Jimmy Iovine: Building Interscope Records & Beats by Dre

David Senra 0:00 [upbeat music] I wanna start with what you were just saying before we started recording. I was like, "Rob, hurry up and run, run the tape." You said, "We live in a corny world."

Speaker 0:09 We've gone from fame replacing great, right? So it became more important at one point to be famous than to be great, because there's a currency. You had to be great at one time to get a record deal, to do all that stuff, and then that sort of dwindled as it- as time went on, which, which is fine. But it has absolutely replaced great, and what you can do on the internet, and marketing yourself, and all this other stuff, because you can make a lot of money just being famous. But now, it's taken another leap, which is fascinating. It's gone to attention, and sometimes that leads or contributes to a very corny world.

Speaker 0:55 I think social media has the biggest impact that I've seen in my lifetime-

David Senra 1:00 Mm-hmm

Speaker 1:00 ... you know?

David Senra 1:01 And that contributes to people being corny for attention on social media, you think?

Speaker 1:03 Yeah! Well, [chuckles] because i- you can make money, and the people that don't need money want attention, and they wanna be the top of the news, or the sp- viral, or, um, you know... Most of my friends, if they go viral, they're devastated. Do you know what I'm saying? [laughing]

David Senra 1:21 [laughing]

Speaker 1:21 They're like, "Oh, shit!" Or they don't even know.

David Senra 1:24 I think not even knowing would be the place that

David Senra 1:27 I would aspire to be in. Like, I wanna make great work. Obviously, I'm public-facing, 'cause I happen to be obsessed with podcasts, and I wanna make some of the best podcasts in the world. But I try to just... I mean, it comes from you. I did this video, I c- I obviously did the founders episode on you, because you've been one of the people I most admire for a long period of time. And you have-- we did this clip that got almost, like, two million views of your advice about, you know, why do the horses have blinders on them?

Speaker 1:50 [chuckles]

David Senra 1:50 And when you... It's one of my favorite things. Every time I post it, it, it, it still, like, resonates, and I post things to remind myself, where it's like, "Hey, I'm chasing after greatness," right? "And it doesn't matter. I can't look left, and I can't look right and worry about what other people are doing." This is one of the things I most admire about you. We were d- we spent a, a, a few hours together at your house yesterday. You were very kind to invite me over there again.

David Senra 2:10 And you pulled up this insane video from you from 2004, which is four or five years before Spotify was, uh, founded, and you essentially were talking about what you saw as the technological shift happening in the music industry. What was that video about?

Speaker 2:26 I always wanted Interscope to move laterally. I didn't want to keep drilling the same hole. I hate drilling the same hole. Just, that's just me. I get bored wh- drilling the same hole. That's kind of why I've jumped around industries a little bit, and got to learn on the fly a lot, you know? So, but that was about, around 2000, we had this little TV show called, uh, Jimmy and Doug's Farm Club. It was about uploading your music to Interscope, and we would put you on our TV show, and it was fantastic, and it worked. And what I really wanted to do was have a, a music streaming service of all you can eat.

David Senra 3:07 But this is before it was invented. There wasn't a, there wasn't a- you were talking about w- the ideal situation before it was actually founded.

Speaker 3:13 Yeah, but, you know, I see online all the time, people talk about shit before it happens.

David Senra 3:17 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3:17 You know what I mean? But that, you know, that isn't... That's 10% of the game. The game is getting it right.

Speaker 3:24 You know, MySpace was ahead of its time, but it lost the race.

David Senra 3:30 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3:31 So I was very fortunate to be at least early enough to have Apple Music get on the board. I had Beats Music, and it went to Apple Music, so we, we- at least we became number two. Daniel, who's extraordinary, had the, the wherewithal and the ability to get the licenses from a record co- business that didn't understand at all what he was talking about. The fact that he wrestled those licenses out, it's so odd. I mean, you could pr- you could prove it, because if you look at those deals, those deals are reflective of the iTunes download market, 70/30. That was the same business as the, the download market. So they just copied that, which is not a great m- bit model for that. Why? Because you have not enough money in the streaming service in order for it to really live, so they gotta now go out and find different versions of revenue, right? And they pay 70% or whatever it is now, 72%, 76, I don't know what the negotiations have been since then. And, um, structured in a really odd way, because, let's say, for example, um, you're married, you have two kids, and you have a family plan. And you and your wife play The Clash, The Police, et cetera. But your kids play Drake and Kendrick Lamar all day. Most of the money from your house goes to Drake and Kendrick Lamar. What you're hearing about is that the artists are like, they used to be able to earn a living like that, but now, unless you're in that top chunk of heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy streaming, the, the, the money's not really meaningful. So that's a problem they have to fix. You know, there's no question about

