Rick Rubin: What Jay-Z Did in 30 Minutes Left Me Speechless! | The Diary Of A CEO Transcript

Rick Rubin on creativity, intuition, and the art of making great things

Steven Bartlett interviews legendary music producer Rick Rubin on The Diary of a CEO.

Summary

Rick Rubin — co-founder of Def Jam Records and producer of some of the most celebrated albums in music history — joins Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO to argue that creativity is not a rare gift but a universal human capacity that is systematically beaten out of people by institutions, comparison, and the pressure to produce commercially viable work. He describes his philosophy of making art as an offering entirely divorced from metrics, market positioning, or audience expectation. The episode covers his practice of transcendental meditation, his work with Jay-Z, Kanye West, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, and Adele, and his recent foray into vibe coding. He also discusses the Jay-Z HBO documentary series and the mysterious final chapter count of his book The Creative Act.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

What Rick Rubin actually does

Steven Bartlett: I'm going to start, Rick, where my curiosity is. How do you sort of self-categorise or self-identify in terms of 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: It 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 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 whether there are other ways around it. Often the accepted version of how to move forward is another limitation.

Steven Bartlett: I'm very curious about your principles as they relate to finding the solution, whether that's in business or in music. I'm really interested in whether there are similarities in the process of finding a solution, because I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a podcaster, I do investments — 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. 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. So I'm in that camp where reason is a tiny sliver of how decisions get made. I would be much more in the camp of intuition, or maybe some sort of 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?

The vibe coding experiment

Rick Rubin: A little over a year ago there was a meme about vibe coding. The way it started was 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. 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.

I thought, the old me — pre-Creative Act me — would have laughed and moved on with my life. One of the things I learned through working on The Creative Act is that 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 it wasn't for me, I would ignore it. But if two or three people say you might want to see this movie, I might go even if it's not interesting to me — it's almost like the universe has put 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. And I thought, okay, how do I participate? If I want to participate in this thing that's going on — a creative experiment — I thought, 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. Typically my tweets get 10,000 to 20,000 views. I looked the next day and this joke tweet had a million and a half views. 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. It comes back.

I thought, what would be the next step? 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. 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: 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 the more successful we become, the more narrow we become in many respects. I'm thinking about this idea of how one resists their label so they can capitalise on all the callings.

Rick Rubin: Any label that you put on yourself, or that's put on you, makes you smaller. No label applies. We are beyond labels.

Steven Bartlett: 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 much time at cocktail parties.

Steven Bartlett: I don't. Don't worry. I'm guessing what goes on there.

Rick Rubin: Okay. So that's interesting — this idea of sometimes following the indefensible.

Well, if you feel a call, even if it doesn't make sense — if you're an artist writing 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. They're challenging to you. They're challenging to the people who see them. The things that are revolutionary — most of the things that I've fallen in love with over my life creatively, when I first see or hear them, I might not like them at first because it's too much, or I don't have any context for it. The truly revolutionary works — we don't have context for them.

On Drake, Kanye, and the value of risk

Steven Bartlett: It appears to me that sometimes things that are more of the same do bigger numbers. I've been thinking about two artists. One of them is Drake, who makes great music, makes hits, everybody loves them, they come out and we dance in the clubs. Then I was thinking about a record that you worked on with Kanye — Jesus Is King. 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. And I put it on and I was like, what is this? But then I loved it. In my little group of six, it took a while. I mean, with Jay-Z's stuff I tend to like it on first listen, but with that Jesus album I had to really persevere — and then I thought it was genius because it was a new paradigm. You worked on that album.

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

Steven Bartlett: But what about the numbers? What about the sales? What about the record label?

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

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Rick Rubin: Okay. Did its job.

Steven Bartlett: But those near-term incentives — listen, we need Drake, we need you to make another —

Rick Rubin: We never consider near-term incentives. 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 and someone doesn't get it, 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: I see it like this. And with that information, you can think, ah, I never considered that before. There's more. The world is bigger than I thought. It's not just more of the same. It's not just more numbers.

And the more-numbers game is a shorter-term game. I remember making an album with Linkin Park, who at the time were probably one of the biggest bands in the world. They had made three albums that were stylistically very similar — rap rock. There was a rap rock movement: Korn, Rage Against the Machine was first, Limp Bizkit, all these bands. And Linkin Park was probably the last of that wave. They were wildly successful doing that music. When we started working together, there was a choice: we could continue and do the next album in that same style, which the audience would love and would be easy to do, or we could be true to where the band was in that moment — eight to ten years after they started — and be free to find the new sound. When we did that, probably half the audience didn't like it and half loved it, and new people came along. They set themselves up to have a much longer career making the things they wanted to make. Whereas they were already on the tail end of a genre — had they made another one, it probably would have been as successful as what they'd done, but long-term the genre was dying.

None of this was thought about at the time. Another example 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 favourite band. And then they made Kid A, totally different, and it really alienated me. Today that might be my favourite Radiohead album.

Steven Bartlett: It feels like a risk. Yes. But all of the best things involve risk. I'm sure you've also got examples where someone followed that thesis — listening to what they wanted to make, doing it for themselves, not thinking too much about the audience — and it didn't work.

Rick Rubin: Of course.

Steven Bartlett: And they could have just made a hit and paid off their mortgage.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. It's not so interesting to me. That's a different game — the investment commerce game. 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.

Steven Bartlett: Which one leads to more success over the long term — defined, let's say, by the subjective opinion of people that it 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 favourite thing. I've always supported the artists in making their favourite thing. And luckily a lot of revolutionary things have happened from that — things that probably inspired other artists to be more free, more true, more honest, to take bigger risks, to make something more interesting, to make the world a more interesting place.

Why great artists call Rick Rubin

Steven Bartlett: 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 I first met Jay was when he was making The Black Album. He was planning on retiring — this was going to be his swan song, his final album. He asked his ten favourite producers to each make one track with him. Ours was called "99 Problems." It was a really fun experience to make.

