0:00:08 you hear that oh paid and done that’s the sound of bills being paid on time but with the bemo
0:00:16 eclipse rise visa card paying your bills could sound like this yes earn rewards for paying your
0:00:22 bill in full and on time each month rise to rewards with the bemo eclipse rise visa card
0:00:27 terms and conditions apply there’s parts of your life where there’s these big question marks that
0:00:34 i’m hoping you can answer for me okay but i want the full truth now i’m nervous screwed up braun is the
0:00:39 man behind some of the biggest stars in the music industry and he built one of the most disruptive
0:00:44 entertainment empires on the planet i’ve never really said this out loud until right now at this
0:00:51 age i feel a lot of guilt because i worked with so many young artists and we were all kids living so
0:00:56 fast and we all wanted to succeed so bad and it wasn’t until i was 40 years old doing some intense
0:01:02 therapy that i realized i was so driven by the fear that i wouldn’t be enough so let’s go back
0:01:06 as a kid growing up i wanted to prove that i could be more than the privilege i was born with and i
0:01:12 created this character scooter because i didn’t think scott could achieve these things that mask made me
0:01:17 absolutely relentless faking it till i make it like i have no right convincing justin and his mom to be on
0:01:22 the first plane they’d ever been on and meet me so what were they starting on my ignorance but it was
0:01:28 also realizing that so much of insecurity drives us and makes us great like now that i’m here i can’t
0:01:32 fail because then everyone will see that i shouldn’t be here so let’s go for it and then we had such
0:01:38 extreme success the whole world thought i was crushing it but i built this mask so big i didn’t realize how
0:01:46 far away i’d gotten from scott so here i am the top of my game i wanted to kill myself it went to a very
0:01:54 dark place and i broke down crying because i spent so much time trying to impress people who didn’t love me
0:01:57 instead of realizing how many people already did
0:02:04 and i was so desperate to do the thing i had never done before what was that
0:02:10 quick one before we get back to this episode just give me 30 seconds of your time
0:02:15 two things i wanted to say the first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the
0:02:20 show week after week means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never
0:02:25 had and couldn’t have imagined getting to this place but secondly it’s a dream where we feel like we’re
0:02:31 only just getting started and if you enjoy what we do here please join the 24 percent of people that
0:02:36 listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app here’s a promise i’m going to make to you
0:02:41 i’m going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as i can now and into the future
0:02:45 we’re going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we’re going to continue to keep
0:02:51 doing all of the things you love about this show thank you thank you so much back to the episode
0:03:00 scooter when i look at your life and i look at the things you’ve achieved
0:03:06 so much of it makes sense but then there’s these other parts of your life where there’s these big
0:03:10 question marks that i’m hoping you can answer for me and maybe the earliest question mark
0:03:18 that remains in my head is what it is that drives you because from an exceedingly young age there was
0:03:23 this dog in you there was something for me when i was going through the research it looked like a chip
0:03:28 on your shoulder or something to prove to someone and so that’s really where i wanted to start i want
0:03:33 to understand your earliest context so i can understand the cauldron that scooter was shaped
0:03:39 in and in the way that that made the boy turn to a man big question but that’s the um the starter
0:03:46 right out of the question in my head you know it’s funny because you started by asking scooter what drives
0:03:53 you and it took me a long time to figure out as an adult that it was actually scott my real name
0:04:01 that was the real driver and i i really created this guy’s scooter when i was an adult because i
0:04:06 didn’t think scott could achieve these things so i almost like created a mask and it wasn’t until i was
0:04:11 40 years old doing some intense therapy that i fell in love with my name again and realized
0:04:21 the answer to your question which is part of it was shame of why with my family’s background
0:04:30 am i getting all this privilege my father’s a refugee from hungary my mother her dad died when she was 11
0:04:35 you know and her mother struggled to to raise them with family help in the catskill mountains my
0:04:42 grandparents were holocaust survivors and here i am first generation born in america and i wanted to
0:04:49 prove that i could be more than the privilege i was born with and i so i had that chip on my shoulder i
0:04:53 wanted to prove my value i wanted to prove i was worthy of this who’s told you you had to
0:05:01 no one i think you know as a kid growing up i read it that way because you know you’re hearing the
0:05:05 stories of the holocaust and my dad every night before he put me and my brother bed would say hey
0:05:11 boys you’re different you’re special i hold you to a higher standard every night before we went to bed
0:05:16 and we started to really believe him of like we need to hold ourselves to this higher standard we need to
0:05:24 do more the idea of failing the idea of looking at my parents and and not achieving it that’s what drove
0:05:30 me and years ago i was on a podcast probably 10 years ago i was doing a podcast with complex with this
0:05:36 guy noah i watched it do you remember the baseball analogy i literally wrote it down in my notes well
0:05:42 i will tell it again but i will tell you on your podcast the difference i hold today okay they asked
0:05:48 me what it takes to be successful and i made up this analogy with baseball and i said imagine
0:05:54 cy young award winner cc savathia at the height of his career is the middle of yankee stadium and they
0:06:00 invite everyone to come hit a home run and they say you get as many a bats as you want and whoever
0:06:04 hits the home run wins like the you know billion dollars million dollars whatever it is
0:06:10 and you can imagine everyone flies in from all around the world people are fulfilling for new
0:06:14 york city the line is crazy and i said the person who’s successful is not only the person who finally
0:06:20 gets up to the plate and swings and misses but stays at the plate and now people are saying are you
0:06:24 kidding me there’s lines of millions of people waiting for their turn and you’re going to stay there
0:06:29 you’re going to stay there and swing again and they swing again and then everyone’s booing and
0:06:34 they swing again and they literally keep swinging as everyone is booing them and booing them and booing
0:06:37 them for hours they’re the most selfish person in the world you don’t deserve to be here get off that
0:06:42 plate this is not and then they finally hit that homer and everyone cheers because oh my god they did it
0:06:49 and i said that years ago and it wasn’t until recently that i realized there’s one difference
0:06:55 in the story i never understood who the crowd was i always thought the crowd was being able to shut out
0:06:59 the outside noise i always thought the crowd was the naysayers and all the people who in your life will
0:07:04 tell you you’re never going to achieve anything and that’s part of it but the crowd all those people
0:07:11 waiting in line is actually you that’s what i never realized till now that that’s the difference
0:07:17 i always thought when people ask me what drove you i thought it was all the outside noise i thought it
0:07:22 was the fear of failure the fear of letting them down all these different things and it wasn’t till
0:07:28 recently when i hit some hardships as an adult and really had to look inward that i realized everyone’s
0:07:33 got the same crowd and everyone has their own issues and everyone has their own stuff and what actually
0:07:39 brings you to success and self-worth and happiness is actually understanding how to stand at that plate
0:07:44 and shut out the noise that’s here not the millions of people around the millions of people are in your
0:07:49 head screaming at you telling you you’re not enough the deep deep lie from the most confident people
0:07:55 they have it so i’m glad i get to finally publicly say the difference because i’ve had it wrong all these
0:08:02 years and in that analogy you talk about how most people come up to the plate they swing once
0:08:07 they leave they hear the boo they leave they go back to their sofa or wherever they’re coming from
0:08:11 or they swing two three times everyone’s telling their selfish and they get you know oh my god and
0:08:16 they’re embarrassed and they leave it takes a lot for someone to stand there in the middle of the noise
0:08:21 shut out the noise and understand the opportunity was given to me i deserve this i’m going to keep
0:08:29 swinging going back to your early context scott yeah your dad irvin yeah he sounds like quite a tough guy
0:08:33 i was reading about some of the things he was saying to you when you were a kid and i was like
0:08:39 dad jesus like when he called you a liar yeah that day and told you about living with integrity etc
0:08:45 my dad grew up tough and it was almost like when you’re being raised by two people who live through
0:08:49 what they live through they were raising him for a world that took everything away from them
0:08:56 they were so loving they still raised him that way and then he was so loving but he still raised us
0:09:01 really tough and i was the first born son so i’m the oldest of all our kids all the kids so he was very
0:09:10 tough on me you’re referencing this time when i was i was probably 14 and he uh he caught me in like a
0:09:17 white lie and usually he would punish me and his punishments could be severe but this time he just said
0:09:21 hey come here i want to talk to you it’s not going to be a punishment this time i just want you to know
0:09:28 you got the gift for gab you could talk your way out of anything and in life i used to tell you if you
0:09:33 lie you’re not going to be successful i want to tell you the truth you’re so good at it you might be
0:09:38 successful but you’re going to be a liar and i’ll know you’re a liar and you’ll know you’re a liar
0:09:44 so do that with what you want and i was so beaten down and ashamed because it wasn’t like raining down
0:09:50 fists on me it was just like the guy i admired so much called me a liar and i walked away i was messed
0:09:55 up and i went back to him and i said dad i want you to know i’m not gonna lie i’m gonna be a man of
0:10:00 integrity i’m i yeah i could do that but i understand this opportunity what you’re saying
0:10:05 and he just looked at me he said okay good he walked away and it was one of the best lessons
0:10:13 ever you know because he was right like you you can win certain ways but you’re gonna know how do you
0:10:20 how do you want to win you want to do it the right way and um and that that tough love i’m appreciative
0:10:26 of it you go to college i went to college you went to college um you started a business at college
0:10:31 doing events yeah well i started selling fake ids that’s what i started first yeah yeah i sold fake
0:10:35 ids because my friend sold fake ids and i thought he had a bad business plan so i was like i’ll market
0:10:43 them you make them um and and quickly uh he broke my golden rule of not keeping in touch with people we
0:10:49 sold to so i stopped immediately because i didn’t want to get caught and um i walked by a nightclub
0:10:54 and said how much would you give me if i brought people here the next week and that was the beginning
0:11:00 of my atlanta party promotion days why did that succeed what is it about you as you look back in
0:11:05 hindsight your skill set your ability that made your party promotion days so successful which eventually
0:11:12 sort of parlayed into music but a combination of things i think one uh i wasn’t a threat to the
0:11:17 freshman girls i had a high school sweetheart at the time i was very committed to her i was a decently
0:11:23 cute kid and i could dance so i was a good person to go out with and have fun so uh that was one
0:11:26 thing number two i was playing sports so i had a lot of friends in different you know teams and
0:11:32 different arenas and three i was in the right place at the right time you know i uh that first party i
0:11:39 threw was successful and at that first party i was approached by a guy named jason weaver he’s an actor
0:11:42 and he was in this old michael jackson movie i used to watch as a kid where he played young michael
0:11:47 and he came in and he said this is crazy because atlanta at that time was very segregated in the
0:11:53 club scene so it was like if you were black you went to a party that you know a club that played
0:11:57 hip-hop and if you were white you went to a club they played techno but i didn’t grow up in the south
0:12:03 and i wanted to listen to hip-hop and rock and roll and we played that and when jason came in he was so
0:12:09 fascinated to see a mixed crowd listening to hip-hop that he was like you want to see how the other half
0:12:15 lives and jason brought me to a club called velvet room on tuesday nights in atlanta georgia it was ran
0:12:20 by a guy named alex gidawan alex was so fascinated to see me in the line he said you know let this kid
0:12:26 in here and alex taught me how to promote he taught me what the value of the door actually was what i should
0:12:31 be getting from the bar and i would start moving my parties and i would spend all my money that i made on
0:12:35 thursday nights at the college party on alex’s tuesday night meeting people meeting rappers
0:12:41 meeting singers meeting different people faking it till i make it and getting people to come back
0:12:44 and forth to my parties and that’s how i started that’s how i met germaine that’s how i met luda
0:12:51 that’s we all kind of came up together relationships why did he give you a foot up so many people are
0:12:55 early in their careers and they’re having these chance encounters but those those aren’t converting
0:13:00 into a relationship and when i look at your life there’s people you meet along the way who end up
0:13:05 being really really pivotal and it appears to me as an objective observer that you have
0:13:09 an ability to form good relationships loyal lasting relationships with people
0:13:16 one i think it’s important to pay people respect you know i came from a household where you respect
0:13:22 your elders and when i was coming up i was 19 so i was very respectful of the people that are giving me
0:13:29 an opportunity and i never forgot who helped me along the way i think the other thing there was a big part of
0:13:35 my philosophy was let your work be the reason they want to meet you i didn’t want to be that kid who
0:13:41 was going hey give me an opportunity and by the way sometimes that works but i wanted them to see
0:13:48 what i was doing and then say come over here i didn’t approach jermaine dupree to work at so so deaf
0:13:53 jermaine heard about me and my parties and he met me and he said you have more potential than parties
0:13:59 why don’t you come work for me i didn’t approach you know ludicrous who was coming up as a rapper and
0:14:03 say let me do that i didn’t a lot of people in my life i i never really approached them and then
0:14:08 even as my life changed and i got older i made a lot of relationships and i have a lot of relationships
0:14:13 now that i’ve never done business with and people go well you have that we can’t why don’t you and it
0:14:20 was because i never wanted anyone to feel probably my insecurity is i never wanted anyone to feel like
0:14:25 i needed them i never wanted to feel like a user it was like my own insecurities of how they might see
0:14:33 me but i think on top of that i just it was that same old thing of never wanting to be in a position
0:14:39 or you’re begging somebody for something i called jermaine and we spoke to him i listened to the
0:14:44 recording again just before you arrived but what jermaine said in that voice recording is also pretty
0:14:50 similar to what your dad said which is they both saw something in you you’re this young kid who doesn’t
0:14:56 have an extensive track record of decades of work but they’re all betting on you in some way as you look
0:15:02 back on your life what were they betting on because they all seem pretty sure that you had something
0:15:09 my ignorance i think i think uh no one told me i shouldn’t be there
0:15:15 and he offered you a job for working at his company which meant you had to drop out of college
0:15:22 i didn’t have to drop out of college i did because um i went to work for jermaine and now i’m traveling
0:15:26 all the time i’m still throwing parties you know we’re gearing up for usher’s album we’re doing this
0:15:31 we’re doing that i’m working with the youngbloods anthony hamilton like it’s and i’m 19 20 years old
0:15:37 and my grade point average went from a three point something to a one point something and they brought
0:15:44 me in on academic probation and they said um you know what’s going on with you is there a drug problem
0:15:49 are you being abused and i said no no no no i’m an entrepreneur i’m building this i want to build a
0:15:52 record label i’m working for jermaine duprey you know and this guy’s looking at me like i’m insane
0:15:58 and he’s this dean looks at me at emory and he says uh do you know the story of robert woodruff
0:16:03 and i said you know robert woodruff he goes yeah the founder of coca-cola the woodruff center
0:16:08 the largest endowment in emory and he tells me this amazing story of this entrepreneur
0:16:15 who created coca-cola who is the largest endowment at our university and i’m so hyped i’m like this guy
0:16:21 gets me he gets me he’s gonna help me i’m gonna be at the school and just when my hopes are really
0:16:25 high he looks at me goes you know we’re gonna do right because we’re gonna stop all the nonsense
0:16:29 you’re gonna focus on school you’re gonna get a degree because the chance of you being like robert
0:16:34 woodruff without an emory degree is like one in a billion and the moment he said it that’s when i
0:16:39 dropped out of school what did your father say before you ask me about my father i want to ask
0:16:45 you a question okay you made a face and you paused yeah because you have your own story of something
0:16:52 happening like this i just have a buy i just have a real hate for dream busters yet every great story
0:16:59 we have of success people tell of that pivotal moment whether it be this dean or michael jordan being cut
0:17:04 by his coach is the varsity coach when he was younger yeah we all talk about the dream buster
0:17:10 as a catalyst to our success and you know in life i’ve i’ve kind of feel like everything even you know
0:17:16 it’s like i have this tattoo amor fati you know from marcus aurelius it’s the concept love of one’s fate
0:17:22 in latin and it’s this concept that you have to love the sorrow as much as you love the joy you have
0:17:26 to love the pain as much as you love the success you know it’s if it wasn’t for that dean i wouldn’t
0:17:30 have had that chip on my shoulder in that moment i would just push you on the fact that like you hate
0:17:36 these dream busters but i am so grateful for them i’m grateful for the dream busters however and this
0:17:41 is actually something i was talking to my friends about in our group chat this morning is it okay in
0:17:50 your view to be driven by haters it’s so funny because if you’re only driven by haters no but i think that
0:17:57 everything plays its role at the time like um robert green he talks about this idea of embracing
0:18:04 your dark side and i think that there’s truth in that like you know if if you continue to fight
0:18:09 something that’s naturally inside of you you’re going to really struggle with it if you can accept
0:18:14 that’s part of you can use it as fuel and you can move right through it so yes there are things that
0:18:20 drive me my curiosity is a big driver for for where i go my children now are big driver for where i go and
0:18:26 how i live my life the people i love the joy that i find the introspective voice that now i can go to
0:18:34 when i’m meditating or you know working you know on myself but doubt from someone who dislikes me or
0:18:40 doubt from a hater i can pretend like i’m zen as much as i want but if i’m being really honest with
0:18:47 myself sometimes that’s the fuel that i need so i think if it’s if it’s solely one thing
0:18:53 it’s not healthy but i think if you can admit you get fuel and different influences from different
0:18:58 places and don’t try and be ashamed of the one that doesn’t fit in your narrative of how evolved you
0:19:05 are yeah you know then it’s okay you established sb projects i believe after leaving germain
0:19:13 when you were 24 25 years old 24 and i read that you’d kind of had this plan to sign three different
0:19:19 types of acts yeah first one asher roth who’s a very famous rapper yeah i wanted to sign three types
0:19:23 of acts and asher fit the mold for one justin for the other and the other one i never found
0:19:29 so asher for people that don’t know is a very successful rapper um what was the mold you were
0:19:36 trying to fit eminem was a very big rapper is one of the biggest rappers of all time and i was in
0:19:42 college and i’m watching all like these at the time these frat guys but they loved hip-hop and i don’t
0:19:48 think they had anyone who spoke to their life so i wanted a kid who could speak to college life who had
0:19:53 the skills to be credible within the world of hip-hop why did you think you could find talent
0:19:59 what did you believe ignorance i’m telling you every aspect of my life if we talked about every
0:20:02 little thing that i’ve been in you said earlier i’ve been in all these different things and probably
0:20:08 your listeners have no idea the hell i am so like what is he talking about but every time i put myself
0:20:16 in that next arena it’s this why not me i had no right contacting asher on myspace i mean at that
0:20:20 point i could say okay i came from so so deaf i was the youngest vice president music because of
0:20:25 germaine when i was at so stuff i was 20 years old so i had the right you know some credibility other
0:20:31 people didn’t have i definitely could do that but to tell him to drop out of college and move down to
0:20:36 atlanta georgia for be the first artist on my record label to you know find justin in canada and
0:20:41 convince his mom and him to be on the first plane they’d ever been on to come down to atlanta and meet me
0:20:50 i mean it was i was 25 years old 24 years old like these are i was insane like you know interesting
0:20:55 when we talk about belief we we ask if you know scooter did you have belief but in your case you had
0:20:59 the lack of limiting beliefs which shows up the same as having yeah there was just like nothing
0:21:06 it wasn’t even because i was so driven by also the fear that i wouldn’t be enough that back then i would
0:21:11 have lied i would have said oh i had such a deep belief in my in my conviction that i could do it
0:21:15 it was partially that but it was also
0:21:22 why not me and no one told me i can’t be here and also now that i’m here i can’t fail because then
