Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters

Steve Stoute is the founder of Translation, the marketing company behind some of the most iconic brand work of the past 25 years, and UnitedMasters, the independent music distribution platform he launched in 2017. Stoute grew up in Queens in the 1980s, where hip-hop was his entire world. He worked his way into the music business, eventually managing Nas and becoming an executive at Sony and then Interscope under Jimmy Iovine. In 1999, at 29, he walked away from a $2 million salary to take a $150,000 job at the Arnell Group — trading income for education. He was there to learn the advertising business from the inside out. What he saw clearly was that Madison Avenue was using an old playbook, failing to see that artists were shaping fashion and other cultural trends. Stoute brokered Jay-Z's S. Carter shoe deal with Reebok — the first sneaker deal for a non-athlete — helped launch McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" campaign, and came within one meeting of signing LeBron James. He watched an 18-year-old LeBron walk away from a $10 million signing bonus to bet on himself. It confirmed everything Stoute believed: the world had already changed, and the old gatekeepers just hadn't caught up yet. UnitedMasters was built on that same conviction — giving artists ownership of their masters and a direct line to their fans. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/steve-stoute Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Deel: https://deel.com/senra HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com Chapters (00:00:00) Run Towards The Unknown (00:04:43) The Men In Black Glasses Nobody Got Paid For (00:07:34) Too Scared To Buy Apple At Nine Dollars (00:15:27) Black Consumers Buy What Isn't Marketed To Them (00:19:13) Betting On The Education, Not The Equity (00:21:39) A Music Video Is Just A TV Commercial (00:24:32) The First Non-Athlete Shoe Deal (00:27:25) LeBron Walks Away From Ten Million To Bet On Himself (00:30:35) Why Are You Giving It Away (00:35:18) If Artists Knew Their Fans They Wouldn't Need A Label (00:39:57) Prince Wrote Slave On His Face (00:46:01) How Jay-Z, Master P, And Wu-Tang Beat The System (00:50:44) The Power Of Repetition (00:54:13) Independent Artists Are The New Small Businesses (00:58:56) Fame And Talent Are Now At Odds (01:04:39) Ryan Coogler's Unprecedented Sinners Deal (01:09:25) Live At The Convergence Of Culture, Technology, And Storytelling (01:11:09) You Can Get Anything Done If You Don't Take Credit (01:12:53) Signing Kobe To Out-Rap Shaq (01:15:25) How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything (01:18:55) The Barefoot Standoff With Jay-Z (01:22:50) Getting Jay-Z To Write Still D. R. E. (01:28:08) Managing Nas, The Greatest Thing He Ever Did (01:31:00) Walking Into Queensbridge To Find Nas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02David Senra?

  Dude, I've been a fan of you for over 20 years because I grew up listening to hip-hop and everybody in hip-hop knows who you are so I'm very excited to have a conversation with you.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:09David Senra?

  One of the fascinating things that Jimmy Iovine told me about you was you made a very unusual decision coming out of a record label. Like you could have started your own record label and you said, "No, I'm not going to start a record label. I'm going to go full-on into advertising and marketing." Can you tell me about that?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  It was 1999 and I get a lot of credit for seeing that whether it was Napster or MP3s were going to shift the music business from the CD. We started to see signs of it but it was in the fledgling stages of that. So I didn't quite see it. What I did see was an industry that didn't know the difference between good and great. What I mean by that is that when an industry is booming, sometimes when it's booming because of the business model itself, mediocre gets rewarded. And over time, it catches up.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  But in the beginning, mediocrity is applauded and financially awarded. And I knew that because we were selling CDs for $16 and people were paying for it when there was only one song on the album, that that wasn't going to sustain itself. Like, there was something wrong with that. Like, why would you pay $16.99 and you only liked the first single? And executives were getting paid tons of money on that idea. And they weren't even talented. And I'm like, "This is going to have to cave in." Outside of that, what I seen was an advertising business that felt like archaic. The advertising business at the time

• 1:45Speaker 01

  looked at the world through the lens of black, white, Hispanic. And I'm like, "That's not the way people relate to products and marketing." It doesn't... No one looks at them and goes, "Well, are they speaking to me because I'm white?" Or, "Like, that's how I prefer to get spoken to because I'm black." Like, these things weren't real. And the music business did teach me that. The music business taught me that... The idea that people listen to certain records had nothing to do with their ethnicity. DMX was selling in Iowa. The radio station in Iowa didn't play DMX.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Eminem was being played, was being purchased in Harlem. It had nothing to do with white and black. But why were products treated that way? Why would like, we're gonna, you know, when you're gonna sell a Cadillac to a black person, you put a deep voiceover like, "The new Cadillac Escalade." Nobody wants that. And Spanish people don't want an ad that just says, "Hola." Like, these things don't work. My whole idea was like, why don't you just find shared values? Like, if you're an 18-year-old African-American from Compton, and you're an 18-year-old white kid from Greenwich, Connecticut, and you like skateboarding, like, it doesn't make a difference if you just speak about skateboarding.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  You're both gonna find the shared value in that, in the culture of skateboarding. But this other thing that was happening just felt like it was dying. And I knew that if I got into that industry, I could make a difference.

• 3:27David Senra?

  But what Jimmy, I think, admired most is that, like, you, you didn't care what was expected. Like, you didn't make the decision that everybody else was making, or the decision that was expected of you. It's like you, you forge your own path.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  So I'm giving you the rational, you know, how I seen it. The idea of seeing it that way and then jumping, and to go into a business in which you didn't understand.

• 3:50David Senra?

  Exactly.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, I can reference a lot in the Jimmy podcast, not that I want this podcast to, like, be the advertising for all your others, but, you know, you've had a lot of interesting people, and there's a lot of six degrees of separation in the way we think. When the unknown is a better option than the known, run in that direction. Run towards darkness. And the unknown was what I didn't know, right? The advertising business. But the known was this industry that was going in the wrong direction. In a direction where they were selling one song for a lot of money, they had a monopoly on the distribution of CDs, and they controlled radio and MTV. And those things didn't seem like they were gonna last forever.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  So running towards the unknown became very easy. Not because, and also because I was 29 years old, right? And... I didn't have a family yet. I didn't have kids. I'd already made a lot of money. I'd already done well. So I wasn't like needing money. And I didn't have like a family that was reliant upon me to like earn instantly. If I didn't make that decision at that point in time, I would have never made it at all. To change industries, fuck it, we going in the advertising business. And I had a big proof point. The proof point was when I was at Sony. I made the soundtrack. I was fortunate to make the soundtrack for the film Men in Black. I had known Will Smith and his manager, James Lasseter, for many, many years.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  And when they were making that film, they wanted to make the soundtrack. They were making it with Sony, who also distributed that film. I was a Sony executive and they, you know, said, look, you know, you do this. I wanted to do it. I was excited to do it. And the song became a hit, right? Here comes the men in black with Will.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  But what was bigger than the song was the glasses. And he said, I make these look good in the movie.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  It was all in the music video. God knows what the impressions were and you measured that. If you measured it in today's sort of metrics.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  And the glasses became contagious because of the popular culture impact of that song in that video. And I'm like, if we're in the music business, why aren't we getting paid off those glasses?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Like, why don't Ray-Ban has nothing to do with any of this, other than they gave Will the glasses? Like, why aren't we making... So the guy in the company that did the product placement for those glasses.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  While I was thinking this, he was trying to find me because he wanted to find the next thing that did that. And I was like, if we can sell 14 million glasses or whatever the number was.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  I could do this shit all the time.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  The idea that Jimmy was putting the Beats headphones and music videos was literally a derivative of that idea. I had seen that idea very early and my peers and others in the industry would tell you that. I seen, I was, I was infatuated with the idea and to the, to the point that I left the industry to learn the advertising business, to understand the language, the dialogue, the people, the movers, the shakers. I wanted to understand that business. So I put my, I immersed myself in it, not by studying it, by quitting and doing it. Jimmy allowed me to do that. I had worked for him at that time. I had left Sony, had gone to Interscope.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  I'd done great work with Interscope. Jimmy and I was close. He's a mentor of mine.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  And when I told him I wanted to do it, the deal was like, look, man, I got your back.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  But bring the deals to Interscope first. So a lot of the early things that I had done were based around Interscope artists. And I mean, I, I, I got great, great stories about me, Jimmy and Steve Jobs, you know, trying to get, bring, when I was working on McDonald's early around the I'm Lovin' It launch.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  We wanted to do was around the same times iTunes was launching. And, uh,

• 8:04Speaker 01

  the thing about Apple at that time, the stock was at nine or 10, you know, very, you know, it was like there. And, uh, you know, it was, so in 2001, I don't want to go all over, Enron had just- Take this wherever you want, man. In 2001, the Enron thing happened, right? Where the CEO

• 8:28Speaker 01

  and the CFO, they had, they, they no longer could, the CFO couldn't say, oh, well, the CEO, the CEO told me to do it. That's why I did it. That was Sarbanes-Oxley came out of this whole thing. And everyone will see it about insider trading. So I remember when we knew that the iPod was coming because of Jimmy's relationship with Steve. We all wanted to buy stock in in Apple and the stock was like nine. Not that we knew that nine was cheap. We just knew that that something good was gonna happen. And we were all scared to death to buy stock. And we were like, no, we're gonna, we're gonna go to jail and we're gonna be Jeff Skilling. I was like, no, no, no, no, no.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  But back during that time, I was transitioning out. And, you know, the iPod launched before iTunes. People think they launched at the same time. So when iTunes launched, the one thing about Apple at that time is if they could put distribution, the expense of distribution to a third party, Steve was all about that. He was all about, how can I find somebody else? Remember, H P was the partner for the iPod. They they're the ones who put it in all of the best buys and Circuit Cities or whatever the retailers were around the world. Apple didn't have the sales team to do that.

