Ian Rogers

Ian Rogers is a technology and business executive whose career spans music tech, luxury retail, and crypto. He began by building early music websites in the 90s, including one for hip-hop group The Beastie Boys, before leading digital music at Yahoo!. Rogers went on to serve as CEO of Topspin and then Beats Music, which was acquired by Apple. In 2015, he became Chief Digital Officer at LVMH, helping modernize digital strategy across its portfolio of luxury brands. Since 2020, he has been Chief Experience Officer at Ledger, where he oversees consumer strategy for the crypto hardware company. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

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

• 0:25Speaker 00

  When we spoke two years ago, I was, in a way, pouring my heart out as this pariah. That was the summer of 23, and FTX had happened in 22. And I think even in that moment, those of us who worked in crypto were a bit in denial as to just how much damage FTX had done to the world of crypto. Again, I think that the important way to contextualize these things is, as the author Carlotta Perez wrote, "Technological revolutions always have a rush of opportunists. And even when there are good ideas, there is over-investment, there's a bubble, the

• 1:08Speaker 00

  bubble bursts, and then you get 30 years of sustained growth." In her book, she talks about it over history, and the book was written in 2002, so it sort of concludes with the dot-com bubble. But we were really feeling it in 2023 in the world of crypto.

• 1:22Rick Rubin?

  Was FTX the bursting of the crypto bubble in some way?

• 1:26Speaker 00

  I think it was that 1999 moment, yes. And the reason I think you can say that, because there have been many crypto cycles before. You had an ICO bubble in 2017, where everyone was going to create a coin, there was Kodak Coin. So there were certainly other bubbles. But the FTX one, it was a Larry David Super Bowl ad, followed by the founder of that company in prison, Big.

• 1:50Rick Rubin?

  But is that because the players in that story were the biggest institutions in the world, as opposed to just regular people?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  I think it was right at that precipice, is the answer. I think that you had the biggest players in the world, and players like BlackRock, Larry Fink and BlackRock as an example, beginning to realize that this is real, and that this is an innovation, and this is an innovation that's going to change the world of finance. At the same time, you had that gold rush mentality. And so after that bubble burst, I mean, we really were persona non grata. For myself, even people I used to be friends with didn't want to associate with me in the same way.

• 2:33Rick Rubin?

  Even though you had nothing to do with FTX.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Nothing to do with FTX at all, but you know, oh, he owns at a crypto company now. We liked Ian when he was music industry guy. We, we loved him when he was at LVMH, you know, we all want to be close to that. But none of us want to touch this third crypto rail and certainly not NFTs and monkey JPEGs. And like, ugh, what are you doing? You know what I mean? For me, I'm a very first principles person and nothing had changed in terms of first principles. But that was where we were. And where we are today, though, is the mainstream financial press has bought the Bitcoin is digital gold narrative. That wasn't the case in 2021. It was still a Ponzi scheme. It was still this, now it's just kind of.

• 3:14Rick Rubin?

  Even before FTX, that was not the case.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  No, exactly. No, even before FTX, it was still just skepticism. You know, just like we experienced in 1998, 99 around the internet, even 2000, even worse in 2001, 2002 around the internet. You had to be one of either, either somebody who thinks it's.

• 3:31Rick Rubin?

  For or against.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, for or against. You can't have a nuanced view, right?

• 3:34Rick Rubin?

  And most people probably don't know anything about it, other than the, the powers that be pointing at it, saying this is good or this is bad. And they follow that.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I think where we are now, though, is, you know, from a financial institution perspective, there is an acknowledgement of, of a technological innovation.

• 3:54Rick Rubin?

  Is it only an acknowledgement or is it an embrace?

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Well, in, in many cases, there's a big bear hug embrace. BlackRock is the leading indicator of that. I think Larry Fink deserves a lot of credit for the way that he has spoken about Bitcoin and blockchain and crypto over the past 18 months. You know, he came out very bullish on Bitcoin and, you know, basically had. A very sane viewpoint, which is Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation. If you would like a hedge against inflation like gold, here's the digital version of that. Very straightforward. And oftentimes, the interviewers would try to push him on this. Is it Bitcoin or blockchain? Blockchain, not Bitcoin. That was kind of a Jamie Dimon. If you go back five years, he was in the blockchain, not Bitcoin camp.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  And Larry Fink of BlackRock has been very much in the no, it's both. You have this Bitcoin thing is very interesting and it's reached kind of a critical mass and a certain scale and it's been tested over time and it's had enough people try to beat it up and defeat it and it's persevered that it's worth taking seriously. And at the same time, he talks about, and I mentioned real world assets, RWAs before, he talks about a world where instead of trading, you know, five days a week, we'll be trading 24/7 using technology and this is the future of finance. And he's been very clear and very well spoken about that. To me, if I had to put my finger on what's the biggest difference, I would just start there. Because I think that when someone like that says those things, which are quite clear

• 5:26Speaker 00

  and quite sane and sort of out of the, you know, pure speculation waters, like the let's dream about a different future waters, they're just very kind of practical in a way, then a lot of people listen. And, you know, when that happens, you know, you get, you get a lot of investment. I mean, as we're sitting here today, Ethereum, which was very much in the doghouse six months ago, it's doubled in price in the last six months. It crossed 4,000.

• 5:51Rick Rubin?

  Why was it in the doghouse?

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Well, I think that you had the Bitcoin narrative was the narrative, the one that everyone was thinking about. If people felt underexposed, they felt underexposed to Bitcoin, not to Ethereum. And Ethereum has a lot of competitors and a lot of people that are coming after it, whether it's, you know, Solana or Sui or others, and not only those. And Ethereum was starting to feel a bit stuck in the middle. It was, it's not Bitcoin and it's also not these kind of young upstarts that are just gunning at it day after day. It's this kind of like loose consortium of developers that are doing a thing. And I think people had more specific criticisms as well, but I'm just giving broad ones. But, you know, what, what has happened is the rising tide floats all boats, as they say, and we now have stablecoin regulation in the US.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  And that means that there will be a crypto ecosystem. So Bitcoin will be Bitcoin. And it's extraordinary for its own reasons, but we will have, you know, trillions of dollars of US dollars that are floating around the world that live on blockchains. Many of those blockchains will be, it'll either be Ethereum or there'll be Ethereum L2s. There'll also be things like Solana and many, many, many others where, where dollars live and other currencies live. But that rising tide does float all boats. You know, you're talking about using technologies more broadly. Technologies that have existed now for 10 years, that have a certain level of maturity, that have many, many developers building on top of them.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  And I think also, I think another thing that's changed, I'll quote the CTO of A16Z, who told me that one thing that he finds interesting is that many of A16Z's non-crypto companies are also retrofitting their products to use crypto rails now. Before it was like, we don't want to do that. Cryptos, we don't want to touch it. We don't want to get in trouble. It's not worth it. So we'll just use the traditional banking system. But oftentimes you're putting a square peg in a round hole. In that case, you're using the credit card system for, for something that's new and innovative. It's expensive. Settlement takes a long time. There's regulations you have to adhere to that don't really apply to your application.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  And now you can use crypto rails to build the same application. It's fast. You know, it's interesting. I think this happens at a super local and non-technical level. Where we stay in Italy is this little village of 300 people. And everywhere in the village, you can pay with status pay. You scan a QR code, you punch in the amount, you hit send. It immediately beeps on their end. Now, why? Why does the little alimentari, you know, accept status pay? Because for him it's cheaper than if I pay him with a credit card. And it's faster than if I pay him with a credit card. It costs him less on a per transaction basis. And he can spend that money immediately. He doesn't have to wait for 30 days for it to clear.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Chargebacks, the expensive chargebacks, all of that stuff that's in that system. Now, is that crypto? Probably not. I don't know if SaaS pay uses crypto under the hood or not. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Doesn't matter. Just like I don't know if Spotify uses peer-to-peer technology to distribute its files. Right? It just works. And it's a meaningful improvement for the merchant.

• 9:14Rick Rubin?

  Is that the case everywhere?

• 9:16Speaker 00

  I think that this is the thing that you can bet is a thing of the past five years from now. Right now in the US, if you go pay with a credit card, there's basically a 3% tax on the merchant, which is the cost of those credit rails. You didn't want credit when you bought that cup of coffee. You just wanted digital payment. And digital payment is available for fractions of a penny instantly. We have that technology. We don't use it because we haven't had the regulatory clearance to use it. And now, for less than two months, we do. That's huge. It's a big thing too, a difference for us at Ledger. When we were here two years ago, we were very much the company that does self custody for digital assets.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  We have about 20% of the entire crypto market cap is protected by our devices or our technology. But the way that it is today, I see us much more living in a world of crypto. Whether you know it or not as a user, 6.5 billion smartphones, the vast majority of those phones have some value management app on them. It's your banking app, Venmo, PayPal, Coinbase, Revolut, Robinhood. Ledger is the premium version of that. And to me, this is where it intersects also with my LVMH past. I'm very happy to be the premium app. I'm very happy not to be PayPal. I'm very happy to be, you know, the one in the, in the spirit of hire the right customers.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  You know, the one for people who care about security, care about privacy, care about self custody, and want the better user experience that comes with having security. Right? Since Coinbase can't ever know that it's really you, they're always going to put 50 roadblocks in front of you. To keep out the not you, whereas when you use Ledger, it should be, you know, a smooth experience, a secure experience, a private experience without the counterparty risk of SFTX or Celsius or fill in the blank, right? It's that premium.

