick Rubin: All the time.

Interviewer: And what are they seeking?

Rick Rubin: Let's talk about 99 Problems a little more because it's an interesting story.

Interviewer: Sure.

Rick Rubin: Jay-Z was...

Rick Rubin: ...signed to Def Jam Records. Def Jam Records was the label that I founded, and I was no longer at Def Jam when we made "99 Problems." And I remember giving it to the people at Def Jam, and the person who was the president of Def Jam at the time listened to it and he's like, "Oh, this is great. It'll never be a single, but it'll be a great album track." I remember thinking, okay, and again, I don't know, I couldn't say, but the president of the label that I founded was saying this could never be a single because it doesn't sound like everything else on the radio.

Rick Rubin: That was the old way of thinking. That was the normal way of thinking, of like you make things to go on the radio that sound like everything else on the radio. But if you do that, who cares? It's just more of the same. So "99 Problems" didn't sound like anything on the radio. So when it eventually got on the radio, it had a big impact.

Rick Rubin: Another band I work with is called System of a Down.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah, I remember.

Rick Rubin: And I remember bringing their record to Kevin Weatherly at K-Rock, which is the rock station, alternative rock station in California. And if they play it, all of the other alternative rock stations in the country play it. They were like the leading station. And this was a California band that was starting to get popular in the clubs. Maybe 200 people would come, but in a club, the club would sell out. Good sign. And I brought—I think the song was called "Sugar"—and I brought it to Kevin Weatherly and I played it for him and he said, "Not only will we not play this record, we will never play this band on our station," because it sounded insane. It didn't sound like anything else on the station.

Rick Rubin: One year later, number one song on the station, most requested, and two weeks ago, I saw System of a Down sell out 80,000 seats in a stadium in Paris. They sold it out two nights in a row. I can't tell you how or why this works. I can't tell you that there's anything to follow, but I will say we made the things that we loved. We never questioned if anyone else was going to like it. We never questioned what the audience was going to think. We never questioned where does it fit in the market. None of those normal conversations. We made our favorite thing. We took it to an indefensible level as far as we could go, and luckily it worked out.

Steven Bartlett: Is there a way to get clearer on what you love? This sounds like a strange question, but um...

Rick Rubin: Meditate.

Steven Bartlett: Meditate.

Rick Rubin: I learned to meditate when I was 14. And I think having a TM as a grounding element in my life...

Steven Bartlett: TM?

Rick Rubin: Transcendental Meditation. That was the first type of meditation I learned when I was 14. It changed me. I know this because I stopped meditating when I went to college. And then when I moved to California, right after college, I started meditating again. Somewhere I knew it was a big decision and somewhere I knew there would be a right moment to start. And it took several months before I actually sat for the first meditation after not doing it for several years. And in that first meditation, I realized, oh, this is very familiar to me. This is a big part of who I am, even though I haven't done it in 5 years. It's a big part of how I see the world. The fact that I got to do that from a young age...

Steven Bartlett: To understand who you are with it, I'm going to ask you who you would be without it.

Rick Rubin: I don't know. It'd be—I'm curious. I'm happy that I don't know because I like having the practice. But whether I continue a practice or not, I've done enough of it over the course of my life that I'm there. When I meditate more, it gets deeper. But even if I don't meditate, it's like Maharishi, teacher of Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi says every time you meditate it's like making a deposit in the bank. So it builds up. And again that was rhetoric before, but in my experience I got to see, oh, it's not rhetoric, like I actually had this experience and it changed the way I saw the world. And I'll say you see beyond the surface. You can see the depth underneath. And for me the things on the surface are not so interesting. I'm interested in the depth behind it.

Steven Bartlett: So my first question would be what is Transcendental Meditation?

Rick Rubin: It's a mantra practice that's done silently. You do it sitting with your eyes closed. You learn it from a TM teacher. I can't teach it to you. We close our eyes and then the mantra is a sound vibration that gets given to you. I was given mine when I was 14. I have never uttered it out loud since that time. I've never shared it with anyone. And that's part of the training. It's like a private sound and you engage with this sound in the way that you're taught. 20 minutes at least once a day, typically twice a day. I would do it right when I woke up in the morning and then again before dinner. Those would be the two windows. When I lived in California and I was working in different recording studios, I meditated with Tom Petty and Johnny Cash and different artists before sessions; that would be part of our practice. Red Hot Chili Peppers—we would sit and meditate together before sessions. So, I've had this experience for a while in my life and it's probably the most profound thing I can mention. We'll get to others, but that's one that's a learnable, practicable action that really changed who I am.

Steven Bartlett: How did you know it was efficacious? How did you know it was working? What is the measure that this practice is worth that investment in time in your view?

Rick Rubin: The only proof that I had was getting away from it and coming back to it. That was—I recognized it in that first meditation back how deep and connected I was to this thing.

Steven Bartlett: And I'm guessing this unlocks, you said a deeper level, a deeper level of creativity and ideas...

Rick Rubin: Everything.

Steven Bartlett: Oh.

Rick Rubin: Everything, deeper understanding.

Steven Bartlett: People often hear that meditation in various forms is beneficial. Very successful people sit here all the time and say it's so central to why I've been able to do what I've done. And then there'll be people that think, well, I sitting there for 10 minutes, my brain is very, very busy. I've tried it once, it didn't really work. And then they move on. And then I study some of the great creatives in the world, the great visionaries, people that I thought could see round corners in an atypical way, like Steve Jobs. And there's always a practice, a meditation practice, so often at the very heart of their brilliance. So I don't currently have a meditation practice. My wonderful fiancee does. She does it every morning for 20 minutes. She's a breathwork practitioner. So I mean it's her whole world.

Rick Rubin: And tell me what she says about it.

Steven Bartlett: She says it unlocks a deeper level of calm. And I don't mean calm as in like stress. I mean a deeper level of like groundedness. And she says she feels more connected. Now in her context I think that's more of like a spiritual thing. She feels more connected to the universe and others.

Rick Rubin: As far as the creative experience goes, a spiritual connection is a big part of that. It's just the nature of how it works. It's not an intellectual process. It's a spiritual process.

Steven Bartlett: What is the mechanism that is causing these results that you see? What from a biological perspective?

Rick Rubin: I couldn't answer that in the way that you would hope, but I will say I think it allows you to let go of all of the ordinary concerns. I also have a question which is if you live with a person who says this practice is so impactful on her life, I'm questioning why you at least haven't tried it with her for a month to see how...

Steven Bartlett: Good question.

Rick Rubin: No, it's a good question.

Steven Bartlett: I have no good answer for it.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because what it has to do with, it's you're not looking for cues from the outside. You're looking for cues on the inside. What lights you up? What are you excited to play for your friend? Not what are you excited to play for your friend of like what do you think this will do? You're...

Rick Rubin: ...playing for your friend like, "Wow, can you believe something like this exists in the world? How cool is that?"

The distinction that I'm trying to make is often if you read business books or entrepreneurship books, when they're talking about innovation, when they're talking about the great companies like Amazon—or I heard Sebastian, who's the CEO of Klarna, say it the other day, who's a tech founder—they spend a lot of time thinking about the customer, the customer's problem, and they work backwards, they call it, to the answer. So they'll zoom in on Rick's world and say, "Rick has these problems, he's..." and they'll work backwards from there to an answer. That's how Amazon say they built the platform.

Steven Bartlett: And and one of the quotes that's quite famous with Jeff Bezos is he bets on things that he knows won't change. He says, "No one in 10 is going to come up to me and say, 'I wish my package would take longer.'" So he can double down on that solving a customer problem. Does that sit in contrast to what you're saying, or is it the same thing, or it's a different type of work?

Rick Rubin: Well, I'll start by saying if you look at the history of Amazon, it lost money for probably 20 years. It was considered one of the worst investments until it wasn't. They kept doubling down on what they believed in. It wasn't working. The audience showed it didn't work. The model showed it didn't work, but they stuck to what they believed and it changed the world.

Steven Bartlett: So, it's it's the same thing. It's it's doubling down on what you believe in when all of the metrics are showing you it's not working. That's the story of Amazon.

Do you think people are um have different levels of their ability to uh you know, if we take practices like meditation aside, it just seems that through history some people are better at cultivating that or listening to that internal voice than others. Obviously, I sit here and interview these like some of these great founders, and it appears that some people are just like inherently more creative than others. Some people are in the analytical part of their brain and they need 1 plus 1 to equal 2 all the time. I'm wondering if you know there's other ways if you think there is an inherent difference in creativity.

Rick Rubin: I think that creativity is beaten out of us over the course of our lives. I think we we go to school, we're told to repeat back what we're told. We're told to sit in a chair all day. Where our spirits are broken by institutions. We're not taught to be free creative thinkers. We're taught to follow rules. The rules are not there to help us. The rules are there to control us.

I'm suggesting we break free and be free and express ourselves freely. And that's our purpose here on the planet is to express ourselves freely. That's why we're here.

Steven Bartlett: What you're saying links to something we were talking about earlier, which is at a very young age, we're taught that the things we make are a means to a particular end, and that end is promotions, pay rises, capital, success, job titles.

Rick Rubin: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: In the creative process, are you saying that it's never productive to talk about how we'll measure success and to try and optimize for that measurement in the creative process?

Rick Rubin: I I would I tend not to think about those things. I can't think of an example where we would want to use data.

I think it's it's much more about this internal feeling and then the feeling we have when you play it for someone, when you share it with someone, whether it lights someone up. You can tell when someone really resonates with something.

Sometimes the numbers don't show the numbers can't reflect that. You know, you can have two things that are kind of on equal footing commercially, yet one of them lights you up and the other one is, well, this gets the job done. They're different.

And longterm, chances are the one that lights you up is going to have more value to you and you'll be more willing to support that thing over time.

Steven Bartlett: In your book here, um, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, you talk about the things that block creativity, thoughts and habits not conducive to the work. Believing you're not good enough.

Rick Rubin: That's a big one. Someone at some point in time you were singing and someone's like, "Ah, you can't sing" when you're a kid, and that gets lodged in you. Singing is not something I can ever do, or you're a terrible cook, or you're not smart enough. So often the gifts that we have are stifled and smothered.

We're all creative. We may not choose to embark on a creative make creative choices, but that's it's on us. We can we just have bad information. We we we're told we're not good enough and we believe it, and it's not true. When people say that, "Oh, you know, Rick is a creative and Steven is say they say Steven is not a creative." What are they actually saying? What is that like in our culture to be a creative? How like we misunderstanding the definition. You see what I'm saying? Cuz we do we go creative, uh they do a little bit of art and music stuff; creative, not creative, Excel documents, creative.

Steven Bartlett: What are we actually saying there?

Rick Rubin: I think it's a way to um try to simplify the world. The world is complicated and I think all of us can do anything. I I'm not saying all of us could do everything to the best of our ability better than anyone else. That's a big part of it is the idea of competition.

Like if I want to play baseball, I know that I could get better at baseball. That doesn't mean I think I could get good enough to play on the Mets, but I know I could get better and I know I could train anything that I'm interested in and get much better at it.

And as soon as we're not capable of playing for the Mets, we think it's not for us and we shut that off. We're not doing a service to ourselves. We're not becoming our best selves or really uh living up to our full potential as humans.

Steven Bartlett: Feels like a natural human instinct to compare in order to understand the value of anything. I feel like we do it when we go to restaurants. There's three steaks. The expensive one's probably a bit bougie. The cheap one's probably not good. I'll go for the middle one. Seems like a a way that humans take shortcuts, but we do it with ourselves as well. So, I know that the thing I've made is good as if I look over at your thing and mine is ranked better or mine is prettier or richer. Are you saying for us to get out of the business of comparison?

Rick Rubin: Yes. Because I'm saying it's it's always apples and oranges. If you if if you were to ask who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince, I would say Michael Jackson's much better at being Michael Jackson. And Prince is probably better at being Prince. But you can't compare what the two of them do. They do two different things.

Before you mentioned Kanye West and and Drake, there's no competition there. They do two totally different things. What you get from each of them is totally different. I wouldn't want from Drake what I get from Kanye. And I certainly wouldn't want from Kanye what I get from Drake. It's It's pointless.

Is either more creative? That's for you to decide. That's for you to decide. The whole idea of competition between artists is it's such a weird thing. Again, it's back to who has a better diary entry. It's ridiculous.

Steven Bartlett: Feeling you don't have the energy it takes. These are all things that are not conducive to the work.

Rick Rubin: Yeah, I have that one sometimes. Feeling like I'm not up to it too much. I flew here yesterday from London. I'm tired. I'm a little jetlagged. I'm going to show up and talk to you. Maybe it won't be good. Maybe it's better to just lay down, relax, and recover. But I'm here. I show up.

