Jimmy Iovine, Interscope Records & Beats by Dre

Jimmy Iovine is the co-founder of Interscope Records, Beats by Dre, and the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy. Iovine is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the modern music industry. Growing up in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, Iovine was raised in an Italian working-class family. He began working as a recording engineer in the early 1970s, and went on to engineer landmark albums including Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run and John Lennon's Rock 'n' Roll and Walls and Bridges, before transitioning into production with Patti Smith's Easter, Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes, Stevie Nicks' Bella Donna, and U2's Rattle and Hum. In 1990, Iovine co-founded Interscope Records with Ted Field. Under his leadership, the label became one of the most dominant forces in popular music, launching or elevating the careers of Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur, Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, Eminem, 50 Cent, Lady Gaga, and Kendrick Lamar. He rose to become chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M Records. In 2006, he and Dr. Dre co-founded Beats by Dre, which Apple acquired in 2014 for $3 billion — the largest acquisition in Apple's history at the time. Iovine subsequently helped launch Apple Music in 2015 before departing Apple in 2018. His accomplishments include being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022 with the Ahmet Ertegun Award, being honored by the Recording Academy's Producers & Engineers Wing during Grammy Week 2012, co-founding the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy in 2013 with a $70 million donation alongside Dr. Dre, launching the Iovine and Young Center high school program in Los Angeles in 2022 with additional locations in Atlanta and Inglewood, and donating to the city of Compton during the COVID-19 pandemic to fund medical supplies, testing, and meals for residents. https://davidsenra.com/episode/jimmy-iovine Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/senra Function: https://functionhealth.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Introduction: The Corny World of Fame (00:00:54) The Impact of Social Media on Fame (00:01:27) Chasing Greatness: Personal Reflections (00:02:10) Technological Shifts in the Music Industry (00:03:24) The Streaming Service Dilemma (00:05:34) The Artist's Perspective on Streaming (00:06:39) Early Career and Influences (00:09:40) The Importance of Humility (00:11:19) Working with the Best: A Career Retrospective (00:13:07) The Role of Brutal Honesty (00:15:00) Navigating the Music Industry (00:33:50) The Birth of Beats by Dre (00:46:14) The Music Industry's Customer Problem (00:46:44) Vertically Integrating Culture and Fashion (00:47:13) Building Beats: From Music Videos to Headphones (00:48:03) Marketing is Empathy (00:50:28) The Journey of Beats Music (00:59:09) The Future of the Music Industry with AI (01:14:40) The Bend in the Pipe: Harnessing Fear and Obsession (01:29:12) Comparing Work Approaches with Dr. Dre (01:30:50) The Tortured Path to Success (01:32:41) Balancing Happiness and Ambition (01:35:22) The Importance of Peace and Therapy (01:49:30) Learning from Legends (01:55:57) The Influence of Bono and Dre (02:00:15) California Dreams and Career Milestones (02:07:20) Final Thoughts and Reflections Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

  I want to start with what you were just saying before we started recording. I was like, Rob, hurry up and run the tape. You said, "We live in a corny world."

• 0:09Speaker 01

  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 had to be great at one time to get a record deal, to do all that stuff. And then that sort of dwindled as time went on, which is just fine. But it has absolutely replaced great. And what you can do on the internet and marketing 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.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I think social media has the biggest impact that I've seen in my lifetime, you know?

• 1:01David Senra?

  And that contributes to people being corny for attention on the social media, you think?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  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 viral or, you know, most of my friends, if they go viral, they're devastated. Do you know what I'm saying? They're like, "Oh shit." Or they don't even know.

• 1:24David Senra?

  I think not even knowing would be the place that I would aspire to be in. Like, I want to make great work. Obviously, I'm public facing because I happen to be up to the podcast. I 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 you have, we did this clip that got almost like 2 million views of your advice about, you know, why do the horses have blinders on them? And it's one of my favorite things. Every time I post it, it still like resonates. And I post things to remind myself where it's like, hey, 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 were, we spent a few hours together at your house yesterday. You were very kind, invited me over there again.

• 2:10David Senra?

  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?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  I always wanted Interscope 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 had to learn on the fly a lot, you know? So, but that was about around 2000. We had this little TV show called Jimmy and Doug's Farm Car. It was about uploading your music to Interscope. 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.

• 3:07David Senra?

  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.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, I see online all the time. People talk about shit before it happens. You know what I mean? But that, you know, that isn't, that's 10% of the game. The game is getting it right. You know, MySpace 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 it went to Apple Music. So we, at least we became number two. Daniel, who's extraordinary, had the wherewithal and the ability to get the licenses from a record business that didn't understand at all

• 3:56Speaker 01

  what he was talking about, the fact that he wrestled those licenses out. It's so, I mean, you could, you can prove it because if you look at those deals, those deals are reflective of the iTunes download market. 7030, that was the same business as the download market. So they just copied that, which is not a great bit model for that. Why? Because you have.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Not enough money in the streaming service in order for it to really live. So they gotta now go out and find different versions of revenue, right? And they pay 70% or whatever it is now, 72%, 760. I don't know what the negotiations have been since then. And um, structured in a really odd way. Because, let's say, for example, um, you're married, you have two kids, and you have a family plan. And you and your wife play The Clash, The Police, etc. But your kids play Drake and Kendrick Lamar all day. Most of the money from your house goes to Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  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, heavy streaming, the money's 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 um, 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.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  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 breathe, which is what, you know, not for philanthropic reasons, but this is what TikTok does. That's what Instagram does. You could 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.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  I learned that in 1973. I came from Red Hood, Brooklyn. My dad was a longshoreman. 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 and with real talent and my life is gonna be okay. All I gotta do is not get thrown out of the fucking room.

• 7:05David Senra?

  And you looked at it even back then as like an act of service to the artists that you're working with?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Not for that person on the other end of the glass. What the hell do I know how to do?

• 7:15David Senra?

  You have this great line in The Defying Ones, which I've told you, I've watched probably at least 10 times. And you're like, 99% of this, when people say, oh, I did this, or I did that, and the music business is like, you're like, it's complete bullshit. It all comes down to the artists that you're working with.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  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 a while. They write the songs, they make the records. But in my day, 80% of it was the artist. You know, Bruce Springsteen wrote the songs, had the idea, had the vision, you know, and you helped. You know, so that's where I was coming from.

• 7:53David Senra?

  There's a great point. I'm glad you brought up Bruce, because me and you were talking about that issue. I told you I've been going through, I went through his autobiography and I really think that book changed my life in many ways. I watched one of your interviews, you said one of the best pieces of advice that you ever got was from John Lindell? Because you were, 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.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  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."

• 8:25David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Something like that. When you're striving for something. Well, the truth was that we were trying 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...

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I let my pride, they brought somebody in to help and I let my pride get in the way. So I went to John Landau and, and he said, I'm gonna tell you something you didn't learn in that neighborhood of yours, your mother and father didn't, because he knew my family, your mother and father didn't tell you this, this is not about you. This is about Bruce Springsteen and about the record we're making. And I'll tell you for 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 had one success

• 9:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:40David Senra?

  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, what I'm trying to do in my life too, is 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 will take care of itself. I won't worry about, you know, the value coming back to me.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  The whole thing you gotta do is, look, there's a certain amount of feigned humility that's good and it works. If you practice it long enough, you actually become somewhat humble.

• 10:15David Senra?

  Do you consider yourself a humble person?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  I think I have a humble side.

• 10:19David Senra?

  Say more about that.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  I do, well, you know, I come from a family, my father was, was a humble guy. He was a dock worker, a longshoreman, manual labor, not, you know, I don't know a lot of people whose fathers really worked manual labor, you know, where if it's 90 degrees down the pier, it's 120 in the hull of the ship. You know, when you carry the coffee bags, they're a hundred pound apiece, right? All day. So, but he had pride, but he was humble.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  And if you're willing to give yourself up for a greater cause, in my case, when I was younger, it was an album, right? If you're willing to do that and set your 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?

• 11:19David Senra?

  One of the things I love most about Jimmy Iovine 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 Reznor, Eminem, 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 Iovine did, and that is exactly what Ramp did.

• 12:04David Senra?

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• 12:48David Senra?

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• 13:07David Senra?

  Every single person that I've either read about that worked 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 Springsteen's 600-page autobiography. The book's so big, you can work out with the goddamn thing. And there's a, there's a story in there where he's struggling and he's trying to do something new and he's in L.A. And he invites like my good friend Jimmy Iovine 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 sing one thing. He goes, so when are you going to record the vocals? Because 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.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I'll give you the setting. He was doing the album for about two years. It was The River. And they worked really, really hard on that. And

• 14:00Speaker 01

  he was doing it, but because I engineered his album, I knew he had a, he had a tendency to bury the vocal. Right? And I knew those guys really well. I knew Landau and Bruce pretty well by then. Actually, part of the story he didn't tell, which was funny, is Tom Petty was sitting next to me.

• 14:19David Senra?

  He shouldn't have left that out.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Because I was producing Tom Petty at the time. We went over and visited, right? So he plays us a double album. And the, and the vocal was buried. So I just said to myself,

• 14:35Speaker 01

  I got one line to penetrate because I saw Bruce's face and he was serious of a fucking heart attack. You know what I mean? He's at the end of an album, he's exhausted. So I just said, when are you going to sing it?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Right? You know, it was very funny, but it was very clear. And they did, they went back in and they remixed the whole album, which was the right thing to do.

• 14:59David Senra?

  But where did you get the self-confidence? Because you were, how old were you when you started working with John Lennon? 20, 21?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  20.

• 15:04David Senra?

  Yeah. You told him the truth too. Like where did, where did that come from?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Because not out of arrogance or confidence, it's comfort. My father really drilled in me from when I was a little kid that

• 15:23Speaker 01

  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 wherever 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's 72, hello? Right, it's, "Thank God." You know, who the fuck wants to die that insecure, right? But, um, you know, in, in work, I always had a certain amount of confidence because it came natural to me. And nothing came natural to me before that. But when I set it a console,

• 16:08Speaker 01

  and I put the faders up, the balance came very, very naturally, and people liked it. So, that's kinda where I got some of the confidence from, but you know,

• 16:21Speaker 01

  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'm, I mean, what's the point of asking me a question if I'm not supposed to give you my answer? I don't, I don't understand that philosophy.