• 11:13Rick Rubin?

  So when you pay in a little town of 300 people and you pay for your coffee, tell me exactly what you do and what is happening when you do it.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  So I'll give you the example with Ledger. So if I, if I show you.

• 11:26Rick Rubin?

  So you pay with Ledger?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Yes. So.

• 11:28Rick Rubin?

  Versus, let's say, like if I were to use Apple Pay and that would be the same as paying with a credit card, except this is, it's like a different format of a credit card. Ledger is not a different format of a credit card.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  So these are, these are, you know, they call these on-ramps and off-ramps.

• 11:45Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Right? So how do you get your money from your bank account into on-chain money? And how do you get it from the on-chain money into the bank account of whomever you're paying? Right? On-ramp or off-ramp? So we have a credit card at Ledger, works just like a credit card. I can put any crypto into the account. It can be Bitcoin, it can be Ethereum, it can be US dollar.

• 12:05Rick Rubin?

  But is it still a Visa or a Mastercard?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  It's a Mastercard in our case. And when I pay, it uses the credit card system and it just converts that crypto money into fiat money at that point of transaction and I can, I can use it effortlessly. So I take some amount of money. I put it in the credit card account. And that could be any kind of value. It could be Bitcoin, it could be Ethereum. I put a little bit of Bitcoin there a long time ago and I've never added any more to it because the value of the Bitcoin keeps going up faster than I can spend it, which is a nice thing. But the, you could put just USDC or USDT on there just as easily.

• 12:38Rick Rubin?

  I know what that is.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Those are digital dollars. So USDT is the company Tether, super interesting company. USDC is Circle, which is Jeremy Allaire. And he's also an incredibly interesting figure, a real like internet pioneer as well. Created Macromedia, I believe, which, you know, Shockwave Flash, I think was, you know, in the nineties. But, you know, these incredible companies, what they do is they issue digital dollars. So they, and they're fully backed by US Treasuries and, and other backed assets. And that, what that means is that now you can transact with those digital dollars on the internet, how you would like to, and just use them as you would use a dollar. I bought a piece of art yesterday using USDC.

• 13:24Rick Rubin?

  How is using Ledger different than using Apple Pay? If you still have a Visa card in there?

• 13:31Speaker 00

  So today, I have this interim way of paying, which is I put some money into the credit card account. I can tap their credit card and I pay just like I would with Apple Pay or anything else. That is easy because it works at every terminal, right? In the future, though, I think that what we'll have is what you have, frankly, in a place like Buenos Aires, where you can scan it with a QR code and just transfer USD C or USCT to that address. I mean, this is already the case in the US. I'm kind of, I've been away from the US for 10 years. And when I go back there, I don't have a Venmo account. People look at you like, you don't have a Venmo account? Like, how can you not have a venue? Everybody has a Venmo account. Like, you can always digitally pay someone with Venmo.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  You just, what happens is, is that the world starts to look like that, right? It's that thing where I just scan a QR code, I punch in the amount, and I hit send. I don't need to do anything else. That's the end result. And at that point, you also have this kind of fully interoperable system. You don't have a system where there's a couple people in the middle, Visa and Mastercard, who are taking everything. You have it where my dollar could be issued by Circle, it could be issued by Tether, it could be issued by JP Morgan, it could be, I might be, I might be using a Starbucks dollar, right? It doesn't really matter. I'm going to send you a dollar, and you're going to get the dollar in the format that you want. We already have that in the form of PayPal. Right now, I can PayPal you,

• 14:57Speaker 00

  and I will send euros, and you will receive dollars. PayPal gets a small fee for doing that. Now, we have decentralized technologies that can do all of that on the fly. Because we have digital value, and that digital value can easily move from place to place at a very low cost. And now, what we've been lacking is the regulation on how does that work so consumers don't get screwed? And what this administration is doing, instead of hiding their head in the sand and saying, "We don't know, we don't, we don't think that's possible. We think that's only for criminals." They're saying, "Well, wait a minute. If we put sane regulation around this and let innovation go,

• 15:38Speaker 00

  then we're going to get kind of global Venmo and PayPal apps that everyone has access to."

• 15:44Rick Rubin?

  That goes back to the same idea of privacy, that if privacy is only for criminals, it's the same argument of...

• 15:53Rick Rubin?

  Secure transactions are only for criminals. It's just a crazy way to look at the world.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 16:02Rick Rubin?

  Are we at a time where blockchain will be the standard used by everybody mainstream versus a fringe alternative?

• 16:11Speaker 00

  I think we're still at that time when it's probably imagined to be used for things that it doesn't necessarily need to be used for. I always come back to P2P, and P2P was going to be the solution to everything, the solution to the way things move around. You know, the reality is, is that you can have a private database and it can work very well, right? And so, does everything need to be a blockchain? No. I think that it's, that it's still sort of overloaded and fundamentally misunderstood. Someone put it to me this way, and I really like this way of looking at it. Blockchains are very good at issuance and trading. So they're very good at creating items on chain and then facilitating the trading of those items.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Again, if like TCP IP is fundamentally, I send a packet from this computer to that computer, and it can receive that, and that's very powerful. I think similarly, blockchains are very good at issuance and trading. You know, there are different blockchains, have different properties, so now you go from there. But I think that if it's not about issuance and trading, then a blockchain is probably not, you know, the right application. I also, though, think that we've really talked about the invention of digital scarcity as the powerful angle, which is accurate. But I think we're at a phase now where what blockchains are giving us is the ability to transact, the ability to digitize value and then transact with that value. And that's very powerful.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  And scarcity has to be a part of that, because if, if I can just make an infinite number of copies, then, well, why would you transact with me over it, right? So scarcity is kind of part and parcel of that. But when you then take that for granted, you can build these applications, which are about high-volume transactions. And lots of the things that we do every day are about transactions that are maybe difficult in some way. And when you remove that transaction and allow them, you know, allow high frequency of those transactions, you can, you can like build new types of applications. And I think that's, this is where blockchains will, will really shine. I think similarly to, you know, we talk about kind of like the ubification of everything, like everything kind of becomes like a...

• 18:21Speaker 00

  A guy on a bike is going to deliver your everything. But the reality is, and a venture capitalist put it very well to me once, where he said that a marketplace is defined as suppressed supply and suppressed demand. In the 90s in San Francisco, there were parked cars everywhere and you couldn't get a ride. You had suppressed demand, I want a ride, and suppressed supply, look at all these cars. So Uber unlocks all of that supply and demand. Same with Airbnb, right? You know, I mean, all these empty homes, people want to go on vacation. But there are many people that have failed by trying to attack something. There are many instances in digital music where people are trying to kind of, you know, take the Uber model and apply it to something where there's not really suppressed demand, nor is there suppressed supply, right?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  And that will never work. I think similarly in the world of blockchain, like people are going to keep trying to apply it to things where maybe they should just use a SQL database. But I think whenever it's about issuance and transaction, then blockchain is going to be the superior choice.

• 19:21Rick Rubin?

  If all content creators had their work on blockchain, how would that change things?

• 19:29Speaker 00

  I think what you have then is provenance. I'll jump to the finish. I think that trust brokers will be very important in the future. Because I could show you, look, this picture is my picture. I can prove to you that I took it. Here's the proof. Well, how do you validate that that proof is really proof of anything, right? I can prove that I have a certificate. You know, I can sell you a piece of art with a certificate as well. You know, mischief has done this a couple of times. They took a Warhol and then they had one of the best fake artists in the world make 99 fakes. And then they sold them all at the price of the original with fake certificates. They did a little wooden Picasso fish. I bought one.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  I have the Picasso fish and I have the certificate of authenticity. Maybe I have the real one. I don't know. Someone does. One of the 250-

• 20:21Rick Rubin?

  Oh, so they sell 250 of them and one of them is the original and it's just mixed in?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Yep, and the other ones are all-

• 20:27Rick Rubin?

  But they're identical. No way to ever know.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:29Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  And so this is what I mean, that trust brokers will have a very important role to play, because we all are going to need someone that we trust. So let's say that there's a service. Like clear, clear at the airport, right? Service, clear as a service that they have done their diligence so well that the airport trusts them. And it fits into, you know, all of the compliance issues around is the person coming through this gate really the person that we think it is. Right? Like, so I could show my passport to the guy or I could scan my retina clear and they're both accepted. So you could imagine something like that on chain where there are these services, a company called Jumio.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  And, and you've probably even used them because when you sign up for a bank account or something, sometimes they'll have you do this like, you scan your passport, you take a picture of your face, 30 minutes later, you get the okay. Right? So imagine if with that okay comes a token. And what that token proves is you're a unique individual who holds this passport. And that has been, you know, verified by this company over here. Right? That's what I mean by a trust broker.