Steven Bartlett: You've referred to yourself as a um a lazy workaholic.

Rick Rubin: Yes, it's true.

Steven Bartlett: What is a lazy workaholic?

Rick Rubin: Often, most days, I would rather not do any of the things that I'm scheduled to do. And I schedule the things and I show up and I do what needs to get done.

Steven Bartlett: Do you ever settle with creative work? The the deadline for the record label is approaching. The work is not yet done. We'll finish here and we'll send it.

Rick Rubin: I tend not to do that. I tend not to work on deadlines until we're past the point. The first time we would ever establish...

Rick Rubin: A deadline is when we already know we've cracked the code. We know what this is going to be. We can see it. It may not be completely finished, but we have a good idea of what it is and how it's going to work, and it's maybe 90% done. Then we might set a deadline for that last 10% of finishing it. And that last 10% probably won't make or break the project.

Host: Part of what you accept when you pursue the creative process you've described—where it's really about like "Do I like it? Do we like it?"—is you will create things that are at some points just absolute legendary and unlike anything else that exists. They are not the same. But part of the risk you take is you'll make things that other people just don't like.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. That's all there is in this process is you have an idea, you build it. You may learn along the way that the idea was maybe not the best idea and it turns left and you make—I'm starting out to make this blue statue and it turns out to be this red painting. You don't know that going in, but you discover it through the process, and it could take a long time. Other times, you'll think, "I'm going to make this blue thing." You make it in 5 minutes. There it is. Done. And we can't—you can't calculate that. You can't anticipate what's going to happen. But if I wasn't doing this experiment here, I would never get to the better thing. It happens all the time. And then sometimes you build it and it doesn't work for 20 years and then it becomes Amazon.

Host: I've thought a lot recently about how time horizons change the work that you do. And that's kind of also what I'm hearing there because in that example you gave of this blue statue thing. If you were under a time horizon, you wouldn't have the space for that exploration you've described. And actually in all of our lives, we—I think apply time horizons. We say this part of my career is going to be 5 years, and in in those 5 years I want to achieve these things. How do you think about setting personal time horizons but also like creative time horizons?

Rick Rubin: One of the things I talk about in the book is that there are different phases of creativity. The first phase is the seed phase, then is the experimentation phase, then is the crafting phase and then is the finishing completion editorial phase. And you can't set a timeline early in that process. In the seed phase, you have to try a lot of things and it's going to take as long as it takes. And in the experimental phase, which is where you're taking the seeds and seeing what they want to be, that takes time. And then in the crafting phase, the third phase still takes time because now you have the seed, you see what it wants to be. You've given it time to just state. You see how it grows. And now in the crafting phase, the third phase, you start trimming it and making it the way you see it. All of that has to happen before there's any idea of a timeline because until that time, you don't really know what you're making. It's a dream. But once you've gotten gone through these three phases and you have this thing in front of you, it may not be finished, but you see what it is. You see it and it's good. You're excited about it.

Rick Rubin: When I say it's good, I mean it's good to me. That's it. That's where it ends. It's good to me. I like it enough that I'm willing to show it to you. If I like it enough that I'm willing to show it to you, I like it enough to show it to everybody.

Host: People will hear this as creative advice. I was hearing it as life advice. I was hearing the seed phase of my life, the experimentation phase of my life, the crafting phase.

Rick Rubin: It's the same. It's all the same. And that's why the the creative act started with this idea of how to make things. And it turned—what I realized through writing the book is it's how to be in the world that that you you either live your life to allow these things to happen or you don't. And if you live your life to allow these things to happen, then you're an artist. Even if you're a businessman or if you're a chef or if you're a mother, you're living your life as an artist. You're embodying it and it's coming from you and it's—I want to say it's who you are. It's not who you are, but it's who you are in that moment. I'm showing you this beautiful thing as a reflection of how I see the world today. Now, tomorrow I may see the world differently. That's fine. But when I share it with you, this is the best it can be in this moment.

Host: The reason I was asking this question about the um you know sometimes they the world might not like what you give it.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: Is because because of this word failure which you talk about in the book as well and how to deal with failure. I guess a lot of the reason why people won't take the risk to listen to themselves to what they love is because of the word risk. And with that comes I might lose money. I might lose friends. If I quit this job and pursue that violin hobby and go to Peru and violin up in Peru, my I'm going to lose friends. People are going to think I'm strange. So I I'll conform.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. And I'm saying you have to do all of those things. Lose the friends. Take the risk. Now, I'm not I'm and and I'm also saying I'm not saying that for that 100% if you go move to Peru and be the violinist, it's going to work. And you may want to have an actual job to pay the bills while you're doing that. That's okay. The idea that it all has to be one thing. I have to do my dream thing and it has to be my prof—it has to be my hobby, my love, my profession. The way I support myself doesn't have to be. When I started making music, I thought I was going to have a real job and I'd make music and it would be my hobby. I would do it forever. I would do exactly what I was doing. But I thought I would have a real job to support myself to do these things that I want to do. Luckily, I was able to—it it turned into its own thing by nothing that I did. Had no expectation that that it could be a profession. I had no—it couldn't be. It was a ridiculous idea. I did it because I loved it. And while I was going to school and while I was probably going to go go to law school and I would have a regular job, day job, and I would do music as the love of my life. That's what I would do. Luckily, I didn't have to do that. But that's what would have happened.

Host: A lot of people at that age are told to follow their passion, find their purpose, which sounds like this, you know, cuz the word passion is a singular word. And also the word find means I have to go go out there and actively pursue the thing. A lot of people listening now would would say, you know, I've been told to find my passion and when they look at their job in the factory or wherever it might be, whatever they're doing, they go, okay, this isn't it yet, but I will get there at some point later.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: And I will jump. So you're saying don't jump necessarily.

Rick Rubin: There are realities of life that you have to deal with. I'm not saying ignore the fact that you get you have to pay rent or or say I'm happy living in my parents house until until it works. That's fine. I'm saying there are realities of life that have to be dealt with. Don't put the pressure of of that on your art because then you won't make the best decisions. You'll make short-term decisions based on real world issues that you have to deal with in that moment that won't support the long-term benefit of the work you're doing, the real work you're doing.

Host: I'm sure you've sat there in those moments where you're trying to persuade an artist to follow themselves and what they—

Rick Rubin: No, I don't try to persuade anyone of anything.

Host: Oh, really? Okay.

Rick Rubin: I don't I wouldn't use that word. I wouldn't use the word persuade.

Host: What word would you use?

Rick Rubin: We talk about it. I I ask what are your what do you hope to accomplish and then I'd support that process.

Host: Can we role play? I pretend I'm an artist who wants to write an album. So, okay. So, I am actually learning to DJ. I've been learning for like 4 years. What would you say to me? So, I come say, "Rick, I want to make an album."

Rick Rubin: What would—

Interviewer: ...the first questions be to me?

Producer: Play me the—of all the things you've made, play me your favorites. Let's talk about it. I would listen to it and then we would talk about it.

Interviewer: So, I play you, let's say it's a House song. I play it. I said, "This is my favorite."

Producer: I would tell you whatever I think about it. Honestly.

Interviewer: Honestly, even if you thought it was terrible.

Producer: Yeah. I probably wouldn't say it in an unpleasant way, but I would probably ask more questions around it. Explain to me what it is that you like about it. How did you get to that? What equipment did you use? Was it fun making it? Was it a good experience? Have you played it for other people? What's it like? What's the experience like? What's the feeling you get when you're making it? What's the feeling you get when you play it for a friend? Have you ever played it in a club? What's that like? I would listen to what you say and then we would talk about it.

Often an artist will come to me, they'll tell me exactly what they want to do and then say, "I have no idea what I want to do. Can you help me?" It's like they can't hear themselves. There's a—we all have this barrier between—it's a little bit how therapy works. If you go to see a therapist, you might talk. They might not say anything, but through the talking you start understanding what you believe, what you think, what's going on in your life. You might have epiphanies just because someone's listening.

Most people are not used to being heard, really heard, deeply heard. Often you will say something to someone and they're thinking about what they're going to say next. They're not really hearing what you're saying. And I find if you really are there and listen to what someone's saying, they tell you what they want to do and then my job is to just help remove the roadblocks that they're putting in the way of themselves to get there.

Interviewer: And when they say what they want to do but then ask you what they should do—

Producer: Yeah.

Interviewer: Is that a lack of sort of self-trust? What is that?

Producer: Yeah. Yes. But that lack of self-trust is what is the condition of the world. That's how we're indoctrinated. Most people don't trust themselves. And it's a fine line because there are the few people who might seem to really trust themselves and you think, "Oh, they're egomaniacs." Usually when someone really comes off as wildly egotistical, it's usually hiding some insecurities really. It's like a mask.

So that's dealing with someone who's insecure and dealing with someone who's overconfident. It's often two sides of the same coin. And we're really looking for this middle place of reality. It's like not what you're afraid of about yourself, or what other people are going to think, but where are you really on this?

I often describe it as tasting food. Like if I gave you two pieces of pizza and say, "Taste the two pieces of pizza. Tell me which one you like better." It's not a hard question. You'll probably say, "I like this one much better than this." And when I ask you which tastes better, you wouldn't say, "Well, I think this guy's going to like this pizza better." You would say, "This one tastes better to me." That's the goal is getting to that, "This one tastes better to me." Simple. We don't believe that it can be as simple as it is. And it is simple.

Interviewer: If you were to bet on an artist being one of these great artists that you've worked with because they have a set of characteristics or a perspective or a humility that is conducive with what you've seen results in exceptional work, what are those similar attributes? As someone that does a lot of investing in entrepreneurs, I was wondering if there were similarities even there, cuz some of it sounded the same.

Producer: I'm sure there are. I asked a friend of mine who is a venture capital guy about when he's picking things to invest in, is it the premise of the business or is it the founder? And he said, it's always the founder, doesn't matter what the business is.

Interviewer: He said, if I believe in the person—

Producer: I'll back them.

Interviewer: Mhm.

Producer: And I suppose it would be the same with artists. It's the artists, not like, "Well, they wrote a great song." The great song is more like the great product. It's like, maybe they could do that again. But if you see that the way that they see music, the way that they innovate in the things that they make, that's a good sign. Tell you a story: the band The Strokes.

Producer: I produced their new album, just came out maybe a month ago, and they had asked me to produce an album for them maybe, I want to say 15 years ago, and I listened to the demos, and I didn't hear it. I'm not saying it couldn't be good. I just didn't see the way in. For me, it's like, I don't think I should do this. I don't feel it. And then they asked me another time maybe 12 years ago and I listened to the demos and I didn't hear it. I just don't see how to do it. So I passed.

Interviewer: I didn't see how to do it. Give me some color on what that means.

Producer: Yeah. It's like when I hear something and I can see a path. I can hear a thing. It doesn't have to be good, but I could hear something in it of like, I understand what this is and I want to see what this can become.

Producer: I didn't feel that the first two times. And then on the first album we worked on together, which came out about 6 years ago, they sent me demos again. They were probably the worst demos they ever sent, but I could hear what it could be. And one of the demos might be a 20-second voice note. Whereas in the past there were these produced demos of like, "Here's our great new songs." But in this 20-second voice note I could listen and think, "I really want to hear this whole song. Whatever this is, this seed of an idea, this is going to be good. Has the potential to really be good."

Interviewer: How do you know?

Producer: Feel it. There is no knowing. It's a knowingness. It's like I have a knowingness. I couldn't explain it to you. It's an internal experience. One of the things is, again, you tend to want to lean forward, not lean back. You tend to want to listen again, not skip to the next one. It generates curiosity. It generates interest and I want to know more.

Interviewer: Do you set goals in your own life?

Producer: None.

Interviewer: You strike me as someone who is okay with uncertainty in a world where most people need certainty in order to take forward motion or take an action in a direction.

Producer: I know uncertainty is real. I had a house in Malibu that was my main house with all of my possessions that 8 years ago burned in a fire. And when that happened, you very quickly see like, I thought I would live there forever. When that happened, I realized, hm, impermanence is real.

I thought I was going to live there forever. It's gone now. It's a dirt lot. So, I don't think that we can know anything. We just kind of move along and make decisions based on the information we have at the time and life unfolds.

Interviewer: I guess an analogy would be satnav in the car. You get in the car in the morning, you put your seat belt on, then you set your satnav and say, "This is my goal. This is where I want to go." And then you drive. So, you put action towards that goal. What you're saying sounds more like you just drive.