• 16:37David Senra?

  It's one of the funniest things, I, I played this clip for you.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Because, one, one second.

• 16:40David Senra?

  No, go for it. Interrupt as much as you want.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  One of the reasons is, I really don't think I walk in trying to get you to like me. Because I believe you do.

• 16:50David Senra?

  Say more about this, you told me this yesterday. This is so, I feel the same way, by the way.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  You know what I mean, I mean, this, that shouldn't be sounding egotistical, because let me tell you that, 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 really deal with a lot of people that are very defensive and are 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.

• 17:27David Senra?

  And some of them say that, privately.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  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

• 17:41Speaker 01

  in a neighborhood where...

• 17:44Speaker 01

  That was it?

• 17:45David Senra?

  You have this like brutal honesty.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Well, you're leaving one word out.

• 17:49David Senra?

  What's that?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Brutal honesty, but an enormous amount of respect.

• 17:55David Senra?

  Yeah, I don't think you do it in a disrespectful way.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  No, you can't do it in a disrespectful way.

• 17:58David Senra?

  I don't even think you'd be in a room with somebody you didn't respect. Because you have complete control over your like your environment.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  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, I'm that. And then you have kids. And it can bring the world back in. And all of a sudden, if you want to get your kid into school, you're gonna go sit across, sometimes you're gonna sit across an asshole. You know what I mean? So, so the answer to that question is no. So, once you have kids, you just go back to zero, 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 Born to Run in particular, when he was flat broke.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  You know, I knew Bruce. Yeah, when I met John Lennon, John Lennon was, 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 margin already, you know? So he was, he was John, right? Bruce was broke, I mean, dropped from his label. And his career was in trouble, right? So he had to, and he said, and he said publicly, he said, "I don't want to be rich. I don't want to be famous. Man, I didn't even want to be happy. I wanted to be great."

• 19:22Speaker 01

  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, Patti 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.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  And it was unbelievable. It was such an education about culture, about life, about what's important, about all those things. And I just sucked it in because I was a really, no, I just catch, I had nothing going on. I didn't understand anything. So, everything that they taught me, I just breathe in. I was lucky that it was them, you know? And I just took it all in and it really set the tone for my life.

• 20:21David Senra?

  Why?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Because these are some of the most culturally relevant poets of the 20th century, you know? And when I say poet, I mean the person, you know, I mean, not just that they write lyrics, you know? And they had the right attitude about their work and their product.

• 20:45David Senra?

  What was the right attitude about their work or their product?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  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, you know, because I've gone on the road. Once Napster came out, I was like, oh shit, what's going on? I better learn something new, you know, 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 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, then I started to get, and then I met Steve. And he was the only one that had soul.

• 21:29David Senra?

  And similar to the same soul of the artist that you worked with in the nineties?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely, but the only one. He had soul and feel. And we bonded on John Lennon and Bob Dylan. You know, we would talk 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...

• 22:04Speaker 01

  It translated to me was you can be in this world and have soul. And you don't find that a lot.

• 22:12David Senra?

  Why did you say that when you met him, you're like, he's the only one that's gonna get this done? Meaning, I think it was, this is pre-streaming. This was the, I think the iTunes.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's like, why did you? I helped him get the licenses for iTunes.

• 22:24David Senra?

  You did?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I helped him.

• 22:25David Senra?

  So why, but why could he do it, no one else?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Because he understood. He understood what made artists tick. He understood the why. Most engineers that I've met

• 22:38Speaker 01

  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 gonna buy all the media companies. Media companies move in different ways, you know? They don't move like the tech business. And when I met him,

• 23:08Speaker 01

  I said, this guy gets it. Now, is he tough? Is he, I don't know, ruthless, maybe? I don't know. But I can tell you what? He gets it. He gets it, you know? 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, not that they're bad people or anything. They just, they don't have that. By the way, you can like music. Like all these guys always say, I love music.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  I love chocolate, but I don't understand Hershey's. Do you know what I mean? I really don't understand it.

• 23:47David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Who makes chocolate and how they make it? So, you know, you could like music all day. And completely, one engineer told me once,

• 23:57Speaker 01

  we were working on something that was gonna be video involved. He said to me, I know how that should end. I love television.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 24:06David Senra?

  That's not the same thing, man.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  You know, so, but anyway.

• 24:10David Senra?

  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. The interesting part about that, one of the, one, I want to hear more about that. But two, why did he call music software?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  You'd know that answer better than me.

• 24:29David Senra?

  I've never heard anybody, I mean, I guess it is.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  I mean, it's treated like, you know, ones and zeros or whatever, you know, because that's how it comes across.

• 24:36David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  You know, and whatever that is, you know.

• 24:39David Senra?

  He's like, all these software guys want to make hardware and they can't.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Well, he, he always felt that what was unique about Apple, which was, is that a software company can make hardware.

• 24:48David Senra?

  Let's talk about the schools.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Why the schools important to talk about? Because it ties into all of this. Occasionally, I run into someone who says, he's the next Steve Jobs, she's the next Steve Jobs. Well, let me tell you something, there's not going to be another Steve Jobs. There'll be some great people and there are some incredible people around today that are doing something extraordinary, inventing the, creating these companies, et cetera. But to be Steve Jobs, you have to truly understand the cross between technology and liberal arts. Where those two things meet and interact. When I had Beats, I realized that engineering, design and culture, the collaboration was

• 25:32Speaker 01

  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?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  What I realized, when I met a lot of other people in the tech business, all, all the companies and everything, they're engineering societies fundamentally. And I find, you can't generalize it, but there are people that aren't like that. But for the most part, why software companies don't make hardware is they don't understand, truly understand design, right? And they can't communicate with it, right?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  That's what I think. What the fuck do I know? But that's what I think. That's what I've observed, right?

• 26:31David Senra?

  How did you know there's a need for a new school, though?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Because I realized it was education, because I realized it was siloing in education. That you go, you, you, because I see, again, what do I know? I know, I know, like, the feel of young people, culture, right? So I see the way kids are being brought up. They're brought, we're multidisciplinary right now. For the last 15 years, they're 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 an accountant. Yeah, they have classes and other, they have an engineering course you could take. Well, you take that engineering course with 50 other engineers, right?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  So now you're seeing schools, remember, we started this school 14 years ago.

• 27:23David Senra?

  That long ago?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:25David Senra?

  Wow.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 27:26David Senra?

  And you, it was you and Dr. Dre, you endowed it with $70 million to get it started?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:31David Senra?

  Okay.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  I mean, we had no, I, none of one of us went to school.

• 27:34David Senra?

  It's funny.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  So we had no, I, we're not afraid to do things we have no idea we'd do. We put our own money up, right? So that's me, 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 lean toward entrepreneurship,

• 28:15Speaker 01

  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 what 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.

• 28:45David Senra?

  When's the first time you had that problem? Was it when you were trying to build a product?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Beats.

• 28:49David Senra?

  Beats?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Beats was a product, not by accident, like the iPod.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  I wanted culture, design, music, right? I wanted it all connected. So I met Steve Jobs and he was like, oh, this guy gets it all. So I figured everybody did.

• 29:07David Senra?

  Did you pitch him on doing the headphones?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:09David Senra?

  Together?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:10David Senra?

  What did he say?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  He said, I don't want to do headphones. You do them. So we went out to a restaurant once. I'll never forget it. We went to this Greek restaurant and this was a, it was, it was after he was sick. And, um, but we went out to a restaurant and it was one of those restaurants where they put the paper thing with the, it could be the crayons for the kids, you know, and they could draw. And so we're in the middle of lunch. I said, you know, I want to build this headphone company. He 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. And he called a guy, took all the food.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  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. And the guy gave him a marker 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. You know, so, and then he would guide me along the way and he was fantastic, right? But I thought, when I started Beats, that I, I could, I'm naive in a way, but I thought I could find people like that. But I found people that are designed. I found people that are engineers.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  I found people in popular culture. I wanted them all to understand how to collaborate. And I just said, siloed learning is bullshit.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  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. But again, what do I know about education? Not a lot. I learned a lot in the last 15 years, but really, not a lot.

• 31:09David Senra?

  Yeah, it started with the instinct that you just didn't think it was being done correctly. And you'll just learn.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I know how to get something done.

• 31:15David Senra?

  Yeah, this goes back to you just being a natural born entrepreneur.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  I just started to get something done. I found a guy, I met this great dean, Erica Moe. I met her. I said, oh, she could do this. She was from the Rossky School. But I just felt instinctively.

• 31:32David Senra?

  What's that?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  It's an art school at USC.

• 31:34David Senra?

  Okay.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Then there was the president, Max Nikias. 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 technologist, but I made a great headphone.

• 31:58David Senra?

  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, like, you have this collection of, I'm trying to think of, like, what is your highest talent? I just ran into Steve Stout at a friend's birthday party, which was really funny because he worked for you for a long time. I was like, dude, I'm seeing Jimmy soon. Can you, like, give me some stories? And I think you're obviously a phenomenal marketer. Let me ask you, like, what do you actually think your talent is? And I want to tell the story that Steve told me.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  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 Interscope, when I ran Beats, and when I ran what became Apple Music, I just woke up in the day and did 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.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:04David Senra?

  But when you were running the company, you wake up and just instinct.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Purely, or listen to people, you know, and grab a piece from here and a piece from there, you know, and just and synthesize.

• 33:13David Senra?

  Did you go after difficult things on purpose?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I only went about what I felt. When Dre said to me.

• 33:19David Senra?

  That that was one example, because Dre comes to you. You, he plays, is it the chronic? What is he playing for you the very first time or is like some?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Chronic, finished.

• 33:29David Senra?

  And you're, I think you asked him like, who engineered this?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:32David Senra?

  And he's like, I did. And he's like, well, who produced it? And he's like, I did. And then you're like, oh, within a few minutes of meeting him, he says something like, he's going to define Interscope.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:39David Senra?

  But he had a, like a very hairy situation you had to get him out of, right?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  It was impossible. It was everything you, watching these shows and stuff, you think it is.

• 33:47David Senra?

  Okay, so what was going on?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Well, what happened was I connected dots, which I think I do really well. I saw him as Snoop.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  I heard, finally heard hip hop with the 808 bass, that big bass 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 into where I understood it. Dre was the first person to really harness it and give it the power that it deserved, because he gave it the clarity that it deserved. It's 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 Mick and Keith.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  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 in the beginning. Now I think I do, you know? I mean, not as much as some of the pioneers of hip hop. But I, I understand it.

