will.i.am Opens Up: “I Would Have Had Children 10 Years Ago!!!” Guilt, Shame, Depression, Creativity & ADHD!

In this new episode Steven sits down with global superstar Will.i.am. William James Adams Jr., better known by his stage name, Will.i.am began his music career in 1992 when he was only 17 years old and signed with ‘Ruthless Records’. In 1995, Will.i.am’s group ‘the Black Eyed Peas’ was officially formed and released their debut album in 1998. In 2001, Will.i.am released his debut solo album and 2 years later in 2003, the Black Eyed Peas released their third album, ‘Elephunk’. It was with this album that the band started to receive major global attention. Since then Will.i.am has worked as an activist, director of creative innovation at Intel, fashion designer, actor, and coach on ‘The Voice UK’. In this conversation Will.i.am and Steven discuss topics, such as: His childhood in East LA Never having felt poor before he attended private school How creativity is his currency Getting a record deal at 17 years old Why he is living in 2030 His tips to creativity Why hard work is actually relative His thoughts on fatherhood How he uses music to help solve his problems His prediction for a future with AI You can download Will.i.am’s AI-powered messenger app, **‘**FYI’, here: https://bit.ly/3KoTakD Follow Will.i.am: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3rOB3yk Twitter: https://bit.ly/44DkrYF TikTok: https://bit.ly/3rPzOyG Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We've been set up to fail. AI didn't do that, people did that. Now here's a tool for us to solve our problems ourself now.

• 0:07Steven Bartlett?

  Here we go.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  Producer, singer, rapper, this man does it all. Seven-time Grammy winner, one of the industry's biggest names.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Man, that's lyrical. When we started the Black IPs, no one believed in us. Now we're playing Super Bowls, World Cups, Grammys. You have to be hyper creative. You can't grow anything without it.

• 0:30Steven Bartlett?

  But there's a cost to creativity, right? What's it like to be in your head?

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Always thinking, analyzing everything. Get it, get it, go, go, make it, make it. That's not good. That's not healthy.

• 0:41Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  You make errors, you hurt people. I remember I got into like a dark period when I felt something that I've never felt before. Just like distortion.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  People want you to fail. But the anxiety comes when you're worried about what people think. When it's things that are happening that you didn't control. You have to be optimistic. You have to arm yourself with optimism and purpose.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  That's what it's about. That path was the hardest path in my life.

• 1:23Steven Bartlett?

  This is a window into the mind of a creative, a divergent, an entrepreneur, artist, and visionary. Someone we all know. But at the same time, someone we don't really know at all. If you're a creative, an artist, an entrepreneur, or someone with big ideas for the future, or just someone that's struggling to balance your professional ambitions with your personal pursuits. This conversation was meant to find you. Enjoy.

• 2:03Steven Bartlett?

  Will, I am fascinated with people. That is why I started doing this many years ago because I have, I've come to learn about myself, that I have a real desire to understand people because from that, I think I can understand myself because I think at the kind of foundational level, we're all quite similar as human beings because we're all related if we go back far enough. So in a pursuit to understand you, I guess my first question is, what is, what is the context of Will that I need to know to understand the man that sat here in front of me today? The earliest context, the kind of kitchen that Will was, was conceived in, was, was cooked in at the earliest age?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  You write songs?

• 2:45Steven Bartlett?

  No, I don't. I write a lot, but I don't write songs.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Because see, like, I get interviewed a lot, but very rarely do you get interviewed by wordsmiths.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  The kitchen I was stewed in, cooked in, it's pretty, I like the visual of that because the chef would be my mom.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  And the kitchen will be the ghettos of East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights specifically. And that was encouragement, acknowledgement of our individual, when I say our, my family, like, we all have our little superpower.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  And my superpower was creativity. And creativity has always been my currency when I had no money. I clearly was like, oh, look, Ma, look what I made. Willie, that's really good. You really like that, Ma? Yeah. And I would, she would, encouragement goes a long way. And then that type of encouragement from my mom that helped create self-belief, fearlessness to express, to share, to go in class and solve problems or raise my hand. I got the answer to that.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  That's really what fueled, fueled me is my mom. Let Willie solve it. Will he try to fix that? You know, this radio is broken, try to fix it. That type of stuff, my mom. Salute.

• 4:15Steven Bartlett?

  Did she know that you were creative or was she just putting wind in whatever sail you'd pulled up?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  My mom was creative, my mom still is creative. She had her sewing machine, she would make her clothes to go to school. That's why most of the clothes I make are still.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  You know, one offs, two offs. I like wearing things that no one has because that's how I grew up. We would go to the thrift store, buy dollar clothes or fifty cent shirts. They would always be too big for me, my mom would fix them and turn old into new. That's, that's how we lived, you know? Will he go to the store, take this food stamp, buy me a twenty five cents bubble gum? Get seventy five cents back. And then you go to different stores, do the same thing. So now my mom has coins that she could go and buy other things with food stamps. Because with food stamps, you only could buy food. You can't buy needles, you can't buy thread, you can't buy fabric.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  You can't buy appliances. You only could buy food. So take this dollar, give me twenty five cents gum, which is food, seventy five cents change back, go to different stores and do that. Now let's go and buy other things. And so she'll buy those other things and she'll make stuff for us. So my mom has always been like super ultra creative. So my mom is my biggest inspo.

• 5:39Steven Bartlett?

  I've heard you refer to her as being your mum and your dad.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:44Steven Bartlett?

  In your household.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  So when you, when you grew up in a, in a household where there's only the mom. I'm like every Father's Day, happy Father's Day, mom.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Thank you, Willie, and happy Mother's Day, Mom.

• 5:59Steven Bartlett?

  In those contexts, it's easy for a kid to go one of two ways, though. And I think that's what people often don't realize is when you're in a context where outside of the house, there's a lot of temptations either way. But inside the house, it takes a really, really strong mother, if she is a single mother, to make sure she creates her own universe so that those kids can end up in a different place. And that's what I kind of read from a lot of the stories of your mother is that rigor and discipline and those values.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was a, we had this next door neighbor in the projects and she couldn't read or write. And then people used to make fun of her. And my mom was like, now, if we all went to Japan and we had to go out there and survive,

• 6:47Speaker 00

  are we not smart? Yes, we're smart.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Could we survive out there? Yes, we could. Can we raise kids and raise families to go out and do awesome things in Japan, in Japan? Yes, we could. But we will all go to Japan not being able to read or write. So the stigma that we put on folks that can't read or write, could they read people? Yep. Can they write a path to raise folks to go out into the world to do awesome things? Yes. So we value, my mom always valued humanity at its purists and people's intents and the things they want to accomplish before, like, you know, cliche setbacks or, and it was awesome that we were raised in a all Mexican neighborhood.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Right? So most people didn't read or write in my neighborhood, which was beautiful. It was beautiful, you know? I love, I love being raised in, in East LA. And we, we, we fit, we fitted in. Is that right? Fitted in? Because I was gonna say fat in, just like pass into fit. There goes, there goes read it or write for me.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  No, I'm joking.