Steven Bartlett: What an iconic record. What was your contribution to that record?

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

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

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

Let's talk about "99 Problems" a little more because it's an interesting story. Jay-Z was signed to Def Jam Records. Def Jam Records was the label that I founded. 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 said, "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 couldn't say for certain, but the president of the label I founded was saying this could never be a single because it doesn't sound like everything else on the radio. That was the old way of thinking — 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. When it eventually got on the radio, it had a big impact.

Another band I work with is called System of a Down. I remember bringing their record to Kevin Weatherly at KROQ, which is the rock station — the alternative rock station in California. If they play it, all the other alternative rock stations in the country play it. They were the leading station. This was a California band that was starting to get popular in the clubs — maybe 200 people would come, but the club would sell out. Good sign. I brought the song — I think it was called "Sugar" — and I played it for Kevin Weatherly. 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. 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 it fits in the market. None of those normal conversations. We made our favourite thing. We took it to an indefensible level, as far as we could go. And luckily it worked out.

Meditation and getting clear on what you love

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

Rick Rubin: Meditate.

Steven Bartlett: Meditate.

Rick Rubin: I learned to meditate when I was 14. Having TM as a grounding element in my life — transcendental meditation, that was the first type of meditation I learned — 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. 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 realised: this is very familiar to me. This is a big part of who I am, even though I haven't done it in five years. It's a big part of how I see the world.

Steven Bartlett: I'm going to ask you who you would be without it.

Rick Rubin: I don't know. 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, the 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 in my experience I got to see — oh, it's not rhetoric. I actually had this experience and it changed the way I saw the world. 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. 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. Twenty 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.

When I lived in California and 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. It's a learnable, practicable action that really changed who I am.

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

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

Steven Bartlett: And I'm guessing this unlocks a deeper level of creativity and ideas?

Rick Rubin: Everything. Deeper understanding. Everything.

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 they've been able to do what they've done. And then there'll be people who think, well, I sat there for ten minutes, my brain is very busy, I tried it once, it didn't really work, and they move on. And then I study some of the great creatives and visionaries — people that I thought could see round corners in an atypical way, like Steve Jobs — and there's always a meditation practice at the very heart of their brilliance. I don't currently have a meditation practice. My wonderful fiancée does. She does it every morning for twenty minutes. She's a breathwork practitioner. Tell me what she says about it.

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

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?

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

Steven Bartlett: Good question. I have no good answer for it.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. It has to do with this — 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 do you think this will do — you're playing for your friend like, wow, can you believe something like this exists in the world? How cool is that?

The distinction I'm trying to make is this: 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 — I heard the CEO of Klarna say it the other day — they spend a lot of time thinking about the customer, the customer's problem, and they work backwards to the answer. So they'll zoom in on Rick's world and say Rick has these problems, and they'll work backwards from there. That's how Amazon say they built the platform.

Steven Bartlett: 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 ten years is going to come up to me and say I wish my package would take longer." So he can double down on solving that customer problem. Does that sit in contrast to what you're saying, or is it the same thing?

Rick Rubin: Well, I'll start by saying if you look at the history of Amazon, it lost money for probably twenty 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. So it's the same thing — 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.

Creativity as a universal human capacity

Steven Bartlett: Do you think people have different levels of their ability to listen to that internal voice? It appears that some people are just inherently more creative than others. Some people are in the analytical part of their brain and they need one plus one to equal two all the time. Do 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. We go to school, we're told to repeat back what we're told. We're told to sit in a chair all day. 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 express ourselves freely. And that's our purpose here on the planet — 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 that at a very young age we're taught that the things we make are a means to a particular end — promotions, pay rises, capital, success, job titles. In the creative process, are you saying it's never productive to talk about how we'll measure success and try to optimise for that measurement?

Rick Rubin: I tend not to think about those things. I can't think of an example where we would want to use data. 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 can't reflect that. You can have two things that are on equal commercial footing, yet one of them lights you up and the other one is, well, this gets the job done. They're different. And long-term, 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.

Blocks to creativity

Steven Bartlett: In your book, 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. At some point in time you were singing and someone said, "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, 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 make creative choices, but that's on us. We just have bad information. We're told we're not good enough and we believe it, and it's not true.

Steven Bartlett: When people say, "Oh, Rick is a creative and Steven is not a creative" — what are they actually saying? What does it mean in our culture to be a creative?

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

Steven Bartlett: It 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. Are you saying for us to get out of the business of comparison?

Rick Rubin: Yes. Because it's always apples and oranges. If you were to ask who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince, I would say Michael Jackson is 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 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 pointless.

Steven Bartlett: Is either more creative?

Rick Rubin: That's for you to decide. There's no — the whole idea of competition between artists is 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. I flew here yesterday from London. I'm tired. I'm a little jet-lagged. 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 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 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 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 ninety percent done. Then we might set a deadline for that last ten percent of finishing it. And that last ten percent probably won't make or break the project.

Risk, failure, and the freedom to start over

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

Rick Rubin: That's all there is in this process. 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. 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. It could take a long time. Other times, you'll think, "I'm going to make this blue thing," and you make it in five minutes. There it is. Done. And you can't calculate that. You can't anticipate what's going to happen. But if I wasn't doing this experiment, 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 twenty years and then it becomes Amazon.

Steven Bartlett: I've thought a lot recently about how time horizons change the work that you do. In that example you gave of the blue statue — if you were under a time horizon, you wouldn't have the space for that exploration. And actually in all of our lives, I think we apply time horizons. We say this part of my career is going to be five years, and in those five years I want to achieve these things. How do you think about setting personal time horizons, but also 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 the experimentation phase, then the crafting phase, and then the finishing and completion phase. 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. In the experimental phase — 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, 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 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. 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.

