How to Access Your Creativity | Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin and Andrew Huberman discuss the nature of creativity, framing it as closer to magic than science and something fed by attention to the outside world rather than generated purely from within. They cover Rubin's working process, including how he dedicates total focus to a project then fully disengages, lets the subconscious work, and trusts a thread to appear. The conversation ranges across the limits of human perception, how the brain confabulates stories, the value of considering the opposite, and the four phases of creative work. It closes with discussion of self-doubt, belief effects, meditation, and Rubin's daily routine of sun, beach walks, and listening to unfamiliar music.

• Rubin claims language is insufficient to capture creativity: 'It's closer to magic than it is science.'
  00:14:47
• Reveals that when making Licensed to Ill, they weren't paying attention to whether people would like it at all because hip hop was a tiny underground thing nobody thought would matter.
  00:38:37
• Argues pro wrestling is more honest than the real world: 'Wrestling's real, and the world's fake,' because we know it's a performance.
  01:31:21
• Says he is not attached to the past at all: 'I don't look back at all. Only present and forward.'
  01:58:36
• Describes discovering the phases of creative work while writing the book, learning that deadlines are fine in the completion phase but harmful earlier.
  02:08:49
• Shares he was vegan for 22 years before switching to animal protein and changing his diet, using it to argue what works for one person may not work for another.
  02:28:31
• Admits when he started writing the book he didn't know hardly any of the things in it; the principles were reverse-engineered from his instincts.
  02:14:35
• Recounts going so deep into meditation before surgery that staff thought he had already been given the sedative when he hadn't.
  02:55:00

• Rubin compares creative ideas to dreams: abstract images you can write down that may only make sense later, if ever.
  00:11:03
• Rubin first felt the bodily 'surge of energy' of creativity hearing the Beatles at age three or four.
  00:20:39
• A neurosurgeon told them roughly half of what's in current medical textbooks may be inaccurate, with incalculable consequences.
  00:35:27
• You can never match a paint color to a real rock because nature holds too much variation in a single color.
  00:46:29
• Courts now treat repressed memories cautiously because false memories can be implanted, especially in young people.
  01:26:31
• A mantis shrimp sees about 67 shades of red for every one shade humans can see.
  01:26:31
• Dopamine release while watching sport spikes at moments of unexpected switches, like an unanticipated half-court shot.
  01:41:50
• Huberman learned the trick of dictating manuscripts by voice from Nobel laureate Richard Axel, who paces his office talking into his phone.
  02:05:01
• Rubin warns that just because a method gave you a good outcome doesn't mean it's the right way, only 'a way' that happened to work.
  02:29:35
• The long-held 'rule' that the brain stops changing after age 25 turned out to be wrong; plasticity exists throughout the lifespan.
  02:30:06