Speaker 5:34 that. But there's a lot wrong with streaming, in my opinion. You know, it's one-dimensional. It's, um, it's an ATM machine. You put your money in, you get your music. They don't do anything for the artist. See, the artists wanna communicate with their fans, period. [chuckles] That's what they want. They wanna communicate, they wanna market themselves, and the streaming services are still saying, "We'll put you on our list if you w- if you're nice to us or if you like us."... That's bullshit! You gotta a- a- allow them to have your, their, your audience, and let them breathe. Which is what, you know, not for philanthropic reasons, but this is what TikTok does. That's what, uh, Instagram does. You could somewhat promote yourself. So the streaming services, to me, are minutes away from being obsolete because of that. You can't rub against the artist like that. You just can't. You've gotta give them what they want. They're driving this ship. I learned that in 1973.

Speaker 6:39 I came from Red Hook, Brooklyn. My dad was a longshoreman. I walked in the studio with John Lennon, I did three albums with him, and I got my own apartment. I realized, "Okay, the rest of my life, I'm gonna try to meet, [chuckles] maybe not John Lennon, but people that can do this, and with real talent, and, ah, my life is gonna be okay. All I gotta do is not get thrown out of the fucking room." [chuckles]

David Senra 7:05 And you looked at it even back then as, like, an act of service to the artist that you're working with?

Speaker 7:08 If not for that person on the other end of the glass, what the hell do I know how to do?

David Senra 7:15 You have this great line in The Defiant Ones, which I've told you I've watched probably at least 10 times, and you're like, "Ninety-nine percent of this, when people say, 'Oh, I did this, or I did that,' in the music business," you're like, "It's complete bullshit. It all comes down to the artist that you're working with."

Speaker 7:27 Yeah, and today, by the way, a lot of artists are producers, like Dr. Dre, Timbaland, and some of the younger guys, which I'm just not that familiar with. I've been out of the music business a while. They write the songs, they make the records, but in, in, in my day, 80% of it was the artist. You know, Bruce Springsteen wrote the songs, had the idea, had the vision, [chuckles] you know, and you helped. [chuckles] You know, so that's where I was coming from.

David Senra 7:53 There's a great point. I- I'm glad you brought, you brought up Bruce, 'cause me and you were talking about that yesterday. I, I told you I've been going through... I went through his autobiography, and I really think that book changed my life in, in, in many ways. I watched one of your interviews. You said one of the best pieces of advice that you ever got was from John Landau. 'Cause you were- they were working you like a dog, and you were thinking about, like, leaving, and he's like, "Let me tell you," he's like, "Stay in the saddle."

Speaker 8:12 Well, Bruce was torturing me. He was... [laughing] He says that, um, he, he, he said himself, uh, in a, in an interview, I think maybe in that documentary, he said, "An artist needs to be indulged."

David Senra 8:25 Yeah. [chuckles]

Speaker 8:26 Right? Or something like that, when you're striving for something. Um, well, the truth was is that we would try to do something, and I couldn't get it right, and it took three weeks to get, like, a drum sound, like a simple thing, you know? But it was really hard, and I got... I let my pride- they brought somebody in to help, and I let my pride get in the way. So I went to John Landau, and, uh, and he said, "I'm gonna tell you something you didn't learn in that neighborhood of yours. Your mother and father didn't..." Because he knew my family. "Your mother and father didn't tell you this. This is not about you. This is about Bruce Springsteen and about the record we're making." And I'll tell you, for the rest of my life, that just stopped me in my tracks. And, uh, because the rest of my life, if you apply, "This is not about me," you really, you could really get somewhere, even if you're not that good. Just being humble enough to say that and not thinking that because you had one success, that you're, you know, The Beatles, or Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs or whatever, you know, is that it's not about you. And if you could follow that, it's really

Speaker 9:40 good.

David Senra 9:40 One of my favorite lines from the history of entrepreneurship actually comes from Henry Ford, and he said that. He's like, "Money comes naturally as a result of service." And some of my favorite entrepreneurs, and what I'm trying to do in my life, too, is it's like I'm just gonna focus on making something valuable that makes somebody else's life better, and so create, like, an act of service. And then once you do that, just try to serve more people, right? Spread the, the product, the service, in this case, the podcast, to as many people, and then, like, the score will take care of itself. I won't worry about, you know-

Speaker 10:04 Yeah

David Senra 10:04 ... the, the value coming back to me.