0:21:29 everyone will see that i shouldn’t be here and so it was this this fear excitement fear excitement
0:21:34 conviction that’s why i always tell people when i meet them as young people i’m like you don’t have
0:21:39 kids you can starve a little bit your parents want you to go the easiest route because they don’t want
0:21:45 to see you suffer but now is the time when you should be suffering if you want to go for it now’s the time
0:21:51 when you don’t have anyone to support where you can really really go for it because later on in life
0:21:57 you got to think about other people and back then 19 years old to 24
0:22:07 i’m let’s go for it and the second artist that you signed was called justin bieber who’s justin
0:22:18 bieber justin bieber you were 26 years old when you came across justin 25 25 and he was 12 13 13 damn
0:22:25 you discovered justin by watching a so sick video by yeah i will i saw a bunch of videos
0:22:29 from his church his mom had posted and the one that moved me the most was so sick by neil
0:22:39 change my answering machine now that i’m alone because right now it says that we
0:22:45 can’t come to the phone and i know it makes no sense
0:22:59 you must have been asked this a gazillion times but the the actions you then took based on seeing
0:23:10 a kid on on a video are bizarre yeah they are bizarre yeah i like googled uh the background of of the
0:23:17 church to look up the businesses and then called the regions of canada school boards to figure out
0:23:22 where he was because his mom had a different name than him because her name was malette his was beaver
0:23:28 so i went a little crazy to find him within 24 hours once i saw him i kind of knew in person no i knew
0:23:33 when i saw online i was like this is the kid i’ve been looking for and i felt the same way about asher
0:23:40 i mean i relentlessly kind of pursued both of them i had a clear vision to like what i could do and what
0:23:45 he was capable of and it was funny because no one believed me i mean even after we met and we did the
0:23:50 deal and we started working together literally no one believed me and youtube was not a big thing back
0:23:56 then so when i took him from 60 000 views and we took him to like 60 million now he’s like one of the
0:23:59 biggest youtubers in the world and everyone’s like yeah youtubers don’t turn into musicians though
0:24:04 what were the first principles that you saw in him like what were this because i when i think about
0:24:11 having those moments where my intuition just says yes to something tone okay charisma um it was like
0:24:18 he had incredible tone and he had soul and he had charisma he was doing like there was one where
0:24:23 there was an instrumental and he was like jumping around and i just believed in him instantly and then
0:24:28 when i met him he had even more charisma he was funny and i was like all right this kid let’s go
0:24:35 and he was an athlete so he was competitive he was a very special special talent and a very unique
0:24:42 individual and uh those were special times and you flew in to meet him and his mother no they flew to
0:24:47 me oh okay i talked to her for like an hour and a half that night and uh first plane ride they ever
0:24:54 went on and i remember he was so excited that there was a fridge inside his hotel room his mother said
0:25:01 and speaking of you scooter really believed in justin from day one he put everything on the line for us
0:25:09 and they put it on the line for me too you know they believed in a 25 year old kid
0:25:18 and uh we were able to achieve some amazing things and i’m very proud of what we achieved and
0:25:22 always rooting for him
0:25:24 what’s your relationship with justin now
0:25:30 um not the same that it was i think you know these things go the ebb and flows i think
0:25:38 there comes a point where i understand he probably wants to go on and and show that he can do it i mean
0:25:44 we we worked together for so long and we had such extreme success and i think you get to a point as a
0:25:51 as a man where you want to show the world you can do it on your own and uh i completely respect that
0:26:00 and i think at this point that’s what he’s doing and myself and and everyone from the old team is rooting
0:26:06 for him but i stopped managing two and a half years ago and now i’m a cheerleader from the side and
0:26:11 you know i want everyone that i worked with to do well i think sometimes when you walk away from
0:26:16 management i’ve heard managers which i never understood they’d be like deep down when behind
0:26:19 closed doors they don’t want to see them do as well without them it’s almost like
0:26:23 you know them succeeding is is tarnishing your legacy
0:26:29 every artist that i worked with i believed in them because they were great
0:26:32 and if they continue to be great
0:26:37 i think that’s the best testimony to that belief
0:26:44 so to see justin move forward and succeed to see ariana you know with what’s happened with wicked in this past year
0:26:52 um to see tori kelly you know to see everybody that i’ve ever had a chance to work with
0:26:57 to see them go on and do great things on their own it’s awesome
0:27:03 is there anything that these individuals have in common at all these people that
0:27:13 pain pain yeah i think it’s pain personally i think um to be able to convey emotions on the level
0:27:19 that it touches people around the world you have to understand emotions and i think um
0:27:27 i think great artists great performers are able to draw from different places and sometimes
0:27:32 it’s joy and sometimes it’s pain and sometimes it’s just a natural god-given gift
0:27:39 how important is hard work oh it’s very important i think especially in the beginning in the beginning
0:27:48 you’re stepping into a pool where everyone talented wants to be seen and you have to work incredibly
0:27:56 hard to break out of the noise so i and by the way i don’t think that’s particular to artists or music or
0:28:02 film or tv or anything i’ve done with entertainment i think that’s every business i’ve ever been a part of
0:28:09 the first three to five years of any business i’ve ever built in any arena or worked with anyone who’s
0:28:14 ever achieved anything great those first three to five years are the most important sounds like something
0:28:15 i said to my girlfriend
0:28:21 um it sounds like you know same thing with relationship maybe but put in the foundation
0:28:25 those first three to five years and really be there together i really believe that i think
0:28:32 you put in that time in the beginning and you can break through the noise and set a foundation for everything else
0:28:40 when i think about justin’s career he he had a wobble um where he was involved in lots of sort of
0:28:46 uh and you know it looked like he was going through a bit of difficulty and i reflect on
0:28:53 one of my friends liam payne and he was on this podcast and who’s sadly passed away now but he also
0:28:58 around the same age was thrown into the public eye at a very young age he joined one direction went on
0:29:03 crazy crazy wild roller coaster ride that is one direction and he admitted on the podcast that he
0:29:07 struggled he struggled with addiction he struggled with lots of pain that he was dealing with
0:29:12 and his story has is a an inspiring one ultimately but also a tragic one in many respects
0:29:18 why does this happen to so many young artists childhood stars
0:29:27 you know when you asked me this question
0:29:36 at this age i feel a lot of guilt um i feel a lot of guilt because i worked with so many young artists
0:29:41 and like i told you i hadn’t taken the time to look at myself or
0:29:51 um do the therapy myself until i was older so i didn’t understand at 25 years old at 27 years old
0:30:01 at 30 years old that they each were coming from very unique backgrounds of their own stuff with their
0:30:07 own families and their own childhoods and growing up this way and being seen by the whole world and being
0:30:12 judged by the whole world at a very young age and i think it’s two things i think one human beings are
0:30:19 not made to be worshipped i think we’re made to serve and i think that when we worship human beings
0:30:25 it changes something within us it messes us up a little bit because that’s not what we’re built for
0:30:32 and i think that can be very confusing and i think being able to transcend the childhood of you know people
0:30:38 cheering your name and and everything else at that level and get to the place where the artists i’ve
0:30:43 worked with are where they are in healthy relationships and and with their families and
0:30:47 and still working through stuff but like having a human experience i think it’s a testament to their strength
0:30:53 so i think that’s part of it i just think the nature of of being on that stage you know that young
0:30:59 and people chanting your name and i didn’t realize that till you know i got older the other side of it is
0:31:07 i never understood even without me i didn’t have that childhood yet i broke and what i think also
0:31:14 is important is um i don’t think we can push everything i think adversity is important we
0:31:19 can’t just talk about mental health and say adversity shouldn’t exist but i do think i understand the
0:31:26 importance now of of really putting in the time to make sure mental health is addressed and that we have
0:31:34 an outlet to speak to someone outside of the crew um and there’s a lot of things that i learned within
0:31:41 myself that i wish i knew back then i met those one direction kids when they started they came to la and
0:31:46 actually the whole group because nile reached out to me they came to my house to hang out in the backyard
0:31:52 when they were first starting before they really blew up like their first u.s visit to la and i met liam back then
0:31:56 and i met the excited young kid with the with the voice
0:32:03 yet each one of them has had a different experience each one of them has had a different
0:32:12 story of perseverance and tragedy um and that’s the thing it’s like with kids like you just never know
0:32:23 what the cocktail is going to make of life um and i think i think you know that idea of we’re not made
0:32:30 to be worshipped that can play funny things on the mind the brain isn’t even developed until you’re 25
0:32:35 they tell me so i don’t even know if mine’s developed at 43 but i’ve sat here with so many neuroscientists
0:32:40 that have said that to me and it and also addiction scientists that say the brain is still learning and
0:32:44 building it sort of like dopamine receptors and stuff so liam was telling me that he he was up on
0:32:50 stage in front of a hundred thousand people in dubai huge adrenaline rush huge surge of dopamine then
0:32:54 they drive him back to his hotel he was like they lock the door and it’s just me in there with the
0:33:00 minibar and then the next day it’s the exact same thing stage car hotel and then without the stage you’re
0:33:10 looking for that dopamine hit yeah no it’s it’s uh like i said it’s i’m very proud of
0:33:16 the job that we did and how much we cared and how much the team cared for all the years that we did it
0:33:23 but it doesn’t mean i don’t look back and wish that i knew what i know now how would you have been
0:33:32 different i think i would have had a therapist on the road for all of us like you know i think that’s
0:33:36 the biggest difference i think i would have slowed down all of us i think i made would have made every
0:33:45 single one of us stop and do that hour you know because we were all kids and we were all moving so
0:33:52 fast and we all wanted to succeed so bad and we all wanted the excitement and we wanted to make kids
0:33:57 dreams come true and bring them down from the upper decks to put them in the front row and you know
0:34:03 to help justin get that number one and you know to help ariana do this and we all wanted it and we were
0:34:08 excited and we were doing something that was so unique and everyone in the world was so excited for us
0:34:14 you know oh my gosh you guys are a part of this this is so cool i didn’t know
0:34:20 i didn’t know to go inward for the dopamine hit
0:34:30 and i wish i would have known that and been able to share it back then when justin ultimately
0:34:36 said that he wanted to kind of go it alone and do it himself does that hurt no not at that point i
0:34:42 think i i was also at that point you know at that point it had been a couple years where i knew i
0:34:50 wanted to do something else and i i wanted to find out who i was i wanted to experiment with you know a
0:34:54 different career and we were both communicating enough with each other everyone the writing was on
0:34:59 the wall how many clients oh god that we would know a lot because when i was doing my research i was
0:35:09 like no surely not carly ray jepsen and then um martin garrick’s kanye yeah can you give me the top
0:35:15 10 off the top of your head that you worked i’d never say a top 10 a good manager knows i got to work
0:35:22 with a lot of incredible artists a long time i mean from zach brown band to black eyed peas to justin to
0:35:29 ariana to you know martin garrick’s we signed um while he was at club med with his parents we contacted
0:35:36 him because he had the song animals and we heard it um to dan and shay i mean just to so many over the
0:35:44 years it was pretty incredible to be a part and so close to so many incredible stories you know and to see
0:35:50 you know going to a coffee shop to see tori kelly sing to seeing her walk on a grammy stage it just
0:35:57 i got to see really incredible moments in people’s lives to you know demi telling me i want to sing
0:36:03 the national anthem at the super bowl you know and show me a tweet that she wrote this years ago to
0:36:11 see her actually perform you know you know uh at the super bowl you know so it’s it’s just been a really
0:36:15 cool experience but i got to see it in so many different arenas and and you’re only there for a
0:36:21 flash right you have this little tiny small moment here a little tiny small moment here but to get to
0:36:27 witness so many different rides it’s a really cool thing i remember as a kid i heard this great saying
0:36:33 don’t just read stories try to be a part of them try to be a story and i think i always try to take
0:36:38 that into my life crazy crazy why i was i was there was a second ago when you were talking and i was just
0:36:45 i stepped into your body for a second and i ran the highlight reel of your life just as justin’s um
0:36:52 sort of manager and i was thinking god like the places you must have been and the things you must have
0:36:57 seen just as his manager let alone working with all of these other great artists it’s not just a
0:37:04 lifetime of experience it’s multiple lifetimes of fortune to get to even see those things i met a guy
0:37:12 years ago and um i’ll name drop here so i got invited to meet charlie munger oh yeah the investor
0:37:18 yeah and everyone was asking him questions about business and i asked him a question about life
0:37:23 and afterwards his guy contacted me he goes charlie liked your question he wants you to meet this other
0:37:29 guy that he really likes he’s a brilliant businessman and i meet this other gentleman and he tells me he’s
0:37:34 a statistician by trade and the reason he’s excited to meet me is because people in my world who are part
0:37:40 of so many different stories live in dog years because they get to be a part of kind of so many other
0:37:49 people’s things yeah um but it’s uh it’s a unique thing but i told you it the biggest lesson i learned
0:37:57 from all of it is that at one point in my life i received so much praise and then the next moment
0:38:08 without me expecting it i received so much hate and on the other side of all these experiences i’ve come
0:38:15 to learn that both were not deserved the people who were praising me did not know me and the people who
0:38:20 hated me did not know me and it’s like one of my favorite uh i saw tom hanks say this on like
0:38:25 an actor’s table one time he goes this too shall pass remember that yeah it’s so great he’s like you
0:38:30 think you’re killing it this too shall pass he’s like you think it’s gonna be hard this too shall
0:38:38 pass like it’s true so what do you anchor in then if so much is transient at this point in life
0:38:42 generally what does one anchor in if everything is transient if you know this too you don’t have kids
0:38:48 yet i have a major anchor in three kids major anchor what if you don’t have kids if you don’t have kids
0:38:53 that’s when you should definitely do the self work because your anchors you and and the truth is i’ve
0:38:59 really gotten to a beautiful place of i fully expect to be misunderstood in the future i expect
0:39:04 tomorrow something can happen where especially because my life has been somewhat in the public eye
0:39:10 you get misunderstood all the time people make up stories they twist things someone’s hurt it comes out
0:39:14 this way that way i could get pulled into this stuff it’s happened to me already and so i’ve come to
0:39:20 terms with that what i’ve realized is being on the other side of it already happening to me all it does
0:39:28 is end up making room for something else so for me what anchors me is i no longer think i’m in control
0:39:33 but i think i’m participating in one hell of a game i can’t control the outcome i’m steph curry and
0:39:37 lebron could be at the height of their game but even they can’t control the game they can influence it
0:39:44 and so that for me it was like the first half of my life was i’m manifesting i’m manifesting i’m doing
0:39:50 this that youthful energy and then you turn 40 and this stuff happens and you start the other half
0:39:53 of your life you’re like you know michael singer i need to surrender you know you’re their surrender
0:39:58 experiment you know like everything surrender and then i realized there’s a balance there’s this balance of
0:40:06 i’m participating in an incredible game and i can bring what i bring to the table and i’m not going to be
0:40:11 able to control this game but maybe i should start enjoying the game a little bit i’m out here
0:40:19 i’m participating that’s pretty freaking cool and i think that is what anchors me at this point that i have
0:40:23 no idea what the next five to ten years of my life are going to look like i used to think
0:40:31 i did now i know it can change like that and i think i’m excited for love in the future i’m excited
0:40:37 for adventure i’m not looking forward to the pain but i know if it comes there’s a reason for it
0:40:44 so tell me about a an artist that you believed in you don’t have to name them of course but an artist
0:40:48 you believed and you were wrong about something you really just your first principles were off and
0:40:52 in hindsight i had an artist who was
0:41:00 honestly maybe the most talented artist i ever signed his name was spencer lee and
0:41:09 spencer lee got brought to me by a buddy my name freddie uh and we did a deal for spencer and dave
0:41:13 appleton who i told you about my buddy was trying to handle in management and dave started calling me
0:41:19 saying hey there’s some real addiction issues here and we’re really struggling and we put him into rehab and
0:41:22 and then he wrote one of the most incredible songs river water
0:41:25 river water
0:41:35 wash me clean uh
0:41:44 river water
0:41:47 take me down
0:41:54 show me the dreams that i never found
0:42:03 about
0:42:08 about addiction and when he got out we thought okay he’s gonna be clean and everything great we made this
0:42:13 video and we started getting going we made the spencer lee band and we started putting him out there like
0:42:18 paying for everything to kind of get it going and he started doing festivals and we started getting phone
0:42:22 calls of like hey people are coming to see this insane talent with this voice
0:42:34 and he went back to drugs and um he overdosed last year and uh he’s no longer with us
0:42:40 and we got the news because his grandmother who’s the sweetest she called to say thank you for trying
0:42:45 and everything else and that was the love of her life and she lost him and um
0:42:54 that one i got wrong because i thought you know maybe if we get the records right if we get the
0:42:58 music if he gets on the road you know he gets out of rehab like you know this would be enough
0:43:06 it’s one of the biggest tragedies because i i can’t tell you how good he was i mean he just a special
0:43:11 special talent you listen to this guy’s records sometimes i always say i want to like reach out
0:43:15 to his family and be like let’s just release the records like the ones that i have that the
0:43:22 the world’s never heard and i you know i all the money should go to you know a cause you know to
0:43:26 help people in a similar situation i wish we could do that i’d love to get permission to do that
0:43:31 um because he was one of the most special talents i ever came across
0:43:34 they don’t want to release the records it’s complicated
0:43:43 last week i was in new york interviewing one of the world’s leading addiction experts and if for
0:43:48 anyone that hasn’t been through addiction it’s a very confusing thing to observe because as an onlooker
0:43:53 you just go just stop that you’re self-destructing but if you’ve had friends that have dealt with
0:43:57 addiction you realize that it’s not an attempt to self-destruct it’s like an attempt to
0:44:04 it’s yeah it’s like it’s maybe the last attempt to do the opposite to survive to survive from something
0:44:10 when i was dealing with addiction with someone i managed um someone i really respect told me about
0:44:18 alan on uh alan on is for a support it’s like aaa but for the families and they recommend i go and i went
0:44:22 to two alan on meetings and it was very helpful at the time and one of the things i learned there
0:44:29 was one this concept of it is not your fault you this is not about you that you have to love them where
0:44:34 they’re at you can you know but the biggest thing i really learned was be a rock you know this person
0:44:40 said to me home doesn’t move around home is a constant place that someone can come back to
0:44:46 if someone beats addiction it is because of them you know they’ve made that choice and they deserve the
0:44:51 credit but if you want to be helpful this person said just try to be a constant place they know that
0:44:56 no matter what at the end they can come back and they’re and you’ll be waiting understanding your story
0:45:00 you stuck around with justin when he went through his his difficult times and people were calling for
0:45:07 you to drop him and to maybe move on yeah i think it was an interesting time but like i said if someone
0:45:12 beats that they deserve the credit so i don’t i don’t deserve any credit in that he does you ended up
0:45:17 posting that post on your instagram which sent a ton of headlines around the world saying that you were
0:45:24 quitting music management 23 years after 23 years there was a little bit of a question mark though because
0:45:30 i think you referenced in something you’d posted that part of your inspiration or a catalyst was a
0:45:38 particular artist had decided that they wanted to go their own way yeah who was that i prefer not to
0:45:44 say that there’s a bunch of legal stuff around that everything else but uh she yeah uh she informed me
0:45:49 and i respected the hell out of it that she was she felt that way and uh but i had had that conversation with
0:45:57 others too and and um i mean i wrote it all in 23 years the reason i posted that at the time was