• 8:06Steven Bartlett?

  What was your self story at that age? Like, what did Will think of Will? Who did you think you were? And where did you think you were going in life? When you were like 14?

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Oh, 14, it was set. Yeah, 14, I wanted to do music. I had these raps that I used to write and I had these demos that I used to make. And I would go to school and I would give my demos to my, my friends. And one of my friends, his name is Stephen Gordy. His dad was Barry Gordy from Motown. And I'm like, yo, give this to your dad. Check out my demo. My sister had Teddy Rexpan. It's like this little teddy bear. It had a cassette in its belly.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  And my mom gave that to my sister for Christmas. And for me, she gave me like a boombox.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  It too played cassettes. And she got herself a stereo. And that stereo had two cassettes. And came with headphones. And so I got my mom's records and I had a record player and two tape decks and a headphone.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  And I don't know what told me to take the headphone, put it in the microphone jack.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Take my sister's Barbie Rockers tape.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Put tape over the left side of the cassette tape, record over it. Get my mom's record, play the favorite part, press unpause, record. Pause it when my favorite part was over. Play it again and make a loop. Put the tape in the play, put another sister's, my sister's Teddy Rexpan tape, put it in there. Do the same thing, record over it. Now press play on my loop that's for three minutes and rap over it. Take the Teddy Rexpan tape with my newly formed song over loops, stereo loops. Put it in Teddy Rexpan, press play and make Teddy Rexpan rap. So my mom was like, you did that, boy?

• 10:04Speaker 00

  I'm like, yeah, ma, look. She was like, you should take that to class for your, for a show and tell. They were like, wow, William. At that point in time, I was William. Wow, William, that's really cool. You did that? Yeah, I did that. The song was whatever.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  For a 10 year old. So then you graduate sixth grade at 12. So from 10, 11, 12, it was clear that my elementary school, I had like a different level of creativity. So when I went to junior high school,

• 10:45Speaker 00

  it was clear what my superpower was. I was creative and I wanted, I wanted to express myself in that, in that realm.

• 10:55Steven Bartlett?

  Were you confident, whatever, however you define that? And what I guess what I mean by confident is like securing oneself and confident in their abilities and social value, I guess.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  It happened in, in, in three steps. I didn't know we were poor. And then I found out we were poor. And I found out we were poor when one year my teacher, Ms. Rich, she said, you gotta come to school with canned food and boxed food so we could give to the poor families.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  And I come home, I'm like, ma, my homework assignment this, tonight is to go to school. I gotta pick through the cupboards and give canned foods and boxed foods for my homework assignment tomorrow. She's like, well, you ain't going to school with no food. I'm like, mom, but I'm, I'm gonna fail the class. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get a fail on my, on my grade. I have to turn this in. Well, I guess you gonna get a fail because you ain't leaving this house with no food. So I go to school empty handed. I don't, you know, complete the assignment. Then I see my, the rich white kids coming up the corridor. I'm like, hey, what's up, Brad? What up, Brad? What you guys doing here? Yeah, we came here to bring the, the food to the poor family.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  I'm like, oh, really? So I start walking with them and we go to my house. I'm like, wait, that food's for us?

• 12:21Speaker 00

  We qualified and the school gave us that food. And that's when I realized we were poor. So I go back to school and they made fun of me for a couple of days. William, he's, William's poor. We dropped the food off in his house.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  This one girl comes up to me, she's like, William, are you poor? How can you be poor if you always wear suits to school?

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Cause my mom used to make us wear suits. So it wasn't like a uniform school. It was like dressed the way you wanna dress, but my mom put me in suits every day.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  And so the kids were like, why do you always wear suits to school? How could you be poor?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  And my mom would say, you ain't going to school with no play clothes. You going, you ain't going to school to play. You going to school to learn. So you put on these, like you go to church to learn about God. You're going to church to learn about, you know, life. And so put this suit on. So although there were like four or five people that were saying I was the poor kid that got the food. But then the rest of the kids were like, no, William's not poor. Look, he always wears suits to school. You guys are lying. That became my cloth to express yourself. Because that, that drape, that attire separated me from the gang. Separated me from you're poor, you're not, you're, you're, you're part of the have nots.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  And expression, just wanted to express. Sometimes my mom used to say, Willie, what you doing? Nothing, get your butt over here. What's wrong, ma? What did I say about saying the word nothing? Even if you sitting there breathing, say I'm breathing or you're thinking about something. You don't got no business saying you doing nothing. So we, we would have to say what we were doing. We couldn't say nothing. Cause you're never doing nothing. Even if you're breathing, even if your heart's beating, whatever you're thinking of. You know, what you thinking about? Nothing. Well, you need to start thinking about something. We could, she didn't settle for that. Yeah.

• 14:27Steven Bartlett?

  So let's talk about creativity then, cause this is what you're really, I mean, this is one of the many things you're really, really known for. So is it possible to become more creative? And how does that happen?

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Let's say it's 1983.

• 14:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Let's go to the past now.

• 14:46Steven Bartlett?

  I was minus nine.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Or if you're 1993.

• 14:49Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, I was one.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  If you're 1993 and you're a musician, the way to be more creative is to look at Prince.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Look at Prince. Because Prince was like the ultimate creative force. And the way Prince became creative is he looked at Stevie Wonder. He's like, wait, he plays the keyboards, the drums, the bass. He writes the songs. Okay. And Stevie Wonder was ultra creative because he looked at Marvin Gaye.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  He looked at Ray Charles. But looking from a different perspective, obviously, because Stevie Wonder can't see. But he, he, uh, felt he was inspired by, he was motivated by. So if you want to be creative, more creative, you have to, one, compete.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  You have to be super analytical on yourself and who you're competing against. You have to be elevated. You have to take yourself from where you are now and position yourself and see the terrain. You have to be

• 16:00Speaker 00

  curious,

• 16:04Speaker 00

  humble, and a predator, all at the same time. You have to do all those things to be ultra, a hyper creative. You have to be humble till you walk in the room and you attract. Because nobody wants to freaking send, you know, perspectives to a dick.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  To an arrogant ass. At some point in time, if you're too arrogant, people stop sending you information. People don't, they want to see you. They want you to fail.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  And they start sending you information for you to fail when you're arrogant. So you gotta get rid of that. Be humble.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  You have to be, you have to be a predator. You have to walk into a room ready to eat.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  But but you can't eat everything. Because then you have to be selective on what you eat.

• 16:59Steven Bartlett?

  What about hard work?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Hard work, hard work is relative because to some, well, this is not hard work. This is just what I do. My pinky to my lung.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  My pinky thinks my lung is working hard.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Because I have to tell my pinky when to move my mind. My mind have has no control over my lungs.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  My lungs are working involuntarily. If I tell my lungs to stop, I could do that. But then it's gonna kick in on its own. My heart is even more involuntary. I can't will like, okay, okay, stop, stop now. Stop, you've been beaten for freaking forty eight years. I mean, you need to take a break. It's what it does. You cannot, yeah, you can meditate, you could slow your heart rate down, but can't make it stop, bro. So hard work is relative to what organ or who or what environment you're working in. And then there's tools. What tools do you need to be hyper creative? You need a humble heart.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  You need a fierce, competitive predator type of vibe as well. You have to be disciplined because you can't eat everything.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  You have to be elevated. You have to see everything. And you have to be magnetic. You have to attract everything.

