Rick Rubin: How to Access Your Creativity

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman sits down with legendary music producer Rick Rubin, who has worked with artists from LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy to Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z and Adele, to talk about creativity and his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, which Huberman says he has read three times cover to cover. Rubin describes creativity less as an intellectual skill than as a practice of paying attention: following a surge of energy in the body, trusting your own taste over other people's opinions, staying open like a child, and treating the world as a constant source of clues. The two range across why language falls short of creativity, how perception and storytelling filter what we see, the four phases of a creative project and when deadlines help, self-doubt, the value of unpredictability, why Rubin loves professional wrestling, his morning and sleep routines, and his meditation practice.

The mood is relaxed, affectionate and philosophical, with plenty of laughter between two old friends. Huberman keeps pairing Rubin's intuitions with neuroscience (perception, dopamine, anxiety, confabulation), while Rubin answers simply and often returns to the idea that we know far less than we think. The conversation swings between abstract ideas about the nature of creativity and concrete habits anyone can borrow.

The Discussion Explores:

• Creativity as a feeling, not a formula: why language can't capture it and the body's surge of energy is the real guide.
• Taste and self-trust: choosing between two options, owning your preferences, and making art for yourself rather than for an audience.
• Beginner's eyes: why children are naturally creative and how rules, beliefs and past success narrow what we see.
• Perception and storytelling: limited sensory filters, the stories we invent to explain events, and why considering the opposite is powerful.
• Rubin's working process: total focus, disengaging between sessions, anxiety at the start of every project, and the four phases of creative work.
• Self-doubt, predictability and surprise: doubt as a useful check, and why real, unrepeatable moments move us.
• Wrestling, nature and nostalgia: why professional wrestling feels "more honest" than the world, how changing landscapes reset us, and living without looking back.
• Daily habits and meditation: morning sun and beach walks, capturing ideas, falling asleep to lectures, and mantra versus awareness meditation.

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Creativity Lives in Feeling, Not Language

Huberman opens by admitting that creativity is the hardest topic in neuroscience to pin down, and he describes Rubin's image of ideas as clouds: one shape now, another shape a moment later, gone in an hour. He links it to Joe Strummer's advice that if you have an idea you should write it down, because if you wait it will be gone. Rubin compares the creative process to dreaming: fragments that don't quite make sense, which come back as you write them down and may or may not make sense later. Making art, he says, means searching for a feeling in ourselves, whether excitement, curiosity or a sense of leaning forward, and following that energy in the body. For him it arrives as a surge of energy, first felt when he heard the Beatles at three or four years old. It is not an intellectual process, which is why it's so hard to talk about. When Huberman suggests there may not be a language for this, Rubin agrees that language is insufficient and says creativity is "closer to magic than it is science."

Children, he says, are more creative because they are open and carry no baggage: no belief system, no sense of how things are supposed to work. A three- or five-year-old singing sings in their own voice, while adults often imitate singers they admire before finding their own. Rubin had the advantage of making music with no experience, so he broke rules without knowing they were rules. He doesn't fully accept that there are no new ideas; what excites him is usually familiar elements joined together in a way he has never seen before.

Trusting Your Own Taste

In the studio, Rubin avoids relying on words. Rather than describing what he thinks, he waits until the artist and he can try something, then they listen and see whether it moves toward or away from what they want. He boils most creativity down to a simple test: if you taste two dishes, you usually know which one you want to finish. That is very different from wondering how something will perform on social media. The key skill, he says, is knowing how you feel in the face of other voices without second-guessing yourself. If everyone tells you something is A and to you it's B, an artist needs to be able to say it's B. Rules can be useful scaffolding, and self-imposed limits (painting only with green and red) can force new solutions, because "Sometimes more choices is not better." Digital tools that make any sound instantly available have not necessarily produced better work.

Rubin says he became an artist to show how he sees things. Undermining his taste for a commercial idea would defeat the purpose. He has only ever made things he loved or felt were missing as a fan. When he and the Beastie Boys made early hip-hop, the genre was a tiny underground scene, and they made it for their crazy friends with no thought of success. Huberman shares that one of his mentors said taste can't be taught, and the people least likely to develop it were perfectionists who filtered their work through others' feedback. He also recalls being teased for sagging skate pants until hip-hop made them fashionable, concluding that many people like what they like because of the certainty of people they admire. Rubin distinguishes making something to please others, which he calls a commercial skill, from making art. Feedback that arrives instantly online, he says, is just more information; the only part we control is our relationship to what we make, and anything that clouds that connection is probably bad for the art.