• 9:52David Senra?

  And they didn't have their stores there, right?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  They relied on a third party to do that. They did H P. H P happened to be one of my clients, Cola Fiorina at the time. And with iTunes, same type of thing. Who could we get to distribute it? Jimmy was trying to get a deal done with Coca-Cola. An executive at Coca-Cola, Steve Hyatt, turned it down twice. I was representing McDonald's and we wanted to do, I had the idea we're gonna do the music meal. You know, Big Mac and large fries and or hamburger fries and a song. And McDonald's turned them down as well. The the the the executive at McDonald's sort of was like posturing. And Steve went, nucleo.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  I mean, nucleo on them. I mean, at the time he went, he said some shit to them. I was like, holy shit. He said, like, like, it's like. You're in a meeting and like the meeting hasn't quite gone bad yet, but it's going directionally in a place where you kind of predict that it's gonna not end correctly. And he seen that coming. He just said, man, don't you, don't you guys know you make food that kills kids? Oh shit. Now I'm a young executive trying to, I'm trying to do the right, I'm trying to come up. Jimmy knows Steve Jobs. I got McDonald's. Jimmy and I have worked together. We're doing the Tango. We're gonna go bring this McDonald's iTunes, Apple thing together.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  You know, and then he says that and the guys at McDonald's are looking at me like you walked me into this shit? And I'm like, he's just playing, man. He don't, he don't mean that.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  I remember that feeling at that time. It was like, shit, what the fuck am I doing?

• 11:42David Senra?

  Did they try to kick Steve Jobs out of the meeting, had the meeting?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Kick Steve Jobs out of the meeting? First of all, the meeting was at Apple. They weren't kicking Steve Jobs out of any meeting.

• 11:53David Senra?

  So we're, we're actually gonna do an episode with Ed Catmull, who's the founder of Pixar. And he worked with Steve Jobs for a long, I think he's worked with Steve Jobs uninterrupted for like 24 years.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:02David Senra?

  And he tells a story about what a meeting with, in his autobiography, Creativity, Inc., what a meeting with Steve Jobs is like. Remember the, I think it was like Magnavox?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Of course, Magnavox, they made video games, they made television.

• 12:14David Senra?

  Yeah. And they used to have this commercial, probably in the, I don't know, maybe 80s or 90s, where somebody's like sitting in a chair and the, the music is so loud, it's like blowing the guy's hair back.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Was it Magnavox? It could have been Maxwell.

• 12:26David Senra?

  Or Maxwell, sorry. Yeah. And

• 12:28Speaker 01

  The tape company.

• 12:29David Senra?

  Yeah, that, that makes more sense. And Ed, Ed's like, you remember that commercial? It's like, that's what it's like being in a meeting with Steve Jobs. He's just so overpowering. He's like, just such a force of nature, like kind of blows you back in your chair.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Look, I didn't have the exposure to Steve Jobs like that. That was, I was in maybe two meetings with him. Where, I mean, like real meetings where like there was feedback and that kind of thing. And that was that. I mean, I'm, I'm close with Eddie Q and he tells amazing Steve Jobs stories along with Jimmy. That was just my version of getting a taste of it. And it was like, holy shit.

• 13:06David Senra?

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• 13:49David Senra?

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• 14:30David Senra?

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• 15:12David Senra?

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• 15:22David Senra?

  Going back to the Ray-Bans, so you were at Sony.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:26David Senra?

  When you're, is that the first time that you're like, oh, wait, wait, there's like a, you can translate cultural influence to sales, like business success. Is that the first time where it clicked or was there something that happened before that?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I had known intuitively, growing up in Queens and being around hip hop my whole life, much my, you know, at 16, when I was 16, was 1986, when, you know, Run DMC performed at Madison Square Garden and like, it was Fresh Fest. It was like a sort of the, the coming out party of that hip hop could have actual rock stars. So that was my wheelhouse. And the only reason why I wore Adidas shell toes was because of that. Like, we knew that. So it wasn't like it was a new idea or, you know, Grand Poobah advertising for Sprite, which is amazing, amazing.

• 16:24David Senra?

  Wait, did you do that deal or was that before you?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  That was way before me, but I remember when he said, you know, the line, like he said the line, you know, first thing first, a bit of your thirst. And like, he talked about Sprite, like you've seen these things or St. Ives malt liquor. You should look at these ads with Ice Cube and St. Ives. Like these, these, these things were so powerful

• 16:48Speaker 01

  that hip hop would be working with these brands and like it would influence urban culture immediately. And when I talk about urban culture, I'm talking about dense cities, not even black kids. I'm talking about just dense inner city, uh, you know, I use it as a measurement of space, a density of people. They would gravitate towards these products that these artists talked about either in their, in their music or did blatant ads for. So by the time I had gotten to Will Smith and Men in Black, I mean, I had seen it for 25 years, but it still wasn't mainstream cultural impactful yet for reasons that I

• 17:31Speaker 01

  still don't understand. Like it was very clear and obvious, but. You know, like most things, when the alternative is working, when the incumbent can still rely on the old business practice, they won't disrupt themselves. They'll just keep doing that, right? Like, why would I invest any money in understanding hip hop when Kenny G is still selling?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  I mean, no disrespect to Kenny G. Michael Bolton is still selling, whatever it may be. But if those things are still working, you're not going to pay attention to Wu-Tang. You're not going to pay attention to things of this. If you're still selling in a world in which you can say, "I'm going to target white consumers." I used to talk about this all the time, like, like, black consumers are the best consumers in the world because they buy products that aren't marketed to them. I grew up in a world where I'd see African-American women buying products, L'Oréal products, in which there was only white women with blonde hair on the box or in the commercial. And African-American women would buy it, or the same thing with African-American men. And like, people took advantage of that.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  But when brands leaned into being authentically connected to where culture was, which also spoke to those segments, they were taking market share.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  They were taking that attention. So to me, it was just a matter of time before it tipped and that became the new marketing paradigm. And that's why I called my company Translation, because I wanted to translate that cultural insight for Fortune 500 companies. And the first company that gave me a shot, that's still my client today, is McDonald's.

• 19:13David Senra?

  Okay, so this is what I was curious about. So you're at Interscope. What are the assets that you have when you start Translation? So you're young, you don't have a family, you can take more risks, you have an insane network. You've already been, you were managing Nas at that time. Like, what were the assets, the non-financial assets you had going into this, like, jumping into a new industry?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  When I first left, remember I said I learned first, right? Before I started Translation, my marketing services company, I learned. And I worked at an intern company before that.

• 19:42David Senra?

  Which one was this?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  It's called Arnell Group.

• 19:44David Senra?

  Okay.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  So I worked at this company, and I worked at, I became partners with. When I left the record business, you know, I was making a couple million dollars a year at 29. And I went into an agency in which I got paid $150,000 and 20% equity.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  I didn't necessarily understand the value of equity at all. I certainly understood 150,000 was a lot less than 2 million, 2 and a half million. But I wasn't even betting on the equity, man. I was really betting on the education. I sincerely mean that. I did not know what was gonna happen at all, but I knew I was gonna learn. That was the period in which I had gotten exposure to certain clients like McDonald's and Reebok. So at Reebok, that was a client that when I was partners in this agency, I'd met Adam Silver at that time, who was Deputy Commissioner to the NBA, because we were doing all the marketing.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Reebok had the license for the NBA. And I was doing all the marketing around the throwback jerseys. And then like I was seating them. And all the artists back then were wearing throwback jerseys. So it became this really big deal that like, wow, this guy knows what he's doing. He has, you know, I had gotten, that's where the market was going, but I had gotten a lot of credit because it was just selling like crazy. And, and Reebok was the beneficiary of it as the NBA licensee. They were the NFL and the NBA licensee at the time. A gentleman by the name of Paul Fireman was founder of Reebok, who did an amazing job. He trusted me and, and, and put a lot of investing behind my ideas.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  And then the thing that was like the loudest was this idea that every artist wanted to be a basketball player and every basketball player wanted to be a rap artist. And I came up with this platform called The Sound and Rhythm of Sport. And we made this commercial for Reebok with Allen Iverson and Jadakiss. And it was explosive. And I had Hype Williams, a music video director, shoot it. And no one thought, like, it was like, this makes, this sounds crazy today. I mean, to think, but it was like, how could Hype Williams, a music video director, shoot a TV commercial? I'm like, I don't even know what you're saying. It's not a TV commercial.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  It's entertaining content. Whether it's a music video, right? Which was Men in Black. Or a 60-second same idea, but you call it a TV commercial only because you run it on television. Not because the format is different, just because you're running it on television. So, music videos ran on MTV. But if you took the music video from MTV and made it a 60-second spot, just run it on television. It's a television commercial.

• 22:42David Senra?

  I heard you like six years ago say, you're like, "Everything is advertising." That like you jumped to advertising earlier. People thought you were bugging. That's the term you used. Like, "Everything is advertising." I just talked to Brian Armstrong about this, founder of Coinbase. And he said the same. It's like, "Everything is marketing." It's just like, you have to entertain or get people's attention. And then you get a message across that serves some kind of thing that you want to happen in your business. In his case, you know, the new products that Coinbase is building or the financial performance of, you know, the stock or whatever the case is. But I love that. Everything is advertising.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Again, at that time, it was just... You know, when you're trying to explain something that you fully don't understand, but you just know it's instinctively correct, it's hard to get people to buy into it. Because they're like... Most people are risk averse. So, it's like, "Why would I... What are you talking about? Like, why would this guy be able to shoot a TV commercial? He's never shot one." I'm like, "Because it's the same thing."

