Jimmy Iovine, Interscope Records & Beats by Dre

[BELL RINGING] I want to start with what you were just saying before you started recording. I was like, Rob, hurry up and run the tape. You said, we live in a corny world. We've gone from fame replacing great, right? So it became more important at one point to be famous than to be great. Because there's a currency. You have to be great at one time to get a record deal, to do all that stuff. And then I sort of dwindle as time went on, which is fine. But it is absolutely replaced great. And what you can do on the internet and market yourself and all this other stuff, because you can make a lot of money just being famous. But now it's taken another leap, which is fascinating. It's gone to attention. And sometimes that leads or contributes to a very corny world. I think social media has the biggest impact that I've seen in my lifetime. And that contributes to people being corny for attention on social media, do you think? Yeah. Well, because you can make money. And the people that don't need money want attention. And they want to be the top of the news or the viral. Most of my friends, if they go viral, they're devastated. Do you know what I'm saying? They're like, oh, shit. Well, they don't even know. I think not even knowing would be the place that I would aspire to be. Like, I want to make great work. Obviously, I'm public facing because I happen to be of self-fifth podcasts. I don't want to make some of the best podcasts in the world. But I try to just-- I mean, it comes from you. I did this video. I obviously did the founders episode on you, because you've been one of the people I most admire for a long period of time. And we did this clip that got almost like 2 million views of your advice about why do they horses have blinders on them. And it's one of my favorite things. Every time I post it, it still resonates. And I post things to remind myself where it's like, OK, I'm chasing after greatness, right? And it doesn't matter. I can't look left. And I can't look right and worry about what other people are doing. This is one of the things I most admire about you. We spent a few hours together at your house to show you. We were very kind and invited over there again. And you pulled up this insane video from you from 2004, which is four or five years before Spotify was founded. And you essentially were talking about what you saw as the technological shift happening in the music industry. What was that video about? I always wanted an inescope to move laterally. I didn't want to keep drilling the same hole. I hate drilling the same hole. Just that's just me. I get bored drilling the same hole. That's kind of why I've jumped around industries a little bit and about to learn on the fly a lot. So but that was about around 2000. We had this little TV show called Jimmy and Dunx Farm Club. It was about uploading your music to Inescope. And we would put you on our TV show. And it was fantastic. And it worked. And what I really wanted to do was have a music streaming service of all you can eat. But this was before it was invented. There wasn't. There wasn't. You were talking about the ideal situation before it was actually founded. I see online all the time. People talk about shit before it happens. But that isn't that's 10% of the game. The game is getting it right. My space was ahead of its time, but it lost the race. So I was very fortunate to be at least early enough to have Apple music get on the board. I had beats music and I went to Apple music. So we at least we became number two. Daniel, who was extraordinary, had the wherewithal and the ability to get the licenses from a record business that didn't understand at all what he was talking about. The fact that he wrestled those licenses out. It's so, I mean, you could prove it. Because if you look at those deals, those deals are reflective of the iTunes download market, 7-E30. That was the same business as the download market. So he just copied that, which is not a great bit model for that. Why? Because you have not enough money in the streaming service can order for it to really live. So they got to now go out and find different versions of revenue, right? And they pay 70% or whatever it is now 72%, 70%, 60. I don't know what the negotiations have been since then. And instruction in a really odd way, because let's say for example, you're married, you have two kids, and you have a family plan. And you and your wife play the clash, the police, et cetera. But your kids play Drake and Kendrick Lamar all day. Most of the money from your house goes to Drake and Kendrick Lamar. What you're hearing about is that the artists are like, they used to be able to earn a living like that. But now, unless you're in that top chunk of heavy, heavy, heavy, streaming, the money is not really meaningful. So that's a problem they have to fix. You know, there's no question about that. But there's a lot wrong with streaming in my opinion. You know, it's one dimensional. It's an ATM machine. You put your money in, you get your music. They don't do anything for the artist. See, the artists want to communicate with their fans. Period. That's what they want. They want to communicate. They want to market themselves. And the streaming services are still saying, we'll put you on our list if you're nice to us. Or if you like us, that's bullshit. You gotta allow them to have your audience and let them breed, which is what, you know, not for philanthropic reasons, but this is what TikTok does. That's what Instagram does. You can somewhat promote yourself. So the streaming services, to me, are minutes away from being obsolete because of that. You can't rub against the artists like that. You just can't. You gotta give them what they want. They're driving this ship. I learned that in 1973. I came from Red Hood, Brooklyn. My dad was a long shaman. I walked in the studio with John Lennon. I did three albums with him, and I got my own apartment. I realized, okay, the rest of my life, I'm gonna try to meet, maybe not John Lennon, but people that can do this in real talent, and my life is gonna be okay. All I gotta do is not get thrown out of the fucking room. - And you looked at it even back then as like an active service to the artists that you're working with? - Not for that person on the other end of the glass. What the hell do I know how to do? - You have this great line in the Defying Ones, which I've told you, I've watched part at least 10 times, and you're like 99% of this when people say, "Oh, I did this, I did that." And the music is like, "It's complete bullshit. "It all comes down to the artists that you're working with." - Yeah, and today, by the way, a lot of artists are producers. Like Dr. Dre, Timberland, and some of the younger guys, which I'm just not that familiar with, I've been out of the music business awhile. They write the songs, they make the record, but in my day, 80% of it was the artists. Bruce Bringsden wrote the songs, had the idea, had the vision, and you helped. So that's what I was coming from. - There's a great point. I'm glad you brought up Bruce, 'cause me and you were talking about that, yes, I had told you I'd been going through it. I went to his autobiography, and I really think that book changed my life in many ways. I watched one of your interviews, I said one of the best pieces of the device that you ever got was from John Landau, 'cause they were working you like a dog, and you were thinking about like leaving, and he's like, let me tell you, he's like, stay in the saddle. - Well, Bruce was torturing me. He was, he says that, he said himself in an interview, I think maybe in that documentary. He said, an artist needs to be indulged. But I know something like that, when you were striving for something, well, the truth was, is that we would try to do something, and I couldn't get it right, and it took three weeks to get like a drum sound, like a simple thing, you know? But it was really hard, and I got, I let my pride, and they brought somebody into help, and I let my pride get in the way. So I went to John Landau, and he said, I'm gonna tell you something, you didn't learn in that neighborhood of yours, your mother and father didn't, 'cause he knew my family, my mother and father didn't tell you this, this is not about you. This is about Bruce Brainstine and about the record we're making. And I'll tell you from the rest of my life, that just stopped me in my tracks. And because the rest of my life, if you apply, this is not about me, you really, you could really get somewhere, even if you're not that good, just being humble enough to say that, and not thinking that because you're one success that you're, you know, the Beatles, or Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs, or whatever, you know, is that it's not about you. And if you could follow that, it's really good. One of my favorite lines from the History of Entrepreneurship actually comes from Henry Ford, and he said that, he's like, money comes naturally as a result of service. And some of my favorite entrepreneurs when I'm trying to do my life too, is it's like, I'm just gonna focus on making something valuable that makes somebody else's life better, and so create like an act of service. And then once you do that, just try to serve more people, right? Spread the product, the service, in this case, the podcast, to as many people, and then like, the squirrel take care of itself. I won't worry about, you know, the value coming back to me. - The whole thing you gotta do is, look, there's a certain amount of fainting humility, that's good, and it works, if you practice it long enough, you're actually become somewhat humble. - Do you consider yourself a humble person? - I think I have a humble side. Say more about that. I do, well, you know, I come from a family, my father was a humble guy. He was a dog worker, a long shroom, and manual labor, not, you know, I don't know a lot of people whose father has really worked. Manual labor, you know, where if it's 90 degrees down the pier, it's 120 in the hole of the ship. You know, when you carry the coffee bags, they're 100 pound of the piece, right? All day. So, but he had pride, but he was humble. And if you're willing to give yourself up for a greater cause, and in my case, when I was younger, it was an album, right? If you're willing to do that, I set you a bullshit aside to get someone else's vision. It takes humility to do that. And if you're truly doing that, yeah, I have some humility that I'm proud of, you know? - One of the things I love most about Jimmy Evien is the fact that he spent his career working with the very best people he can. People like John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bono, Dr. Dre, Trent Rezner, M&M, and Steve Jobs, Jimmy knew, just like Steve Jobs knew, just like Jeff Bezos knew, that you always bet on talent. In fact, Steve Jobs said so. He said that you must find the extraordinary people and that a small team of A-Players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. Jeff Bezos set the tone from his very first shareholder letter when he said that setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success. You must build a team that pursues the A-Players. That is exactly what Jimmy Evien did and that is exactly what Ramp did. 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Make a wise decision by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money today. That is ramp.com. Every single person that I've either read about that work with you or has given interviews, they say that you want Jimmy in the room because he'll tell you the truth. Yeah, I want to tell the story because it's hilarious and then I want to ask you about this. I'm reading, you know, Bruce me seeing 600 page autobiography. The book's so big you can work out with a goddamn thing. And there's a story in there where he's struggling and he's trying to do something new and he's in LA and he invents like my good friend Jimmy Iveen comes over. We play this new album for him and no one else is heard. He said you sat there silently for 80 minutes, he turns it off and then you just say one thing goes, so when are you going to record the vocals? 'Cause the music was so loud. But he said he goes, that's why you want Jimmy in the room because he'll tell you the truth. I gave me the setting. He was doing the album for about two years and was the river. And they worked really, really hard on that. And he was doing it but because I engineered his album, I knew he had a tendency to bury the vocal, right? And I knew those guys really well. I knew Landown Bruce pretty well by then. Actually, sorry, he didn't tell which was funny. His Tom Petty was sitting next to me. Oh, I didn't know what that was. 'Cause I was producing Tom Petty at the time. We went over and visited, right? So he plays us a double album. And the vocal was buried. So I just said to myself, I got one line at the penetrates. I saw Bruce's face and he was serious at the fucking heart attack. You know what I mean? He's at the end of an album, he's exhausted. So I just said, when you're going to sing it, right? And it was very funny, but it was very clear. And they went back in and they remixed the whole album which was the right thing to do. But where did you get the self-confidence? Because you were, how old were you when you started working with John Lennon in '21? - '21. - Yeah. You told him that you're two. Like where did that come from? Because not out of arrogance or confidence, it's comfort. My father really drilled in me from what I was a little kid that wherever you go, the place is better because you're there because you're a decent person. He used you're a humble person, you're a decent person, you're a good person. And you're not gonna screw anybody in his language, right? So whatever I went in my life, I always feel comfortable, very insecure in my personal life, which I've grown out of in the list that that 72, hello. Right, thank God. What the fuck wants to die that insecure, right? But in work, I always had a certain amount of confidence because it came natural to me. I nothing came natural to me before that. But when I set out a console and I put the faders up, the balance came very, very naturally and people liked it. So that's kind of where I got some of the confidence from. But you know, I just, I don't know, I was always willing to say what I felt about music and to anybody at any time. You know, and I, I mean, what's the point of asking me a question if I'm not supposed to give you my answer? I don't understand that philosophy. It's one of the funny things I've played this clip for you. Because one second. No, go for it. One of the reasons is I really don't think I walk and try to get you to like me. 