Speaker 10:06 The whole, the whole thing you gotta do is... Look, there's a certain amount of feigned humility that's good, and it works. If you practice it long enough, you actually become somewhat humble. But-

David Senra 10:15 Do you consider yourself a humble person?

Speaker 10:18 I think I have a humble side. [chuckles]

David Senra 10:20 Say more about that.

Speaker 10:21 I do. Well, you know, I come from a family... My father was, was a humble guy. He was a long- a dockworker, a longshoreman, manual labor. Not, you know... I don't know a lot of people whose fathers really worked manual labor, you know, where if it's 90 degrees down the pier, it's 120 in the hull of the ship. You know, when you're carrying coffee bags, they're 100 pound apiece, right? [chuckles] All day. So but he had pride, but he was humble. And if you're willing to give yourself up for a greater cause, and, in my case, when I was younger, it was an album, right? If you're willing to do that and set your bullshit aside to get someone else's vision, it takes humility to do that. And if you're truly doing that, yeah, I have some humility that I'm proud of, you know?

David Senra 11:19 ... One of the things I love most about Jimmy Iovine is the fact that he spent his career working with the very best people he can, people like John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bono, Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor, Eminem, and Steve Jobs. Jimmy knew, just like Steve Jobs knew, just like Jeff Bezos knew, that you always bet on talent. In fact, Steve Jobs said so. He said that, "You must find the extraordinary people, and that a small team of A players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players." Jeff Bezos set the tone from his very first shareholder letter when he said that, "Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon's success." You must build a team that pursues the A players. That is exactly what Jimmy Iovine did, and that is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last twelve months, Ramp has hired only point two three percent of the people that applied. That means when you use Ramp, you now have top-tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers in the world working on your behalf twenty-four/seven to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations, and they do this on a single platform. Ramp gives your business easy-to-use corporate credit cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. That means the longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. I run my business on Ramp, and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs that I know. I hear from people that listen to this podcast every day that have switched to Ramp and rave about the quality of the product. Businesses are saving millions of dollars a year by switching to Ramp. Make a wise decision by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money today. That is ramp.com.

David Senra 13:07 Every single person that I've either read about that worked with you or has given interviews, they say that you want Jimmy in the room because he'll tell you the truth. Yeah! I want to tell the story because it's hilarious, and then I want to ask you about this. I'm reading, you know, Bruce Springsteen's six-hundred-page autobiography. The book's so big, you can work out with the goddamn thing. And there's a, there's a story in there where he's struggling, and he's trying to do something new, and he's in LA, and he invites, like, "My good friend Jimmy Iovine comes, comes over. We play this new album for him, and no one else has heard it." He said you sat there silently [chuckles] for, for eighty minutes. He turns it off, and then you just say one thing. He goes, "So when are you gonna record the vocals?" [chuckles] 'Cause the-

Speaker 13:42 Well-

David Senra 13:42 -the music was so loud.

Speaker 13:43 I'll give you the-

David Senra 13:43 But he said, he goes, "That's why you want Jimmy in the room, 'cause he'll tell you the truth."

Speaker 13:46 I'll give you the setting. He was doing the album for about two years. It was The River. And, uh, they worked really, really hard on that. And... he was doing it, but because I engineered his album, I knew he had a, he had a tendency to bury the vocal, right? And I knew those guys really well. I knew Landau and Bruce pretty well by then. Actually, part of the story he didn't tell, which was funny, is Tom Petty was sitting next to me.

David Senra 14:19 [chuckles] Oh, you should've left that out.

Speaker 14:20 'Cause I was producing Tom Petty at the time.

David Senra 14:22 Yeah.

Speaker 14:22 We went over and visited, right? So he plays us a double album, and the but-- and the vocal was buried. So I just said to myself, "I got one line to penetrate," 'cause I saw Bruce's face, and he was serious as a fucking heart attack. You know what I mean? He's at the end of an album, he's exhausted. So I just said, "When are you gonna sing it?" [chuckles] Right? And, you know, it was very funny, but it was very clear. And they did, they went back in, and they remixed the whole album, which was w- the right thing to do.

David Senra 14:59 But where did you get the

David Senra 15:00 self-confidence? Because you were... How old were you when you started working with John Lennon, twenty, twenty-one?

Speaker 15:04 Twenty.

David Senra 15:04 Yeah. You told him the truth, too.

Speaker 15:06 Yeah, I-

David Senra 15:06 Like, where did, where did that come from?