0:46:01 i’d already made the decision a year prior but i’d never talked about it
0:46:06 and you know when you’re running a big company there’s all these you know legal things and we had
0:46:12 to wait till everything was in order and then i could say it and um and they were like well you’ve
0:46:17 already been out of it for a year why say it now and i just felt i need to say it for me but i also
0:46:23 need to say it so i hold myself accountable not to ever go back okay and i you know it was way too
0:46:28 long it was like 10 slides on instagram no it was incredible but it was uh i appreciate you saying that
0:46:36 but it was from the heart and i remember waking up posting it and then just like falling down because i was
0:46:42 like oh my god like this thing i’ve been doing since i was 19 is now over and what i wrote in
0:46:50 there is the truth my entire adult life that’s all i had known so not being in that situation i didn’t
0:46:55 know what a normal adult life was like i didn’t know you could have a weekend like i didn’t know
0:47:01 you know like that’s what it was i was on call all the time for 23 years and it wasn’t one it was a
0:47:08 lot and um finding out what a normal adult life was like was pretty wild to me and also really
0:47:13 interesting but i don’t i had some of the most incredible memories and i’m very grateful but if
0:47:19 you remember do you remember the barry gordy quote at the end no i don’t barry gordy is the founder of
0:47:26 motown records barry gordy is a kid from detroit michael jackson’s theater play barry gordy correct yes
0:47:32 so before barry gordy black musicians would make incredible music and a white person can come along
0:47:39 and just cover it and make it theirs and barry gordy took that back and gave us motown records and changed
0:47:47 the entire music industry and i was at a dinner and barry gordy was placed next to me and i was just like
0:47:53 freaking out barry gordy’s next to me and we start talking and this is years before
0:47:57 he said i’m gonna tell you a story and you’re gonna need it one day
0:48:05 and boy was he right and he said you know do you know what the motown 25 was and i said absolutely it
0:48:09 was the first time michael jackson did the moonwalk diana ross and he’s like oh you really are a motown
0:48:14 fan i was like yeah and he said well do you know i didn’t want to go i said what he goes yeah i didn’t
0:48:19 want to go at the time michael had left for cbs records diana left for cbs records and everyone
0:48:24 was saying that i took their publishing and i was like the bad guy for all these people that i had
0:48:30 supported and lifted and like i was so angry and i didn’t want to go i said well what changed he goes
0:48:34 my family made me go and i said yeah because i remember you were in the balcony and i kept cutting
0:48:39 to you and he goes you know the first i get there and diana ross is hosting michael’s going to perform
0:48:45 him he’s the biggest thing in the world i’m i’m mad but as the night went on i suddenly realized
0:48:51 little barry from detroit would have lost his mind knowing this was coming he said young man it will
0:48:57 never end the way you want it to but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen and i didn’t know how much i
0:49:03 needed that in the years to come you can plan it you can try and control it as much as you want but
0:49:08 barry gody was right it will never end the way you want it unless you’re derek jeter on the yankees
0:49:15 but or you know you’re messy but um but most of us it’s not going to end the way we wanted however it
0:49:23 happened and how cool is that like how cool is that that like we get to do this and get to have this life
0:49:31 and i thought that’s the way i wanted to end 23 years because the me stopping managing and ending
0:49:36 managing and it didn’t end the way i necessarily wanted i would have wanted a giant concert where all
0:49:42 the artists come out we celebrate everything we did together and ended pretty abruptly of like oh this is
0:49:47 it and some want to leave and some want to stay and yeah i’m done i don’t want to do this anymore
0:49:54 and some people understood it and other people didn’t but it happened and no one could ever take
0:50:02 that away did you ever feel betrayed oh of course but i’m sure that goes both ways like as much as i
0:50:07 felt betrayed like music business can be heartbreaking management can be heartbreaking if you watch david
0:50:12 geffen’s documentary he says uh management is like move the mountain over here and they say it was supposed
0:50:20 to be there you know like but at the same time it must be heartbreaking the other way it’s such an
0:50:27 interdependent relationship and it’s such i don’t i you know the people always say stay on your side of
0:50:32 the street i try to do that it’s easier for me to move on with my life and be happy by staying on my
0:50:38 side of the street so yeah i’ve definitely felt betrayed a hundred times i’ve definitely felt misunderstood
0:50:45 so many times but i also try to give empathy of if someone is doing this to me they must be hurting
0:50:49 for some reason and maybe i did play a role in it even if i don’t know i did you know so
0:50:59 do you feel betrayed yes especially in a job of service yeah but yeah you’re right we all do have
0:51:08 a preconception of how how the run will end man we’re all the protagonists in our own story
0:51:14 now that there’s been some space between that decision yeah two and a half years two and a half
0:51:19 years since that decision wow two and a half years wow it feels like it was six months ago well it was
0:51:24 two and a half years for me okay it’s been probably a year and a half since i probably posted that okay
0:51:29 you’ve had some space since that decision correct decision yeah oh yeah even high conviction now
0:51:33 that it was the right thing yeah and like i said it happened in hindsight it was what it was supposed
0:51:37 to be at the time it was supposed to be i think the reason why i wrote 23 years and why i quit
0:51:42 i wouldn’t say i quit when i retired and stopped doing that when i moved on how about that when i moved
0:51:50 on to something else was because what exactly what i wrote it was i was too afraid to find out who i was
0:51:55 without it for so long that i probably should have left earlier but i finally got to a point where i
0:52:00 realized either you do it now or something bad you’re gonna have to learn the hard way again
0:52:08 you know so it was time and it was time for some of the most amazing artists that i worked with to
0:52:14 also spread their wings and do their own thing i think b2b marketeers keep making this mistake they’re
0:52:20 chasing volume instead of quality and when you try to be seen by more people instead of the right people
0:52:24 all you’re doing is making noise but that noise rarely shifts the needle and it’s often quite
0:52:29 expensive and i know as there was a time in my career where i kept making this mistake that many
0:52:35 of you will be making it too eventually i started posting ads on our show sponsors platform linkedin
0:52:39 and that’s when things started to change i put that change down to a few critical things one of them
0:52:45 being that linkedin was then and still is today the platform where decision makers go to not only to
0:52:50 think and learn but also to buy and when you market your business there you’re putting it right in front
0:52:55 of people who actually have the power to say yes and you can target them by job title industry and
0:53:00 company size it’s simply a sharper way to spend your marketing budget and if you haven’t tried it
0:53:06 how about this give linkedin ads a try and i’m going to give you a hundred dollar ad credit to get you
0:53:13 started if you visit linkedin.com diary you can claim that right now that’s linkedin.com diary
0:53:19 you sold your company for 1.1 billion dollars that’s what i read you can’t confirm or deny but
0:53:24 that’s publicly traded so i can confirm but i don’t like talking about it okay you sold your company for
0:53:31 1.1 billion dollars which i don’t think people realize it’s a lot of money um at 39 years old
0:53:37 roughly i was about to turn 40. you talk about laying on the beach yeah with your belly out yeah
0:53:42 i mean with a significant amount of money in your bank account without the same
0:53:47 job that’s sort of demanding your time seven days a week
0:53:54 a lot of people are scared of that but not not the money but the gap the uncertainty the space
0:53:59 honestly the timing of when it happened for me
0:54:08 i was in such a place like i said of surrender that i really wasn’t looking at it as like
0:54:14 achievement or money or something like that i more looked at it as what are you going to do now
0:54:18 are you going to try and control are you going to participate like i told you earlier and i started
0:54:23 to just be curious for the first time instead of i love this idea of a competitive mind versus
0:54:31 a curious and creative mind a competitive mind is what i had and it’s where i was of there’s always
0:54:35 something finite when you’re competitive you know it’s going to finish there’s going to be an outcome
0:54:42 and then what but when you’re operating from a curious and creative mind there’s no end you can
0:54:47 just continue to create you continue to build and i want i want to be in that place in my life now of
0:54:53 what how big can i think i saw this jeff bezos interview the other day and he just said one of the
0:55:00 biggest curses of an entrepreneur is not thinking big enough you know and i think you know think big
0:55:06 you know you only get one what ride around this thing think big have fun love your friends love your
0:55:17 family dance laugh cry you know do all the things and get to know yourself more and more every single day
0:55:22 just before that time we have this whole taylor swift incident what happened
0:55:28 is this the moment you’re talking about where you received bad press
0:55:36 oh bad yeah yeah that was that’s the when i bought big machine i thought i was going to work with all the
0:55:43 artists on big machine i thought it was going to be like an exciting thing i knew that taylor she and i had only
0:55:49 met three times i think in my life three or four times and one of the times it was years earlier it
0:55:53 was really a great engagement she invited me to a private party and we we respected each other we had
0:55:58 a great engagement in between that time since i’d seen her last i started managing kanye west i managed
0:56:05 justin bieber i knew she didn’t get along with them i had a feeling this is where my arrogance came in i had
0:56:09 a feeling she probably didn’t like me because i managed them but i thought that once this announcement
0:56:16 happened she would talk to me see who i am and we would work together and the announcement came out
0:56:21 and i’m calling scott borchetta and saying hey send me her number i’m i just talked to thomas rett
0:56:26 he’s excited and i just talked to you know uh this you know this person and they’re excited and i’m calling
0:56:32 you know florida georgia line next and oh and then this tumblr comes out and says all this stuff and i
0:56:42 was just like shocked um and it’s it’s been five six years i don’t need to go back into it but what i can
0:56:50 tell you is everything in life is a gift having that experience allows me to have empathy for the people i
0:56:55 worked with who i would always say yeah i understand but i never knew what it was like to be on the global
0:57:00 stage like that i never knew what criticism like that felt like and like i told you the biggest
0:57:05 gift that i got from that was understanding that all the praise i had received up until that moment
0:57:14 was not deserved and all the hate i got after that moment was not deserved because none of these people
0:57:20 knew me yeah she didn’t know me this person didn’t know me this person who met me three times they didn’t
0:57:25 know me i could show respect for all of them because i don’t know them so i can love them where they’re
0:57:29 you’re at but the gift of pain
0:57:34 was awareness
0:57:36 and
0:57:40 the other part i was going through very something very personal shortly after i was going through the
0:57:45 divorce my marriage and all these different things and it just felt like one after another
0:57:50 but i look back if those things didn’t happen i really think they’re all gifts because when when
0:57:56 something’s fair you don’t respect it when something happens to you that you feel is fair
0:58:02 you’re just like oh i i deserve that you move on you feel justified because you saw it coming
0:58:07 when something happens to you that feels deeply unfair and you can’t fix it
0:58:16 then you really got to look at everything and realize the role you played in this or maybe this
0:58:23 or that or who do you want to be or how so i’m grateful but how does one contend with an unfair
0:58:27 world and i use the word unfair as well because you know we’ve got investigative reach researchers
0:58:33 here who looked through everything relating to that particular deal and then we also looked at
0:58:36 what’s written on the internet and there’s this great disparity between what actually happened and
0:58:40 what people say happened yeah and there’s actually i think there’s a documentary out there which goes
0:58:44 into it in great detail which andrew schultz was talking talking about on a podcast which i saw so i
0:58:49 looked at that documentary as well i mean look i’m grateful for a couple of things one my kids were
0:58:54 really young when it happened so they didn’t feel it as much yeah it was very hard at the time it was hard
0:58:59 on marriage it was hard on our family you’re getting death threats yeah but i also don’t know what was
0:59:04 being said on the other side you know because i never got to have the conversation you know so i think when
0:59:08 people aren’t communicating and refusing to communicate a lot of things can get misconstrued
0:59:14 and you you know i don’t want to hold any hatred or like i don’t we everyone moves on you know so
0:59:19 yes i appreciate you saying that i appreciate actually doing the research but for me
0:59:29 i choose to see it as a gift i choose to see it as being able to have a perspective that very few people in the
0:59:39 world have of knowing what that’s like of feeling that on a global level pain yeah and also just what
0:59:45 does that mean in reality when you just felt unfair it felt like and but so much but of course of course
0:59:52 it happened to me right of course because here i was thinking my value was from all this praise
0:59:59 you know and i and everything was me making sure that i was living up to it and then this happens
1:00:03 and it’s unfair and i can’t control it and of course the universe was like screaming at me like god’s
1:00:10 screaming at me like hey wake up you’re not in control you can’t navigate all of this you don’t
1:00:16 get to decide what your legacy is and you you just get to decide who you are on a daily basis and who
1:00:20 you choose to see in yourself and how you treat the people that love you and the people you can
1:00:27 actually interact with surrender but surrender and participate you know that’s the big thing for me
1:00:32 it’s more than just surrender it’s surrender and participate and just enjoy the ride that’s
1:00:35 why i got the tattoo you know it was
1:00:43 i can’t worry about everyone’s niece being mad at me
1:00:51 you know like you know it’s what i gotta do is is show up for my niece you know and i gotta show
1:00:57 for my friends and my family and i wish everyone involved across the board whether i know them or not
1:01:03 nothing but good wishes when i say specifically that pain people don’t like i think about how
1:01:07 many people on earth have experienced such a thing and if you if i could be a fly on the wall that is
1:01:14 actually just has cctv for eyes and i was watching you at that moment in time just for seven days i
1:01:20 got to watch scooter what would i have seen like i said at that point i hadn’t really done the work
1:01:27 again um so resistance resistance trying to navigate it trying to understand it trying to
1:01:35 um figure out how to fix it and then i couldn’t but then i did financially like i couldn’t fix the
1:01:42 relationship that i didn’t have but then i was able to figure out okay you know what we will sell it
1:01:50 you know in in a world of streaming re-records will only help the old catalog as much as they help the
1:01:55 new catalog both will get a bump i presented that i showed you know how everyone can be a winner here
1:02:01 and i was able to sell the catalog and i don’t want to go into too much detail but i but i offered it
1:02:07 it’s that now come out very factually that i did offer it there’s evidence of that yeah multiple times
1:02:12 in that process they said no i sold it someone else and i washed my hands of it and moved on
1:02:18 and i actually sometimes look back at that and i go the universe was trying to teach me something
1:02:25 and i navigated out of it i found a way out so then the universe went oh man we tried to
1:02:30 try to give you a warning sign we try to like you’re you’re sailing by in the titanic and we’re waving
1:02:36 like iceberg and then the universe said okay you really didn’t pay attention and you still aren’t doing the work
1:02:45 like marriage because that one got me that one got me to pay attention losing my kids 50 percent of the time
1:02:56 that one changed everything and the world that still couldn’t move me i was still able to figure out
1:03:01 the chess board but my kids and my marriage
1:03:10 that one rocked me and woke me up what’s really crazy is when i told you i did this hoffman process
1:03:14 i won’t tell you the process because you’re not supposed to but i can tell you at the end of the
1:03:18 week they can you give it context for anyone that doesn’t know that the hoffman process is this one
1:03:26 week no phone no email um intense work on your early childhood to understand why you are the way you are
1:03:32 and give you tools to go out in the world and understand yourself the reason i went
1:03:39 october of 2020 my marriage was falling apart the whole world thought i was crushing it ariana’s
1:03:48 crushing it this justin’s all these people like we’re on fire and i had a suicidal thought for 20 minutes
1:03:53 where i was like if my marriage is going to fall apart i’m not going to be with my kids all the time
1:03:57 i can’t control this i’m not going to be this perfect image that i presented to the world
1:04:03 and if i can’t be this perfect image i don’t want to be here and it went to a very dark place and after
1:04:08 20 minutes i said what the hell was that that’s not me i would never leave my kids i don’t like leave
1:04:16 anybody like what was that and the next morning i was on the set of a video shoot and a friend of mine
1:04:21 called and he said you know what’s going on with you and i told him i told him about that night
1:04:25 before he called me back with another friend and they said you need to go to hoffman we did it it
1:04:30 changed our life they told me that they could get me in in two weeks because there was a cancellation
1:04:35 october 24th and that was the release of ariana grande’s dangerous woman album it was the busiest
1:04:42 week of the year for me at work and i started laughing in the parking lot of this video shoot
1:04:46 and she goes do you want us to pick another week i said no i said i’ve spent my whole life
1:04:52 pursuing these things doing this choosing this choosing scooter choosing that life choosing the
1:04:59 clients and i’m the top of my game yet i wanted to kill myself last night something’s got to change
1:05:07 and i chose to go to that place instead and the hard stuff actually came after i got out of hoffman
1:05:11 you know i ended up going through a divorce i ended up going through all this different stuff
1:05:17 but i never was depressed again and the most interesting thing that happened on the other
1:05:25 side of it is six years ago i was biggest manager and the perfect marriage and you know everything i
1:05:31 touched turned to gold and there was no negative press about me ever six years later i’m divorced
1:05:38 i don’t manage anymore i’ve had negative press and i couldn’t be happier it doesn’t mean it doesn’t
1:05:44 ebb and flow but i get to be the dad i’ve always wanted to be in the friend i’ve always wanted to be
1:05:49 and it doesn’t mean that things aren’t going to go you know be hard and i’m going to say suffer more
1:05:55 things and go through them but i’m in a place that i understand amor fati it’s like everything’s a gift and
1:06:02 i’m being super long-winded but that’s the story that phone call the day after that to your friends
1:06:09 yeah did you tell him the truth on the phone the full truth yeah i did and what was that full truth
1:06:16 that i had the night before thought about you know just shutting it all off it wasn’t even an idea that
1:06:21 i wanted to die i just wanted the noise in my head to go away i wanted the failure the disappointment
1:06:27 the fear i was going to fail in my mind i couldn’t control it i’d always been able to navigate out of
1:06:35 failure and head towards success a pit stop but i had left what i found at hoffman i told you is my
1:06:43 name the inner child the scott i had built this mask so big i wanted to feel like me again and i didn’t
1:06:50 realize how far away i’d gotten from that building up this armor building up the mask you know i want to
1:06:53 tell you something funny i usually don’t say names in these things but i want to give him credit because
1:06:59 i think it’s hilarious michael rapino is the ceo of live nation he’s an amazing guy i think he’s
1:07:02 one of the most impressive people in the entire entertainment industry because
1:07:07 he wields so much power but he also empowers other people so well
1:07:16 and after the divorce after you know the big machine and stuff that happened with that all these
1:07:20 different things and you know michael told me because i like you a lot more now because you seem
1:07:27 human you know and he told me he was like before he’s like nobody goes on like it’s like this he’s
1:07:30 like you know i just didn’t he goes he goes i didn’t think you were real i thought you were full of
1:07:37 and he was right i mean i didn’t know myself because i had no reason to do so and it wasn’t
1:07:44 until i had some real hardships and real pain and real scares and real rock bottom moments that i started
1:07:51 looking at myself and started figuring out who i was and then everyone got to know me my best friends
1:07:58 since i was 11 years old they’re the people i hang out with the most um two of them live out here mike
1:08:03 and vuk and i hang out with them all the time and people who know me they know these guys because
1:08:11 they’ve been my friends since we were 12 years old 11 years old and mike and vuk told me at 40 years
1:08:16 old when i was doing this work we’ve known you since you were 11 and this is the most we’ve ever known you
1:08:23 and i’m not surprised or insulted because they say you haven’t changed but we didn’t know you
1:08:31 because i was always even to them presenting what i thought they needed me to be perfect
1:08:37 and then i broke and then i said this happened and this happened when i was a kid this was going on
1:08:44 and this was and they were like we love you and i really became one of the boys for the first time in my
1:08:50 life i became one of the boys because the boys became vulnerable i thought it was the opposite
