Rick Rubin: What Jay-Z Did in 30 Minutes Left Me Speechless!

Host Steven Bartlett asks Rick Rubin how he approaches problems across music, business, and creativity. Rubin says “indefensible” is normally a harsh criticism, but in art it can be a requirement: the best work may be impossible to justify rationally and should be pushed toward an extreme. He believes reason is only a small part of decision-making and relies heavily on intuition, inner guidance, and what he calls the creative force of the universe. Rubin illustrates this with his book The Way of Code. A meme associating an image of Rubin wearing headphones with “vibe coding” began circulating, even though he initially knew nothing about the term. Instead of ignoring it, he treated the flood of messages as an invitation, posted the joke “Tools will come, tools will go, only the vibe coder remains,” and was surprised when it received roughly 1.5 million views rather than his usual 10,000–20,000. He then put aside other work to write a book about vibe coding, despite being unable to explain why it was a good idea. Rubin and Bartlett agree that labels narrow people, especially as success makes their identity more rigid. Rubin’s practical test for creative work is whether it excites its maker—not whether it can be defended to everyone.

Rubin argues that making “more of the same” may produce short-term numbers, but it rarely creates lasting significance. Bartlett recalls initially hearing Kanye West’s Yeezus and asking, “What the fuck is this?” before gradually deciding it was genius. Rubin says the album intentionally entered an “indefensible” anti-hip-hop territory, and that near-term sales expectations and record-label incentives were never part of the creative decision. He tells a similar story about Linkin Park. The band could have repeated its successful rap-rock formula, but instead chose to find a new sound around a decade into its career. About half the existing audience disliked the change, while new listeners arrived and the band gained a longer creative life as its original genre declined. Rubin also cites Radiohead’s Kid A, which alienated Bartlett at first but later became his favorite Radiohead album. He says everything he makes is effectively a diary entry: another person cannot tell him that his personal expression is false. Rubin acknowledges that risky work can fail, but says he is playing the art game rather than the investment-commerce game. His measure is whether the work is personally true and potentially revolutionary, not whether it immediately pays a mortgage.

Bartlett asks why major artists such as Jay-Z, Kanye West, Adele, Justin Timberlake, Mick Jagger, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers seek Rubin out. Rubin says he has been making things for 40 years and that these artists are not fundamentally “special”; they made decisions, cultivated their abilities, and pursued their own points of view. He then explains how 99 Problems came together. Rubin created the track, drawing on a suggestion from Chris Rock that Ice-T’s phrase “99 problems” could become a hook about problems rather than women. Jay-Z heard the beat, asked Rubin to keep looping it, sat silently for 20 or 30 minutes, and then announced he had the verse. He ran into another room and recorded it without writing lyrics down. Jay-Z repeated the process for later sections, memorizing dense verses and delivering several takes with different cadences, as if a saxophonist were improvising variations on a solo. Rubin says this was unlike any other rapper’s process he had seen. The track was initially dismissed by Def Jam’s president as something that could never be a single because it did not sound like radio music. Rubin gives the same example with System of a Down: KROQ initially said it would never play the band, but a year later the song was the station’s most requested and the band eventually sold out 80,000-seat stadium shows in Paris.

Rubin credits Transcendental Meditation, which he learned at 14, with helping him see beneath the surface of things. He silently repeats a private mantra for 20 minutes, ideally twice daily, and says the practice became clearest when he stopped for several years and recognized its depth when he returned. He does not offer a biological explanation, but believes meditation quiets ordinary concerns and strengthens an inner sense of what is meaningful. Bartlett describes his fiancée’s related experience as greater groundedness, calm, and connection. Rubin rejects the idea that creativity belongs only to people labeled “creative.” He says schools and institutions train people to repeat answers, follow rules, and compare themselves, gradually beating creativity out of them. He recommends escaping comparison: Michael Jackson is better at being Michael Jackson, while Prince is better at being Prince; comparing them is as pointless as asking which artist has the better diary entry. Rubin also describes himself as a “lazy workaholic”: he often does not feel like working, but schedules the work and shows up. He avoids imposing deadlines until a project is about 90% understood. In his four phases—seed, experimentation, crafting, and finishing—the early stages take as long as they take, because a timeline is impossible before the work reveals what it wants to become.