• 23:38David Senra?

  I mean, what is a music video? It's an advertising for a song.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  It's a TV commercial for a song. If you run it on television, right? So, anyhow, we shot this, uh, content as we've evolved. And it blew the fuck up. Because it was Jadakiss rapping to the sound of a basketball bouncing. And Allen Iverson can dribble a basketball and make it sound like a beat. So, it sounded just like any other hip-hop beat, but it was literally a ball bouncing while this guy rapped over it. And the commercial was beautiful. And it was boom. And that changed the trajectory of Reebok. And when that happened, that was a big deal. And then I started doing artist deals around Sneak because I did the Jay-Z S. Carter's.

• 24:24David Senra?

  But that's the first ever non-athlete shoe deal. This is, again, why I wanted to talk to you. You just seen... Stuff before anybody else.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did that. We did the G unit. Fifty was just hot at that time.

• 24:37David Senra?

  What was the marketing? Didn't, and you guys did something smart, if I remember correctly, like wasn't, didn't Jay put out a mixtape around?

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:44David Senra?

  It was like the S Carter.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  We did the S Carter mixtape, which was a mixtape around the sneaker, marketing the sneaker, the S Carter's. Then we did a commercial with Fifty and Jay-Z. No one understood it at the time, like, why would you be doing this? Like, why are we spending money on this? And I'm like, at the time, all I could say to them was like, it's like a commercial. Imagine trying to sell a product to housewives, to women overall, and you got Martha Stewart and Oprah. That's what this is. This is like the equivalent of that level of power between these two guys. And that's the only way I could explain it to somebody who didn't understand it, you know?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  And, you know, the S Carter's were big, the G units were big, then I did the Pharrell sneaker. And Pharrell would tell you, that was his foray into footwear and gives me a lot of credit for like his path in the design, because I gave him that opportunity very early. What was clear was Nike wasn't doing lifestyle at that time. They just thought like Just Do It was all about athletes and performance. So what I was trying to do was

• 25:57Speaker 01

  tap into the truth, which was people were wearing sneakers not to perform at all, just so it could match their hat, their shirt, that other thing. It was, it was fashion. So I just started choosing guys that didn't want to work out or run or jump at all. Jay-Z being the number one version of that. Like, he doesn't, right? He doesn't give you the athletic vibe. He gives you the vibe of like, I'm chilling. And then it was Fifty and then it was Pharrell. And it was all just playing along the lines of fashion.

• 26:29David Senra?

  Dude, how many people are wearing Jordans that are playing basketball on them?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  It was the only white space left because there was no way I could market Reebok as the age, as the agency of record at the time. I told Paul, I'm like, Mr. Fireman.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  There is no way I can convince a 16 year old they can jump higher or run faster than Nike and Reebok. Like, like that's not happening. Okay. So like, let's go into the other thing, which is the non-performance stuff. And it got so hot that we got a chance to go into the performance business again. And we were trying to sign Kobe and I have great stories of, you know, pitching Kobe. First of all, I signed Kobe to a record deal, recording contract when he was a rookie. And then we pitched LeBron. That's how me and LeBron and I became good friends to this day. When we pitched LeBron and he, um, he has a famous

• 27:23Speaker 01

  story of LeBron. Uh, we're pitching him for Reebok. We, you know, they send a plane. Everybody wants to sign him. I, I tell Paul, while he's coming from Akron, we're flying from New York to, uh, to Boston to meet him there. And I'm like, Paul, we do this in the record business and it works. You give an artist an advance and you give it, you bring the advance right there.

• 27:49David Senra?

  Like in cash and a duffel bag?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  It, it, well, that has been done in the music business, but this was like, this was gonna be a check. And I, I seen Paul fucking, this was some ball and shit, call his wife, because he couldn't get the company to get the check. And his wife wrote a personal check for $10 million. And the driver, when we landed, had the check. We went to the meeting and Paul says, LeBron, I know, you know, a hundred million dollars, you know, Adidas is gonna offer that when you go see them next. And then Nike is gonna offer that when you see them. I'll match that deal and give you a $10 million signing bonus right now to not take those meetings. That's the number. We'll give you the number plus the

• 28:33Speaker 01

  $10 million. So Paul took my advice all the way. LeBron, he's, he's going back. He has to be in homeroom the next morning. Okay?

• 28:43David Senra?

  He's in high school, right?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  He's in high school. He's going back to homeroom the next morning. He's in there with his mom and, and his team, his agent at the time. But he's clearly LeBron James. He's, he's making the decision.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  We leave the meeting, he asks for some room, we leave the boardroom. Paul and I, we go in the other room, we're like, oh, you think he's gonna do it? I'm like, man, I think so. Like, it's 10 million dollars, man, the guy. And we're paying him exactly what he's gonna get paid. We're not, this is just a bonus. It's not, this is not coming from the money. This is a signing bonus to sign it now and not take the other meetings. We come back in the room. This 18-year-old kid says, no, I'm betting on myself. He didn't say that, but we knew that. He was gonna take the other meetings. He walked away from 10 million dollars, check signed to his name, to go back to the projects in Akron and back to Homero.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  I, I applauded him. Because I knew at that moment in time that the world had changed. When a young African-American that was in poverty knew that his talent was bigger than that check. It taught me a lot. It taught me a lot of where the world was going and that we were already there. And it's something that I'm proud of him for to this day. Not that Reebok was the bad choice or anything like that. It wasn't even about that. It was the fact that he believed in him more than the money at that moment in time.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  That was a big shift for a community of people.

• 30:35David Senra?

  But I think that's one of the main themes that runs through your entire career. It's like you're encouraging other people around you to like bet on themselves. Even the story you told about the Ray-Bans. We sold the glasses, we didn't get anything for it. Like, I read Andre Agassi's phenomenal autobiography called Open. And he goes out one night, is hungover, and, you know, he's a wild boy. And he winds up playing a tournament the next day. Wins the tournament, but he's wearing Oakleys, like the crazy multicolored ones. And just because his eyes are bloodshot, he's hungover, right? He wins the tournament, there's a crazy photograph that gets put on like the cover of Sports Illustrated. He winds up selling a ton of Oakleys. Did he get equity in Oakley? No, you know what he got? He got a Dodge Viper sent to his house by the founder of Oakley. So it was like, if that guy bought you a $60,000 or $80,000 car,

• 31:20David Senra?

  how much money did he make?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:21David Senra?

  And so your whole thing is just like, why are you giving it away? Won't you? This is very entrepreneurial.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  It happens all the time, again, when the incumbent is already making money doing what they're doing. When you're making all this money, if you're in the record business at that time, think about this. The music business used to sell singles. Right? So you'd buy the single for $4.99 or $3.99. And then the single was a way to get you to buy, ultimately buy into the artist for a less expensive price. And then ultimately, when they dropped the album, you'd buy the album. When the CD came,

• 31:55Speaker 01

  they didn't even fuck around and sell singles no more. They removed the single.

• 31:59David Senra?

  The single was on cassette?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  The single was a cassette.

• 32:01David Senra?

  Okay.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Or 45 or, you know, back before that. But it was a cassette. So when they stopped selling singles, they wanted the artist so badly that one song, one music video, you heard "Hot in Here", and you seen that video, you're $16.99. Without even knowing what song number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 was, you didn't give a fuck. And the industry took advantage of that.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  What's the first single? Let me tell you what happens in that environment.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  You spend all your time making one single. The rest of the album,

• 32:39Speaker 01

  right? So the creativity suffers because they're buying it anyway. So let's just try to make the first single. What's the thing that's gonna work on MTV? And what's the thing that's gonna get on radio? That thing. In fact, a lot of artists would make an album and then go to like all the top producers just to make the first single. So they'd make a whole album with one guy or two guys. And then go to one specific person to make a song that was the radio record. And that song could sound like nothing else on the album. They didn't give a fuck. They just wanted to sell, obviously, the thing. And it worked. So when you're making that margin on that product, the last thing on your mind is,

• 33:20Speaker 01

  who's making money off the glasses? All of the shit that's being sold in a music video.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  What are the other businesses that we should be building on the back of this? Because we're giving it away. And that's what Jimmy talked about. Why don't we own the end customer? Why don't we build businesses with artists? Why don't we build businesses with artists? When I first started United Masters, my music distribution company, the first thing I tried to do, the only thing I wanted to do, was build a universal, not a record company agnostic CRM system. My whole idea was like, if, like anything else, you go on Amazon, it's like if you buy this, then you buy that, right? So they, if they're selling you toilet tissue or whatever, they're selling you, the next thing is a plunger.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  There's this, there's other things that have associated with that product that you just bought. My whole thing is that if you listen to Yeezy, Yeezus, the Kanye album, Life of Pablo, you know, 30 times, why the next thing, I'm referring to you a pair of Yeezys? Or a hoodie that he made? It's not that. And the record companies and the artists had no CRM tools. Every other, you know, product that I've seen, digital product, you found a way to go, okay, the margins are going to be a lot lower, but the remarketing is going to be cheap because I know who the customer is. So even if I make this amount of margin on the first transaction,