Steven Bartlett: 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 Creative Act started with this idea of how to make things. And what I realised through writing the book is it's how to be in the world. 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, a chef, or a mother — you're living your life as an artist. You're embodying it and it's coming from you. 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.

Steven Bartlett: The reason I was asking about the world sometimes not liking what you give it is because of this word failure, which you talk about in the book as well. A lot of the reason why people won't take the risk to listen to themselves is because of the word risk. 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, my friends are going to think I'm strange. So I'll conform.

Rick Rubin: And I'm saying you have to do all of those things. Lose the friends. Take the risk. Now, I'm not saying that one hundred percent of the time, 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 hobby, my love, my profession — the way I support myself doesn't have to be that.

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, it turned into its own thing — by nothing that I did. I had no expectation that it could be a profession. I did it because I loved it. While I was going to school and probably going to go to law school, I would have a regular day job and I would do music as the love of my life. That's what would have happened. Luckily, I didn't have to do that.

Steven Bartlett: A lot of people at that age are told to follow their passion, find their purpose. And also the word find means I have to go out there and actively pursue the thing. A lot of people listening would say, I've been told to find my passion, and when they look at their job in the factory or wherever it might be, they go, okay, this isn't it yet, but I will get there at some point later. 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 have to pay rent, or say I'm happy living in my parents' house until it works. I'm saying there are realities of life that have to be dealt with. Don't put the pressure 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 real work you're doing.

Steven Bartlett: 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.

Steven Bartlett: Oh, really? Okay. What word would you use?

Rick Rubin: We talk about it. I ask, what do you hope to accomplish? And then I support that process.

Steven Bartlett: Can we role play? I'm actually learning to DJ. I've been learning for like four years. I want to make an album. What would the first questions be to me?

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

Steven Bartlett: So I play you a house song. I said, "This is my favourite."

Rick Rubin: I would tell you whatever I think about it. Honestly.

Steven Bartlett: Even if you thought it was terrible?

Rick Rubin: I probably wouldn't say it in an unpleasant way, but I would probably ask more questions around 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 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, 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. It's a little bit like 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 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 just to help remove the roadblocks that they're putting in the way of themselves to get there.

Steven Bartlett: And when they say what they want to do but then ask you what they should do — is that a lack of self-trust?

Rick Rubin: Yes. But that lack of self-trust 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. It's like a mask. So dealing with someone who's insecure and dealing with someone who's overconfident — it's often two sides of the same coin. We're really looking for this middle place of reality. 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. If I gave you two pieces of pizza and said, "Taste the two pieces. Tell me which one you like better" — it's not a hard question. You'll probably say, "I like this one much better." 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 — 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.

What makes a great artist

Steven Bartlett: If you were to bet on an artist being one of these great artists you've worked with because they have a set of characteristics or a perspective or a humility conducive to 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.

Rick Rubin: 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. He said, if I believe in the person, I'll back them. And I suppose it would be the same with artists. It's the artist, not the great song. The great song is more like the great product — maybe they could do that again. But if you see 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. I produced their new album, just came out maybe a month ago. They had asked me to produce an album for them maybe fifteen 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. I don't feel it. And then they asked me another time maybe twelve years ago and I listened to the demos and I couldn't see how to do it. So I passed.

Steven Bartlett: "I didn't see how to do it" — give me some colour on what that means.

Rick Rubin: When I hear something and I know I can see a path — I can hear something in it, it doesn't have to be good, but I could hear something of like, I understand what this is and I want to see what this can become. I didn't feel that the first two times.

And then on the first album we worked on together, which came out about six years ago, they sent me demos again. They were probably the worst demos they ever sent, but I could hear what it could be. One of the demos might be a twenty-second voice note. Whereas in the past there were these produced demos of here's our great new songs. But in this twenty-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.

Steven Bartlett: How do you know?

Rick Rubin: Feel it. There is no knowing. It's a knowingness. I have a knowingness. I couldn't explain it to you. It's an internal experience. One of the things is 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.

Steven Bartlett: Do you set goals in your own life?

Rick Rubin: None.

Steven Bartlett: You strike me as someone who is okay with uncertainty in a world where most people need certainty in order to take forward motion. I know uncertainty is real — I had a house in Malibu that was my main house with all of my possessions that eight years ago burned in a fire.

Rick Rubin: When that happened, you very quickly see — I thought I would live there forever. When that happened, I realised: 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.

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

Steven Bartlett: Yeah. All the time. I used to do that. There was a period of time when I worked a lot in the recording studio — a lot of hours, many sessions, sometimes eight albums a year, 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. I would just drive and listen to music in the car and drive. I might end up somewhere, but I might just drive for a couple of hours and relax. It felt good.

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

Rick Rubin: That's okay.

Steven Bartlett: That's why we have goals in our life. That's why we make a five-year plan, a New Year's resolution.

Rick Rubin: I've 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 a 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. Is that something that we can all do, or is that a privilege that you have now that you're so successful?

Rick Rubin: We limit ourselves in so many ways. I can remember a very successful artist who was going through a really hard time. We went out to dinner at a restaurant in Malibu. 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. And I remember saying, you know, you don't have to keep doing this. 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.

I found out years later — I didn't even know that the person really heard what I was saying, because they were in a really hard place. But years later, that person said to me, "Remember what you said? You said I could check out." And they did. Not in the way that I imagined, but they did that.

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 they've made have them boxed in and there's no way out. And when someone thinks that, the inclination to commit suicide is the person knowing something needs to die — and they think the body needs to die. 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 can say, you know what, I want to do it all differently. I want to start a whole new life in a whole new way. 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 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 and find a new one.

Steven Bartlett: A lot of the prison that I almost hear you referring to — that makes us feel boxed in — is our identity. "I am a lawyer in Manhattan and a father." We accepted that identity, which meant that at cocktail parties people were impressed by us. We traded something for something else and now we're boxed in. And I hear a lot from our listeners that they feel stuck.