1:08:54 my whole life i thought you had to be cool you had to be tough to be one of the boys and it was funny
1:09:00 because they didn’t all the achievements not only did they not give a shit about i probably lost touch
1:09:06 with them more so and when everything fell apart they were the ones that were there the ones who knew
1:09:12 scott the ones who didn’t care about any of it and i’ve never really even said that out loud
1:09:16 to this extent until right now and i’m actually glad i get to say i’m here at both their names
1:09:18 because they
1:09:31 they picked me up and in a really really tough time and a time where i couldn’t even look at my
1:09:34 own brothers because i was too ashamed and um
1:09:40 and i never felt like one of the guys like i felt like i had those friends but i just couldn’t
1:09:45 let them all the way in because i felt well maybe i’m smarter maybe i’m this maybe i need to be perfect
1:09:45 and it wasn’t till
1:09:55 i really hit rock bottom that i realized that they always had my back and i made all these stupid ideas
1:10:05 in my head and they were they were there and they weren’t there for scooter you know they were there
1:10:10 for scott and i see you getting a little emotional too because you probably have the same type of friends
1:10:20 so i’ll i did it so you can do it too what are their names michael ash dom anthony and oliver
1:10:25 but they are they’re they’re the constant they’re they’re there through everything the up the down
1:10:31 the up the down the up the down again and they don’t give a crap about any of this in fact if your
1:10:39 friends are like mine they’re brutal about this stuff my friends rip me like if people saw the
1:10:46 text messages between us they would think we hate each other um but we love each other deeply and
1:10:52 and the best part about the messages is the random hey guys i love you you know it happens all the
1:10:56 time i get a phone call i’ll pick up i’ll just see paul hey brother i love you just want to call and tell you
1:11:02 i’m really grateful like i have so many different people i can name and what was really interesting is
1:11:10 before all this happened i don’t know if you can relate to this but i spent so much time
1:11:21 trying to impress people who didn’t want to love me instead of realizing how many people already did
1:11:27 i was just thinking what a great shame it is that the amount of units of energy we exert on as you said
1:11:33 like the external like the audience whereas when you ask me who would be there for me irrespective of
1:11:38 what was going on in my life i can name them and then i ask myself how much energy and effort am i
1:11:41 putting into these relationships and i’m embarrassed about how much energy and effort
1:11:44 i’m putting into these relationships i’m like embarrassed by it
1:11:49 like that makes me a scumbag and they’ll still be there yeah they don’t care yeah yeah and and
1:11:52 that’s the best part because when you do start putting energy it becomes even more fun
1:12:02 it’s really it’s really um it’s really difficult for me to understand and this is my naivety the part
1:12:06 that’s difficult for me to understand is you family meant so much to you didn’t you don’t you have a
1:12:13 a tattoo that says family first one yeah i was 18 you got a tattoo at 18 about your future family
1:12:21 correct so family has been this like dream and ambition of yours so it’s surprising to me as
1:12:28 someone who was naive in this context that some it had to be threatened for you to care enough to
1:12:35 you know i cared i just uh childhood trauma is a hell of a thing man yeah it’s um and we all have
1:12:39 it that was the thing the reason i didn’t think i had it is because i had friends who you know had
1:12:43 parents who were alcoholics i had friends who had parents who this so i always thought you know both
1:12:49 my parents are here they love me like the stuff i dealt with that’s not real you know i come from
1:12:54 an immigrant family like we can deal with this like we’re strong you know that’s not real and
1:13:02 what i realized is everyone has trauma that’s the human experience and the faster we value our own
1:13:07 trauma and stop trying to downplay it because we don’t think it equals someone else’s the more we can
1:13:12 work on ourselves because all you get to do is work on yourself you don’t get to work on the other
1:13:16 other person like you can really only work on yourself you can help the other person but the
1:13:26 work that’s only here and i think that i saw my life is perfect so why change anything
1:13:33 and that’s why you’re smiling stop calling me out yeah it’s so true because you see your life is
1:13:38 perfect and she’s screaming at you she’s screaming at you and trying to and you can’t see it she’s not
1:13:45 screaming just yet she is in her own way increasingly expressing to me and yeah in her own way that there
1:13:52 is an issue and i i’m going to be completely honest because this is why i started this podcast was the
1:13:59 diary of a ceo so this is what would be written in my diary the alarm is getting louder and i’m still in a
1:14:05 state where i think i’ve got a lot of time before the alarm is so loud that i can’t fix it i got you
1:14:10 i see you buddy trust me i see and here’s the funny thing i don’t want to go into details i have a lot
1:14:17 of respect we’re family forever it goes both ways it’s not like there was one thing happened it both
1:14:24 people have to play a role in where we got to you know things happen on you know both ways however
1:14:30 chris rock says something really special he goes relationships are actually quite easy
1:14:35 you know you ever try to pick up a couch with two people no problem pick up a couch by yourself
1:14:44 and that was the thing we we both went to pick up the couch at different times and we were made to be
1:14:48 amazing co-parents we were made to come into each other’s lives to help each other be better in different
1:14:53 ways through the heartbreak of our relationship ending and we were we were brought together to
1:15:00 make three incredible souls and now whoever gets me next is in for a treat
1:15:04 because i’m a better version than i was before
1:15:09 and in hindsight what are those warning signs for someone like me who might be
1:15:17 the choices that you make that you justify oh i got to do this because you know if i don’t do this
1:15:24 one it could all fall apart no it isn’t you know if i don’t if i don’t stop everything i’m doing and
1:15:30 choose this it could all fall apart or yeah okay you’re saying this to me but you don’t really mean
1:15:34 it because you don’t understand what i’m going through because i’m in this grind i’m in this hunt
1:15:39 that you no one can understand because only i can achieve this you’re smiling because you live
1:15:47 can i ask you some questions sure how long you guys been together uh six years now
1:15:53 and why are you smiling so big because how many times have you made those choices i just justify
1:15:57 bullshit and there’s always gonna i know logically there’s always going to be something else there’s
1:16:02 always there’s never going to be a perfect time so i know logically that i have to pick in perfect
1:16:08 moments and do you guys want kids yes do you use that as an excuse well the kids aren’t here yet
1:16:12 so i need to grind now
1:16:19 i’ve i’ve i’ve certainly thought it as a way to justify to myself to self-rationalize i don’t think
1:16:23 i’ve ever said that to her but i have said to her i’ve said internally yeah i’ve said it to myself
1:16:28 internally i’ve said to myself like this season of life up until i’m 35 i’m gonna go for it and then
1:16:36 you know she’s looking at you thinking i want to be able to trust you to have children yeah listen
1:16:45 a long time ago someone really smart ran this little exercise with me and i wish i would have
1:16:51 paid better attention to it other than just thinking it was a cool saying to like use in the office he said
1:16:58 if i told you someone you loved was sick and you had a billion dollars how much of it would you spend
1:17:08 to save them a billion dollars yeah correct and he says is your loved one is she healthy does she love
1:17:15 you is she here with you right now everything you’re working to achieve with that perspective
1:17:19 you already have it yeah and they said it to me and it sounds great i’m seeing it on your face you’re a
1:17:23 smart guy it’s logical you’re like yeah i get it and then you’re gonna go repeat the same stuff
1:17:29 because that’s what we do and what i realized when i went and did this work was it’s not going to
1:17:35 change between you and her or me and my ex you know that wasn’t what it was about it was actually
1:17:41 something deeper deeper underlying that had nothing to do with the current relationship it had to do with
1:17:47 that lie that i’m not enough that this person actually doesn’t really love me unless i do this
1:17:55 were you happy before the marriage fell apart i think so but i also didn’t know who i was i think
1:18:01 i was happy because everyone in the world told me i was doing great and i thought that that was enough
1:18:07 and i i feel like looking back now i feel like i was asleep at the wheel i feel like i didn’t know
1:18:12 myself at the time and but i had so much success at such a young age so everyone was telling me i was
1:18:17 doing great so i just chose to believe them and it wasn’t until i you know the foundation broke and
1:18:23 there was nothing underneath it that i was like oh shit i’m actually not happy and i never knew and
1:18:30 it’s like i wouldn’t go back to that before all the crap in a million years i want to stay here
1:18:35 because now i’m like i’m a i’m awake what is the um the practical advice you would give me because
1:18:40 you can identify where i’m at in your own story so what is the practical advice you’d give me now
1:18:47 to avoid myself getting to a situation where one day i have regrets because i didn’t listen to the alarm
1:18:54 a couple things okay number one turn the cameras off and go do some self-work stop being nudged just go
1:19:00 do it stop being with all due respect to pussy okay i appreciate it and um and i’m like my group chat
1:19:07 yeah yeah i mean it’s just there’s no good time in the future there’s no when i get to 35 when i get to
1:19:14 36 when i get to 40 there’s when i achieve this go do it one to two weeks out of the year will not kill
1:19:19 you it will only make you stronger because what you’re dealing with with what you’re telling me has
1:19:23 nothing to do with the two of you it has more to do with your stuff and she has to go do her stuff you
1:19:28 have to see if she wants to go do the same thing and and work on herself in the same way because it’s a
1:19:34 constant thing the second thing is go on vacations together and when the kids come go on vacation that’s
1:19:38 something i think we we forgot to do we did the vacations with the kids we did the vacations with
1:19:43 friends but we didn’t do vacations together because we were so we had three kids in five years yeah and i
1:19:49 think um you know that’s something i think about but then also just trust that like if it’s supposed to
1:19:54 be it’s supposed to be my journey was supposed to be exactly the way it was even the when i found out
1:20:01 things and she found out like about ourselves it was exactly when we were supposed to find out
1:20:07 so i just i’m a firm believer you know you’re here to learn exactly what you’re supposed to learn have
1:20:14 you read many lives many masters no by brian weiss no easy quick read on a weekend you’ll enjoy the hell
1:20:21 of it um brian weiss was the head of psychology at university of miami and he was recommended a nurse
1:20:25 from the hospital would he see her and he saw her and she had deep trauma and couldn’t figure it out
1:20:31 so he goes we’re going to do hypnotic regression she does hypnotic regression she goes into something
1:20:35 from like age zero to six that she couldn’t remember very traumatizing he’s like oh this will make a
1:20:39 difference she comes back the next week it’s even worse that makes no sense to him he does hypnotic
1:20:45 regression again and she goes into a past life he calls bullshit he does another hypnotic regression
1:20:49 she goes into another past life and he realizes her educational background could not know the
1:20:55 things that she’s saying that he’s looking up so what happens is he just writes a book about this
1:21:00 patient and how she changed his entire practice and what was really interesting about it is
1:21:07 it made me look at death differently and life differently we’re here to learn and then if we
1:21:11 don’t figure it out we leave and we come back again and if we learn that one we come back and this
1:21:18 transitions and but it’s never it’s not ending it’s all about coming here to learn but i feel like i
1:21:22 i have so much to learn and at least i know that and i’m such a mess and i’m figuring it out every
1:21:29 single day that if brian weiss’s book is right i’m not going anywhere for a while but it’s a really
1:21:33 amazing way to look and what was interesting is when i told my mom had read it when i told my dad
1:21:38 he actually goes well you know we’re jews we don’t believe in reincarnation and when i started
1:21:44 studying kabbalah i realized that actually kabbalah teaches reincarnation almost the exact same way this
1:21:50 woman was describing it which means judeo-christians actually believe in reincarnation but many of us
1:21:56 don’t know it um and it was just a really interesting way of looking at life do you believe in reincarnation
1:22:01 i do you do yeah i do especially reading this book and then studying kabbalah and i started studying
1:22:08 kabbalah about a year ago um i like some of the principles i’ve learned from kabbalah about this
1:22:19 idea of being a custodian that nothing is actually ours but we’re custodians you know that um god has
1:22:25 hashem is what they say in kabbalah but um this idea that we’re supposed to give 10 of charity but
1:22:31 no more than 20 you know because the belief is if god is giving you this he’s asking you to hold on to
1:22:36 it because he has a purpose for you but if he chooses to take it away you should be just as joyful
1:22:40 because it was never yours in the first place you are a custodian and i think that’s a really great
1:22:45 way of looking at materials looking at life and understanding like i said participating and i’m
1:22:52 getting to play in this game but you have your moments right yeah still today because you’re
1:22:57 someone that’s done so much work so it’s it’s interesting speaking to you because you’re someone
1:23:03 that i would seek advice on in everything in my life but you still have work left to do you said that
1:23:07 i still have things left to learn well i think i have a lot of things left to learn i find myself
1:23:15 sometimes needing to defend myself sometimes not defending myself when i should i feel like sometimes
1:23:20 i feel misunderstood or not loved and you know i have you know have that moment and then
1:23:23 even on the other side there’s times where you feel like oh you’re doing all this work and people
1:23:28 see you as someone who’s done the work and then you don’t want to be seen as someone who’s failing
1:23:34 at that work and the truth is that’s all part of the process it’s like a constant surrender to your
1:23:41 your human experience the work for me is life is going to throw the things you need at you so
1:23:46 like i said tomorrow something could happen that you know i’m being ridiculed again and i’m having
1:23:50 to learn again you know or a praise could come and i’m having to learn how to handle that like i don’t
1:23:55 know what tomorrow is going to bring it’s always a new experiment but it’s almost as if like when
1:24:01 you’re doing this work people call it it’s as you’re swimming in the waves and now you have the skills
1:24:06 to get through the wave the waves still come but you’re just going through them differently do you
1:24:15 wish they wouldn’t come hell no that’s life you know i i asked you said i had a company ithaca
1:24:23 do you know where it comes from no so some people think they’re like oh ithaca new york no it comes
1:24:33 from a poem by kafafi um i asked david geffen uh years ago with his extraordinary life and career when did he
1:24:40 feel like it was like enough i was 30 years old when i met him and i asked him that question the
1:24:46 first meal we ever had and he looked at me and he said that’s not how life works it goes up and down
1:24:54 this and he goes i want you to read a poem and he gives me ithaca by kafafi and i named my holding
1:24:58 company i had sb projects but then when i did the holding company and started doing other things too
1:25:04 i named it after this poem because i was so moved by it and the concept of the poem of ithaca is you’re
1:25:08 on the way to the island of ithaca and the greek islands and along the way you’re going to see so
1:25:13 many different things and you’re going to meet scholars and you’re going to you know learn wisdom
1:25:17 and all these different things and when you find ithaca finally if you find her poor she did not fool you
1:25:24 because it was never about the destination always about the journey and i think right now
1:25:31 if there if i get to this end game with you like that’s no fun then it’s over so like keep the waves
1:25:38 coming i made the biggest investment i’ve ever made in a company because of my girlfriend i came home one
1:25:44 night and my lovely girlfriend was up at 1am in the morning pulling her hair out as she tried to piece
1:25:50 together her own online store for her business and in that moment i remembered an email i’d had
1:25:56 from a guy called john the founder of stan store our new sponsor and a company i’ve invested incredibly
1:26:01 heavily in and stan store helps creators to sell digital products courses coaching and memberships
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1:26:19 going to launch a stan challenge and as part of this challenge i’m going to give away one hundred
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1:26:30 knowledge that you have visit stephenbartlett.stan.store to sign up and you’ll also get an extended
1:26:35 30-day free trial of stan store if you use that link your next move could quite frankly change
1:26:44 everything i told danielek that i was interviewing you a couple of months ago and he sat me down in his
1:26:48 la office and was like i’ve got to tell you a story about that scooter brawn guy i’ve got to tell you
1:26:54 something he said that when he made the forbes under 30 list when he was a young man in i think stockholm
1:27:01 sweden he said he randomly got a phone call out of the blue from you and you had decided to call
1:27:07 everybody on the forbes 30 under 30 oh the billboard is billboard 30 under 30 i thought it was forbes and
1:27:12 you decided to call all every single person on the list just to introduce yourself yeah i when i heard
1:27:19 heard that i thought fucking wow you don’t want to know why why because every single time i met someone
1:27:27 very accomplished and successful and they wanted to help me they’d say well who are you trying to reach
1:27:32 and they’d say oh my gosh i’ve known them for 20 years 30 years and they would pick up the phone call
1:27:40 and their power was in relationship that was expansive and and long and they knew each other from the
1:27:46 beginning not that they had met some powerful club at the end and what i realized was
1:27:56 the real power is in community and i wanted to know my peers i wanted to grow with them that we didn’t
1:28:01 need to go and find someone who already had it we needed to support each other how old were you when
1:28:05 you did that 27 so you were 27 and you called everybody on that list yeah
1:28:12 such a cool thing to do so many people are now going to go do that but it’s such a cool thing to do
1:28:20 by the way i am an early investor in spotify because of that phone call he was just i’m sure he told you
1:28:24 this he was just a company in sweden he didn’t tell me this part oh yeah he was just and when i called
1:28:29 him he was you know they were talking about this new thing spotify but it was in sweden and
1:28:36 we met and i tried to get in right away after we met because i was like what is this and and he didn’t
1:28:41 let me in at first and then you know i went and met shack you know oh yeah i met shack in london we
1:28:48 walked around and then d.a wallick was like advising them and um i ended up getting to be a significant
1:28:54 you know investor at that point in my life in this you know new young company spotify and i have not
1:29:01 sold a share in probably 18 years you haven’t sold a share no i’m a firm believer in that company i’m a
1:29:07 firm believer in daniel and i and i think listen i hear all the time where people are like oh look you
1:29:17 know this is so unfair daniel eck with his bravery and his foresight saved the music industry he gave value
1:29:23 to our industry again he found a way to make us go from going in one direction to the most successful
1:29:29 we’ve ever been and i don’t think people realize that and give him enough credit for what he did
1:29:34 people don’t understand the machine they just think well record sales went away and now we’ve got the
1:29:39 streaming fee and it’s lower so what is the context we’re missing there what did he what did that company
1:29:46 do it gave value to our business it gave you know uh multiples on publishing and masters that we had
1:29:52 never seen before because now everyone’s music can be heard and heard for a long time you know at
1:29:57 the time daniel came along all i would hear going in the music business is man you missed the 80s and 90s
1:30:05 sorry kid you know this business is going down you know and daniel was streaming made it so that
1:30:10 you know these these major labels and these independent companies and you know these artists
1:30:15 are able to do things they’ve never been able to do before one on bringing that amount of revenue to
1:30:22 our business but two also bringing our global community together and uh and that was daniel’s
1:30:29 foresight and his vision and his uh i mean he didn’t have any relationships he didn’t know the
1:30:37 major labels crazy isn’t it you know he he he saved the music industry and i think now that you know he’s
1:30:43 the biggest thing in the music industry it’s easy to point at him as like the big bad oh and yes he’s
1:30:46 always trying to innovate and change but he has brought more money back into our industry than
1:30:53 we ever thought would be there and um and i’m grateful to him and i think he he saved a lot of
1:31:01 careers i also would like to add a couple of words to that just to say what an unbelievably humble smart
1:31:07 kind human being he is it’s an impossible story for it for to do what he did out of stockholm as well
1:31:12 not silicon valley and for it to be the dominant platform and still to be the best platform even as a
1:31:17 podcast that’s my favorite platform by far and they’ve just decided in the last two to three
1:31:21 months which is actually why i was over at spotify’s office to meet him that they’re going to start
1:31:24 paying podcasters revenue that we’ve never been paid before they’re going to cut us in on the
1:31:29 spotify membership fee which means that again it’s going to fuel this whole industry apple aren’t paying
1:31:35 us anything but spotify have decided to pay podcasters who upload on video which is going to mean