'Cause I believe you do. Same or about this. You told me this yesterday. I feel the same way by the way. Explain. I mean, I mean, that shouldn't be saladigo. It's just to go, let me tell you the people that walk in a room when you meet a lot of angry people, they think people aren't gonna like them. And it's not true. So I'm not saying that I'm arrogant. What I'm saying is that I, they were a lot of people that are very defensive and aggressive because they think people don't like them. And you know that. We know a lot of people that are very visible right now that I can smell. They think everybody hates them. And some of them say that privately. I'm sure. I'm sure. But you can smell it. And that's not ego thinking that people are gonna like you. It's because I came from a home in a neighborhood where that was it. You have this like brutal honesty. Well, you're leaving one worried out. What's that? Brutal honesty. But an enormous amount of respect. Yeah, I don't think you're doing it disrespectful. No, you can't do it in a disrespectful way. I don't think you'd be in a room with somebody you didn't respect. 'Cause you have complete control over it. You're like you're learning. And what happens is you think you build these walls and you get over these fences, right? And you go, okay, I'm on the other side. I'm insulated. I'm this under and then you have kids. And they can't bring the world back in and all of a sudden, if you wanna get your kid into school, you're gonna go sit across sometimes. You're gonna sit across an asshole. So the answer to that question is no. So what you have kids, you just go back to zero, where you're, you know, whatever. But Bruce Springsteen said it best. He says a lot of things best, you know? He said, when I was making music, when I was on board around in particular, when he was flat broke. You know, I knew Bruce, when I met John Lennon, John Lennon was three years after the Beatles broke up. Right? So I did three albums with him. But he was already John Lennon. He had a marginal ready, you know? So he was John, right? Bruce was broke, me and dropped from his label as career was in Trump, right? So he had to, and he said publicly, he said, I don't wanna be rich, I don't wanna be famous. Man, I didn't even wanna be happy, I wanted to be great. And when I was 20 to 27, really 20 to 25, I got to work with Bruce Springsteen on two albums, John Lennon on three, Patty Smith on one, and Tom Petty at that point on one. So I learned my college years, those impressionable years of college, I spent with those four people. And it was unbelievable. It was such an education about culture, about life, about what's important, and all those things. And I just sucked it in because I was a, I was a, I was a really, no, at your sketch, I had nothing going on. I didn't understand anything. So everything that they taught me, I just breathed in. I was lucky that it was them, and I just took it all in, and it really set the tone for my life about what, because these are some of the most culturally relevant poets. I'm a 20 century, and when I say poet, I mean the person, not just that they write lyrics, they had the right attitude about their work and their product. What was the right attitude about their work? Well, they weren't thinking about how to promote it. They were thinking about how to make it. You know, and it's kind of what I liked about Steve Jobs when I met him, you know, I met a lot of these guys since the year 2000, because I'd gone on the road. Once the, once the apps that came out, I was like, oh shit, what's going on? I've been learning something new, you know what I mean? Because this trick isn't going to work anymore, you know, the whole music business, I felt was going to be upside down, you know, and it has been, but, but in those days, I wanted to get a feel for what I called at that time, the other side. So I met with a bunch of tech companies, and then I started to get, and then I met Steve, and he was the only one that had salt, and similar to the same soul of the artist that you worked with him. Yes. Yes, absolutely, but the only one. He had soul and feel, and we bonded on John Lennon and Bob Dylan. You know, we were talking about that all the time, you know, and he had the same attitude that they had. Now, he was a businessman, he was a lot of things that they're not, and there are a lot of things that he isn't, but how I, it translated to me was, you can be in this world and have salt, and you don't find that a lot. Why did you say that when you met him, you're like, he's the only one that's going to get this done. Meaning, I think it was, this is pre-streaming. This was the, I think the audience. Yeah, he's like, why didn't you get the licenses for iTunes? You did? I helped him. But why could he do it? No one else. Because he understood, he understood what made artists take. He understood the why most engineers that I've met in my now 25 years of playing in that world is they don't understand the why of the people that do what I used to do. And that's why it was so interesting. I knew, I knew from then that tech was going to buy all the media companies. The companies move in different ways. They don't move like the tech business. What I met him, I said, this guy gets it. Now is he tough? Is he, I don't know, ruthless maybe? I don't know. Like I tell you what, he gets it. He gets it. And most of the people I meet in that world know how to do what they're doing. But as far as the particular thing that Steve had, I haven't met another one that has that. I really, but that they're bad people or anything, they just, they don't have that. Well, anyway, you can like music. Like all these guys always say, I love music. I love chocolate, but I don't understand her shoes. Do you know what I mean? I really don't understand who makes chocolate and how they make it. So you know, you can like music all day. One engineer told me once we were working on something, it was going to be video involved. He said to me, I know how that shit. And I love television. I mean, it's not the same thing, man. You know, so, but anyway, Steve called you one day to congratulate you because he said there's all these people trying to make hardware and they're not successful at it. And you were one of the few people that had no experience, by the way, making hardware that made hardware successfully. So interesting part about that one, one I want to hear more about that, but two, why did you call music software? You know that answer better than me. I've never heard anybody. I mean, I guess I mean, I mean, it's treated like, you know, ones and zeros or whatever, you know, because it cuts out what comes across it. Yeah. You know, whatever that is, you know what? He's like, all these software guys want to make hardware and they can't. Well, he always felt that what was unique about Apple, which was, is that a software company can make hardware. Let's talk about the schools. And the school is important to talk about because it ties into all that is occasionally I run to someone who says he's the next Steve job. She's the next Steve jobs. Let me tell you something. There's not going to be another Steve job. There'll be some great people and there are some incredible people around today that are doing something extraordinary, inventing the creating these companies, etc. But to be Steve jobs, you have to truly understand the cross between technology and liberal lots where those two things meet and interact. When I had beats, I realized that engineering, design and culture, the collaboration was not happening the way I thought it would. I thought everybody in the world in tech was like Steve jobs because he got it. He got the why of everything that I was doing and the people around me were doing. He understood it at its core. It was in his instinct, right? What I realized, what I met a lot of other people in the tech business, all the companies and their engineering societies fundamentally. And I find, you can't generalize it. There were people that aren't like that. But for the most part, my software companies don't make hardware. They don't understand, truly understand design, right? And they can't communicate with it, right? And that's what I think. What the fuck do I know? But that's what I think is what I've observed, right? And how did you know there's a need for new school, though? Because I realized it was education because I realized it was siloing an education. Yeah, you go to, you go to, you go to, I see, again, what do I know? I know, I know like to feel a young people culture, right? So I see the way kids are being brought up. They brought multi-disciplinary right now. For the last 15 years, they all being brought up with multiple disciplines, you know, tech, music, culture, design. They're all fascinated by that. So when you go to school, when you go to college, you get siloed. You go to Wharton, you're in a accountant. Yeah, they have classes and all that. They have an engineering course you take. When you take that engineering course, we're 50 other engineers, right? So now I just seeing school. Remember, we started the school 14 years ago. That long ago? Yeah. Wow. Absolutely. And you, it was you and Dr. Dre, you endowed it with $70 million to get started. Yeah. Okay. I mean, we had no, I know that one of us went to school. So we had no, I, we're not afraid. We had to do things we have no idea would do. We put our own money up, right? So that's neat. And I don't care who you are. That's a lot of money, right? But I knew there was a problem and we wanted to fix it. And siloed learning, you're hearing a lot of people doing it now, trying to bring all the disciplines. But what they do is they bring it in through the side door. You could take a course at any other school. Our school is a school of collaboration, which you saw. So if you lean towards tech or if you lean toward the arts or if you lead toward art, entrepreneurship or if you lean toward design, you get to work in concert. You innovate collaboratively, which is what these big companies don't have. They don't really sing in concert in harmony. And that's where I observed, right? I observed that. I don't know that. I observed that. It's the problems that I had communicating. And the problems they had communicating with me. And when's the first time you had that problem? Was it when you were trying to build a product? Beats. Beats was a product not by accident like the iPod. I wanted culture, design, music, right? I wanted it all connected. So I missed the jobs. I even was like, oh, this guy gets it all. So I figured everybody did. Did you pitch him on doing the headphones together? Yeah. What do you say? I don't want to do headphones. You don't. So we went out to a restaurant once. I'll never forget it. We went to his Greek restaurant. And this was a. It was it was after he was sick. And but we went out to a restaurant. And it was one of those restaurants where they put the paper thing with the, give me the crayons for the kids, you know, they could draw. And so we're in the middle of lunch. I said, you know, I want to build his headphone company. It goes, you can do it. You build a headphone company. I said, why don't we just do it together? I don't want to do a headphone company. You build a headphone company, right? So I said, okay. He goes, let me show you how any cold a guy took all the food. Good thing I don't care about eating one way or the other. I mean, I like food, but it's not the most important thing in my life. So. And he said, give me a marker in the guy game. And he drew distribution, inventory. It'll kill you. China, you can make things that are made in China, but they can't look like they were made in China. I said, holy shit. I was like, holy shit. And then he would guide me along the way. And he was fantastic, right? But I thought, when I started beats, that I could, I'm not even allowed. But they're like, I find people like that. But I found people that are designed. I found people that are engineers. I found people in popular culture. I wanted them all to understand how to collaborate. And I just said, silo learning is bullshit. And now we have five, six high schools. And it's a great place. It's considered one of the best interdisciplinary schools in the country. And I'm really proud of that. Again, what do I know about education? Not a lot. I learned a lot in the last 15 years, but really not a lot. Yeah, sorry about the instinct that you just didn't think it was doing being done correctly. And you'll learn to learn. I know how to get something done. This goes back to you just being a natural born entrepreneur. I just thought I'd get something done. I know how the guy found the guy. I met this great dean, Eric and Mo, I met her. I said, she could do this. She was from the Rosky School. I just felt instinctive. You could do it because it's an art school or USC. Okay. And then there was the president, Max the Kess. He was an engineer, but I knew he got it. You know, and we built it and now it's a fabulous school. You know, it's a really fabulous. A lot of people want to go there. It's fantastic. Look, I work on a lot of things. I don't know how to do, but I can get it done. You know, I don't claim to be some great technologies, but I made a great effort. I think I've studied you a lot. I've talked to you now for hours and hours and hours. I still am trying to figure out. You have this collection of, I'm trying to think of what is your highest talent. I just ran into Steve Stout, a friends birthday party, which was really funny because he worked for you for a long time. I was like, do you know what I'm saying, Jimmy, soon? Can you give me some stories? And I think you're obviously a phenomenal marketer. Let me ask you, what do you actually think your talent is? Then I want to tell the story that Steve told me. My talent, whatever it is, I'm learning more about now because I'm not running the companies. So when I used to run the companies, like when I ran in a scope, when I ran beats and when I ran, when became Apple music, I just woke up in the day and that everything by my instinct, whatever that was in the morning, you know, it's a little more difficult to do it at Apple than it was when there are my own companies because they have a giant infrastructure and they have, you know, I always felt like I was a bit on the tail that's wagging the dog. You know, I used to live on the dog and the whole thing about, you know, when