Rick Rubin

Rubin was born in 1963 in Lido Beach on Long Island, New York; he later said it was close to Manhattan yet had the beach and the peace of small-town living. He became obsessed with arena rock at 13, turned to punk by high school, and later fell for hip-hop, which at the time could only be heard at one club in New York. He had already founded his own record label in high school.⁠[1][1][2][1]

Rubin majored in philosophy at New York University. Feeling that the hip-hop records being released did not sound like the club, at 18, as an NYU freshman, he made a single himself with T La Rock, “It’s Yours”; the Def Jam address printed on the record was his NYU dorm, 5 University Place. The record drew demo submissions, including from a teenage LL Cool J, and Rubin went on to produce LL Cool J’s first record.⁠[1][2][2][3][3]

He ran Def Jam Recordings with music manager Russell Simmons, with his dorm room as its headquarters. From the mid-1980s, Def Jam released work by LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Slayer, Public Enemy, and others, becoming one of the most influential record labels. Rubin’s credit on these records did not say “produced by” but “reduced by.”⁠[3][4][2]

In the 1980s, Rubin produced records both for emerging New York rappers and for heavy rock bands, often bringing together genres that had belonged to separate worlds. In 1986 alone, he produced Run-DMC’s Raising Hell, Slayer’s Reign in Blood, Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill, and Original Concept’s Can You Feel It. He believed punk and hip-hop followed similar trajectories: both were made by young people without virtuoso skill, and both were about ideas more than musicianship.⁠[4][4][4]

In 1988, Rubin left Def Jam and moved to California, where he founded a new record label, Def American Recordings.⁠[3][1]

In the 1990s, Rubin’s range of collaborations widened further: he worked frequently with Red Hot Chili Peppers and also produced records for Mick Jagger, Tom Petty, and the Spice Girls’ Mel C; in 1993 he recorded the album Wildflowers with Tom Petty. His collaborators in the 2000s included Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Limp Bizkit, and the Chicks, and in the 2010s Adele, Lana Del Rey, and Kanye West (Ye). He has said his role is like that of a coach, so he can work on types of music he does not usually listen to.⁠[4][4][4][4]

Rubin first saw Johnny Cash perform at a dinner theater in Orange County; he felt the world had passed Cash by, and that Cash believed so too. The two then spent time listening to music Cash loved and built a working partnership, recording seven albums together until Cash’s death in 2003 and reviving the veteran country singer’s career. In 2002 the pair recorded a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” which as of January 2023 remained Cash’s most-listened-to work on Spotify.⁠[3][3][3][4][3]

From 2007 to 2013, Rubin was co-head of Columbia Records, overseeing the label’s transition into the digital era. In 2007, he was named to Time magazine’s annual “TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry 100” list of the most influential people.⁠[4][5]

In 2011, Rubin purchased the Shangri-La recording studio in Malibu, California.⁠[3][6][6]

In February 2014, Rubin received the Lifetime of Harmony Award from the David Lynch Foundation. He was initially reluctant to accept it and agreed only after Lynch convinced him that it would help promote transcendental meditation; at the ceremony he did not go onstage, and Lynch brought the award to his table in the audience. His former Def Jam partner Russell Simmons spoke at the ceremony.⁠[7][7][7]

In July 2021, McCartney 3,2,1, a six-part docuseries of conversations between Rubin and Paul McCartney, premiered on Hulu, with the two exploring McCartney’s work with The Beatles, Wings, and as a solo artist; Rubin was also an executive producer of the series. That same month, Rubin reached a partnership with Endeavor Content’s Film 45 to expand Shangri La Studios’ business into film and television.⁠[6][8][6][6]

On February 11, 2022, Rubin announced that he would publish his first book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. He said: “I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.”⁠[4][4]

In 2023, Penguin Press published The Creative Act: A Way of Being, for which Rubin spent eight years distilling what he had learned from helping artists. He said he wrote the book to distill what happens in the studio and share it with others, not to write a memoir of celebrity anecdotes. In the book he writes that a creative act can be a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, or a new route home to avoid a traffic jam. On January 15 of that year, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired Anderson Cooper’s interview with him at Shangri-La.⁠[1][1][9][1][3]

In May 2025, Rubin and the artificial intelligence company AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry launched The Way of Code, an interactive digital work modeled on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and divided into 81 short chapters that reinterpret “vibe coding” through Taoist thought; each chapter is accompanied by artwork generated with Anthropic’s AI model Claude, and readers can also modify the artwork using Claude.⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

In April 2026, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced that year’s inductees, with Rubin, Linda Creed, Arif Mardin, and Jimmy Miller to receive the Musical Excellence Award; the ceremony was scheduled for November 14 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.⁠[11][11]

On May 24, 2026, David Senra’s podcast released an interview with Rubin covering his founding of Def Jam in a dorm room and his “reduced by” approach to production. On the show he described himself as a “lazy workaholic.”⁠[2][2][2]

Rubin’s method is to strip a work down until what remains has no place to hide, and then protect the inspiration that appears. He has applied this approach to many artists, including Jay-Z, Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eminem, The Strokes, Metallica, Kanye West, and Tom Petty. He believes that most people in collaborations want their own idea to win, but that this is not a good collaboration.⁠[2][2][9]

Rubin produced The Strokes’ album The New Abnormal, which won a Grammy Award. As of 2022, he had won nine Grammy Awards, covering his work with Johnny Cash, the Chicks, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, and The Strokes, as well as recognition of his production work generally.⁠[6][4]