Producer: Yeah. All the time. Yeah. I used to do that. It's funny you bring that up, but there was a period of time when I worked a lot in the recording studio. A lot of hours, many sessions. At sometimes I made eight albums a year and I'd be working on different projects at the same time, and then I would have a day off on the weekend and I wouldn't make any plans, but I would just drive and just listen to music in the car and drive. And I might end up somewhere, but I might just drive for a couple of hours and relax, and it felt good.

Interviewer: You might get lost though, and that's the risk.

Producer: That's okay.

Interviewer: That's why we have goals in our life. That's why we make a 5-year plan, a New Year's resolution. Yeah, I've—

Rick Rubin: Never done any of those things. Couldn't imagine it. Seems like a terrible limitation. As good as it can be, I could never imagine that. I would have much more ordinary understanding of the world than what actually happens, than seeing the impossible become possible on a regular basis. I certainly couldn't plan for that. Now, because it's happened so much in my life, I accept that's how it is and I'm on the ride.

Steven Bartlett: You accept the unknown and the uncertainty.

Rick Rubin: The unknown.

Steven Bartlett: Is that something that we can all do or is that a privilege that you have now that you're so successful in that...

Rick Rubin: We limit ourselves in so many ways. I can remember a very successful artist who was going through a really hard time went out to dinner at this restaurant in Malibu. I remember specifically what it was. And I remember thinking this person might commit suicide. That's how I could feel their energy was so unbalanced and so conflicted and they were suffering.

Rick Rubin: And I remember saying, you know, you don't have to keep doing this. You know, you've done a lot of great things. You've had great success. You can afford not to do this. And anytime you want to, you can say, you know what? I'm going to move to the other side of the world and live on the beach and just eat good food, play in the water. You're not obligated to continue doing what you're doing that's causing so much conflict in your life. You've done enough.

Rick Rubin: And I found out years later, I didn't even know that the person really heard what I was saying cuz they were really in a hard place. But years later, that person said to me, "Remember what you said? You said I could check out." And he did. He didn't do it in the way that I imagined. I didn't know that that's what happened, but he did that.

Rick Rubin: I know several people who committed suicide and I have one friend, a good friend who unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide. All of them, in those moments, it's like they feel like the choices I've made have me boxed in and there's no way out. And when someone thinks that, the inclination to commit suicide is the person knows something needs to die and they think the body needs to die.

Rick Rubin: But in reality, those choices that they made, that lifestyle in that moment, that career path, that relationship, that's what needs to die. And they can go and start a whole new life. And we don't see that. We get very locked in thinking this is all there is, and this is not all there is. This is what we have chosen, and we're going along on this path, and at any time we say, you know what, I want to do it all differently. I want to start a whole new life in a whole new way.

Rick Rubin: And that doesn't take a lot of money to do. It might take less money to do because you can move to somewhere in the world that costs nothing to live, beautiful places where people are happy. It's just a choice. It's almost like we're playing a game. It's a game of chess. You can get up and leave the table and not play anymore and go on and play a different game and have fun. It's always available to us. You could press a button and it all goes away. And it doesn't mean that you have to die for that to happen. Just that scenario has to stop and you go on, find a new one.

Steven Bartlett: I've seen a lot online again about how to find your flow. That feeling when everything just clicked, distractions disappear, and suddenly you're operating at your very very best. But most of us treat flow like it's something that just happens randomly. But when you're operating at the highest level, you can't just leave that to chance, or at least you don't want to. Bad days are expensive and you need to be able to zone in on demand.

Steven Bartlett: That's the idea behind our sponsor, Ketone-IQ, a company I've invested in and become a co-owner of because I've seen for myself the profound impact it has on me as a podcaster. Sometimes I'm here with an investor or a business person or a philosopher or someone talking about menopause, whatever it might be. I need my brain to be sharp. Ketone-IQ is a premium focus fuel for your brain and delivers sustained mental clarity and focus so you can be more intentional about creating the conditions for focused work. And it's no longer just chance because your best work shouldn't have to depend on a lucky moment. So go to ketone.com/stephven for 30% off or you can head to CVS and get your first shot for free. That's right, Ketone-IQ is now available at CVS locations nationwide.

Steven Bartlett: The biggest unfair advantage in business right now is having people who genuinely understand AI and big businesses are hiring them very, very quickly. AI job postings in the US have roughly doubled since 2023, while postings for VP of AI roles are around 600% up. If you're running a small business, you can't just build an entire AI team, but you still want the same advantage that these big businesses have.

Steven Bartlett: This is where our sponsor Fiverr comes in. It lets you plug into top tier AI specialists for the strategic work that usually requires serious in-house expertise. That could mean building custom AI tools. It could be automating complex workflows or creating something that off-the-shelf software simply cannot do because at the end of the day, it still comes down to human judgment, knowing what's worth building and what good actually looks like. So, if you want that kind of leverage in your business, check out fiverr.com. That's fiverr with two rs.com.

Steven Bartlett: A lot of the the prison that I think I almost hear you sort of referring to that we've kind of built that makes us feel boxed in is our identity.

Rick Rubin: This word identity. "I am a lawyer in Manhattan and a father," and I took that identity. It's almost a bit of a trade I made. I accepted it which meant that at cocktail parties people were impressed by me.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah. And so, you know, we traded something for something else and now we're boxed in. And now a lot, you know, I hear a lot from our listeners on this show like they feel stuck.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. We're free. We're free. We just have to choose to take advantage of this human gift of freedom and we can start over.

Rick Rubin: I remember the one close friend who tried to commit suicide and didn't, luckily lived. I went to visit him in the hospital. He was laying in a hospital bed and he was seemingly catatonic. He hadn't spoke since this happened. And I was standing in the hallway and there were a series of his friends coming to see him. Everybody would go into the room one at a time. And I listened to the two people who went in before me and they were crying and they were acting as if he had died.

Rick Rubin: Now he's laying there. He's in fetal position. He's not saying a word. And I'm just thinking this is really weird. This is it's really the whole scene is weird. Never seen anything like it before. And my first thought was the people who are going in there and talking to him, they have no idea how to act. None of us do because this is an unusual situation. Unless you've been in it, which I hadn't been before, you'd have no idea what to do. But I knew from listening, this is not the best. What they're doing is not the best situation. There's a better way.

Rick Rubin: And I was the next one in. And I went in and I looked down and I said, again, I don't know where this came from, but it came. I said, "This may be hard for you to see right now, but you're in the sweet spot." And I remember saying that and he looked at me and he looked at me like I was insane. But it was the first time the first thing he reacted to was that.

Rick Rubin: And I said, "You just hit the reset button." I said, "All of the things that you hate to do, that you feel obligated to do, that you feel committed to do, that made you want to not be here anymore, you just hit the reset button. You never have to do any of those things again. And now you can do anything you want. You're free to start. All of those old ideas, none of those obligations are hanging over your head." And we ended up having a really nice conversation and he got up and he got dressed and he was like himself. It was an amazing an amazing experience. But that that's how boxed in we feel. But it's all

Host: ...just a story. It's not true. We are free. Is there a step one in that direction for people that want to hit the reset button? Is there a first step?

Rick Rubin: Well, I would try to see what are the things in your life that really you want to change and then think about what's the cleanest way to change them, leaving a job, leaving a relationship. You know, the reason these things happen is we make commitments with good intentions, and then when it's hard to keep the commitment is where it starts feeling boxed in. Now, I think commitments are a good thing both to make and to keep. That said, there can be a point where it becomes life and death. It's like, this commitment that I made was a mistake, and it was, and or something changed. Maybe the person that I married became an alcoholic, and it's really hard living with an alcoholic and it's not fun. This is not what we signed up for, and I can do everything I can to help this person, but maybe nothing works, and at some point it's okay to hit the reset button and say, you know what, you're not doing any favors if you're locked in a situation.

I have a lot of friends who are in relationships, and maybe the relationship has gone south, but they stay in it because both sides of the couple feel like, "This is the life we signed up for." And in reality, you're not doing any favors for the person being unhappy in a relationship. The nature of love is it's a two-way street. Or the same I can say if someone is in love with someone and the other person—unrequited love—the person's not in love with them, there's no really such thing, because the nature of love is it's like a negative and a positive magnet pull pulling towards each other. You can't have one side of the magnet in love. It doesn't work. And it's just a fantasy of what you know, it's a beautiful fantasy of what you think like as an optimist, it could be so beautiful, but if it's not there, it's best for everyone involved.

Sometime I have some friends who feel like, "Well, I don't want to break up with them because it'll destroy them." It's not true. It's better for everyone involved if it's not working to find the new beautiful life. You can do that. It's okay.

I imagine as well there's some people who have lots of small misalignments. None of them are huge issues on their own, but now they have a life full of a hundred small misaligned things. Could be anything. And so their life feels really fundamentally misaligned, but it's actually just maybe they struggled with honesty across many little areas of their life.

Host: Yeah. And maybe those can be worked on and maybe it can be fixed. But in either case, don't let it just linger, you know, repair them. It's hard conversations there, Rick.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: A lot of people aren't good at that. But, you know, people pleasers, and there's a through line here with creativity generally. I think this idea of like people pleasing, the difficult conversation. And I've obviously seen from some of the things you've mentioned through this conversation, like you would be willing to tell people like, "This isn't for me." I imagine you offered a lot of money a lot of the time as well.

Host: Yeah. How do you sort of pass through that if you're offered a ton of money to do something but at some level it's not aligned with your principles or values or—

Rick Rubin: I want to make good things, like I want to make something good.

Host: Have you turned down large numbers of in terms of money or other incentives because you didn't feel something was going to be good or was aligned or—

Rick Rubin: Yeah, I'm sure I have. I can't think of examples, but I'm sure I have. I don't think about the stuff like, I think about the things I do. I don't think about things I don't do, you know.

Host: Does it matter to you the money part of it?

Rick Rubin: I want to be in success. I want to participate in the success. I think that's right. That feels right to me. I never make a decision for a financial reason. That said, if we make something successful, that's valuable.

Host: And in your own life, and we're talking there about mental health through your early 30s, you had a depressive episode yourself.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: Was there a causal factor? And how important was that in shaping how you think generally about the world and the art and the creativity? Cuz I know I've heard you say on Newsday that it changed you permanently.

Host: It did. Take me into that part of your life. You're 33 years old, my age.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: What happened?

Rick Rubin: What happened was I had been an only child. My parents really loved me, really cared about me, always supportive. I went to school. I started making music as a hobby. It ended up taking on a life of its own and becoming a business and had great success for all those years. And then at 33 for the first time it got called into question.

I had a business relationship with a big company. The person who I was in relationship with was one of the probably the top person in the whole music industry. Well-loved, beautiful person, one of my mentors. He got politically forced out and a new person was put in who I didn't have a relationship with. And that person called me and said, "I read your I read our agreement"—because he had adopted the agreement that I had with my mentor. He's like, "I don't like it. When you come back to California, we should talk about it." That was it. That was the whole conversation.

Now, for me, I didn't know because I'd had so much success for so long. I never had to deal with any instability in my life in that way. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me, and I started having panic attacks and couldn't sleep and got really sick. And again, for almost anyone else, the exact same scenario would have been, "Okay, we'll deal with it when I get there, no problem," and move on. But I didn't have the ability to deal with it because I never had to deal with anything like that. I didn't have the musculature to deal with that issue, and it felt like the rug was pulled out. I didn't know what to do and sunk, and then it ended up going on for years.

Even after the problem was solved—I ended up leaving the company, starting a relationship with a new company, everything was fine—but it was like I was a balloon that got burst in that moment. And I'm still not the same person as I was before. Now maybe now I'm more rooted in reality, which probably sounds funny after a lot of the things I've been saying before, that I would say I never questioned anything. It was just like everything was always rolling in this one direction, and that was the first time that it was questioned and it sunk me, and it took years to get out of it.

What I will say though is that because of that, so many of the artists I work with deal with a lot of personal issues. And before that, before I was 33, I probably didn't understand how they felt as much as I do now, because now I've had an experience where I feel like the bottom fell out. I would say it has helped my understanding of the artists I work with.

Host: On your Desert Island Discs, you said it wasn't anything that I understood. I thought I was dying.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: The essence of this is it was your first sort of big professional, dare I say, rejection.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: Yeah.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. I was wrapped up in that, in who I was, and that questioned who I was for the first time.

Host: And you went to therapy.

Rick Rubin: Yes. Went to therapy and ended up using an anti-depressant drug, which I tend not to be a drug person, but it was bad enough for long enough that that was the final, it was the last thing. I was seeing a different therapist, probably a therapist or a healer, at least one, 5 days a week. And every time I would wake up and go and just thinking, maybe today it's going to be better. Maybe today it's going to be better. And it wasn't better. It was really a tough time.

Host: What was going on under the surface of this? Cuz on the surface one would say Rick got a professional rejection and it resulted in him saying that he thought he was dying.