• 35:02David Senra?

  Were there lawsuits? Were they signed? Like, what, what did you have to untangle?

• 35:05Speaker 01

  There were three lawsuits. There was a Rico lawsuit, right?

• 35:10David Senra?

  Rico?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  That came with Sony, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a-

• 35:13David Senra?

  Wait, is Rico money laundering? What is?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Gangster is.

• 35:17David Senra?

  Gangster, okay, okay, that's right.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  That was from the Eazy-E thing.

• 35:20David Senra?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Right, this is in all the movies. I'm not talking out of 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. Uh, so he was suing them from prison. Um, they were Sony. And there was a company that distributed Eazy-E's label that was suing as well, or challenging as well. So I had to settle all those things out. Which is kind of like, if you see something great, but there's T-Rex sitting on it. And most people would avoid, say, look, there must be something else to eat.

• 36:04David Senra?

  And you just know, I'm only want to work with great?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  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 are wearing these things on their head, and they look like medical equipment. There's nothing attractive about a headphone.

• 36:26David Senra?

  The funny thing about that is there was opportunity hiding in plain sight. And you're like, what's our competition, guys? Bose? It's, they want to, there's no music. It's like silence.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Well, their marketing thing was, you can go to sleep with us. I'm like, that's ridiculous. What a marketing thing, right? Keep, you know, so I said, no, no, no. We want to wake you up.

• 36:47David Senra?

  Okay, hold on, I want to pause here. Because I text Daniel Ek, right? Founder of Spotify. And I was like, tell me, like, 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 Jimmy Iovine. It's just hilarious.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Well, that just means my bullshit was better than his. You know, it doesn't mean, it doesn't mean, he's so, he's so, what he did in the music business, man. No one has any idea how hard it was. Patti Smith had an incredible line. It's people have the power, the power to dream, to rule, and to wrestle the world from fools.

• 37:24David Senra?

  Oh, that's good.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Okay, that's what Daniel had it, okay? So anytime you get a guy like that. I didn't beat him at anything. I just, I just, I just must have been slicker than him.

• 37:36David Senra?

  To me, in my opinion, wildly 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?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:49David Senra?

  So hardware first, that was the initial idea.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  It was all about moving Interscope laterally. I think companies should move laterally, and they don't. Most companies don't move laterally out of fear. 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.

• 38:17David Senra?

  Well, what do you mean by lateral, though?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Like, for example, Interscope 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. So 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 you'd listen to it on. So that's moving laterally. I would also want, which I'm doing now with Complex, to have e-commerce. So artists can communicate in different ways with their audience.

• 38:52David Senra?

  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.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 39:00David Senra?

  So you have this idea for Beats. You see this opportunity. Obviously Dre's known for the best sonics ever. So it makes perfect alignment with him. This was Steve Stout's point to me, where he's like, Jimmy's just a phenomenal marketer. I'm gonna 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 Dre and Snoop. And they wouldn't play them on the top 40. And he says Jimmy did something genius to get Dre and Snoop played on the top 40. What did you do?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Well, I just considered it a reflex. You know, what we did was, I said, okay. You gotta understand, whenever there's gatekeepers 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 in, you know, at radio stations, or at wherever the gatekeepers are, your job is to skate around them, right? So, I said, "Okay, let's do this. Let's make a minute commercial of G-Thing", which was Dre's first single with Snoop, right? I said, "Let's make a 60-second spot.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Now, I don't want anything said before it or after it. I just want it to play."

• 40:19David Senra?

  The radio's not gonna play my song, that's fine. I'm going to buy ad space on the radio and play the song.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Yes, and we did on the 50 Top Markets, spent a fortune doing 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'd call it gangster rap or whatever music is today. They didn't play that then, right?

• 40:43David Senra?

  How'd you get on MTV?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I said, "This is the same thing as Guns N' Roses." Period.

• 40:49David Senra?

  You said that twice now. You said, "Snoop, Dre's Mick and Keith", you say, "This is just like Guns N' Roses." What does that mean?

• 40:55Speaker 01

  It means that it's counterculture, that people are gonna relate to it. People that feel marginalized and feel isolated and feel angry. And it represents an entire culture that people are gonna relate to. And that's what Guns N' Roses did. That's what the Rolling Stones did. That's what Nirvana did. That's what James Brown did. It's that thing, you know, that moves people. So, yeah, I instinctively felt that.

• 41:22David Senra?

  So who do you go to at MTV? You just go to the top guy? Like, how do you actually get it done?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  I said, "Play this." He goes, "I can't play this." And he had the 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...

• 41:43Speaker 01

  I said, I said, I don't know how to progress. I said, put it next to Guns N' Roses. And if it doesn't work, please never play an Interscope record again.

• 41:53David Senra?

  Wow.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  So I put it on.

• 41:55David Senra?

  You had that much belief?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  You don't have to be talented to know that. I mean, it's just fucking obvious. You know what I mean? You know, ask Ray Rubin. He knew it before me, right? So, but what it caused was all these kids, sons of senators, daughters of senators, congresspeople, business people, they, they came home with one of those records. And when that happened, that's what led to the whole falling out with Time Warner that we had when we, when Interscope got thrown out of Time Warner over lyrics. Because Bob Dole, Dolores Tucker, Bill Bennett, right? Who was the education czar or whatever he was at the time, you know, all those guys.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Bill Clinton went on the floor of the Senate and, you know, Bob Dole said, we were some, somebody said, we were a mustard gas factory or something like.

• 42:52David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:52David Senra?

  I remember that.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  But I've been involved with, and I was involved with John Lennon. They tried to throw him out. But I was, when I was doing his album, Nixon was lit. He had to go to court every day during Walls and Bridges because Nixon was trying to throw him out of the country. That was real.

• 43:06David Senra?

  Yeah, that's, that's insane.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  It was real.

• 43:08David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  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, yeah, I didn't, I didn't care what those people were saying, you know?

• 43:17David Senra?

  So you got them on MTV, you got them on the radio. Once you played the ads on the radio, then people start calling.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 43:25David Senra?

  They start calling the radio stations, like, play that song.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 43:29David Senra?

  That is an ad. No one else is doing this.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Only because I wouldn't do anything illegal because I'm psychotic about doing anything that like 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. And 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.

• 44:01David Senra?

  I've heard the name but know nothing about him.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Well, he founded Motown.

• 44:04David Senra?

  Okay.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  During Jim Crow. You know what I mean? So his artists weren't even 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. What he did? Talk about wrestling the earth from fools. Barry Gordy.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  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 gonna stick. And if you're passionate about it.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Then just break through that wall. Cause there's gonna be a lot of resistance. But if it sticks. You win.

• 44:46David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  It has to stick though.

• 44:48David Senra?

  There's actually a lesson for entrepreneurs 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 the entrepreneurs I most admire. And he realized he had a sticky product with Amazon. Because he saw that once you become an Amazon customer. Not only do you 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, a thousand customers saying, hey, you know, you bought a book. What else did you buy? And one guy goes, can you sell me windshield wipers? And he's like, oh my God. We're gonna 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.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:30David Senra?

  Because the 10 million or whatever the number is. Let's say he spent 100 million in new customer introductions and advertising, marketing this year. It's like, these people are gonna be with me next year, the year after, a decade.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Well, if you're an entrepreneur. And you see something work. You can extrapolate what else will work. Right? And that's what he did. But I mean, these guys have built businesses that dwarf anything I've ever even dreamed of. You know, but they can extrapolate. You know, like. For example, Beats, right?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  We have this, I was always frustrated that the music industry didn't have customers. It drove me crazy.

• 46:09David Senra?

  What do you mean they don't have customers?

• 46:10Speaker 01

  They don't have a customer. They still don't have a customer.

• 46:12David Senra?

  They don't have a relationship with the end user?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Right. Instagram does, TikTok does, MTV did. Constantly, the music, the streaming services do. For some reason, the music industry is allergic to a customer. Okay, and I don't know why, but they don't have an end user.

• 46:32David Senra?

  What was the first time they outsourced the, the relationship with the end customer? Is this just?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Always.

• 46:38David Senra?

  So even when you're selling it to like through record stores back in the day?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Record stores, radio, MTV.

• 46:44David Senra?

  You would have controlled every, so when you said you want to go lateral, the entrepreneurial version of this, the business version, you want to vertically integrate. You want to vertically integrate all the way down. So you would have even had Interscope if there's.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I want to vertically integrate, if you call it that, to fashion. I, I, I mean.

• 47:02David Senra?

  Cause you guys are controlling the culture. They're having the influence.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  We're causing it.

• 47:06David Senra?

  Causing it.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  My artists are causing the culture. Artists that I work with rather, putting it clearly. For example, we put beats in all of our music videos when we first started.

• 47:18David Senra?

  You were insistent and relentless with this.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what, but you know.

• 47:23David Senra?

  No, I'm not crazy.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  But I put a lot more money into 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.

• 47:35David Senra?

  Worked is an understatement.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it worked, you know, and we built the number one headphone company in the world. We were, when we sold to Apple, we were number one in 50 countries. Then we were number one in Germany and Sennheiser was number two. We were number one in Japan and Sony was number two. I, I, I still can't believe it, to be honest with you.

• 47:53David Senra?

  This is, goes 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.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Marketing is empathy.

• 48:05David Senra?

  Say more.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  It's empathy. Marketing is understanding who you're trying to communicate with and understand them. And understand from where they click and come. 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 sell thing or communicate with, right? I'm not Bob Dylan. I ain't stretching imagination. But Bob Dylan, to take it to an extreme, had a feel for an entire generation. And he made his product. He made it because he was a purist. He wanted to do something great. But it turns out that was marketing.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  The product is marketing. If you make the product great. Steve Jobs is a 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 what somebody else is feeling on a massive scale.

• 49:07David Senra?

  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.

• 49:50David Senra?

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• 50:28David Senra?

  So how long did you have the headphones before you decided you bought like a small streaming service?

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was about, I bought it in probably 2011.

• 50:39David Senra?

  Like, how long were the headphones going?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Three years into it.

• 50:41David Senra?