The Source, Nature and Changing Perspective

Rubin describes "the source" not as something only inside us but as the organizing principle of everything: why trees grow and mountains exist, and where every discovery, artwork and machine comes from. We are antennae that connect to it. Nature offers endless richness; you could never match the color of a single rock with paint. Novelty is what wakes us up: a microscope image of a drop of oil or a Hubble photo thrills us, but if we saw them every day we'd become numb, just as we are to the wonders we see daily. When a whale surfaces or a bird flies into the house, it breaks us out of our trance. He recounts a painting exercise in which students study a model in one room and paint from memory in another, capturing what stuck with them rather than tracing lines. To finish projects, he uses the next project as motivation: tinkering forever means never getting to make the thing you want to make next.

Huberman connects this to neuroscience. Richard Axel argues that everything the brain does is an abstraction. Rothko's paintings, by removing white and high-contrast elements, alter how we perceive color, much like the viral dress image, because color is always judged by contrast. The nervous system habituates to constant input, so a persistent smell fades and a steady image disappears without tiny eye movements. Rubin adds that blue is only blue in relation to yellow, and night exists only because of day, so considering the inverse of any idea is always worth doing. Huberman notes that psychology uses a similar practice, and that science works by testing whether hypotheses hold. He relays that neurosurgeon Eddie Chang once estimated, when Rubin asked him, that maybe half of what's in medical textbooks is right, with incalculable consequences. Rubin's view is that another superpower of artists is accepting that "we don't know anything."

Perception, Storytelling and Why Wrestling Is More Honest

Rubin explains that when something unfamiliar happens, like a man running down the street, we instantly invent a story ("he's chasing his dog"), relax, and later remember that story as what happened. Our whole lives, he says, are built on stories we made up without realizing it. Huberman adds that people confabulate constantly, most dramatically in dementia or Korsakoff syndrome, and that false memories can be drawn out of young people, which is why courts are cautious about repressed memories. We also have narrow sensory filters; the mantis shrimp, he says, sees many shades of red for every one we see. Rubin once texted Huberman that it's all lies, except nature, which is the only truth. Our resolution on everything is so low, he says, that there is great power in admitting we have no idea.

That leads to professional wrestling, which Rubin watches for hours a week. Everyone knows it's scripted, so in a sense it's more honest than the rest of the world: "Wrestling's real and the world's fake." It's more like ballet than sport, with everyone cooperating to put on the best show, and the fun lies in not knowing where reality ends, since real marriages, feuds and injuries weave into the storylines. It's charisma, storytelling and physical skill, and it relaxes him without requiring thought. Huberman frames this through dopamine: studies of basketball and comedy show dopamine spikes with surprise and shifting anticipation, and wrestling's unpredictability may deliver a similar pull. He suggests creative work resembles this, because you don't know where the nuggets of gold will appear but trust from experience that they will. Huberman's own resets have been chaotic punk shows and staring at aquariums, where you never know which way the fish will turn.

Rubin's Process: Total Focus, Then Let Go

When Rubin works on a project, whether for 20 minutes or five hours, he gives it total focus with no outside distractions. When he leaves, he tries not to think about it at all: no works in progress on the drive home, no listening during the day. Ideally he throws himself fully into other projects in between. He believes the subconscious keeps working, and that stewing over a problem is not how you solve it; you hold problems lightly. He admits to real anxiety at the start of every project, because he never knows what will happen and feels others may expect him to make it happen, even though something has always come, usually within the first day or two. Finding that first thread is like seeing "you are here" on a map whose routes are still unknown. Huberman offers that anxiety is a state of readiness, citing his former graduate student Lindsey Salay's work showing animals can be highly anxious while moving forward toward a goal.

In the studio, Rubin stays "in the cloud," only glancing at the technical side when something good is happening to make sure they are recording. He never interrupts a flow once it starts. Asked whether chaos is essential to great artists, he says not generally; most artists and comedians he knows are far more serious about their craft than they appear on stage. Huberman gives the example of Floyd Mayweather's playful public image masking brutally intense training, and Rubin notes it may be psychologically useful for opponents to believe you aren't working hard.

The Four Phases of a Project, and When Deadlines Help

Writing the book taught Rubin something new. He had treated every phase of work as open-ended play with no timeline. He now sees four phases. First is seed collecting, which never stops: noting anything that interests him, like wondering whether a movie exists on a subject and, if not, whether one should be made. Second is experimentation, where you are like a gardener who plants, waters and puts the seed in the sun but can't make it grow. Third is crafting, where you shape what has grown, trimming it or combining it with other material. Fourth is completion, the final edit into something you can share.