Rick Rubin: Well, it all was happening on the unconscious level. Couldn't sleep, was nauseous all the time. Didn't want to get out of bed. It was like I felt it in a physical way and didn't want to do anything.

Steven Bartlett: What is this? What was that?

Rick Rubin: Well, I've heard it described as like being shot with a poison arrow in a philosophical or a psychological way. I was shot with a poison arrow.

Steven Bartlett: Cuz I've looked at your earliest years. I've looked at, you know, two wonderful people there.

Rick Rubin: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: Your mom and your dad.

Rick Rubin: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: Um, and sometimes, you know, when I interview people that are anomalous in some way, I find that their upbringing had some sort of trauma and they had a chip on their shoulder. But with you, I had very much the opposite that you had two parents that really, really loved you,

Rick Rubin: really loved me, could do no wrong. But that was part of what it was. It's like I had been raised believing I could do no wrong. And then in the real world making music, the success showed that I could do no wrong until someone decided, you know what? I don't like what you're doing. So, I just didn't have context for it, no way to deal with it.

Steven Bartlett: Sounds like a horrific season of your life.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Steven Bartlett: Would you if there was a button on the table now that would allow you to erase it, would you press it?

Rick Rubin: I would not.

Steven Bartlett: Why?

Rick Rubin: Um I feel like every event that I've had in my life, positive and negative, has brought me to where I am now. And I wouldn't want to change a thing. I wouldn't want to change anything.

Steven Bartlett: What did it give you?

Rick Rubin: It gave me a different perspective. Again, I think it brought me down to a more realistic view of the world. Still one who believes in magic and that the impossible is possible on a daily basis. But before I might have felt more like Superman and I don't feel like Superman anymore.

Steven Bartlett: What do you feel like?

Rick Rubin: Uh tired.

Steven Bartlett: Tired. I am, you know, as creatives. I want to go back to this question I was asking you earlier on about the similarities you see in these great artists. I heard on one end conviction and then I also had humility which kind of seemed like opposing forces. Is there anything else that you see in the similarities between the Jay-Z's, the Kanye's, the list of people that you worked with is endless?

Rick Rubin: It usually has to do with a point of view. Seeing the world in a way that other people don't see. Now, maybe something that everybody sees, but no one has pointed out before. They notice the world in a different way. It's what a great comedian does. Great comedian says something and you laugh at it because you relate to what he's saying. It's like, of course, it's so funny. It's so ridiculous. That's what we do.

Steven Bartlett: It's the same. It's seeing another layer of what's possible. Understanding the world on a deeper level than we think we see it. And with art, we get to experience all these emotions that are happening to someone else, but because we're humans, they resonate and we get to feel. You can hear a song of heartbreak. And you don't even have to be heartbroken, but you feel you can feel it. You can see a movie that can really impact your life. And art has this incredible ability to widen our perspective and see things from different angles that we couldn't see before.

Steven Bartlett: Do great artists work hard?

Rick Rubin: Very hard.

Steven Bartlett: And what does that mean?

Rick Rubin: From the outside, you'd think you check into the recording studio and make something and put it out and then you go on tour and everybody screams. It's a grueling job. Everything about it is hard. It's wildly competitive, not because you're competing with other people, but because a lot of people are trying to do it. And you can be tremendously talented, but if you don't have the work ethic to go with it, it's unlikely that anyone will ever hear what you do. So, it's this combination of really diligent work ethic doing whatever it takes and some interesting perspective, an interesting point of view, an interesting view on the world that someone else looks at and thinks, hm, I never saw it that way before.

Steven Bartlett: Is there a way that you know to make my perspective on the world more interesting?

Rick Rubin: It sounds like you spend a lot of time looking at business and self-help material. And I would say maybe look outside look at the great things outside of that area and see how they rhyme or how they resonate or how they relate. Often we get great ideas from something having nothing to do with what we're actually interested in.

Steven Bartlett: We'll see some new thing.

Rick Rubin: I would say start going to museums. You know, go to museums, look at the art, take the walking tour with the headphones, listen to the stories, read the great literature. When I say the great literature, it's not one single list, but if you ask around, you'll find out. And if three people recommend it, definitely read it. See the great movies. Ever. See the great movies. The, you know, the greatest movies of all time.

Steven Bartlett: It's funny cuz when we're told how to become a good insert occupation, we're told to go study that occupation. Being a good lawyer, go study law. But often times it appears to be the case even with someone like Steve Jobs that they have these sort of rare things in their skill stack like his love of design and typography.

Rick Rubin: Mhm. No one at university would have told him, "Okay, you want to be a great computer programmer, go do typography design."

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. It's usually what makes you good at what you do is not that you do it the same as everybody else. So if everyone is reading the same books, they're going to have the same perspective.

Steven Bartlett: I would go outside.

Rick Rubin: I would also recommend reading old books as opposed to new books. Ancient wisdom is the best. Start very old.

Steven Bartlett: I mean, I've got some books here.

Rick Rubin: Yes. Good choices.

Steven Bartlett: You're a fan of these books?

Rick Rubin: I love these books.

Steven Bartlett: Why? What did they give you?

Rick Rubin: I first read The Dao when I was I had just moved to California. It's probably 30 years ago. And I read it and I felt like this is different than anything I read before. It speaks to me on so many levels. And then I remember reading it something like 6 months later and it was an entirely different book. And it's the kind of book that every time you read it at different points in your life, you'll read an entirely different book. And this was the inspiration for the way of code. And the way of code is essentially an adaptation of the Dao for vibe coding.

Steven Bartlett: Often times books can be summarized into a sort of a lesson. Is there a lesson a central lesson that you got from that book?

Rick Rubin: Maybe I would use one sentence like that. The soft overcomes the hard. That would be a good that would be one things that seem counterintuitive that non-action is often the best action. Now that seems crazy, but that really is where it's at. You know, there's a story about Napoleon that when someone would come to Napoleon during all the waring stuff that was going on, they would come with an emergency. You know, you're the only one who can answer this. Here's the problem. It's an emergency. He would always say, "Bring it back to me in two weeks." And the idea was 99% of the problems that need your immediate attention in 2 weeks will resolve themselves. And if it's still a problem in 2 weeks, he'll deal with it.

Steven Bartlett: Might try that with my fiance.

Rick Rubin: See how it goes.

Steven Bartlett: It's an interesting idea though that what was that phrase you said? The soft

Rick Rubin: the soft overcomes the hard.

Steven Bartlett: The soft overcomes the hard.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. That's like the idea of water dripping on a rock that eventually the water will eat through the rock slowly dripping and the water's soft. The water's totally

Steven Bartlett: pliable, malleable, soft.

Steven Bartlett: And what about this book? Is there an essence?

Rick Rubin: Well, I like Carl Young, and this is probably his most mystical book, but in general, his ideas of archetypes and looking into dreams and synchronicity are beautiful ideas, and I think that they're really how the world works. So, I find comfort in reading him because it's different than what we're shown in math

Speaker A: ... and science, but maybe closer to how it really is.

Speaker B: I'm going to have to ask you to elaborate, especially on this point of you saying that synchronicity is actually more so how the world works.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think we don't know how anything really works. I think the world is much bigger and more interesting than we give it credit for. And most of the things that we think we understand maybe are not so accurate. Like the one of the things about science is that science is the understanding of how things are now until the next scientific breakthrough comes and negates everything that was before it. It's like this ongoing interest and I think maybe there's an inner knowingness like we don't know why you meet somebody and you really want to spend time with them. I don't think that science can explain that and you meet someone else and you feel like you know what I don't want to be around this person. There's something going on energetically here that's not for me. I think that that's the kind of wisdom that probably has more impact on our lives than anything that you can uh any data can show us.

Speaker B: I was thinking about how believing what you've just said might change my life.

Speaker A: Yes, it would.

Speaker B: In what ways do you think it might change my life?

Speaker A: It's like you would take the shackles off of feeling like it has to be this narrow way or thinking well if these numbers look like this then it means this and this is what's going to happen when in reality you know many times you've looked at the numbers and then acted accordingly and then 3 years later realized hm didn't really work out the way I thought that's the real world like that's one way of looking at things you know the money ball approach is one way. And then the other way is when you met your wife and you felt like I want to be with her. That's different. There weren't any metrics you could use to calculate whether that was a good idea or not.

Speaker B: It's like an invitation to trust ourselves more as well because you're talking about energetic feeling and

Speaker A: and doing things that would make trusting yourself make more sense.

Speaker B: That's the other part of it. It's like if you spend so much time not trusting yourself, then that antenna to be able to tell what's going on might be a little rusty.

Speaker A: So, anything you can do to start using the antenna as often as possible and letting it dictate you. There was a time when I was surprised by the miracles that I would see and now I'm not surprised. It's still surprising, but it happens enough where it's like, "Yeah, that's what happens. Look at that. Can't predict it. Can't bet on it. But when it happens, like it seemed like that's what was going to happen. Happened. Look at that."

Speaker B: And do you think there is a higher force taking actions on our lives or

Speaker A: I think there's a higher creative intelligence that I'll say lives the world like the thing that allows plants to grow. There's some generative force. I don't know that it's like aiming particularly at you or me, but there's some energy that like life wants to live and you can ride. Same like catching a wave, you know? You can you can catch the wave. The wave is there. There's a lot of waves beyond the ones in the ocean

Speaker A: and you can ride those waves. You can't always see them, but you might be able to feel them. you might be able to over time you start to recognize them and for some reason it seems like the universe wants us to know about this. It's what I talked about paying attention and about the um the way of code like it was a ridiculous thing. It was indefensible. But I listened to this feeling was coming from a lot of sources. Didn't make sense to me, but it felt like, hm, I'm being asked to do something here. What could it be? Let me try to participate.

Speaker B: What I hear from a lot of what you're saying is um it's making me think about how like rationality as an idea, being rational,

Speaker A: yeah,

Speaker B: can be a bit of a curse. I would consider myself to be quite a rational person.

Speaker A: I would say rationality is overrated. The rational world is very small. There's much more there are much more interesting things going on than the rational world.

Speaker B: Yes, that's what exactly what my fiance would say to me. What she has been saying to me. I think I think we we go together. Funny enough, you're talking about plus and minuses because she is someone that helps me break outside of rationality.

Speaker B: Yes. And when when she when she speaks to me about these ideas she has about these you know bigger ideas she has I always listen very intently although at some level I am I guess rebuttling them

Speaker A: but do you see how they impact her life? Do you see what they do to her?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Does it feel like it raises her vibration like

Speaker B: 100%.

Speaker A: Yeah. It's like there there's

Speaker A: that counts you know the way she feels that counts her vibe. Yeah.

Speaker B: One of the um

Speaker A: enough for you to want to be around her all the time.

Speaker B: I feel like I'm Yeah. leeching off that vibe to some degree sometimes.

Speaker B: What you talked about higher intelligence and you talked about uh a generative force which is the perfect segue into the big subject of the moment which is artificial intelligence. Kind of links to what you're saying about vibe coding as well. for the first time ever. I was saying yesterday I I got a message from my f one of my friends who isn't involved in technology saying like I'm concerned. I don't know what this technology is. Is it going to take our jobs? I'm concerned. And that for me was the bat signal that that that this is really getting down to everyday people. This week there was a anthropic researcher um who also worked at a uh chat GBT open AI say he thinks it might be uh the the end of the human race or at least there's a more than 10% chance of that. AI is a broad subject. Sure. You've got lots of thoughts on it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'd think it's a it's a wildly powerful tool and I'm curious to see what it can do. Like any powerful tool, it could be really dangerous. It could be used for bad or it could be used for good. Fire burned down my house. I wouldn't say we should ban fire. Fire cooks our food. Does some good stuff. Heats our heats our houses. It's one of these things. It's like the internet changed the world. It does some really good things. Probably does some really bad things. It's very powerful. The printing press when it came along, the church tried to ban the printing press. They didn't want that. They didn't want books to be able to they didn't want information to be able to be for everybody. Good came from that and probably some bad.

Speaker B: Can it be creative?

Speaker A: I don't know. I'm curious. I I don't know. I feel like everything we've talked about today about what creativity is has to do with point of view.

Speaker A: And AI doesn't have a point of view. AI is uh the collected ideas that already exist. It doesn't have it doesn't see it from a particular angle. And if you ask it the same question several times or several days in a row, it may give you very different answer day after day. So it's not like it has this is how it sees the world.

Speaker B: If I asked an AI to make 10 million different tracks,

Speaker B: Yeah. Would it theoretically it would at some point make a hit even though it doesn't have a a point of view per se?