Speaker 15:08 Because not out of arrogance or confidence, it's comfort. My father really drilled in me from when I was a little kid that wherever you go, the place is better because you're there, because you're a decent person. He used, "You're a humble person, you're a decent person, you're a good person, and you're not gonna screw anybody," in his language, right? So wherever I went in my life, I always feel comfortable. Very insecure in my personal life, which I've grown out of in the last... At, at seventy-two, hello? [chuckles] Right. Thank God. You know, who the fuck wants to die that insecure, right? But, um, you know, in, in work, I always had a certain amount of confidence because it came natural to me. Uh, nothing came natural to me before that, but when I sat at a console, and I put the faders up, the balance came very, very naturally, and people liked it. So that's kind of where I got some of the confidence from, but, you know... I just, I don't know. I was always willing to say what I felt about music, and to anybody, at any time, you know? And I, I, I'm... I mean, what's the point of asking me a question if I'm not supposed to give you my answer? I don't, I, I don't understand that philosophy.

David Senra 16:37 It's one of the funniest things. I, I played this clip for you-

Speaker 16:39 Because one, one second.

David Senra 16:40 No, go for it.

Speaker 16:41 One of the reason-

David Senra 16:41 Interrupt as much as you want. [chuckles]

Speaker 16:42 One of the reasons is, I really don't think I walk in trying to get you to like me, uh, 'cause I believe you do.

David Senra 16:50 Say more about this.

Speaker 16:51 [chuckles]

David Senra 16:51 You told me this yesterday. This is so... I feel the same way, by the way, to explain.

Speaker 16:53 You know, I mean, I mean, this, that, that shouldn't be sound egotistical, 'cause let me tell you something. The people that walk in a room, when you meet a lot of angry people, they think people aren't gonna like them, and it's not true. So I'm not saying that I'm arrogant. What I'm saying is that I re- deal with a lot of people that are very defensive and are aggressive because they think people don't like them, and you know that. We know a lot of people that are very visible right now-... that I can smell they think everybody hates them.

David Senra 17:27 And some of them say that privately. [chuckles]

Speaker 17:30 I'm sure.

David Senra 17:31 Yeah. [chuckles]

Speaker 17:31 I'm sure.

David Senra 17:32 Yeah.

Speaker 17:32 Uh, but you can smell it.

David Senra 17:34 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 17:34 And that's not ego, thinking that people are gonna like you. It's because I came from a home in a neighborhood where that was it.

David Senra 17:45 You have this, like, brutal honesty.

Speaker 17:47 Well, you're go- you're, you're leaving one word out.

David Senra 17:49 What's that?

Speaker 17:50 Brutal honesty, but an enormous amount of respect.

David Senra 17:55 Yeah, I don't think you'd do it in a disrespectful way.

Speaker 17:56 No, you can't do it in a disrespectful way.

David Senra 17:58 I don't even think you'd be in a room with somebody you didn't respect, 'cause you have complete control over, like, your environment.

Speaker 18:03 You know, what, what happens is, you think you build these walls, and you get over these fences, right? And you go, "Okay, I'm on the other side. I'm insulated. I'm this, I'm that," and then you have kids.

David Senra 18:14 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 18:15 And the kids bring the world back in, and all of a sudden, [chuckles] if you wanna get your kid into school, you're gonna go sit across... Sometimes you're gonna sit across an asshole. [laughing] You know what I mean?

David Senra 18:25 [laughing]

Speaker 18:26 And so, so the answer to that question is no. So, uh, once you have kids, you just go back to zero, 'cause you're... You know, whatever. But Bruce Springsteen said it best. He says a lot of things best, you know? He said, "When I was making music, when I was in on Born to Run," in particular, when he was flat broke... You know, I knew Bruce. You know, when I met John Lennon, John Lennon was, it was three years after The Beatles broke up, right? So I did three albums with him, but he was already John Lennon. He had imagine already, you know, so he was, he was John, right? Bruce was broke, I mean, dropped from his label, and his career was in trouble, right? So he had to... And he said to, he said, and he said publicly, he said, "I didn't want to be rich. I didn't want to be famous. Man, I didn't even want to be happy. I wanted to be great." And when I was 20 to 27, really 20 to 25, I got to work with Bruce Springsteen on two albums, John Lennon on three, Patti Smith on one, and Tom Petty, at that point, on one. So I learned, my college years, those impressionable years of college, I spent with those four people, and it was, uh, unbelievable. It was such an education about culture, about life, about what's important, about all those things, and I just sucked it in because I, I was a, I was in, I was a really a l- no Etch A Sketch. I had noth- that was like, I had nothing going on. I didn't understand anything. So everything that they taught me, I just breathe in. I was lucky that it was them, you know? Uh, and I just took it all in, and it really set the tone for my life, about what I-

David Senra 20:23 Why?