you were running the company, you wake up and just instinct purely or listen to people, you know, and grab a piece from here and a piece from there, you know, and just synthesize. Did you go after difficult things on purpose? I only went about what I felt when Dre said to me that that was one example because Dre comes to you. He plays, is it the chronic? What is he playing for you the very first time or is it like some sort of. The chronic. I finished. And you're, I think you asked him like, who engineered this? Right. And he's like, I did. And he's like, well, who produced it? And then you're like, oh, within a few minutes of meeting and he says something like, he's going to define the inner scope. Right. But he had a, just like a very hairy situation you had to get him out of, right? It was impossible. It was everything you watching these shows and stuff you think it is. Okay. So what was going on? Well, what happened was I connected dots, which I think I do really well. I saw him and Snoop. I heard, finally heard hip-hop with the 808 base, that big base now. Producers couldn't harness it. All the records, you know, whether it was public enemy or any of those records made in New York, they couldn't harness that. And to where I understood it, Dre was the first person to really. harness it and give it the power that it deserved. Of course, he gave it the clarity that it deserved. It was very hard to do. So I understood that. And when I saw that combined with Snoop and Dre and the image that they were projecting and they were talking about, I said, this is the Rolling Stones. I said, this is the Micking Keith. It scares you, but the music brings you in. So I'm like, this has to work. I didn't have to understand the music, which I didn't at the beginning. Now I think I do, you know, I mean, not as much as some of the pioneers of hip-hop, but I understand it. Were there lawsuits? Were there sign? What do you have to untangle? There were three lawsuits. There was a Rico lawsuit, right? Rico. That came with Sony. Yeah. Yeah. There was a Rico money laundering. What is. The gangster. Gangster. And that was from the easy thing. Oh, okay. Right. Just didn't know the movie. The Mets are talking about a school. So there was a Rico lawsuit. There was a guy in prison who supposedly put up the money for one of the albums, the first album. So he was suing them from prison. They were Sony and there was a company that distributed at EZE's label. That was suing as well or challenging as well. You write the settle all those things out, which it's kind of like if you see something great, but there's T. Rec sitting on it. And most people would avoid saying like, "There must be something else to eat." And you just know I'm only going to work with great. If I see something new and great and unusual, I can't stop. That's why Beats attracted me so much. I looked at it and said, "Oh, shit. People wear these things on their head." And they look like medical equipment. There's nothing attractive about a headphone. The funny thing about that is there was opportunity hiding in plain sight. And you're like, "What's our competition, guys? Bose?" They want to. There's no music. It's like silence. Well, they're marketing. They're marketing things. You can go to sleep with us. Yeah. I'm like, that's ridiculous. What a marketing thing, right? So I said, "No, no, no, no. We want to wake you up." Okay. I want to pause here because I text Daniel Eck, right? Found her Spotify. And I was like, "Tell me, give me some ideas because he's known you forever." He told me the first time we ever had dinner. He's like, "I only lost two deals in my life and both of them were doing me high fiend." But just hilarious. Well, that just means my bullshit was better than his. You know, that doesn't mean. He's so. He's so. What he did in the music business, man. You have no one has any idea how hard it was. Patty Smith had an incredible line. Is people have the power to power the dream to rule and to wrestle the world from fools. Ooh, that's good. Okay. That's what Daniel Eck did, okay? So anytime you get a guy like that, try to beat him at anything. I just. I just. I just must have been slicker than him. That's a lot. To me, in my opinion, while the underrated still to this day, one of the most fascinating people to me. But he's like, "Ask him about the origins of beats." Did you do the headphones before you did the streaming service? Yes. So hardware first. That was a niche idea. It was all about moving in a scope laterally. I think companies should move laterally and they don't. Most companies don't move laterally at a fair. That's why what I'm doing with complex right now, which we'll talk about in a minute. I got the opportunity, I came out of retirement a bit because I got another bite at the apple because I couldn't finish my thought on streaming. Well, what do you mean by lateral though? Like, for example, in a scope was a music company, right? I wanted to make the hardware to listen to it. I wanted to have a streaming service. I wanted to distribute my own music. I wanted to have the complete thought. I wanted to make the music. Have the artists that make the music? Distribute the music. And then have the instrument and you listen to it on. So that's moving laterally. I would have walked so long that what I'm doing now with complex is that he comes. So artists can't communicate in different ways with their audience. So these businesses that other artists, let's just use musicians for example, are starting now. You were the only one that did it inside of a record label. That's right. So you have this idea for beats. You see this opportunity, obviously, Jres known for the best sonics. So it makes perfect alignment with him. This is Steve Stalz point to me where he's like, Jimmy's just a phenomenal marketer. I'm going to come back to beats real quick. I want to close that loop where he's like, ask him about the fact that he's bringing these super controversial artists at the time. They're not that well known. I think it was Jres and Snoop. And they wouldn't play him on the top 40. And he says, Jimmy did something genius to get Jres and Snoop played on the top 40. What did you do? I just considered it a reflex. What we did was I said, okay, you got to understand whenever this gatekeeper is on anything, your job is to figure out a way around the gatekeeper with something you really believe in. Whether the gatekeepers are people at your own company or people at radio stations or at wherever the gatekeepers are, your job is to skate around. So I said, okay, let's do this. Let's make a minute commercial of G-thang, which was Jres first single with Snoop, right? I said, let's make a 60 second spot. Now I don't want anything said before it or after it. I just wanted to play. The radio is not going to play my song. That's fine. I'm going to buy ads based on the radio and play the song. Yes. And we did on the 50 top market, spent the fortune during it. And then we simultaneously, we got it on MTV because they didn't play rap music either. They played MC Hammer, but they didn't play, I guess you call it gangster rap or whatever music is today. They didn't play that then, right? How did you get on MTV? I said, this is the same thing as Guns and Roses. Period. You said that twice now. You said, stupid Jres, making Keith. You say, this is just like Guns and Roses. What does that mean? It means that it's counter culture, that people are going to relate to it. People have feel marginalized and feel isolated and feel angry and it represents an entire culture that people are going to relate to. And that's where Guns and Roses did. That's where the Rolling Stones did. That's where Nirvana did. That's where James Brown did. It's that thing, you know, that moves people. So yeah, I instinctively felt that. So who do you go to at MTV? You just go to the top guy like, well, how do you actually get it done? I said, play this. He goes, I can't play this. And he had to remote in his hand. His TV was on behind him. I said, I can't because we play this. And it was three women singing. And then the next video was a guy and you know, and all this. But it was pure pop music, right? And I said, I don't know how to progress. I said, put it next to Guns and Roses. And if it doesn't work, please never play an inner scope record again. Wow. So you put it on. You had that much belief. You have to be talented to know that. That means just fucking obvious. That's a good room. And he knew it before me, right? So, but what it caused was all these kids, sons of senators, daughters of senators, Congress people, business people, they came home in one of those records. And when that happened, that's what led to the whole falling out with time warning that we had when we, when it's got got thrown out of time, water over lyrics because Bob Dole, the Loris Tucker, Bill Bennett, right? Who is the education's law or whatever he was at the time? You know, all those guys, Bill Clinton went on the floor of the Senate. And you know, Bob Dole said we were some, so much they were a must and gas factory or something like that. Yeah. I've been involved with, I was involved with John Lennon. They tried throwing up, but I was, when I was doing his album, Nixon was literally had to go to court every day during Wilson Bridges because Nixon was trying to throw him out of the country. That was real. Yeah, that's insane. That was real. Yeah. Because he was against the war, right? So I'm not, I'm used to that. I'm like, so what? You know, I mean, I didn't care what those people were saying. So you got him on MTV. You got him on the radio. And then you played the ads on the radio, then people start calling. Of course. They start calling the radio stations, like play that song. Of course. That is an ad. No one else is doing this. Only because I wouldn't do anything illegal because I'm psychotic about doing anything that is illegal or anything. So I just said, this is legal. Let's do this. I mean, the record business, God knows what they did to get records played, but they weren't going to play these records. There was no chance. Look, there's nobody better at this. No one. The greatest record executive of all time, of all time is a guy named Barry Gordy. I heard the name, but no, nothing about him. Well, he founded Motown. Oh, okay. During Jim Crow, you know what I mean? So his honest warning allowed off the bus. They were considered race records. He had to get those records played. He had to get that into the white market. But he did talk about wrestling the earth from fools. Barry Gordy miracle what he did. And he made the greatest music in the world. So when he got, when he pushed, it stuck. See, if you know what you have is going to stick. And if you are passionate about it, then just break through that wall because there's going to be a lot of resistance. But if it sticks, you went. Yeah. It has to stick though. There's actually a lesson of Frenchpreneurs in there too because I reread Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters like three or four times. He's like one of the people one of entrepreneurs and most of my and he realized he had a sticky product with Amazon because he saw that once you become an Amazon customer, you not only do order, but you reorder and then you ask Amazon to carry more things. And so he tells the story of this guy emailing him or he emailed like, you know, 1000 customers saying, Hey, you bought a book. What else would you buy? And one guy goes, can you sell me windshield wipers? And he's like, Oh my God, we're going to be able to sell anything like this. And so he goes, Okay, if we have high retention with my product, which he knew at Amazon, that means I have a winning system. That means I need to invest heavily in introductions to new customers. Right. Because the 10 million or whatever number is, let's say you spent 100 million new customer introductions and advertising marketing in this year. It's like, that's these people are going to be with me next year, do you after a decade? Well, if you're an entrepreneur and you see something work, you can extrapolate what else will work. Right. But I mean, these guys have built businesses that dwarf anything I've ever even dreamed of, you know, but they're they can extrapolate, you know, like, for example, beats, right? We have this. I was always frustrated that the music industry didn't have customers. It drove me crazy. What do you mean they don't have customers? They don't have a customer. They still don't have a customer. They don't have the relationship with the end user. Right. It does TikTok. It does MTV did constantly. The music, the streaming services do. Some reason the music industry is allergic to a customer. Okay. And I don't know why, but they don't have a user. What was the first time they outsource the, the relationship with the end customer? Is this just so even when you're selling it to like record studio record stores, radio, MTV. You would have controlled everything. When you said you want to go lateral, the entrepreneurial version of this business version, you want to vertically integrate. You want to vertically integrate all the way down. So you would have even had inner scope. If there's, yeah, but I want to vertically integrate if you call it that to fashion. I mean, because you guys are controlling the culture. They're having the influence. What causing it? Causing it. My artist, the causing the culture, artists that I work with, right? But putting it clearly. For example, we put beats in all of our music videos and we first started. You were insistent and relentless with this. It's so hot, but you know, I know. But I put a lot more money in the videos. Everybody benefited, you know what I mean? And it was a time that the industry was desperate. So yeah, man, you know, we did that and it worked. Worked is an understatement. Yeah, yeah, it worked, you know, and we built another one head for company in the world. We were, when we sold to Apple, we were number one and 50 country. And then we were number one in Germany and Sunhizer was number two. We were number one in Japan and Sony was number two. I still can't believe it to be honest with you. This is a close back to like you have this instinct. I'm still trying to figure out, you know, your, your like web of really special talents. And marketing is definitely one of them. You have this weird instinct to just make the right. Marketing is empathy. Same or it's empathy. Marketing is understanding who you're trying to communicate with and understand them. And understand from where they click and cop. That's all