• 18:21Steven Bartlett?

  What about failure and then also the goals of creativity? Because the one of the, I think the two things are kind of linked. So fear, failure, and then what is the goal of creativity? Because if I, if my, if I set myself, I've just started learning to DJ about a year ago. And if my goal is to become the biggest DJ in the world, that might make me fearful. It's a huge mountain to climb and that might make me scared of failure. So I might not start. But real creatives seem to, from what I've observed, they don't seem to really give much of a fuck about the outcome as much as other people do. And I, so what is, you know, what is the right goal for creativity? And how does, what role does fear and failure play in being a good creative?

• 18:58Speaker 00

  The reason why you're fearful is because you're worried about what people think.

• 19:02Steven Bartlett?

  That's true.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  And if you're worried about what people think, then maybe true creative is not what you are. You just got the costume of creative on.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  Because creativity, when you're creating and it's like a rinse, whether the rinse, a sponge absorbs and eventually you gotta rinse it out. So it can absorb more. Do you think a sponge is like, oh, man, I don't want people to judge how I'm rinsing myself out. Oh, I'm gonna make a mess. You see, a sponge ain't thinking about that. People like, are you talking about SpongeBob, Will? Like, no, bro, I'm talking about just like the metaphor of absorbing and rinsing. Or let's say vomiting, it's powerful. You can't control it. And that's creativity.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  And some people will be like, yeah, that's right, Will. You, the stuff you make is like vomit. You make me more. No, if that's what you think, I don't care. I have to let it out. It's like shitting.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Now, people could say, yeah, well, I am. Your shit is like shit. But I'm gonna ask you, which farmer does not need manure to grow and cultivate? You need it. You cannot farm without it. You can't grow anything without it. It's like cycles of life and creativity is that. The more, the moment you start worried about people's opinion, then you definitely by default are not a creative. You're doing it for the wrong reasons.

• 20:43Steven Bartlett?

  What is the right reasons?

• 20:46Speaker 00

  To let it out, to rinse yourself. It's like you absorb, you rinse.

• 20:52Steven Bartlett?

  Nothing you've said is about the impact it then has on the world or others.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Well, no, that's a different tool.

• 20:57Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  And then once you, once you real, once you mastered like, I absorbed, I rinse. And that becomes therapeutic and you seeing how that helps you, then you're like, wow, wait, if it's helping me. Well, then I can be strategic and I could do something to help others. First, it has to help you. You make sense of the world and whatever it is you're doing, whether you're painting, you're cooking, you're teaching, you're tutoring, you're making songs, you're making dance, you're writing films, you're doing journals, whatever it is you're doing, you would have absorbed the world and rinsed and contributed in some.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Way that brings progress to yourself and others.

• 21:48Steven Bartlett?

  Relationships. What role do you, because I, I didn't get into relationships until I was like, really until I was like 28. Again, I thought it was a hindrance on my chances of professional success. And then at some point I felt lonely. I didn't know what loneliness really was, but I just could feel something. What's the point? You know?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  When you have this mission, I'm, I'm, I'm mission driven.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  I'm like, what are we trying to accomplish? What am I trying to accomplish 10 years from now? What's my five year plan? What's my 10 year plan? How did I do my last five year tenure?

• 22:26Speaker 00

  And uh,

• 22:29Speaker 00

  if there's someone that can help you, that you could relate to,

• 22:36Speaker 00

  to help you ship this vision from the, in your mind

• 22:43Speaker 00

  to the future.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  I have a different understanding of relationship. It's like, because you want to relate with someone that you could ship things with.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Whether you're shipping in a PCU to the future, or you're shipping a PCU to the future. If you could relate to that person to help you on your journey, that's awesome. It all depends on what you're shipping.

• 23:14Steven Bartlett?

  What's it like to be in your head? I know that's hard because you've never been in someone else's, but you know, you probably figured out from conversations that there's, you think in a different way.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So thinking a lot. I think a lot.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  I'm always thinking. Not about nothing. I'm always thinking about something. Like.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  It's very rare that I'm just sitting around like, oh wow, look at that chandelier. I'm thinking like, I wonder how they made, I wonder how much that weigh, what a material is that? Like, I'm always thinking and analyzing everything, like a scanner. Every time, every moment.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  And that can be overbearing to someone you're in a relationship. That could close them up.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  That can like, wait, wait. That, that's not good. That's not healthy. And, uh, and I realized that. Took a long time for me to realize that, where I gotta turn that off. I didn't know there was an off switch.

• 24:27Steven Bartlett?

  Is there one?

• 24:28Speaker 00

  No, there's not an off switch.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  But there is like a volume knob.

• 24:34Steven Bartlett?

  Volume knob, okay.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Um, but, uh, I don't know how to not, like, wait, that, say that again? I don't know how to just take, especially with somebody you're in a relationship with. I don't know how to take like, oh, we're just, we're just at the beach the whole time? You don't want to go down to explore to see how deep this ocean is? You just want to chill here on the beach? Like, yo, let's, let's go down to the, let's go to try to find the crevices. Let's go down deep, deep, deep, deep.

• 25:13Steven Bartlett?

  And that's saying, no, let's just sunbathe.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  It's just stay on the beach. And that's cool. If, I'm not a beach guy.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  I'm a deep diver.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  I'm a freaking, I like the abyss. I like to be like, yo, look what in the what? Look at that. I like that. I like to freaking explore. I like to research. I like to explain, like, oh, wait, this doesn't make any sense at all. Let's try to make sense of it all. Let's try to make sense of it.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Like, I like that. I love that.

• 25:52Steven Bartlett?

  You have ADHD, right? You've referred to it as the gift of ADHD. It's funny because I'm trying to figure out your relationship with stillness and silence. Doesn't seem, I mean, from what you've said.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  We're assuming that an electron and a proton and a neutron all have the same tasks and goals. So the electron that I am, the concept of stillness and silence is you have no purpose. Because the whole purpose of an electron is to do that.

• 26:25Steven Bartlett?

  There's a cost to that, though. That seems exhausting.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Cost to that, if you're coming from the perspective of the proton looking at the electron whizz around it. But you gotta know who you are in the equation. I'm the electron. That's cool. You kick it there, neutron state. It's cool. You still.

• 26:43Steven Bartlett?

  But the proton has something the electron doesn't have, and the electron has something the proton doesn't have.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  But they're not supposed to do the same thing.

• 26:50Steven Bartlett?

  And they both have costs and like they have a good, like a light side and a dark, a cost and a gift.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Do they?

• 26:56Steven Bartlett?