  So three years into it, and it's called, what was the, I forgot the?

• 50:44Speaker 01

  M.A.G.

• 50:44David Senra?

  Okay.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:45David Senra?

  And you renamed it Beats?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, Spotify had 3 million subscribers at the time, at the time we sold to Apple. I renamed it Beats Music, but I realized I couldn't scale it on my own. Because, as you know, with Spotify, it costs a lot of money to do that. And I realized I can't do this on, me and Dre, we can't do this on our own. We brought Trent Reznor, right? Who's an incredible talent. Talk about understanding tech, technology and the arts and culture, you know? And 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.

• 51:27David Senra?

  So you tried to run it, and then you realized you had to?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  I can't scale it on my own.

• 51:31David Senra?

  Can't scale it on your own?

• 51:32Speaker 01

  I wanted it to be at Interscope. And for one reason or another, we couldn't get that done. The guys running at the time weren't in charge, really. There was the whole Vivendi thing and all that stuff. I went to them early on. I said, I want to build businesses with your artists. And the guy actually said to me, goes, Jimmy, I hear you. We paid a lot for your company, I have 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.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  I asked Vivendi to give me $100 million to Interscope to start businesses with the artists inside Interscope.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  And in fairness to them, they didn't see that. They didn't want to do it. So I said, my contract was up. And 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.

• 52:40David Senra?

  They didn't see it at the time that they were in a dying or dwindling business?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Because it wasn't. This is 2003.

• 52:46David Senra?

  So you saw it early.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  It scared the hell out of me. For some reason, the day it started Napster, 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 field that an entrepreneur has.

• 53:13David Senra?

  Once you see you can't put the genie back in that bottle, there's just no way it's going to work.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  So I knew that. And then I went and met with people at Intel and places like that. And I heard these guys talk and I'm like, holy shit.

• 53:25David Senra?

  What were they saying that made you say, holy shit?

• 53:28Speaker 01

  One of the things the guy at Intel said to me is, Jimmy, I got to tell you something. Your story is compelling. He said, but not every industry was built to last forever. I was like, this guy's smarter than me? Yeah. Where do you want to start, right? So I'm like, oh shit. Right? So, so I, I, I went to the, I went to them and I said, I can't just be in the record business.

• 53:53David Senra?

  The music almost goes like something you sell to something that markets another product is how you actually monetize it.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:05David Senra?

  You told me yesterday, you're like, I'm just a hustler.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  I know how to hustle.

• 54:10David Senra?

  I do too. No, I love it.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  By the way.

• 54:12David Senra?

  I feel the exact same way.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  The greatest baseball players in the world were hustlers. That's what I call a hustler.

• 54:19David Senra?

  I don't think it's a pejorative. I don't think it's a negative parent.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Well, people think it is.

• 54:22David Senra?

  Oh, not me and you, though.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  It's not. What I'm saying, I know how to hustle. Meaning I'm willing to work harder than the next guy.

• 54:28David Senra?

  What you did for Dre, when you first met him, Dre and Shug, you're like, well, this guy's great. There's an asset in front of me. And the 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 that is sitting on top of this genius, then I get to work with the genius. And that is hustling. That is being resourceful. That's the same thing.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  As Dre would say, it's a little bit of street knowledge.

• 54:49David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  You know.

• 54:50David Senra?

  And what is street knowledge? It's an understanding of people as they actually are.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Well, because you have no, what street knowledge is, is you have to move around because the world isn't, it's tough. You know, in any neighborhood, I don't know what you call it, lower class or whatever it is, you know. My dad was a long show. I remember we lived in an Italian neighborhood in Red Hawk, Brooklyn. You know what I mean? So.

• 55:11David Senra?

  You lived in a neighborhood with actual gangsters.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but I wasn't.

• 55:16David Senra?

  No, I know you weren't.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  My family weren't, you know.

• 55:17David Senra?

  No, but you were in the neighborhood that, you know, the mafia was everywhere.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, my neighborhood 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 at docks and everybody worked down at docks.

• 55:38David Senra?

  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 Napster and Kazaa and all the other LimeWire 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.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  One of the hardest things that I had to do when I look back on my career, life, whatever it is. Had a lot, we all have a lot of hard things. One of the hardest things was getting Universal Vendate to give me permission to build beats, to build, no, to build products with my artists. Beats came three years later.

• 56:15David Senra?

  This is, this is when you, your response to them was, I don't want to be the guy that sells the last CD.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:32David Senra?

  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, and then you sold it physically, right? And you're already understanding, oh, once it's digital and free, that means we have to sell something else that we're not going to be able to sell the music anymore.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  I knew we were invaded.

• 56:50David Senra?

  Invaded.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Okay. And I knew that something had to 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 listen to the Beatles, every album was new and different. They reinvented themselves on every album, you know? And if you, you, they keep it moving. You know, the great company, that's why Apple was so great. It 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.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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. Well, it did and it didn't. Of course, Spotify is worth 150 billion and the entire record industry is worth half that together.

• 58:06David Senra?

  I think it's really smart. It's like, for the longest time, we sold it. Now you can't sell it anymore. I'm talking about music. So it, and you're not gonna agree with this, it becomes advertising or marketing. These songs become advertising or marketing for another product you can sell, whether it's concerts, they were selling 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?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  No, not before anybody else. Hip hop saw it.

• 58:33David Senra?

  You're right, because they were doing the shoes, the sneakers, the alcohol.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Def Jam, Adidas.

• 58:38David Senra?

  Did they influence your thinking on this?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I get, I owe African American culture so much. I have a debt to black culture.

• 58:51David Senra?

  Why do you think rap, because I grew up on hip hop. I told you, like, it's still almost all the stuff I listen to now. Why did they figure out how to monetize? I hate using that word, make money off music do other, besides selling music for anybody else?

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Because they're practical and they see the truth and they saw what it was.

• 59:09David Senra?

  What's the next bite of the apple?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  The record industry now can rewrite the, guess the, the luxury of rewriting the book with AI.

• 59:18David Senra?

  AI created music?

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, creative music, intera, 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.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Let's say hypothetically, I'm right and the record industry,

• 59:40Speaker 01

  your word wrong is not fair, didn't take advantage of it, didn't optimize the streaming thing. What would optimizing be? 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 door.

• 1:00:14David Senra?

  Which is their normal route of doing things?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yes, you gotta build enterprise around AI now. You can't just give the enterprise to someone else.

• 1:00:25David Senra?

  But you know everybody in the music industry, when you tell them this, what's their response? The people in power right now?

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Well, all I can tell you, Will, I can't tell you everything that I'm doing, because I think the labels are now realizing, and again, really what all I can tell you is, Universal Music has invested in a project that we're doing called Complex that has the ability

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  to go on and do a lot of these things that I'm talking about. It's media, it's live, meaning Complex Con, and it's e-commerce, right? I want to help the labels if I can, you know,

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  build enterprise around AI and not just be licensees. I just, I felt that way about streaming, and I feel even stronger about that. They shouldn't be afraid of the tech.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  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. You know what I mean? But I know how to get it done, you know? I knew how to build, I didn't know how to build a headphone. People say to me, well, you're a recording engineer. I said, Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards are the greatest guitar players and, you know, my favorite, you know, Keith Richards is incredible. If you gave him two pieces of wood, he's not going to come out with a guitar. You know, so, you know, 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 a possibility now to rewrite

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  the book. But if 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.

• 1:02:12David Senra?

  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?

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  I don't know. Let me tell you, I don't fucking know. If I could predict the future, ma'am, you know what I mean? I wouldn't have health insurance. You know, it's like, you know, I have fire insurance in my house. I can't predict the future. I have no, I overpaid 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 to get a record deal, going back to my, when I was a kid, right, in the music business, you had to sing. You had to really sing. Sometimes you had to write, but if you're Boba Fett, then you had to sing. Frank Sinatra, you had to sing. Those people

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  could really sing. You know, Sam Cooke, whoa, could he sing? He could sing and write. You know what I mean? Incredible, right? Stevie Wonder. There's a lot of people out now in the charts right now, or being really successful, selling out arenas, that can barely sing Happy Birthday. So what I say to the people that are challenging AI, and they're doing that because of technology.

• 1:03:25David Senra?

  They're like autotune and stuff like this?

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  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 in their mirror and did all the moves that everybody does, you know, they watched Madonna and like everybody else and say, I could do that, I can act like that. So I don't understand the difference.

• 1:03:54David Senra?

  So Yeah, because the amount of technology invented for the music industry since you've been in it, it's like you told me yesterday that Prince did a whole album without a drummer. And I was like, what does that mean?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Well, he's one of the first people to, um, to use the Lin drum machine. See, the Lin drum machine, I was, I was producing an album in the seventies and I brought this guitar player in who I think it may be the first computer I ever saw, but he had a computer on the session. It was 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 and go on the computer and do all that. And he looked at, I said to him, I said, amen, what, what are you doing? I mean, you know, this is a session, we're paying attention to the music. He says, well, I'm, I'm creating a drummer. I'm creating a machine that's

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  going to play the drums. I said, well, thank God, because I, I always had very, I always had difficulty with drummers, you know? I always felt where you sit on the beat is impossible. You know what I mean? Because everybody hits where the one 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 player drum. The guy's name was Roger Lynn. Roger Lynn's a guitar player.

• 1:05:18David Senra?

  That's who made the drum machine?

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  The Lin machine, the Lin drum machine.

• 1:05:21David Senra?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Yes. I've seen technology, I grew up with it. So everybody's afraid of AI. AI is going to make music better. AI is not going to thwart great people. There will always be the next Billie Eilish. There will always be the next Kendrick Lamar. There will always be the next great talent. But there's also going to be a lot of

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Bullshit.

• 1:05:45David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Right? So I think the bullshit will get better. I really do. I think AI is gonna 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 in 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 because they're great tools. I'm all in on AI music. All in. And I don't think it's gonna hurt

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  the greats. But more importantly than anything that I think is that now it's time for the artists and the labels to get on the enterprise side of it.

• 1:06:40David Senra?

  This is what I wonder if you would agree with or not, because when you were just telling the story of the person that invented the drum machine, he was inventing it out of necessity. He needed a sound for what he was making. I worry that if these are like professional managers in the music industry, like think about the difference between a professional CEO and a founder.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57David Senra?