marketing is. You can call it marketing what I do. I don't think it's marketing. I just, I have, I guess I have a feel for the market of who I want to. Soping or communicate with, right? I'm not Bob Dylan. I think it's stretching imagination. But Bob Dylan to take it to an extreme had a feel for an entire generation. He made his product. He made it because he was a purest. He wanted to do something great, but it turns out that was marketing. The product is marketing. If you make the product great. Steve Jobs is great marketer. So yeah, if you know your product and you know your audience, I guess that's a great marketer. But all it is is empathy, understanding where somebody else is feeling on a massive scale. All of the founders and extreme winners that I have studied have this one trait in common. They have excessively high energy levels. If you're going to be the best at what you do, you need to maximize your energy and output. And that's why I've partnered with function. I signed up for function long before they were a sponsor of this podcast. And when you sign up, they ask you what your health goals are. And my response in all capital letters was maximum energy. Function provides access to comprehensive blood tests and other lab testing to help you improve your health so you can perform at your highest level. Function has made it easy for me to monitor and improve my internal health markers so that I feel at my absolute strongest. As a member of function, you get access to test over 100 plus biomarkers from hormones to toxins to markers for heart health, inflammation and stress. Function gives you a straightforward analysis of all your results along with advice from expert doctors on how to improve things like your testosterone, your stress hormones, how to reduce toxins in your body and much more. The platform is absolutely beautiful and provides an easy to understand picture of your overall health. Once you try function, you will immediately understand why it's the fastest growing health platform in the country. You can now join function for just $365 a year. That's a dollar a day. Learn more and join by visiting functionhealth.com/CENRA and use code CENRA25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. That is functionhealth.com/CENRA. So how long did you have the headphones before you decided you bought like a small streaming service? I bought it in probably 2011. How long were the headphones going? Three years into it. So three years into it and it's called, what was the, I forgot the mark. Okay. Yeah. And you rename it beats. Yeah. Spotify had three million subscribers at the time we sold to Apple. I remained at beats music but I really couldn't scale it on my own because as you know, it's Spotify cost a lot of money to do that and I realized I can't do this on week, me and Dre, we can't do this on our own. We bought Trent Resderon, right, who's an incredible talent. Talk about understanding technology and the arts and culture, you know, on his partner, Atticus Ross, they make some of the greatest music in the world right now. So you know, there's all the movies and everything he's doing. So you try to run it and then you realize you can't scale it on my own. Can't scale it on. I wanted it to be at Interscope and for one reason or another, we couldn't get that done. The guy's running at time born in charge really. There was the whole Vendee thing and all that stuff. I went to them early on. I said, I want to build businesses with your artist and the guy actually said to me, goes, Jimmy, I, I, I hear you. Repeat a lot for you company. I respect for you. But we want to sell CDs and that's what we do. So that's how part of my story that not a lot of people know is I was a CEO of Interscope. I had to get the right to start another business. I asked Vendee to give me a hundred million dollars to to inner scope to start businesses with the artist inside Interscope. And fairness to them, they didn't see that. They didn't want to do it. So I said, my contract was up. I said, I'm not going to be the guy to sell the last CD. I got no interest in this. You know, I'm going to do something else. They didn't see it at the time that they were in a dying or a dwindling business. Of course it was. This is 2003. So you saw it early. It scared the hell out of me. One reason the day it started, maps to I said, this is toast. Because I understand the market. I understand why the audience would say, I'd much rather be doing my homework and not have to ask my mother to take me to a record store. Okay, that's simple impulse. And it's free. That's a feel that an entrepreneur has. Once you see you can't put the genie back in that bottle. There's just no way it's going to lie. I knew that and then I went in with people at Intel and places like that. And I heard these guys talking. I'm like, holy shit. What were they saying that made you say holy shit? One of the things the guy at Intel said to me is, Jimmy, I got to tell you something. Your story is compelling. You said, but not every industry was built to last forever. I was like, this guy smarter than me. Yeah. Where do you want to start? Right? So I'm like, oh shit. So I went to the, I went to them. I said, I can't just be in the record business. The music almost goes like something you sell to something that markets another product is how you're using my time. I don't know what it is. I just call it lateral. I don't, I can't break it down to what it is. I just know the feeling. You told me yesterday, you're like, I'm just a hustler. I know I don't hustle. I do. I do. I know. I love it. By the way, I feel the exact same way. People, players in the world were hustlers. That's what I call a hustler. I don't think it's a majority. I don't think it's a negative term. Well, people think it is. Oh, not me and you though. It's not. What I'm saying? I know I had a hustle. Meaning I'm willing to work harder than the next guy. What you did for Dre when you first met him, Dre and Shugs. You're like, well, this guy's great. There's an asset in front of me. An asset is, is a big hairy problem that no one else wants to solve. And if I solve, if I can kill the T-Rex and sitting on top of this genius, then I get to work with the genius. That is hustling. Being resourceful, that's the same thing. As Dre would say, it's a little bit of street knowledge. Yeah. And what is street knowledge? It's an understanding of people as they actually aren't. Well, because you have no, what street knowledge is, you have to move around because the world isn't, it's tough. In any neighborhood, I don't know what you call it, lower class or whatever it is. My dad was a long showroom and we lived in an Italian neighborhood and read dog Brookland. You lived in a neighborhood with actual gangsters. Oh, yeah, but I wasn't. No, I know you were in the neighborhood that the mafia was everywhere. Oh, yeah. Well, my neighbor was an Italian neighborhood, only in America. I mean, everything was the same. You know, there's four fish stores on a restaurant. There's three pizza places on one street. You know, it was like that, you know. So, and my father worked down a docks and everybody worked down a docks. I know you were saying it's instinct, maybe you weren't like, there weren't words around this idea you just understood it, but you saw it's like, if I'm a college kid and I was at this time and I was using Appster and Kazaan, all the other, lime wire and all the other ones, like, I don't have to go to the store. I'm definitely downloading this and now we have MP3 players. So like the record store is gone. Well, one of the hardest things that I had to do when I look back on my career, life, whatever it is, kind of a lot of, we all have a lot of heart, maybe one of the hardest things was getting universal, preventate, to give me permission to build beats, to build no, to build products with my honest. Beats came three years later. This is, this is when you're response to them was, I don't want to be the guy that sells the last CD. That's it. I just, I just, this, this thing is not going to work the way it is right now. We have to move laterally and I just instinctively knew that and I wasn't going to do it. I was going to quit. That's an interesting idea if you sit down and actually think about what's happening for the whole time of recorded music industry. You made the music, you recorded it and then you sold it physically, right? And yours are already understanding, oh, once the digital and free, that means we have to sell something else that we're not going to be able to sell the music anymore. No, I knew we were invaded. Invaded. Okay. And I knew that something had a change. I didn't know what it was, but I knew we couldn't just do only what we're doing. And that's like a music instinct. You know who knew that? The Beatles knew that. If you look at the Beatles, every album was new and different. They reinvented themselves on every album, you know? And if you, they keep it moving, you know, the great company, that's why Apple was so great, he kept it moving, kept innovating and moving it. And I felt that the record business needed to stop doing, not just do what they were doing. And that was really hard because they were paying me a lot of money. They just bought my company for, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars, right? But I wasn't going to do it. I knew it was not what I wanted to do. And the problem is people say, well, the record business turned out okay. All it did and it didn't. Of course Spotify is worth 150 billion. And the entire record industry is worth half that together. And it gets really smart. Like for the longest time, we sold it. Now you can't sell it anymore in problem music. So it, and you're not going to agree with this, it becomes advertising or marketing. These songs become advertising or marketing for another product you can sell, whether it's, you know, concerts, they were song concerts back in the day, products, all this other stuff that they're doing. Like you had that insight before in the music industry before anybody else. No, not before anybody else. Hip hop saw it. You're right because they were doing the shoes, the sneakers, the alcohols. Def Jam, Adidas, bat, oil. Did they influence your thinking on this? Absolutely. I owe African American culture so much. I have a debt to black culture. Why do you think rap, if I grew up on hip hop, I told you like, it's still almost all the stuff I listened to now. Why did they figure out how to monetize, I hate you, Zaiwater, make money off music, do other besides selling music for anybody else to. Because they're practical and they see the truth and they saw what it was. What's the next bite of the apple? The record industry now can rewrite the, guess the, the luxury of rewriting the book with AI. They can. AI created music. Yeah, creative music, interact, many things. It isn't just creating a song. It's, it's how you listen to music, everything. It affects, it can affect everything. So there is, let's say, hypothetically, I'm writing the record industry. Your word wrong is not fair. Didn't take advantage of it. Didn't optimize the streaming thing. What would optimizing be they, they would have their own distribution. That would be optimizing and they don't, right? They have another bite at the apple right now. It could start all, ring the bell all over again, etch a sketch, and go back into it. But where they can make a giant mistake in my opinion, okay, is if they start licensing their music to every dog and that comes in the dog. Which is their normal route of doing things. You got to build enterprise around AI. Now you can't just give the enterprise to someone else. But you know everybody in the music industry, when you tell them this, what's their response that people empower right now? Well, I can tell you where, I can't tell you everything that I'm doing because I think the labels are now realizing it. And again, really what I can tell you is, Universal Music has invested in a project that we're doing called Complex that has the ability to go on and do a lot of these things that I'm talking about. It's media, it's live, pretty complex, and it's e-commerce, right? I want to help the labels if I can. You know, build enterprise around AI. And not just be licensed always. I felt that way about streaming and I feel even stronger about that. They shouldn't be afraid of the tech. They shouldn't be. You don't have to understand something fully to do it. I'm proof of that. I don't understand fucking anything. But I know how to get it done. You know, I know how to build a, I didn't know how to build a headphone. People say to me, well, you're in your recording engineer. I said Bruce Breaston and Keith Richards and the greatest guitar players and my favorite and Keith Richards incredible. If you came to pieces of wood, he's not going to come out with a guitar. You know, so what building a headphone was as far from me and Dre as you could possibly imagine. But we figured out how to do it. So that's how I think is the possibility out of rewrite the book. But you start seeing licenses pop up to all these other companies. They're going to feed a dragon that is absolutely going to eat them. Absolutely. Five years from now, do you think we're going to have AI, complete AI created music that is at the top of the charts? Isn't it already happening? I don't know. Let me tell you that I don't fucking know if I can predict the future, ma'am. I wouldn't have health insurance. You know, it's like, I have fire insurance in my house. I can't predict the future. I have no time. I overpay for everything. I'm a retail guy. But you know, it's like I do know one thing that I don't understand. I hear a lot of these artists coming out against AI. So I come from a place where they get a record deal going back to Mike when I was a kid right in the music business. You got to sing. You got to really sing. Sometimes you have to write, but if you have obvastrised, then you have to sing. Frank Sinatra, you have to sing. Those people can really sing. You know, Sam Cook. Who could he sing? He could sing at right. Incredible, right? Stevie Wonder. There's a lot of people out now on the charts right now, or being really successful, selling out arenas. That can barely sing happy birthday. So when I say to the people of the challenging AI, and then doing that because of technology, like auto-tune and stuff like that, whatever the technology is. So my question is, what's the difference between somebody who could barely sing happy birthday, which is all over the charts right now? For someone who can't sing