  So I think of like, I've been, I'm, I would say I'm more whizzing around electron generally. So I'm just playing devil's advocate here because when I've, when I've come into my girlfriend's proton world, where things may be a little bit stiller, there has been gifts to that. There's been gifts to that. And I hear everything you're saying about to be in a relationship, you need to be able to lay on the beach. I can't lay on the beach, but I know that's what my girlfriend wants of me. She wants me to be present with her and not to think about the future and to think about where we are right now.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, but there's a way to do it from an electron's perspective.

• 27:27Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Is to really look at the word relationship and relate. Even though you can't relate, you have to have empathy, understanding of what their contribution is and support.

• 27:46Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  And and be there.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  So it from the perspective of the electron, it is still for the electron. You think the electron is like, man, I'm tired. I'm tired of wasn't around you the whole time. That's not what what's going on in the electron's mind.

• 28:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  To the electron, I'm still and I am still going around. It's all the perspective of the word still. There's still. And then there's constant still. Which still are you? Are you the one that's still? And you're just like steel, S T E E L. And you're steel? Or are you still? And that is still moving, still at it. And it, no matter how you look at it, it's still still. Because from the perspective and the empathy of that electron moving, it is still.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  From the, from the POV of what it, who's viewing it, it's moving. But to the electron, I am still. And I will still be moving and gravitating around you. And I could still think and add to your life as I do the things that I do to add to life. But the moment you stop doing what you're doing, then it's no longer a relationship. Because they can't relate to what you're doing and what you're adding. And now you're conforming and changing. When maybe that's not what you were supposed to do. Or maybe you didn't, you weren't candid and forthcoming enough to make

• 29:29Speaker 00

  true understanding, to stand under the circumference and know the ledge of what it is you do together.

• 29:40Steven Bartlett?

  You, you speak of almost like a recent epiphany when you say like realizing that there was this off button. Even though you don't think the off button is necessarily there. What, where, where do you sit now with the, the concept of finding like a life partner and getting married and having kids and all that stuff? And is there work to be done? Is it finding the right person? Or is it an inward piece of work that needs to be done in your view? And is it something you, you, you want?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  I want to have kids. I, I'm, I'm going to be an awesome dad. If you would have asked me this, uh, 10 years ago.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  I would have a different answer.

• 30:17Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 30:18Steven Bartlett?

  Why has it changed? And what is it now and what was it then?

• 30:23Speaker 00

  That you don't do a family until you completed the ultimate? Well, my version of ultimate.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  My, my version of ultimate is to be able to be of assistance and

• 30:39Speaker 00

  help and provide and service folks that resemble the lifestyle that I lived, the hardships that I lived, without having to ever raise money ever again. Ten years ago?

• 30:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  What I know now?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  I would have had a kid.

• 31:01Steven Bartlett?

  You would have had a kid ten years ago?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  If I know what I know now, yes.

• 31:06Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 31:07Speaker 00

  I was moving too fast and I thought the only way to get up the mountain is to move the way I moved when I was at the foothill.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  To get to the middle of the mountain. And now that I'm up the mountain, you're thinking that I'm doing, I'm gonna do it by myself still.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  And the purpose of me getting up the mountain was to take care of my mom.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  And that was my motivation. That was my gas. That was my electricity. That was my energy. Is to take care of my family. Hunter gatherer to go out and bring back to the village. I didn't know. What I didn't know then, now that I know, would I be able to get up the mountain with family and offspring to take the information that I have and pass it on? I have knowledge here. I have knowledge in my DNA.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Who do I pass it to?

• 32:08Speaker 00

  If something were to happen to me.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Like, it's like different type of knowledge that you just don't say to someone. It's like, it's in me, it's stored in me, somebody gave me this.

• 32:18Steven Bartlett?

  Your mom.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  And my grandma, and my grandma's grandma.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  And my grandma's grandma. That person had a different life. My grandma was born in nineteen twenty. My grandma's grandma was born in eighteen something? That means it had, wow. That person was working in the field, in somebody's factory, in some unknown company. But in America, just called it slavery.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  That wasn't that long ago. So, but that information was passed on to me, passed on to me, resilience, tolerance, hope, living in a different world.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  So your offspring can have a different life. I'm a recipient of that. But when you're hustling and bustling, you think that, ah, no, I gotta wait till the ultimate. Was I wrong? Now that I could look back at my...

• 33:14Speaker 00

  He, he was wrong.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  But I was right, but still wrong.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Would I be a...

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Would I be further along in my journey?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  A little bit more organized? Yes. Why? Because something would have forced me to be organized.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  It's not just for myself now.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Even though it was never for myself, it was always for my mom and my family. I would have had even more regiment. I would have had even more streamlined aerodynamics. So that I could, you know, you know, cut through corners. You know? And make tighter turns, keep the downwinds. Would be a little bit more aerodynamic. Had I, you know, so, yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Nothing will stop you if you have kids, probably just gonna motivate you more. But I couldn't see that back then.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  But I'm gonna be an awesome dad when I'm, when I'm a dad.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  But I wanna be a full-time dad. And I realize that I don't have to be the...

• 34:30Speaker 00

  The the the the juggler.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Anymore. Before I had to do it all because no one really believed. And so I always had to prove. I had to like. Be the creative, understand business, sit in the business meetings, co-manage.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Come up with the artwork, execute the artwork, learn Illustrator, learn Photoshop, do the album artwork, hand it off to somebody else to fine tune what you sketched up.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Plan the tour with your manager. I had to do it all. But probably because a part of me didn't trust. That someone cared as much as I cared. But.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Now.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  I don't have to do it like that anymore. I've got to a point where now I could assemble teams and fund teams. Now I'm the financier. I don't have to worry about somebody's financing me. That's a different, it's like, that's an exhale. And so with that exhale, if I, when I'm a dad. I could be. I could be a full-time dad.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  As my understanding of full-time, which I'll still be, I'll still be working, just not working the way I'm working now. I don't know. I don't, I don't want to work the way I used to work.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Uh, not anymore. Not anymore. I was a proton for the planet, like just going around the planet.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  The longest I've been home. Since nineteen ninety-eight.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Was all of, the majority of two thousand and two.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  And then the majority of twenty twenty, like everyone else.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Outside of those two years, the longest that I've been in one place has been two months since 1998.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Oh, gotta go. Oh, I'm here for two months. See you later. Be back two weeks. Gotta go. Got, and I've been doing that since, I don't want to do that no more.

• 36:48Steven Bartlett?

  So you're speaking to a change perspective and I'm wondering, for me in my life, there had to be a symptom. There had to be something I noticed where I go, do you know what? I'm doing something not right here. So for me, I talked about it being that kind of almost this feeling of loneliness that I didn't realize was a feeling of loneliness. It was this emptiness in my chest. When you go to the office seven days a week and then you look at your phone and go, who are my friends? Like, who is my partner? Like tuning out of survival mode, tuning out of that and tuning into like thrive. Like, how do I thrive as a human being is what made me shift. So really, I'm curious about the symptoms that you noticed in your life that made you go, I don't want to do that anymore.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Oh, but I never had that.