• 21:43Rick Rubin?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Cause if I say, hey, I own this Warhol. Look, I have the certificate. You're gonna squint your eyes a little bit and go, I see you have the certificate, but I, I don't know enough to know if that certificate is real or not. Your certificate even has a hologram. Good on you, but I still don't know. Whereas if Christie's said to you, we've done the work and that is a Warhol and that certificate is real. You're more likely to go, well, okay, I guess, I guess it is. And this is, this is what I mean, you know, by these, these trust brokers. So I think, you know, it's a lot like, um, the patent authority, right? Like I, I go there and I register my work and I say, I am the creator of this work.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  And they say, okay, we've looked around and we don't see anyone else who's created this and we're going to issue you that. Right? I think that, that you need that. And, you know, is, is fraud impossible? No, of course not, but there's, you've created a lot of friction.

• 22:39Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  You know, at the fraud point, it's very hard to get a driver's license. It's very easy for someone to verify your driver's license. That's the kind of dynamic you want to set up. It's relatively hard to register a work.

• 22:51Rick Rubin?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  It's relatively easy to verify that the work is in original.

• 22:55Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 22:57Rick Rubin?

  We were talking about creators' rights as it relates to AI. What are your thoughts?

• 23:05Speaker 00

  I think that we have to agree that it's a gray area, that there are probably absolutes that we can agree upon, that if I just took the Tyler Childers album that you just worked on and uploaded it under a new name with a different cover, that that's not what we want as a society and that that is copyright infringement. I think we can agree on that. And then at the other end of the spectrum, if I want to comment on an article in The New York Times, that I should be able to pull a quote from that and say, they said this and I believe differently. And that there's a lot of gray area in between and we're going to argue about that, about that gray area.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  And I think that now that AI is just an incredibly powerful tool to challenge that gray area. It's one thing when I make an exact copy. It's another thing when maybe I'm inspired by a riff and it's a complete other thing when I have synthesized all of human knowledge and now I'm squeezing the sponge and a new mixture is coming out. And how do we call that and what do we treat that? I think ultimately, we just as a society.

• 24:16Rick Rubin?

  The other part of it though was how would you know? Like if you vibe coded a great country album and ChatGPT served up Tyler Childers' new album to you but didn't tell you, how would you know?

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think, I think that this is the challenge that we are kind of presented with. And I think our only choice as a society is to lay down some rules and to live by them. You know, if you think about it, the, you know, the doctrines that we've all lived by in the music business are somewhat arbitrary. You know, statutory licensing around radio broadcasting that then didn't translate into the internet. You know, I sat on the stand in ASCAP and BMI versus AOL, Yahoo, LiveC365, et cetera, once upon a time because. The statutory licensing that was set up to serve radio didn't serve internet radio. And so new technologies come along and we have to rewrite the rules.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  And I think that my point is, we probably aren't post copyright. I'm not sure we want to be that as a society. I feel like-

• 25:22Rick Rubin?

  Well, then there'd be no incentive to make anything.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Exactly. We would like for creative people to be rewarded for their creations. I think that we can say that that would make us feel good as people and acknowledging that there will always be people who want to steal. We should make stealing from creative people sufficiently difficult. At the same time, it's constantly evolving, the technologies that we have available. So we're going to need to just lay down some rules of engagement. But also, I don't know how that happens. I don't know-

• 25:54Rick Rubin?

  What would be your guess? Let's just say, make up, what could a framework look like?

• 25:57Speaker 00

  I think this is so unknown because we don't even know what the pricing around AI might look like in the future. What is society willing to pay for pricing? Like, think about how early innings we are in this. There isn't even really an ad-supported model around consumer AI tools yet, but there certainly will be. And it took us a very long time to sort that out in kind of round one of the internet, where we went from Google being a search engine to Google being an ad engine, basically, right? The internet's ad engine. From Facebook being, you know, a way to like meet your peers at your university, to it being one of the biggest ad engines on the planet.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  From Instagram being a way that you could put a cute filter on a photo, to it being the way that you discover a new product. Those are very long roads, and we're just at the beginning of that journey when it comes to AI.

• 26:53Rick Rubin?

  In each one of those cases, from the original idea to where it is now, does the ad model ultimately undermine and destroy the original function?

• 27:04Speaker 00

  I don't think so necessarily. You know, what people on the internet have pointed to a thousand times. You've heard this in a lot of pitches, but I don't think they're wrong. Whether it's Vogue or Thrasher, the ads are part of the content. I'm not saying we like them.

• 27:20Rick Rubin?

  It's not always so obvious what's an ad now, though.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, and even that's evolved. I mean, you know, just a couple of weeks ago, Instagram presented me with this option to subscribe or see ads that actually stop my feed. You know, so it's still evolving. You know, at the same time, like, I have discovered interesting products through Instagram ads. I have to be honest. And really, Google Shopping, which is that bar of images that comes above the search, it's often pretty good. You know, there is a market incentive. You know, I believe in markets and I believe in free markets. And I think there is a market incentive to have a good balance. So as consumers, we find ads annoying. I actually, I loved what Bob Pittman had to say about this.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  He was making the comment that in radio, advertisements are considered differently than in television. I think it's important for people to understand that it's not just black and white. Ads bad, especially if your choice as a consumer is to see ads or pay. You know, I think without that, we don't have Spotify. And Spotify has, you know, really pushed people towards pay, pushed toward pay, of course. But we wouldn't have managed to get on this slippery slope without it. You know, I was in a store, in a grocery store in New York, like a small health food store in New York a few weeks ago, and I heard the Spotify ads over the, I'm like, oh my God, you guys, please pay for Spotify, you know, so I don't have to hear advertisements when I'm in your store. But they can have free music.

• 28:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  I'm not saying it's legal even, but you get my point. And so I think there is some value to being able to offer content to more people and not have a paywall. At the same time, I mean, I truly don't understand people who have YouTube without paying. YouTube is such a great resource. It's got, you know, every concert you could ever want to see on it as an example, and it's so easy to get it without ads and on a relative basis, considering what my mom used to pay for cable and what I can today pay for YouTube is what I mean. So I understand everybody has their challenges, but if my family could afford cable when I was a kid. Then people that I'm talking to on this topic right now can afford YouTube.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  And getting that without ads is such a luxury, like a true luxury in a way. So I don't know. I don't think it, but at the same time, I would never pay for Instagram. I don't value it enough or look at it enough.

• 29:40Rick Rubin?

  And you, and you get a benefit from the ads. So that's a win-win.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And the ads don't kill me, you know, considering I look at Instagram for a total of 15 minutes per week. Advertising is the, is the right model for that. So again, to come back to the original point, I think we're in the early innings of this AI thing. We don't even know what the business model looks like. So how would we decide what we're going to charge for input into that model? That's also really dangerous, right? Because that means that every media publication that is becoming an input to that brain is effectively giving it for free today. I guess on some level though, I have a belief that as Bob Pittman said, people don't fall in love with robots, they fall in love with humans. I would say don't bet against humans. I think the more time we spend on our phones, the more time we value

• 30:28Speaker 00

  in-person, you know, meetings and relationships. The more time we spend looking at a screen, the more premium being off the screen becomes. The more we get content which is created by robots, the more special hearing Gillian Welsh and David Rawlings do what they do is, just in general. So I don't think there's anything that AI could do that would make me want to see David Rawlings play his guitar less. I don't think it's possible. I don't think that technology risks that in any way, shape or form.

• 31:01Rick Rubin?

  And if AI happens to come up with something different than that that you like, that's fine.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think also there probably will be entire classes of things where the creative class is removed from it though, right? If you're listening to FM radio and you hear a jingle.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  You know, will that jingle be created by a musician in a studio tomorrow? That's hard to imagine, you know? But you could also imagine that if it is, it's a premium that it is. The theme music was created by. And the fact that it is, we'll be like, wow, that's cool. That that makes me feel like this is a more premium channel or podcast or whatever it is.

• 31:39Rick Rubin?

  Someone was telling me there was a, I think it was a musician who wanted to buy the Muzak company in the sixties to

• 31:46Speaker 00

  In the seventies and you know who it was?

• 31:47Rick Rubin?

  Who?

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Ted Nugent.

• 31:49Rick Rubin?

  To destroy it?

• 31:50Speaker 00

  To destroy it.

• 31:51Rick Rubin?

  To buy it to kill it?

• 31:52Speaker 00

  That Muzak is such a great study for people when they're thinking about AI music. I really, I actually think I'm glad you brought it up because if you are right now complaining about robotic music, then go study Muzak. Right? It used to be, it probably still is, I don't know. You walk into the grocery store and you're going to hear an instrumental version of Barry Manilow Mandy.

• 32:14Rick Rubin?

  Elevator music.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Yes, elevator music. That was all done by a company called Muzak. Now, search the words Muzak and Ted Nugent. And you'll find like maybe one of the best publicity stunts of all time. Ted Nugent offered, I can't remember the number, but a lot of money at the time to buy Muzak and he was clear, I'm going to buy it and I'm going to destroy it.

• 32:38Rick Rubin?

  How do you use AI on a daily basis, you personally?

