The Singular Life of Rick Rubin

**David Senra** (0:00)
I just made an episode about Rick Rubin's ideas on creativity and how to do great work over and over again for a long period of time. To prepare for that episode, I actually re-listened to an episode that I made about the Singular Life story of Rick Rubin a few years ago. There were so many interesting ideas and stories in that episode that I re-listened to it twice. So I'm going to re-play that episode for you now. Before I do, I wanna remind you about the great sponsors and supporters of Founders. The first one is Ramp. Ramp helps your business save both time and money, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. I run my business on Ramp and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs that I know. Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help make your business stronger and more efficient. The next company I wanna tell you about is Vanta. Vanta helps your company automate compliance, manage risk and build trust. Many companies won't sign contracts unless you're certified and this is causing you to lose out on sales. That is why the average Vanta customer reports a 526% return on investment after becoming a Vanta customer. Vanta will help your company win trust, close deals and stay secure faster and with less effort. Make sure you go to vanta.com/founders and you will get $1,000 off. That is vanta.com/founders.
And finally, Collateral helps you improve the way your company tells its own story. Collateral transforms your complex ideas into compelling narratives. Collateral crafts institutional grade marketing collateral for all types of companies by using Collateral. You improve the way that your company tells its own story. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it. And you can do that by going to collateral.com. And now here is the life story of Rick Rubin. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
There's no greater enigma than Rick Rubin working in record production today. His career began in hip hop. He co-founded Def Jam Records with Russell Simmons in 1984
He produced Rap's first number one album and was widely credited for launching hip hop as a viable commercial medium. Refusing to play it safe, Rubin jumped ship from rap to metal, leaving Def Jam to found another record label, Def American, where he signed and produced groundbreaking acts like Slayer. After his work on the hugely successful Red Hot Chili Peppers acclaimed album Blood Sugar Sex Magic, Rubin was only seven years into his career and already a living legend. Though he worked with legends like Mick Jagger, AC DC and Tom Petty in the early 1990s, it was his recordings with Johnny Cash that still stand out as his most astonishing and studied collaboration. By the turn of the century, Rubin had invented, reinvented or redefined so many musical genres that there was no way to categorize his style. Rolling Stones called him the most successful producer of any genre. But the praise and album sales didn't shake Rubin's focus as he dedicated himself to artist after artist. Grammy nominations and awards poured in, including winning producer of the year. But Rick Rubin, workaholic and recluse, found himself too busy to attend. That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Rick Rubin, In The Studio, and it's written by Jake Brown. This book wasn't even on my radar. A few weeks ago, I did a podcast on Jay-Z. It's episode number 238, and in that podcast, I talked about Jay-Z studying and working with Rick Rubin, and he said something that I thought was interesting. He's like, Rick ain't normal. He is strange by strange standards. Rick's 20 years into his career and dude has not changed. He's got his own vibe. You got to love him for that. And so after that episode came out, a listener contacted me and they're like, hey, you should check out Lex Friedman's podcast. He just released with Rick Rubin, and I started watching it and I absolutely loved it. And I realized as I was taking notes, listening to that episode, I was like, I need to find a biography of Rick Rubin immediately. So I'm working off of Rick Rubin's biography, the one I just read from you or read apart to you from. I took notes on Lex Friedman's podcast. I'm going to link all this below in the show notes, but below the link to the book, if you want to buy the book. But I used Lex Friedman's podcast. I took notes on that. Peter Attia's podcast, which I'll link to. And then I watched a three part, excuse me, a four part documentary on Rick Rubin's studio in Malibu. It's on Showtime. It's called Shangri-La. And then I also spent several hours listening to Rick's own podcast. I didn't even know he had a podcast, and it's actually really, really good. It's called Broken Record. And listening to him speak for so many hours actually enhanced my understanding and reading of his biography, because Rick, just like a ton of the other founders that you and I have said in the podcast, they identify a handful of core beliefs that's really important to their philosophy on work and life, and they repeat them over and over again. So I want to jump right into the book, and one of his core beliefs is in the beauty of simplicity. In fact, it's repeated so much. I had this idea of Da Vinci. If Leonardo Da Vinci was able to speak to Rick Rubin and say and repeat his one of his most famous quotes, which is simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, I think Rick would have smiled and nodded his head. And so we go to the first chapter. It's called Production by Reduction. This is one of my favorite ideas of Rick Rubin's. So it says, when Rick enters the studio, his goal is to record music in, quote, its most basic and purest form. No extra bells and whistles, all wheat, no chaff. And this is what he says, when I started producing, minimalism was my thing. My first record actually says, instead of produced by Rick Rubin, it says reduced by Rick Rubin. And he was producing that album when he was around 18 years old. Def Jam, the company he founds, which is probably the most iconic hip hop label of all time, was actually founded by Rick Rubin in his dorm room at NYU. So we're going to get it to a lot of the early history because it's just fascinating. It's the exact equivalent of like the Silicon Valley, starting your company out of your garage. He just happened to do it in the dorm room. Going back to Rick Rubin's quote, it's still a natural part of me not to have a lot of extra stuff involved that doesn't add to the production and try to get to the essence of what the music is. You want to feel like you have a relationship with the artist when you're done listening to their record. And then Rick describes how he works. And when I read this paragraph, the thing that jumped out to me most was, this is exactly like Steve Jobs and his hero, Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, how they would talk about seeing the finished product first in their mind and then working backwards from that. Be like, okay, that's the finished state. Now I just have to go through the steps to get there. And I'm going to read a section of this famous interview. But let me read what Rick says about this here. He says, finding the potential and seeing how to realize it can be the best part. And then the actual work of having to get there is just going through the process. Once you hear it in your head, it's like being a carpenter, trying to build the thing when you already know what it is. So that's the key. You're trying to build the thing when you already know what it is. And so there's this famous meeting that happens when Steve Jobs still is in his 20s. Edwin Land, I think, is in his 70s at this point. Steve Jobs borrowed a lot of ideas from other people. Obviously, he had this deep historical knowledge and he used that deep historical knowledge and influenced the work in building Apple and Pixar and everything else that he was involved in. But the one person he took the most ideas from was undoubtedly Edwin Land. And so let me read this excerpt from this meeting that they were having. It says, Dr. Land was saying, I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one. And Steve said, yes, that's exactly the way I saw the Macintosh. He said, if I was asked, if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator, what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn't have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it. So I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say, now what do you think? And then this next sentence, I think, is the most important part. And it really, from spending an unbelievable amount of hours, probably close to 40 hours studying Rick Rubin in the last couple of days, I think this gets to his essence. Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but to discover them. Both of them said these products have always existed. It's just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed. It is a matter of discovery. Back to the book, this is where Rick describes, like what exactly do you bring to, like you're a producer but he's not a technical producer. Really when he describes the role that he plays with the bands and the artists and the rappers and the musicians that he works with, I'm like, oh, he's the founder. He's playing the role of the founder. Check this out. Listen to what he says and I think it makes sense to you. He says, it's almost more like I join a band when I produce a record, but I'm unlike all the other members of the band who each have their own personal agenda. The bass player is concerned about the bass part. Everyone else is concerned about their own part. I'm the only member of the band that doesn't care about any of those particulars. I just care that the whole thing is as good as it can be. My goal is to just get out of the way and let the people I'm working with be the best versions of themselves.