Rick Rubin: 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.

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 lying in a hospital bed and he was seemingly catatonic. He hadn't spoken since this happened. I was standing in the hallway and there were a series of his friends coming to see him, everybody going into the room one at a time. I listened to the two people who went in before me and they were crying and they were acting as if he had died. Now he's lying there. He's in the foetal position. He's not saying a word. And I'm just thinking, this is really weird. The whole scene is weird. I'd never seen anything like it before. And my first thought was: the people who are going in there and talking to him 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 that this is not the best. What they're doing is not the best. There's a better way.

And I was the next one in. I went in and I looked down and I said — 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 like I was insane. But it was the first thing he reacted to. And I said, "You just hit the reset button. 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. 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 experience. But that's how boxed in we feel. And it's all just a story. It's not true. We are free.

Steven Bartlett: Is there a step one in that direction for people that want to hit the reset button?

Rick Rubin: I would try to see what are the things in your life that you really want to change, and then think about what's the cleanest way to change them — leaving a job, leaving a relationship. The reason these things happen is we make commitments with good intentions, and then when it's hard to keep the commitment, that's 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. This commitment that I made was a mistake, or something changed. Maybe the person that I married became an alcoholic and it's really hard living with an alcoholic. This is not what we signed up for. 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 anyone any favours if you're locked in a situation.

I have a lot of friends who are in relationships where 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. In reality, you're not doing any favours for the person by being unhappy in a relationship. The nature of love is it's a two-way street. You can't have one side of the magnet in love. It doesn't work. It's just a fantasy of what, as an optimist, you think it could be so beautiful — but if it's not there, it's best for everyone involved.

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.

Steven Bartlett: I imagine as well there are 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. Their life feels really fundamentally misaligned, but it's actually just maybe they struggled with honesty across many little areas of their life.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. And maybe those can be worked on and maybe it can be fixed. But in either case, don't let it just linger — repair them.

Steven Bartlett: It's hard conversations there, Rick. A lot of people aren't good at that. People pleasers. And there's a through line here with creativity generally — this idea of people pleasing, the difficult conversation. I've obviously seen from some of the things you've mentioned through this conversation that you would be willing to tell people, "This isn't for me." I imagine you're offered a lot of money a lot of the time as well. How do you 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?

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

Steven Bartlett: Have you turned down large amounts of money because you didn't feel something was going to be good or was aligned?

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 I don't do. I think about the things I do.

Steven Bartlett: Does the money part of it matter to you?

Rick Rubin: 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.

The depressive episode at 33

Steven Bartlett: In your early thirties, you had a depressive episode yourself. 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? I've heard you say it changed you permanently.

Rick Rubin: It did.

Steven Bartlett: Take me into that part of your life. You're thirty-three years old — my age. 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 thirty-three, 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 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 our agreement — because he had adopted the agreement that I had with my mentor — I don't like it. When you come back to California, we should talk about it." That was it. That was the whole conversation.

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. 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 I 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's 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 I'm more rooted in reality, which probably sounds funny after a lot of the things I've been saying. I never questioned anything. It was just like everything was always rolling in this one direction, and that was the first time 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 I was thirty-three, 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.

Steven Bartlett: On your Desert Island Discs, you said it wasn't anything that I understood. I thought I was dying. The essence of this is it was your first sort of big professional, dare I say, rejection.

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

Steven Bartlett: And you went to therapy.

Rick Rubin: Yes. Went to therapy and ended up using an antidepressant drug, which I tend not to be a drug person. But it was bad enough for long enough that that was the final step. I was seeing a different therapist, probably a therapist or a healer, at least one, five days a week. And every time I would wake up and go, 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.

Steven Bartlett: What was going on under the surface of this? Because 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: It was all happening on the unconscious level. Couldn't sleep, was nauseous all the time. Didn't want to get out of bed. I felt it in a physical way and didn't want to do anything.

Steven Bartlett: What was that?

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

Steven Bartlett: I've looked at your earliest years. I've looked at two wonderful people there — your mom and your dad. Sometimes 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 had no context for it, no way to deal with it.

Steven Bartlett: Sounds like a horrific season of your life. 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: 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. It gave me a different perspective. 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: Tired.

Similarities between great artists

Steven Bartlett: I want to go back to the question I was asking you earlier about the similarities you see in these great artists. I heard on one end conviction, and then I also heard humility, which seemed like opposing forces. Is there anything else that you see in the similarities between the Jay-Zs, the Kanyes, the list of people that you've worked with?

Rick Rubin: It usually has to do with a point of view. Seeing the world in a way that other people don't see. 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. A 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. 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 can feel it. You can see a movie that can really impact your life. 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 gruelling 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 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. 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.

I would say start going to museums. 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 — the greatest movies of all time.

It's funny, because when we're told how to become good at an 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 rare things in their skill stack, like his love of design and typography. No one at university would have told him, "Okay, you want to be a great computer programmer, go do typography design."

Steven Bartlett: 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.

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

The Tao Te Ching and Carl Jung

Steven Bartlett: I've got some books here.

Rick Rubin: Good choices. You're a fan of these books?

Steven Bartlett: I love these books. Why? What did they give you?

Rick Rubin: I first read the Tao when I had just moved to California — probably thirty years ago. And I read it and I felt like this is different than anything I've read before. It speaks to me on so many levels. And then I remember reading it something like six months later and it was an entirely different book. 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 — which is essentially an adaptation of the Tao for vibe coding.

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

Steven Bartlett: Maybe I would use one sentence like that: the soft overcomes the hard. 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. There's a story about Napoleon — when someone would come to him during all the warring stuff that was going on, they would come with an emergency: 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." The idea was ninety-nine percent of the problems that need your immediate attention will resolve themselves in two weeks. And if it's still a problem in two weeks, he'll deal with it.

Rick Rubin: Might try that with my fiancée.