  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.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Record producers are entrepreneurs.

• 1:07:05David Senra?

  Record producers, but the people running the big companies.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  But I was a record producer.

• 1:07:08David Senra?

  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 then reinvent their business to survive the next technological wave. You disagree with that?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  I think what's happening is the music industry 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 3% of your company. That is the greatest deal anyone's ever made. Who gives a shit who owns 3% of my company? But your company is Spotify, right? I mean, it's absurd. So they have to grab the enterprise value of the new technology.

• 1:07:59David Senra?

  But don't you think it's going to come outside? Like, one of my heroes is James Dyson, I told you about.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Who?

• 1:08:03David Senra?

  James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner guy.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:05David Senra?

  And one of his, who? I love it. And one of his heroes was Buckminster Fuller. And Buckminster 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. I almost feel like what you're talking about has to be done outside.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Anywhere there's not a founder, usually it has to be done outside. You don't usually see big companies innovate.

• 1:08:29David Senra?

  That's my point.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  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, I, I try to pair those new Facebook Ray-Ban glasses. They made a good product.

• 1:08:42David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  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 question. Can they innovate? And, uh, look, I'm a terrible businessman. I had to learn business at Interscope.

• 1:09:03David Senra?

  You are not a terrible businessman.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  I know how to do what I know how to do, but I had to learn business for defense. When I got into the record business.

• 1:09:11David Senra?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  1990, I had no fucking idea how to run a company. None, zero.

• 1:09:19David Senra?

  Is this when David Geffen sold Geffen?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Geffen, yeah.

• 1:09:21David Senra?

  Can you tell that story?

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  David Geffen is brilliant, right? He comes from right near my neighborhood in Brooklyn. He's exactly 10 years older than me. He's like 5'7", I'm 5'7". He's Jewish, I'm Italian. We were buddies, right? He was great with artists, you know? He signed Joni Mitchell and the Eagles and all this 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.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  I'm like, I'm from Brooklyn, you know, I want to, I want to make a lot of money. I'm not embarrassed that I had my whole life, I've been like, you know, I, I didn't have any money. I had money as a record producer, but that's a certain amount of money. I wanted to live like I saw on TV.

• 1:10:26David Senra?

  Where you were like, hold on, what I love in The Defying 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 a record producer. This story 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. And you're like.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  That's it. Yeah, you bet that's it. I mean, look, I'm not, look, let me tell you something, man. You gotta tell yourself the truth. I'm not Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Chris Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye. So I felt the next best way in. I got into producing and engineering, right? That was my next way in, right? So I'm like, well, this feels really good. Then I saw Gaffin and I said.

• 1:11:14David Senra?

  That feels better.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Oh shit, he's doing the same thing out. He's not even in the studio all night. He goes home at 6 o'clock. I'm like 3 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.

• 1:11:28David Senra?

  And then you go talk to him, what does he say?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  He said to me, oh, you could start a record company? You know how many stupid people there are that have record companies? I said, okay. So I started a record company.

• 1:11:44David Senra?

  I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high-quality sleep. He said that 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 of 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. So I go over and say, "Hi." When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, "Who was I talking to?" And I said, "That's Mateo, the founder of Eight Sleep." And my friend replied, "He looks like he gets good sleep."

• 1:12:27David Senra?

  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 worth 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 5, 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

• 1:13:12David Senra?

  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 eightsleep.com/cenra and use the code CENRA 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 eightsleep.com/cenra. People were willing to give you money and back you right away. Why? Did you have previous relationships with them? What did they know about you?

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  No. Well, Doug put up half the money. Gethin was gonna put the money up, but he sold his company, so he was very generous with me. And I... No, Jer, Gethin was gonna distribute the money, and Ted Field was gonna put the money up. But Doug volunteered to put up half the money. Doug Morris at Atlantic. So I went to David, and I said, "David, you willing to put up half the money?" He goes, "Jimmy, I want what's good for you." Go do it over there. All good. Really helpful to me, but I knew nothing about running a business. Or, you know, I didn't know you buy 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.

• 1:14:27David Senra?

  I want to pause this story because then when I went to your house the first time, this a few months ago, you told me something I haven't stopped thinking about. You said every great, anybody that's great is bent.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39David Senra?

  What does that mean?

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Well, to be really brilliant, I call it, there has to be a bend in the pipe.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  You know, whether it's through trauma or through your interpretation of yourself, of how that it could happen. You can come from the greatest family in the world and have trauma. You know, just it's it's your sensitivity compared to the environment and put it all together. So the ones that I know that are truly brilliant

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  have a bend in the pipe.

• 1:15:11David Senra?

  What's the bend that you see normally?

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  It's usually trauma from when they were younger, family stuff.

• 1:15:17David Senra?

  It's always the childhood?

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all, yeah. But they had the gift to to write or produce or film or paint. Right? I mean, they were the one, the chosen ones. That that you put that trauma compared with an innate talent and it makes Picasso.

• 1:15:41David Senra?

  But your bend was it has to be, which brings us to the founding of Interscope. Because there's, there was a ton of people after Geffen that had your same idea. We're like, well, I can do that.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  14 labels started with $50 million in funding in 1989, 90.

• 1:15:57David Senra?

  And how many survived?

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  None.

• 1:15:59David Senra?

  You.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Interscope.

• 1:16:00David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Me, Ted, John and Tom Wally.

• 1:16:04David Senra?

  When you say it has to be, what does that mean?

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  When you grow up like I did and you did and other people that I know.

• 1:16:11David Senra?

  Yeah, the first time we met, you're like, you're definitely bent.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  When you're, when you're walking forward, right? The sidewalk behind you is caving in.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  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, the people I know and I watch, the fear stops them. And the ones that succeed is the fear that propels them forward. If you could harness it, learn how to harness it and take that. Because fear is energy. It's massive energy. It controls your entire system. And if you can learn to take that fuel and have it propel you forward, it's a powerful thing.

• 1:17:06David Senra?

  Some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet that I've met, it's like what drives them is not a love of success. It's a fear of failure.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Whatever your fear is, you know what I mean?

• 1:17:17David Senra?

  So when did you, when did you, 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 a step forward.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Well, look, I was a kid in Wright Field playing baseball. I come from a neighborhood where 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 in my toolkit. But when I got to the studio, and I sat there with the guy Roy Sacala, who was my boss, who taught through me, and they put me in with John Lennon. And all of a sudden, all that fear, I was able to, I don't know why, flip it into energy to learn.

• 1:18:04David Senra?

  So you're like 20 at the time?

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  Twenty.

• 1:18:06David Senra?

  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 podcasts that you do, because like then somebody that you've never met, that is in a different industry, has lived a different time, reads that and 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 all I can.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Let me tell you something.

• 1:18:34David Senra?

  All I can control.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  That's not genius.

• 1:18:36David Senra?

  No, it's a, it is a simple genius. It's very, it's practical wisdom.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  You know, when you, people talk about geni, there are real geniuses out there that are freaks. But people talk about people that are successful and stuff like that. It's basically. You're blessed that your instinct drives you in the right direction. And your instinct, Bob Dylan's instinct, oh, Bob Dylan is a genius. But Bob Dylan's instinct drove him for an entire generation to lead. You know, Steve Jobs, or even people that I know, my friends, that their instinct is commercial or works.

• 1:19:14David Senra?

  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. There's like, there's never been other famous people like the Beatles. It's not like, oh, yeah, that Taylor Swift is kind of like the Beatles. Like, no, no, you don't understand how big this phenomenon is. And you're, by your own admission, know 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 like, this is, I just stay here and my life will get better.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  It's also to know which pole to start reeling in. You know, when I was, when I got permission at Interscope to make our own businesses with the artists, I had a bunch of things going. But soon as Dre said to me, I want to sell sneakers. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, speakers, right? And I saw him and I saw his credibility and sound. And I said, oh, shit, it all came together, you know? I dropped all the other poles. I just said, okay, let's go.

• 1:20:24David Senra?

  But there's also a simple genius of the way you move that I admire. And I'm not like trying to just overly compliment you here. Like, I really learned from it. Where that story, Dre tells a story of that conversation. He said this conversation, the entire time was like 10 minutes. Once you had that realization, you dipped out, you just left. And then you call him like a week later to come to the office and you have like 30 prototypes already done.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Well, because I'm very lucky to be able to connect the dots. I can see something. And 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 do these guys make ugly products, they don't know how to market. They're not cool. They don't.

• 1:21:12David Senra?

  Back to corny.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  Corny is a curse. Some people that are corny are really nice, but you know, too corny is just, I don't know. It's not 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?

• 1:21:26David Senra?

  What does that mean?

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  That means they don't know how to lay back and just watch something happen. They're always like, they want to be noticed and they don't have a natural feel for like, you know, for themselves, you know, I think, but what do I know?

• 1:21:38David Senra?

  I think that's it right there. Let's go back to the Interscope. When you started Interscope, you're like, my band is It Has To Be. Like, the way you described it to me is just like, this, there's no, failure wasn't an option. There wasn't like a, you said Plan B didn't even enter your mind, where it's like, I'm doing this? It is, will work.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Because if you 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, Apple's a great 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 the music side of it, but they don't want the tail wagging the dog, you know? And I don't blame them, right? Because I come from a world of breaking things, you know?

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  I would try anything, you know? And they have a very structured, fabulous business, right? And so I said,

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  The combination of it having to be successful, how I see it, plus my team, like Trent Reznor, et cetera, and Dre, and not being able to do anything to get it to work. That combination said, you know, you're 65. You know, I met Liberty and we want to be together. And I just said, you know.

• 1:23:18David Senra?

  Were you already married at that point?

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I retired in 2018. I got married in 16. But why I came, started working again, I was dabbling. But why I started, I'm not running any companies right now.

• 1:23:35David Senra?

  You said you don't want the bit in your mouth anymore.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:23:45David Senra?

  Do you feel you were crazy, the version of you that started Interscope was crazy?

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  No, I was obsessed. I'm obsessed. We're all sort of obsessive people. I was really obsessed and you know.

• 1:23:56David Senra?

  You considered Interscope in a very intense mission that had to succeed.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  It was obsessed. I had to be obsessed. And you know what? Obsession doesn't make for a great partner at home.

• 1:24:08David Senra?