happy birthday at all, who's just a marketer and a really clever guy or girl that's sitting there mirroring that all the moves that everybody does. You know, they watch Madonna and like everybody else and say, like, I could do that. I can act like that. So I don't understand the difference. So yeah, because the amount of technology invented for the music industry since you've been in it is like you told me yesterday that Prince did a whole album without a drummer. And I was like, what does that mean? Well, he's one of the first people to use the Lynn drum machine. Didn't he Lynn drum machine? I was I was producing an album in the 70s and I brought this guitar player in who I think it made me the first computer I ever saw, but I had a computer on the session. In 1977, right? And he had a computer on the session. And in between takes rather than listen with the rest of us, he'd go put a pair of headphones on, I go on the computer and do all that. And he looked at I said, five minutes, it's home. I said, Hey, man, what are you doing? Yeah, I mean, you know, this is a session with paying attention to music. He says, well, I'm creating a drummer. I'm creating machine that's going to play the drums. I said, well, thank God because I always had difficulty with drummers. I always felt where you sit on the beat is impossible. Because everybody hits where the one hit what hits it on or before or after. It just drove me crazy working with drummers my whole life. You know, and he said, I'm making a very, very, very, very, the guy's name was Roger Lynn. Roger Lynn's a guitar player. That's who made the drum machine. The machine. Oh, wow. Yes. I've seen technology. I grew up with this. So everybody's afraid of AI. AI is going to make music better. AI is not going to thwart great people. They will always be the next Billy I list. They will always be the next Kendrick Lamar. They will always be the next great talent. But this also going to be a lot of bullshit. Right? So I think the bullshit will get better. I really do. I think AI is going to help those people that work like that. And by the way, a lot of people that we know right now, great talent are using AI. They're just not telling anybody. AI will never be able to write, blown in the wind by Bob Dylan, not anyone who's listening to this or in my lifetime for sure. AI will take the middle of music, the average music. I believe and make it better. Of course, they're great tools. I'm all in on AI music, all in. And I don't think it's going to hurt the greats. But more importantly than anything that I think is that now it's time for the artist and the labels to get on the enterprise side of it. This is what I wonder if you would agree with or not because when you were just telling the story of the person invented the drum machine, he was inventing it out in necessity. We needed a sound for what he was making. I worry that if these are like professional managers in the music industry, think about the diversity of professional CEO and a founder. Right? Like you thought completely different because you're an entrepreneur. Like you were instinctively an entrepreneur. You were an entrepreneur before you even knew you were an entrepreneur. Well, I'm record producers at entrepreneur. Record producers, but the people running the big companies. But I was a record producer. Yeah, exactly. Like you had that instinct. But like there's one, almost they don't see the necessity for it. And two, I don't even know if like a professional manager can reinvent their business to survive the next technological wave. You disagree with that? I think what's happening is the music in the street is finally moving into things they're afraid of. They just need some light. What you don't want to do is license the next AI Spotify and say, give me three percent of your company. That is the greatest deal anyone's ever made. Who gives a shit who wants three percent of my company? If your company's modified, right? I mean, some sort. So they have to grab the enterprise value of the new technology. But don't you think it's going to come outside? Like one of my heroes is James Dyson. I told you about James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner guy. Oh, and one of his who I love it. And one of his heroes was Buck Mr. Fuller. And Buck Mr. Fuller has this quote where it's like, you don't fight the like, if you want to change things, you don't fight the existing system. You build your own. Like you build a new version of that. And almost feel like what you're talking about has to be done outside. Anywhere there's not a founder. Usually it has to be done outside. You don't usually see big companies innovate. That's my point. I'll tell you what, I don't know this company. I don't know the guy. I don't know anything. But I try to, I try to pair those new Facebook Rayban glasses. They made a good brother. So that's, but that's a founder. Big companies always have the advantage. They just don't. They have bureaucracies and they don't have the entrepreneur as the leader anymore. So can they innovate? That's the court. Can they innovate? And look, I'm a terrible businessman. I had to learn business at NSCO. You are not a terrible businessman. I know how to do it. I know how to do, but I have to learn business for defense when I got into the record business. Oh, that's interesting. 1990. I had no fucking idea how to run a company on zero. Is this when David Geffen sold Geffen? Yeah. Can you tell that story? David Geffen is brilliant, right? He comes from right now, my neighborhood in Brooklyn. He's exactly 10 years old in a me. He's like five, seven on five, seven. He's Jewish, I'll tell you, and we will buddies, right? He was great with artists. You know, he signed Joni Mitchell and the Eagles and old is great shit, right? In his life. So I felt real camaraderie with him. I produced some records. I'm actually in the studio for 20 years, making music. They go on. They sell all these records. I wake up one day, he sold his company for $500 million. I'm like, I'm from Brooklyn. You know, I want to make a lot of money. I'm not embarrassed that I'm in my whole life. I've been like, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I didn't have any money. I had money as a bracket producer, but that's a certain amount of money. I wanted to live like I saw on TV. You know, well, you were like, well, I don't, I don't. But I love into the fine ones because everybody feels this way, especially if you didn't grow up with money. I know exactly what you're talking about. And you were, I think you might have been an engineer before you were record produced. The sort of came from when you were an engineer, not a record producer. The producer comes in, he's got like a leather jacket. You're like, what the hell is this? He's got a fancy bag and then he's got a beautiful girl. Yeah. And you're like, that's it. Yeah, you bet that's it. I mean, look, I'm not like, let me tell you something, man. You got to tell yourself the truth. I'm not Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Chris Pristene, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye. So I felt the next best way in. I got into producing an engineering, right? That was my next way in, right? So I'm like, well, this feels really good. Then I saw a gap in it. I said, that feels better. Oh, shit. He's doing the same thing out. He's not even in the studio all night. He goes home at six o'clock. I'm like three o'clock in the morning still working on the drum sound, you know, like doing that. So I said, I bet I can do that. And then you go, talk to him. What does he say? He said to me, oh, you can start a record company. You know, many stupid people that have record companies. I said, okay. So I started a record company. I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep. He makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night. And as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high quality decisions. And you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality sleep for years is eight sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of eight sleep Mateo and we live in the same city a few months after I started using eight sleep. I randomly ran into Mateo at a restaurant and I was with some friends. I go over and say, hi, when I got back to my table, my friend asked me who was I talking to him? And I said, that's Mateo, the founder of eight sleep. And my friend replied, he looks like he gets good sleep. Mateo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an eight sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my eight sleep ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed. So I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is where 10 times the price. There are very few no brainer investments in life and I believe eight sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use eight sleep. I would recommend getting the pod five, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress and it is next level sleep tech. It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no brainer investment in your sleep by going to eight sleep dot com forage slash senra and use the code senra to get $350 off. You can try it for 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my eight sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at eight sleep dot com forage slash senra. People are willing to give you money and back you right away. Why? Are you solutions with them? What do they know about you? No, well, I don't put up half the money. Yeah, Catherine was going to put the money up. He sold his company so he was very generous with me. And I know, Jack, that definitely was going to distribute the money. And that feel we're going to put the money up. But Doug, while he had to put up half the money, Doug Mara said, "Atlantic." So I went to David and I said, "David, you won't want to put up half the money because Jimmy, I won't what's good for you. Go do it over there. All good. Really helpful to me. I knew nothing about running a business or, you know, I didn't know you spiked vegetables for less money than you sell them. I had no idea of anything regarding business. I had an instinct of how to move and what was important." I want to pause the story because then when I went to your house the first time, just a few months ago, you told me something I haven't stopped thinking about. You said, "Every great, anybody that's great is bent." Yeah. What does that mean? Well, to be really brilliant, I call it, "There has to be a bend in the pipe." You know, whether it's through trauma or through your interpretation of yourself, of how that could happen. You can come to the greatest family in the world and have trauma. You know, just it's your sensitivity compared to the environment and put it all together. So the ones that I know that are truly brilliant have a bend in the pipe. You know, what's the bend that you see normally? It's usually trauma from when they were younger. Family stuff. It's always childhood. Yeah, it's all, yeah. But they had the gift to write or produce or film or paint, right? I mean, they were the ones that chose them ones. That you put that trauma compared with an innate talent and it makes Picasso. But your bend was, it has to be, which brings us to founding of Interscope because there was a ton of people after Geffen. That had your same idea. We're like, "Well, I can do that." 14 labels started with $50 million in funding in 1989, 1990. And how many survived? None. You. Interscope. Yeah. Me, Ted, John, and Tom Wollick. When you say it has to be, what does that mean? When you grow up like I did and you did and other people that I know. Yeah, the first time we met, you're like, "You're definitely bent." It's going to be totally. When you're walking forward, right? The sidewalk behind you is caving in. So you have no choice but to walk forward. No matter how scary it is, how much it hurts. So what you have to learn at that moment is how do I take this fear and make it a tailwind? Instead of a headwind, a lot of my friends and people I know and I watch, the fear stops them. And the ones that succeed is the fear that propels them forward. If you can harness it, learn how to harness it and take that, of course, fear is energy. It's massive energy. You control your entire system. And if you can learn to take that fuel and have a propel you forward, it's a powerful thing. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the planet that I've met, it drives them is not a love of success. It's a fear of failure. Whatever your fear is, you know what I mean? What do I mean? So when did you have the insight about fear though? Like, when did you. You said, "I train myself that when I feel fear to take us forward." Well, look, I was the kid in right field playing baseball. I come from a neighborhood with physicality, sports, and tough was the currency. I didn't have any of those things. So I had to go learn a whole new set of tools for my toolkit. But when I got to the studio, I said there was a guy Roy Cicola, who was my boss, who taught through me. And they put me in with John Lennett and all of a sudden, all that fear, I was able to. I don't know why. Flip it into energy to learn. You're like 20 at the time. 20. You have a simple genius about you. I want to go back to it has to be in the bend. And this is why I think it's so important to make the documentaries that you made, to do the podcast that you do, because then somebody that you've never met that is in a different industry, is living a different time, reads that like, "I'm like that too." And you said something about your early life, where you just felt it was all fucked up. But all you knew was that if you just went to the studio, the more time you went to the studio, the better your life got. That is exactly how I feel. Like. That's not genius. No, it's a simple genius. It's very. It's practical wisdom. You know, when you. People talk about, "Gee, there are real geniuses out there that are freaks." But people talk about people that are successful and stuff like that. It's basically, your blessed, that your instinct drives you in the right direction. And your instinct, Bob Dylan's instilled, Bob Dylan is a genius. Bob Dylan's instinct drove him for an entire generation to lead, you know, Steve Jobs, or even people that I know, my friend, that their instinct is commercial or works. But that simple genius of, "I do more of X and my life gets better." It's very, very smart. Especially when you're 20, you're not like, you're not experienced. You're in the room with legends. I heard the