Rick Rubin on Diary of a CEO: The Lesson Behind the Jay-Z Story

The story everyone will clip from Steven Bartlett's new episode with Rick Rubin is the Jay-Z one. Rubin put the beat for 99 Problems on a loop. Jay-Z sat at the back of the studio, mumbling to himself, for twenty or thirty minutes. Then he said he had it, walked into the booth and delivered the first verse from memory. He did three takes with identical words and a different cadence each time, the way a saxophonist phrases the same solo differently from night to night. Nothing was written down. He picked the second take, sat back down, and half an hour later did the same thing for verse two.

It's a wonderful story. It's also the least useful part of a conversation that runs close to three hours, because almost nobody can work the way Jay-Z works. The rest of it covers things the rest of us can do. I work with leaders and teams on performing at a high level without burning out, and I kept pausing to take notes. This is what stayed with me, including the places where I think Rubin is wrong.

Make your favourite thing

Rubin claims that in forty years he has never let a short-term incentive shape a creative decision, and he has the stories to back it up. The president of Def Jam, the label Rubin co-founded, heard 99 Problems and said it would be a fine album track and never a single, because it sounded like nothing on the radio. The program director at KROQ told him the station would never play System of a Down. A year later they had the most requested song on that station, and Rubin says he recently watched them fill a Paris stadium two nights running. Linkin Park, after two enormous rap-rock albums, chose to find a new sound with him. By his estimate half their audience hated it. His view is that the genre they left was already dying, and that the change bought them a much longer career.

His word for this kind of decision is indefensible. You can't justify it with data or a business case. You make the thing because it's your favourite thing, and you take it as far as it will go. The line I wrote down was this: "Everything we make is a diary entry." Nobody can read your diary and tell you it's wrong.

The obvious objection is survivorship bias, and to his credit Rubin doesn't dodge it. Bartlett asks whether you can be a great creative and never succeed commercially. Rubin says yes, probably more often than not, because so much of success depends on things no artist controls. What he's describing is a way of working that protects the quality of the work, and the person making it, while the dice roll. It guarantees nothing about hits. That gets lost in the short clips, and it's the part I'd want any ambitious person to hear.

Don't ask the work to pay the rent

The most practical advice in the episode is about pressure. Rubin started making records as a hobby in college. He assumed he would go to law school, hold down a regular job and make music on the side for the rest of his life. When Bartlett raises the person who dreams of quitting everything to play violin in Peru, Rubin says go, and keep a job that covers the bills if you need one. Once the work has to pay the rent, you start making short-term decisions that damage it.

Organisational researchers have had a name for this since the early 1980s. They call it threat rigidity: under financial or social threat, people and teams narrow their attention and fall back on familiar responses. You can't explore when you're scared.

This is the problem FLAME was built to solve, and it is why the method starts with the nervous system rather than with techniques. Creativity is a state before it is a skill. A brain that predicts safety opens up, explores and combines; a brain that predicts threat narrows and repeats. So the work runs in order: regulate the state, then check the story the brain is running, then act from purpose with people you trust. Rubin's studio, with the beat on a loop and nobody watching the clock, is a state-first environment. Most workplaces are the opposite, and then they ask people to innovate.

He applies the same logic to deadlines. He describes four phases in any project (seed, experimentation, craft, completion) and refuses to set a deadline until the third is done and he can see what the thing is. Only the last ten percent gets a date. Most organisations do the reverse. They fix the date at the seed stage, before anyone knows what they're making, and then wonder why the result looks like last year's.

Most people have never been properly listened to

Rubin describes something I see in coaching all the time. An artist arrives, explains in detail what they want to make, then says they have no idea what to do and asks for help. They said it a minute ago and couldn't hear themselves. He compares his role to a therapist's: the insight comes because someone is paying full attention, which most people rarely experience. After that, his job is to clear away the obstacles the artist has placed in their own path.

He has a good test for whether you're hearing yourself or hearing the crowd. If someone hands you two slices of pizza and asks which tastes better, you don't answer by guessing which one other people would choose. You know. The work is getting back to that level of honesty about bigger things.

Leaders could take this literally. Before offering a view in your next one-on-one, ask what the person wants, listen to the whole answer, then ask what's in the way.