• 37:28Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 37:28Speaker 00

  What you're explaining, no. I had my best friends that I grew up with. And we lived our dream to the highest level imaginable. Kids that were broke. Apple, my best friend who came from the Philippines, who I started Black Eyed Peas with. He comes from a province in the Philippines where he pumped water out the ground. He washed his clothes on the riverbed. He farmed rice with his pet bison. He did, he experienced a different level of poverty. Taboo, single mom. His dad was in the gangs.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  And we started the Black Eyed Peas and we lived the, what? Wait, how, how did we do this, guys? No one believed in us? Now we're playing Super Bowls, World Cups, multiple Grammys, taking care of our families. No, bro, like this is the biggest blessing one could imagine. Loneliness, how can I be lonely? I'm with my best friends.

• 38:35Steven Bartlett?

  So why change?

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Because I live 10 years from now. I've always seen 10 years from now. Always. I don't know what it was, but when I was 13, I'm like, I'mma buy you a house. How old was I when I bought my momma's house? A little off, I was 26.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  I wanted to do it, but I still did it.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  Then 10 years from there, I was like, Ma, how about everyone else in the, we still, our aunts, our uncles, or my grandma, we're still in the projects. We're still going back to the projects on holidays. We need, we need to do a whole exodus. She was like, that's what you want to do. So we moved everybody out.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  And when I got everyone else out, I'm like, well, I gotta go back to the neighborhood because there's people that we grew up with. And they have kids now. Start a robotics program there. Start a computer science program there so that when they, and a college prep program, so that when they graduate college, they have skills that are needed. Not just send kids to college so that when they graduate, they have debt and a diploma. So we did that. And there's purpose. So I want to be purposeful. So if I could see 10 years from now, okay.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  At some point in time, my tenure, looking around the corner, one day I'll be 70.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  One day I'll be Tom Jones age, I'll be 80.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  And what, I, I just stop?

• 40:19Speaker 00

  I don't pass it on?

• 40:23Speaker 00

  That's what happens here?

• 40:26Speaker 00

  No, that's not responsible. You know, that's not, that's not, that's not a responsible thing to do.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  So you gotta pass on knowledge. You gotta pass on gifts. For me, it's a gift. The little kid on the bike.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  You know, I have good intentions. I want to, it's all for the good.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  And I want to, I want to pass it on.

• 41:01Steven Bartlett?

  You said you're living 10 years in the future or five years in the future. There must be a cost to that. When people talk and, you know, spiritual people talk about what peace is and happiness is, they talk about presence. You strike me as someone, from what you've said, that is my struggle with the concept of being present when you're five years in the future. And this kind of leads into a point where people talk about the tortured creative that is like very, you know, cognitively active. How does, how does one square being a creative that's living five years in the future with peace, happiness, presence and calm? And, and what's your story in that regard?

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Like I said, we're assuming that a proton, a neutron, an electron, all should have the same role to make an atom. In actuality, they all have different roles.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  And the moment an electron acts like a proton, then an atom's not an atom anymore.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  So I got out of my predicament because I didn't live in my current reality. Had I lived in my current reality, I would still be in my reality that was constructed for me. So I had to live in this realm that was dreamt of. And my whole premise was to manifest that dream with strategy. So I had to, I had to live as if it was real. I had to live like I already moved my mom out the projects. I had to live like this gang doesn't want me. I'm no use for this gang.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Why even get initiated and be, and live that gang life?

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Let me just keep wearing these suits because these suits that my mom made me is my attire for the world that I'm going to be living in. You have to live, if you're living in some place that you know that you don't belong, you know you don't belong there. Why are you stuck in that?

• 43:14Speaker 00

  So in my mind, I have to, I've always been that way. Unfortunately, I can't change how my makeup is. So I'm constantly, if it got me out of that, it's going to get me out of this. And where we are right now, my people that live in communities that reflect where I come from are still in some version of that. So in 2008, I started my foundation, started with 65 students. And I, and my gut was like, yo,

• 43:41Speaker 00

  let me surround them with robotics and computer science skillsets. So I went out in the world, absorbed these, these skillsets, these tools, met Jack Dangerman from Esri, met Dean Kamen from DECA and First Robotics, met Lorraine Powell Jobs from College Track. My vision was to take these three independent entities, duct tape them together to make a cluster, to give a new type of project-based learning to kids, 65 kids. That 65 kids from 2008 to now, now we serve 15, almost 15,000 students in Los Angeles. We've sent kids to Dartmouth, to Brown, to Stanford, to Georgetown, because in 2008, I was living right now.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  I knew that because the way technology was going, that kids in the inner cities are going to be super

• 44:36Speaker 00

  conflicted with the way the world's going and the amount of jobs that are going to disappear. I thought it was just going to be like, uh, blue collar jobs. I don't think it's going to be white collar jobs. I don't think kids in the suburbs were going to be, you know, impacted by, you know, this nude.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  This new digital age. We seen the last one, but this generative stuff? Yo, bro.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Thank God we were doing what we were doing in 2008. Thank God we have, you know, a fleet,

• 45:15Speaker 00

  a herd of amazing engineers out of the, out of, you know, the inner cities of LA. And now we want to scale that. So 2030, yeah, I'm living there right now. Because there's still work to do.

• 45:28Steven Bartlett?

  I was listening to one of your songs before you arrived here. And it was very curious.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  What's with my house? Man, that's just lyrical.

• 45:37Steven Bartlett?

  It was a song, I think the song was called Be Nice. And when I, oh yeah, it was called Be Nice. And when I started thinking, looking into the song, looking about what you'd said around that song, you said, "I was on a dip in the low part of a roller coaster." And you wrote that song because it helped you to change your vibration, but also to help other people change their vibrations. The dip on the low part of a roller coaster. What are the things in, in your life that have caused that dip in the low part of the roller coaster? I think men, but particularly black men, we don't always talk about our mental health or the dip in the low part of the roller coaster. So I was super, I thought it was wonderful that you, um, you'd made a song about that, but also you were, you're speaking so openly about that.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  Oh, I was reflecting on my, and my 1993,

• 46:25Speaker 00

  18 year old, so.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  That, that, uh, that path was the hardest path that I've, in my life. 18. 18 was the hardest. Cause it was, uh, 30 years ago.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  This time 30 years ago.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  It was March when I had like a, it was March of 1993 when I felt something that I've never felt before, just like.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Distortion.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  I felt, uh, that's a perfect word for it.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Dis-ease.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  And dis-ease vibrationally

• 47:16Speaker 00

  is dis-ease. Like a disease on a vibrational level. Like the word disease is really dis-ease of molecular cellular where you're vibrating.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  There's no harmony or sense of your vibrational field. No matter how you look at it. And in this case, you have a vibration and thought. And I was vibrating off. And when you're vibrating off, you're dark. You're vibrating off, you panic, angst, your hypertension, your hyperactivity is