• 34:50Speaker 01

  the fact that I now have your name and your taste, I can sell you the next product. This is what you talk about, that you learned Jeff Bezos knew about selling windshield wipers. Once you bought on the platform, and he had your intelligence, your information, he could find out what else you wanted, and he could speak to you directly. The record business doesn't own their customers at all. I mean, at all. I have a theory around this, at least as of late. If the artists knew who their fans were, they wouldn't need a record company at all.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  If you're an artist and you have 200,000 people who love you, how much money you can make with those 200,000 people selling them higher margin items? Or selling them the music and then the higher margin items like hoodies and t-shirts and merchandise and other things that go back to the essence of why they fell in love with you in the beginning? When the record companies cut the deal with Spotify and this whole 70-30 split, they had all the leverage in the world. In fact, they took equity in Spotify. The record companies own a piece of Spotify. It was a big thing that came out. It's like, was that value passed along to the artist? Who was the leverage that they utilized in order to get that equity?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  But putting that to the side, rather than negotiating the equity, why wouldn't you renegotiate the access to the data? The real access to the data? So that the artists would know, if you listen to that, if Taylor Swift has a fan that listened to her album 700 times, why wouldn't Taylor Swift be able to communicate directly with that artist? To sell them the ticket directly, sell it to fan, the gear directly? The record companies, I believe, never negotiated that when they had that leverage because they didn't even want to have to share that information with the artist. Time has passed and maybe there's privacy laws around it, but they could have still had the option to opt in. Like, do you want Taylor Swift to be able to contact you?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. Do you want Kendrick Lamar to be able to contact you? Fuck yeah. Beyonce? Hell yeah. But they didn't negotiate that because they may would have to share that. And once the artist had direct connection to their fans, record companies would then become obsolete. I was trying to build CRM tools for the artists, like any other brand would have CRM tools. These CRM tools would allow you to navigate with your customer and that you could be able to manage that relationship. The rude awakening was there is no data to be gotten. There's no data to be gotten, meaning that...

• 37:38Speaker 01

  The data source, Spotify, or YouTube, or whatever it was, were not gonna ever give you the user IDs, right?

• 37:49David Senra?

  So like on- Apple wouldn't either, either, right?

• 37:50Speaker 01

  No, well, Apple, no. They're not gonna give you the user IDs. So it's not like if that phone downloaded something, you know, or streamed something X amount of times, I wouldn't be able to send an advertising directly to that phone. They wouldn't allow you to do that. Years later, there was a law around GDPR that talked about this. So that definitely got in the middle of this. And it was around Facebook and voting and things of that nature that sort of brought this to light. But prior to that,

• 38:24Speaker 01

  if it would have been shared

• 38:27Speaker 01

  and the artist had an opportunity to get that intelligence

• 38:32Speaker 01

  and the fans had a chance to allow the artist to get an opportunity to that intelligence through those platforms, I think we'd be talking about a completely different industry today. When I was building United Masses, and I started in 2017,

• 38:48Speaker 01

  the idea about building an independent distribution company was driven by the premise that the record business at one point, for many, yet for decades, since its inception, was you have to find a record company in order to find an audience.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  You get a record deal.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  We control radio. We're gonna get you on the radio. We're gonna get you on MTV. Oh, my God. Because trying to get on MTV and radio, if you didn't have a record company at a point in time, was almost impossible. Since this whole digital content revolution, artists would find audiences before they found the record company. So if they found the audience before they found a record company, why would they have to give over their rights? Why would they have to sell? Off their name, image and likeness in perpetuity to somebody because they gave them a half a million dollars when they were 18, 19 years old in the beginning of their career. So we started United Masters with the premise to invert the economics so that the artists

• 39:52Speaker 01

  got the lion's share of the economics because they actually did the work.

• 39:57David Senra?

  They kept the ownership. That's why you called it United Masters.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Yes, you got it. And Ben Horowitz was a big supporter of that in the beginning. Tim Cook strongly believes in that. Tim Cook is a big believer. It's the Apple ethos to support and give the creative tools. They believe in that, whether it's an architect, a designer, or artists themselves. They believe in that at its core. So it's not like it's an idea that doesn't have massive support behind it. But it takes a generational shift because the artists for so long, it was a Stockholm syndrome. They're stuck in these deals. They believe that if I'm signed to a record company, A, I'm gonna get a lot of

• 40:39Speaker 01

  money. They're gonna make me global. I'm gonna get awards, you know, and recognition around it. So I'm gonna keep doing that. Then you have another generation of artists that are coming up right now that are like, are you fucking crazy? I own my shit. I market myself anyway. These guys don't do anything for me. At least I don't believe they do. I rely on myself first and foremost. I'm the best marketer of myself. I'm the best marketer to my audience of myself that anybody else can do, a third party can do. So I'm betting on that. So you have artists, independent artists right now that are blowing the fuck up, that are done really well. You know, we have an artist on United Masters, a big

• 41:20Speaker 01

  extra plug. He's made 20 million dollars this year. I mean, more, more, more, more. And it's his and he owns this and it's something that he can give to his family, his kids. He owns it. This idea, when you seen years ago, like, people ask, like, when Prince wrote slave on his face, Prince changed his name from Prince to a symbol to get out of a contract.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Because Warner owned his name, image and likeness. So he said, if I change my name to a symbol, doesn't that navigate me out of the contract that I signed? He wrote slave on his face. One of the most successful artists of all time, wrote slave on his face because he knew that I don't even own the shit that came out of my brain.

• 42:08David Senra?

  That's crazy.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  When you explain this to technology companies, I have explained this to Larry Page was the first guy that invested in United Masses. I said, could you imagine if every time a seed investor came in, they actually owned the IP and intellectual property? They owned it? That's what it is in the music business. The guy comes in first and gives you a check for half a million dollars. He owns your name and image and likeness. The people look, you can't be fucking. That can't be real. I'm like, I swear to God, that's real. That's why these artists, at the end of their career, they die broke. Cause they don't own anything. It's owned by the person who discovered them. It's not owned by them. Even though they have the unique gift

• 42:55Speaker 01

  to create something that others can't, they don't own it.

• 42:58David Senra?

  They actually have the thing that's rare and therefore valuable.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yes. And why I love where we are today and the democratization that digital has provided is that an artist can now, and not only musicians,

• 43:18Speaker 01

  artists, painters, painters, but like, I'm a painter, I draw. Substack, I'm a writer, I'm a journalist.

• 43:26David Senra?

  Podcasters.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Podcasters. Like, I don't need

• 43:32Speaker 01

  the publisher to be a third party that owns this anymore. I can find an audience on my own.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  And the power in that and the economics in that.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  And the long-term value of that is something that we've never seen before in the hands of the actual creators.

• 43:54David Senra?

  Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world. So you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers.

• 44:35David Senra?

  The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, "We built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories and ideas to every corner of the world." Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. There's a long history of the music industry, you know, the executives in the industry essentially fucking over the artists. I read Jay-Z's fantastic book, Decoded, and he talks about reading this book called Hitmen. And I think it was all the stuff, crazy shit going on in the 70s and 80s.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, 60s, 60s, yeah, 50s, 60s, 70s, it's crazy. You have to read that book. It's almost like reading, it's like the movie that they turned, the book they turned into Goodfellas.

• 45:31David Senra?

  Really?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  That's what it feels like when you read it. What was the name of the book they called that turned into Goodfellas, the movie?

• 45:37David Senra?

  I don't remember. But Jay-Z's point was just like, all he did is like, I just read the book, I'm like, I'm gonna avoid that.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Wise guys.

• 45:43David Senra?

  Okay, so I read, Jay-Z's like, I read the book and I'll just avoid doing that. And then he came into the game independent, I think he, the founding of Rockefeller. So he got it and he got it back in, what, 96? How the hell are you still telling this story in 2000?

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, what's that? You know, Jay got it because he was turned down. Record companies wouldn't sign him.

• 46:05David Senra?

  Okay.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  A guy that talented, they wouldn't sign him. He had no choice but to go independent.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  He figured it out. And then when he got independent, he obviously figured it out. Master P figured it out. Cash Money figured it out. To a certain extent, because there's different versions of this. There's different versions of guys figuring it out. Like, there's a figuring it out where you're like, I own the whole fucking thing. It's mine. And you're my partner, and I pay you a percentage, right? Then there was a version of it like, look, I'm not going to allow one contract to hold everybody, which was Wu-Tang's thing. The RZA had a record deal, and it didn't work. Then he came back and invented this thing called Wu-Tang. And he made sure that he did not sign what he had signed prior, uh, when he was Prince Rakim and artist.

• 46:56David Senra?

  What was the difference?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  All those artists could, could be allowed to sign. Wu-Tang was signed in one place, but the artists had uh, the right to sign in different places. They weren't stuck under one agreement. Right? So what happened in the record deal, like if I signed the group, then if anybody in that group ever went solo, they also had to be with me. That's what record companies' deals looked like at the time. So if I signed you in a group, if you decide to break off from the group, you're with me first. When he did the deal immediately with Wu-Tang, none of them had to sign with the record company that originally BMG RCA, which originally gave them the deal. That was a breakthrough, that guys got hot off the album, the Wu-Tang album, and then was signing deals in other places. People had never seen that before.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  And then when you seen Master P No Limit, this was independent and putting out number one, top five records every week. And talking about how much money they were making, selling records out the trunk. It was like, what are they doing down in New Orleans? These guys were finding ways in resourceful manners and were making a ton of fucking money.

• 48:04David Senra?