• 32:42Speaker 00

  I feel like I'm still playing with

• 32:44Rick Rubin?

  You use it every day?

• 32:45Speaker 00

  For sure. I use it multiple times every day. And what I'm generally doing is trying to offload some task. Let me give you the professional use case for me. My day is full of meetings. I try to prep every one of those meetings with AI. Who am I talking to? What could I learn about them? What questions should I ask? Then during the meeting, we use the G suite, like Google, all the Google tools at Ledger. So you've got the the note taking. There's also a really great tool called Granola that I've tried, but I now I just use the Google one because we're already giving all our data to Google is the best way to say it. So we we just give them that. It's amazing how good it is at taking all of our kind of jibber jabber in the meeting and then pulling out

• 33:30Speaker 00

  action items, notes.

• 33:34Rick Rubin?

  You know, what do you get a synopsis after every meeting?

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. And you can share it with someone else.

• 33:38Rick Rubin?

  And you don't have to say you want a particular note. It just takes whatever seems important.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you can then query it, ask it questions about it. It'll provide you the full transcript. And then it's nice for me because if I can take the meeting, but you know, my head of marketing or head of technology can't, then I can copy paste the summary of the meeting into Slack and they're going to get some kind of ambient knowledge out of it. So there's that, I think, are very practical use cases that even as a professional who's not a coder anymore, that's super useful. On the coding front, I have done some things where I just wanted to prototype something or something that I want to exist for me. You know, with my daughter, I challenged her to build a better gallery for our NFT art collection, just these kind of things.

• 34:20Rick Rubin?

  Just for your own use.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I would have maybe waited for a commercial tool to come available or, but it's almost like, oh, I've got a vision for what I want. If I can describe it well enough, then Claude can probably help me build it. That sort of thing. To be honest, I don't have time to do that much of that. I've done a little bit of it just to see what's possible.

• 34:39Rick Rubin?

  To use it as a time-saving tool.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's the kind of creation tool. The most use, though, is for me is just that replacement for Google. The search or smart search, I would say, right? It's like what Hedwig and I were just doing on this. This whole road trip has basically been planned in partnership with ChatGPT. We've got this many days, we're going roughly these places, and we even told it we're interested in these things because we're not trying to do tourist things. We're interested in architecture. We're interested in specific kinds of architecture. We're interested in nature. We're interested in music. And it's amazing what it's found for us. And then you have this kind of smart companion. Uh, you know, we want to stay in places that aren't too fancy,

• 35:24Speaker 00

  but aren't dirty, you know, like, so you're not going to get that out of Google. And the amazing thing to me is I remember 10 years ago when voice was the future, right? And we know that Siri is laughable. It's not even a good kitchen timer, especially if you have an accent, like the difference between 15 minutes and 50 minutes is something that it's always had a problem with, right? So that's pretty basic, but.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  With ChatGPT, I can literally mumble into this thing, and it will give me something pretty damn good. I can say, "Draw a picture of," and then just start talking, and it will draw a picture of that thing that is better than you could have imagined.

• 36:01Rick Rubin?

  In the past, if I wanted to know something, and I did a Google search, I would get a list of responses, and they wouldn't all agree with each other. They would say different things, and depending on how low you went, how many pages you were willing to look down, you could see a variety of information. And then from that, you would kind of decide, "Hmm, this one seems like the way I want to go."

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:25Rick Rubin?

  Whereas now, if you ask an AI, it gives you the answer. And for some reason, everyone I talk to who uses AI treats it like it's the answer.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:36Rick Rubin?

  Now, it's the same one of ten answers you might have gotten from Google, but now you just don't see the other nine.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  I think this is super concerning. I think it's a moving target. For example, ChatGPT-5 is... One of the things they talk about is that it's improved for sycophancy.

• 36:58Rick Rubin?

  What's that mean?

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Meaning, it doesn't just agree with you as much as it used to, right? It used to just say like...

• 37:05Rick Rubin?

  "I'm sorry."

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. A result of that, that improvement in sycophancy, is that it takes a point of view more often. It used to be, if you asked it, "Do you think this or this?" And it would end up giving you pros and cons of each. Now, it seems a little better. You know, it's early returns on ChatGPT-5, but it seems a little better at picking a point of view and going for it.

• 37:28Rick Rubin?

  Doesn't mean it's right.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  I think that we are... We have to remember that we are very early in this, and it's as bad as it will ever be. I think that the really amazing thing about AI that I think we wouldn't have predicted, I think AI is far more capable and amazingly intelligent than we would have imagined if we would have described it today 10 years ago. I also think that it is wrong far more often than we would have imagined if we could have imagined it's as good as it is. So it's amazing how amazing it is. And it's also amazing how

• 38:05Rick Rubin?

  How wrong it can be.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  How wrong it can be on just basic, basic stuff. I just tried to build this a mini ramp for skateboarding and my building partner was my planning partner was ChatGPT. I wish I hadn't done that. It was wrong on basic math.

• 38:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  And I should have checked the math harder.

• 38:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Because there were things I then stumbled into at build time where I'm like, oh my God. You just had that amount of wood totally wrong, right? And so we can't really rely. Now, at the same time, when you talk to enterprise customers, companies about AI adoption. The amazing thing is, is that over the past 12 months, it's gone from less than 50% to vast majority of companies are investing heavily in AI.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Another thing that they say, though, is that their number one concern is accuracy. Also, remember, these AI companies are the most well-capitalized companies on the planet at the moment. And if the number one concern of enterprise customers is accuracy, you can bet they're working on solving this problem.

• 39:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  So it's easy for us to criticize it today and say it's often flat out incorrect. But I would, I see it as a non-problem because that will be solved. That's like saying the internet is really hard to use in 1998. Yes, it was, but it is not today. I think it's the same thing.

• 39:29Rick Rubin?

  We hear about the AI arms race all the time. Every few weeks, a new version of one of the big six comes out. And the world stops and everybody switches from this one to this one. For most people, in the way that they use it, are all AIs the same.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  I think it's still really early. I just think that we're at this moment where it's it's probably only us nerds that are really paying attention to it. That's where I think chat GPT or opening out was very smart to kind of make. They made a version of chat GPT now that is going to annoy a lot of the power users, but be much easier to use for the average user. And I think that's smart, like directionally makes perfect sense to me. And I think ultimately there probably is, and this is why it is such an arms race. There is a Google like winner. And I think that's quite scary. Like it probably is quite winner take all. Everyone's got to find their lane. One will be built into more things.

• 40:27Rick Rubin?

  Are some of them better than others at certain things?

• 40:31Speaker 00

  That's definitely been the case. Yes. I mean, even within companies, certain models are better at different things, right? And that will continue to be the case. And I actually think that's what we can expect. The interesting thing will be when every app we use has the AI built into it. Right? I think that's the next step that comes. That's what we see 12 months from now. Right now, if I want to build something, I'm going to ask Claude or chat GPT how to build it. And then it's going to help me through it. But this is where coding is leading, right? Because coding is already built in. There's a window where I can basically code with the English language. And it's going to change my my computer code in the other window. And that will do the same thing in Photoshop and in Figma and in Pro Tools.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Well, that's what it will be. There'll be just a chat box in Pro Tools and you'll tell Pro Tools what you want to do.

• 41:20Rick Rubin?

  Will AI eventually replace Pro Tools?

• 41:23Speaker 00

  Now we're talking about user interfaces. So.

• 41:27Rick Rubin?

  Is there anything Pro Tools can do that AI can't do?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  I mean, in theory, no, right? Because I could tell it, you know, move that selection, you know, kind of one one millisecond to the right or to the left, which is what you can do when you're dragging a waveform, right?

• 41:44Rick Rubin?

  Record these microphones individually and show them to me in a grid pattern where I can move them around.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think. Really, it's just about precision of language, right? With computer code, I could be very precise with my language and say, okay, I've got a variable, I'm going to store this number in that variable. Now increment that variable by 10. That's very precise language. It's not very open to interpretation. Whereas if I say something more generic, I want to build an app that identifies plants. Now I'm using very broad language. Okay, well, it's open to interpretation.

• 42:18Rick Rubin?

  But would it ask you questions back? Like, in that case, I want to identify plants. And it would say, are you going to show me pictures? Are you going to describe the plants?

• 42:29Speaker 00

  I think that's the best way to think about it, is you think about it as a partner. That's the way they're describing ChatGPT-5. It is an amazing pair programming partner. Pair programming is a thing that two people do together. They sit together and they program together. And what they're doing is they're saying, you can pair program with Claude or with ChatGPT. You're interacting with it. You're telling it what you want to do. You're doing some of the things yourself. It's checking your work with you. It's making suggestions. When you make a bug or an error and you can't find it, you can say, hey, can you help me find this? And it goes and helps you find it. And I think you can think about that for all kinds of things. If you're editing, you know, maybe you're working on a research paper and you're editing like tons of facts and figures.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  You can ask it, like, do you find any inconsistencies in these facts and figures? If you were my professor and you were reading this paper, what questions would you ask me? One thing we haven't talked about is, when it comes to AI, people talk about how, oh, man, now we have AI, no one's ever going to learn anything, right? Well, it's exactly what they said about like books when they were created. You know, no one's going to remember anything.