  No, for sure.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? It's like, so you know, I'm like, okay, I'm 65 years old. You know, how many summers do I have left? As Tom Waits would say, you know what I mean?

• 1:24:19David Senra?

  But how old were you when you started Interscope? 30, in your 30s?

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  I was 38, seven, eight.

• 1:24:24David Senra?

  And so does that mean every minute of the day is?

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28David Senra?

  On making sure.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Interscope, yeah.

• 1:24:30David Senra?

  When did you feel the relief? Was there any sense of?

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:24:34David Senra?

  I love that you didn't want to finish the question.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:24:37David Senra?

  Till when?

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Till I was 65.

• 1:24:40David Senra?

  We talked yesterday, you said something like, you're always like a happy, optimistic person, but miserable at the same time.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I remember waking up with Liberty one morning, about months after I left Apple and decided I wasn't going to run companies anymore or anything started, whatever. I said to him, do people wake up not thinking of something?

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Because I was waking up and I had nothing on my mind. And I'm like, what? Do people really do that? You know? And that's when I started Feth. I felt really good and I feel really... See, the whole, the whole goal to me in life, I think it's 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 is. I meet somebody, they run companies and they don't want to quit. And I love what I do. You'd love, you'd love that more than sitting on a beach somewhere. I mean, you...

• 1:25:46David Senra?

  I do, for sure. I don't want to sit on the beach.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  Right now, you don't.

• 1:25:49David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  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. I left Apple. I wasn't the head of Apple Music anymore, or the head of Interscope anymore, or blah, blah, blah, head of Beats.

• 1:26:12David Senra?

  So you lose the status part, is that...

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Whatever the fuck it is. I didn't care about any of that shit. I just wanted to stop feeling that feeling. You know what I mean? So I didn't have that. That wasn't a currency for me. It's a blessing and a currency. But I just said, I don't give a fuck. I don't want to. I, I, 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, if you're a 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, I, I had to do for my own sanity. And, and I...

• 1:26:50David Senra?

  So this is, this is where I want to talk to you about. So from the time, just say you're 20, you start to 65, you did not feel peace?

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  No. Not for one second.

• 1:26:59David Senra?

  But you sell, you become a billionaire. You sell Beats to Apple. What'd that feel like?

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  It felt great.

• 1:27:06David Senra?

  Okay. No peace, though.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  Well, because a company like Apple pays you a lot of money.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  I'm my father's son. I got a job to do now.

• 1:27:19David Senra?

  But you have a billion dollars in your bank account.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  That doesn't matter. What matters is there's a job that you're gonna do, that you're not gonna be, I have to get the job done right.

• 1:27:28David Senra?

  But money is a piece of peace.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Money is a piece of it. It's really great. You know what I mean? But if I have your money, I'm fucked. Because I gotta 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.

• 1:27:52David Senra?

  That's not corny at all.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  It's a great place. It's a great place, but I twitch.

• 1:27:57David Senra?

  You're not, it's a big fucking company. You're an entrepreneur.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  I couldn't have that compulsion, obsessiveness, insanity, and not have the wheel completely. Meaning to make any mistake I wanted to make, to experiment, to just go. I couldn't, I couldn't do it.

• 1:28:15David Senra?

  How does it feel when you're going through, when it's like, when you, 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?

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  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, I never, I've never had a victory lap in my life.

• 1:28:41David Senra?

  You don't have any rearview mirror?

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  I didn't have a victory lap. When we sold Beats. I mean, it's very public. Dre felt great.

• 1:28:51David Senra?

  Oh, that, the video with Tyrese?

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  I mean, Dre felt great. I, I felt great, but I didn't like, I'm like, oh shit, these guys gave us all this money. And now we gotta 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.

• 1:29:11David Senra?

  How different are you and Dre in the way you approach your work? Because when I watch The Defiant 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 that I, about you that I.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Well, we're both record producers.

• 1:29:23David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  Okay, so.

• 1:29:25David Senra?

  He seems to need more solitude, though. Is he more comfortable? Wait, wait.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  I mean, solitude. Dre, I mean, Dre doesn't, Dre don't go anywhere. Every time Dre and I have to go do something, he calls me the night before and say, we really have to do this. This is 32 years of it. Do 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.

• 1:29:53David Senra?

  I feel that way too. Like, this is why I 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 gonna happen. Like, there's just no way.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Dre's like that. But, you know, you gotta have a yin and yang to be partners, you know? It works, you know? So, we're, we're very different, but we, we both, we're both record producers. I can't explain it. There's certain, there's certain kind of person that's, I always, I get along with every record producer I ever met.

• 1:30:19David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Swizz Beatz, Timbaland, Pharrell, you know? I love all these guys, but I get along really well with record producers.

• 1:30:27David Senra?

  And you can't explain why? It's the same kind of personality? What is it?

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  I don't know what it is. I don't think about it. But I know that if I meet a record producer, that's always my favorite people I meet.

• 1:30:38David Senra?

  Yeah, I feel the same way about founders. There's a, there's the founder of Nvidia, Jensen Huang. I read his biography. He says something that's interesting, where he, I think, reading between the 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?

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  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's, I wake up every morning with seeing what's wrong.

• 1:31:22David Senra?

  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 just absolutely loved it. Work for you was always work.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:35David Senra?

  It's like, I shouldn't say like, you can't wait till it's over. Is that the right way to think about it? Like?

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  Well, you see, the problem that I had was, if it sounds possible.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  It was the only place I felt relief, but I was still tortured. So, you know, I don't know what the rest of my life was.

• 1:31:54David Senra?

  But we had this conversation yesterday and I told you I was on the phone with a friend driving to your house and we had the same conversation where he was just, "How are you?" And I'm like, "I'm fantastic and miserable at the same time."

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's possible.

• 1:32:06David Senra?

  Yeah, I know, and we talked.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  I'm always in a good mood. I've never, I don't think I've ever woken up in my life in a bad, 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.

• 1:32:21David Senra?

  The two words you used are happy and miserable.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's a whole other side of you that wants to accomplish something. And accomplishing something in the world is not easy. There's 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, I got my kids and I'm really happy and, I mean, now I'm really happy. I'm at liberty and we have six kids together and everything is fantastic. I'm really happy. I'm at peace 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.

• 1:33:07David Senra?

  You're the first person, I think, actually could explain that to me about how I feel. Because I was like, um, I just was interviewing on another podcast and he's like, "Are you happy?" And I was just like, "Yeah, I'm happy, but like, I also, like, I'm striving to do something."

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  I think Steve Jobs was tortured.

• 1:33:23David Senra?

  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 Springsteen, you, I mean, you kind of pushed me in this direction too, when you're like, "Go watch that movie," you know? Because I didn't, when Jimmy A. Bean says, "Go watch a movie," I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna go watch a movie." I thought I was gonna watch a biopic of his life. I thought it was gonna be like, "He was born and he did this, he did that." No, it's about the darkest time in his entire life.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  That's the only movie he would make.

• 1:33:51David Senra?

  Why?

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  He's not gonna make the Born in the USA movie. What I'm talking about is I've always been a positive person and I wake up in a good mood.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  So, you know, you ever met me in those days I was running Interscope and stuff? You would say, "Oh, you're having a great time," you know what I mean? But there was always this thing, this compulsion and this insanity that was just driving me constantly. And eventually I wanted to shake that. So I could say to you, "Yeah, I'm happy in 1980."

• 1:34:29David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Or something like that. But I wanted to be at peace. And I didn't give a shit about being the head of Interscope or being the head of BTR. I mean, that nonsense. I just wanted a peace.

• 1:34:44David Senra?

  Do you think Bruce is at peace?

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  I think Bruce has found a lot of peace. I don't ask, I don't speak for him, but I think he's incredible.

• 1:34:53David Senra?

  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 have..."

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, in the words of John Lennon, "I'm just trying to get me some peace." And Christ, you know, it ain't easy.

• 1:35:02David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  So, you know, I mean, I didn't invent this.

• 1:35:06David Senra?

  No, you didn't invent it, but I think you just said something that I think is important. It's like, most people lie to themselves. And Bruce, in that book, was lying to himself for a while, and then he realized, "Oh, the actual source of unhappiness."

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we all lie to ourselves and then...

• 1:35:17David Senra?

  Are you still lying to yourself today?

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  I'm sure about some things.

• 1:35:21David Senra?

  You think so?

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  I try not to. I just want to, I just want to find peace. You know what I mean? And every day is a search for it, you know? And the monsters want to come in, and you gotta make your shit bigger than the monster's shit. You know? My father would say, "As long as the cat's 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, when he said that to me. And he was right.

• 1:35:52David Senra?

  When you were building Interscope, or really any time in your career, when you were younger, what was your inner monologue like? Was it negative to yourself? Were you like overly self-critical?

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Only the product, I felt like...

• 1:36:05David Senra?

  So it wasn't, you're like, "This product's not good enough."

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  First of all, when you grow up, when you grow up...

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  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 gonna be broke. That's what everybody, that's what you think, you know? So that was a big driver of me.

• 1:36:39David Senra?

  When did you lose that fear of being broke?

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I just know that when I sold to Apple, it didn't fix it.

• 1:36:47David Senra?

  Dude, I thought you were gonna say like, when you were making tons of money in Interscope. That's wild.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  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 gonna be broke. But it was, that overrode any of it, was having to get the job right. That overrode everything.

• 1:37:12David Senra?

  You were able to separate criticism that the work isn't good enough or isn't done to, I am not good enough, in your mind?

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  No, because you beat yourself up. You feel that if you can't-

• 1:37:24David Senra?

  So you were still beating yourself up, even when you were in your 50s and 60s?

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because-

• 1:37:30David Senra?

  Do you do it today?

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  No. No, I don't. Today I-

• 1:37:35David Senra?

  I'm not.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  Right. Today I actually approached the job. Now I get cranky, and when 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. And, but when I put the phone down-

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  I don't feel it. When I used to do that, I never stopped feeling it because I had to get it right.

• 1:38:13David Senra?

  I felt like that for a while. This just changed, like as a result of like the work that I've been doing. There's a guy named 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 him. 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 whole 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 fuel source, which is I didn't like the way I was born, what the environment I was born into. I'm gonna, you know, channel that, just like Bruce Springsteen, just like you, it's like, I'm gonna channel that into achievement.

• 1:38:53David Senra?