Speaker 20:23 Because these are some of the most culturally relevant poets of the 20th century, [chuckles] you know? And when I say poet, I mean the person. You know, I mean, not just that they write lyrics, you know? And, um, they had the right attitude about their work and their product.

David Senra 20:46 What was the right attitude about their work or their product?

Speaker 20:48 Well, they weren't thinking about how to promote it. They were thinking about how to make it, [laughing] you know? And, uh, it's kind of what I liked about Steve Jobs when I met him, you know? I met a lot of these guys since the year 2000, you know, 'cause I'd gone on the road. Once, once Napster came out, I was like, "Oh, shit, what's going on? I better learn something new," you know? I mean, 'cause this trick isn't gonna work anymore. You know, the whole music business, I felt, was gonna be upside down, you know, and it has been. But, um, but in those days, I wanted to get a feel for what I called at that time, the other side. So I met with a bunch of tech companies, then I started to get... And then I met Steve, and he was the only one that had soul. And-

David Senra 21:32 Similar to the same soul of the artists that you worked with in music?

Speaker 21:35 Yes. Yes, absolutely, but the only one. He had soul and feel, and we bonded on John Lennon and Bob Dylan. You know, we would talk about that all the time, you know? And, uh, he had the same attitude that they had. Now, he was a businessman, he was a lot of things that they're not, and they're a lot of things that he isn't. But how I... It translated to me was, you can be in this world and have soul, and, um, you don't find that a lot.

David Senra 22:12 Why did you say that when you met him, you're like, "He's the only one that's gonna get this done"? Meaning, I think it was, it w- this is pre-streaming.

Speaker 22:20 Yeah.

David Senra 22:20 This was the i, I think the iTunes-

Speaker 22:21 It was iTunes.

David Senra 22:22 Yeah, so you said, "Why did you- "

Speaker 22:23 I helped him get the licenses for iTunes.

David Senra 22:24 You did?

Speaker 22:25 I helped him, but yeah.

David Senra 22:25 So why did... But why could he do it and no one else?

Speaker 22:28 Because he understood. He understood what made artists tick. He understood the why. Most engineers that I've met in my now 25 years of playing in that world, is they don't understand the why of the people that do what I used to do. And, uh, that's why it was so interesting. I knew, I knew from then that tech was gonna buy all the media companies. Media companies move in different ways, you know? They don't move like the tech business. And when I met him, I said, "This guy gets it." Now, is he tough? Is he, I don't know, ruthless? Maybe, I don't know. But I can tell you what, he gets it. He gets it, you know? And most of the people I meet in that world know how to do what they're doing, but as far as the particular thing that Steve had, I haven't met another one that has that.... Mm. I really-- not that they're bad people or anything, they just, they don't have the-- By the way, you can like music. Like, all these guys are always saying, "I love music!" I love chocolate, but I don't understand Hershey's. You know what I mean? [chuckles] I really don't understand it-

David Senra 23:47 Yeah.

Speaker 23:47 -who makes chocolate and how they make it.

David Senra 23:50 Yeah.

Speaker 23:50 So you know, you could like music all day, and, and it's completely... One engineer told me once, um, we were working on something, there was gonna be video involved. He said to me, "I know how that should end. I love television." [laughing] I mean-

David Senra 24:06 That's not the same thing, man. [chuckles]

Speaker 24:08 You know? So, but anyway-

David Senra 24:10 Steve called you one day to congratulate you because he said there's all these people trying to make hardware, and they're not successful at it, and you were one of the few people that had no experience, by the way, making hardware, that made hardware successfully. The interesting part about that, one of the-- o- one, I wanna hear more about that, but two, why did he call music software? [chuckles]

Speaker 24:28 You know that answer better than me.

David Senra 24:30 I've never heard anybody-- I mean, I guess it is.

Speaker 24:31 I mean, it's treated like, you know, ones and zeros or whatever-

David Senra 24:34 Yeah

Speaker 24:35 ... you know, because that's [chuckles] how it comes across.

David Senra 24:36 Yeah.

Speaker 24:37 You know, and, uh, whatever that is, you know, uh-

David Senra 24:39 He's like, "All these software guys wanna make hardware, and they can't."

Speaker 24:41 Well, he, he always felt that what was unique about Apple, which was, is that a software company can make hardware.

David Senra 24:48 Let's talk about the schools.