1:31:42 that people can quit their jobs and and daniel’s a very innovative guy and i remember him as the kid
1:31:48 i called on that list and who when he came to the united states a couple weeks later played me in ping
1:31:55 pong eight times you know and that’s how we became friends and um he’s incredibly humble incredibly
1:32:01 smart incredibly hard working and he has changed a lot of people’s lives
1:32:08 what’s next for you scooter should i call you scott or scooter either one i’m proud of both now okay i’m
1:32:15 gonna call you scott okay what’s what is next in if we sit here in 10 years time do you have any idea
1:32:20 what that chapter look like or do you have any idea what would have had to have happened for you to
1:32:27 consider it a success the only thing i want to make sure is that you know i stay i want to be the father
1:32:32 to my children right that i that i want to be that i continue that that’s the thing like that’s the one
1:32:36 consistent thing i want to make sure that i put them first that they are my priority because i get
1:32:41 them until they’re 18 and then you know they’re gonna be like dad we’re out yeah um and i’m still gonna
1:32:47 obviously look forward to the next chapter but um i got 10 years of that i think something i’m
1:32:51 excited about in the next chapter is like what does love look like what does relationship look like
1:32:58 um and then i’m excited to be a rookie again and try new things and get into industries because i said to
1:33:04 you before we started taping you know you asked me about ai and i said i feel like we’re in the
1:33:10 beginning of an industrial revolution and a cold war at the same time but there’s just so much opportunity
1:33:14 because things are shifting and things are moving and we’re becoming a more productive society
1:33:20 because like you i’ve gotten to see some of the things that are coming on the technology side and
1:33:26 it’s mind-blowing what’s coming and it’s mind-blowing what’s already happening that people a lot of people
1:33:33 don’t even realize and the innovation is going to get faster and faster and faster and i think the
1:33:40 one thing that will never go away is humans want for taste for human error for experiences
1:33:47 if anything during covid we saw national parks explode people had time for experiences i think ai
1:33:51 is going to make us more productive we’re going to have more time for experiences and i’m excited for
1:33:55 that and i’m excited for what that world looks like and i think there will always be growing pains when
1:34:01 there’s change but on the other side societies have always been measured by productivity not by wealth
1:34:05 how productive is that society we’re about to be the most productive society we’ve ever been
1:34:11 it’s quite it is quite scary but it’s also extremely exciting and i think i think both responses are quite
1:34:17 natural i think excitement’s often present where fear is and um i the choice that i’m personally
1:34:22 just making is to lean in and to mess around and to learn when we spoke earlier you were telling me
1:34:27 that you’ll stay up all night long like learning how to code with ai and you’re trying to understand all
1:34:31 the ai tools that are in front of us you can kind of be first because you feel like you know you
1:34:35 weren’t at the right place in the dot-com boom and you want to make sure that you’re in there
1:34:44 can i ask you what you consider success is it you don’t want to miss out like what what is the
1:34:49 success why do you feel like you want to not miss out what do you want to be first to if you if you
1:34:53 achieve something on the other side because you actually master ai and you are one of the first
1:34:59 what are you hoping happens so i think i’m trying i’m running from a fear and the fear is
1:35:09 i’m 32 now and i’ve i’ve been playing at the frontier my whole life so like my first business
1:35:13 was in social media i rode that wave into shore it changed my life i was relevant it made me feel
1:35:17 great i built on on that frontier as the wave came into shore then the blockchain came around started a
1:35:21 company called third web valued 160 million dollars amazing i was on the frontier then this ai thing
1:35:27 comes along and it feels like the wave is coming in and i’m i’ve got a surfboard and i’ve got to
1:35:31 decide whether i want to take this wave or not and if i i feel like if i miss the wave if i’m not
1:35:41 involved if i’m not building there then it’s quite existential it’s like then i don’t know what can
1:35:46 happen and i don’t like that i don’t like the unknown and it goes back to many things we talked
1:35:53 about but you’re swimming in the ocean yes i’m not the best swimmer in the world i’m saying but you’ll go
1:35:58 in the ocean yeah not just on the beach will you go out in the ocean and get in the water if i have
1:36:02 my floating vest on because i can’t i can’t swim which is interesting though you’ll get in though yeah
1:36:08 yeah 100 i have a top i wear to go in no i understand that but i i find that interesting
1:36:14 only because the ocean is a place where you have absolutely no control you know it’s the ocean can
1:36:18 do what we want you don’t know what’s in there you know a lot of people like i see when they want
1:36:23 control i realized there were years that i kind of just didn’t swim in the ocean i swim on the beach
1:36:27 but i didn’t really want to go into the ocean because i didn’t have control out there you know
1:36:31 i didn’t know what was in there i didn’t know what could get me at it like i couldn’t see it coming i
1:36:36 couldn’t control the outcome and you talk a lot about this like the need for control that makes you
1:36:43 feel uncomfortable but you are also a very big risk taker i mean you’re 32 years old you’ve achieved all
1:36:48 this you’re pushing yourself to find out more you’re defying all the odds you got the kid from
1:36:54 home who’s still talking crap because you know look everything what you’re doing and and i i guess i’m
1:36:59 intrigued because one you don’t give yourself the credit of how much you go into the unknown
1:37:05 it’s almost like you do it out of fear and necessity but i’m really pushing you on like
1:37:11 what does success look like for you because you’re on the surfboard you keep surfing i’m trying to figure
1:37:18 out like where where is what is success to you is it you’re you’re 90 years old and you’re looking
1:37:23 back at your life what are the things that you could not live without you’d be disappointed if
1:37:29 they weren’t there i imagine it’s going to be my kids i imagine it’s going to be my relationship with
1:37:34 my partner i think that’s the going back to this sounds like a crazy thing to say but if there was a
1:37:38 button on the table and i had to press it to kill myself or my partner i’d press to kill myself and that
1:37:42 was a really clarifying thought for me because i was like i would literally take my i’d give my life
1:37:49 to save this person this other human being my nieces my brother um my fam my fam my family
1:37:57 i’m confused because you haven’t named all the achievements of ai
1:38:02 you haven’t named you know all the things that you think you need to do
1:38:09 you know the um ithaca yeah part of what i think makes the journey exciting is being like slightly
1:38:14 terrified and having something that consumes you and that challenges you and that scares you a little
1:38:19 bit and and building and experimenting and leaning in like when i was a kid in my bedroom i’d turn my
1:38:23 bunk bed into a business it’d be a salon one week and then the next week i’d be
1:38:30 dismantling my brother’s radio and trying to sell the parts and like so i’ve always been extremely
1:38:37 curious extremely experimental i’ve always tried to build things so i think that’s my fun but i also
1:38:40 i these days the more i’ve done this podcast the more i’ve learned to like question myself
1:38:46 question what i’m saying listen i think you’re an incredibly intriguing guy that’s why i wanted to meet
1:38:52 at you and i love how much you push yourself and you question things but i find it very interesting
1:38:58 that when i asked you about your 90s and when you look back you name things that are very attainable
1:39:04 to you because you found someone that loves you and you love them yeah and then when we’re talking
1:39:10 throughout this entire conversation it seems that when you actually open about your personal life
1:39:18 you spend a lot of your time avoiding that thing and focusing on all these others that make you feel
1:39:25 worthy to experience that thing and i i guess like what i’m just trying to say to you for as a smart
1:39:29 a guy as you are this is coming from someone who literally suffered from the same thing
1:39:39 the thing that you want the most at 90 you got it’s true the building in your room and the building
1:39:47 with ai should be just fun it shouldn’t be terrifying anymore it should be fun because the terrifying
1:39:52 thing is turning 90 and not having the thing you really want that’s when i woke up
1:40:00 and so what does that mean for me and what what did for anyone that can resonate with that what
1:40:04 does that mean that they should do i know you said like turn off the cameras and but can you do both
1:40:09 i don’t know i think everyone’s journey is different i think everyone experiences things
1:40:13 in a different way some people are able to like you talked about with addiction some people are able to
1:40:18 say just stop and other people can’t and other people have to go through a different process to
1:40:22 get there so i’m trying to understand the balance though like how do i know if i’ve got the balance
1:40:27 right in that well i hate that word because uh someone i really admired said to me harmonize you
1:40:32 know um so how do i know jeff bezos was the one who said it he was like don’t balance things
1:40:36 harmonize why why weigh things that you love against each other you love building in your room
1:40:44 you love learning things and building things you love that you love your partner and you want to build
1:40:48 a family with her one day it’s not about balance it’s about putting them together
1:40:55 bring her into every aspect of it bring her into the fears that you have with this bring her into
1:41:00 you know that’s what i i you know i didn’t know that you know it’s it’s bring every aspect of your
1:41:06 life together and share and let them be with the up and downs and you do the up and downs and kind of
1:41:11 go across the board and then also like i said do the work to find out why you ask all these questions but
1:41:16 still with all the nudging that’s happened do the work to find out why you’re so afraid to actually turn
1:41:23 off the camera and just do it so are you saying then to get out of like competition and get into
1:41:27 that curiosity that you described you said about these two states that you can invest i mean look
1:41:33 i think being competitive is always a beautiful thing if used in the right way i love that but i will say
1:41:39 to you when you talk to me about where the ai staying up at night we’re building your company
1:41:47 came from it was a kid building in his room that kid wasn’t competing with anyone he was having fun
1:41:54 in his room he was building that’s when you’re at your best it’s when you’re actually just building
1:41:59 for the joy of building and i think along the way based on our fears based on the i’m not enough
1:42:04 based on all these different things we start to take that thing that brought us joy and we start to
1:42:10 think if i don’t crush it now that people are watching me do it i’m not good at it and
1:42:17 you’re asking me for like this question is almost if it’s like advice i’m trying to figure it out the
1:42:24 same time you are yeah you know so i guess i’ll pose it back to you you’ve done research you know
1:42:29 a little bit about my life what would you say to me what should i be doing next what do you think
1:42:44 i should be nudged to do i think what you’re what you’ve done today is some of the most valuable work
1:42:49 that you can do and what i say today i mean is as you’ve sat here and the vulnerability that you’ve
1:42:55 expressed the honesty the nuance to certain points i think it’s one of the most important things you can
1:43:00 do because many of us don’t get to climb up to the top of the mountain top and see what’s up there
1:43:06 and you’re choosing to go up there and then shout back down about your marriage about business about
1:43:10 your mental health and everything in between about mistakes you’ve made injustices all these kinds of
1:43:14 things probably one of the most powerful things you can do because as you you’ve identified there’ll be
1:43:21 a couple of kids maybe me being one who will not have to be burnt not have to hit the rock bottom to
1:43:25 learn the lesson and there’s actually very few people i do this for a living there’s very few
1:43:31 people that have both that experience and the ability to articulate it in a way that is resonant
1:43:38 in terms of this next season of your life i think you’re doing so much well like yeah it was so nice
1:43:42 actually hearing you on the phone to your kids yesterday when they came over it was like dad i want
1:43:46 a pencil or whatever he was saying and you’re like steven you said to me i’ve got to you hang up the phone and
1:43:49 you addressed your kid you call me back in 10 seconds and i thought there was something really
1:43:55 special and telling that you were willing to end a phone call with someone and put the phone away and
1:43:59 immediately be present with your child to have a conversation with him to have a conversation
1:44:02 then call me back straight away most people don’t do that so i thought okay he’s really this really
1:44:09 means a lot to him in this season you know when when you just said to me what i did here today yeah
1:44:14 i smiled because i was being really honest with myself and i really appreciated you saying that
1:44:19 but i also smiled because being honest with myself of how funny it is that when i leave here
1:44:27 all i’ve been doing lately when i’m away from my kids is thinking of what do i build next
1:44:33 so i can show my value i’m going back to that old habit because i’m excited to build something else
1:44:38 but when i’m being really deep honest with myself really going deep it comes from this place of
1:44:46 well if i can do it again then i’ll show them this time will be the one that i’m happy about
1:44:51 this time like it’s that same old thing that comes every single time and i still want to build something
1:44:56 because i get joy out of that but same while i’m giving you this advice when you said that to me i went
1:45:04 oh man he’s right this is the most valuable thing i could probably do but the reason i don’t do it
1:45:12 is because deep down i feel not worthy of it i feel like who am i to tell anybody anything you know all
1:45:19 of us we feel like a fraud when we’re giving any kind of advice and that creeps up in me and i i get
1:45:25 this very if i’m being very vulnerable it gets this place of i don’t even want to say oh thank you for
1:45:29 saying that at first because i’m like well if someone’s watching they’ll be like this arrogant
1:45:35 guy or you get all the voices coming back in your head but the truth is
1:45:44 i want to go and build something next i want to fall in love again i want to be present for my children
1:45:49 and i want to be someone who can give advice from a place of wisdom
1:45:56 and be proud that i give it but also receive it because i’ve learned just as much talking to you
1:46:03 and what i will tell you is you are way ahead of the game at 32 compared to where i was thank you
1:46:08 and i had a lot of success at 32 but i wasn’t asking these questions and i wasn’t pushing myself
1:46:13 the way you did and i think it is an incredibly cool thing that this is what you get to do as a career
1:46:21 because i think you get to help a lot of people um and don’t ever lose sight of the fact that the
1:46:27 kid who was building in his room is now building in a lot of other people’s rooms and it’s really
1:46:33 impressive thank you that means an awful lot coming from you i’ve been extremely excited by this
1:46:37 conversation and i’ve been telling everybody in our team up because of the conversations we have on the
1:46:43 phone and i knew that if those conversations or any reflection of the conversation we’d have on my
1:46:47 show it would be really pivotal for me and it has been it’s been the nicest punch in the face
1:47:02 you know people probably wonder why i say all this stuff in public but um what an unbelievable
1:47:07 opportunity it is to meet someone like you and get to get to learn from you genuinely to get to learn
1:47:12 from you like what an unbelievably crazy thing from this kid from botswana to get to meet someone like
1:47:18 you and learn from you to the point that my life has a chance of being better than i’ve spoken to you
1:47:22 and then to get to share that with people who i know are struggling with the same shit who are contending
1:47:27 with the same battles so that is why i make the decision to have these conversations in the way that i do and um
1:47:32 by the way just want just because i struggle with giving myself credit i want to say this to you
1:47:41 the kid from baswana is teaching me as well the kid from cascap you know it’s uh
1:47:45 as much as like that’s an incredible thing
1:47:52 i wanted to come on here because i’ve listened to your podcast before and i’ve been one of those listeners
1:47:59 who grew and learned from it so thank you honestly and continue to give yourself the credit you deserve
1:48:04 and continue to ask the questions i do want to blow a little bit of smoke up your ass for something else
1:48:09 that you’ve done because i don’t think people have the all of this information but when i looked at the
1:48:14 breadth of philanthropic work that you’ve done whether it’s the support you gave to manchester which
1:48:20 is the city that i consider my hometown after the um ariana attack ah oh my god you’ve got a bee
1:48:26 on your arm and the way that that brought the city together in that moment or the work that you’ve
1:48:33 done supporting the attack that happened in israel um but all these other foundations the list of
1:48:40 philanthropic work that you’ve done is so long that i that i would have to we’d have to do another podcast
1:48:43 just to go through all of these things and you don’t talk about it publicly i don’t see you posting
1:48:47 about it all the time so for me that’s always indicated that you’re doing it for the right
1:48:51 reasons but it’s incredible so thank you for doing that as well and you deserve credit that you never
1:48:57 you never get for doing all of these things and this inspired me as well because sometimes i think
1:49:01 as entrepreneurs we can fall into the trap of thinking we we cut down the forest then donate to
1:49:08 the bees you know my mom is the reason um she as i started building in college she said just promise me
1:49:16 you know you’ll do sadaka which is charity within our our culture to give back and i basically said
1:49:21 every aspect of my business will have a give back component and shauna nepp who runs our family
1:49:26 foundation like our job is to make the money her job is to help me give it away and um and sometimes
1:49:31 it’s with money sometimes it’s with effort but i’ve met so many incredible heroes unsung heroes in all
1:49:37 this work um people who really dedicate full-time their lives to this and i really always i always
1:49:43 say uh my grandfather before he passed he said if your glass is filling with water and you’re one of
1:49:48 the lucky people in this world that god continues to pour water into your glass well you better start
1:49:54 pouring it into other people’s glasses otherwise it’s just going to spill and make a mess and i never
1:49:59 forgot that even when you sold hype there was this tremendous amount of money that you turned around
1:50:04 and gave to all the employees which a lot of people don’t know about and you also gave money to several
1:50:09 of your artists and from what i’ve researched tens of millions were given to your artists as well and
1:50:12 you could have kept all that money to yourself so when i hear that someone’s gone around and given that
1:50:17 much money to 264 of their employees and artists that have worked with them you kind of get a picture
1:50:21 of who the guy is we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question
1:50:26 for the next guest not knowing who they’re going to be leaving it for and the question that has been
1:50:39 left for you is now i’m nervous why do people always get the question left for you is if you could
1:50:45 do one thing that fear of failure has kept you from doing what would it be and why has it kept you from
1:50:52 doing it man if i could do one thing that’s a really great question um
1:51:04 you know at first i was thinking it would be like oh say sorry to somebody or this that but i feel like
1:51:08 i’ve gotten to do that with people in my life for the last couple years for things that like i wanted
1:51:13 to kind of talk about and some things you realize like it’s just not the season for that you know it takes
1:51:22 two and i felt myself it was almost the fear of saying this out loud um write write a book oh thank
1:51:30 god yeah i’ve always uh i think it’s it’s my brother wrote a book a really great one called the promise of
1:51:35 a pencil and it was a new york times bestseller and i was always like that’s adam’s thing and i’ve always
1:51:39 wanted to write but i always feel like my mind and you know the things i’m working on myself all these
1:51:44 things they change like every week and i’ve always felt like deep down like oh yeah you should write a
1:51:49 book but like you’re really not going to write a great book if you do and i think it’s always held
1:51:54 me back from actually just sitting down and doing it i got goosebumps then because as in that silence
1:51:59 for some bizarre reason i swear on my mother’s i was thinking i hope he says he’s going to write a book
1:52:03 i swear to you that’s what went through my mind i went i hope he says he’s going to write a book
1:52:07 that’s why i went thank god well i didn’t say i was going to write it i said fear has been holding
1:52:11 me back but maybe maybe you’ll turn off the camera and go in your nudge and this will be the nudge for
1:52:19 me okay well we hope you do scooter because um i’ve been so shocked and blown away by your wisdom and your
1:52:24 ability to articulate things and the stage of life that you’ve you’ve arrived at is for me as an objective
1:52:30 observer just the perfect moment i appreciate that and uh we’ll keep doing the work together and this is
1:52:35 the beginning of a great friendship and i’m really honored to be here and really happy for all your
1:52:42 success thank you the feeling is mutual thank you brother thank you so much thank you this has always
1:52:47 burned my mind a little bit 53 of you that listen to this show regularly haven’t yet subscribed to this
1:52:51 show so could i ask you for a favor if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to
1:52:56 support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button and my
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1:53:17 guests that you want me to speak to and we’ll continue to do what we do thank you so much

0:00:04 I think in the future, you’re going to see consumer spam to be like food, rent, software.