What happened at 33

The section that moved me most was about his breakdown. Rubin was an adored only child who grew up believing he could do no wrong, and more than a decade of hits confirmed it. At 33, the executive who had championed him was forced out. The replacement phoned to say he didn't like Rubin's contract and they should talk when Rubin was back in California. That was the entire call. Rubin began having panic attacks. He couldn't sleep, felt sick constantly and thought he was dying. It went on for years, long after the contract problem was solved, through sessions with a therapist or healer five days a week and eventually antidepressants.

His own diagnosis is that he lacked the musculature. Nothing had ever gone wrong, so he had built no capacity for things going wrong. The research supports him. In a large national study published in 2010, Mark Seery and colleagues found that people who had lived through some adversity reported better mental health and higher life satisfaction than people who had lived through a great deal, and also better than people who had lived through none. An unbroken run of wins is poor training.

There was a second problem underneath. His sense of who he was had fused with his professional success, so a question about a contract landed as a question about his worth. He says elsewhere in the interview that any label you accept makes you smaller, and I suspect this is where he learned it. He wouldn't undo the experience, because it taught him how the struggling artists he works with feel. Before it, he says, he felt like Superman. Bartlett asks what he feels like now, and Rubin says tired. I laughed, and I believed him.

Where I'd push back

Rubin says rationality is overrated and that reason plays a small part in his decisions. He trusts what he calls a knowingness: the pull to lean forward, the wish to hear the song again. He credits it to something larger, which he is comfortable calling God. He also says science is only our current understanding until the next breakthrough negates everything before it.

That last claim is wrong. New theories mostly absorb old ones, and Newton's equations still get spacecraft to the Moon. But Rubin doesn't need the claim, because science explains the intuition he relies on rather well. Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein came from opposing camps on intuition and ended up agreeing on when to trust it: the environment has to be regular enough to learn from, and the person needs long practice with fast feedback. Rubin has spent forty years in studios, hearing within seconds whether a take works. His antenna is a superbly trained prediction system, and a feeling is how a prediction shows up before the reasons do. When he says the universe is guiding him and a neuroscientist says his brain is forecasting from deep experience, I hear two descriptions of one event. That's my reading and not settled science, but it carries a practical caution. The same feeling of certainty turns up in areas where we have no track record. Trust your gut where you've earned it.

AI and point of view

On AI, Rubin is relaxed. It's a powerful tool, and he notes that fire burned his house down and he still wouldn't ban fire. He doubts AI will replace artists, because what we want from an artist is a point of view, and a system that answers the same question differently every day doesn't have one. He places creativity in the idea more than the execution, pointing to Hitchcock, who storyboarded his films before shooting, and Warhol, whose assistants did much of the screen-printing. On that logic the prompt is the creative act, and more people will get to make things. He welcomes that.

Bartlett then tells a story that complicates it. He loved a song on Spotify for two months, discovered it was AI-generated, and liked it less. Rubin finds this odd, since you either like a song or you don't. The evidence suggests Bartlett's reaction is the normal one. In a 2023 study led by researchers at Duke, every painting shown was made by AI, and labels saying human-created or AI-created were assigned at random. The ones labelled as human work scored higher for liking, beauty, profundity and worth. We listen to the person as well as the song.

That leaves Rubin's own argument as the strongest one in the room. If point of view is the scarce thing, then knowing what you value and how you see the world becomes the most important asset you have, in art and everywhere else.

What I'm taking from it

The freedom Rubin describes rests on a lot of discipline. Eminem, he says, fills notebooks all day knowing almost none of it will be heard, the way a serious athlete trains through the off-season. Tom Petty spent more than two years on Wildflowers and would re-record a word if the s on a plural was hard to hear. Rubin calls himself lazy and a workaholic at once: most days he would prefer not to do what's in his calendar, and he turns up regardless. He had flown in from London the day before this interview, jetlagged, and still gave it nearly three hours.

Asked what makes great work repeatable, he says none of it is, except showing up and continuing until it's great. The numbers and the reception he treats as none of his business. His closing advice is to be true to yourself, work hard, keep going, and arrange your life so your art never has to carry more weight than it can bear.

I'd extend that beyond art. Whatever you do best, try to protect it from the job of proving your worth. Rubin learned that the hard way at 33, and he's still making records at 63.

The full conversation is on The Diary of a CEO. I've also written about the show's Jonathan Haidt episode on brain rot. JAŸ-Z in 8, the eight-part HBO series Rubin directed, premiered on 18 September.