  But how did they get in, how did they get on radio or MTV if they were independent?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  This idea, the power of emerging subculture.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  They were building something on the way up. Remember, man, if you get 200,000 people who love you, the amount of money in that is tremendous and they grow with you. They didn't need MTV and radio at the time. They may have had a local radio station. They were down in New Orleans. They had a community of people who bought into this idea and they were building No Limit Records and that contagion and growth kept going throughout the South. And, and you know, at some point MTV had to play it. You couldn't be left out. Right? So it wasn't about you, you, you needed it at some point because it was so popular versus it needing you to break.

• 48:54David Senra?

  Okay. So this is the difference between like top down, record companies at the time. They're like, we have these relationships with national radio and MTV. We're gonna make you a star. We're gonna push it from the top down. Master P and these other guys, they did bottom off. I remember hearing Sean Parker on an interview one time. He said this unnamed record company executive was just like, you know, give me anybody in the world, even though they're not talented. And with enough push behind them, I can make like them a popular musician. Basically saying they controlled the system.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did control, they did control the system, system. They control radio.

• 49:25David Senra?

  Is this related to what you were saying earlier? How mediocrity was like

• 49:28Speaker 01

  rewarded. Yeah. You, you know, and I, I'll use references like, like I said, you know, Kenny G, who's a great musician or Michael Bolton and that. And sometimes I just say these things because I know it brings like shock value, but just to make the point, I shouldn't know the Britney Spears song, Oops, I Did It Again. There's a lot of NSYNC songs I shouldn't know. But they were pounded in your brain. You couldn't avoid it because MTV and radio, local radio, they had a monopoly on it. So all of a sudden you started listening to this music. By the way, I grew up my whole life thinking Hall and Oates was black. Because you wouldn't even, you, you would listen to these songs. And they were like,

• 50:13Speaker 01

  there were times in the seventies where there weren't a music video. So you'd hear the voices. And like a lot of these artists were trying to sound African American or like R and B artists. So you'd hear it and you'd be like, I guess they are black. And then you find out, you know, obviously they were not. But like,

• 50:31Speaker 01

  When they control the system,

• 50:34Speaker 01

  they could push something on you. And the power of repetition will force you to have some recall. Whether you like it or not, now that's a whole nother story. But the awareness is more than there. And like, if I got fifty, if I got a fifty fifty shot, because you already heard it, I love those odds versus the shot that you never heard it at all.

• 51:02David Senra?

  Repetition is persuasive. So, again, I think we both have a love of, like, I love to study the advertising industry. And I'll go back to like the early nineteen hundreds when it was just copywriters for the best advertisers. But even if you think about the fifties, the sixties, when they're building all the the massive advertising firms, the global advertising firms on Madison Avenue. It's like they all talk about this for a hundred years. You're not repeating your ads enough. Repetition is persuasive. Do it over and over and over again. If you see all the deals we do with our partners, I don't, you can't buy an ad on any of my podcasts, a single ad. You're doing at least a year, in many cases, many, many years. You have to repeat this. It's so important. So, going back to, you're realizing, hey, what is the purpose of a record label? You're essentially creating almost like a record label infrastructure in your, in United Masters or through United Masters.

• 51:47David Senra?

  But you're, the artists maintain ownership.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:50David Senra?

  So you're taking the parts like, you guys can market better than we can. You have control. Like, I've watched all your interviews. I love Russ, the rapper Russ.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Love him.

• 51:58David Senra?

  You've done a book. Yeah, you've done, I've taken so many ideas.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  He's so fucking good. The way he's so, the way he explains it, his passion around it, dope as fuck.

• 52:09David Senra?

  And I've taken ideas from where he markets his music to the way I run my podcast. It's the exact, I don't see any barriers here. It's the same thing, whether you're a filmmaker, you mentioned a writer earlier, a rapper, a podcaster, a founder, it's all the same thing.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Painter.

• 52:22David Senra?

  Russ is a rapper, but he's really an entrepreneur. His product is.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  He is.

• 52:26David Senra?

  Yes.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  First of all, A, he is an entrepreneur. Like, full stop. A good one. A really good one.

• 52:34David Senra?

  We should tell people that don't know him. He's the first person in history to, a single person that wrote, recorded, engineered, produced, mixed, and mastered an album that got a billion streams. A single person.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I don't know all of the stats around him as a artist. Him as a business person and the way he, how prolific he is at explaining his business and the amount of songs he puts out. Knowing that, you know, if you don't like this song, I may put out 12 songs and then you like the 13th song and then all of a sudden you like song number one and then his whole catalog. When he was explaining that at the beginning of his, you know, of my sort of entering his journey, I was just blown away by how prolific he was as a business guy to explain it. And then, you know, Chance the rapper. Like, there were a lot of guys

• 53:28Speaker 01

  that took independence in the whole digital era and like took it and turned it on its head. And they were proud about it. I don't want a record deal. Are you fucking crazy? Pay, you can't give me $200 million. You can't buy me out of this shit. That was the next step. Like when I just talked about LeBron James saying I wouldn't take the $10 million. That's Russ saying I wouldn't sell my publishing for $200 million. Right? Like, you start to realize the power of ownership.

• 53:56David Senra?

  Here's a funny story I gotta tell you about Russ. He might have said it to you on the interview you did with him, which, again, both of them were excellent. When his business manager said, hey, this company wants to buy, you know, your catalog, he goes, I just need to know the number. You obviously know the answer is no. I just want to know the number so I can put in a song. I can rap about the fact I turned down this much money.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  LaRussel, Russ, Toby Niewe, Big X the Plug, like, but it's so Larry June, this Brent Fires, there's so many artists that your audience may not even know their name. They're making so much money because they're independent. And now you're watching the artists that were signed for many, many years. Usher's an independent artist now. Usher's independent. Usher was the first independent artist to play the Super Bowl. Then Bad Bunny. Bad Bunny's an independent act.

• 54:48David Senra?

  Are you serious?

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Yes, he signed to Remus. Bad Bunny's an independent artist. These, these are, these guys are making a fortune.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  They own themselves. That's the future of the music business. That's the future of all of these media businesses. You own this podcast. What does it mean? The power of that. Fucking look at Joe Button. When I talk about Russ, I think about Joe Button too. Joe Button walked away from a lot of money, man. And, you know, forget me and going into the advertising business. This guy left, you know, a rap career, whether he left the career or the career left him. He went into the podcast business very early. And he's done an amazing job. Then he turned down Spotify and went to Patreon.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Because he wanted to work directly with fans. I don't want any obfuscated version of money. I want to know exactly what, I want to get paid exactly what I deserve. Because I have the audience who pays me directly. And he uses Patreon.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  These are great things that are breakthrough in business models.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  I look at all of these artists

• 56:04Speaker 01

  as solo entrepreneurs, as SMBs. The SMBs that used to be flower shops and bodegas and this, that and the third are now streamers,

• 56:17Speaker 01

  independent artists,

• 56:20Speaker 01

  influencers, podcasters,

• 56:25Speaker 01

  vloggers and writers on Substack, they're the new SMBs.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And I don't think industries has caught up to that idea yet.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  I don't think the insurance companies understand it. A lot of the new fintech companies understand that. But there's so many incumbent industries that don't see that yet. So they're still looking at the old. Uh, version of SMBs and they're so locked in with that.

• 56:57David Senra?

  You know who gets it? Like it's the founder led companies. Because just like you had that observation when you were 29 years old, it's like, I'm in this industry. That's like maybe dying or this can't be sustained. It's being attacked by technology. Right? You're not going to sell these high margin CDs anymore when Napster exists. Same thing that Jimmy Iovine realized, you realized as well. And so like even look at like some of our big partners, like I'm a huge partner with this company called Ramp. It's like this is a founder led company.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Ramp is awesome.

• 57:23David Senra?

  They think like founders and they place a huge, huge, I should have a multi-year bet on me. Because of all they asked, they didn't, there's no numbers. You talk about being intuitive. They didn't even know how big the audience was. All they said is like us and all of our founder friends, the most elite people are listening to you. Let's figure out how to work together.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  100%.

• 57:40David Senra?

  And that's what founders think. He's like, I don't care if State Farm hasn't come into podcasting yet, or they have now. But like all the money that's flowing from TV and radio is going, going into podcasts.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  I've seen this with Cash App was in very, very early. It was a marketing guy at Cash App. So fucking good. Seen it early. Placing bets on emerging subculture.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Is on its path to mainstream culture.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  So placing the bets on the right guys who are driving this emerging subculture, whether it be podcast or whatever it may be as a medium. It's just a matter of time before those things become the next mainstream, go to mass consumed product.

• 58:23David Senra?

  And the founder, I mean, dude, I've talked to Mark Zuckerberg about this. I've talked to Jeff Bezos about this, to Daniel. Like they see what I'm doing. They get it completely. They understand the power of this, especially when you have a very, you know, wealthy.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  You, you, you know, you, you do the work.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  The one thing about you is that you actually do the work. You're well read. You understand the topic of each person that you are interviewing. This whole idea now that, and you and Jimmy sort of got into this.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  And I'm a big believer in this, that we're at odds.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  With fame and talent.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Fame and talent historically always had this relationship where they knew how to coexist. In fact, fame was an accelerator would blow the flames so that talent can actually get bigger.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  So they had a great partnership.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  And I would say in the last 20 years, maybe longer, but like 20 years, it's become very profound that those two things are at odds. In fact, fame believes it doesn't need talent at all. And I've come to the realization that talent believes that. And what I mean by this is this whole idea that you are famous without having any talent. Or if you're talented, you actually will put the talent to the side and do the thing that will get you most famous, rather than actually utilizing your talent to get that attention and that fame. And that's a very dangerous aspect of where we are in society when talent is not being

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  incentivized to be talented, where fame is being incentivized to be famous for things that are not necessarily driven by talent.