Rubin tells Bartlett that people can feel trapped because they mistake an identity, commitment, career, or relationship for an irreversible reality. He recalls advising a suicidal friend in hospital that he was “in the sweet spot” because he had already hit the reset button: the obligations that seemed to make life impossible no longer had to govern his future. Rubin stresses that this was not an argument for dying; what needed to die was the lifestyle, career path, or relationship—not the person. He applies the same idea to ordinary misalignment. Someone may need to leave a job, end a relationship, or stop honoring a commitment that has become destructive. Commitments are valuable, he says, but there is a point at which remaining in an alcoholic relationship or an unhappy partnership helps nobody. He rejects the idea that a breakup necessarily destroys the other person and compares love to two magnets pulling toward one another: if it is entirely unrequited, the relationship does not contain mutual love. Rubin also warns against trying to secure a replacement before leaving the current situation. In the story of Jay-Z and Cristal, Jay-Z stopped promoting the champagne after a Cristal executive made disparaging comments about hip-hop consumers. Only after creating that “vacuum” did an opportunity arise to build Ace of Spades. Rubin treats the episode as evidence that principled action can open unexpected possibilities.

Rubin describes a depressive episode that began at 33 after a mentor and senior music-industry figure was forced out and replaced. The successor told Rubin he had read their agreement and disliked it. Although this might have been a manageable business problem for someone else, Rubin had experienced years of success without serious instability and felt that “the rug had been pulled out.” He developed panic attacks, insomnia, nausea, and severe illness, describing the experience as being “shot with a poison arrow.” Therapy, repeated sessions with therapists or healers, and eventually an antidepressant helped, but the effects continued for years. Rubin says the experience permanently changed him. Previously he had felt almost like Superman because success had reinforced the belief that he could do no wrong; afterward he became more rooted in reality and better understood the personal difficulties faced by artists. He would not erase the episode because it gave him perspective. Rubin also argues that rationality is overrated. Data and metrics can describe one path, but they cannot explain why someone feels drawn to a partner, artist, or opportunity. His preferred word is “knowingness”: an internal signal strengthened by meditation, therapy, exposure to conflicting information, and repeated practice. The goal is not blind confidence or ego, but discovering what genuinely tastes better “to me,” like choosing between two pieces of pizza without guessing what someone else will prefer.

Rubin sees AI as a powerful tool that can be used for good or harm, comparing it with fire, the internet, and the printing press. He is unsure whether AI itself can be creative because creativity requires a point of view, while AI largely recombines existing ideas and can answer the same question differently from one day to the next. He believes AI could nevertheless help artists and people who do not think of themselves as creative, because prompting lowers the barrier to making images, music, or other work. For Rubin, the creative act is in the idea or prompt rather than necessarily in executing every physical step. He compares AI assistance with Andy Warhol’s studio, Renaissance painters working with assistants, studio musicians, and filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Wes Anderson, who plan shots before the final film is made. Bartlett notes that he liked an AI-generated Spotify song less after discovering it was AI, because the imagined human story behind it had disappeared. Rubin says the reaction is interesting but maintains that the work should ultimately be judged by whether it moves people. Rubin recounts “miracles” in the studio: an Avett Brothers performance suddenly became extraordinary with no obvious change, while an album with Neil Young seemed impossible during its first week before the original recordings revealed hidden magic. His repeatable rule is not a formula for inspiration but showing up and continuing until the work is right.

Rubin says great artists combine relentless work with an unusual way of seeing. Eminem, for example, writes constantly because he wants to improve; Rubin saw notebooks containing material Eminem expected nobody ever to hear. Greatness is not guaranteed by talent alone because timing, distribution, and other external conditions matter, but artists need a distinctive perspective and the discipline to keep developing it. Rubin points to Johnny Cash’s humility and spiritual depth, Tom Petty’s craftsmanship and patience, and Adele’s ability to make every take feel personal and alive. He contrasts Petty’s two-and-a-half-year work on Wildflowers with procrastination, which he says is often driven by fear of releasing work. Rubin explains that he made an eight-part Jay-Z documentary to reveal a side of Jay-Z obscured by his public image as a billionaire businessman and celebrity husband. Rubin wanted viewers to see the poet and lyricist, particularly the intricacy of the writing that produced his reputation. Jay-Z initially said he liked the idea but withheld a commitment; Rubin eventually called back after a friend told him the project would not happen unless he asked again. Rubin’s broad advice is to make work as an offering rather than optimize for numbers. He says artists are here to self-express, and the result should be a truthful reflection of how they see the world at that moment.