• 43:34Rick Rubin?

  It's true.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Now that you can.

• 43:34Rick Rubin?

  But it's true.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. You can write it down. It's ridiculous. You know, my 11-year-old goes to school in a French school. My French is pretty poor. She comes home one day and she's got a test tomorrow. Can you help her with her homework? Well, sure. So what I did was I I took pictures of all five pages of homework. They're all written in French. Thankfully, they have very good handwriting in French schools. And I asked ChatGPT, I said, OK, first of all, tell me what each of these things says. You know, in French and in English.

• 44:05Rick Rubin?

  Translate.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Translate it for me. Like, first of all, read it in.

• 44:08Rick Rubin?

  Yep.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Tell me that you know what it says.

• 44:09Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Now translate it to English for me.

• 44:11Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Then I said, OK, you know, she has a test tomorrow. Can you please build an interactive study guide for her? Make it fun for her.

• 44:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  You're asking her questions until she learns the material. And it did. It kept your attention for like ninety minutes.

• 44:25Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  And and then I said, OK, now give her the quiz as you imagine it will appear in school tomorrow. And it did. And then I said, OK, and please tell me the five questions I should ask her when she wakes up tomorrow morning. So that I know she's ready for the test. And it did. And I said, hey, how did you, you know, give me a report. And it gave an incredible report. She spent this much time. She went from here to here. Here's what she what she understood well. Here's what she understood less well. Here are the things you need to work on.

• 44:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  And Saul Kahn from Kahn Academy talks about this very well. When he started Kahn Academy, what he thought was, how much of what a tutor brings?

• 45:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Can we do with technology?

• 45:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  But I hazard to guess that instead of ChatGPT robbing her of her ability to learn.

• 45:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  I bet she knew that material better than any other kid in the class. Without question. Her stepdad, who doesn't speak French very well, was able to help her study better than I could have, even if I was a native French speaker.

• 45:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  And she probably enjoyed it more.

• 45:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  And spent more time doing it than she would have otherwise.

• 45:34Rick Rubin?

  OK, I have a question. There's a redundant step in the story you told. Why did she have to go to school? And feels like that defeat.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  Why is she?

• 45:42Rick Rubin?

  You just told me she learned it. Better than she would learn it in any other way. And now she has to go and show somebody that she learned it. Why?

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I believe me. So, you know, my eldest daughter was homeschooled at this age. My middle daughter went to a progressive school in Los Angeles, which I think does much more than the kind of industrial education system we were talking about earlier does. And I think that French schools are pretty stuck in the past, unfortunately.

• 46:11Rick Rubin?

  I'm told the French schools are the best of all school choices.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  They are rigorous, but they are old fashioned.

• 46:22Rick Rubin?

  When AI hallucinates, does it know it's hallucinating?

• 46:27Speaker 00

  I think this is something where it does not know today, but it will know tomorrow.

• 46:31Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  And even if you look, there are some metrics that came out about ChatGPT five, where hallucinations are way down. Like, it's hard to measure, but they try, right? And that's my point, is that those hallucinations are, I think, a number one reason that people will not use AI. Therefore, they will work hard on fixing those things. And it's very doable. You know, you can even do it as a user. I was using, I'll just give a very simple example. I was using it to look for hotels on a road trip. And it would give me a bunch of hotels that are sold out. It's a month of August and, you know, and it's a waste of my time.

• 47:05Rick Rubin?

  And you also say?

• 47:07Speaker 00

  And you can say, go look and please double verify.

• 47:11Rick Rubin?

  There are rooms available.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  That rooms are available and provide a link. This is also where it will surprise you by how bad it is.

• 47:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Because it will give you a link on Airbnb, which is just either not a link or the wrong link. And you're just like, wow, you actually went to the trouble of making up a link on Airbnb. That's crazy.

• 47:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  I'm trying to think, how does it even do that? I can understand giving me a broken link. I can understand giving me no link, but giving me, like, you imagined a link?

• 47:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  That's incredible.

• 47:40Rick Rubin?

  Well, it knows what a link would look like.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. I'll just put these letters after these letters.

• 47:45Rick Rubin?

  Because that's how, this is how many letters there are.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:48Rick Rubin?

  So that this will work.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 47:50Rick Rubin?

  You gave a great example of using it as a tutor for your child. I think the problem.

• 48:00Rick Rubin?

  Is because AI can do essentially anything. It's hard to know the point of access. How do you use a tool that can do anything? We know how to use a tool that does a thing and we know to grab that tool. But what you did was creative. You did a creative act. Many people might not realize that that's a possibility.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:24Rick Rubin?

  And I think that's a big question is what are all of the possible use cases for a tool that can do anything? It's only as much as we can imagine.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  That's just one of the things that is the most astounding about this technology. Like I started working with computers when I was eight years old. I'm fifty three soon. And I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen anything move this quickly. I've never seen so many people who have been predicting the future for their entire lives so surprised.

• 48:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  By what technology is capable of. It really does feel, you know, unprecedented. And then to the example that you just gave, what's interesting about this chat G P T five release is that people were sort of ho hum about it. And the people that are truly impressed by it are the people who are trying things with it that they never would have tried with AI before. And they're amazed by what it can accomplish. And I think you're right. We don't have the reflex. Our children will, I hope. I also think there's a bit of a disservice that education is doing by kind of making AI this bad thing that's for cheaters. I think that will be the next stigma that's removed.

• 49:34Rick Rubin?

  It undermines their cartel.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Yes. And I think, of course, like the kids will figure it out. It's not something they're taught to use in school. In fact, they're taught if you use it, you're a cheater.

• 49:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Right? Whereas the reality is, is that if you're struggling with your calculus homework.

• 49:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  That asking an AI to help you learn it.

• 49:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  I remember the way that I memorized Shakespeare when I was in high school was to put it to Astro Zombies by the Misfits. So you could say, I'm having a very hard time learning this material. Can you please, you know, make it a Nicki Minaj, Drake and Lil Wayne Truffle Butter Part Two? And it would do it. And that could make you learn it and help you find your way there. Kids will figure that out. Kids will develop that reflex. All right. In many ways, the more specific you go, the better it is.

• 50:31Rick Rubin?

  I think that's really also the root of creativity. When you see the thing that you're working on, and you can understand the detail to change, to make it go from not working to working, it involves being really specific in that understanding, whether you say it out loud or not.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  I always say the best employee is somebody who says to you, I understand what it is you're trying to do, and now you don't need to worry about it anymore.

• 51:03Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  And I remember being at your place in Malibu and watching Kanye work with his engineer, who he clearly worked with for a long time. I was super impressed by how little Kanye could say, and then what he was able to do as a result. And you see the teamwork in that. So that is super interesting. And I think also, yeah, that, there, that's why we've been talking about prompting as a skill, right? And when I see, you know, you look on X and you see people that are giving you prompting advice.

• 51:30Rick Rubin?

  Posting prompts.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  I'm always blown away. I'm like, wow, I'm a long way from that.

• 51:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 00

  But it also is one of those things where you're like, okay, well, and it's all out there.

• 51:39Rick Rubin?

  It's a really cool idea is to research prompts that work.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:43Rick Rubin?

  For anything, just understanding the language.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  There are so many people sharing that right now, on X especially. You know, prompts for creating images, prompts for creating marketing plans, prompts for, it's all out there. And then this is how we built the web. You know, the great thing about the web was right-click view source. You know, so in the early days of the web, you wanted to know how someone did something. It also was pretty simple. It wasn't that hard to understand. But you just right-click view source. Oh, okay. Copy, paste, you know, put it in your own context. Yeah.

• 52:15Rick Rubin?

  Giving the example of Kanye and his engineer, does AI remember all of your past interactions? And it starts to know what you like? Whereas when you're looking for a hotel in two years, it remembers last time he liked this when I did that. Does it consider that?

• 52:36Speaker 00

  It does. And it's incredible and actually, you know, worrisome when you think about the negative, potential negative side of that. What I did the other day, just to sort of... Test that notion to see how it goes even kind of across your own conversations is. I just typed in, give me a summary of what I've learned from you over the past week. And it did, and it was incredible, and it felt a little creepy in this like, yeah, well, I mean, of course, these are all the conversations I've had with you over the past week, but it just did an incredible job summarizing them. And you realize that it remembers more than you do, right? And that that is a creepy feeling. You know what I did is I told my chat G P T to, whenever possible, make a Ween reference, the band Ween.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  I can't get it to stop. I've now asked it many times to stop making Ween references, and I can't figure out. It was easy.

• 53:28Rick Rubin?

  So you can't undo a prompt?

• 53:30Speaker 00

  I think you, there must be a way. I consider this more a bug than a feature, but point is, is that it will constantly make Ween references.

• 53:38Rick Rubin?

  It seems like you want to be able to overwrite anything that over time, either your taste changes, or you stop liking a feature.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  I think it's going to probably pick up on your taste changes before you do, is my guess.

• 53:52Rick Rubin?

  What did you learn about branding when you were at LVMH?