• 1:00:21David Senra?

  Yeah, it's not a world I want to live in.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  It's the world that we do live in. And

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  I don't know what the long-term unintended effects are of this, but I've seen this affect many different industries, including politics, where fame is more important than the talent.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  In corporations, in politics, in popular culture, whether it be films or podcasts, you name it. That fame is the driver, not the talent itself. Now, you find the rare cross-section of talent, you do all the work, and you have a great follow. But that's rare.

• 1:01:08David Senra?

  I think this also plays into what you're saying is like, why independence and retaining ownership is so important. Because like, Russ may not have, obviously, the audience that Taylor Swift does, but Russ makes a phenomenal living. You know, I think he's got like, whatever, 10, 15 million listeners. So it's not a small audience, but it's not, you know, it's not 100 million monthly listeners. But if you own it and you retain control, his unborn grandkids are already rich.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  And if you really owned it, he would have the CRM intelligence around the people who loved him. And that's the next step of the music business. That's where these industries have to go next. That's because the creators are going to demand that. They're one step removed from demanding that. Like, I need to know exactly who listens to this podcast. I don't give a fuck, or you're not going to get the podcast. Whoever the distributor is, whoever the platform is, you know what?

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  The next evolution of this in the next three years, I have to be able to go direct and I have to be able to collect that fan data. I want to send out the newsletter. I want to send out the fan, uh, sort of correspondence. Like, it's the platform you own. I now want to be able to have my direct relationship with the fan. And somebody's going to build the next platform that's going to become the one that drives consumption, is the one that allows that to happen fluidly. That's for certain. Book it. That's what Jimmy's talking about, what he wants to do with his company. That's, that's exactly what we're doing. That's, that's why you're seeing these shifts right now in the marketplace.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  There's a company called Eleven, uh, or Even, rather. Eleven Labs is different, right? Even-

• 1:02:50David Senra?

  We use Eleven Labs for our transcripts. Shout out Eleven Labs.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Eleven Labs is, does any Andreessen Horowitz, uh, led company? They're fucking awesome. They invest in, and they believe in founders. They believe in CEOs. They bet on good CEOs. They have great CEOs in their portfolio.

• 1:03:05David Senra?

  What does the company even do?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Even allows artists to sell directly to their fans. And they're selling, uh, merch and vinyl, and vinyl is now considered merchandise.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  And a lot of the independent artists have used them for a while. And now artists on labels have used them and they have found success using their platform to sell directly. And now UMG is moving in that direction. They just signed a deal with them. So I guess the good news out of all of this, since we started United Masses, is that the independent music space, and there's a lot of us, have outgrown on the frontline the major labels. So if you talk about new releases, market share, the independents have, obviously the record companies make a lot more money, they have catalog and all these other things.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  But because of that trend line, what the major labels are doing now are borrowing tactics from the independents, including buying the independents. UMG just completed the sale of, the purchase of Downtown Records, which has a lot of independent, all independent music assets. And Sony has an independent, the fastest growing part of their business is a company called The Orchard, which is all about independents, which is where Bad Bunny, for example, is signed to, or through his company Remus. So the majors are now following the independent. Watch and see what happens. Pay attention to what Ryan Coogler has just done with Sinners. Oh, what's that?

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Oh, so Ryan Coogler, top three, if not the best director of Fruitville Station, and obviously Black Panther, and now Sinners, which got nominated for the most, you know, Oscars and probably ever, I think 16 is the most ever. The rights of that movie reverts back to him. So what he did when he negotiated his deal with Warner to put out Sinners, which he wrote and directed, was that he would only put it with a studio.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  That would allow him to get the rights back in a certain period of time. So they put up the money and he gets, that is unprecedented in the film industry. What we just talked about is happening in the music business with Russ, does not happen in the film industry. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars as the initial bet. He said, you're not getting the movie, you're not getting my intellectual property unless you allow me to, this movie to revert back to me. I'm not giving this to you. They agreed to it. The movie went on to make $400 million at the box office. It's the most awarded movie, definitely this year, probably ever with 16 Oscar knobs.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  What do you think every other director and film producer is thinking right now? Cause once you break that ice, right? That's, the door is now open. I want Ryan Coogler's deal.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  I want to get that. I want, I want ownership. That's where this is going. Ben Harwood said to me, you know, we were sitting there one years ago, he said, you know, he talked about the evolution of like the workforce and it like, it went from the indentured servant to the slave, to the employee, to the owner. We're at the owner. People want ownership, whether it's stock in the company or ownership of a print or ownership, you know, in the, in the art business. You know, one of the big thing with artists is like, artist sells, gallery finds artists. Artists work, gallery markets artists and sells to, you buy it.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  You buy it for, you know, a hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Artist is so happy, you know, David owns his work. David sells that work that he paid for a hundred thousand dollars for $10 million. Artist doesn't get any of the lift from the, from the hundred thousand to the 10 million. Artist feels like, why don't I get a carry on all of this? It's, it's my name, it's my, my intellectual property. How come I don't get a piece of this? You're going to start to see that take place when artists sells work and they get a carry every time that work is sold.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  The galleries, which are the, at this point, necessary middleman, because the galleries are like, you wouldn't have an audience if it wasn't for me.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  As everything else is taking place, you're going to start to see the galleries start to lose relevance because the artists are going to start finding audiences directly without needing a gallery to authenticate the fact that they are great artists. And this is where the world is going.

• 1:07:44David Senra?

  Yeah, the common theme through everything we're talking about is just the constant elimination of middlemen. Brian Halligan founded HubSpot 20 years ago, and he has this line about AI that I keep thinking about. He said, "Most companies are using AI to make their teams more productive, but the companies that will thrive make the company itself the intelligence." And that is exactly what HubSpot does. HubSpot gives you AI that works, AI that actually knows your customers and your business. Your AI needs to know what you know, your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't. HubSpot connects AI to your real customer data. So when it writes an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago. It knows what campaign brought them in, and it knows that they already contacted support twice this month. And that's when you start seeing actual results.

• 1:08:29David Senra?

  Visit hubspot.com to learn more. That's hubspot.com. So we've been talking a lot about like ownership, going your own path, making your own independent decisions. We had dinner at our mutual friend Rick Gerson's house several months ago, and you told this amazing story.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Rick Gerson just got paid.

• 1:08:45David Senra?

  He's coming on the show. We'll let him talk about that.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Go ahead and get out.

• 1:08:52David Senra?

  No, no, that's staying in. He definitely did an incredible deal just now, which we're going to talk about on the podcast. But something you told me that night, which was very fascinating is like, I really admired the fact that you like bet on yourself, just like you talked about LeBron betting on himself, the people you respect the most. Because like, people don't understand, you built a phenomenally successful, not only was translation influential, but it was making a ton of money. And you took the unusual, another unusual decision to roll that in to United Masters.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24David Senra?

  Can you talk about that?

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I believe strongly that music and marketing, at least the segment that I focused on with translation, is the same customer. And if I'm going to make marketing ideas that focuses on, you know, Gen Z primarily and understands that culture is what drives decision-making.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  If I have a music company that distributes artists at scale, I'll be able to glean intelligence from that in order to make that a marketplace offering that no one could fuck with. That was really what I was, the idea. Like, in my heart of hearts, building a company today, if you want to disrupt and do something that is groundbreaking, you have to live at the convergence of culture, technology, and storytelling. They have to be able to coexist. The culture people can't be too cool for the technologists. The technologists can't be too nerdy to give a fuck what culture's talking about. Like, these things must work as one. So when Jimmy was talking about his school at USC,

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  and he talked about like, so, you know, software people don't make hardware because they don't respect design, or these, these worlds must collaborate. So the, the, the emotion that brings these things together are, obviously, it's curiosity, but the emotion that drives it is empathy. You have to have empathy for things that you actually don't understand and know that the power of these things working together is going to create something phenomenal. Bono said something to me one time, which is so profound, that we should all take with us, which is you can get anything done in this world if you're willing to not take credit.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  So this idea that you're going to put the idea of doing that thing, and you're not going to let the politics of who gets the credit for it affect everyone's incentive for doing that thing? If you can actually remove that

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  feeling of needing to be self-applauded for doing that, you can get anything done. And I believe in building a company that's disruptive to be able to get culture technologists and storytellers to work together, they have to be able to put themselves second to the idea.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  And being service to that idea.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  And that's the company I'm building. And that's the company I want to be a part of. That's the only thing I want to do is be a part of things like that. That bring worlds together. And I did that in the music business. I I was always working on like, you know, how do we tell stories that are going to bring that and that together? So whether it be basketball and and and that or or, you know, Eve and Gwen Stefani. You know, these things that I was working on was always about like, if you could put two worlds together, you're going to find a synergy that's going to compound each one of those worlds as individual worlds.

• 1:12:37David Senra?

  Yeah, you kind of you like a habitual like line stepper. You don't really respect boundaries between anything else because you don't think there should be boundaries. Like even your decision to sign.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  I don't believe it.

• 1:12:47David Senra?

  Exactly. Well, it's obvious to be like me studying your career for so long. But even your decision to sign Kobe.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53David Senra?

  To rap.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Well, let's talk about that first.

• 1:12:55David Senra?

