Make It Indefensible

Rick Rubin has been making things for 40 years, starting with music as a hobby and co-founding Def Jam Records as a young man. He has worked with Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Adele, Kanye West, Jay-Z, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and System of a Down, and he now also coaches filmmakers and startup founders looking for creative solutions. His 2023 book The Creative Act took about 8 years to write and is organized into 78 "areas of thought," and he followed it with The Way of Code, an adaptation of the Tao for vibe coding. He learned Transcendental Meditation at 14, went through a depression lasting years at 33 after a new label boss questioned his deal, and lost his Malibu home to a fire 8 years ago. These signals are from Rick Rubin's interview with Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO.

1. The Indefensible Standard. Rubin says the best work is indefensible: taken so far that you can't explain or justify it. In his view reason is "a tiny sliver of how decisions get made," and he trusts intuition far more. When hundreds of friends sent him a meme tying his photo to Andrej Karpathy's new term "vibe coding," he tweeted a joke ("tools will come, tools will go, only the vibe coder remains") that drew 1.5 million views against his usual 10,000 to 20,000. He then put his professional work aside to write a book on vibe coding, a choice he says he still can't defend.
2. No Near-Term Incentives. "We never consider near-term incentive ever at any point in time. Never once," Rubin says. He calls Kanye West's Yeezus an intentional anti-hip-hop album that went as far into indefensible territory as the team could take it. With Linkin Park, he says the band passed on an easy fourth rap-rock album that fans would have loved and went looking for its next sound. Half the fans left, new ones arrived, and the band avoided riding a dying genre to its end.
3. Nothing Like the Radio. The president of Def Jam, the label Rubin founded, heard 99 Problems and said it would never be a single because it didn't sound like anything on the radio. That difference is why it hit so hard once it got airplay. Kevin Weatherly at KROQ told Rubin he would never play System of a Down because their song "Sugar" sounded insane. A year later it was the station's most requested song, and Rubin recently watched the band sell out an 80,000-seat Paris stadium two nights in a row.
4. Back the Person. Rubin says a venture capitalist friend told him he always invests in the founder, whatever the business, and Rubin backs artists the same way, judging how they see music more than any one song. He passed on The Strokes twice, about 15 and 12 years ago, because their polished demos gave him no way in. The third time they sent their worst demos ever, including a 20-second voice note, and he could hear what the song could become. His signal is physical: you lean forward, you want to hear it again, and you feel curious about where it goes.
5. The Pizza Test. Rubin describes honest taste as tasting two slices of pizza and saying which one you like better. "I have the confidence that I don't like the pizza," he says, and his verdict means no more than that. He turned down producing Guns N' Roses' first album after seeing them as a hair band in a basement club with about 30 people, and he once told an artist a song didn't fit the album, which then became a big hit. If an artist truly believes something is great, he supports putting it out, even when he doesn't like it himself.
6. Deep Listening. Rubin says he never tries to persuade an artist of anything. He asks them to play their favorite work, then asks what they like about it, how it felt to make, and what happens when they play it for a friend. Artists often tell him exactly what they want to do, then say they have no idea what to do. He compares the job to therapy: most people have never been deeply heard, and once they are, his work is removing the roadblocks they put in their own way.
7. Deadlines After the Breakthrough. Rubin won't set a deadline until a project is about 90% done and the team knows what it's making. He splits creative work into 4 phases (seed, experimentation, crafting and finishing) and says the first 3 take as long as they take. You might set out to make a blue statue and end up with a red painting. Tom Petty spent about 2.5 years on Wildflowers, which Rubin separates from procrastination: procrastinators are usually afraid to release, and the longer they wait, the harder it gets.
8. Show Up Until It's Great. "None of this is repeatable," Rubin says, except showing up and continuing until the work is great. After a week recording with Neil Young, he thought the band might never be able to play the songs, yet nearly the whole album came from that first week once they listened back with fresh ears. With Johnny Cash, two full studio bands failed to beat the living-room recordings they made only to get to know each other, so those went out instead. Eminem fills notebooks that he says 99% of no one will ever see, because he trains like an athlete in the offseason.
9. The Prompt Holds the Art. Rubin says AI has no point of view: it is the collected ideas that already exist, and it may give a different answer to the same question each day. He places creativity in the idea, pointing to Alfred Hitchcock's frame-by-frame storyboards, Wes Anderson's pre-built mockups and Andy Warhol's screen prints, which studio assistants made while Warhol directed. "The prompt is where the creativity is," he says. He expects AI to lower the barrier so people who can't draw or play an instrument can create, and he can see it as a sample source, the way hip-hop producers once dug through old records for a single break.
10. Read Far Outside. Rubin's advice to someone who reads mostly business and self-help books is to go to museums, see the greatest films, and read old books before new ones, since everyone reading the same books ends up with the same perspective. If three people recommend a book, he says, read it. His central lesson from the Tao is "the soft overcomes the hard," along with the idea that doing nothing is often the best action, as in Napoleon telling aides with emergencies to come back in 2 weeks. He warns that people give advice based on their own story, so he gathers conflicting views until he knows the right answer for himself.
11. Quitting Opens Space. When Cristal's leadership made disparaging remarks about hip-hop fans, Jay-Z dropped the brand he had made popular in hip-hop, with no plan to start his own. Almost at once someone brought him a gold bottle for a new champagne, Ace of Spades, and Bartlett puts the value of Jay-Z's stake at $630 million when he sold. Rubin says ending what isn't working creates a vacuum the right thing can fill, and he has seen that with people leaving relationships, careers and a senior role at a big tech company. He calls stepping away "an empowering thing" and says starting over often takes less money than people expect.
12. An Offering to God. Once Rubin and an artist both like something enough to release it, he moves on, and he treats how the world responds as "none of my business." If an artist in the studio says a track could be a single, he shuts the conversation down because it undermines a delicate process. A few years ago, sitting on a lifeguard chair in Hawaii, he realized he had always been making the work as an offering to God. "There's no metric that competes with that," he says, and when listeners love it, he treats that as a bonus.

Watch the full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_GiFiHXJ6g.