0:00:10 All of the aspects of our lives are going to be intermediated by the models, and we’re going to pay for that.
0:00:17 The definition of what a companion is has evolved so quickly from either a friend or a girlfriend to like anything,
0:00:23 any sort of advice or wisdom or entertainment or counsel you could have gotten from a human before.
0:00:27 Maybe you just need to feel connected to something. It doesn’t need to be human.
0:00:33 I think it’s been a puzzle to me what the first AI social network is going to look like.
0:00:37 To work, a social network has to have like real emotional stakes.
0:00:44 We’re living in this early era of AI where velocity is the most.
0:00:48 For decades, consumer tech followed a similar beat.
0:00:51 New platforms, new behaviors, new breakouts.
0:00:54 Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snap, TikTok.
0:00:56 But lately, that rhythm has changed.
0:00:59 And so has the nature of what we mean by consumer.
0:01:04 In this conversation, we bring together A16Z’s consumer and AI investing minds to ask,
0:01:06 what is the state of consumer in the AI era?
0:01:11 You’ll hear how creative tools like MidJourney and VO are reshaping expression,
0:01:13 how voice is becoming the new interface,
0:01:17 and how companions, AI ones, are filling in social white spaces.
0:01:20 We talk about retention and revenue curves,
0:01:22 defensibility beyond network effects,
0:01:24 and why velocity might be the new mode.
0:01:26 We also get speculative.
0:01:29 What happens when AI knows you better than your friends do?
0:01:31 What does the next social platform look like?
0:01:34 And are we heading towards a world where software, not shoes, not handbags,
0:01:36 is the new luxury good?
0:01:39 This episode is about new form factors, new business models,
0:01:41 and a new definition of connection.
0:01:42 Let’s get into it.
0:01:47 As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only.
0:01:50 Should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice,
0:01:53 or be used to evaluate any investment or security,
0:01:57 and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.
0:02:01 Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments
0:02:02 in the companies discussed in this podcast.
0:02:06 For more details, including a link to our investments,
0:02:10 please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.
0:02:17 It seems like every few years there was a breakout,
0:02:24 starting from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snap, WhatsApp, Tinder, TikTok.
0:02:28 Every few years there was this sort of new paradigms, new breakout,
0:02:30 and it feels like at some point a few years ago it just stopped.
0:02:33 Why did it stop, or did it stop?
0:02:34 Would you reframe how we should think about that,
0:02:36 and where do we go from here?
0:02:40 I would argue probably ChachiBT was a huge consumer outcome
0:02:41 and winner in the past few years.
0:02:46 And we’ve also seen a bunch of other ones in various other modalities of AI,
0:02:50 in image and video and audio companies like MidJourney and Eleven Labs
0:02:54 and Blackforce Labs, now things like Kling and Veo.
0:02:57 Weirdly, though, a lot of them don’t have the same social
0:02:59 or traditional consumer dynamics that you mentioned.
0:03:04 I think because AI is still relatively early and so much of the new products
0:03:06 and innovation has been driven by research teams
0:03:09 who are like so good at training models,
0:03:13 but historically have not been amazing at creating the consumer product layer around them.
0:03:18 So I think the optimistic view is that the models are now mature enough
0:03:21 and many are available either open source or via API
0:03:25 for people to build great, more traditional consumer products on top of them.
0:03:30 It’s interesting that you asked that question because I was thinking about the past,
0:03:34 what, 15 years, 20 years, where, as you said, like Google, Facebook, Uber, all the names.
0:03:39 And it’s interesting because when you think about internet, mobile, cloud, everything together,
0:03:41 there were all these amazing names.
0:03:47 I think the cloud, mobile, all that had a lot of maturity baked in.
0:03:50 Like the platform was around for like 10, 15 years.
0:03:53 Every little nukes and crannies have been explored to some extent.
0:03:59 The changes that people had to adopt was Apple coming out with new features,
0:04:04 as opposed to changes that people need to adopt now is the underlying relentless model updates.
0:04:06 So I think that’s one different.
0:04:09 But the other thing is, again, Justin, you touched on this,
0:04:12 but if I think about the past historical winners,
0:04:15 there’s like information area like Google of the world.
0:04:17 And now I think ChatGPT is certainly doing that.
0:04:21 And they’re the utility we missed out like box and Dropbox of the world.
0:04:24 They’re more consumer, prosumery that people use,
0:04:28 where we also see a lot of the companies attracting and going after that use case.
0:04:30 Expression, creativity, same thing.
0:04:33 The creative tools are endless and that’s happening.
0:04:35 What I think is missing potentially is connection.
0:04:40 Like this social graph, this thing hasn’t rebuilt on AI yet.
0:04:46 And that may be just a white space or something that we just continue to see what develops there.
0:04:49 It’s interesting because Facebook’s almost 20 years ago at this point.
0:04:53 Like the companies that you mentioned, Justine, aside from ChatGPT and OpenAI,
0:04:55 are they going to be around 10, 20 years?
0:04:57 Like what is the defensibility of the companies we’re talking about?
0:04:59 And also the use cases of all the companies I mentioned,
0:05:02 are they going to be disrupted by these new players?
0:05:07 Or in 10 years from now, will they continue to be sort of the mainstream application for all those use cases that they serve?
0:05:15 I mean, you could argue that ChatGPT has got way higher business model quality than the analogous consumer companies from the last product cycles, right?
0:05:17 Their top SKU is $200 a month.
0:05:20 At the top Google, consumer SKU is $250 a month.
0:05:24 So sure, there’s a question of defensibility, networks, all these other things.
0:05:30 But that might have been a response to the poor business model quality that would have occurred if you didn’t have those things.
0:05:34 Now you can just charge people a lot of money and perhaps we’ve been overthinking it previously.
0:05:35 Yeah.
0:05:40 There was poor business model quality, maybe stronger sort of retention or product market fit or durability.
0:05:46 Yeah, like you had to have a story for how this was like compounding enterprise value in the absence of just making money right away.
0:05:49 And now these models and these companies are just making money right away.
0:05:50 Yeah.
0:05:55 I think the other thing is, Justine, you talked about this, like all the foundation models are kind of pointy in different ways.
0:06:01 So you could say, look, Claude and the ChatGPT horizontal model and the Gemini model, aren’t they interchangeable?
0:06:02 And doesn’t that mean price pressure?
0:06:05 But different people use them for different things.
0:06:07 And it seems like they’re raising prices, not lowering them.
0:06:13 So I think when you like zoom in a little closer, you see that there are like some interesting defensibility dynamics that are already there.
0:06:22 Increasing price, not decreasing in an interesting point, because monetization is clearly a different thing from previous era to AI era, especially for consumer companies.
0:06:24 They’re making money right away.
0:06:34 One thing that’s always on my mind, and Olivia, tell me if you think that’s not correct, but like the retention, when we talked about retention on the consumer subscription model before AI,
0:06:43 I don’t know if we actually try to make a differentiation between unique user retention and revenue retention, because they’re like kind of the same.
0:06:45 Like you don’t get to change pricing that often.
0:06:46 You don’t get to upgrade.
0:06:47 Like it’s the same thing.
0:06:56 As opposed to now, we make a very clear differentiation between unique user retention and revenue retention, because people actually upgrade.
0:07:03 They actually have all these like credits and points they need to actually overages that they actually end up spending.
0:07:11 So you actually see revenue retention being meaningfully higher than unique user retention, which again, like I haven’t seen that before.
0:07:11 Yeah.
0:07:11 Yeah.
0:07:17 I think before the average consumer subscription was maybe $50 a year, if that.
0:07:18 That was kind of a lot.
0:07:21 Like the best in class consumer products would charge that.
0:07:24 And now we have people very happily paying $200 a month.
0:07:25 Wow.
0:07:29 And even saying in some cases that they feel like they’re being undercharged for that or they would pay more.
0:07:30 How do we explain that?
0:07:32 What value are they getting such that they’re paying more?
0:07:34 I think it’s doing work for them.
0:07:40 Like consumer subscriptions in the past were on things like, I don’t know, personal finance, fitness, wellness, like things that.
0:07:41 Entertainment.
0:07:41 Yeah.
0:07:45 But they were things that ostensibly would help you help yourself, entertain yourself.
0:07:48 But you would have to invest a lot of time to get the value from them.
0:07:55 And now with products like Deep Research, for example, that could replace 10 hours of generating a market report by yourself.
0:08:00 And so that kind of thing is easily worth, I think, for many people $200 a month, even on one or two generations.
0:08:05 I mean, I think things, too, like VO3, like people are paying $250 a month.
0:08:10 Unfortunately, I have since – it’s a limited, the $250 credit plan.
0:08:11 You’re the whale, Justine.
0:08:13 You’re the $1,000 a month.
0:08:16 I’ve since charged several more of the $50 credit packs.
0:08:20 So I probably spent, if I had to guess, like over $500 in the first few weeks at VO3.
0:08:22 The revenue retention is higher.
0:08:22 Exactly.
0:08:30 And I’m happy to pay that because it’s like you have this suddenly – it feels like a magical mystery box that you can open in and get whatever video you want only for eight seconds.
0:08:32 But it’s incredible.
0:08:33 And the characters can talk.
0:08:41 And you can make amazing things that you can share with friends, make like personal memes of someone delivering a message to your friend with their name in it.
0:08:45 Create full stories that people are posting on Twitter and Reddit and all of these different places.
0:08:50 It’s sort of like nothing we’ve seen before in terms of what consumer products can actually do for people.
0:08:51 Yeah.
0:08:55 It seems like every part of consumer discretionary spend is going to be overtaken by software.
0:09:00 And I think in the future you’re going to see consumer spend to be like food rent software.
0:09:03 And that’s kind of where we’re going with Justine speaking to.
0:09:04 And can you give us some examples of that?
0:09:06 Well, a lot of it is what Olivia said, right?
0:09:09 So I think all the entertainment is being subsumed by it.
0:09:14 A lot of the sort of creative expression work that you would do outside of software is now being subsumed by it.
0:09:20 A lot of the sort of relationship intermediation, which might have been a place for disposable income spend, is being subsumed by it.
0:09:27 So all of the aspects of our lives are going to be intermediated by the models, and we’re going to pay for that.
0:09:35 Brian, you’re saying what we’re still missing is connection from this new paradigm, and people are still relying on sort of Instagram, Twitter, some of the other sort of social networks of the past.
0:09:38 What’s going to get us to something new here in the realm of connection?
0:09:40 Or has that just been one data network effect?
0:09:50 You know, it’s funny, when I think about social, which is a category that I get so excited about, at the end of the day, a lot of it was status update, right?
0:09:53 Facebook, Twitter, Snap, it’s just like, here’s what I’m doing.
0:09:57 And through status update, you feel connected to that person.
0:10:01 And that status update showed up in different modality.
0:10:10 It used to be, here’s what I am, here’s what I’m doing, to actual photos of where you are and what you’re doing, to videos and short-form videos now.
0:10:14 So now people feel connected to others through reels and what have you.
0:10:19 So I think that has been one era of feeling connected with others.
0:10:22 Now the question is, how can AI help that?
0:10:28 How can AI feel like you’re connected to other human beings and know what’s going on in your friend’s life?
0:10:36 The truth is, if I just think of a modality of photo, video, audio type things, I think a lot of it has been explored.
0:10:42 Different versions and mutations of that have been explored quite extensively, especially on mobile.
0:10:50 I think where we could get to is, it’s funny, I don’t know about you guys, but I pour my heart and soul into ChatGPT.
0:10:53 It knows more about me than probably Google, potentially.
0:10:56 Which is an insane thing to say.
0:11:03 Like Google, I’ve been using Google for a decade plus and ChatGPT may know more about me than Google because I type more, I tell it more, I give more context.
0:11:11 What might connection feel like when that essence of me is shareable with others?
0:11:23 And I don’t know if that’s the next version of feeling connected, but I can certainly see a world where that is, that resonates with a lot of folks nowadays, younger generation, et cetera, that are tired of just looking at the surface of all the stuff.
0:11:40 I mean, we already see some examples of exactly that, where like, there’s all these viral trends where people are like, I asked my ChatGPT based on everything you know about me, write my five strengths or weaknesses, or like make an image of who you think the essence of me is, or make a comic like about my life.
0:11:41 And people are sharing those everywhere.
0:11:49 I posted one the other day, and within minutes, I had dozens of people responding like with their own and sharing stuff, people I didn’t even know.
0:12:02 I think the interesting thing, though, is so far, the social behavior that has come from the AI creative tools largely, but also things like ChatGPT, is still happening on the existing social platforms and not in the new AI platforms.
0:12:06 Like, Facebook now is like, a lot of AI content.
0:12:09 Potentially unbeknownst to some of the audience.
0:12:15 Facebook is like the boomer AI swap, and then like, Reddit and Reels are like the younger people AI content.
0:12:15 Yeah.
0:12:17 I agree.
0:12:27 I think it’s been a puzzle to me what the first AI social network is going to look like, because we’ve seen attempts at, for example, like a feed of pictures of you that are AI generated.
0:12:34 And I think the problem there is that to work, a social network has to have, like, real emotional stakes.
0:12:44 And if you can generate the content in a way that you like it, and you always look amazing, and you always look happy, and you’re always in a cool background, like, it doesn’t have the same sense of stakes.