Steven Bartlett: See how it goes. It's an interesting idea though — the soft overcomes the hard. That's like the idea of water dripping on a rock, that eventually the water will eat through the rock, slowly dripping. The water's soft, totally pliable, malleable. And what about this book?

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

Steven Bartlett: 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.

Rick Rubin: 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 may not be so accurate. 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 this ongoing interest.

I think maybe there's an inner knowingness. 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, I don't want to be around this person. There's something going on energetically here that's not for me. I think that kind of wisdom probably has more impact on our lives than anything that data can show us.

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

Rick Rubin: Yes, it would. 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. In reality, many times you've looked at the numbers and acted accordingly and then three years later realised, hm, didn't really work out the way I thought. That's one way of looking at things — the Moneyball approach. 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.

Steven Bartlett: It's like an invitation to trust ourselves more as well, because you're talking about energetic feeling.

Rick Rubin: And doing things that would make trusting yourself make more sense. That's the other part of it. 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. 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, it seemed like that's what was going to happen. Happened. Look at that.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think there is a higher force taking actions on our lives?

Rick Rubin: I think there's a higher creative intelligence that lives in the world — like the thing that allows plants to grow. There's some generative force. I don't know that it's aiming particularly at you or me, but there's some energy where life wants to live and you can ride it. Same as catching a wave. You can catch the wave. The wave is there. There are a lot of waves beyond the ones in the ocean, and you can ride those waves. You can't always see them, but you might be able to feel them. And over time you start to recognise them.

For some reason it seems like the universe wants us to know about this. It's what I talked about with paying attention, and about the way of code — it was a ridiculous thing, it was indefensible. But I listened to this feeling 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.

Steven Bartlett: What I hear from a lot of what you're saying is it's making me think about how rationality — being rational — can be a bit of a curse. I would consider myself to be quite a rational person.

Rick Rubin: I would say rationality is overrated. The rational world is very small. There are much more interesting things going on than the rational world.

Steven Bartlett: Yes, that's exactly what my fiancée would say to me. She is someone that helps me break outside of rationality. And when she speaks to me about these bigger ideas she has, I always listen very intently, although at some level I am, I guess, rebutting them.

Rick Rubin: But do you see how they impact her life? Do you see what they do to her?

Steven Bartlett: Yeah.

Rick Rubin: Does it feel like it raises her vibration?

Steven Bartlett: One hundred percent.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. That counts. The way she feels — that counts. Her vibe. And enough for you to want to be around her all the time.

Steven Bartlett: I feel like I'm leeching off that vibe to some degree sometimes.

Artificial intelligence and creativity

Steven Bartlett: You talked about higher intelligence and a generative force, which is the perfect segue into the big subject of the moment — artificial intelligence. Kind of links to what you're saying about vibe coding as well. I got a message from one of my friends who isn't involved in technology saying, "I'm concerned. I don't know what this technology is. Is it going to take our jobs?" And that for me was the bat signal that this is really getting down to everyday people. This week there was an Anthropic researcher who also worked at OpenAI saying he thinks there's more than a ten percent chance of it being the end of the human race. AI is a broad subject. You've got lots of thoughts on it.

Rick Rubin: I think 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, heats our houses. It's one of these things. 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 information to be available to everybody. Good came from that, and probably some bad.

Steven Bartlett: Can it be creative?

Rick Rubin: I don't know. I'm curious. I feel like everything we've talked about today about what creativity is has to do with point of view. And AI doesn't have a point of view. AI is the collected ideas that already exist. 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 answers day after day. So it's not like it has, this is how it sees the world.

Steven Bartlett: If I asked an AI to make ten million different tracks, would it theoretically at some point make a hit, even though it doesn't have a point of view per se?

Rick Rubin: It could make ten thousand tracks and you might like one or two of them, or you might like five percent of them. And that's interesting. 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. This little breakbeat — let's use that and make a new song out of it. 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 think the idea of it doing the end-to-end of replacing the artist — I can't imagine it 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. I see AI maybe as a tool that could help the artist, and maybe even help the person who doesn't know they're an artist to be an artist. 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.

Steven Bartlett: This is such a recurring debate. You'll hear it on every panel everywhere at the moment — can AI be creative? I've tried to interrogate the question itself, because you first need to define what creativity is. And I think what people are actually saying when they think of creativity is good creativity that sold well or was number one. One of my friends was saying to me the other day, "I don't think AI could ever make" — and then he named a great song. But even when I look at that great song, what's making him think it was great creativity in hindsight was actually an end-to-end process — having the meeting with MTV, building up distribution and reputation, people 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. And in hindsight we go, amazing creativity. But what we're actually saying is there was this long process which resulted in me experiencing this thing. Now AI might be the tool you describe. But isn't the whole process part of what we look back on and say that was great creativity?

Rick Rubin: I would say the whole process. I also think it's even beyond the process. 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. 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 — like a 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. 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.

So I feel like now, using prompts, anyone can prompt, and you can get better at prompting through experimentation. Someone who thinks of themselves as not creative — the idea of learning how to prompt, it's pretty easy. The barrier of entry is very low. And I think that's a good thing.

Steven Bartlett: 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?

Rick Rubin: Well, the same thing as now. 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 see any indication that that's going to happen. But more good art doesn't seem like a bad thing.

Steven Bartlett: Me and my business partner Georgia Gibson were on Spotify and we listened to this song. We really liked it. And about two 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 realised it was AI. And then there were these two songs from this Spotify artist, and one of them disappeared. That's when I went on Google and was looking — what happened to that song — and it turns out it was an AI artist. Something interesting happened when I realised I was listening to an AI song.

Rick Rubin: What happened?

Steven Bartlett: I didn't like it as much anymore. And so when I think about creativity, I wonder if there is an irreplaceably human element, because it resonated with me because there was this story — it came from this woman who was singing and she was talking about this subject and it meant something to her. And when I found out it was none of that, the song lost something.