• 48:02Speaker 00

  off tilt.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Um, and so from March till about August was a very, very, very turbulent time for me when I was 18. And there's nothing wrong with being emotional. And when you're creative, you're always sensitive, like you're hypersensitive. That's a part of creativity, like you feel, uh, you feel too much. Um, and I feel too much. I empathize hardcore.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  I'm the guy in the olive area that talks to strangers. I'm the guy that's like,

• 48:41Speaker 00

  some, I was walking down the street, came out of Tesco, somebody's like, well, I am. I'm like, hey, what's up? Oh, I don't mean to bug you. I'm here. That's cool. Straight up conversation for like 30 minutes with random strangers. I like that because I don't, I don't ever want to ignore

• 49:01Speaker 00

  folks that I could shed light on or they could shed light to me. You never know what little nuggets that you give or receive.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  So that song, that lyric was just remembering, reminding myself of like what that, what that period was like for me. It was a very, very like coming of age. I was.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  And I didn't have a ma- a man in my life, a do- a father in my life to guide me through that. My mom did that, which probably made me even ultra feminine, which is no- I have no shame of being super feminine. You know, I remember in the nineties, we- we don't have the support in the LGBT community like now than we did then. So growing up in the nineties, we're like, are you gay? Like, a lot of people questioned if I was, because I was feminine. I'm still feminine. I sit the way I sit, I act the way I act, my mannerisms

• 50:10Speaker 00

  are my mom's. But it was a- it was a very, uh, and I'm strong with my- my femininity. I'm- I think it's a superpower. But, um, that, um, when- when you know who you are, when you- when you love who you are, how you are, how you vibe, that's what it's about. I like girls. Um, never was attracted to men. I'm attracted to females, but I'm feminine.

• 50:44Steven Bartlett?

  What caused that chapter in your life? Do you know?

• 50:47Speaker 00

  What?

• 50:47Steven Bartlett?

  That- that- that dark chapter in your life, was there a clear causal?

• 50:51Speaker 00

  Distortion is a better word.

• 50:52Steven Bartlett?

  Distortion? That chapter in your life where you had distortion?

• 50:56Speaker 00

  What? Weed?

• 50:58Steven Bartlett?

  Weed, okay.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was the, uh, it's chemicals.

• 51:04Steven Bartlett?

  You said shame and guilt as well. You said, use those words.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was shameful because I did something that I knew hurt my mom.

• 51:11Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  You know, like, you were smoking and her head hanging low, like, did I do a- what is my son out there doing?

• 51:25Speaker 00

  You know, what trouble is he getting into? What is it going to lead to? I saw her panic. I felt her panic. I felt her worry. I felt her concern.

• 51:32Steven Bartlett?

  Do you still? Do you still have? Have you had moments of distortion since?

• 51:37Speaker 00

  It's usually when um you make errors. You hurt people indirectly, clumsily, irresponsible. When you, when, when you let people down that you love. When I let people down that I love, I distort.

• 51:56Steven Bartlett?

  Is distortion different from depression in your definition? Is there a difference?

• 52:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Big difference.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Distortion leads to depression.

• 52:07Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, okay.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  Like um, let's take this water, right?

• 52:15Speaker 00

  In this metal cup. If I fill it up to the top.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  And I don't move this table. The water's still. No matter how I fill it up, it could be straight to the top. If you don't interrupt the table, the water's not going to spill. Distortion is when I start to shake the table.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  And if I shake the table fast enough, it could shatter the glass.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  It could crack it. If I shake this at the right frequency, that doesn't disrupt the table, but can mess up the object. Shattering the glass or, or obstructing with the form of this is depression. Shaking the table, causing it to spill, is distortion.

• 53:08Steven Bartlett?

  Have you experienced anxiety before? A lot of creatives speak to anxiety. And when you're thinking about that shaking table, it made me feel of, it gave me that, the, the, the thing that I could liken it to was anxiety.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, it comes with the territory of um futurist, futurism.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  You are experiencing something that hasn't happened yet.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Cause your imagination has already created plausible, like realistic scenarios. And you're already feeling the emotion.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  So that unfortunately comes with the territory of having a hyper imagination.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  And living over there.

• 54:00Steven Bartlett?

  Doesn't that mean that you live in anxiety then?

• 54:02Speaker 00

  No.

• 54:03Steven Bartlett?

  If you live in the future.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Because once you're aware of that,

• 54:08Speaker 00

  then you know that's what it is.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  It's like

• 54:14Speaker 00

  the difference between the shower and the rain. People run in the rain and stand in the shower. It's a difference between bikinis and drawers. People go to the beach with nothing on, but get afraid when you see them in their underwear.

• 54:33Steven Bartlett?

  Expectations, right?

• 54:34Speaker 00

  It's expectations. It's like, once you're aware of you getting wet, you ain't tripping. Once you're aware that you're going to the beach with nothing on, you're not tripping. So once I'm aware that I'm thinking over there, I don't have to have emotions there.

• 54:50Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  So the moment I start having emotion for future casting, then I'm doing it wrong.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  The anxiety comes when it's things that are happening that you didn't control.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  And you're now having emotions because your imagination is now thinking of the outcomes of things that are out of your control.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Now, when you're future casting and you're seeing stuff, you're controlling looking around the corner. I am purposely looking there and then putting my imagination to work on thinking, what do I have to do now strategically?

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Between now, five, 10.

• 55:32Steven Bartlett?

  Got you. FYI, FYI is Will's brand new app, which is launched now. And the whole purpose of FYI is to help creators to organize, collaborate and communicate in one place, rather than having all of these different communication channels and digital assets spread across all of these different products that we might use today.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:47Steven Bartlett?

  I had this problem last night. I was on like Monday over here, to do list over here. I'm on Google Clouds over here. Google Sheets here. And when I opened up FYI this morning, I can see from where we're on the roadmap, looking into the future, how having all of that in one space with AI as kind of the agent to power a lot of the the knowledge work, I guess. Is a really special combination. FYI is now available on the App Store. I got it this morning. Everybody should go and check it out. And I'm really excited. If you're starting here, what the roadmap looks forward for the future. Cause I can see the mission.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  So FYI.ai is like, we're at 1.0. 4.0? Do you understand how awesome of a platform FYI is going to be? It's also equipped with elliptical curve cryptography methodologies. Because during COVID, NFTs and blockchain told us that, you know, protect your assets. I mean, here's a key. But why isn't the same type of key architecture and product structure, I commit it's not for my data on messengers? Why am I not given a key to where I own my digital assets? When my digital assets are the data itself?

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Why is it just for NFTs and crypto? So on FYI, yes, there's messengers that are encrypted end to end. But where's the key? If you're not issued a key, that the company itself doesn't have. We ensure that your data and your stuff is your stuff. What is yours is yours. How you speak is how you speak. And when it comes to AI and mimic machines, none of us own our face and none of us own our voice. I own the publishing to my songs. You could copyright and you could create NDAs to protect your IP. But when it comes to you, every human being,

• 57:41Speaker 00

  walking in the age of AI, who owns our essence and our likeness? And why aren't we talking about that enough? The Drake AIs, yeah, it's, it's, it was a buzz and it's still going to continue to buzz.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  But shouldn't Drake own his likeness and his essence? Why is that legal? Why is it legal that Biggie Smalls is rapping a Tupac verse that was actually about him?