interview, the conversation you had with Rick Rubin and you both agreed. It's like, there's never been other famous people like the Beatles. It's not like, "Oh yeah, Taylor Swift's kind of like the Beatles." Like, "No, no, no, you don't understand how big this phenomenon is." And by your own admission, no nothing, insecure, and you're in the room with them. And you still. There's something very. Again, I'm going to use the word simple genius of like your ability to just stay here and my life will get better. So to know which pole to start reeling in, you know, when I got permission, I was. I got permission to at NSCO to make our own businesses with the artist. I had a bunch of things going. But soon as Jerry said to me, "I want to sell sneakers," and I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, speakers right? And I saw him and I saw his credibility in sound, and I said, oh, shouldn't it all come together? You know, I dropped all the other polls, I just said, okay, let's go. But there's also a simple genius of the way you move that I admire. And I'm not like trying to overly compliment you here, like I really learn from it where that story, Dre tells a story of that conversation. He said this conversation with the entire time was like 10 minutes once you had that realization, you dipped out, you just left, and you call him like a week later, to come to the office and you have like 30 prototypes already done. Well, because I'm very lucky to be able to connect the dots, I can see something in my little computer in my brain connects all the dots. I just, and the things that I can see, I don't do the things I can't see, but I saw the headphone thing and I said, okay, and then I started to see, oh man, not only did these guys make ugly products, they don't know how to market, they're not cool, they don't back to corny. The corny is a curse. Some people out of corny are really nice, but you know, too corny is just, I don't know, stuff for me, you know what I mean? I'm not, you know, it's like, they don't know how to lay in the cut, you know. What does that mean? They don't know how to lay back and just watch something happen. They're always like, they want to be noticed and natural feel for like, you know, for themselves, you know, I think, what do I know? I think that's it right there. Let's go back to the inner scope. When you start inner scope, you're like, my bend is it has to be. Like the way you describe to me is just like, there's no failure, it wasn't an option. There was like a, you said plan B didn't even enter your mind, where it's like, I'm doing this, it will work. Because you mean think like that, it's an uncomfortable life, you know, so that's kind of why at 65, I'm 72 now at 65, I was at Apple and I said, I can't, this is not for me anymore, you know, first of all, couples are great company, company, company, they treated us great and we did some great stuff together. But I couldn't just wake up in the morning and do whatever I wanted to do. Because they're a giant company and they don't want the, I'm in music side of it, they don't want the tail wagging the dog, you know, I don't blame them, right? Because I come from world breaking things, you know, I would try anything, you know, and they have a very structured, fabulous business, right? And so I said, the combination of it having to be successful, how I see it, plus my team like Trent Resner, etc., and Dre and not being able to do anything to get it to work. And that combination said, you know, you're 65, you know, I met Liberty and we were going to be together and I just said, you know, we already married. That's that point. Yeah, okay. I've retired in 2018, I got married in 16. Okay. But why I came, started working again, I was dabbling, but why I started, I'm not running any companies right now. You said you don't want the bit in your mouth anymore. Yeah, I don't want it in my mouth. I have to have somebody with that energy that's crazy, that runs the companies, you know. Do you feel you were creating the version of you that started in your scope was crazy? No, it was obsessed. We're all sort of obsessive people. I was really obsessed. And you know, you considered in your scope in a very intense mission that had to succeed. It was upset. I had to be obsessed. And you know what? Obsession doesn't make for a great partner at home. No, for sure. It's like, so you know, I'm like, okay, I'm 65 years old. How many summers do I have left as Tom waits? How would you when you start to interstate 30 in your 30? I was 38, 7, 8. And so does that mean every minute of the day is on making sure when did you feel the relief? Was there any sense of no? The name life is a question that's no till when? July 65. We talked to Shredd you said something like, you're always like a happy optimistic person that miserable at the same time. Yeah, because I remember waking up with Liberty one morning about months after I left Apple and said I wasn't going to run companies anymore or anything started whatever. I said to them, the people wake up not thinking of something. Because I was waking up and I had nothing on my mind that I'm like, the people really do that, you know, and that's where I started to feel that felt really good. And I feel really see the whole the whole goal to me in life. I think most people, but some people don't admit it is a search for peace. You know, and a lot of people lie to themselves about what peace I mean somebody they run companies and they don't want to quit. And I love what I do. You love you love that more than sitting on a beach somewhere. I mean, I do for sure. I don't want to sit on a beach right now. You don't. I'm talking about people that are 75 that don't want to that can't give up the badge. You know, they have to have that badge to walk into a room. They're not that person right left Apple. I wasn't the head of Apple music anymore or the head of Inescope anymore or blah blah blah. That beats. So you lose the status part is that whatever the fuck it is. I didn't care about any of that shit. I just wanted to stop feeling that feeling. So I didn't have that. That wasn't a currency for me. It's a blessing and a car. But I just said, I don't give a fuck. I don't want to I want this. I just don't want to I want to get rid of the obsession. I mean, if you work if you want to work past 70 75 80, a fair founder of a company like Phil Knight, I understand that he's still involved with Nike. Do it. If you're feeling it, it's not what I wanted to do. And it's what not what I had to do for my own sanity. And and this is this is where I want to talk to you about. So from the time you just say you're 20, you start to 65. You did not feel peace. No, not for one. But you sell you become a billionaire. You sell beats to Apple. What'd that feel like? For great. Okay. No peace. Well, because company like Apple pays you a lot of money. I'm my father's son. I got a job to do now. But you have a billion dollars in your bank account. Doesn't matter what matters is there's a job that you're going to do that you're not going to be I have to get the job done right. But money is a piece of piece. Money is a piece of it. It's really great. But if I have your money, I'm fucked. Because I got to do the job. And that's kind of one of the reasons I left because I I really couldn't do. This sounds really corny. I couldn't do me there. That's not corny at all. It's a great place. It's a great place. But I twitch. You're not it's a big fucking company. You're an entrepreneur. I couldn't have that compulsion obsessiveness, insanity, and not have the wheel completely. Meaning that make any mistake I wanted to make to experiment to just go. I couldn't I couldn't do it. How does it feel when you're going through when it's like when you the your version of bend is it has to be is it just you wake up with like overwhelming pressure every day? Like what is that? You wake up seeing it. Yeah, you wake up. I mean you wake up seeing what's wrong. Every day you wake up seeing what's wrong. I never I've never had a victory lap lap in my life. You don't have any rear view mirror. I didn't have a victory lap. When we sold beats. I mean, this is very public. Dre felt great. Oh, the video with Tyrese. I mean, I Dre felt great. I I felt great, but I didn't like I'm like, Oh, shit. These guys gave gave us all this money. And now we're going to make a streaming service work and Spotify's got the lead. And I'm like, Oh, shit. So then the next minute I was thinking about that. How different are you and Dre and the way you approach your work? Because when I watched the define ones over and over again, and there's a lot of things about him that I personally identify with and there's a lot of things I about you that are well, we're both record producers. Okay. Okay. So he seems to need more solitude though. It's even more comfortable. Why would I? I mean, solitude. I mean, Dre doesn't, they don't go anywhere. Every time Dre and I have to go do something, he calls me a night before and say, we really have to do this. This is 32 years of it. We really have to do this. Why are we doing this? You know, so yeah, no, he he's much more like that than me. I feel that way too. Like this is why like small conversations like this. But if you say, Hey, come to this group dinner or come to this public event, I'm like, that's just not going to happen. Like there's no way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Dre's like that. But you know, you got to have a yin and yang to be partners. You know, it works, you know, so we're we're very different. But we can't we both we both record producers that can't explain it is certain, the certain kind of person that's I will, I get along with every record producer ever met. Yeah. So his beats, Tim Belan, Farrell, you know, I love all these guys. But I get along really well with record producers. And you can't explain why. This is the same kind of personality. What is it? I don't think about it. But I know that if I meet a record producer, this is always my favorite peak blind. Yeah. I feel the same way about founders. There's a there's a founder of NVIDIA Jensen Wong. I read his biography. He says something is interesting where he, I think reading between lines, he tortured himself into greatness. I want to go back to the bend of it has to be, were you like torturing yourself into success? I don't think it's torturing myself. I just felt tortured. I don't know who's torturing me. But all I knew is that every day, I would see what's wrong. What's wrong with the product? What's wrong with the business? What's wrong with the record? What's wrong with the guitar sound? What's wrong with, you know, how the headphones are being sold? What's wrong with the sound of them? What's wrong with it? I wake up every morning with seeing what's wrong. Your example is very different than most of the founders that I talked to or profile because like Steve would be working on Apple no matter what. He's just absolutely loved it. Work for you was always work. Yeah. It's like, actually, like you can't wait till it's over. Is that the way you're going to think about it? Well, you see, the problem that I had was if it sounds possible. It was your only place I felt relief, but I was still tortured. I don't know what the rest of my life was. But we had this conversation you're in. I told you I was on a phone, a friend driving to your house and we had the same conversation where you're just how are you? And I'm like, I'm fantastic and miserable at the same time. Yeah, well, that's possible. Yeah, I know. And we've always been a good mood. I don't think I've ever woke up in my life in a back. Except, except after my father died, I don't think I ever woke up in my life in a bad mood. I wake up in a great mood every day. I wake up happy. The two words you used are happy and miserable. Yeah, but there's a whole other side of you that wants to accomplish something and a couple of things. Something in the world is not easy. This everything working usually against you. The world doesn't want to go the way you want to go most of the time, right? So I'm really happy as a person. I got my kids and I'm really happy and I mean, now I'm really happy. My from Liberty and we have six kids together and everything is fantastic. I'm really happy. I'm a piece for the first time. But when I was running the companies or producing the record, I just see what's wrong. And it would just drive me bananas. You're the first person I think actually could explain that to me about how I feel because I was like, I just was interviewed on other podcasts and he's like, are you happy? And I was like, yeah, I'm happy. But like I also like I'm striving to do something. I think Steve Jobs was tortured. Oh, for sure. Most of them are. But my whole thing is like, I don't also want to go through life like that. This is where Bruce Greenstein, you kind of push me in this direction too when you're like, go watch that movie. You know, because I didn't when Jim A.B. says go watch a movie. I'm like, oh, I'm going to go watch a movie. I thought I was going to watch a biopic of his life. I thought it was going to be like, he was born and then he did this. He did it. No, it's about the darkest time in his entire life. That's the only movie he would make. Why? He's not going to make the born in USA movie. What I'm talking about is I've always been a positive person. I wake up in a good mood. So, you know, you ever met me in those days and I was running anoscope and stuff. You would say, oh, you're having a great time. But there was always this thing, this compulsion and this insanity. I was just driving me constantly and eventually I wanted to shake that. So I could say to you, yeah, I'm happy. In 1980. Yeah. Well, something like that, but I wanted to be a piece and I didn't give a shit about being ahead of NSGO or being ahead of B.T. Right? I mean, that nonsense. I just wanted a piece. Do you think Bruce is a piece? I think Bruce has found a lot of peace. I don't want to ask, I don't speak for him, but I think he's incredible. I feel that's what he's searching for too in the book, where he's like, I got this thing. I still don't know. Well, I mean, the words of John Lennon, I'm just trying to get me some peace and Christ, you know what ain't easy. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I didn't invent this. No, you didn't invent it, but I think you just did something that's important. It's like most people lied to themselves. And Bruce in that book was lying to himself for a while and they realized, oh, actual sources. Well, you know, we all lie to ourselves. And then are you still lying to yourself today? I'm sure about some things that I try not to. I just want to, I just want to find peace. And every day is a search for it, you know, and the monsters want to come in. And you got to make your shit bigger than the monster shit. My father would say, as long as the cast bigger than the shit, keep the cat. The minute the shit gets bigger than the cat, he went like this. I must have been 13 years old, 12 years old, but he said that to me. And he was right when you were building inner scope or really anytime in your career, when you were younger, what was your inner monologue? Like, was it negative to yourself? Were you like overly self-critical? Only the product. I felt like you're like this product. Of course, when you grow up, when you grow up, not having a lot of money and money being a concern and the family and all that kind of stuff. You know, my family was very generous, but you know, we had reality, right? When you grow up like that, that plays a big part in your brain, you know what I mean? Because you don't think, you think I'm going to be broke. That's what everybody, that's what you think. So, that was a big drive for me. When did you lose that fear of being broke? I don't know, but I just know that when I sold the app or didn't fix it. Do I thought you were going to say like, when you're making tons of money and inner scope, that's wild. No, because I had to get something right. That overrides. I knew I had a lot of money. I knew I didn't need money. I knew I was never going to be broke. But it was, that was, well, overroad any of it was having to get the job right. That overroad everything. You were able to separate criticism that the work isn't good enough or isn't done to I'm not good enough in your mind. No, because you beat yourself up. You feel that if you still beating yourself up, even when you were 50s and 60s. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because do you do it today? No. No. I don't. Today I, right? Today, I actually approached the job. Now, I get cranky and I get cranky. But when I crank, when I put the phone down, it doesn't travel with me. Like right now, I do what I need to do with the CEOs that are running the companies and the people that work. I do stuff that I need to do personality-wise to get the job done and it annoys me when people don't see things clearly or whatever. But when I put the phone down, I don't feel it when I used to do that. I never stopped feeling it because I had to get it right. I feel like that for a while. This just changed. Like, there's a result of like the work that I've been doing. There's a scanning Brad Jacobs who started eight separate billion dollar companies. I did a bunch of episodes of founders on him. He came to do this show. I've spent a bunch of time with them. And he's 68 years old. He's been an entrepreneur for longer than I've been alive. Like, the guy is just absolutely incredible. And his old thing is he just used to beat the shit out of himself mentally. And he's like, you know what? This is not helping my performance. And talking to him and then using some of the strategies in his book, like now I used to have a very negative feel source, which is I didn't like the way I was born, what the environment had grown into. I'm going to channel that just like Bruce Freenstein, just like you, is like, I'm going to channel that into achievement. I thought for a long time that constant self-criticism of the work that I'm doing will only make it better. So therefore, that'll increase my likelihood of achievement. And now I'm like, you know what? I just obsessed with what I'm doing. Like before, when I woke up this morning, I was like, giddy. It was like, this is going to be one of the best days of my life. I get to freaking record a podcast with Jimmy. This is going to be insane. Like my now, my self-talk is just like, just love what you do and follow your curiosity. And you're going to be obsessed anyway. You can't work any other way. Just know that you've handled to a certain extent a monster in your life. But the next monster is going to come in and disguise a different look, a different way is going to come in through this door. And you'll so break up one day and that monster will go, oh, fuck, I feel like I felt I thought I killed that monster. This is a new monster. Only it's changed. Where do you think that would happen? It just happens to everybody in life. You know, just some people like to admit it. Some people don't. So like might not be your professional life and might be your personal life. It could be anything. Yeah, man. It could be one of your kids. It could be anything, you know? And for the first time in my life, I feel balanced. I feel kind of like, I feel okay. You know, I feel like in my peace. But I'm also not running your company. If I was running your company, I know that I know that it's not for me. I know that I couldn't do it. I'm not that cured. I take what I do serious. I don't take myself too serious because I love having a sense of humor. I think laughing extends your life. So my father was really funny guy. You know, and and we lived like that and growing up. Everything was like we saw a sense of humor and everything. You know, I remember when he was dying. Probably before he died, he something happened. And it was it was like a person came in and did something wrong. And he just looked at me and he made a joke because he knew it was funny and he grabbed the moment. He had 28% of us all that were to he know he was dying. It was crazy time in my life. I was 31 years old or 30, 30, 31. And I went to my grandfather's funeral, his father. And the next morning my father had a heart attack. And then he died probably seven weeks, eight weeks later. And then my grandmother, his mother died the next week. So they all three of them died within eight weeks. So it was a really pretty crazy time. And my father was so close with him. He just that was stated me. But he always had a sense of humor. So I take what I do really serious. But I don't take myself too serious. I really don't. And you learn that from him. Yeah. Yeah. My father was always a hard worker. Here's your best friend. Still is. You know, still is. It's his voice that really if I ever get on the right page, it's always his voice that makes me on the right page. Yeah. Those were stayed your life. It still is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Worst in a matter of my farm. My farm. Yeah. Man. You know, when I when he died, I made a Christmas album about him. I I was called a very special Christmas. And we raised over a hundred million dollars for special Olympics. I want to ask you some advice unrelated to work. I just saw that you have on your wrist a bracelet with your wife's name on it. Yeah. How important has that relationship been in your life compared to your work? Well, you know, I again, I don't look back. Right? So I don't go by how I feel now. And right now it's more important than my work. And that's part of why I have peace. Because we we connect. We work on our marriage. We work on our friendship. We work on our bond. You know, and I'm not I'm not cum by yeah, about anything. You know, I realize they can happen. Oh, you're super. Super tense. You know, so so right now it's more important than my work. You get more satisfaction out of that. Yeah. It's the only place I find peace. You know, and I'm I'm really in search of peace, man. The rest of the shit. But I do think we can crack the code at complex. I really believe that I really I believe that we can really do something in education. I really believe that. So I'm very passionate about that. Yeah, you need something to work towards. I want to see that I can get something done without being nuts. But I'll feel that heart will feel in me. You know, I mean, I feel like I can get something done without feeling like that. Yeah, I do too. You know, it really is the truth, you know, but not everybody feels like that. There was some really talented people who are completely happy about their work. I don't know, but I don't know any of it. But I'm sure they're all you met like, I mean, your entire world, your entire life was surrounded by top performers by geniuses by people that are, you know, the top of their profession. And that's why I would let you up the questions last two times. We saw each other about like, what these people are like, because what you just said, I want to try to create something great without being nuts. Yeah, me too. And I like want these examples of that. Yeah, but I wish I could have learned it at 52. I think I got it at 72. Why do you think it took you longer than you wanted it to take you? I didn't go to therapy long enough early enough for my life because the unwinged the bells of your childhood takes a lot of work. I'm very pro therapy, you know, I really am. To unwing the bells of your childhood takes a lot of work. That's a great line. It's true. And you think the only way to do that is through. It's not the, it's my way. Okay. It's my, that the only way. When did you realize, oh, shit, I need it. I didn't take therapy really serious to my 50s. And I wish I had done it earlier. And what does really serious mean to you? mean twice a week but take it in not just not just show up at the appointment and listen but actually change your behavior. Yeah. Were you doing it like inner like in your 30s and 40s? I started in my 30s and 40s but I was in a good patient pro customer or client. Yeah, yeah, whatever the fuck they call me. So you go, you show up. You would talk. They would talk. They would talk. The minute I walk on the phone and grab the phone, they'd have like, you know, it was like, you weren't ready to like, to take an information. No, no. What do you think made you ready other than eight? Well, my divorce. Very simple. I, I was in a marriage and we were married and everything was going along. And then when we got the divorce, which people do, I realized that that was a time that I needed to get my shit self-contained. All of a sudden I got an idea about life that I didn't see before. So I pursued that. It's no different than the school or the beats or streaming or any of the things that I. That's a great way to think about it. Yeah. I had the idea earlier. I would have did it early. Why did you tell me yesterday that you think I need to talk to somebody? Because of some of the things that you told me, you know, some of the personal stuff you told me. I said, it's a lot easier to go with a guide. It's like easily enough to play tennis with a tennis teacher. It's good to have somebody in your life that doesn't have an agenda. Everybody in your life has an agenda. If you find a person without an agenda, it's. You can get a lot further. You can have those other people who love you very much and care about you, but have the one without the agenda for me, was very hopeful. Why do you think it works with that with this particular person? I believe this person. It's trust their judgment. Everything in my life is guttural. Steve was the same way though. But you have to know you're wrong. A lot of times you're doing things for reasons that are controlled by that childhood. Right? So as you work through that, you start doing things for more of a reason, more honest reasons that are not driven by that voice of your childhood. There's another thing that you said to me about you always kept a small circle of, I still do. These are true friends. I try to have an infield. You know, that's how many people say that. I don't know. I haven't seen this. I don't need another shorestop until the other one dies. I limited. I don't go for six. It just takes time to develop trust with these people. Yeah. Yeah. I trust other people, but not like that. Not to where I connect like that. Yeah. I'm very lucky. You get to be 72 years old. You have some friendships that are 50 years old. That's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice. It's nice. But you know, on the school thing, we're on to something. And I like to build, I like to do something which goes back to all the business stuff that's going to catch on and going to grow on its own. So I think like the stuff we're doing in the inner city, we have five schools now. These are high schools. Yeah. Because again, my debt to black culture is enormous. I want to really help the inner city and give these kids an advantage of an education that no one else is thinking about. I think we're going to build some extraordinary people that companies are going to really want. So that's the way you want high schoolers and people in college to learn. What's the best way for you to learn something new now? I was terrible in school when I had to learn something. I just couldn't do. I just how the hell do you learn to produce records of? Well, like anybody my age, I'm just in music or around culturally, there was the big bang which was the beels on Ed Sullivan. I was probably 11 years old, right? And I didn't have a currency in my neighborhood. I wasn't an athlete. I wasn't physically big. I wasn't any of the things that worked in the neighborhood. And when I saw the beels, I said, oh, there's a currency I can have because you try to try to create music first, right? Yeah. It was terrible. I mean, however, you know, I was in a band, you know, but I realized quick, I wasn't going to be in the wrong way. So I met this woman through my cousin, this woman, Ellie Granite, who took me to recording sessions. That's where I saw that guy with the leather bag and the beautiful woman and the candles and pretty girl coming to me. And I said, oh, that's it. I never saw anybody with a leather bag before, you know. And so you just learn by observing. No, then I got it. I went to get a job. I was cleaning up, you know, cleaning up the studio, setting up the studio, repetition, putting this over there, you know, figuring out, being around it, being a, the ability to observe. I can see how you can learn to be like a engineer, right? And recordings to be that way. But then you go to much more almost like creative part of it, which is producing. Well, because I had an instinct. I had an instinct for, again, for what the audience would like and what they wouldn't like and what was good and what was not. Based on your own personal taste, based on my taste influenced by John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen. In intense, intense therapy, sitting next to them every day for five years. And you were up close and you saw what true excellence looked like. Yeah. And they taught me what was cool and what was not cool and