Speaker A: Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't. It's hard for me to say what a hit even is,

Speaker A: but I would say

Speaker A: it could make 10,000 tracks and you might like one or two of them or you may like 5% of them. You might. And that's interesting. And I could see like there was a time when we would sample records when we were doing hip-hop records. It was called crate digging where you'd go to record stores, find old records, listen to them all the way through and find one little part. It's like, ah, this little breakbe beat, let's use that and make a new song out of it and and you change the context, make something new. So, if AI was playing music constantly in the background and then all of a sudden I heard a little clip, oh, that's a good sample. We can make that into something that would be a use. I I I I think the idea of it doing the end to end of replacing the artist, I don't think it I I I can't imagine it

Speaker A: doing that. I'd be curious to see if it could, but I think what we want from an artist has to do with point of view. And I see AI maybe is a tool that could help the artist and maybe even help the person who doesn't know they're an artist be an artist. So, I can't draw. I can't play any instruments. I don't have any talent. I have no way to express my creativity. But I could talk to the AI and maybe I could prompt the AI into making something beautiful through iteration and prompting. So maybe more people will get to be creative using AI. And I think that's a beautiful thing. This is such a recurring debate. You'll hear it probably on every panel everywhere at the moment, which is can AI be creative? And I've thought a lot about like I've sort of tried to interrogate the question itself because you first sort of need to define what creativity is and then I think what people are saying is when they think of creativity they actually think of good creativity that sold well or that was number one. So often times I remember one of my friends was saying to me the other day um I don't think AI could ever make and then he like named a great song.

Speaker B: AI could never make that. And even when I look at that great song, what's making him think it was great creativity in hindsight was actually, as you use the word end to end, an end to end process of having the meeting with MTV, building up distribution and reputation. Maybe people being following that artist's life and therefore that being part of the point of view. People have followed Olivia Dean. So when she makes music, something else comes with that. A story comes with that. Olivia Dean signed to a record label. So maybe there's some support there that's done. And in hindsight we go amazing creativity. But what we're actually saying is there was this long process which resulted in this me experiencing this thing and so I consider it creative. Now AI might like I was trying to think like okay AI could help with be the tool that you describe.

Speaker A: But isn't the whole process part of what we look back on and say that was great creativity. I would say the whole process. I also think it's even beyond the process. Like the things that we make are the reminders that we're creative. They're just the output. The real creativity is the idea that allows this thing to be made. If you look at Alfred Hitchcock, his movies, he works out his whole movie in advance and he storyboards the whole movie. And if you look at the storyboard, he doesn't even really need to make the movie. The whole thing is there just in drawings. Exactly. Frame by frame, the whole movie is there. Wes Anderson makes his movie frame by frame in advance before there are actors. So he could watch the whole movie. um like a mock mockup of the movie and then with the actors is where he executes the idea. And I think AI could be a great tool to assist in this mocking up,

Speaker B: but it's the prompt. The prompt is where the creativity is. The prompt is what Wes is using and what Alfred Hitchcock is using to tell the artist what to draw in each frame. The creativity is there. It's not in the drawing. It's not in the finished movie. It's in the prompt.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker A: So the I feel like now using prompts anyone can prompt and you can get better at prompting through experimentation. So someone who thinks of themselves as not creative, the idea of learning how to prompt, it's pretty easy. It's really like the barrier of entry is very low and I think that's a good thing. In a world where the barrier of entry is so low to creating, what becomes the distinction? What makes a great artist from a not so great artist?

Speaker B: Well, the same thing now. It's the same thing as now. Like the reason you love the artist you love is they make something that changes your life, moves you. You want to listen to it a million times. You want to see the movie over and over again. You want to read their books. I don't know if the AI itself could write the book that you want to read over and over again. I don't know if that's a problem. If that happens, I don't see any indication that that's going to happen.

Speaker A: But more good art doesn't seem like a bad thing. me and my business partner out there, Georgia Gibson. We were on Spotify and we listened to this song. We really liked it. And about 2 months later, I figured out it was AI. The only reason I figured out it was AI was because I went to get more from the artist. As I clicked through, I realized it was AI. And then the other thing that happened around the time is there was these two songs from this Spotify artist, I guess, and one of them disappeared. And so that's when I went on Google and was looking like what happened to that song and it turns out it was an AI artist. Something interesting happened when I realized I was listening to an AI song.

Speaker B: What happened?

Speaker A: I didn't like it as much anymore.

Speaker B: Interesting.

Speaker A: And so when I think about again creativity, I wonder if there is a sort of an irreplaceably human element because it resonated with me because there was this story that it came from this woman who was singing and she was talking about this subject and it meant something to her and then when I found out it was none of that it the song lost something.

Speaker B: If you think about Andy Warhol's art, Andy Warhol started as a commercial illustrator. He would draw shoes for advertising, let's say. And then he came up with what essentially now what we call pop art. And pop art was a brillow box or a soup a Campbell soup can. And maybe the first Campbell soup cans, he drew them and painted them. Those were the first ones. But then over time he did a series of images that were screen printed. So like Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, really famous the most famous Andy Warhol images. He never painted anything. He never touched anything. He said, "We're going to use this shot of Marilyn and we're going to treat it in this way." and he prompted the the people in the studio to screen print these things. And they're not less Andy Warhol. The art's always in the idiation. That's where the art is. It's not who put the paint on the canvas. There was a time even even going back to the um the Renaissance so many of the painters had studios and you'd see Rembrandt and Rembrandt might have painted 70% he might have painted 30% of that painting but it was his vision for the painting and he would have the guys in the studio you guys do this not sure if Rembrandt's the best example of this but could be that it was it's a normal thing that artists who had studios would have other people, other painters, disciples who would do a lot of the work. Happens now in the studio. So many records, you'll hear a it can be a band, but then the band isn't playing on the record. Studio musicians are playing on the record. It's normal. It's just part of the process, but doesn't make it less good. It's just a different thing. It's fine. It's the idiation is where it comes from. And I don't know that the AI's idiation is interesting to anyone. We'll see.

Speaker A: I always think with like the F1, um, if they removed Lewis Hamilton from the car, I wouldn't watch the F1 anymore, even if the cars drove faster and beat their times because there's something in me watching a human being experience those emotions of competition and anger. And you know, you can kind of see by the way they're driving how they're feeling. And you can relate to that. I felt like that in work once.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. It does seem less interesting if it was just a car, automated car doing it.

Speaker A: So what what has been removed is kind of I guess what I experienced with that Spotify song I was talking about is human relatability and resonance and connection.

Speaker B: But it's interesting that you liked it before you knew.

Speaker A: And that's you know, that's interesting to me. And I wonder, would I be against something because of the way it was made? This doesn't make sense to me. You either like it or you don't.

Speaker B: We're living in interesting times.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: You used the word miracles earlier on, which I found to

Interviewer: ...be an interesting word. And I wondered if you had experienced miracles through the creative process of working with great artists?

Producer: All the time.

Interviewer: What are those? Is there a miracle you could share?

Producer: Uh there's an Avett Brothers song called No Hard Feelings and they were playing it in the studio and it was okay. It was fine. Wasn't great. They played it a few times and then finally they played it one time and again I don't even remember if we even said do anything different. It might have been just try it again. You know, that could have been that nothing changed.

And for some reason, while they were playing it, it was like time stopped and this incredible thing happened. I don't know why. No one involved knew why or how.

But after I remember about a minute into the song, I remember thinking there's this feeling it's scary because it's really good. We don't know how or why. I hope they can get to the end of the song because if they don't get to the end of the song, we don't have it and maybe we can never get back to this.

That's what it's like. It's like so as soon as you realize in the process if you happen to realize okay something shifted something magic is happening now. Sometimes you don't know it right away, sometimes you know it after.

Producer: I've made an album with Neil Young where we recorded for a week. It was not good. The band it sounded like the band not only couldn't play the songs, but would never be able to play the songs. That was a feeling in the first week.

And at the end of the first week, Neil said to me after he's like, "Don't worry, next week's going to be better. They're going to be able to do it." It's like, "Okay, okay." Like, nothing showed me that, but let's go. I'll listen.

And then the next week, Neil said to Ralph, the drummer, he's like, "Uh, okay, let's play whatever the third song again." And Ralph's like, "Well, we already did that last week." And he was like, "Oh, maybe we could beat it." And Ralph's like, "No, I really think we got it."

And now last week we thought not only did we not get it, but that we may never get it. And then we try playing it again. It is no better. And then Ralph says, "Put back. Put on the one from last week." And he puts on the one from last week. And he says, "Well, turn down the turn down the bass a little bit. Maybe turn the piano up." And we listen to it again.

And it seemed like it still had problems, but the magic was there. It had a lot of mistakes, but forgetting the mistakes, the feeling, the feeling was there. And then our job was just like doing little bits of repairs here and there or ducking a sound or featuring a sound or adding another vocal or doing little things and almost the whole album turned out to be recorded that first week when it seemed like it would never happen. So that felt like a miracle.

Interviewer: The question that's front of mind when you talk about these moments where great art was created, everybody wants to know how to make it repeatable. How do we repeat that process?

Producer: Yeah. None of this is repeatable. Ah, no. The thing that's repeatable is you show up and you keep going till it's great. Whatever it takes. That's the thing.

It's like and sometimes you listen back like you'll make a demo or you'll do a little sketch and you think this is a great idea. This is beautiful. Now I'm going to make a big painting. And you work on the painting for months and months and months, it never really comes together.

Producer: But then you look back at that original drawing that you made in five minutes like, you know, that's actually it.

It happened on the first album I made with Johnny Cash. We recorded all these songs in my living room of him singing and playing guitar. We weren't recording for an album. We were recording. It was the way that we got to know each other. I asked him to play me all of his favorite songs, songs he remembered from growing up. Songs that mean a lot to him. Or I might say, "Can you try playing this song? Let's just see what it sounds like." More like trying to understand what sounded good when he sang it. We were doing this exploration.

And we did that with the idea of we're going to test a hundred songs this way and then maybe we'll find 10. And the 10 that we like best, we'll go into the studio with a band and we'll record them. And we did that and recorded with a great band and it was interesting but it wasn't better. And then we did it again with a different band. Same thing wasn't better. It's like I guess those recordings from the living room which we had no thoughts of ever anybody ever hearing, they have something that the real recordings don't have.

Producer: And we ended up putting out those. So, but again we didn't go into the process to do that. We discovered it through the process.

And sometimes it's the opposite way where you have a clear vision of what it's going to be and you do it all the way and it tells you through that process. It wants to be this entire other thing.

Interviewer: It wants to be.

Producer: It wants to be.

Interviewer: You're saying that as if it's got a mind of its own.

Producer: It does. Hm. Well, I'm only saying it does because it shows you no what you think is wrong. Try it like this.

Interviewer: You're sort of personifying. You're sort of...

Producer: Yeah, I'm personifying. It doesn't say it in words, but it's clear. The indicators are clear. What we get back is, hm, we thought it was supposed to be this fast. When we listen to it, it's clearly much too fast. We have to play it slower. We thought it was going to be a loud electric song. Turns out it wants to be a really quiet song. We didn't know that.

Interviewer: Has there been a time where you thought something was just the most amazing thing ever and then when it went out into the world, the world didn't subjectively think it was amazing?

Producer: For sure. It probably happens often.

Interviewer: And how do you rationalize that on the basis of...

Producer: As soon as I decide that I like it enough to share with the world, I'm done. I move on to the next thing. What anyone else thinks doesn't really impact it. It's fun when people like it. I love it when people like it. But that's total bonus.

The real work is I like this enough to put it out into the world. My name's on the back of the record. The artist's name's on the front. They like it enough to put it out. I like it enough to put it out. Here you go. What's next?

Interviewer: And what comes of that you're treating like none of your business.

Producer: Correct. Cuz anything that I think of past that is going to totally undermine the creative process. The creative process is a pure delicate process to be protected. And if you're thinking about what happens next totally undermines it, the house of cards crumbles.

When we're working in the studio and something starts sounding good and someone, one of the artists might say, "This sounds like it could be a single." It's like, "We're not talking about that. That has nothing to do with what we're doing."

Interviewer: What are you doing?

Producer: Making the best thing we can make. We're making the best thing we can make. And I always thought of it as greatness. Like we're working towards greatness, timeless greatness. Didn't know what it meant.

And more recently, I came to realize we're making it as an offering to God. And if we're making it as an offering to God, things like the numbers, that's insignificant. This is we're doing our best as an offering. There's nothing deeper than that. There's no metric that competes with that. I didn't always know that, but it was always the same.

Interviewer: Was there a point when you realized that?

Producer: Yeah, a few years ago. And it felt good when I realized it. It was like, ah, of course, you know, 35 years in like, oh...

