Rick Rubin Told Andrew Huberman to Scrap His Book. Three Times.

Andrew Huberman showed up to The Joe Rogan Experience carrying what Joe Rogan called a "thick-ass book." Huberman had a simpler description: a doorstop, or a weapon. What he didn't have, for most of eight years, was an ending — because Rick Rubin kept sending him back to the beginning.

The book started small, Huberman explained: a manual on the autonomic nervous system, covering stress, sleep, and focus. Then it grew. Then it got torn apart. Huberman would bring drafts to Rubin, the famously spare, famously intense record producer, and ask what he thought. The answer, more than once, was total demolition.

"He just goes, scrape it, man."

Huberman said he'd push back — he'd already told his publisher he was releasing it — and Rubin didn't care. He wanted him to love it first.

The process repeated itself summer after summer. Huberman would visit Rubin in Europe, and the two would supposedly sit down to read pages together. In practice, Huberman said, almost none of the actual reading happened. Instead Rubin would watch him talk about the material and gauge his reaction to it — reading the writer more than the writing. The verdict kept coming back the same.

"It's not ready. You're not ready."

It finally cracked this year, and not gently. Huberman and his girlfriend went to Europe for a friend's wedding — what he called a "quote unquote vacation" — and he spent it doing edits from 9 p.m. to 2:30 in the morning every night, working while she slept, catching a few hours before doing it again. He said he owes her a real vacation now. When they stopped by Rubin's afterward and Huberman told him it was done, Rubin didn't need convincing. He just felt it.

That, Huberman said, is the whole Rick Rubin experience — a guy who seems to operate on some frequency nobody else can pick up, constantly tuned in to other people's work and where they actually stand with it.

"He's such a fucking weirdo."

Rogan, who has known Rubin for years through music, backed it up instantly: that's him all day, every day, he said, whether it's producing a record or just sitting with a friend's manuscript. Rogan brought up watching Rubin make a Red Hot Chili Peppers album inside a mansion instead of a studio, chasing the sound of the house itself — the same instinct, Rogan said, that Rubin brings to any project, book or record. He's not really a tastemaker, Rogan argued. He's something closer to an analyst of realness, someone who can tell whether a thing is true before anyone else can name why.

Huberman didn't come on the show to promote Rubin's own project, but he mentioned it anyway: a documentary Rubin made with Jay-Z, out the following week, of the two of them simply sitting in a European monument and listening to music together. Fitting, given the story Huberman had just told — eight years of a friend refusing to let him call something finished until it actually was.

Heard on The Joe Rogan Experience — #2553 - Andrew Huberman (2026-09-14).