what was good and what was great. They were saying good and great and what you do to get there. And so then I was able to produce records because of those two people. I watched them. I watched Lennon, I watched John, I watched John Lennon, I watched Bruce. I said, oh, shit. And I just absorbed it. And I applied it. That's how Bruce gave me the song because the night for Patty Smith. I was able to translate that into a record where I was the producer. I always wanted a song that sounded like the animals. You know, it's my life and other, you know, that, that. And we got to get out of this place. Right. So when I heard that song, I heard the chorus because he had the chorus, right. I said, shit. And then I heard because the night belongs to lovers. I said, wow, for woman sings that. That's powerful. So I said to him, you're going to use this song. He goes, no, it doesn't fit on this album. I said, okay, can I use it for Patty? And he was great. And he said, yeah. And she rewrote the verses and killed it. But connecting the dots, you know, and you could learn a little bit how to connect the dots, but you got to be that kind of person that just sees you can connect the dots. And that's is simple and as difficult as it is. I was always able to connect the dots and see what could be what this is and what it could be. But that's what always tortured me because I would see something and see what it could be. And then try to get it to be that is maddening. Even with beats, I, you know, I saw the iPod and we finally decided to do it. I said, Oh, wow, it could be that. You know, it could be as cool as that. We got to make it as cool as that because the iPod was really cool. You know, did you ever meet a K. Amarita? The founder of Sony? No, but I just served him. I observed them and Steve would talk to me about him. And I saw, but I was always very into the fact that he, when I met Steve, I'd never understood instinctively why Sony had Columbia records, the Walkman, PlayStation, and then the CD and all this stuff and how to Apple become Apple and not them. I told him what's like they had all the components, but it was siloed. No, Marita died. Okay. But it goes back to your, I see some kind of connection to the school you're doing. Yes. It's like you had it all. You just had to have one person like a Naqiyah who was if he was alive or Steve or Jimmy to put it all together. I am not as smart as those two people. And I'm just telling that God's on his truth, man, they knew how to do what they were doing. I don't know how to do what I, I don't really know how to put it together. I do. I know how to put it together. You know, so that's really cool. But did Steve talk to you about the implicit? Absolutely. What was he saying about Sony and a K. Amarita? It would say that guy was really new. What he was doing. He really had a feel. And I, you know, it was obvious to me, you know, Marita bought Sony, bought Columbia records, bought Columbia pictures. He saw the distribution, the hardware, the software. He saw it all. But Steve took it not literally, but it was part of the inspiration behind his chain of thinking, right? He talked, in interviews, he talks about how he loved about a K.O. and the Walkman in particular because a K.O. had to fight to build a Walkman in his own company. There's like, this is the stupidest day. I remember him. Game with Bruce Springsteen. And he told me, he said, you know, this guy, this guy from Sony came up to me and he runs the company. He says, the guy asked me to put these headphones on if there was enough bass. And it was him. So this guy got it, you know? And I'd have met him, but I know we got it. You know, I learned a lot from Steve. I learned a lot from John and I learned a lot from Bruce Springsteen. I'm really blessed. Were you able to learn those are people I guess Bruce was your age, right? You guys are, he's a little older. He's three years old. We were able to learn from younger people than you. Like when were you learning from your artists? No, from Botto. You know, a lot from Botto. Botto's 10 years younger than me. Where I met Botto in 1983 and we did on the blood, we did on the blood red sky. I said, oh shit, the framing of how artists are thinking is changing. I said, wow, look at this. The music was different, you know? And the kind of music I was going on with that they were doing was different. It was a take on punk, but it was like more ethereal and different. And also he's an extrovert. Whereas the other guys, a lot of the guys I worked with weren't they're introverted really? Drey? So what did you learn from Drey? Well, Drey brought back the Springsteen thing and me, which was the commitment to a vision and sticking by the culture that you came up in and servicing that culture. And it was something that I really didn't understand at the beginning. So I was really hungry to learn about it, you know, about hip-hop and the culture and what it was doing and how it applied and the true power of it. So learn, I mean, learn everything about that I know about hip-hop from Dr. Drey. Period. I feel like he was some kind of like prodigy as a young person, but then he just has this relentless work ethic. So he took like a Nate talent and I don't and seems to like just through an insane like day after day after day after day dedication and made the next, because he's the greatest the hip-hop producer of all time. Well, like Drey and Bruce have a lot in common. How so? They are completely uncompromising. Okay, completely uncompromising. They will not compromise. You have to convince them to move to the left or right. They are completely what they do and they uncompromise. It's just that simple. Bruce was the lead. Why am I Drey and Bruce was very similar. They were both broke and Drey was in trouble and broke and they were that vision. Back then they weren't compromising. Not even close. You couldn't rent Bruce Springs. You couldn't buy nothing. You could rent me in those days. Absolutely. Well, you couldn't anything with that guy. He didn't think about, "Wow, where am I going to sleep tonight?" It was like this. I learned that from him. It was like really, really a powerful thing. There was nothing that anyone had that he wanted. Nothing. That's powerful. That's powerful when you're broke. Right? It's like, "Well, you know, I got. So I admired that." So, Gano was an extrovert. He extrovert me. He'll go out. He'll talk to people and he's passionate. By the way, in his book and in his play, one man's show, he talks about the issues he had at home with his dad and all that stuff. But he is the most positive person I met in music. So his bend, same thing comes from this childhood trauma. But somehow, didn't fix it along the way. No, no, no. He just is naturally positive person. He can steal stuff. He can get clout through things. He works. He's incredible work at the incredible writer, credible lyricist, credible performer. But he's positive. Whenever you see him, he's got an idea. He wants to do this. He's got very broad interest. I mean, you know, I didn't go on vacation until I met him. Let's say more about that. I'd never been on a vacation really until the year 2000 because I was doing Rital and Hum with him in 1988. And I went to the South of France. I remember when I was like, "Whoa, what the fuck?" So you were just my olipically focused on achievement. Yes. I love this story where you fly to California for the first time. Right? I don't think you'd ever been on a plane. No. You're 20? How old are you? 20? You're 20. Never been on a plane. Never been on a hotel. And then I don't know if it's the same sugar later. I think Tom Petty puts you in a house. You would never let him put me in the Beverly Hills hotel. But that's when you start to like, oh, wait, the world is huge. And there's a lot in front of me if I focus on this. Well, I remember John took me to a guy named Richard Perry's house. Okay. A very famous record producer. And John took me to his house with Harry Nielsen. They were going out. They said he just was like really nice to me. He said, you want to come? Sure. Yeah. I had nothing to do. I was in the hotel. Takes me there. And this guy's got a house in the hills in Laurel Canyon, overlooking or doheny or something overlooking the city. He was at night. Yeah. Tennis court. That was lit up. I was like, it's like seeing the guy with the bag. You know, like, wow. Yeah. Just opens up the scope of possibilities. Yeah. You know, you see for the first time, I've never been on a plane. I mean, I only been to Manhattan because of the work. Did you know, this is where you were going to spend your life? Like the minute I got off the plane and my boss Roy. So let's rent the car. We rent the Cadillac, right? And we drove down Sunset Boulevard and it was December. It was 75, the 78 degrees or something like that. I said, are you kidding me? I said, no, this is the one, like California, you know? So I went to pull into the Beverly Hills Hotel. First hotel you ever stay in? Yeah. Is that that's wild? Except the host motel in Pennsylvania where the car pulls up through the door, you know, that one of those places and pulls on the highway. So a little different from where you're going. Well, this was the first time. And so I go to my room and I come back and I talk to the door man. I said, can't she son? The regular people live here. And he said, yeah, I'm a regular person. I'm a doormat. I said, I live here. I said, my father's long shunmin. Oh, did it doxia? Yeah. So it's the port of California. Yes, one of the biggest ports in the world or whatever. I said, thanks. I go back to my room. I call my mother. I said, mom, how did you get this wrong? We land in Ellis Island and we live 30 feet from Ellis Island. It's freezing. It's cold. It's, why do we live in California? Yeah. So yeah, I knew I wanted to live in California from that day. So how long did it take for you to move here permanently? 79, Tom Petty. Daniel took my whole life was controlled by was was documented by alcohol because I was Daniel took feed house when I moved. How many years later was that six six years and that's when you he put Tom Petty pull you up on a house. Yeah. And you were kind of freaked out. You're like I'm in the well, because it was I was in again, I never I never had a house. Yeah. I live in an apartment, right? Yeah. There was noises outside the window, you know, and I mean, so I was completely freaked out, you know, but Petty was that Petty was incredible. What'd you learn from him? He was the first guy I worked with. That was my age. He was like only two years younger than me. I saw him, but he was like, he was more of a contemporary in mind at that point. We were both trying to prove something, right? So we locked in and he was just great song, right? And again, perfectionist than his art. He would never bring a song and Tom Petty never brought an average song into the studio. He was a great self editor. He would come in. That song would be complete and done versus like that as well. But that's another thing. His motivating factor was creating the best possible song art. Yeah, he wasn't thinking about it again, like everybody else. You want to have a better life. You know, yeah. And another guy that had issues with his father. But he had commercial instincts because there's a great line in the documentary where like he writes some song and you're like, I think you wrote a great song and two other ones, you're like, get seven more. We're done or like this song's going to buy you a house. Yeah. Tom's like, I'd never heard any way. Sometimes I sound crass or whatever. Just that I have a sense of humor. I know how funny that would sound. Yeah. Like, Bono one day, I didn't work on on on John's retreat. I wanted to do it, but they chose Brian Eno and Danny Lain-Wah, which was a better choice. They wanted to change that sound. But that was the right choice. But they were always bringing me into listening to the songs like Bruce did that day on the river. Yeah. So I go man and he plays me this song and he says, this was the beginning of it. He says, Jimmy, this is house music. I said, really? I said, I don't know if I like house music that much. So he plays me with it without you. I said, Bono, that's house music. No, you don't know where you're talking. I said, Bono. That other song, that's apartment music. You put this song out, you get a house. Okay. So, you know, I just the way I express myself is just kind of, you know, I try to, you know, I can't help it. If the line is good, I say it even though it even makes you look, you know, like, wow, you're going to buy a house with the song, Tom Petty. I knew what I was saying that it sounded like that. But my father was like that. He couldn't resist the good line. Goes back to one of the first things we talked about. It's like the fact that they want you in the room because you tell them the truth. And what I love about you is like exactly before I met you exactly how I thought you would be. You are in person. And this started with when I sent this clip when you're on Ari Emmanuel's podcast. And at the end, I sent the clip to Daniel Heck and me and him were just laughing about it because you're like, the production, he goes, this is Ari's podcast. It's a reduction value. There was a voluor couch. And he says it's not a voluor couch. I grew up with voluor couch. It was okay. Only my voluor couch that plastic on them. No, but you're like a production value slugs. It's hot. I don't got a tea. The water is warm. You got this goddamn light in my face. I know it felt kind of Rick Ruben sitting there in Italy in this incredible house back with we looks like Moses. I'm like, what the fuck? I'm going to last thing. What do you think of reduction value today? You happy? I thought it was good when you when you finally get going. I mean, the wood paneling is just not really for me. I'm not like, because I had wood paneling growing up. You know, I mean, everything was not real. We got you the tea. I sent that clip to the team. I was like, Jimmy's comment. We're not going to disappoint. We have the air going. It's a very nice time. It's very nice place. It's perfect. I absolutely love you. I tell you this all time. You're one of the people I most admire. This was fun. You want to most be like, thank you so much for taking the time. It was fun. You look, you know, don't leave me hanging. Don't leave me hanging. Jimmy, come on. So I didn't see that. I was looking for my microphone. No, you're good. Thanks, man. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I have obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.