Interviewer: Do you remember the moment?

Producer: I have a vague memory. I don't remember the specifics. I remember I was sitting on a lifeguard chair in Hawaii and I remember thinking about it there, but I don't know if that's the moment where it struck me, but I remember it was like it was a total epiphany even though it was only, you know, for me. It...

Rick Rubin: ...didn't apply to anything else. It was just like I realized what I've been doing all this time without understanding it. It just became clear. It's like ah that's what it is. Yeah, it was a great, it was a great feeling of like now it all makes more sense.

Interviewer: Do you mean in the literal sense? You think that you are making offerings for a higher power?

Rick Rubin: Very literally.

Interviewer: I'm saying God—

Rick Rubin: —and God defined as the higher power.

Interviewer: We can call him the father.

Interviewer: Okay. And you're liter— So so the art you make, the music you you make, he is actually the customer in some respects.

Rick Rubin: No, because it's a gift. So he's not, it's not a customer. He's the beneficiary, but he's not the customer. And it's like a I want to, I want to show you my best out of love and thanks, gratitude. Here's the best I can do. That's what it is. This is my best. If anybody else likes it, great. But if not, we're good.

Interviewer: Does he ever give feedback?

Rick Rubin: I want to say that when other people like it, I might I might take that as a good sign, but I don't know. I I don't really think about it, but I feel like when a lot of people like it, it's like the energy of it is positive all the way around. Interesting to think about, fun to think about.

Interviewer: Do you think that's why we're here? Cuz I'm now trying to figure out why there would be such relationship with God where we were offering gifts and how that links to our maybe higher purpose.

Rick Rubin: Well, I think we're here to show who we are. We're here to self-express. I am here. I'm here to tell you this is me. This is how I see the world. And to say to you, show me who you are. Tell me how you see the world. And the way we make sense of it is we discuss that. And we may, in some areas, we may line up. In some cases, we may differ. But that's how we figure it out. And everything we do is this is how I see the world. And then other people say, "I never saw it that way, but yes, I'm on board with that." And other people are like, "No, that's not for me." And that's fine. But we are here. Our purpose is to self-express through several different means through any different way any self-expression comes in a lot of in a lot of forms. But the best version, it's never because they did it this way. That's not self-expression. Copying the They were successful and I'm copying them. That's not self-expression. That's a different game. That's not what we're here for. You can do it. It's fine. It's fine. But I don't think that's why we're here.

Interviewer: I sat with a someone who is an expert on consciousness. He's a physicist who just, you know, is very spiritual. One of the things he said to me which has really stayed with me is he was positing that potentially consciousness itself is God has divided consciousness into lots of little pieces into my French bulldog Pablo into Rick into someone in China and he set us all off to go and explore and understand the world and by doing so consciousness is seeking to understand itself. very strange idea. And then I went to I think Malta and I was driving down the road in Malta and I looked and I saw these tourists and with that idea in mind that consciousness has divided itself to go and understand itself into these pieces into a fish so we can go check the bottom of the ocean. I saw these tourists and they were all just looking up at this mountain.

Rick Rubin: Mhm.

Interviewer: And like with in the abstract that's it looks like a very strange thing that we're like fascinated by the novel. And so I started to think maybe that is true. Maybe this thing called consciousness is this exploration to understand itself and it's turned some consciousness has gone into Rick and Rick is experimenting and creating to understand and to and kind of what you were saying there reminded me of it cuz sounded like you were talking about consciousness itself and the self-exression of consciousness. So

Rick Rubin: it could be it's a beautiful idea.

Interviewer: Strange idea, isn't it?

Rick Rubin: Not not strange to me.

Interviewer: Not strange to you. Okay.

Rick Rubin: Not at all. Nothing. Nothing is

Interviewer: Nothing is off the table.

Rick Rubin: Nothing's off the table.

Interviewer: One of um one of the great artists you've uh you've worked with, we talked about is um is Jay-Z.

Rick Rubin: Yes.

Interviewer: And you have this wonderful eight-part documentary.

Rick Rubin: Yes.

Interviewer: Coming out with Jay-Z, which I was fascinated enough to uh what I found fascinating to watch. It's out on the 18th of September. And one of the clips that I watched from it just had us run down is the story of um this brand.

Rick Rubin: Ah yes, Ace of Spades.

Interviewer: I found it really fascinating the story that Jay-Z told about this brand Ace of Spades um for many reasons, but it also it rhymes with some of the things you're saying about integrity and how you feel and his decision to um abandon another brand and at a cost at a near-term cost against his near-term incentives and pursue launching his own.

Rick Rubin: Yes. And what's interesting what what's most interesting about that story and it's not we don't make a lot of it. It's just a passing remark but what happened was he decided not to support a company going forward.

Interviewer: Crystal

Rick Rubin: yes which he had made very popular in the hip-hop community. He was the first person to drink it. Nobody knew what it was. He talked about it in in records, in songs, and it became a very popular drink in the hip-hop community. And the person who ran Crystal said some disparaging remarks about it, about hip-hop people drinking Crystal.

Interviewer: I can't get them to stop drinking it.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. And Jay was insulted, rightly so. And he said, "You know what? No more. I won't do that anymore." Now, he that didn't happen and then he thought, I'm going to go start my own. That's not what happened. That happened and almost immediately someone came to him and said, I'm thinking about starting this brand. Do you want to do it with me? And all they had was the bottle. Which he loved the shape of the bottle and he loved that it was a gold bottle. And it's like the universe allowed first he gets this negative comment he reacts following his belief stood for what he believed in

Interviewer: removed it from his clubs.

Rick Rubin: Yes. And this new opportunity that he was not looking for arrives and it's like you couldn't write the story. I mean, you could write the story, but it seems almost unbelievable the way it happened, but that's how it really happened. And that's again like the miraculous nature of Jay did the right thing and in response for doing the right thing, he ended up owning a champagne brand.

Interviewer: Do you believe that's how the universe is working?

Rick Rubin: Yes, I know it. I know it.

Interviewer: Is that karma? What is that?

Rick Rubin: Well, that's part it. You could call it that. It's like there there's a lot of there's a lot of names. There's a lot of labels, but you can call it karma.

Interviewer: When he took that action, he wasn't thinking about how he might benefit.

Rick Rubin: Not at all. All he knew was these guys are insulting this movement and I'm not going to have anything to do with them anymore after I was telling everybody this is the best stuff. They insult us. They're we crossing them off. They're not for us anymore. We will not give them our business. He wasn't thinking about starting a business. He was he wasn't thinking about that at all. But it became a great business.

Interviewer: It became a great business.

Rick Rubin: But it's it's the universe filled the void. This is another thing we could talk about. It's an interesting idea. You're in a you're dating someone. you think maybe this is not this is not right for the long term but you're going along with it and then you think well maybe I'll meet someone while this is happening and then if I like that person more then I'll get out of this relationship for that relationship and switch a lot of people do this I feel like it's not the way I don't I don't think that's the way it works I think when you know that something isn't working and you end it and you create that vacuum. You create that space, the good thing that you're looking for can come in to fill it. Jay wasn't looking in this case, he wasn't looking for a good thing to fill it, but he did create a vacuum in his life. There's a thing that he's out there representing. And now he decides based on their action, I'm not going to

Rick Rubin: represent this anymore. And the universe steps in and says, you know what? you were doing a good job representing that thing. How about representing one for yourself that you can feel good about representing?

Host: It's funny what you were saying there um about creating a vacuum. We in culture like generally in society we celebrate starting. So like you know you start a new job, you start a new thing but obviously from what you've just said logically you can't really start anything big in life without first doing something which none of us really glamorize actually it's the opposite. We say never quit. Don't quit. Yeah,

Rick Rubin: but that is the necessary first step to starting to starting a brand which in Jay-Z's case went on to be worth 630 million at the time when he sold his stake. Um, we have a weird relationship with quitting. We need certainty. I need the branch.

Host: Yeah. No, I think that's it's an empowering thing. It's like taking control. I just had a conversation about this recently with someone who's a very high up person in a very high-tech company who is um who's decided to step down and he's stepping down for the right reasons and he's concerned that people the perception will be he's being fired that that'll be the outside world but he's really stepping down because he doesn't like what's going on there and usually people don't leave jobs at that level. M

Rick Rubin: so it's an interesting it's an interesting moment in time when that when that happens

Host: similar to what you were saying about getting artists to step outside of their genre to quit their genre.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. Yeah.

Host: This is something that I've made for you. I realize that the dire audience are strivvers whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big big big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps. And we call this in our team the 1%. And actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So, what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out. So, I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So, now we have a better range for you. So, if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at the diary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much. I hear you used to make music with one of these things here. I've never used that particular device, but it looks beautiful.

Host: You know, if I came to you, Rick, and I went, I love that.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: And clearly, I mean, objectively, it wasn't great.

Rick Rubin: I don't know. could be great

Host: if but if I if I was like Rick

Host: I want to put that out.

Rick Rubin: Do you really believe it's great? If you really believe it's great I support you putting it out.

Host: Really?

Rick Rubin: If you really believe it's great. Yes.

Host: Would you interrogate?

Rick Rubin: You're giving me this hypothetical with like what if this thing that's bad if I tell you I think it's great. It's like you don't believe it's great. I trust when you tell me I really love this thing. I want to play it for people. I support that.

Host: Even if you don't, it doesn't matter if you

Rick Rubin: doesn't matter. And if I don't like it, I'll say you might want to try these things. But I always support somebody who makes something that they love. That's beautiful for the world.

Host: Is there an example of that with artists you've worked with where they presented you with something and you didn't really get it, you didn't feel it? You didn't like it. They put it out and it was a huge success for them but also for the audience.

Rick Rubin: I can think of one but I don't really want to talk about it but yes I could think of one. It it has happened.

Host: Is there anything you can tell me about it without identifying what the song was or the person was?

Rick Rubin: Um I was working with an artist and there were lots of good songs and there was one song that I felt like this one doesn't fit with all the rest. M it feels like it doesn't go with the others and um the artist chose to include that one and it ended up becoming a big hit wasn't the first single but it did become a big hit and it's anytime I give my opinion this isn't this is a really interesting idea this idea of I'm asked how do I have the confidence cuz when I say I don't like something, I really mean it. It's like, well, how could you have the confidence that it's not good? It's like, well, I have the confidence that I don't like the pizza.

Rick Rubin: It It doesn't mean more than that. You know, it ends I was asked to produce Guns and Roses's first album and I turned them down because I went to see him live, played in a little club in a basement, maybe 30 people there, and they were they were a hair band at the time with makeup and stuff and I just looked like I don't really get it. Now, they went on to become Guns and Roses. It's good that I didn't work with them because if I would have worked with them, it might have turned into something different than what they did without me.

Host: Mhm.

Rick Rubin: So, it wasn't the right it wasn't the right fit. Um, do you know what I'm saying? It's like,

Host: yeah,

Rick Rubin: it's

Rick Rubin: I'm honest about what I see and it's true, but it's only true for me. I'm wondering if you can be at the inverse of that if you can be a great creative and never be commercially successful ever. Absolutely. For sure. For sure. Probably more often than not. That's probably the That's probably regular because becoming successful has so much to do with other things beyond being talented. M

Host: like the talent is a piece but then the stars have to align like for for anything to break through and get successful. So many things have to go right so many totally out of your control. You must have worked with a lot of artists where you thought I know this person is so talented.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: Um but for whatever reason they they just didn't

Rick Rubin: Yeah. It happens. the world wasn't. It happens. And that also could be a karmic thing like there could be maybe for some reason this person as good as they are that's not their path on this life. Maybe success is not part of their life path. Who knows? That's a it's a different that's a different question. You know,

Host: you co-founded Death Jam when you were a very young young man. I think you were 21 years old when you co-ounded Death Jam. And then

Host: through that process, you you got to meet, you know, some incredible people. I've got some of the albums that you produced around that time and published. Um, but one of those people through throughout your career and then thereafter was Jay-Z. What was special about Jay?

Rick Rubin: Jay wrote in a way that no one else wrote. All the other rappers that I worked with spent a lot of time writing lyrics. And I never saw Jay write lyrics. And when I got to work with him, I got to see him not physically write lyrics. And when I played him the beat for 99 Problems, he said, "Okay, just keep looping it. Keep playing it over and over again." And he sat in the back of the room. And it went on long enough that I almost forgot that he was there because I was talking to the engineer and song's just playing over and over. And he's silent in the back. On occasion, you could hear him mumbling or humming. And then after 20 or 30 minutes, he's like, "Okay, I got

Speaker A: it." Ran into the other room and did the first verse totally the whole thing. No, nothing was written. Just he just remembered it. And he did it. He did several takes. And each of the takes the words were the same, but the cadence was different. Like almost as if a saxoponist was playing a solo. And you you know how the solo goes, but every time you play it, you play a little different.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: That's what it was like. Like it had emphasis in different places and the cadence was a little different and one word might be featured in one version whereas in the next version that word just kind of went by less important. Um and then so he did let's say three takes and then he came in, he'd listen to him. He's like, "Oh yeah, I think the second one's good." And then he's like, "Okay, keep playing it and I'll" and he sat back down and he did the same thing again about another half hour later. He's like, "Let's do the next one till he was ready." So he just it just happens in his mind.