  Let's talk about Kobe.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  God bless.

• 1:12:57David Senra?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  God bless that man and his family. When Kobe came out as a rookie, I had found out that he was part of a group, actually, when he was in high school.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  And they were recording.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  But the one thing I knew about him, which we all knew about him, was his competitive nature with Shaq. Shaq was a successful musician. Shaq sold millions of records. Shaq really sold millions of records. Shaq has a song with Wu-Tang. Shaq has songs with Notorious B.I.G. On Shaq's first album. I know this sounds crazy. So when I went to Kobe, I already knew he wanted to do better than Shaq. So he wanted a record deal. And my bet was that he's going to like really do his thing because he wants. And the first thing is Kobe Bryant. Well, do I sign the group? Three months later, he gets rid of the group.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  And now, he's the solo act. You know, I had a, got a chance to know him really well. He spent a month at my house in New Jersey at the time, working on recording the album. And I watched his routine, which was phenomenal. And I watched this, and I remember watching, I had to book a local gym and watch him shoot a thousand shots. And then he had these tapes of Michael Jordan going right, Michael Jordan going left, Michael Jordan guarding people going right, Michael Jordan guarding people going left. And, you know, you realize that he didn't come to America till he was 15, 14, 15 years old. He had all this footage that I guess the team had made for him of, of these cut downs and shit.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  But watching him go through that taught me a lot about like discipline. And he had that fucking early. I mean, he, obviously, I'm not saying anything that's not obvious to everybody at this point in time. But, uh, his recording career, we made the first song. Uh, it didn't go over well. But he met his wife. He met Vanessa at the set. So it went over very well.

• 1:15:02David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  He met his soulmate on the set. But the experience of working with him was amazing. He worked really fucking hard.

• 1:15:10David Senra?

  Even on rapping?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Man, he immersed himself in it, man. He was around Nas all the time. And, you know, obviously Nas and, and, and Foxy Brown. And, you know, he, he came to New York. He lived with me. I mean, he was in it. He was in it, man.

• 1:15:25David Senra?

  Yeah, I love the idea that's like the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Everything. That's, by the way, if you look, that, that's the one thing I learned in life. That idea, whoever said that coined it perfectly. How you do anything is how you do everything. That guy was hardworking. You know, you ask athletes, whether it be Tom Brady, LeBron, like you go to these guys' lockers, it's perfect. It's, it's, it's how they play on the court is how they fucking make sure that their locker looks. It's like pristine, like all the great athletes. It's not sloppy. It's not sloppy because somebody comes and does it for them. They don't leave it sloppy. They are very pristine. If you just look at a player's locker, it will tell you a lot about how that player's play.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  And that's everything about that. And I was just saying about Kobe, everything he did, he went all the way. And then, and then like he came to New York and I have great stories where, you know, where he was training to play against Allen Iverson and he got like 10 New York City type point guards. And he stood, he, I had a guy go get him for me and my man, shout out to my man Anton, who worked for me at the time in the music business, but always had a love for basketball. He's now a recruiter for the Cleveland Cavaliers. But back then, when I said, look, Kobe wants, he's gonna go to Allen Iverson, he wants 10, like, New York City point guards with handles. Can you find them? This guy go finds him.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  We go to Chelsea Pears, Kobe's, these guys are lined up at half court, 10 of them, with basketballs. Kobe's at half court, and they, at the foul line, and they start coming through, fulls one by one. And they, with a head of steam, they have to get by him and go to the basket. He's stripping the ball, blocking the ball, and as soon as he gets that one, the next one comes. He does not play offense, like an assembly line. I was like, this is after a thousand shots and this, that. It's like, who am I dealing with? And he's an 18, 19.

• 1:17:21David Senra?

  Is there anybody in the music industry that you thought had a Kobe level work ethic?

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Beyonce. She's at the top. I mean, the work, from everything I've seen, like, work ethic, I, I, I know Michael Jordan obviously has a strong work ethic. I, I don't, but I don't know that firsthand. Beyonce, Kobe, Ed Reed, Ray Lewis and Ed Reed.

• 1:17:50David Senra?

  Who's the rapper that has the best work ethic?

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  I would say Jay has the, has, out of all of them, has the strongest work ethic.

• 1:17:56David Senra?

  Okay, I wanted to ask you about Jay-Z. I didn't expect you to answer that with him. I heard you tell this hilarious story years ago on a podcast, that Jay-Z like rolled, I think this before you guys were close, he like rolled up on you with like his crew at the office. I think you were so Sony, you're like, this is the first thing, this is when we started to get close. You told a story that you were barefoot.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16David Senra?

  What, what? I remember I was like, why are you barefoot at Sony and at quarter to Sony?

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Hold on. Yo, I don't know if it's because I'm from the West Indies and from Trinidad and shit. I love, I would be barefoot right now.

• 1:18:27David Senra?

  Well, next.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  I don't know why, I don't know why I'm not barefoot.

• 1:18:29David Senra?

  Next time we do the podcast together.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  I'm always, I'm, I love being barefoot. I feel comfortable being barefoot. My son and my daughter, they take off their shoes all the time. I have a lot of stories about being barefoot.

• 1:18:39David Senra?

  But this is the first time I heard about you. This is like 99 and I think this is like a remix of like a Maya song or something and.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  That was a result of it.

• 1:18:48David Senra?

  He's like, tell us how to holler at me, man.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  That was before that, that led to that. The story is like, obviously I, I had known of Jay and in New York, there was this thing like after, there was like Biggie and Nas and then Jay was the guy coming up behind them in, in, in the New York rap scene thing.

• 1:19:09David Senra?

  Because Illmatic and Ready to Die came out before Resoled Out?

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Before, but people were judging it just rap skills. It's almost like a, it was A, sales and notoriety and skills. And it was just like Biggie was the best, who's, or Nas was the best. Jay was coming up to be in that conversation. He, he says that on a record, people on the streets is watching, who's the best rapper, Biggie, Jay-Z or Nas? He talks about that because that was like a thing. He inserted himself in that conversation.

• 1:19:39David Senra?

  Which is smart.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  It was very smart because the conversation really was Biggie or Nas. But anyhow, there was something going on with an artist that they were supposed to sign and they had never signed them. They basically, let's say you and I, you're doing a deal and then you don't sign the deal for six months, but the paperwork is there and you're basically holding an option without even holding it because you don't sign the deal. So when after six months, oh, there's time that goes by, I'm like, look, I was working with the artist. There was a lot of other interest for more money in the artist and I'm like, he's going to do a deal over here.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  And then Jay and his team were like, no, we could, you keep your word, he has to keep his word. Bro, it's been fucking six months. Like, his word is, like, expired. I mean, it's been six months. And they did not like my response. So, it's nine o'clock in the office and they roll into the office, him and four or five other guys.

• 1:20:40David Senra?

  This is Jay-Z.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Jay-Z, uh, Tata.

• 1:20:44David Senra?

  Had you met Jay before in person or no?

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  I'd seen him before, but like, we didn't know each other like that. And I didn't give a fuck, and neither did he.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  And he come to the office. I'm at Sony at the time, and they're like, so we speak on the phone, and he's like, we're coming to see you right now. I'm like, great. I'm at 550 Madison. And they come upstairs, and I'm sure that, I didn't even notice at the time. They thought, oh, we're going upstairs, and he's probably gonna have some guys, and there's gonna be like a, you know, some face-off or some version of that, I guess. They came upstairs, let them upstairs, you know, front desk, let them up, they come upstairs, and I'm by myself barefoot.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  And I'm like, and you seen their face. And I'm like, listen, I don't wanna have an argument about anything about, anything that doesn't involve big houses. They just start laughing. I'm like, unless there's big houses involved, this is a stupid conversation. And then like, literally after-

• 1:21:46David Senra?

  Wait, wait, wait. What do you mean, I don't wanna be involved in anything with big house? You say it's like a small deal?

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, like money.

• 1:21:51David Senra?

  This deal can't buy-

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  If we're not talking about a lot of motherfucking money, what are we talking about? So, my analogy to that was just big houses. I'm like, are we talking about big houses? Cause it doesn't even matter unless we're talking about big houses. They love that shit. Started laughing, and then Jay and I became friends and started playing Madden all the time, and then realized that our, not realized, but my, my cousin was his cousin. My, uh, my father's brothers, my father's brother married a woman that happened to be connected to his side of the family. They were cousins. So, my cousin was his cousin. So, he was, we were second cousins.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  And like that all came out because we started to hang out with each other. It was like, oh shit. Right. That's true. Oh, fuck. I didn't even realize that. And we, you know, ensued a-

• 1:22:43David Senra?

  And then how soon after did you guys start doing business together? Cause you did-

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  Immediately, immediately.

• 1:22:48David Senra?

  Okay. So you did his shoe deal.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  The first deal we did was I got him the right still D R E for Dr. Dre. So Jimmy comes to me. This is Jimmy.

• 1:22:56David Senra?

  Jimmy Ibe.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Jimmy Ibe. I love that. You're in podcast mode like Jimmy. The audience doesn't know that. Jimmy Ibe. Jimmy Ibe, who was on the last episode, in case you really go and listen to that again. Dr. Dre comes in with the album, The Chronic 2001, which is a fucking amazing album.

• 1:23:14David Senra?