  I thought for a long time that like 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. Because like this is gonna be one of the best days of my life. I get to freaking record a podcast with Jimmy. This is gonna be insane. Like my now, my self-talk is just like, just love what you do and follow your curiosity. And you're gonna be obsessed anyways. You can't work any other way.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  Just know that you've handled to a certain extent, a monster in your life. But the next monster is gonna come in a disguise, a different look, a different way. It's gonna come in through this door and you'll wake up one day and that monster, we go, oh, fuck, I feel like I felt, I thought I killed that monster, but this is a new monster, only it changes shit.

• 1:39:44David Senra?

  Where do you think that would happen?

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  It just happens to everybody in life, you know? Just some people like to admit it and some people don't.

• 1:39:51David Senra?

  So like, it might not be in your professional life, but it might be in your personal life.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  It could be anything. Yeah, man. It could be anything. 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 kinda like.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  I feel okay, you know, I feel like I'm at peace. But I'm also not running a company. If I was running a 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.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  I take what I do serious. I don't take myself too serious because I, I, 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, everything was like, we saw a sense of humor and everything. You know, I remember when he was dying. Right before he died. He, something happened. And it was, it was like a person came in and did something wrong. And he, he just looked at me, he, he made a joke. Because he, he knew it was funny and he grabbed the moment. He had 28% of his heart.

• 1:41:05David Senra?

  Did he know he was dying?

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  It was a 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 really a pretty crazy time. And my father was, I was so close with him, he just devastated 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.

• 1:41:50David Senra?

  And you learned that from him?

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, my father was always a hard worker.

• 1:41:55David Senra?

  He was your best friend?

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  Still is. You know? Still is. It's his voice that.

• 1:42:04Speaker 01

  Really, if I ever get on the right page, it's always his voice that makes me on the right page.

• 1:42:12David Senra?

  Was it the worst day of your life?

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  It still is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, worst day of my life by far. By far, yeah, man, I, you know. When I, when he died, I made a Christmas album about him. I, it was called A Very Special Christmas. And we raised over $100 million for Special Olympics.

• 1:42:33David Senra?

  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.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42David Senra?

  How important has that relationship been in your life compared to your work?

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I, again, I don't look back. Right? So I don't want to 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 kumbaya about anything. You know, I realize anything can happen.

• 1:43:15David Senra?

  No, you're super, super tense.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  You know, so, so right now, it's more important than my work.

• 1:43:24David Senra?

  You get more satisfaction out of that?

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the only place I find peace, you know. And I'm, I'm really in search of peace, man. I, 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.

• 1:43:50David Senra?

  Yeah, you need something to work towards.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  And not only that, I want to see that I can get something done without being nuts, without feeling that horrible feeling.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like I can get something done without feeling like that.

• 1:44:03David Senra?

  Yeah, I do too.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  You know, it really is the truth, you know. But by the way, not everybody feels like that. There are some really talented people who are completely happy about their work. I don't know, but.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  I don't know any of it, but I'm sure there are.

• 1:44:18David Senra?

  No, you've met like, I mean, your entire world, your entire life was surrounded by top performers, by geniuses, by people that are, you know, at the top of their profession. And that's why I would light you up with questions the 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.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I, you know, I wish I could have learned it at 52, but I think I got it at 72.

• 1:44:43David Senra?

  Why do you think it took you longer than you wanted it to take you?

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Um, I didn't go to therapy long enough, early enough in my life because to unring the bells of your childhood takes a lot of work. I'm very pro therapy, you know, I really am.

• 1:45:00David Senra?

  To unring the bells of your childhood takes a lot of work. That's a great line.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 1:45:05David Senra?

  And you think the only way to do that is through?

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  It's not the, it's my way.

• 1:45:09David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  It's mine, not the only way.

• 1:45:10David Senra?

  When did you realize, oh shit, I needed?

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  I didn't take therapy really serious till my 50s. And I wish I had done it earlier.

• 1:45:18David Senra?

  And what does really serious mean to you?

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Mean twice a week, but take it in, not just.

• 1:45:24David Senra?

  Not just show up at a appointment and listen, but actually change your behavior?

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:29David Senra?

  Were you doing it like in your 30s and 40s?

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  I started in my 30s and 40s, but I wasn't a good patient, pro customer or client.

• 1:45:38David Senra?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  Whatever the fuck they call it.

• 1:45:40David Senra?

  So you'd go, you'd show up, you would talk, you would talk, they would talk.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  The minute I walk on the phone, I get the phone, they, you know, it was like.

• 1:45:48David Senra?

  You weren't ready to like to take in the information?

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:45:52David Senra?

  What do you think made you ready, other than age?

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  My divorce. Very simple. I was in a marriage and we were married and everything was going along. And then when we got divorced, 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.

• 1:46:26David Senra?

  That's a great way to think about it.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I had the idea earlier, I would have did it earlier.

• 1:46:32David Senra?

  Why did you tell me yesterday that you think I need to talk to somebody?

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  Because of some of the things that you told me, you know? So some of the personal stuff you told me. I said, it's a lot easier to go with a guide. It's a lot easier to learn how 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 could have those other people who love you very much and care about you, but to have the one without the agenda, for me, was very helpful.

• 1:47:12David Senra?

  Like, why do you think it works with that, with this particular person?

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  I believe this person.

• 1:47:17David Senra?

  You trust their judgment?

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  Everything in my life is guttural.

• 1:47:21David Senra?

  Steve was the same way, though.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:47:43David Senra?

  There's another thing that you said to me about you always kept a small circle of.

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  I still do.

• 1:47:49David Senra?

  These are true friends.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  I try to have an infield, you know?

• 1:47:54David Senra?

  That's how many people seven?

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:47:58David Senra?

  I haven't seen baseball.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  By the way, I don't, I don't need another shortstop until the other one dies. You know what I mean?

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  I limit it. I don't go for six, you know?

• 1:48:08David Senra?

  And it just takes time to develop trust with these people.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:11David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I trust other people, but not like that. Not to where I connect like that.

• 1:48:18David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  You know, I'm very lucky. Oh, you know, when you get to be 72 years old, you have some friendships that are 50 years old.

• 1:48:25David Senra?

  That's incredible.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's nice. It's nice. But, you know, on the, on the school thing, we're on to something.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  And I like to build, I like to do something which goes back to all the business stuff that's gonna catch on and gonna grow on its own, you know? So I think, like the stuff we're doing in the inner city, we have five schools now.

• 1:48:53David Senra?

  These are high schools now?

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, again, my debt to black culture is enormous. I wanna really help the inner city and give these kids an advantage of an education that no one else is thinking about. And I think we're gonna build some extraordinary people that companies are gonna really want.

• 1:49:15David Senra?

  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?

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  I was terrible in school. When I had to learn something, I just couldn't do it.

• 1:49:26David Senra?

  How the hell do you learn to produce records then?

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  Well, like anybody my age that's in music or around culturally, there was the Big Bang, which was the Beatles 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 Beatles, I said, oh, there's a currency I can have.

• 1:50:04David Senra?

  Because you try, you try to create music first, right?

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was terrible. Coming out, you know, I was in a band, you know? But I realized quick I wasn't gonna be in the Rolling Stones. Then I met this woman through my cousin, this woman, Ellie Greenwich, who took me to recording sessions. And that's where I saw that guy with the leather bag and the, you know?

• 1:50:25David Senra?

  And the beautiful woman.

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  And the candles and the pretty girl coming to meet him. I said, oh.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  That's it. I never saw anybody with a leather bag before, you know?

• 1:50:37David Senra?

  And so you just learned by observing?

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  No, then I got it. I wanted to get a job. It was cleaning up, you know? Cleaning up the studio, setting up the studio. Repetition, figuring, putting this over there, you know, figuring out, being around it, being the ability to observe.

• 1:50:52David Senra?

  I can see how you can learn to be like an engineer, right? In a recording studio that way. But then you go to a much more almost like creative part of it, which is producing.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:51:11David Senra?

  Based on your own personal taste?

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Based on my taste influenced by John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen.

• 1:51:18David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  In intense, intense therapy, sitting next to them every day for five years.

• 1:51:25David Senra?

  And you were up close and you saw what true excellence looked like?

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they taught me what was cool and what was not cool and what was good and what was great. The difference between 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 Lando. 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, when Bruce gave me this song, Because the Night for Patti 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 gotta get out of this place, right?

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  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, if a woman sings that. That's powerful. So I said to him, you're gonna 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, you could learn a little bit how to connect the dots, but you gotta be that kind of person that just sees you can connect the dots. And that's as simple and as difficult as it is. I was always able to connect the dots and see what could be.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  What, what this is and what it could be. But that's what always tortured me. Cause 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, 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 gotta make it as cool as that. Cause the iPod was really cool, you know?

• 1:53:22David Senra?

  Did you ever meet Akio Morita, the founder of Sony?

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:53:25David Senra?

  But you observed him?

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  I observed him. 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 did Apple become Apple and not them?

• 1:53:57David Senra?

  It's almost like they had all the components, but it was siloed.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  No, Morita died.

• 1:54:01David Senra?

  Okay. But it goes back to your, I see some kind of connection to the school you're doing.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54:06David Senra?

  Cause it's like you had it all. You just had to have one person like an Akio, who was, if he was alive, or a Steve or Jimmy to put it all together.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  I am not as smart as those two people. And I'm just telling you the God's honest 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.

• 1:54:21David Senra?

  Yeah, but you know how to put shit together.

• 1:54:23Speaker 01

  I do. I know how to put shit together, you know? So that's really cool. But.

• 1:54:27David Senra?

  Did Steve talk to you about the influencer?

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:54:29David Senra?

  What was he saying about Sony and Akio?

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  He would say, that guy was really, knew what he was doing. He really had a feel and I, you know, it was obvious to me. You know, Morita bought Sony, bought Columbia Records, bought Columbia Pictures. He saw the distribution, the hardware, the software. He saw it all.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  But Steve took it, not literally, but it was part of the inspiration behind

• 1:54:58David Senra?

  No, for sure.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  His chain of thinking, right?

• 1:55:01David Senra?

  He talked, in interviews, he talks about how, what he loved about Akio and The Walkman in particular, because Akio had to fight to build The Walkman in his own company. They're like, this is the stupidest thing.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  I remember being with Bruce Springsteen and he told me, he said, you know, this guy, this guy from Sony came up to me, you know, and he runs the company. And he says, the guy asked me to put these headphones on if there was enough bass. And it was him.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 1:55:36David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  So this guy got it.