Speaker B: What is that? Is that taste? Is that

Speaker A: I don't know. It's a it's a real and unusual skill set. Very unusual. I don't know how he how he can remember cuz it's complicated. It's not like in a rock song there might be four lines in a verse. pretty easy to remember. But rap songs have a lot of words and it's complicated. But so that was that was the first thing that really I would say separated him from everyone else from me is that his process was totally different than anyone else I ever worked with.

Speaker B: Which is interesting cuz other people might arrive at the same outcome but take a different journey there. They might, you know, write lots of things down and

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So there's not a correct process.

Speaker A: No, there's ne with all of these things that aren't there's never a right way. What what works for one person doesn't mean it works for someone else. And that's one of the real dangers of getting advice from people is someone tells you, I wrote it this way and it was really successful, so this is how you have to do it.

Speaker B: But that's not true. That it might work, but that might be the way that it works for that guy, not you.

Speaker A: M so always be wary when getting advice because again people give you advice with the best intentions but they're giving you advice based on their story not your story.

Speaker B: So where do we get advice from?

Speaker A: I would say listening to a lot of stuff. It depends on what what the sub like what where we're what what medium we're working in. But I would swim deeply in that medium, whatever it is, and then really listen to what's going on in you. It it has to do with you, how you see it. It's an internal um it's an internal compass that tells you where to go. And I'll also say there may not only be one answer. There may not even be a right answer. And that's where it really comes down to like this internal feeling of I would take as I would hear as much information from as many people as possible hopefully conflicting and then really check in and take as much time as it takes to internally get to a point of where you know what you know what the right answer is. You know what the right answer for you is.

Speaker B: M there is no right answer but you know what the right answer for you is and that's what you always want to get to what is the right answer for me how do I know

Speaker A: you'll know it and if you don't know it you don't have enough there's not enough you haven't done enough research yet because you it has to come from you it has to come from you of I've gotten to the point I've done enough homework of conflicting information where I can listen to myself and I feel good about it.

Speaker B: One of the ways um that that noise that voice inside of us gets conflicted is we have our parents. I I know your story. I know your parents, you know, they kind of thought maybe you'd be a doctor, but you didn't like needles. So, they were like, "Okay, he can be a lawyer." A lot of people say they have that voice, my parents. and and it's sometimes hard to untangle what voices me and my wishes

Speaker A: versus external.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: I remember when I first went to college and moved out of my parents house, it took me probably a year to understand what in my head was me and what in my head was them. I was definitely confused but had to create that space or lucky enough to create that space to to allow it to happen. Again, I didn't go to college for that to happen. But in college, being outside of the house, I started to understand who I was and who they were and where we were aligned and where we saw the world differently. And it was fine, but it took time because I didn't know that. I didn't know that. If you ask a lot of people who they want to be or in your case in music, you know, what what music they want to make or what their goal is, they will say things that they don't realize have come from somewhere else.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Happens a lot in my life. I'll I'll interview someone. I'll say, "What do you want to be?" And they'll say something just arbitrary and big and fancy.

Speaker B: And then often times when you like ask

Speaker A: more questions, there's nothing behind it.

Speaker B: So they got it from Instagram or they got it from their parents. How how how can we cultivate a better understanding of um of our own truth? It's like when I played you that bad song, you started trying to you went in search of truth. How can I How can I know? How can I pass out what is me and my alignment and what is inherited from somewhere else?

Speaker A: I I as I said before, I think you need to find some practices that ground you in yourself. Meditation is a great one. I'm sure there are others, but you have to get in touch with you with you. Maybe therapy works for some people. Well, you got to get to where who you are.

Speaker A: It's a it's a it's a big job. It's a big job. And it's not it's not a quick There's no quick fix. I remember the first time I ever was in a talk therapy session. I remember not knowing how to talk. I didn't know how I felt about anything. I didn't know how to talk. I didnt know about my inner state at all. And only through repetition and doing it over time and you start understanding. So it's just another skill set to develop. I never looked inward. Even with all the years of meditation, I never looked inward.

Speaker B: Are you there now?

Speaker A: I think so.

Speaker B: Do you know who you are?

Speaker A: I think I don't know that I could explain it, but I feel like I feel like I am uh grounded in myself and I feel it pretty clearly.

Speaker B: What's the difference between when you weren't and now that you are? Is it a feeling or is it is there a symptom? Is it happiness?

Speaker A: I would say there's more of a No, there was happiness there, too. So, it's it's not happiness. There was happiness in in the time that I didn't know who I was. I probably didn't know why, but I I remember being happy. Um, it's not happiness. Yeah, I think I come back to the word knowingness just like you feel it. When you ask me something, I can tell you how I feel. I can tell you how I see it. I don't know if I was able to do that before.

Speaker B: I'm talking about when I was young. I I don't know if I could do that.

Speaker A: Are you telling me

Speaker B: I still like the things I liked. My taste was still my taste, but I don't think I could um I don't know that I could access it as well as I can now.

Speaker A: Is happiness a goal to aim for?

Speaker B: Well, I like happiness. I I don't think it's a goal, but but I I definitely would rather be happy than not. Joyful is beautiful. Um I I I think maybe the word is peace. Getting to a point of cuz peace like resting in peace seems like a really good state. And I guess when things get if things get too high, there's always the other side, you know,

Speaker A: like even if if I if I find myself in a really great mood, which does happen sometimes,

Speaker B: sometimes the next day I'm just in a bad mood. And it almost feels like it's a it's a maybe it's a chemical thing. Maybe if you burn if you really use the feel-good chemicals, maybe there's a deficit the next day. I don't know. I don't know how it works, but it feels like if everything's cool and if that keeps going, I

Steven: ...like that. An artist that is very familiar with the highs and the lows, one of my favorite artists is Kanye. And you've worked with Kanye. I want to ask the same question about what made him different, what makes him brilliant in your point of view.

Producer: He's—I've said this to him: I'm totally fearless when it comes to art. He's totally fearless always. He's fearless in life. I'm not fearless in life. I'm a good collaborator for him when it comes to art because I am fearless at art and not everybody is. But he's always fearless and it's really something to behold. Great strength.

Steven: It's rare to have that many successes when you're taking such big risk. That's what fascinates me about him.

Producer: Yeah. I don't agree with that.

Steven: Really?

Producer: No, no, no, no. I think the risk and the success go hand in hand. It's only through the risk that the greatness is shown. So it's not possible to sort of produce more of the same and still be considered a great. I don't think so. I don't know. It doesn't seem right to me. It feels like there's this edge. There's a tight rope and you're walking on the tight rope and if you make it, it's really good. And if you don't make it, it's not so good. But the only choice is the tightrope.

Steven: The risk.

Producer: Yeah.

Steven: And then you will achieve greatness.

Producer: Well, if you make it, yes. If you make it, yes. But that's the risk. And it's the risk that I wholeheartedly support. Wholeheartedly.

Steven: Why?

Producer: Because that's where it's at. Like that's if the goal is to make the most beautiful thing you can and to self-express in the purest way. It's a razor's edge walk. There's nothing ordinary about it. It's beyond ordinary. There's nothing normal about it. Normal is nothing to aspire to. Average is nothing to aspire to. If you're looking for greatness, sometimes eggs get broken. But that's just what comes with it. That's how it works. Are we all cut out for greatness? Cuz it comes with a cost. And walking tight ropes is not for everybody.

Steven: Yeah. I think we all have potential. And when I say greatness, it's like we all have potential to be the greatest version of ourselves. You know, you can be the best version of you. I don't know what that is compared to other people who are great at other things. You know, it doesn't mean you'll be the best F1 driver, but your light can shine brighter than anyone else doing what you do. And I'm into that. I support that. I want to see that.

Steven: With these great people, this big list of people that I have in front of me that you've worked with, I mean, it's just this endless endless almost unbelievable list. Everybody from like Justin Timberlake to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to helping I mean Kanye on his the record Runaway, which is one of the most incredible records of all time to um we've talked about Jay-Z and System of a Down and AC/DC and Mick Jagger and I mean there's a endless list. When I look at it, I go, "Were these people all great?"

Producer: Yes.

Steven: And were they great from birth or are they ordinary people that made a decision?

Producer: They're I would say they're ordinary people who made a decision. Maybe some of them had some particular gifts. Um but others were ordinary and cultivated a gift. That list, they're not special. They're not the only ones like that, but they really rode that wave. I think of Eminem as a good example. Eminem is someone who's always writing. He's always writing because he wants to be able, he wants to be the best he could possibly be, and he's insanely obsessive about that. So, his entire life is focused on sitting in a notepad writing all day and all night. It's all he does. That's what makes him him.

Steven: Even if he's not publishing an album or...

Producer: ...doesn't matter. It's not he's not writing—I asked him one point looking at his notebooks. He's like, "Is all this going to, you know, is are all these?" He's like, "No, no, no. 99% of this stuff no one will ever see. I just want to be good. I want to I'm practicing. I'm I want to get better at what I do." He's in training always. If you think of it like an athlete, you know, there are athletes who there are some athletes who train in the offseason and there are some who don't. And the ones who train in the offseason are usually better and usually have a longer career. It's like that.

Steven: When we sat down, you asked me a question. You said, um, you said, "Stephen, you you're doing this podcast. Have the guests changed you?" And much of what I've shown here is how you've changed people's lives through being a coach or a producer or however you might define that. My question to you is, can you give me a couple of example of artists that for whatever reason fundamentally changed you?

Producer: Yeah. The first one I I'll say is Johnny Cash.

Producer: Johnny Cash. Um because I got to spend time around someone who was so humble and quiet and smart and didn't offer much. Like like if you didn't if you didn't draw him out, he wouldn't say anything. But anything you asked him about, he knew about and had a really incredible point of view. But he wasn't um he didn't have a need to let you know that...

Producer: ...it was all going on inside and he was a beautiful spiritual person and I loved him and I feel like my life was really improved getting to spend so much time with someone so so inspiring. That's one.

Steven: What is the um emotion there?

Producer: Where's...

Steven: There was some emotion there.

Producer: Yeah. Yeah. He's beautiful man. Beautiful man. Next one would be um Tom Petty who was he was the ultimate craftsman. So in the Beatles you have John and Paul and John was more of a raw nerve who tore his chest open and led with his heart and then Paul was more of a almost like a a savant of music like like a crafts person. Paul could take anything and make it good. John was like a raw nerve who could just show his soul and they're two very different skills and together that's what makes it the Beatles. Also the fact that George and Ring are incredible. I mean even with you know even as great as as Paul and John are, it's only the Beatles when it's the four of them. Paul is the craftsman. Paul knows all the parts. Paul knows how to put it together. He was the only one of the Beatles who knew how to do that other than George Martin whose job was to do that. But Paul understood that side of it. Tom Petty was like Paul. He could do he could play anything. He saw all ways around it. He knew how to make it. And in addition to that was a great songwriter. So he had kind of what was great about John and Paul both in him. So being around him was really inspiring. Also as a record producer I learned a lot from getting to work with him. I offered a outside perspective. I was younger different. So I I brought something to the table, but I learned a tremendous amount because at the time that I worked with him, I had only worked with artists who had, you know, made their first albums, like new artists. And he was a very established, brilliant studio recording artist. So I got to learn a lot working with him.

Steven: What did he teach you? If there had to just be one lesson you pulled out.

Producer: One of the things he talked about was everything always had to be in time and in tune. You have to understand every word of the vocals. Seems like an obvious thing, but so many records you can't understand every word. And he would listen back and he's like, "Ah, this word is supposed to be plural and you can't hear the s. I have to re-record it or I have to maybe we could punch in the S because if you can't understand it, it loses something in translation. You have to understand every word." Um so timing, tune, um he also was another person who would work forever on it until it was right. He would he would he was not at all lazy. He would never want it to be done. The first album we worked on together was called Wild Flowers. And I think we probably worked on it, not every day, but we worked on it over 2 years, probably 2 and 1/2 years. It's a long time for an album at that point in time especially. It was a long time, but there was no hurry. It was just like, oh, we're making progress. Let's keep...