Rick Rubin: If you think about Andy Warhol's art — Andy Warhol started as a commercial illustrator. He would draw shoes for advertising. And then he came up with what we now call pop art. And pop art was a Brillo box or a Campbell's soup can. Maybe the first Campbell's soup cans, he drew them and painted them. But then over time he did a series of images that were screen-printed — Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, 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 people in the studio to screen-print these things. And they're not less Andy Warhol. The art's always in the ideation. That's where the art is. It's not who put the paint on the canvas.

There was a time even going back to the Renaissance — so many of the painters had studios. Rembrandt might have painted thirty percent of that painting, but it was his vision for the painting and he would have the guys in the studio do the rest. It's a normal thing that artists who had studios would have other people, disciples, who would do a lot of the work. It happens now in the studio. So many records — 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. Doesn't make it less good. It's just a different thing. It's fine. The ideation is where it comes from. And I don't know that the AI's ideation is interesting to anyone. We'll see.

Steven Bartlett: I always think with F1 — if they removed Lewis Hamilton from the car, I wouldn't watch 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. You can kind of see by the way they're driving how they're feeling. And you can relate to that.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. It does seem less interesting if it was just an automated car doing it.

Steven Bartlett: So what has been removed is human relatability and resonance and connection. But it's interesting that you liked it before you knew.

Rick Rubin: And that's interesting to me. 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.

Steven Bartlett: We're living in interesting times.

Rick Rubin: Absolutely.

Miracles in the creative process

Steven Bartlett: You used the word miracles earlier, which I found to be an interesting word. I wondered if you had experienced miracles through the creative process of working with great artists.

Rick Rubin: All the time.

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

Rick Rubin: There's a Brandi Carlile 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 I don't even remember if we said do anything different, it might have been just try it again — 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 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 we may never get back to this. That's what it's like.

Sometimes you don't know it right away. Sometimes you know it after. I made an album with Neil Young where we recorded for a week and it was not good. The band sounded like they not only couldn't play the songs but would never be able to play the songs — that was the feeling in the first week. And at the end of the first week, Neil said to me, "Don't worry, next week's going to be better. They're going to be able to do it." It's like, okay. Nothing showed me that, but let's go.

And then the next week, Neil said to Ralph, the drummer, "Okay, let's play whatever the third song again." And Ralph said, "Well, we already did that last week." And Neil was like, "Oh, let's maybe beat it." And Ralph said, "No, I really think we got it." 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 the one from last week." And he puts on the one from last week. He says, "Turn down the bass a little bit. Maybe turn the piano up." And we listen to it again. It seemed like it still had problems, but the magic was there. It had a lot of mistakes, but forgetting the mistakes, the feeling was there. And then our job was just doing little bits of repairs here and there — a little ducking a sound, featuring a sound, adding another vocal, 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.

Steven Bartlett: 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?

Rick Rubin: It's not repeatable. The thing that's repeatable is you show up and you keep going till it's great. Whatever it takes. That's the thing. Sometimes you'll make a demo or 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 and it never really comes together. But then you look back at that original drawing that you made in five minutes.

That happened on the first album I made with Johnny Cash. We recorded all these songs in my living room — him singing and playing guitar. We weren't recording for an album. It was the way that we got to know each other. I asked him to play me all of his favourite songs, songs he remembered from growing up, songs that meant 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 with the idea of: we're going to test a hundred songs this way and then maybe we'll find ten. And the ten 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 anyone ever hearing, they have something that the real recordings don't have. And we ended up putting those out. 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.

Steven Bartlett: "It wants to be." You're saying that as if it's got a mind of its own.

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

Steven Bartlett: You're personifying it.

Rick Rubin: Yeah, I'm personifying. It doesn't say it in words, but it's clear. The indicators are clear. What we get back is: 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.

Steven Bartlett: 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 think it was amazing?

Rick Rubin: For sure. It probably happens often.

Steven Bartlett: And how do you rationalise that?

Rick Rubin: 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 a 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?

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

Rick Rubin: Correct. Because 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, it totally undermines it — the house of cards crumbles. When we're working in the studio and something starts sounding good and 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.

Steven Bartlett: What are you doing?

Rick Rubin: Making the best thing we can make. I always thought of it as greatness — we're working towards greatness, timeless greatness. Didn't know what it meant. And more recently, I came to realise: 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 us 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.

Steven Bartlett: Was there a point when you realised that?

Rick Rubin: Yeah, a few years ago. And it felt good when I realised it. It was like, ah, of course. Thirty-five years in — oh. 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. I don't know if that's the moment where it struck me, but I remember it was like a total epiphany — even though it was only for me. It didn't apply to anything else. It was just like I realised what I've been doing all this time without understanding it. It just became clear. It's like, ah, that's what it is. It was a great feeling of, now it all makes more sense.

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

Rick Rubin: Very literally. I'm saying God.

Steven Bartlett: God defined as the higher power. And you're literally — so the art you make, the music you make — he is actually the customer in some respects?

Rick Rubin: No, because it's a gift. So he's not the customer. He's the beneficiary. And it's like — 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.

Steven Bartlett: Does he ever give feedback?

Rick Rubin: I want to say that when other people like it, I might take that as a good sign. But I don't know. 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.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think that's why we're here? I'm now trying to figure out why there would be such a 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 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. We may in some areas 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. The best version is never because they did it this way. That's not self-expression. Copying — 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.

Steven Bartlett: I sat with someone who is an expert on consciousness — a physicist who 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 — that God has divided consciousness into lots of little pieces, into my French bulldog Pablo, into Rick, into someone in China, and set us all off to go and explore and understand the world. And by doing so, consciousness is seeking to understand itself.

And then I went to Malta and I was driving down the road and I looked and I saw these tourists all just looking up at this mountain. 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 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 into Rick, and Rick is experimenting and creating to understand. And kind of what you were saying there reminded me of it, because it sounded like you were talking about consciousness itself and the self-expression of consciousness.