Speaker 24:49 Why are the schools important to talk about? Because it ties into all of this. Occasionally, I run into someone who says, "He's the next Steve Jobs. She's the next Steve Jobs." Well, let me tell you something. There's not gonna be another Steve Jobs. There'll be some great people, and there are some incredible people around today that are doing something extraordinary, m- inventing the, creating these companies, et cetera. But to be Steve Jobs, you have to truly understand the cross between technology and liberal arts, where those two things meet and interact. When I had Beats, I realized that engineering, design, and culture, the, the collaboration was not happening the way I thought it would. I thought everybody in the world in tech was like Steve Jobs, 'cause he got it. He got the why of everything that I was doing, and the people around me were doing. He understood it at its core. It was in his instinct, right? What I realized, when I met a lot of other people in the tech business, all, all the companies and every... They're engineering societies, fundamentally. And I find you can't generalize it, but there are people that aren't like that. But for the most part, why software companies don't make hardware is they don't understand, truly understand design, right? And they can't communicate with it, right? And that's what I think. What the fuck do I know? But that's what I think. That's what I've observed, right? And-

David Senra 26:31 How did you know there was a need for a new school, though?

Speaker 26:34 Because I realized it was education, 'cause I realized it was siloing in education, that you go to, you, you, you-- 'cause I see-- Again, what do I know? I know, I know, like, the feel of young people, culture, right? So I see the way kids are being brought up. They're brought, brought multidisciplinary right now. For the last fifteen years, they're all being brought up with multiple disciplines. You know, tech, music, culture, design, they're all fascinated by that. So when you go to school, when you go to college, you get siloed. You go to Wharton, you're an accountant. Yeah, they have classes and all that. They have an engineering course you could take, but you take that engineering course with fifty other engineers, right? So now you're seeing school... Remember, we started this school fourteen years ago.

David Senra 27:23 That long ago?

Speaker 27:24 Yeah.

David Senra 27:24 Wow!

Speaker 27:25 Absolutely.

David Senra 27:26 And you, it was you and Dr. Dre, you endowed it with seventy million dollars to get started.

Speaker 27:30 Yeah, yeah.

David Senra 27:31 Okay.

Speaker 27:31 I mean, we had no idea. Neither one of us went to school. [laughing]

David Senra 27:35 [laughing]

Speaker 27:36 So we had no idea. We're not afraid to do things we have no idea we're doing, and we put our own money up, right? So that's, you know, I don't care who you are, that's a lot of money, right? But I knew there was a problem, and we wanted to fix it. And siloed learning, a- you're hearing a lot of people doing it now, trying to bring all the disciplines, but what they do is, they bring it in through the side door. You could take a course at any other school. Our school is a school of collaboration, which you saw. So if you lean towards tech, or if you lean toward the arts, or if you lean toward entrepreneurship, or if you lean toward design, you get to work in concert. You innovate collaboratively, which is what these big companies don't have. They don't really sing in concert, in harmony, and that's what I observed, right? I observed that. I don't know that. I observed that. It's the problems that I had communicating, and the problems they had communicating with me. And-

David Senra 28:46 When's the first time you had that problem? Was it when you were trying to build a product?

Speaker 28:49 Beats.

David Senra 28:49 Beats.

Speaker 28:50 Beats was a product, not by accident, like the iPod. I wanted culture, design, music, right? I wanted it all connected. So I met Steve Jobs, and he was like, "Oh, this guy gets it all." So I figured everybody did.

David Senra 29:07 Did you pitch him on doing the headphones?

Speaker 29:09 Yeah.

David Senra 29:09 Together?

Speaker 29:10 Yeah.

David Senra 29:10 What'd he say?

Speaker 29:11 He said, "I don't wanna do headphones. You do them." So we went out to a restaurant once, I'll never forget it. We went to this Greek restaurant, and this was, uh... It was, it was after he was sick, and, um, but we went out to a restaurant, a- a- and it was one of those restaurants where they put the paper thing with the, give you the crayons for the kids, you know, and they could draw?... And so we're in the middle of lunch, I said, "You know, I wanna build this headphone company." He goes, "You can do it. You build a headphone company." I said, "Why don't we just do it together?" "I don't wanna do a headphone company, you build a headphone company," right?

David Senra 29:48 [chuckles]

Speaker 29:48 So I said, "Okay." He goes, "Let me show you how." And he called a guy, took all the food. Good thing I don't care about eating one way or the other.