Deadlines can hurt the early phases but help once you are deep into crafting and completion. He recommends setting them for yourself rather than publicly, so that if you discover the work can become much better, you can break your own rule. He moves back and forth between phases and says projects have sometimes run longer than was good for them because he didn't know this. Most of the book, he explains, came from reverse engineering: looking back at decisions that worked, asking why, and extracting principles useful elsewhere. Huberman highlights the book's warning to be aware of the assumption that the way you work is the best way simply because you've done it before. Rubin adds that advice from experienced people reflects their data points, not yours. He was vegan for 22 years, later changed his diet several times, and found that an approach that supposedly worked for everyone didn't work for him before a different one did. Huberman offers the example of neuroscience's long-held belief that the brain stops being plastic around age 25, a dogma overturned by researchers like Michael Merzenich.

Self-Doubt, Real Moments and Clues Everywhere

Huberman reads the opening of the book's chapter on self-doubt: "self-doubt lives in all of us and while we may wish it was gone It is there to serve us." Rubin says doubt is a check on yourself. It can undermine you, or it can balance confidence; you can have all the confidence in the world and still ask whether this is the best it can be, and you can doubt your way to a masterpiece. Huberman observes that he has met far more successful people driven by self-doubt and pressure to repeat success than truly arrogant ones.

Rubin loves being surprised by music he doesn't know, such as classical, jazz and old recordings. He aims to capture real moments in the studio that sound like something truly happened and couldn't be repeated, which is how jazz works and why the Grateful Dead were thrilling live though their albums don't capture it. He also sees clues everywhere: a phrase, a coincidence, three people recommending the same thing. He believes the universe is on the side of creativity, and things will happen through you if you're paying attention, or through someone else if you're not. Huberman shares that he wrote Joe Strummer's line "no input no output" on his lab wall. Rubin says he stays open to ideas wherever they come from, whether Stanford or someone talking to himself on the street, and likes trying fringe things; Huberman cites acupuncture research, light therapies and Alia Crum's work on how belief shapes the effects of exercise. Rubin concludes that harnessing belief on your own behalf is healthy, because if you believe you can make something great, your chances are better. Everything he has made started with seeing or hearing something that let him see what he hadn't seen before. Being present matters more than being happy; pain matters mainly when it drowns out how the work makes you feel.

Nature, Nostalgia and Resetting

Rubin describes walking the same beach in Hawaii every day for a year, leaving for six months, and returning to find it completely transformed, whereas the backyard tree of his childhood home would probably look the same today. Both kinds of places are useful depending on what you want to open in your psyche. Asked about the New York of his youth, he says, "I'm not attached to anything in the past." He doesn't look back at all, only at the present and forward, and doesn't know why. Huberman calls that rare, since many people live with emotional anchors to the past. Wrestling works for Rubin like a palate cleanser; if he watches it before bed, he knows he'll sleep well. He avoids anything violent before sleep.

Morning Routine, Capturing Ideas and Meditation

Rubin wakes slowly and likes not engaging too much too soon. He tries to get into the sun as soon as possible for about an hour, then usually walks on the beach alone for an hour to 90 minutes, not looking at his phone but listening to lectures, podcasts or audiobooks. Ideas go into notes on his phone. Huberman prefers speaking ideas into voice memos and having a service like Rev turn them into transcripts, a trick he learned from Richard Axel. Rubin also falls asleep listening to a lecture, which gives his mind just enough focus to stop talking to itself. His notes are mostly for himself; he learns things because they interest him, and they often find their way into projects later.

He learned Transcendental Meditation at 14 and it remains his main practice, though he has tried others, including tai chi. He meditated for five or six years, stopped in college, and on returning realized how profound it had been. He explains two broad types. Focused practices (a mantra, the breath, or loving-kindness phrases) give the mind a single point so it stops its usual self-talk. Awareness meditation simply notices whatever arises, and he demonstrates on air: a slight ringing, cars in the distance, a feeling in his chest and jaw, warmth in the room, an itch on his shoulder, with no story attached. In neither form is he thinking. He usually meditates first thing, perhaps in the sun, and sometimes before dinner, and once meditated the whole flight from New York to Los Angeles. He also used a Monroe Institute surgical audio series before an operation and was so calm that staff assumed he had already been sedated. Meditation, he says, is available to anyone: learn a technique, show up and do it, and it works.

Conclusion

Rick Rubin's view of creativity is humble and practical: it isn't something you force but something you notice and follow. Trust the surge of energy in your body, choose what you genuinely prefer as simply as picking between two dishes, and make work for yourself rather than an imagined audience. Stay childlike and assume we know very little, since our senses are limited and our minds invent stories to explain everything. Protect your focus fiercely while working, let go completely afterwards, collect seeds constantly, experiment without deadlines, and set internal deadlines only when crafting and finishing. Treat self-doubt as a check rather than a verdict, look for clues everywhere, and reset with nature, meditation or even professional wrestling. As Huberman puts it through Strummer's law, there's no output without input, and Rubin's whole approach is a way of paying closer attention to the input.

This is a summary of "Rick Rubin: How to Access Your Creativity" from Huberman Lab, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.