• 1:55:38David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  You know, and I never met him, but I know he got it. You know, I learned a lot from Steve. I learned a lot from John Lennon. I learned a lot from Bruce Springsteen. I got really blessed.

• 1:55:46David Senra?

  Were you able to learn, those are people, well, I guess Bruce was your age, right? You guys are, he's a little older.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  He's three years older than me.

• 1:55:53David Senra?

  Were you able to learn from younger people than you? Like when, were you learning from your artists?

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  I learned from Bono. You know, a lot from Bono. Bono's 10 years younger than me. Well, I met Bono in 1983 and we did Under Blood, we did Under Blood Red Sky. I said, oh shit, the framing of how artists are thinking is changing. I said, wow, look at this. Their music was different, you know? And the kind of music that was going on, that they were doing was different. It was a take on punk, but it was like more ethereal and different. So, and also, he's an extrovert. Whereas the other guys, a lot of the guys I've worked with weren't.

• 1:56:39David Senra?

  They're introverted, really?

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  Dre.

• 1:56:42David Senra?

  So what, what did you learn from Dre?

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  Well, Dre brought back the Springsteen thing in me, which was the commitment to a vision and sticking by the culture that you came up in and servicing that culture. And

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  And it was something that I really didn't understand in 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 I learned, I mean, I learned everything about, that I knew about hip hop from Dr. Dre, period.

• 1:57:19David Senra?

  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 innate 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, cause he's the greatest hip hop producer of all time.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  Well, Dre and Bruce have a lot in common.

• 1:57:41David Senra?

  How so?

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  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, they know completely what they do and they don't compromise. It's just that simple. Bruce was the lead, when I met Dre and Bruce, it was very simple. They were both broke and Dre was in trouble and broke. And they would, that vision-

• 1:58:16David Senra?

  And even back then, they weren't compromising.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  Not even close. You couldn't rent Bruce Springsteen, you couldn't buy, nothing. You could rent me in those days, you know what I mean? Absolutely. You know, but you couldn't, anything with that guy. He just, he didn't, he didn't think about, wow, what am I gonna sleep tonight? It was like this. I learned that from him. It was like, really, really powerful thing. There was nothing that anyone had that he wanted. Nothing. That's powerful.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  That's powerful when you're broke. Right? It's like, well, you know, like I, I saw, I admired that.

• 1:59:00David Senra?

  So Bono was an extrovert?

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  I say extrovert, I mean, he'll go out, he'll talk to people and he's passionate. And by the way, he, in his book and, and his play, a one man 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.

• 1:59:23David Senra?

  So his bend, same thing, comes from like this childhood trauma?

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:27David Senra?

  But somehow didn't, fixed it along the way?

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  No, no, no. He just is naturally positive person. He can, he's tough, he can get plowed through things, he's works, he's incredible work ethic, 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 wants, he's got very broad interest. I mean, you know, I didn't go on vacation until I met him.

• 1:59:59David Senra?

  Say more about that.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  I'd never been on a vacation really until the year 2000, because I was doing Rattle and Hum with him in 1988. And I went to the south of France, I remember, and I was like, whoa, what the fuck?

• 2:00:11David Senra?

  So you were just myopically focused on achievement?

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:00:15David Senra?

  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?

• 2:00:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:00:22David Senra?

  You, you were 20, how old are you?

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  20.

• 2:00:24David Senra?

  You're 20.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Never been on a plane, never been in a hotel.

• 2:00:26David Senra?

  Never been in a hotel. And then, um, I don't know if it's the same trip or later, I think Tom Petty put you in a house. You had never?

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  No, no, Lennon put me in, um, in, um, the Beverly Hills Hotel.

• 2:00:36David Senra?

  But that's when you start to like, oh, wait, the world is huge and I, there's a lot in front of me if I, if I focus on this.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  Well, I remember, John took me to a guy named Richard Perry's house.

• 2:00:47David Senra?

  Okay.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  A very famous record producer. And, uh, John took me to his house with Harry Nielsen, where they were going out. They said, he just was like really nice to me. He said, you want to come? I said, sure. Yeah, I had nothing to do, I was in the hotel, right? Takes me there and this guy's got. A house in the hills in Laurel Canyon overlooking or Doheny or something overlooking the city was at night. Yeah, tennis court that was lit up. I was like, it's like seeing the guy with the bag. And I was like, holy shit. You know, like, wow.

• 2:01:24David Senra?

  Yeah, just opens up the scope of possibilities.

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you see for the first time. I'd never been on a plane. I mean, I've only been to Manhattan, you know, because of the work, you know.

• 2:01:35David Senra?

  Did you know this is where you were going to spend your life? Like, when?

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, the minute I got off the plane and my, my boss, Roy, said, let's rent the car. We rented a Cadillac, right? And we drove down Sunset Boulevard and it was December and it was seventy five, seventy eight degrees or something like that. I said, are you kidding me? I said, no, this is the weather like in California, you know? So I went to, uh, pull into the Beverly Hills Hotel.

• 2:02:07David Senra?

  First hotel you ever stay in?

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:09David Senra?

  Is that? That's wild.

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  Ever, except, except the Host Motel in Pennsylvania, where the car pulls up to the door, you know, that one of those places and pools on the highway. So.

• 2:02:23David Senra?

  A little different from where you're at.

• 2:02:25Speaker 01

  Other than that, this was the first time. And so I go to my room and I come back and I talked to the doorman. I said, can I say something? The regular people live here. And he said, yeah, I'm a regular person. I'm a doorman. I said, I live here. I said, my father's a longshoreman. Are there docks here?

• 2:02:50David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  Said it's the port of California. Yes, one of the biggest ports in the world or whatever.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  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 don't we live in California?

• 2:03:18David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I knew I wanted to live in California from that day.

• 2:03:21David Senra?

  So, how long did it take for you to move here permanently?

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  Seventy-nine. Tom Petty, Damn the To- my whole life was controlled by, was documented by albums. I was Damn the Torpedoes when I moved.

• 2:03:30David Senra?

  How many years later was that?

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  Uh, six.

• 2:03:32David Senra?

  Six years. And that's when you, he put, Tom Petty put you up in a house?

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:36David Senra?

  And you were kind of freaked out. You're like, I'm in the...

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  Well, because it was, I was in, again, I never, I never had a house.

• 2:03:41David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  I lived in an apartment, right?

• 2:03:43David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  There was noises outside the window, you know what I mean? So, I was completely freaked out, you know? But Petty was, Petty was incredible.

• 2:03:53David Senra?

  What'd you learn from him?

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  He was the first guy I worked with that was my age. He was like only two years younger than me or something. But he was like, he was more of a contemporary of mine at that point. We were both trying to prove something. Right? So, we'd locked in and... He was just a great songwriter and, again, perfectionist in his art. He would never bring a song in. Tom Petty never brought an average song into the studio. He was a great self-editor. He would come in, that song would be completely done. Spruce is like that as well.

• 2:04:30David Senra?

  But that's another thing. His motivating factor was creating the best possible song art that he could make.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, he wasn't thinking about... And again, like everybody else, you wanted to have a better life, you know?

• 2:04:43David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:44Speaker 01

  And here, another guy that had issues with his father.

• 2:04:47David Senra?

  But you had commercial instincts because there's a great line in the documentary where like, he writes some song and you're like, I think he wrote a great song and two other ones. You're like, get seven more, we're done. Or like, this song's gonna buy you a house. And Tom's like, I'd never heard anybody talk that way before.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  Well, because I, you know, sometimes I sound crass or whatever. Just that I have a sense of humor. I, I, I know how funny that would sound.

• 2:05:11David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? Like, Bono, one day, I didn't work on, on Joshua Treat. I wanted to do it, but they chose Brian Eno and Danny Leno, which was a better choice. But they wanted to change their sound. But that was the right choice, but they would always bring me in to listen to the songs like Bruce did that day on The River.

• 2:05:32David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  So I go in 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, I don't know if I like house music that much.

• 2:05:45David Senra?

  Right.

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  So he plays me With or Without You. I said, Bono, that's house music. He said, no, it's not. You don't know what you're talking about. I said, Bono, that other song, that's apartment music. You put this song out, you're getting a house. Okay? So, you know, it's just the way I express myself. It's 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, even if it makes you look, you know, like, wow, you're gonna buy a house with the song, Tom Petty? I knew when I was saying it that it sounded like that. But my father was like that. He couldn't resist the good line.

• 2:06:28David Senra?

  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, uh, when I sent this clip when you're on Ari Emanuel's podcast. And at the end, I sent the clip to Daniel Ek and me and him were just laughing about it because you're like, the production, he goes, this is Ari's podcast, this is production value.

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  There was a velour couch and he says it's not a velour couch. I grew up with velour couches, okay? Only my velour couches have plastic on them.

• 2:07:01David Senra?

  No, but you're like, production value sucks. It's hot. I don't got any tea. The water's warm. You got this goddamn light in my face.

• 2:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it felt, and Rick Rubin's sitting there in Italy in this incredible house backlit. He looks like Moses. I'm like, what the fuck?

• 2:07:20David Senra?

  I'm gonna, last thing, what did you think of production value today? You happy?

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  I thought it was good. When you, when you finally get going, I mean, the wood paneling is just not really for me. You know, I'm not like. Because I had wood paneling growing up, you know what I mean? Everything was not real.

• 2:07:36David Senra?

  Well, we got you the tea. I sent that clip to the team. I was like, Jimmy's coming. We're not going to disappoint him. We have the air going.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  It's a very nice time. It's a very nice place. It's perfect.

• 2:07:44David Senra?

  I absolutely love you. I tell you this all the time. You're one of the people I most admire.

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  This was fun.

• 2:07:49David Senra?

  People I want to most be like, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:07:51Speaker 01

  This was fun.

• 2:07:52David Senra?

  You're so great.

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  You know?

• 2:07:53David Senra?

  Oh, don't leave me hanging. Don't leave me hanging, Jimmy. Come on.

• 2:07:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't see that. I was looking for my microphone.

• 2:07:58David Senra?

  No, you're good. Thanks, Ben. 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've 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.