David Senra 29:56 [chuckles]

Speaker 29:57 I mean, I like food, but it's not the most important thing in my life. So [chuckles] and he said, "Give me a marker," and the guy gave him a marker, and he drew, "Distribution, inventory, it'll kill you."

David Senra 30:09 [laughs]

Speaker 30:10 Uh, "China, you can make things that are made in China, but they can't look like they were made in China." [laughing] I said, "Holy shit!" You know, I was like, "Holy shit," you know? So... And then he would guide me along the way, and he was fantastic, right? But I thought when I started Beats, that I tr- I could f- I, I'm naive, and I thought I could find people like that. But I found people that are design, I found people that are engineers, and I found people in popular culture. I wanted them all to understand how to collaborate, and, uh, I just said, "Siloed learning is bullshit." And now we have five, six high schools, and, uh, it's a great place. It's, it's, it's considered one of the best interdisciplinary schools in the country, and I'm really proud of that. But again, what do I know about education? Uh, not, not a lot. I learned a lot in the last 15 years, but really not a lot.

David Senra 31:09 Yeah, it started with the instinct that you just didn't think it was doing- being done correctly, and you were just learning along-

Speaker 31:14 I know how to get something done.

David Senra 31:15 Yeah, this, this goes back to you just being a, a natural-born entrepreneur, and you're just like-

Speaker 31:19 I just know how to get something done. I know how to get... I found the g- I met this great dean, Erica Muhl. I met her. I said, "Oh, she could do this." She was from the Roski School. But I just felt instinctively that she could do-

David Senra 31:33 What's that?

Speaker 31:33 It's an art school at USC.

David Senra 31:34 Okay.

Speaker 31:35 Then there was the president, Max Nikias. He g- he was an engineer, but I knew he got it, you know? And we built it, and now it's a fabulous school, you know? It's a really fab... A lot of people wanna go there. It's fantastic. Look, I work on a lot of things I don't know how to do, but I can get it done. You know, I don't claim to be some great technologist, but I made a great headphone.

David Senra 31:58 I think I've studied you a lot. I've talked to you now for hours and hours and hours. I still am trying to figure out, like, you have this collection of... I'm trying to think of, like, what is your, your highest talent? I just ran into Steve Stoute at a friend's birthday party, which was really funny, 'cause he worked for you for a long time. I was like: "Dude, I'm seeing Jimmy soon. Can you, like, give me some stories?" And I, I, I think you're obviously a phenomenal marketer. Let me ask you, like, what do you actually think your talent is? Then I want to tell the story that Steve told me.

Speaker 32:22 My talent, whatever it is, I'm learning more about now, 'cause I'm not running the companies. So when I used to run the companies, [chuckles] like when I ran Interscope, when I ran Beats, and when I ran what became Apple Music, I just woke up in the day and did everything by my instinct, whatever that was in the morning. You know, [chuckles] it's a little more difficult to do it out at Apple than it was when they were my own companies, 'cause they have a giant infrastructure and, um, and they have... [scoffs] You know, I always felt like I was a bit on the tail that's wagging the dog. You know, I used to live on the dog, and I- the, the, the whole thing about, you know-

David Senra 33:04 But when you were running the company, you'd wake up and just instinct.

Speaker 33:07 Purely, or listen to people, you know, and grab a piece from here and a piece from there, you know, and just... and synthesize.

David Senra 33:13 Did you go after difficult things on purpose?

Speaker 33:16 I only went a- about what I felt. When Dre said to me-

David Senra 33:20 Th- that, that, that was one example. 'Cause Dre comes to you, um, you- he plays... Is it The Chronic? What is he playing for you the very first time, or it's like some song?

Speaker 33:27 The Chronic, finished.

David Senra 33:29 And you're... I think you asked him, like, "Who engineered this?"

Speaker 33:32 Right.

David Senra 33:32 And he's like: "I did." And he's like, "Well, who produced it?" And he's like: "I did."

Speaker 33:35 Right.

David Senra 33:35 And then you're like, "Oh," within a few minutes of meeting him, you said something like, "He's gonna define Interscope."

Speaker 33:39 Right.

David Senra 33:39 But then he had a, sh- like a very hairy situation you had to get him out of, right?

Speaker 33:43 It was impossible. It was everything you... watching these shows and stuff, you think it is. [laughs]

David Senra 33:48 Okay, so wh- what was going on?