• 53:57Speaker 00

  That storytelling plus time equals value. You know, you have these brands that have this incredible heritage. And one of the things I have just enormous respect for is that their their care about craft and quality is real, and that never faltered. You know, even when fashion was moving toward H and M and, you know, et cetera, they said, no, no, our lane is over here. That builds heritage and builds value. You know, if you look at the mixed media modeling around the marketing money that they spend, and you ask, what of this ad spend returns value? You do magazine ads and outdoor ads and online ads and fashion shows and all these other things. So which of these things returns value?

• 54:42Speaker 00

  The answer is all of it. And so therefore branding is this, if you if you get it right, and you have a brand that resonates with an audience, then you can spend money, grow your brand, and make that money back. And I think that the other thing I learned is that that is a very slow process relative to, say, the adoption of a consumer product like the iPhone or ChatGPT. It can only happen organically or relatively slowly. You know, you can spend to make culture and then have more people enjoy that culture day over day, but there isn't a way to just drive that from 10 million people to 100 million people.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  It happens because you create things and people love those things. And that can only happen naturally because people genuinely love them. And so that's where I feel super fortunate to have watched Brice Partouche build Satisfy Running over the last 10 years because it's the first time I'm getting to see someone really do it from scratch.

• 55:46Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about that. I don't know anything about that company.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Brice is a, he's French. He actually comes from a fashion family. His dad is a textile person. His dad was, you know, one of the people who brought jeans to France once upon a time as a product in a culture. And Brice actually had a jean brand throughout the 2000s called April 77. And then about 10, 11 years ago, he, like a lot of us, he changed his lifestyle and, you know, he grew up with punk rock and skateboarding. He's a drummer and he was in punk bands and had this jean brand, but you know, as he, as he got closer to 40, you know, he started eating well. He's a vegan. He's straight edge. He picked up running and just realized that there's a gap in the, in the market here. Like, running isn't cool.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  He's like, I love running and I think it's really cool, but then when I look at what Nike is doing or what Adidas is doing, it doesn't, doesn't talk to me at all. And he just said, I'm gonna make that brand. It is a luxury brand. The stuff's expensive. You go on SatisfyRunning.com and you'll see, you know, $80 t-shirts and $150 running shorts, right? But The textiles are incredible. Quality is great. The storytelling is beautiful. He just released a new video that's about their first shoe. And it's a dune buggy in the desert in Utah. It's, you know, it's branding. It's the kind of branding that a luxury brand would do. But it's, you know, in this world of running.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  In 2017, I know the year because the year I ran the Berlin Marathon. I was, I went to the Berlin Marathon with Breeze and he had a little pop up shop for Satisfy. The brand is a couple of years old at this point. And these people come in, they're Americans. I start talking to them like, hey, are you guys, you run the race? Like, no, where are you from? Oh, we're from Portland. I'm like, oh, you work at Nike? And they're like, yeah, we do. You guys know about Satisfy? They said, we wish, this is a brand we wish we could do, you know? Because it's cool. Like, this is about, you know, Scott Campbell running in the mountains by himself, covered in tattoos. This is not about an Olympic athlete on a track.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  But also watching that, what I'm impressed by, coming from where I come from and the kind of companies that I've worked with, is his patience. He waited 10 years to launch a shoe. He waited 10 years to do a women's line. There's a lot of stuff that for me, I would have felt this like desperation, like, oof, am I moving too slow? Am I going to lose the market to someone else? Is Adidas' latest campaign looks a lot like Satisfy. It's clear that they're paying attention. Like, am I going to get swallowed by these guys? But Breeze is just so good at what he does. And he's just got this steady hand. And he's like, I'm not worried. They can't do what I do. That's how you build a brand. You do it when the product is right. You never compromise on quality.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  And you have to have this, like, there's a magic, you know? And most people don't have it.

• 58:48Rick Rubin?

  Would you say efficiency is not part of the picture when it involves luxury branding?

• 58:54Speaker 00

  I think one of the things that was interesting about working with LVMH and Ben Nardono is that he was willing to sacrifice efficiency for the brands having their own sovereignty. In other words, if he was given a choice, he could make an operational efficiency behind two brands, but it might compromise-

• 59:13Rick Rubin?

  Like every corporate merger that you see.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Exactly. But it might compromise the brand's identity.

• 59:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  He would always choose brand identity, go, go, go, over that. And also just incredible patience. I think the best example of this was Jonathan Anderson, who now is, since we spoke last time, Jonathan has now taken on Dior. And he built Loewe over a very long period of time, from a brand that was a couple hundred million to a brand that's approaching two billion. But, you know, it doesn't work right away. It takes investment. It takes patience. I think the other thing that I grew in appreciation for, though, is having a business model that can do that. You know, as consumers, we like to complain about prices and... But the reality is, is that if you want the company that you're buying from to be great, well, they have to make money. Like, it has to work.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  And I think the thing that you and I have experienced in the music business is, the music business is not great at artist development, because the business model doesn't really serve it. You know, you kind of get like one at bat, and if you're not that artist, then, man, I'm sorry, I just can't continue to pour money into this. And it's not because, it's just, shit, I don't have an infinite amount of money. I think that a lot of times, they want to think it's like the man, and the man is keeping them down. I think the nice thing for me was seeing the luxury business and going, oh, wow, when the business model affords it, you can invest in creativity. And on some level, we should endeavor to have a business model that has enough money

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  in the system to allow us to invest in creativity. I wish we had more of that in the music business, so that we could do what, you know, Warner Brothers did in the seventies, where they said, hey, Rakuta, we know that album wasn't successful, but why don't you make another one?

• 1:00:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  Let's see how it goes.

• 1:01:00Rick Rubin?

  If you were to take over the Beatles business going forward, how would you think about that?

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  I think about Daft Punk. When Daft Punk broke up, I thought, wow, that's a missed opportunity. Because when I look at the LVMH brands, I think, well, Christian Dior passed away a long time ago. Louis Vuitton passed away a long time ago. Yet these brands are more vibrant than ever. And they're not like, they're not just referencing their past. You know, they're bringing in new creative people and they're continuing to create, but in a way that is actually quite respectful to the original vision. And there is something great about this model where you have a brand and then you have a designer. Kind of like the New York Times, you have a masthead and you have an editor in chief. And, and that gives you some flexibility because John Galliano can come in and have

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  years of doing just incredible work and then he can kind of go off the reservation and they have to excuse him and bring in someone else. And, and that's okay. Like these two things can, can coexist. And I feel like there's something missing in music where we haven't allowed that to, to happen. Daft Punk could have said, look, we don't want to do this. So what if, what if we found the next couple of guys? You know, we know people. Let's say that on our last record, yes, it was us. It was also Pharrell and Nile Rodgers. And I, I just think it would be interesting for, for, for someone to do. In the case of The Beatles, I definitely think The Beatles are a brand. Now also, there's this incredible thing, right?

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  They're just four incredible people and it's almost limitless what you can do and learn about them and what you can learn through them. But I would argue that there is a way to take the mission of the family. The family looks after that brand today. And you could spread that music and you could spread that mission in new and creative ways. You probably don't get like four new guys like Menudo and have them go pretend to make the next Beatles record. That's probably not what you would do. And I think the cupboards are pretty bare in terms of like going in like. Making Anthology 12, or whatever it would be. I don't think that's the, that's the way either.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  But I think you certainly could allow creative people to interpret what the Beatles have done and bring it to new audiences.

• 1:03:25Rick Rubin?

  Well, in the seventies, there was a show on Broadway, very successful, called Beatlemania.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Well, and more recently, a Beatles love. And also, I think if you take that kind of internet analogy like we've been talking about and say, look, you could put the Beatles at the V and A in London, but why? You don't want to make Brits love the Beatles more? No, I would say, what are you taking to South America and to India and to Asia? Where you can take this incredible culture of the Beatles. And by the way, this is what Christian Dior did, right? Like, look at the growth. It stopped recently, but if you look at the growth of the previous 15 years in the luxury business, it was geographical expansion, right? And so I think there's a lot of untapped things there. Beatles love is over. Like, what replaces that? But maybe you don't replace it with something in Vegas.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Maybe you replace it with something that you can take to India and South America, et cetera. If Spotify is worth, you know, $10 or $12 a month, is there a Beatles app that's worth somewhere between $1 and $5 a month? I would think yes. I think there's a lot to explore there with who they are, all the solo projects, everything surrounding them. There's a lot of surface area there that's never been explored.

• 1:04:34Rick Rubin?

  There's a Beatles station on XM that's fantastic. I listen to it all the time.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Breakfast with the Beatles on, on Sunday mornings in LA. That's like a ritual for our family. Even now that we don't live in LA anymore, I have a playlist that gets shuffled every Sunday morning and we make pancakes and we listen to the Beatles. And to me, it's just life and education. I mean, why wouldn't you have an app where I say, I'm going for a run? And it gives you the perfect Beatles playlist for that run? Let's face it, it's a genre, especially when you pull in all of the solo. But I think, I think if you approached it as...

• 1:05:03Rick Rubin?

  If you don't think of it as a band, but you think of it as a brand.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  It's a Christian Dior or a Disney. I don't think, either of those are perfect analogies at all.