Rick Rubin: Going. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. And so I learned a lot from him also about patience.

Interviewer: Some might say that's perfectionism. And people think of perfectionism as a form of procrastination. And yeah, there was no procrastination in it. And I've been around both. Like I've been around procrastinating artists, too. It's a whole different thing.

Interviewer: How do you know? How do you know if you're a perfectionist or a procrastinator? Is there a symptom?

Rick Rubin: Yeah. The real procrastinators get to the point usually has to do with being afraid to put it out into the world. So there are some artists I know, famous artists, you know who they are, who haven't put out an album for 10 years. I think the longer you wait, the harder it gets in general.

Interviewer: Why the pressure, like the longer you wait, the more it feels like it can never live up to what the expectation is. It's a difficult position to get into. And the perfectionist, their reason for delay is not to do with fear. It's to do with something else. Is that what you're saying?

Rick Rubin: Hard to know. Hard to know. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know.

Interviewer: So, those are two artists that you've mentioned that changed you, Johnny and Tom. Is there any others that front of mind?

Rick Rubin: Let me see. Adele.

Interviewer: She's really good.

Rick Rubin: I mean, she's amazing. She's like myth. I feel like everything she does is great. When she sings, everything stops. And she can do it over and over again. And it's always great. It's not like some singers work for a long time singing a bunch of takes, piecing them together to get the good one. She'll sing a song 30 times in a row and it'll be great 30 times. Might not be the same 30 times, but it'll always be great.

Interviewer: You produced her 21 album.

Rick Rubin: Worked on songs on there, some of that.

Interviewer: Did you know she was great when you met her? Was there something that made her distinctive from these other great artists?

Rick Rubin: At a time when most pop artists at that time didn't write their own songs. She was more like a throwback to the 70s singer-songwriters. So, there was something about her. I also got to work with Shakira, who also writes her own songs, and there's something about those pop artists who write their own songs that it's different than someone who can just deliver a song well. So I feel like it's a little bit of an anomaly in a pop world where so much of it is more, I want to say manufactured, meaning a bunch of people work on the song and then the singer sings the song.

Interviewer: Mhm.

Rick Rubin: Adele, a key piece is that it always comes from her and you can feel that in the songs and it's more personal and I love that.

Interviewer: You can feel it. I've seen her live as well. Feels like this is the first time she's ever sung the song when you experience her live. Rick, what is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to creativity and the art of making great things or good things or whatever the measurement stick might be?

Rick Rubin: I think we've kind of covered it. The main idea really is don't listen to what anyone tells you. Be true to yourself. Work hard. Never give up. Don't quit. And just keep going, and don't put undue pressure on your art. Find a way to live that doesn't put pressure on your art so that you could be totally free in the things that you're making for them to be the dream version. And hopefully at some point the dream version takes over and it becomes your whole life, not just your passion.

Interviewer: Why did you make this documentary with Jay-Z?

Rick Rubin: Well, I had made a documentary with Paul McCartney a few years ago that was six episodes. And the reason for that one was there were no—I never saw any documentaries about either Paul or the Beatles about musicianship. They were always about either the songwriting or about Beatlemania. And I thought without the musicianship there wouldn't be Beatlemania. And yes, the songs—you couldn't deliver the songs without the musicianship.

Rick Rubin: So, I thought there was this big void in the story of Paul. If you were to make a list of the best bass players of all time, Paul belongs at number one, but most people wouldn't even put him on the list because you don't think of him as a bass player. You think of him as Beatle Paul.

Interviewer: Mhm.

Rick Rubin: And I just thought there was an opportunity to shed light on something that I love. And I thought that was going to be a more traditional documentary, but it turned into a different kind of documentary. Happened by itself. Wasn't pre-planned. Turned into this interesting thing that was different than anything else that had been made with Paul or about the Beatles. And people liked it. It felt like a dream for me to be part of it. And after that happened, I was thinking about who else is—I want to say misunderstood because that's kind of what it is. Like yes, Paul's great and everyone knows Paul's great, but people don't think of him as a great musician. They think of him as something else.

Interviewer: Mhm.

Rick Rubin: And I started thinking about Jay-Z.

Interviewer: Why?

Rick Rubin: Because Jay-Z is thought of today as this incredible businessman. And you think of him as billionaire businessman, behind the scenes genius married to a famous singer. Most of what we think about him isn't poet. That's not the first thing you think of. And even the people who like Jay-Z might not really know the depth of the writing. And I thought it's an interesting story. Like the lyrics are really intricate and really difficult and it's astounding what he does. And he's famous, and that's the reason he's famous, but nobody knows it. People see him in a different light.

Rick Rubin: So I thought shedding light on the poet, the lyricist, the artistry of Jay-Z was a really interesting thing. And luckily I shared the idea with him and when I told him the idea he said, "I like it a lot. I'm not going to say yes because if I say yes we're going to make it and I don't know, so I'll let you know." He said okay. And then we didn't talk about it again for probably a year.

Rick Rubin: And then I called a friend of his and I said, "You know I shared this idea with Jay a year ago, but we haven't discussed it since. What do you think?" He's like, "Call him and ask him." I said, "I feel like I already told him the idea. Don't you think he should just call and tell me he wants to do it?" He's like, "If you don't call him, it's not going to happen. Just call him and ask him. And he'll either say yes or no, but at least you could ask him." It was good information given to me of what to do. And I probably didn't call for 6 months, 8 months, just cuz felt uncomfortable, really discussed it.

Rick Rubin: And eventually, I can't remember if it happened in a call or if I ran into him or if I went to see him. Can't remember. But the next time we talked about it, he's like, "Yeah, let's do it." I said, "Okay." Then we did this.

Interviewer: It's stunning. It's stunning, I think, because it's different. So different in a way that's quite surprising. And a couple of observations I had is things are usually shot in a certain way. It felt like you had once again abandoned the rules of how to shoot something like that. Even like the color, the color grading, the sort of black and white color grade that I saw on the screen. And then some of the angles were a bit off. I'm like that's not how you shoot an interview. But for some reason, it felt like I was spying on a personal conversation.

Rick Rubin: That's what it was. It was a deeply personal conversation. And in all the years of seeing interviews with Jay-Z, he doesn't do so many, but the ones that you've seen...

Interviewer: He's never like that.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. He's never like that. So, and this is really who he is. Like you really after you watch this, you'll really know who Jay-Z is, which is incredible. It's an incredible privilege to have that point of view of a real intimate view into someone so great.

Interviewer: Clearly, he felt very safe with you as well because you do get that real side of Jay-Z that I think is really rare. Um, speaking of incredible things, this...

Host: The book is also an incredible thing. I know that in part because so many of my guests have come here and talked about it.

Rick Rubin: Really?

Host: Oh, so many of them. And so many people hold it up as their favorite book on creativity. I think because it's challenging. I think, which is the essence of Rick Rubin in some respects, is to be a challenging coach. This book, I think, finds itself being the same, which is a very challenging coach. So I think it came out in 2023. I'm going to link it below for anyone that hasn't got it. If you haven't got it, I think it might be the challenge you need. And I don't necessarily think it's a book necessarily about creativity. It's really just—I consider it to be a philosophy book, dare I say.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: Tarot cards. Some people noticed, I think, that you have—is it 73—

Rick Rubin: 78.

Host: 78—we call them chapters—

Rick Rubin: Areas of thought.

Host: Areas of thought in this book, and that tarot cards have 78.

Rick Rubin: Yes.

Host: Is there a link?

Rick Rubin: There is and there isn't. I'll tell you the link and it's a pretty funny story. Originally there were, I want to say 60—I think there were 63 areas of thought when I first thought of areas of thought and giving them names. There was this period where the book wasn't separated into the ideas, and it was just a lot of pages of ideas. And then tried to move them after years of unsuccessful organizational methods, got to the point, again through a lot of failed experiments and some successful experiments, moved from 1400 pages into a little bit of a shape when the areas of thought came to be. And there were—I say I think there were 63. I have them, they're handwritten and I have a photograph of them in my phone. The original 63 areas of thought. And then once we separated all the ideas into the 63, there ended up being more. And I think there ended up being something like 80, 82, or 83, 84. They were in the 80s. And then the book was done and there were 80-something of them. And I have a collaborator named Neil who is a friend of mine who lived in my neighborhood, great writer who helped me from the beginning, although not in an official capacity until the end. He was involved the whole way, and I was working with another writer and it just didn't work out. And then we got to the point where there were these 83 or 84 areas of thought and it was all done and everybody was happy. And I remember calling my friend Neil and saying, "Okay, book's done. We have 83 areas of thought. I'd rather it be 78." He's like, "What are you talking about? What do you mean?" I said, "Well, I want it to be related to something. The tarot cards are 78. If we had 103, I would say let's make it 108 to get it up to 108 because that's another—there are certain numbers that are good numbers. 78, 108, 144 is a good one. It's some good numbers. I want it to have a reference to something else in the world of a number."

Host: And he's like, why?

Rick Rubin: That's just—that's how I feel. That's how I want it. And I remember him saying, he's like, "You're insane." He's like, "You've been working on this book for 8 years. Now you want it to be randomly 78 instead of 83. It's good. Be happy. It's good. Be done." I said, "How? We have to figure out how to make it 78."

Host: Why? Just a feeling.

Rick Rubin: So listen, what happens next? I have an assistant at that time named Dylan. And we work on the 83 sections independently. So they're almost like separate essays. And when we would work on it, we would work on let's work on 37, whatever it is, whatever the title is, and just work on that section. We would work on each section independently. And I said, "Okay, put them all—here's the order. Put them all in order." And he put them in order. And the next day came—you were in Italy. I remember this is the day after the conversation with Neil where he told me I was crazy, and he said it's the weirdest thing. "I put them in order and there were 78 sections." I said, "No, there were 83 yesterday." He's like, "Now there's 78." I said, "Where are the others?" He said, "There are no others." That happened.

Host: So, did somebody miscount or something or—

Rick Rubin: Don't know, nobody knows. But we were sure they were 80-something, and it turned—and I wanted it to be 78, and the next day there were 78 and nobody did anything.

Host: Someday Neil's going to find four chapters and not mention it. Maybe or maybe you call excited like, "I told you you were crazy."

Host: Rick, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. If you could make a phone call and you had 60 seconds to call anybody and it had to be an apology, who would you call and what would you say and why?

Rick Rubin: It's a hard question for me to answer for several reasons. One, I almost never make a phone call and I'm not really a phone person.

Host: So, the only reason I would call somebody would—it would have to be some sort of an emergency situation. And I feel like there are not a lot of outstanding apologies to make.

Host: What about a thank you?

Rick Rubin: A thank you would be great. I could call anyone and thank them.

Host: If you could only make one last phone call to say thank you.

Rick Rubin: A one last phone call. I would probably call Moodielle, my wife, and just thank her for being in my life. And maybe either her or my child to just thank them for bringing so much light into my life.

Host: How did that change you?

Rick Rubin: It's different. Totally different. It's beautiful being in a relationship. We travel as a pack. We go everywhere together. We've never been apart, I don't think. I think maybe in the 15 years that I've been with my wife, we've maybe spent three nights apart.

Host: In 15 years, something like that.

Rick Rubin: And we're—everything we do, we travel together. This is a long time that I'm away from them. So, I'm looking forward to getting back with them.

Host: And becoming a father.

Rick Rubin: It's just so much fun. I get to see the world in—I get to see the things that he's excited about that remind me of things I was excited about. And I get to show him things that I like and sometimes he likes them and sometimes he says things that I can imagine how he knows them. There's a real wisdom that's—it's baffling. It's just fun.

Host: You talk in the book about how children are the great reminder of what, you know, creativity might be at its essence.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

Host: Before we it up.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. And the thing is that when you're a little kid, you haven't yet—no one has told you what you can and can't do yet, how the world works. You really look at things with wonder. And that's the perspective of a great artist. They're walking around in wonder, in awe of things that maybe seem ordinary to everyone else, but the world is filled with just incredible beauty. It's breathtaking. It's breathtaking. People are amazing. Talk to anyone. It's interesting. People are interesting if you just slow down and really listen.

Host: Rick, thank you. Thank you for the inspiration and the wisdom and for being a challenge and coach to many millions of creatives all around the world and being fearlessly yourself. This is a fantastic book. I'm going to link it below for everyone that hasn't yet read it. But also the HBO documentary with Jay-Z, the eight-part documentary we referenced is out now on HBO. It comes out on September 18th. So, if you're watching us after that, it's already out. Thank you, Rick.

Rick Rubin: My pleasure. It's on MUBI in the rest of the world.

Host: Rick, thank you.

Rick Rubin: My pleasure.

Host: YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior. And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out and I bet you you might love it.