0:12:48 And so I don’t think we’ve seen the version of what a ground-up AI social network would be.
0:12:57 Like, you use the word skeuomorphic, a lot of the AI social products that mimics Instagram feed or Twitter feed was bots and AIs.
0:12:59 That feels skeuomorphic.
0:13:01 That feels like, this is what it used to look like.
0:13:02 We’re going to do it with AI.
0:13:05 And maybe that’s not really the form factor.
0:13:13 And, you know, there’s an additional hurdle in my mind that a true consumer product probably needs to leave it mobile.
0:13:23 And for AI products to work really, really well, I think there’s still a little bit of work where the cutting-edge models can do to live on edge, live on the device side of things to really enable that.
0:13:26 So I’m also excited to see what happens there.
0:13:30 It seems like people recommendation is the obvious use case at some point.
0:13:32 Like, who would be good for me to start a business with?
0:13:33 Who would be good for me to be friends with?
0:13:34 Who would be good for me to date?
0:13:37 These platforms get all this information about us.
0:13:37 Connect the dots.
0:13:50 I mean, I think an interesting area that’s maybe informed, like, where this all goes is if you look at the AI native LinkedIn efforts, the observation is that LinkedIn is a pointer to what you know instead of actually containing what you know.
0:13:58 And with this tech, we can create a profile that actually contains what you know, so I can talk to synthetic ET and get all of your wisdom.
0:14:01 Perhaps that’s what future social looks like as well.
0:14:03 That’s what you’re talking about, Justine, right?
0:14:09 If the models already know who you are, then is there, like, a synthetic you you can deploy in an interesting way to interact with people?
0:14:10 I don’t know.
0:14:20 One thing I heard you guys say is that when surprised that you guys sort of realized was that enterprises are sometimes adopting these products first before consumers, which feels different from previous era or maybe not what we expected.
0:14:21 What can we say there?
0:14:23 Yeah, that has been fascinating.
0:14:27 And BK and I saw that a lot with Eleven Labs, which we were relatively early.
0:14:31 I think we did the Series A a month or so after the initial launch.
0:14:37 And I think what we saw was first the early adopter consumers got on board and they were making memes.
0:14:39 They were making fun video and audio.
0:14:40 They were cloning their own voices.
0:14:41 They were doing game mods.
0:14:47 But then I would argue it hasn’t even gone in many cases to the true mainstream consumer.
0:14:53 Like, it’s not yet every single person in America or most have Eleven Labs on their phone or have a subscription.
0:15:03 But the company has these massive enterprise contracts and a ton of huge customers across, like, conversational AI, entertainment, tons of different use cases are using Eleven.
0:15:10 And I think we’ve seen this across a bunch of AI products, which is, like, there’s an initial consumer virality moment.
0:15:17 And then that actually leads to lead generation in enterprise sales in a way that we did not see with the last generation of products.
0:15:27 Like, enterprise buyers, there’s so much of a mandate to have AI now, an AI strategy and use AI tools, that they’re watching places like Twitter and Reddit and all of the AI newsletters.
0:15:38 And they’re saying, like, hey, this looks like a random consumer meme product, but I can actually think of a really cool application of that in my business and become the hero for having our AI strategy.
0:15:45 I’ve also heard of, like, similar in that vein, really exciting use cases of AI where you start with consumer virality.
0:15:50 So, you know, from a company side, you get all these Stripe payment data.
0:15:57 You look at all the Stripe cells and you basically put it in an AI tool to go try to find where they work.
0:16:06 And then when you find out more than X number of people working in that company, you reach out and say, hey, by the way, looks like 40 plus people are using our product.
0:16:07 What’s up?
0:16:13 I think the fact that they can do it with one person on an hour was, like, really what really struck me.
0:16:17 It was a chief of staff guy who was like, yeah, what I do is do this.
0:16:19 And, like, it all does it in, like, a couple minutes.
0:16:24 And then I send a mass email out and that’s, Jesus, okay, that’s like a go-to-market at extreme speed.
0:16:28 Justine, you rattled off a list of products and companies in the beginning of this conversation.
0:16:33 What I’m curious is, do you think just as examples, are they sort of the MySpace or Friendster?
0:16:37 Are we in sort of that era or are they the list of companies I rattled off that are still relevant 20 years later?
0:16:39 Like, where are we right now?
0:16:47 I mean, I think our hope always is that every big consumer AI company now that we see and love and use all of the products, which we all do, sticks around.
0:16:50 I think, unfortunately, that’s not always going to be the case.
0:17:02 I think maybe the interesting differentiation in AI versus the last era of consumer products or even two eras before is, like, the model layer and the capabilities are still improving.
0:17:07 Like, we have really not even, I think, in many cases scratched the surface of what these models can do.
0:17:13 I think we’ve seen that in things like the VO3 launch where it’s, like, you can suddenly have multiple characters talking.
0:17:14 You can have native audio.
0:17:16 You can do all of these things.
0:17:20 Like, all of these modalities, I don’t know, maybe we could argue about this with the techs people.
0:17:26 The LLMs are more mature, but have the opportunity to just keep improving capabilities as they scale.
0:17:43 And I think what we’ve seen is as long as a company stays at what we say is sort of, like, the technology or the quality frontier, so as long as they sort of have a state-of-the-art model or are integrating one or something like that, they won’t become, like, the MySpace or Friendster or whatever.
0:17:49 Like, they just keep – you fall a little bit behind, you ship the new update, suddenly you’re number one again, and you keep moving.
0:17:54 The interesting thing now, though, too, is we’re starting to see even segmentation in that.
0:17:58 So, like, in image, for example, there’s not just one best image model.
0:18:00 There’s, like, best image for designers.
0:18:02 There’s best image for photographers.
0:18:08 There’s best image for people who can only pay $10 a month versus the people who can pay $50 or $100 a month.
0:18:17 And so I think there can be – just because Ganesh mentioned people are spending so much, there can be multiple winners that persist over time as long as they keep shipping.
0:18:19 I absolutely agree.
0:18:22 I mean, even in video, it’s, like, a different video, but ad video.
0:18:28 And then even in ad video, I saw a post yesterday, I’m like, this is best for product shots and this is best with people.
0:18:32 And it goes on and on, and each of those, I think, is a very large market.
0:18:32 Yeah.
0:18:40 Say more about how – I know we talk a lot about defensibility and moats and how that has changed in this era, how we’ve changed how we consider that topic.
0:18:46 I’ve gone through a little bit of a come-to-Jesus woman on that, especially recently.
0:18:48 I think moats has always been very important, right?
0:18:53 The gold standard, this network effect, being part of the workflow, being system of record.
0:18:54 And these are all very, very important moats.
0:18:57 And I will posit that that’s still very important.
0:19:08 But funny enough, like, I would say the companies or investments that I’ve reviewed with this moat-first theory has not really been the winners.
0:19:18 And the winners in the category that we look at has always been the ones that break the mold, move really fast, have these incredible model launches, have these incredible product generation speeds.
0:19:28 And I’ve sort of come around that in that we’re living in this early era of AI where velocity is the moat.
0:19:36 And whether that’s in distribution, which is incredibly important and hard to break through noises these days, but also followed with product velocity.
0:19:49 That’s what wins the game because that’s what leads to mindshare and, frankly, right now, mindshare and users and traffic that actually converts to real revenue that gives you more ability to continue that journey.
0:20:00 It’s interesting, Ben Thompson, I think a decade ago at this point, had this blog post called Snapchat’s Gingerbread Strategy, where he was basically saying, hey, anything Snap can do, Facebook can do better.
0:20:04 But Snap is just going to keep sort of coming up with the next sort of innovation.
0:20:07 And if they can just keep doing that, maybe that’s their moat.
0:20:08 And he called it the gingerbread strategy.
0:20:10 It’s a good, it’s a good theory.
0:20:11 I think you just keep going to.
0:20:13 Keep adding candy to it?
0:20:13 Yeah, that’s funny.
0:20:17 And like, at some point, it’ll be such a beautiful gingerbread house.
0:20:20 You know, I think that worked to some extent.
0:20:20 Yeah.
0:20:24 And famously, I think Evan joked that he’s the chief product officer of that.
0:20:28 I think distribution and network effect ultimately kicks in, right?
0:20:36 And Snap has that too on its own, where it sort of has a corner of Gen Z and the younger users as like a core messaging platform.
0:20:38 How do we think about network effects with these new products?
0:20:44 I think it’ll, we’re not there yet where I think it’s because it’s mostly creation efforts right now.
0:20:50 There isn’t really a closed link, closed loop with creation, consumption, network effect, social network.
0:20:53 So I think we’re still a little early before a network effect kicks in.
0:21:00 But I think we see that in, we see a different type of moat form in the likes of Eleven Lab.
0:21:07 Like I said, because it moves so fast, because the product is very good, it gets to go into enterprise and gets to get locked in into the workflow.
0:21:13 So I think that version of moat we’re starting to see, I think the true network effect we’re still looking out for.
0:21:15 I think Eleven is an interesting example.
0:21:20 I was making an AI generated video the other day that I needed a voiceover for.
0:21:26 And Eleven now, because they had a head start, they had the best models, which then more people were using the product.
0:21:27 They can make the models better.
0:21:29 All of these compounding advantages.
0:21:34 They now have a library of people who have uploaded their own voices and their own characters.
0:21:44 And so for me, when I was looking across a bunch of voice providers, if I needed like a very specific, like old wizard mystical voice, like Eleven had 25 options for that fit what I need.
0:21:48 Where another platform might have, I don’t know, two or three.
0:21:52 And so I do think it’s early, but we’re starting to see signs of that.
0:21:56 But they’re more like traditional network effects that we saw with old marketplaces.
0:21:58 They’re not necessarily something like completely new.
0:22:02 I want to go deeper on voice as we talk about sort of new paradigms and form factors.
0:22:08 We got excited about voice pretty early on, or we’re the first friend that I saw sort of a thesis around it.
0:22:13 Anish, why don’t you talk about what got you so excited about voice in this new paradigm and what sort of played out and what hasn’t yet?
0:22:14 Where do you think is going?
0:22:18 I mean, the original observation, and Olivia really is our voice expert, so we should hear from her.
0:22:24 But the original observation that got us started was that voice has intermediated human interaction since the beginning of time.
0:22:28 And yet it’s been not a substrate on which technology has been applied because we just, the tech never worked.
0:22:34 And there’s all these previous efforts, voice XML and voice apps, and it just, it simply didn’t work.
0:22:36 The technology wasn’t ready yet.
0:22:40 And even then there was these pockets of Dragon Naturally Speaking and all these products from the 90s.
0:22:44 So there was always interest in voice, but it never made sense as a technology substrate.
0:22:48 And now with the generative models, you can just use voice as a primitive.
0:22:53 So it’s sort of unexplored, yet so critical to our day-to-day lives.
0:22:56 It feels like a perfect area where you’ll see a lot of AI-native efforts.
0:23:07 I think we first got excited about voice from more of a consumer perspective, like the idea of an always-on, like, coach or therapist or companion in your pocket that you can talk to.
0:23:09 And that has started to play out, I would say.
0:23:11 There’s lots of products where that’s working.
0:23:28 I think what surprised me, at least, is as the models got better, like, real enterprises have picked up voice so quickly to replace human beings on the phone or to augment what human beings are doing on the phone, even in really sensitive and critical categories like financial services.
0:23:36 Because previously they were using offshore call centers that also had lots of compliance issues and had 300 percent annual turnover and were really difficult to manage.
0:23:44 And so I think we’re still waiting to see in many ways what the first great, truly net new consumer voice experience will look like.
0:23:46 There’s some early examples.
0:23:51 I think people are pulling ChatGPT advanced voice mode into fascinating directions.
0:24:00 We’ve seen products like Granola blow up because they allow people to finally, for the first time, do something valuable with all of the things that they’re saying all day.
0:24:05 But the great thing about consumer is it’s completely unpredictable and the best products emerge out of nowhere.
0:24:07 Otherwise, they would have been built already.
0:24:11 So I’m excited to see what happens in consumer voice in the next year.
0:24:11 For sure.
0:24:16 I mean, it feels like voice is the AI insertion point for the enterprise period.
0:24:25 And I think the thing that everybody is missing right now is that the sort of mental model many folks have is that the low stakes conversations will be AI voice, the customer support, et cetera.
0:24:39 But what we’ve talked about is like the most important conversation that happens in a business in a given day, week, year is going to be intermediated by AI because AI will just do a better job with the negotiation or the sales pitch or the persuasion or the friendship.
0:24:47 What’s going to be sort of the first use case where people are going to be talking to synthetic versions of ourselves, like in a sort of consistent, relevant way?
0:24:51 Like why are they going to be talking to sort of AI Justine or AI Anish or AI Me?
0:24:52 We’ve seen a little bit of that.
0:25:02 There’s companies like Delphi that sort of create AI clones of people who have a big knowledge base that they can go and reference and you can get advice or get feedback or things like that.
0:25:04 And Brian sort of alluded to this earlier.
0:25:13 There’s this really interesting question of what if you allow not just like thought leaders or experts to have this AI clone that you can talk to via text, voice, maybe even video one day.
0:25:32 One of the things we think a lot about in consumer is there’s a lot of people who basically have had some sort of skill or insight or knowledge, whether it’s your friend from high school that’s like insanely funny and you always thought they should have a comedy cooking show, but they just never were able to break through or get it.
0:25:44 Or your guidance counselor who had incredible advice, like how can we enable those people to essentially scale themselves in a way that they never could before having an AI clone or an AI persona?
0:25:54 What we’ve seen thus far is a lot of that has been either thought leaders or experts or on the other, like total other end of the spectrum, like characters that people already know and like.
0:26:07 We saw early versions of that with character AI, which added a voice mode where there’s this pull, especially when you’re trying out a new technology to have some sort of familiarity of I’m talking to this character from my favorite anime series that I already know and love.
0:26:16 But I think we’ll start filling in everything in the middle that’s not just like a character, a fictional character, not just a human thought leader, but like all of the real people in between.
0:26:21 I mean, I think people learn in different ways and AI voice products play really well to that.
0:26:31 Masterclass launched kind of an interesting beta where they take people who have already recorded courses on the platform and turn them into voice agents, where then you can ask questions that are really specific to you.
0:26:36 And from my understanding, it basically does rag on everything they’ve said in the course.
0:26:39 And so returns a fairly customized and accurate result.
0:26:47 And that for me is interesting because I’m a fan of them as a company, but I’ve never had the attention span or the time to sit down and watch like a 12-hour Masterclass.
0:26:54 But I’ve had some really interesting conversations with the Masterclass voice agents where I can talk to them for two or three or five minutes.
0:27:00 And so I think that’s an example of where we’ll see real people turn into AI clones in ways that are useful.
0:27:06 Drawing on that one of the things that we said earlier, which is enterprise are pulling these type of things faster even than customers.
0:27:14 Like we actually talked to a company that from its inception recorded every single interaction of every single employee.
0:27:19 So when the employee’s gone, the ghost lives there and you can still get all the wisdom.
0:27:21 Terrifying.
0:27:26 Terrifying, but also I’d love to continue to get wisdom and then thoughts from the greats, you know.
0:27:28 It really echoes the idea that everyone’s replaceable.
0:27:29 And it’s interesting.
0:27:29 By yourself.
0:27:34 We only need you for five hours.
0:27:36 I thought that was fascinating, like crazy.
0:27:40 Like everyone’s sort of ghost version that lives on like Harry Potter.
0:27:44 It’s also like, do you want to talk to a synthetic version of a person that you find interesting?
0:27:51 Or is there an entirely synthetic person that doesn’t exist in the real world that is a perfect match for your interests?
0:27:53 And maybe that’s a more interesting question.
0:27:54 What does that person look like?
0:27:57 Because they might even exist in the world, but if you don’t meet them, you don’t meet them.
0:28:00 And now they can be sort of brought to life with this technology.
0:28:01 Yeah, it’s interesting to think about.
0:28:10 What are the sort of use cases for which we’re going to want to have a human or someone we think is a human sort of doing the activity versus where are we going to be more open to that?
0:28:15 Like I think Olivia’s point is with the master class thing, there’s already this parasocial relationship.
0:28:25 So there’s value in feeling like you’re talking to a specific instance of a person versus talking to the abstract, most interesting person you may ever meet where you don’t need to have that pre-wired.
0:28:27 Which may be ChatGPT.
0:28:30 Wasn’t there like a viral tweet that someone recorded in New York Subway?
0:28:34 Like this person was fully talking to ChatGPT as if they’re talking to a girlfriend?
0:28:35 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:28:45 And there was another one where this parent posted they had lived through 45 minutes of their son asking questions about Thomas the Tank Engine and they couldn’t do it anymore.
0:28:46 So they gave him the phone.
0:28:54 They put voice mode up and forgot about it and went to do something else and came back two hours later and the kid was still talking to ChatGPT about Thomas the Tank Engine.
0:28:55 That’s awesome.
0:28:59 In that case, like the kid has no idea who the character on the other end is.
0:29:02 They just know it’s a person who wants to go super deep on their interests.
0:29:06 Right, and there is no human that can talk about Thomas the Tank Engine for that many hours.
0:29:08 For two hours and 45 minutes straight.
0:29:08 That’s right.
0:29:22 I mean, if we go to ChatGPT or Claude right now for therapy or coaching, I’d prefer to go to my sort of AI clone therapist or coach and maybe in the future we record our session so that they have the data or the therapist or coach has like so much content online that we could just recreate them.
0:29:32 But yeah, and to your point of like five, ten years from now, will the top artists be sort of new versions of Lil Mikaela, sort of AI-generated people, or will they be sort of Taylor Swift?
0:29:34 And her just army of AI.
0:29:35 Or a duet.
0:29:36 Yeah.
0:29:37 A little bit of both.
0:29:43 And similarly on Twitter, the social characters that we follow, the next Kim Kardashian, is that a real person or is that AI-generated?
0:29:44 Do you have a hypothesis on that?
0:29:49 I have been thinking about this a lot for a couple of years because I think we all followed Lil Mikaela closely.
0:29:56 Then we followed some of the like K-pop bands that I think were the first to start introducing like AI, hologram-based type characters.
0:29:58 I thought you were going to say they were AI-generated.
0:29:59 I was like, that would make sense to me.
0:30:03 No, one of them went to military, so they like replaced them with an AI.
0:30:04 Something like that.