• 1:05:11Rick Rubin?

  Well, it's the church carrying on after Jesus is gone.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  And they, I think they've done an extraordinary job, but already, I think to your point about Sirius XM, when they did Beatles Rock Band, I was shocked. Like, at the time, that felt like, whoa, what are you guys doing?

• 1:05:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  But what a great way to bring this incredible music to a new audience. And what's interesting is, the Beatles are not the most streamed band on Spotify. And if you look at them even among their peers, like even Queen and Elton John, because of the biopics, have had this huge resurgence. So I do think, first of all, you can expect, you know, there are four Sam Mendes biopics coming out within the next couple of years. And that will be a huge moment. And that will bring the Beatles back to a lot of people the same way that the Queen-

• 1:05:55Rick Rubin?

  How come there are four biopics? I don't understand.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  They're making four movies and releasing them on the same day.

• 1:06:01Rick Rubin?

  About each of the Beatles or four different movies?

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Four different movies, one about each of the Beatles.

• 1:06:06Rick Rubin?

  I see. So like when Kiss did the solo albums?

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  They're doing the Kiss solo albums as Sam Mendes biopics.

• 1:06:11Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Yes. And I think that's also a very important moment for the brand, right? Because those biopics for Elton John and Queen were very important moments for those brands, if you will, right? Again, storytelling plus time equals value. And, you know, the Queen story, people understanding the story of Queen through the biopic, helped them to enjoy the Queen catalog. I loved the John Higgs book about the Beatles and James Bond. And what I loved it for was his reverence for that, for the Beatles in particular, as individuals-

• 1:06:47Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about that book.

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  That really came through. So John Higgs, who is, I think, my favorite contemporary author, wrote the book on the KLF. I wrote a book on Timothy Leary of all people, but he wrote a book recently called Love and Let Die, because the very first James Bond movie and the very first big Beatles single were released on the same October day in 1962.

• 1:07:08Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing.

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  It's just an incredible fact.

• 1:07:10Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:07:11Speaker 00

  And so what Higgs does, and he's just so gifted, is he uses that as a jumping off point to tell the story of those- Two cultural icons.

• 1:07:24Rick Rubin?

  Is it a nonfiction book?

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Yes, it's a nonfiction book and it's really, all John Higgs books are not quite about what they're about. And so this book is really, what do these two brands say about British culture over the last 50 years? And he just pulls out all of these little interesting things and even things that you just think couldn't possibly be connected, turn out to be connected. You also get this feeling of like James Bond is such an unlikely cultural icon in a way, like very reprehensible in so many ways. And yet here the Queen is showing up at the Olympics in the helicopter with James Bond because the cultural importance of James Bond is so entrenched

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  and so undeniable that, damn it, that's just where we are. Right? And, and you get that same feeling, but you also get a sense of the Beatles as individuals. And he does such a great job of talking about the heartbreak really of John calling Paul's album granny music and Rolling Stone, like really looking down on, on Paul's music and Paul in the eighties, still struggling to find his, he's Paul McCartney, goddammit. You know what I mean? But, and, and you sort of really feel it and the reverence is real. So that, you know, that, that book is fantastic. And what I'm hoping with these biopics is that people really feel that. And then they have this connection to it. Now, the interesting thing is that's really different than

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  Pharrell representing Louis Vuitton and bringing Louis Vuitton to a totally different audience. But I think all of these things are, are culture and they're all storytelling. If I can share one more thing that I've come to believe through all of these lenses that I've seen, the story that sticks out to me is the story of Golden Goose, where Alessandro from Golden Goose was a steward of that brand for the first, I can't remember, let's say 15 years. And he got it to a certain point.

• 1:09:22Rick Rubin?

  What is Golden Goose?

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  Golden Goose is a shoe brand. They've got a star on the side. They are expensive sneakers handmade in Italy. And they've they've grown. I don't know the numbers. I know the numbers from years ago, but let's say that Alessandro got them to less than 20 million in revenue. The CEO that took over after Alessandro, Alessandro became the creative director. They brought in a CEO. They got investment. He took them above half a billion, right? But I think that you have to spend, I think if you're building a brand, you have to spend that first 15 years building a brand. And then you can you can find an inflection point if you've made it through those hard years and you're lucky and you've stayed around.

• 1:10:05Rick Rubin?

  It's also sort of the Amazon story. Like, Amazon was just a loser for most of its existence.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  I think it's almost everything. I think when the world heard about Arcade Fire, because David Bowie decided that he was going to shine a spotlight on them, everyone thought it was an overnight sensation. They just didn't know about the first seven years. It just takes longer than you think in all cases. Why was last year Bitcoin's year? Because Bitcoin was 15 years old. That's why. You know, when Mary-Kate and Ashley, the twins from Full House, made a fashion company, everyone laughed at them. They have a lot of respect today because they persevered. They showed that they could stand for something. They showed that they could do it year after year after year without giving up.

• 1:10:46Rick Rubin?

  And they make really beautiful things.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  And they made beautiful things and they built.

• 1:10:49Rick Rubin?

  Consistently.

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:52Rick Rubin?

  Based on the world today, is there something different about the luxury industry or the fashion world that's going to change going forward?

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  I think it's already changed in a very big way.

• 1:11:04Rick Rubin?

  When and how?

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Well, I'm not the expert on this, but I'll give you my point of view. I think I was, you know, very fortunate at the moment that I came into LVMH, because I came in to run digital and I wasn't there for the denial years. And I was there for the

• 1:11:22Rick Rubin?

  Acceptance.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, acceptance, growth and change.

• 1:11:25Rick Rubin?

  There's a new world.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that was just fantastic. And not only that, but kind of culture was moving that direction. My thesis was that things that are focused on storytelling and quality and creativity will really shine on the internet. And the internet is a great distribution for that culture. And then if we can plug that in to the commerce, that that's a great business. And I do think that that proved to be true. I think the other thing that happened, though, is that that there was a bit of a bubble in the growth, probably partially due to COVID and maybe even COVID stimulus and these sorts of things where the the business grew kind of unnaturally over those years. And then

• 1:12:08Rick Rubin?

  Why would the luxury business increase during COVID?

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  There were a lot of people who had been wanting to make a luxury purchase for a lot of years. It was an aspirational purchase for them. And when they got a stimulus check, they made their first luxury purchase.

• 1:12:22Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  And those customers were not going to come back and make a second purchase anytime soon. If those were just my words, I would say you shouldn't listen to them. But, you know, then repeating something that was said to me by someone in the luxury business whom I respect

• 1:12:38Rick Rubin?

  Who would really know.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, who really knows. And and so I think that that that was real. Also, I think culture has shifted a little bit, right? You know, I'm on the board at Dr. Martin's and, you know, we make an amazing black boot. You, as a customer, have many choices of black boots today relative to the choices that you and I had when we were 16 years old. So you could buy a boot that's cheaper, a boot that's more expensive, a boot from that Instagram brand, you know, Dr. Martin's is still the is still the best, but there's a lot more choice. And I think that is multiplied across kind of every brand. You know, even a small brand like Satisfy Running has three copycat brands. And that's just kind of the world that we're in now.

• 1:13:19Rick Rubin?

  How important was hip hop to the fashion brand world, the luxury world?

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  I think it's the most interesting thing. I think it's an interesting thing about culture. It comes towards you over time. I remember wearing long shorts in sixth grade and, you know, being made fun of and then a few years later, those people were also wearing long shorts. And I come to LVMH and I realize that a lot of the same culture that I saw with Jimmy Iovine and Beats, I'm seeing at LVMH right there. There's much more crossover than you than you think. I guess, you know, I'm not sure that it's for me to try to zero in on exactly what that is, though. I think in hip hop, we would say real recognize real. But I think it's a little more than that, right?

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Because it has to do with social status at moments in time. You know, coming from no money to having more money than I grew up with. I understand nouveau riche. You know, nouveau riche is nouveau riche. Like there's, I understand when you hear a rapper who probably just got money, talk about money. To some people, they think that's really gauche. I say, I understand. I understand the feeling that that comes from. When people talk about nouveau riche in China 15 years ago, I would say, I understand. If you are doing better than your parents did, then you have a certain feeling.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  If you're doing worse than your parents did, you also have a certain feeling. So I think that it's probably, it goes much deeper than, oh, this culture is cool. Let's put it on the front of the magazine. But when Christian Dior did a women's ad with women skateboarding at the Venice Beach Skate Park, I texted the CEO at the time, Pietro Baccari, and said, man, you guys just come closer and closer in my direction, don't you? So there is something, though, about leading edge culture.

• 1:15:28Rick Rubin?

  It's like in the post-grunge world, when we saw the fashion brands all of a sudden doing flannel shirts.