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Like, why is that? I can't take a Nike swoosh. Nike owns a swoosh, but I don't own my face and my voice. Beyonce don't own her face and her voice, but Adidas owns Stripes. Something's not right for people. So as FYI grows, that encryption key, 1.0 versus 5.0, the vision that we have, what we want to go, how we need the community to help us get there. I want to build the people's tool. I want to build a company that where people own their data. 100% of it. I am not my identity to my driver's license and my, my, uh, social security number and my passport. I'm my data. I'm my searches.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  I am my freaking spell check. I am my voice. I am my facial unlocked with the machine. I am all that stuff. I'm my location, on my address book. It could predict me. But why can't I have power of that? Why, why? I could say, I want to weigh 194 pounds by November 24th, 2024. I currently weigh 210 pounds.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Which app would you like to use?

• 59:26Speaker 00

  You can't do that right now. There's no aspiration on GPS. And for aspiration on the GPS, that means a system has to be mine. Not me have access to a system. I have a record deal. Because at one point in time, it was expensive to record. Now, recording is ubiquitous. Everybody could do it. So why do I have a record deal? So what is luxury when it comes to? What's premium? What's the highest way of creating? At some point in time, making films and recording music was the highest level of creating. Painting for the freaking, for the, uh, for the, for the monarchy or for the church was the highest level of creating. Now you could just do it on your phone.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  But the highest level of creating right now is building models. To build models and compute, it's expensive. So tomorrow, people are going to be training their own models.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  It's unheard of deal right now. We know the folks that are spinning out models in these companies. But soon compute's gonna come down. And there's going to be new models. That are going to be just as powerful as GPT. Some 15 year old right now. It's dreaming right now. When they're 25, that person is gonna have his own model. And his own company. And it's gonna be morally sound for people in the communities. Because greed, not saying that the models right now are greedy. I'm not saying that. But watch what happens in 2023.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  We're going to be driven by love. Because the concept that we had and that we're baking it off of with Terminator. That's not sustainable. That's not, that's fear. And if you're gonna base it off of movies, then go Star Wars. Not Terminator. Star Wars, there's multiple models. There's multiple robots. They all speak different fucking languages. But there's Jedis. And Jedi is a different, yes, there was a dark force. Yes, there was Siths, but there's fucking Jedis. And if this is gonna take us to where we are better humans to one another. Then fucking bring it. Because we can't get any worse than we already are with one another. And I'm speaking that as a black person.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  We've seen what people can do to people. It can't get any more worse. So bring it. The optimism, bring it. Let's be better people. Let's love better. Let's empathize better. Let's freaking serve better. Let's care better. Right? Let's use the tool for that. Because if we're mimicking. That's what they're fearful of. People are fearful of what people do.

• 1:02:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. People are gripped by AI at the moment. And they're terrified. They are excited. Where do you sit? And if you were talking to those kids in the inner city about AI? And what they need to know about it? What would you be saying?

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  If I go to the inner city. I'm telling kids. Hey.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Our whole entire life has been set up for us to fail.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Our investment for education has been undermined our investment to where other neighborhoods are getting a bigger investment for their education than us.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  The way they've zoned our communities. We have liquor stores next to check cashing, next to bad food, next to bad food. Our teachers are not being, you know, invested in to teach us the things that we need to learn. We have no financial literacy. So when we get our checks, we cash our checks and then we spend it on bad stuff. Our understanding of money is to spend it to pay bills. We're not even taught to grow it.

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  We've been set up to fail. AI didn't do that, people did that. Now here's a tool for us to solve our problems ourself now.

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  Grab it while you can. And we are now our own Calvary.

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  Right? Because the people that are afraid

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  are not the people here. We've already went through the worst and survived the worst conditions of life. Are these folks afraid?

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, those, the ones that are responsible for our zoning. Got it. Okay, cool. Now let's, let's build a better world. Let's educate ourselves with this tool. Let's understand that it is a tool. Let's understand that there's these biases there. Let's try to solve those biases. So that what is the ultimate dream? My ultimate dream is like, wow, we all know this wave. We see it coming. It could be good or it could be bad.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  It's going to be good when we're mindful of what our contributions are to prepare people for this wave.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  We have to prepare folks. And got to do information, inspiration, preparation.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  Motivation and, you know, mentorship. So that they can activate their creativity to unearth tomorrow's industries. Because this wave is gonna topple yesterday's industries, today's industries. If you're a lawyer and you work at a law firm and you do redlining on contracts, that's not what you're doing in 2030. If you're an accountant and you're counting, counting beans and penny pinching, that's not what you're doing in 2030.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  If you're a cashier at a, at a retail, you're probably not doing that in 2030. If you're a bus driver, Uber driver, taxi driver, that's not what you're doing in 2030. Because you're seeing the construct of what tomorrow is now. You're dealing with machines that could go and pivot from subject to subject, go deep to subjects in ways that people can't. Writing songs, making pictures, Midjourney is freaking crazy. It's the most amazing tool that ever, like yo, Midjourney's nuts.

• 1:06:04Steven Bartlett?

  For people that don't know, Midjourney is a tool that uses text to create generative images of whatever you type in, in seconds.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  So if you're a marketer, if you're like a, an artist that works for a brand, if you're an agency that works for brands, this technology is gonna give super creatives agency. So why do they need agencies? Just, just the vast transformation and for hyper creatives, that now they just need a new tool to help them like, oof, and just birth stuff? It's a new renaissance.

• 1:06:50Steven Bartlett?

  The ultimate.

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  It's the ultimate dream if you're preparing

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  up a section of the world that whose problems have always been ignored to now go out and solve those problems with this tool.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Are you using this tool to make songs?

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  You know it's gonna make better songs than you. It's Pac-Man right now. We ain't even got to Halo. It's we're in freaking Super Mario Brothers. We even got to Call of Duty yet. This thing's gonna make better songs than you soon, bro.

• 1:07:24Steven Bartlett?

  The songs out already are pretty dope. I've talked about that in this podcast before, that Drake song with the.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  No, but the Drake song still required somebody to sing it. And then they layer a plug-in over it to make it sound like Drake.

• 1:07:37Steven Bartlett?

  Oh.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  I heard a song that didn't. I heard, yo, this new tech. It's out of here. But more importantly, I saw it in 2010.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  In my mind's eye, I was like, yo, no, no, no. If I'm in this computer, that means it's computer. Wait, what? If I'm in the computer making music, I'm not, I'm not a musician like Prince or freaking Stevie Wonder. I make music because I can make the computer make music. And with machine learning, that means eventually the computer is gonna remember how I made it to make music.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  And eventually just make it itself.

• 1:08:17Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe even publish it itself.