  Classic.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  Right. And he plays it for Jimmy. And Jimmy goes, are you sure that's the, that's it? Dre's like, yeah, this is the shit. Da, da, da, da, da. So Jimmy like, what does Eminem think? Cause Eminem was hot at the time. So I know, so Dre's like, the fuck you mean, what does Eminem think? You know, and I'm sitting in the meeting and Jimmy's, Jimmy's so good at reading the room. He bets on his nose more than his any other sense. Fuck his eyes, fuck his ears, his nose. Does Dre know confidence tell me that this is the shit?

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Or is there any fucking crack in the door that he can go further? And whatever line of questioning he asked led to like, let's try to make one more.

• 1:24:09David Senra?

  Jimmy's always, one more.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  One more.

• 1:24:10David Senra?

  One more.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  One more. So Dre plays a bunch of beats for the one more. And like, I picked five beats. They cut me a CD with five beats to make the one more. And Steve's gonna go help get the record made. Man, I'm honored. I'm, I'm fucking, it's Dr. Dre. Fuck all that.

• 1:24:35David Senra?

  Motherfucking Dr. Dre.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Fucking, motherfucking Dr. Dre. Fuck all that. I can't believe I'm getting on a plane

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  with Dr. Dre beats and I'm flying to New York with it. It is that, there's nothing, there's nothing I could be more responsible for than having a fucking, what this guy cooks on me. And I go to New York, there's a beat I like.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  But I don't say anything. I played the beats for Timbaland. I remember playing it for Timbaland. He's like, "You got fucking Dre beats?" I'm like, "Hell fucking yeah." Played for Timbaland. Timbaland's like, "That shit right there is crazy."

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Call J. Yo, J, listen to this shit. You got fucking doc- Yes, motherfucker. Listen to this.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  He hears that shit. He picks the same exact beat. The same beat I like, Timbaland picked and then Jay-Z picked. I told Jimmy, "See if I can get J to write it." I asked J to write the record and J writes fucking Still DRE.

• 1:25:34David Senra?

  And he doesn't actually write, right? Is this at the point in his career where he stopped writing? He's still doing-

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but he-

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  He fucking raps like a west coast artist. Listen to Still DRE. Every line Snoop says in the hook is fucking J wrote.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  I was like, "This guy's different." He wrote Snoop's parts in that song. He knew west coast lingo. He understood the nuance of being from the west coast. If you listen to that song, talking about the four or fives, talking about khakis with the cuff in the crease. Like, he understood that thing. And they did it word for word and it ended up becoming the first single.

• 1:26:21David Senra?

  You just brought something to my mind because I've been reading a lot about Bob Dylan. And, you know, it's like, I'm always interested in like, who influences the influencers? So like, some of the greatest living musicians are like, like Bruce Springsteen, he's like, "I just followed Bob Dylan." And when you study Bob Dylan's early career, he was so good at mimicking. He could sit in Club Wawa in Greenwich Village and listen to you play and then be able to recreate your sound exactly as if he was you. Kobe could mimic, we're talking about people, Bob Dylan, great, right? Can mimic people. Kobe could mimic, I mean, look at his, look, he could mimic Michael Jordan. Now you're saying the exact same thing. Jay-Z is not from the fucking west coast. He could rap as if he grew up-

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  It's not even a problem.

• 1:27:02David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  It wasn't even an issue. Jay-Z can write R&B songs. What people need to know is I am not taking anything away from the great writers. Maya Angelou, Shakespeare, you name the writers, nothing.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Nas and Jay-Z are in that conversation. They're that good. The way they can paint pictures that you would never with words, like you're watching a film, is a phenomenal gift that because of the art form being rap, gets overlooked because of the beats, the clothing, the media surrounding it. But the words that they paint, the feeling that they can give you. If you listen to those songs, that's why you love it. Because you could actually put yourself in an environment

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  that you didn't grow up in and you could live through those lyrics. They painted the pictures more vividly than anybody else. And one of the greatest things that I've ever done, like people give me a lot of credit for doing many things. The greatest thing I've ever done was be able to manage Nas. One of the greatest writers of all time.

• 1:28:23David Senra?

  You went into the hood, Queensborough Projects, to find this young prodigy. Can you tell that story real quick about like, how the hell did you even hear about Nas? And then what lengths did you go to manage him?

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33David Senra?

  So let me, let me back up too. This is why shout out to our mutual friend Jared Kushner for putting us together, the way I met you. I'll tell the story real quick, right?

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  So listen, Queensbridge Projects, Nas, Jared Kushner. That's what you just did.

• 1:28:48David Senra?

  Yes, exactly. But we're gonna go back. But like this, because I was like a little like sad the first time I met you because obviously Jared's a close friend of both you and I. And he's like, we're having this private birthday party at this private restaurant in Miami. And there's getting that room. There's not a lot of people. There's like eight to 10 people and they're just fucking killers. I heard Steve Stow, I was like, oh shit. And I'm sitting across from you and you're like, who is this big headed fucking dude? That like I was lighting you up with questions all night.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  I couldn't believe that you knew. No, you know what it was? No, no, I'm glad you said that. We never talked about this. I was shocked by the nuance of what you knew. The specificity and the nuance of what you knew. Was alarming to me. It was alarming to me. That's what it was. It was almost like, wow. But it wasn't, it was wow in a scary way. Now that I, but I didn't know what you did.

• 1:29:43David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  Because if you knew that level of information and you didn't do this, it'd be psychotic.

• 1:29:49David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I didn't know what you did. So I didn't know that I was speaking to a journalist or a writer.

• 1:29:54David Senra?

  I'm not a fucking journalist, but that's why I told you.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Okay, what the fuck? You're more than a podcaster.

• 1:29:59David Senra?

  Yeah, but like, that's why I, I was like, Jared, like, I need you to, because it felt that way. I was like, dude, I need another shot at Stout, because this was, and so Jared, you know, says something to you, vows for me, and then Rick.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  No, when they told me what you did, then I got it. But when you started coming at me with these hip hop, fucking Jeopardy, fucking insights, I'm like, fuck off.

• 1:30:19David Senra?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  We're trying to eat a dinner. It's this guy's birthday. You fucking attacking me. Anyhow.

• 1:30:24David Senra?

  Let's go back to Nas.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Let's go back. Jared Kushner definitely played a role in this. Big time. I'm at home. I live at, I live with my parents. And, you know, I decided that I wanted to be in the music business. I didn't know what I was gonna be. I didn't know what was gonna turn out. All I knew was that that was my calling at that time. I, you know, whatever. And what nailed it for me was I was sitting in my, I had my car, it was in my driveway, listening to Nas, "It Ain't Hard to Tell."

• 1:31:01David Senra?

  Before Illmatic's out, or no?

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Yes. There were two singles.

• 1:31:04David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  "Halftime" and then "It Ain't Hard to Tell."

• 1:31:07David Senra?

  Is "Halftime" the one he did with Large Professor?

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:10David Senra?

  Where it's like, uh,

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:12David Senra?

  "Street disciple, my raps are trifle. I assume slugs from my brain just like a rifle." That's one of my favorite Nas lines ever.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  That's "Live at the Barbecue."

• 1:31:19David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  And then "Live at the Barbecue" was him part of a, there's four other rappers on that thing. "Halftime" came out, and "It Ain't Hard to Tell," this is a Michael Jackson sample. And I heard "It Ain't Hard to Tell." I was in my driveway, I was like, I need to know this guy.

• 1:31:39David Senra?

  Prodigy.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  I, I, I can't, this is, the thing that he was saying shit. I, I couldn't even believe what this person was saying.

• 1:31:49David Senra?

  That he wrote it, but he was like sixteen.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  Seventeen, I didn't even, I'm, I can't even believe, it was like so fucking genius. So anyhow, I was on my journey, I'm like, you know, like for me, my idea of trying to figure something out, when there's no clear path, it's to start from ground zero. Ground zero was, where's he live at? Queensbridge Projects, go to Queensbridge Projects. There was no other way to find this guy, not that I knew of at that time. So when I went to Queensbridge Projects, you know, I make this joke, the projects, it's not even a joke, but the projects doesn't have a front door, it's, it's a bunch of buildings, there's no like clear front door. So you basically are walking to a building and I'm trying to find

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  somebody who I could ask, yo, where does Nas live or hang or whatever?

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  And that person immediately goes to get a gun.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Because I looked like

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  one of the guys that they had beef with. And then somebody tell you, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, I think that guy works with these producers and shit.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  And that, that, the second guy who said that happened to give the first guy reasonable doubt to like, go further in, in the question, it happened to be Nas' brother Jungle that I asked. So I did ask the right person immediately, randomly. Uh, or the wrong person, depending on how that thing ended.

• 1:33:23David Senra?

  And yeah, knowing about Jungle, like he's gonna have a gun.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  He's never leave home without it. And

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  that led to me meeting him. And when I met him, I realized that

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  as brilliant as he was and as successful as Illmatic was,

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  that the infrastructure around him did not give him the opportunity to be able to be everything he can be. And as much as I cr- cr- credit for going there and having the guts to do that.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  I was one of 50 people who tried to seem that he was an undervalued asset. That wasn't, it wasn't a unique idea. He chose me. And he put his career in my hands at 25 years old, and I had not done it before. Why he chose me, I'll never understand. I do know that 30 years later, 31 years later, that's my brother. We're really good friends and I, I look at a lot of relationships in the music business. And whether the person's died, or they're no longer friends, or partners, or whatever it may be. Him and I started our careers together. And not one thing has ever interfered in our relationship and us being brothers. I love him.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  He's one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life, in my family's life.

• 1:34:49David Senra?

  That's a beautiful place then. Stout, thanks for taking the time, man. I really appreciate you doing this. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.