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

Steven Bartlett: Strange idea, isn't it?

Rick Rubin: Not strange to me. Not at all. Nothing is off the table.

The Jay-Z documentary and Ace of Spades

Steven Bartlett: One of the great artists you've worked with is Jay-Z. And you have this wonderful eight-part documentary coming out with Jay-Z, which I was fascinated to watch. It's out on the eighteenth of September. One of the clips I watched from it is the story of this brand — Ace of Spades. I found it really fascinating for many reasons, but it also rhymes with some of the things you're saying about integrity and his decision to abandon another brand at a near-term cost against his near-term incentives, and pursue launching his own.

Rick Rubin: Yes. And what's most interesting about that story — 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.

Steven Bartlett: Cristal.

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 records, in songs, and it became a very popular drink in the hip-hop community. And the person who ran Cristal said some disparaging remarks about hip-hop people drinking Cristal.

Steven Bartlett: "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, 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 — and it was a gold bottle. It's like the universe allowed — first he gets this negative comment, he reacts, follows his belief, stands for what he believed in, removes it from his clubs. 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. That's how it really happened. And that's again the miraculous nature — Jay did the right thing, and in response for doing the right thing, he ended up owning a champagne brand.

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

Rick Rubin: Yes. I know it.

Steven Bartlett: Is that karma? What is that?

Rick Rubin: Well, that's part of it. You could call it that. There are a lot of names, a lot of labels, but you can call it karma. When he took that action, he wasn't thinking about how he might benefit. 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. We're 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 wasn't thinking about that at all. But it became a great business.

Steven Bartlett: It became a great business. But it's the universe filling the void. It's an interesting idea. You're dating someone, you think maybe 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 if I like that person more then I'll get out of this relationship for that relationship. A lot of people do this. I feel like it's not the way. 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 for a good thing to fill it, but he did create a vacuum in his life. 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?

Rick Rubin: It's funny what you were saying there about creating a vacuum. We in culture celebrate starting. 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 glamorise — actually it's the opposite. We say never quit. Don't quit.

Steven Bartlett: But that is the necessary first step to starting — to starting a brand which in Jay-Z's case went on to be worth six hundred and thirty million at the time when he sold his stake. We have a weird relationship with quitting. We need certainty. I need the branch.

Rick Rubin: I think that'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 has decided to step down. He's stepping down for the right reasons and he's concerned that the perception will be that he's being fired — that'll be the outside world's view. 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. So it's an interesting moment in time when that happens. Similar to what you were saying about getting artists to step outside of their genre — to quit their genre.

What makes a great artist — continued

Steven Bartlett: When I look at this big list of people you've worked with — everybody from Justin Timberlake to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to helping Kanye on Runaway, which is one of the most incredible records of all time, to Jay-Z and System of a Down and AC/DC and Mick Jagger — I go, were these people all great? And were they great from birth, or are they ordinary people that made a decision?

Rick Rubin: They're ordinary people who made a decision. Maybe some of them had some particular gifts. 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 the best he could possibly be, and he's insanely obsessive about that. So his entire life is focused on sitting with a notepad writing all day and all night. It's all he does. That's what makes him him.

Steven Bartlett: Even if he's not publishing an album?

Rick Rubin: Doesn't matter. He's not writing to publish. I asked him at one point, looking at his notebooks — "Is all this going to, you know, are all these going to be used?" He's like, "No, no, no. Ninety-nine percent of this stuff no one will ever see. I just want to be good. I'm practising. I want to get better at what I do." He's in training always. If you think of it like an athlete — there are some athletes who train in the off-season and some who don't. And the ones who train in the off-season are usually better and usually have a longer career. It's like that.

Steven Bartlett: When we sat down, you asked me a question. You said, "Steven, 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. My question to you is: can you give me a couple of examples of artists that fundamentally changed you?

Rick Rubin: The first one I'll say is Johnny Cash. Because I got to spend time around someone who was so humble and quiet and smart and didn't offer much. 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 didn't have a need to let you know that. It was all going on inside. And he was a beautiful spiritual person and I loved him. I feel like my life was really improved getting to spend so much time with someone so inspiring.

Steven Bartlett: There was some emotion there.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. He's a beautiful man. Beautiful man.

The next one would be Tom Petty, who was the ultimate craftsman. In the Beatles you have John and Paul — John was more of a raw nerve who tore his chest open and led with his heart, and Paul was more of a savant of music, like a craftsperson. Paul could take anything and make it good. John was like a raw nerve who could just show his soul. They're two very different skills, and together that's what makes it the Beatles. Also the fact that George and Ringo are incredible — it's only the Beatles when it's the four of them.

Paul understood all the parts. Paul knew 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. Tom Petty was like Paul. 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. Being around him was really inspiring. Also as a record producer I learned a lot from getting to work with him. I offered an outside perspective — I was younger, different. So I brought something to the table, but I learned a tremendous amount. At the time that I worked with him, I had only worked with artists who had made their first albums — new artists. And he was a very established, brilliant studio recording artist. So I got to learn a lot working with him.

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

Rick Rubin: 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 say, "Ah, this word is supposed to be plural and you can't hear the S. I have to re-record it, or 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."

He also was another person who would work forever on it until it was right. He would never want it to be done. The first album we worked on together was called Wildflowers. And I think we probably worked on it — not every day, but over two years, probably two and a half years. It's a long time for an album. It was a long time, but there was no hurry. It was just like, oh, we're making progress. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. And I learned a lot from him about patience.

Steven Bartlett: Some might say that's perfectionism. And people think of perfectionism as a form of procrastination.

Rick Rubin: 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.

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

Rick Rubin: The real procrastinators — it usually has to do with being afraid to put it out into the world. There are some artists I know, famous artists, who haven't put out an album for ten years. I think the longer you wait, the harder it gets in general. The longer you wait, the more it feels like it can never live up to the expectation. 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. Hard to know.