0:30:21 And then I think we’ve also really closely followed, like this is sort of tied really closely into photorealistic image and video because we’re now seeing people create these like influencers who get a ton of attention and followers largely because they now look realistic enough that you don’t know if they’re AI or not.
0:30:23 And there’s a lot of debate around that.
0:30:28 My take is probably there will be fragmentation into two types of creators or celebrities.
0:30:34 One type is like a Taylor Swift type where like the human experience of it I think matters in some ways.
0:30:45 Like a lot of people not only love her song but resonate with the things that have happened to her in her life and her stories and her live performances and like all of those things that AI cannot yet replicate.
0:30:50 There’s another type of celebrity or creator who is more like interest-based.
0:30:57 What we were talking about with ChatGPT talking about like Thomas the Tank Engine, it sort of doesn’t matter if that person has lived the real human experience or not.
0:31:02 It just matters if like they can be interesting talking about or sharing content around a certain topic.
0:31:05 And so if I had to guess, we’ll still have both.
0:31:05 Yeah.
0:31:09 This kind of gets back to the great like AI art debate that always rages on.
0:31:09 Yeah.
0:31:18 Which is like, yes, anyone can generate art now easier than ever before, but it still takes an enormous amount of time to make great AI art.
0:31:21 We hosted an event with a bunch of AI artists last summer.
0:31:30 And many of these people, when they walked you through their workflow of making an AI movie, it actually probably takes just as much time as it would have to film that.
0:31:33 But maybe they didn’t have the skill set, so they’d never be able to do that before.
0:31:42 And so I think we’ve seen, yes, an explosion of like influencers that are AI, but still very few of them have risen to the top and become the little Michaela’s.
0:31:43 There’s only been a couple.
0:31:48 So I think we’re going to see something similar happen where we’re going to have pools of AI talent and pools of human talent.
0:31:51 And the very best of each is going to rise to the top.
0:31:55 And it’s going to be a really low conversion rate on both, which is probably how it should be.
0:31:56 Or non-human talent.
0:31:56 Yeah.
0:32:02 Like I think what like AI unlocks, one of the interesting things we’ve seen in VO3 is like that street interview format.
0:32:10 But like the person being interviewed is like an elf or like a wizard or like a ghost or these furry blob characters that Gen Z loves talking to.
0:32:12 Like those could all be AI.
0:32:14 Like that sort of thing is very interesting.
0:32:16 I mean, I think we see this in music too.
0:32:21 I think a lot of music, the problem is that the music that the AI generates is it just feels very mid.
0:32:26 And definitionally, these things are averaging machines and culture is supposed to be at the edge.
0:32:30 So I think it’s more of a problem with bad art versus bad artists.
0:32:33 And we’re conflating those two things and saying it’s AI.
0:32:35 It’s not the AI that’s the problem.
0:32:36 It’s the bad art that’s the problem.
0:32:40 So if the art was at the same level, you don’t think that there’s necessarily any,
0:32:42 that people would just want to hear from humans.
0:32:43 Well, potentially.
0:32:47 And then I also think this is where we start to get a more philosophical debate,
0:32:52 which is if you train a model with all the music up until, but just prior to hip hop,
0:32:53 would it like infer hip hop?
0:32:58 I don’t think so because music is the intersection of past music and culture is critical to it.
0:33:04 So you sort of need something that is at the edge and outside of the training data to create new interesting music.
0:33:07 And that sort of definitionally doesn’t exist in the models.
0:33:07 Fascinating.
0:33:11 So some of my closest friends who are some of the most talented people I know are working
0:33:16 on a gay AI companion app, which the 2015 version of myself, upon hearing that statement, would have been like, what?
0:33:17 That’s a thing?
0:33:22 But one of the things they were saying is that on our list, 11 of the top 50 apps were companion apps.
0:33:25 So let’s reflect on, are we just at the beginning of that trend?
0:33:27 Is there going to be all these different vertical companion apps?
0:33:28 What is the future of this?
0:33:29 How do we think about that?
0:33:30 Everyone’s looking at me.
0:33:31 Yeah.
0:33:32 Well, you’ve done the most work here.
0:33:33 Yeah.
0:33:42 We’ve spent an enormous amount of time in every facet of companionship from the like therapy, coaching, friends, all the way to the like not safe for work, AI girlfriends.
0:33:43 Like we’ve looked at basically everything.
0:33:49 And interestingly, I think like it was probably the first mainstream use case of LLMs.
0:33:58 We like to joke that like literally any chat bot, whether it’s like your car dealers, customer support or whatever, people try to turn into their therapist or their girlfriend.
0:34:05 Like you talk to these companies and you look at the logs of the chats and it’s like a ton of people just want someone or something to talk to.
0:34:16 And the fact that you can now have a computer be talking back in a way that’s like immediate, always available and feels human is just like a massive unlock for so many people who could never get that before.
0:34:19 Or felt like they were just yelling or talking into the void.
0:34:30 I would argue we’re just at the beginning, especially because the products that have existed were largely very horizontal and came from or were exclusively from the base model providers.
0:34:34 Like people were using ChatGPT for all of these things it wasn’t designed for.
0:34:46 We’ve already seen a bunch of cases where like an individual company can create a personality for a character and embody it in some like digital avatar and prompt it and create a game or a world around it.
0:34:51 That gets a ton of engagement and companies like Tolan that are doing this for teenagers and college kids.
0:34:59 Whereas a totally different company, which I would also call a companion, is like allowing you to take a photo every time you eat something.
0:35:08 It pulls out and analyzes all of the data and then it gives you all this information about how you’re doing nutrition wise and allows you to talk to it and get emotional support.
0:35:30 And so I think what’s really exciting to us is like the definition of what a companion is has evolved so quickly from either a friend or a girlfriend to like anything, any sort of advice or wisdom or entertainment or counsel you could have gotten from a human before.
0:35:33 And we’re going to see even more vertical companions moving forward.
0:35:43 One thing I thought about is having worked at a social company, there is a very clear trend of average number of friends that you can talk to over time going down.
0:35:46 I think the youngest generation is something above one.
0:35:52 So I think the need for companion as a use case will absolutely be there.
0:35:54 It’ll be an enduring use case.
0:35:58 It’ll be something critical for actually a lot of people.
0:36:01 So I think I’m very excited about the companion use case.
0:36:03 And as Justine said, I think it branches out into different things.
0:36:09 But the need for having a close connection to talk to will endure.
0:36:15 And perhaps we talked about how maybe connection is a missing area, white space, but maybe this is filling that in, right?
0:36:18 Like as we say, maybe you just need to feel connected to something.
0:36:19 It doesn’t need to be human.
0:36:22 And that average number of one will go down to zero.
0:36:24 That’s the sad part of it.
0:36:25 One AI friend.
0:36:33 Tell me a story about the senior citizen that they set up with the AI.
0:36:34 Oh, I love that story.
0:36:35 Oh, my gosh.
0:36:35 Yeah.
0:36:38 So this woman set up her dad.
0:36:40 He was having some memory issues.
0:36:41 Her mom had passed away.
0:36:43 Her dad, I think, went into like a care home.
0:36:46 And she posted on Reddit.
0:36:49 And this was like when AI companion didn’t exist as a term.
0:36:55 So she posted on some subreddit, I think it was like a not safe for work AI one being like, I don’t really want something not safe for work.
0:37:02 But I want like an AI girlfriend or an AI friend to talk to my dad and keep him company all day because like I can’t spend hours on the phone with him all day, every day.
0:37:15 And then when she actually reviewed what he was doing and what he wanted to talk about, he wanted to like mostly talk about World War II stories and like random and like occasionally feel like someone was like flirting with him and found him interesting.
0:37:28 And that sort of thing, it’s like ChatGPT is not great at just the way it speaks, the voices, like OpenAI does not want to build the AI girlfriend for seniors who mostly want to talk about World War II.
0:37:31 But that might end up being a massive market.
0:37:32 In a flirty way.
0:37:33 In a flirty way.
0:37:34 It’s interesting.
0:37:39 I tend to look at like Korea sometimes or Japan as like an indication of what the societal changes can be.
0:37:41 And there’s a bunch of elderly there.
0:37:41 Yeah.
0:37:43 And the ratio is completely off.
0:37:51 So that need for beings that need to talk to the elderly people and keep them company about World War IIs and so on and so forth.
0:37:53 I think that’s actually a really interesting use case too.
0:37:54 It’s phenomenal.
0:37:59 I’m imagining just seeing you trying all these companions or getting immersed in it and Olivia being like, what are you doing?
0:38:01 And just being like, it’s for work.
0:38:05 What has been your impression of all of it?
0:38:09 I think it’s been really fascinating, the companion thing,
0:38:14 because there is a huge category of people who’ve been willing to type into a text box and treat it as a friend.
0:38:21 And then there’s probably a much bigger category of people who don’t want to think of themselves that way.
0:38:36 And so I think that we have yet to unlock the next modality of companions where maybe it’s like a voice in your ear or maybe it’s sitting on your computer screen where it’s not obvious that you’re turning to it for friendship, but it provides the same emotional value.
0:38:43 And I think that is what is just now emerging in companions as the models become more multimodal, essentially.
0:38:44 Always on companion.
0:38:44 Yes.
0:38:46 And that’s what’s really exciting.
0:38:47 Like some people would use an AI assistant.
0:38:48 Yes.
0:38:49 But not an AI friend.
0:38:50 Yes, exactly.
0:38:55 Even if the assistant is like a friend that’s also an agent that can send emails for you.
0:39:01 So a lot of people upon hearing this conversation of companions just think, oh, man, people are going to have less friends.
0:39:02 People aren’t going to date anymore.
0:39:04 And depression is going to go up.
0:39:05 Suicide is going to go up.
0:39:07 Fertility is going to continue to go down.
0:39:12 Mark and Jason once had this famous quote of, I’m not saying you’re going to be happy, but you’re going to be unhappy in new and exciting ways.
0:39:14 Are you kind of like, yep, that is what it is.
0:39:15 That’s technology.
0:39:16 Or are you like, no?
0:39:17 I don’t think so.
0:39:22 This reminds me of my favorite post of all time on the Character AI subreddit, which I’ve spent an immense amount of time on.
0:39:24 Which is, okay, and to set the scene.
0:39:33 So there’s all of these like high school or college kids who had their formative years during COVID and they weren’t really in person with other kids or teenagers or learning how to talk to people.
0:39:36 And I think it really ended up impacting a lot of them.
0:39:43 And one of those kids, I think he’s in college now, had been posting on the Character AI subreddit about his AI girlfriend for a while.
0:39:51 And then one day he posted that he found a 3DGF, so a real-life girlfriend, and that he wouldn’t be returning to the subreddit for a while.
0:39:57 And he actually credited Character for teaching him how to talk to other people, especially teaching him how to talk to girls.
0:40:02 Like how to flirt, how to ask people questions, how to engage with them about their interests.
0:40:06 And I think that like, in some ways, that’s sort of like the peak value of AI.
0:40:10 It’s like enabling better human connection.
0:40:11 Just less weird.
0:40:11 Yeah.
0:40:13 Were people happy for him or did they call him a traitor?
0:40:14 People were extremely happy.
0:40:21 I mean, there were a few, I think, jealous souls in there who had not found their 3DGF yet, but I have hope for them.
0:40:31 I think that’s real, though, because we’ve even seen studies like, I think of the Replica product, where actual studies were showing depression and anxiety and kind of suicidal ideation were going down in users.
0:40:37 I do think there’s this trend of a lot of people don’t feel understood and don’t feel safe.
0:40:41 And so then it’s hard for them to be in the real world doing real things.
0:40:46 And so if AI can help them, and maybe they don’t have the money or the time to go to therapy and make all of these changes in their lives.
0:40:54 And so if AI can do that for them, they can emerge a transformed person that’s then more able to do things in the 3D world.
0:41:05 The thing that really got me sort of aware of how big these companion apps are, where when we did the first interview with the founder of Replica, it was amazing.
0:41:15 After she turned off the interview stuff and the subreddit for Replica and the comments in our video were basically a lot of people being like, hey, this is like my wife when we stopped having sex.
0:41:18 You know, like I already have this sort of neutered.
0:41:23 And like so many people were just like, my life is over.
0:41:27 And I’m like, oh, my God, I didn’t realize how big of a role this app was playing in people’s lives.
0:41:31 I feel like that is bringing out an activity that people have done for a long time.
0:41:39 Like people have had these like Internet chat room, Discord relationships, like the youth, the Zoomers have like Discord girlfriends and boyfriends.
0:41:53 In our day, there was like this anonymous postcard website where you would go and send anonymous postcards back and forth and develop these like really deep relationships with like people you would never meet or you didn’t know if they were the person they were pretending to be.
0:41:57 And I think AI just makes that deeper, more engaging experience.
0:42:04 Well, so this is where I think an important point, though, is that the AI not be too agreeable because people in real life, I mean, there’s a give and a take to human relationship.
0:42:08 And like highly agreeable AI does not set you up well for that.
0:42:17 So I think there’s a fine balance between being just agreeable enough to help you like engage and get better at this versus being so agreeable that you’re actually worse at this.
0:42:19 And that’s also important on the therapist’s use case.
0:42:19 Yeah.
0:42:23 Therapists can’t just say you’re absolutely right on everything.
0:42:23 Totally.
0:42:26 Can say, actually, let’s actually review your behavior.
0:42:30 That weekend when 4.0 was like telling everyone that they were like the king of the world.
0:42:35 It turns out everyone hated it because you don’t believe it when it just tells you that you’re amazing all the time.
0:42:40 When it comes to like therapist use case, they’re the actual real world where the disagreeableness and matters a lot.
0:42:43 I want to close with what’s possible going forward.
0:42:48 Let’s speculate on new platforms or form factors that could be game changing.
0:42:50 Open AI just acquired Johnny Ives’ company.
0:42:54 You know, Brian, I’ve heard you talk a bit about glasses and why you’re still excited about that form factor.
0:43:02 Maybe we could start there, but I want to hear from the group on what they could imagine as something that’s additive or even disrupting some of the mobile use cases.
0:43:08 It’s funny, thinking about glasses and all that, but there are 7 billion of mobile phones out there.
0:43:13 There aren’t that many devices at all that actually gets to that level.
0:43:17 So my thought process is either it will live in mobile.
0:43:30 And for that, there’s many different ways to think about the future where there’s a privacy wall around it or is a local LLM or local model that helps you sort of really contain all the things that you want to contain in your device level.
0:43:36 So I think I’m still very much excited about the model development layer to get to that.
0:43:39 And I think that’s what I’m actually most excited about.
0:43:44 And then if you think about always on, as Olivia, you said, like mobile, we have always on.
0:43:47 But there are other things we also have always on.
0:43:53 And what does that look like when there are net new devices or what have you or appendages, if you will,
0:43:57 that like actually attach to things that you always have that actually can enable that?
0:43:59 Any speculation from you guys?
0:44:07 Is there a piece of hardware or something that we’re going to be wearing or carrying around or using that’s either attached to the phone or separate from the phone that could enable the use cases?
0:44:15 I think AI has scaled for consumers tremendously well, given it’s mostly been text box in, some output in a web browser out.
0:44:19 And so I love the idea of AI kind of actually being with you and seeing what you see.
0:44:28 It’s funny now when I go to tech parties, like a lot of the under 20s are wearing pins that record what they’re saying and doing and they find like real value from them.
0:44:29 That’s one example.
0:44:40 We’ve seen a new wave of products that can see what’s happening on your screen and take action for you, help you, coach you, other things like that, that I also find really, really exciting.
0:44:52 And I think as also the agentic models get even better, it goes beyond just like suggestions to actually doing work for you, sending emails for you, which is very exciting for me, I think.
0:44:55 I think, yeah, the human insight layer of that is big too.
0:45:00 Like often we have no way of measuring ourselves compared to other people or sort of where we exist in the world.
0:45:10 So if an AI can hear all of your conversations and see everything you’re doing online and say, hey, look, like if you spent five more hours a week doing this, you would actually be a world expert in this topic.
0:45:15 And based on this vast network of other people I’m serving, like you should connect with these three other people.
0:45:17 And this person could be an amazing co-founder.
0:45:20 You should like date this person, like that sort of thing.
0:45:21 That to me is the ultimate.
0:45:22 Yes.
0:45:23 Like sci-fi vision.
0:45:27 Which comes from AI being with you all the time.
0:45:27 Right.
0:45:29 And something that’s not just like a chat GPT text box.
0:45:30 Totally.
0:45:35 The device that has been most widely adopted post phone is the AirPods.
0:45:38 So that feels like the thing that’s hiding in plain sight.
0:45:43 And there’s a whole bunch of like social protocol questions around it because it’s weird to have your AirPods in at dinner.
0:45:44 No one does that.
0:45:44 Right.
0:45:50 But there may be a way that you can integrate AI and also fit the current social protocols around AirPods.
0:45:51 It would be interesting.
0:45:51 Yeah.
0:45:55 You said something that we glossed over, but young people at parties are recording their conversation.
0:45:56 Yes.
0:45:58 In the future, is everything going to be recorded?
0:46:00 You think that generation is already growing up with that norm?
0:46:01 To some degree?
0:46:01 Yeah.
0:46:06 I think there’ll be new social norms developed around this behavior because I think it’s like
0:46:07 real and it’s valuable.
0:46:10 And so it’s like scary, I think, for a lot of people that this is happening.
0:46:13 But I think it’s a wave that started and it’s not going to stop.
0:46:15 And I think the context matters too.
0:46:19 Like I think a lot of what you’re talking about is like the SF networking parties where like
0:46:21 work and personal stuff like really blurs.
0:46:22 We talked about this.
0:46:23 You can do that in SF.
0:46:26 You did that party and brought up in New York.
0:46:27 Canceled.
0:46:27 Yeah.
0:46:31 But I think that’s why there’ll be like a new set of cultural norms.
0:46:34 Like when the cell phone was introduced, like there’s places where it’s rude to take a loud
0:46:34 call.
0:46:38 Like the same set of things will emerge around these recording devices.
0:46:39 Yeah.
0:46:41 Let’s end on this idea that we’re very early.
0:46:42 Guys, it’s been a great conversation.
0:46:43 Thanks so much for coming on.
0:46:49 Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast.
0:46:54 If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash
0:46:55 A16Z.
0:46:57 We’ve got more great conversations coming your way.
0:46:58 See you next time.