• 1:08:20Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe even not even tell you.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, like.

• 1:08:24Steven Bartlett?

  Say if you're making something on Adobe, you're also you're making Adobe smarter at creating records. So you know, why does, why does Adobe eventually need the person hitting the buttons or with the ideas when it can learn from a million of those? And then it can also track the outcome. Does that become a smash hit? And it's going, okay, so when they did this to me, you know what I mean? The film Oppenheimer is into cinemas shortly and Oppenheimer was the guy who was in the world war was told to go out to make the nuclear bomb. And that is almost what I'm scared about in this current AI race where. China or Russia or another country versus the US, they're all in a race to create the most powerful artificial intelligence system, but also to use it for the defensive purposes,

• 1:09:09Steven Bartlett?

  but also attacking purposes, offensive purposes. And when an intelligence is a hundred times smarter than the smartest human, that world is the world where I go, are we, do we realize what we're getting ourselves into? Is this another Oppenheimer moment where we create something that has the capabilities to destroy humanity? That's what I haven't figured out yet.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  But for everything that we create, a hammer, we don't make hammers?

• 1:09:37Steven Bartlett?

  A hammer can kill how many, you know?

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  A screwdriver, a vehicle, an airplane, electricity, lights, everything that we advance, the first caveman that found a freaking flame on a branch. Imagine all the folks at some point in time, when they first had a branch with flame on it, they're like, you're gonna burn the village down. And some villages-

• 1:10:03Steven Bartlett?

  Burnt down.

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  Burnt down.

• 1:10:04Steven Bartlett?

  Because that was the capacity of that weapon. The capacity of this weapon is it can think for itself and take down civilization. And that's the, the difference is like going from the hammer, which can probably take a couple of people out, can't think for itself. And then you go right up to artificial intelligence where it has a propensity to be smarter than all of us. And, you know, if programmed with malicious intent. I like your optimism.

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, but, but at the same time, like,

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  who's responsible for the people that are living in villages in Africa that are clearly living under an abundance of resources, but can't benefit from those? Is that AI did that?

• 1:10:47Steven Bartlett?

  No, it's humans.

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  Humans at that. So what you're saying is that it's not the AI that you're afraid of.

• 1:10:53Steven Bartlett?

  A hundred percent. Yeah.

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  It's people.

• 1:10:55Steven Bartlett?

  It's the people. It's the Putin.

• 1:10:57Speaker 00

  Maybe AI is to push us to love.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  Because we can't out logic, logic.

• 1:11:03Steven Bartlett?

  If will I am has it, that's what will happen. If Putin has it, I'm not sure.

• 1:11:11Steven Bartlett?

  Like a hammer, like if you would create something dope with a hammer, Putin might hit me with it.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  I would create something like MC Hammer.

• 1:11:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  Can't touch this. But yeah.

• 1:11:25Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the person that's left this question for you, I think you know them.

• 1:11:33Steven Bartlett?

  The question is, what would be your superpower if you were, if you could be a superhero and why? It feels quite.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  Somebody asked me that?

• 1:11:41Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Shall I tell you who it is? Rita Ora.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Oh, Rita Ora, that's, she's my fave. I love Rita.

• 1:11:47Steven Bartlett?

  But she didn't know it was for you.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  Get the frick out.

• 1:11:49Steven Bartlett?

  She just writes it in the book. I didn't tell her who's coming next.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:11:53Steven Bartlett?

  So usually I don't tell people who's written it, but I figured you might know her, so.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've worked with her many years and recorded songs that we never released. But yeah, I love Rita.

• 1:12:01Steven Bartlett?

  She was sat there yesterday.

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  She's awesome. It's gonna sound super like cheesy or corny. I would be Particle Man.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  My, my, my superpower would be.

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  I could.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  I can influence particles to vibrate harmoniously.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  Cause that's the concept of love. It's when everything's vibrating harmoniously. And there's, I'll be the ultimate superpower.

• 1:12:44Steven Bartlett?

  Are you vibrating harmoniously?

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  Right now?

• 1:12:47Steven Bartlett?

  In life?

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  In life, at the moment?

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Because I feel too much. And when you feel, it affects your vibration.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  And then it takes a while to make sense of what you're absorbing. And you rinse out and that, and you repeat. But in that process of absorb, rinse, repeat.

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  You learn more about environments that you're in, people that you're around. And your curiosity, my curiosity.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  And search for knowledge. Why did I go to CERN? I'm I'm gonna go next in two weeks. And then they send me emails all the time. Hey, Will, we're here. You're gonna be in Geneva. You want to come down to CERN? Um, just come see our, you know, advancements and learn more.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  I'd just like to know as much as possible.

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  And when you, in my pursuit of knowing.

• 1:14:08Steven Bartlett?

  Causes some distortion?

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  There's nothing wrong with a little bit, Jimi Hendrix. There's nothing wrong with a little bit of distortion.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  You can't just be consumed by it. Sorry, with amplification comes some distortion as you amplify. And to get the word out or to get the vibe out. You know, you just got to be aware of of how you're amplifying.

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  Not turn up too loud or too fast. And that's, you know, double entendres on turn up.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  But, uh, yeah, so no, I'm not, um.

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  That would be my superpower is. But the name Particle Man's whack.

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  Particle Man.

• 1:15:02Steven Bartlett?

  Kids ain't gonna win.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  Subatomic. But, um, yeah.

• 1:15:07Steven Bartlett?

  Vibration man was, I don't know, vibes man, I don't know.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, super vibes.

• 1:15:13Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, super vibes on a on a particle level. And that will be like soon as as soon as as soon as a motherfucker wants to fuck around and do some wild shit. You just like zap them with some super vibes and change. Alter the particles because that's what we're all made of that down every molecule, every cell.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  And if you could.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  And if you could put consciousness on a particle level.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  That's some uh, that's some awesome sauce.

• 1:15:44Steven Bartlett?

  Well, thank you. In many respects, you are super vibes because you've created a lot of awesome stuff and you've brought brought people's vibes into harmony, certainly mine with your with all that you've created with your art, with your creativity. Walking through your studio, your office in Los Angeles was a real trip into a decade's time. It was a glimpse into the future in many respects. I remember looking at some of the stuff you'd created in there, the backpacks, and I remember all of these dope inventions that I saw in that space. And to meet you, it kind of makes sense now. When you talk about living in the future, with that, of course, comes a disharmony, I think, like, and that's what you've spoken to as well. I think a lot of creatives have that feeling of like dis-ease. I think it

• 1:16:27Steven Bartlett?

  comes with wanting to bring about the future and that impatience that comes with all of that. I really do hope you find the the personal harmony that you spoke of this, the next, passing it on to somebody. I really do hope you find that because I think I do agree you'd make an absolutely incredible father. Oh, thanks. Because you're so you're so luck, you're so built on love, which I think is a real testament to your mother. Thank you. Thank you for being here today. It's a real honor to get to spend some time with you. You're someone that I admire greatly for all of the creative reasons I've said, but also just as a human being.