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  Exactly, leading edge culture. And fashion is cyclical. So these things definitely go, definitely go in cycles. Cultures that are really of the people, they find their way of reaching broader audiences. Also, though, I think that we have to recognize that it's not generic. I mean, Pharrell is a really special character. It's not like you can like, look at Pharrell running Louis Vuitton and go, oh, it's that hip hop guy. I mean, come on. By the time Pharrell was 30, I think he'd already had more hits than Elvis, right? And, you know, he's done so much. You just can't put him in a box and say, oh, it's that hip hop guy. It was just, people do that from the outside.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  They look at ASAP Rocky and Rihanna and they're like, oh, it's those rappers. They're culturally much more interesting and much more meaningful than that, right? So I think that's where you do come back to real, recognize real. Like, where are interesting things happening in culture? Where are people breaking molds and bounds and creating? When Virgil was at Louis Vuitton and Jonathan Anderson was at Loewe, I would try to talk about Jonathan Anderson because I think that people come into a conversation about Louis Vuitton and Virgil with a lot of assumptions. Louis Vuitton has a bunch of connotations. Virgil's got like this sort of hip hop, streetwear Kanye association.

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  Whereas Jonathan Anderson, I think, did exactly the same magic trick as Virgil. But it's like, you know, you have to kind of build your mental model for it from scratch. And that's, you know, and that's quite helpful. And I think that that's actually just a great thing about luxury is, is that they really have historically, and I hope that they continue to, really try to support people. You know, the story of Ben I don't know hiring John Galliano, who walks into his office with a leather vest and no shirt and flip flops, and hires him on the spot is a story I heard firsthand from the family. And that is a, that's what a creative, that's what someone who believes in creativity does.

• 1:17:41Speaker 00

  So I think the main thing to point to is that it's not only hip hop. I like that it includes a Pharrell and it includes a Rihanna, but it also includes Jonathan Anderson and, you know, John Galliano and Matt Williams and looking for creativity.

• 1:17:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, maybe even Marc Jacobs.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  Marc Jacobs, absolutely.

• 1:18:00Rick Rubin?

  How are the art world and the tech world similar and how are they different?

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  First thing that comes to mind is Goethe Lescher Bach, the Douglas Hofstadter book about the eternal, the eternal golden braid between mathematics and music and philosophy. But maybe that's a bridge too far. I mean, look, music is math. That we know. And, you know, the brain is a

• 1:18:23Rick Rubin?

  Well, let's say math explains music.

• 1:18:28Speaker 00

  Yes. And, you know, I'm not sure how to even pull them apart.

• 1:18:32Rick Rubin?

  Think you'd be selling music short to say music is math.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And what I mean by that is, well, I think math is beautiful. So there's no, there's no, there's no short sell on that from my perspective. You know, the brain is a complexity simplifying machine and it's a prediction engine. And I think one of the reasons that we like music is because we think we know what's going to come next and it gives us some comfort. And when we really like it is when it surprises us. Right? We love that familiar with a twist.

• 1:19:01Rick Rubin?

  So it's AI with hallucinations.

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. It's familiar with a twist, as Jeff McFetrich would say. We love that we can follow the beat and then the key changes. And we go, oh, wow. What was that feeling? Right? I think that's where they're similar. Just like with math is just knowledge and we're always building on that knowledge. I think this is where then I immediately think that AI, you know, again, if we overestimate the impact in the short term and we underestimate it in the long term. I would again quote Ian Hogarth and say, you know, look around you. Everything you see is built by human intelligence. We've never had a supplementary intelligence before. And now we do. Now we have an intelligence partner.

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  Just the fact that everything we've made thus far is kind of building on the knowledge that we had previously. And knowledge moved pretty slowly a few hundred years ago. And science is this kind of, you know, zoom in. We used to think that everything revolved around the earth and then Copernicus and then Newton and then particle theory and then, you know, quantum theory. And we just keep zooming in and getting a clearer picture of what's going on. And now with advancements in quantum and quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  Those microscopes that we're looking at reality with are getting pretty powerful. And they will aid us in our intelligence and understanding and very shortly surpass us. And I don't think we, I don't think we're even really capable of understanding the impact of that.

• 1:20:42Rick Rubin?

  What are your thoughts today on the metaverse idea?

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  I'm going to try not to sound smug. I feel a little vindicated on this. I'll just give a very specific example. When I was the chief digital officer at LVMH, once a week, someone would come in my office and try to sell me a virtual luxury experience. And I would say, we've done all the, all of the customer journeys in terms of what consumers want, and none of them land at 3D shopping mall. So I will believe that people want to inhabit a three dimensional world that isn't a game when they do. So I think we have those worlds. Minecraft, Roblox, Call of Duty, there are many of them, and people love them, no question.

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  But we have not yet made a kind of generic world that we want to live in. And so I think it probably has, it has its place in very specific ways, but it's not something that I'm holding my breath for. Tim Cook said years ago that he thinks augmented reality is much more interesting than virtual reality. So I think we probably had more in that direction, the augmented reality direction, than the virtual reality direction. I had an entrepreneur pitch me on an idea a couple of weeks ago. It was a music experience where you actually go to a physical place and you put on goggles and kind of like the Abbot experience, but with goggles.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  And I said, look, he has a great artist that he's working with on it. I'm sure it will work. There's a place in Paris where you can go and experience a virtual Paris and they put you on this pedestal and they make you feel like you're flying above the city and okay. So as kind of an amusement park attraction. You know, I agree, but I want to live in that world. No, I'd actually rather walk into a box where the artist comes to life and even if it's projection mapping and audio, it just feels alive and I feel like I'm inside of it and I think that those are will be very specific things, you know, would I play an immersive Tony Hawk Pro Skater? I probably would. Would I kind of live in a metaverse like Ready Player One? Uh, not in my lifetime.

• 1:22:58Rick Rubin?

  Does pressure make you better or worse at work?

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  I hate to say it, but it makes me do better work.

• 1:23:06Rick Rubin?

  Why do you think that is?

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  Well, the question is where does the pressure come from, right? Because a lot of us put pressure on ourselves. So I think I definitely have that kind of pressure and I always have. When I was young, I would just stay up all night obsessing over some detail of something. I think I do that less now, but I put pressure on myself for just excellence. There's a bar for me, which is it's, it's almost an ideological bar in terms of like what I'm proud of. But I remember this moment when I was the CEO of Top Spin and you know, my, my board was being really critical of me and very tough on me as a CEO.

• 1:23:52Speaker 00

  And I was, you know, I was a little defensive, of course, you know, it's human nature. I thought these guys were my friends, you know, why are they being so mean to me? And then I realized that I was being more thorough and doing better work.

• 1:24:05Rick Rubin?

  Because of that.

• 1:24:06Speaker 00

  Because they were questioning me. They were asking me, why are you making this decision? Shouldn't you be doing that? I was having a different thought recently. There's a, there's someone I was talking to and hearing their professional story. They were having a hard time with the, with the job that they were doing. And I realized that they had never failed before. They had always worked for big companies, kind of moved from big company to big company, and they'd never had failure. And I realized that they lacked this fear of failure that I have. I've had my company go bankrupt. I've lost my investors' money. I know that depression. I know what it feels like. And that's the specter that I'm running from, right? It's not that I

• 1:24:46Speaker 00

  feel then comfortable losing. Success makes you feel like you're smart and you're not. And failure makes you really introspective and say, I fucked up, you know? What could I do better? I have that both personally and professionally. And so I feel like, you know, the, the pressure is good. Honestly, working with Jimmy Iovine was super stressful. The guy calls you at seven o'clock in the morning. He calls you at 11 o'clock at night and at any hour in between. The first thing he does when he gets you on the phone is knock you off balance, right? Like, he's gonna say something where you've got to react. And it's, you know, it's exhausting.

• 1:25:26Rick Rubin?

  Do you think it's intentional when he does that?

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  I think it's his style. Is he thinking, I'm gonna do this? No, I think it's just his style. It's what he knows how to do. And he's incredibly effective. And it's stressful. And then I think I'd stopped working with him for two weeks and I missed it already. You know, I'm like, oh shit. I, I was talking to Tony Parker the other night, and I read Tony Parker's-

• 1:25:50Rick Rubin?

  Basketball player?

• 1:25:50Speaker 00

  Basketball player, Tony Parker. Ledger are now sponsors of the San Antonio Spurs. So we had a chance to sit with Tony Parker and talk about life and business. And I had read his book and I asked him, I said, in your book, you talk about pop, coach, guy sounds really difficult. Like, no matter how well you played, he was not satisfied. You know, one of these guys. But in the book, Tony Parker talks about him with a lot of reverence. Like, basically says, I'm really thankful for what he did for me by pushing me that hard. And I identified with it a little bit. And I asked him, I said, what you said in the book, like you were really kind. How do you really feel? Basically, that's what I asked him. He's like, that's how I feel. He's like, I know he did it with the absolute best of intention.

• 1:26:35Speaker 00

  It wasn't easy, but there's no way I could have performed at the level I performed without that. I needed that. And I think that that's really true. So with Jimmy, you know, I never forget Jimmy saying to me, Ian, you're a major league player. What are you doing in the minors? And then watching, you know, the documentaries where he yells at Springsteen and yells at Petty and feeling really lucky that I was one of the people that he yelled at also, just like Pop yelling at Tony Parker. So I, I think there is something about like feeling that pressure and being able to take that pressure that some people, probably not everyone, but some people really excel at.

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

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