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

Rick Rubin: Let me see. Adele.

Steven Bartlett: She's really good. 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 thirty times in a row and it'll be great thirty times. Might not be the same thirty times, but it'll always be great.

Steven Bartlett: You worked on her 21 album — some songs on there. Did you know she was great when you met her? Was there something that made her distinctive?

Rick Rubin: At a time when most pop artists didn't write their own songs, she was more like a throwback to the seventies 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 — it's different than someone who can just deliver a song well. I feel like it's a little bit of an anomaly in a pop world where so much of it is more manufactured — meaning a bunch of people work on the song and then the singer sings the song. Adele — a key piece is that it always comes from her, and you can feel that in the songs. It's more personal and I love that.

Steven Bartlett: You can feel it. I've seen her live as well. It feels like the first time she's ever sung the song when we experience her live.

Steven Bartlett: 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?

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. 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.

The Jay-Z documentary

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

Rick Rubin: I had made a documentary with Paul McCartney a few years ago that was six episodes. The reason for that one was 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. 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. I thought there was an opportunity to shed light on something that I love.

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.

After that happened, I was thinking about who else is — I want to say misunderstood — because that's kind of what it is. 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. And I started thinking about Jay-Z.

Steven Bartlett: Why?

Rick Rubin: Because Jay-Z is thought of today as this incredible businessman. You think of him as a 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. The lyrics are really intricate and really difficult and it's astounding what he does. He's famous, and that's the reason he's famous, but nobody knows it. People see him in a different light. 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. 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." And then we didn't talk about it again for probably a year. 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. He'll either say yes or no, but at least you could ask him."

I probably didn't call for six months, eight months, just because it felt uncomfortable. 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 — but the next time we talked about it, he's like, "Yeah, let's do it." I said, "Okay." And then we did this.

Steven Bartlett: It's stunning. It's different in a way that's quite surprising. 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 the colour grading — the sort of black and white colour grade — and some of the angles were a bit off. I thought, 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 you've seen — he's never like that. He's never like that. And this is really who he is. After you watch this, you'll really know who Jay-Z is, which is incredible. It's an incredible privilege to have that intimate view into someone so great.

Steven Bartlett: 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.

Speaking of incredible things, this book is also an incredible thing. I know that in part because so many of my guests have come here and talked about it. So many of them. And so many people hold it up as their favourite book on creativity. I think because it's challenging — which is the essence of Rick Rubin in some respects. I don't necessarily think it's a book about creativity. I consider it to be a philosophy book, dare I say.

Rick Rubin: Yeah.

The mysterious chapter count of The Creative Act

Steven Bartlett: Tarot cards. Some people noticed that you have — is it seventy-three?

Rick Rubin: Seventy-eight.

Steven Bartlett: Seventy-eight — we call them chapters —

Rick Rubin: Areas of thought.

Steven Bartlett: Areas of thought in this book. And tarot cards have seventy-eight.

Rick Rubin: Yes.

Steven Bartlett: 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 sixty — I think there were sixty-three 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 organisational methods — got to the point, again through a lot of failed experiments and some successful experiments, moved from fourteen hundred pages into a little bit of a shape when the areas of thought came to be. And there were — I think there were sixty-three. I have them, they're handwritten, and I have a photograph of them in my phone. The original sixty-three areas of thought.

And then once we separated all the ideas into the sixty-three, there ended up being more. And I think there ended up being something like eighty-two or eighty-three or eighty-four. They were in the eighties. And then the book was done and there were eighty-something of them.

And I have a collaborator named Neil who is a friend of mine who lived in my neighbourhood, a great writer who helped me from the beginning, although not in an official capacity until the end. He was involved the whole way. I was working with another writer and it just didn't work out. And then we got to the point where there were these eighty-three or eighty-four 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 eighty-three areas of thought. I'd rather it be seventy-eight." 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 seventy-eight. If we had a hundred and three, I would say let's make it a hundred and eight to get it up to a hundred and eight, because that's another — there are certain numbers that are good numbers. Seventy-eight, a hundred and eight, a hundred and forty-four is a good one. Some good numbers. I want it to have a reference to something else in the world of a number." And he's like —

Steven Bartlett: Why?

Rick Rubin: That's just how I feel. That's how I want it. And I remember him saying, "You're insane. You've been working on this book for eight years. Now you want it to be randomly seventy-eight instead of eighty-three. It's good. Be happy. It's good. Be done." I said, "We have to figure out how to make it seventy-eight."

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

Steven Bartlett: So did somebody miscount or something?

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

Steven Bartlett: Someday Neil's going to find four chapters and not mention it.

Rick Rubin: Maybe. Or maybe he'll call excited like, "I told you you were crazy."

The closing question

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

Steven Bartlett: What about a thank you?

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

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

Rick Rubin: I would probably call Mourielle, 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.

Steven Bartlett: How did that change you?

Rick Rubin: It's 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. In the fifteen years that I've been with my wife, we've maybe spent three nights apart. 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.

And becoming a father — it's just so much fun. I get to see the world through 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't imagine how he knows them. There's a real wisdom that's baffling. It's just fun.

Steven Bartlett: You talk in the book about how children are the great reminder of what creativity might be at its essence.

Rick Rubin: Yeah. And it's the thing — when you're a little kid, you haven't yet been told what you can and can't do, 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. People are amazing. Talk to anyone — it's interesting. People are interesting if you just slow down and really listen.

Steven Bartlett: 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. And the HBO documentary with Jay-Z — the eight-part documentary we referenced — is out now on HBO. It comes out on September eighteenth. So if you're watching after that, it's already out. Thank you, Rick.

Rick Rubin: My pleasure. It's on Apple TV+ in the rest of the world.

Steven Bartlett: Rick, thank you.

Rick Rubin: My pleasure.