Speaker 33:50 Well, what happened was, I connected dots, which I think I do really well. I saw him and Snoop. I heard, finally heard hip-hop with the 808 bass, that big bass sound. Producers couldn't harness it. All the records, you know, whether it was Public Enemy or any of those records made in New York, they couldn't harness that and, and, and to where I understood it. Dre was the first person to really harness it and give it the power that it deserved, 'cause he gave it the clarity that it deserved. It's very hard to do. So I understood that, and when I saw that, combined with Snoop and Dre, and the image that they were projecting, and they were talking about... I said, "This is the Rolling Stones." I said, "This is Mick and Keith. It scares you, but the music brings you in" So I'm like, "This has to work." I didn't have to understand the music, which I didn't in the beginning. Now I think I do, you know? I mean, not as much as some of the pioneers of hip-hop, but I, I understand it.

David Senra 35:03 Were there lawsuits? Were they signed? Like, what, what did you have to untangle?

Speaker 35:05 There was three law- there were three lawsuits. There was a RICO lawsuit, right? Uh-

David Senra 35:10 RICO?

Speaker 35:10 -That came with Sony, yeah. Yeah, yeah. There was, uh-

David Senra 35:13 Wait, I thought... Is RICO money laundering? What is-

Speaker 35:16 The gangster is-

David Senra 35:17 Gangster. Okay, okay, that's right.

Speaker 35:18 That was from the Eazy-E thing.

David Senra 35:20 Oh, okay.

Speaker 35:21 Right? This is in all the movies. I'm not talking out of school. So there was a RICO lawsuit. There was a guy in prison who put up- supposedly put up the money for the, the, one of the albums, the first album. Uh, so he was suing them.... from prison, um, there was Sony, and there was a company that distributed and, um, Eazy-E's label that was suing as well, or challenging as well. So I had to settle all those things out, which is kinda like if you see something great, but there's T-Rex sitting on it. [laughing]

David Senra 35:58 [laughing]

Speaker 35:58 And most people would avoid, say, "Look, there must be something else to eat."

David Senra 36:04 And you just know, "I'm only wanna work with great?"

Speaker 36:06 If I see something new, and great, and unusual, I can't stop. That's why Beats attracted me so much. I looked at it and said, "Oh, shit, people are wearing these things on their head, and they look like medical equipment." There's nothing attractive about a headphone.

David Senra 36:26 The funny thing about that is there was opportunity hiding in plain sight, and you're like, "What's our competition, guys? Bose? It's... They want to-- There's no music. It's like silence [chuckles] ." Well, their mar-

Speaker 36:35 ... [chuckles] Their marketing thing was we, you can go to sleep with us.

David Senra 36:38 [chuckles] Yeah.

Speaker 36:39 I'm like, "That's ridiculous." And what a marketing thing, right? Keep... You know, so I said, "No, no, no, no. We wanna wake you up."

David Senra 36:47 Okay, hold on. I wanna pause here, 'cause I text Daniel Ek, right? Founder of Spotify, and I was like: "Tell me, uh, like, give me some ideas," 'cause he's known you forever. He told me the first time we ever had dinner, he's like, "I only lost two deals in my life, and both [chuckles] of them were to Jimmy Iovine," which is hilarious.

Speaker 37:01 Well, that just means my bullshit was better than his.

David Senra 37:03 [laughing]

Speaker 37:03 You know, it doesn't mean, [chuckles] doesn't mean... He's so, he's so-- He-- What he did in the music business, man, yeah, no one has any idea how hard it was. Patti Smith had an incredible line, it, it's, "People have the power, the power to dream, to rule, and to wrestle the world from fools."

David Senra 37:24 Ooh, that's good.

Speaker 37:25 Okay? That's what Daniel Ek [chuckles] did, okay? So anytime you get a guy like that, I didn't beat him at anything. I just, I just, I just must have been slicker than him, that's all. [chuckles]

David Senra 37:37 He, to, to me, in my opinion, wildly underrated still to this day, one of the most fascinating people to me. But he's like, "Ask him about the origins of Beats." Did you do the headphones before you did the streaming service?

Speaker 37:48 Yes.

David Senra 37:49 So hardware first-

Speaker 37:51 Yeah

David Senra 37:51 ... that was the initial idea?

Speaker 37:52 It was all about moving Interscope laterally. I think companies should move laterally, and they don't. Most companies don't move laterally out of fear. That's why what I'm doing with Complex right now, which we'll talk about in a minute, I got the opportunity, I came out of retirement a bit because I got another bite at the apple because I couldn't finish my thought on streaming. And-

David Senra 38:17 Well, what do you mean by lateral, though?

Speaker 38:19 Like, for example, Interscope was a music company, right? I wanted to make the hardware to listen to it. I wanted to have a streaming service. I wanted to distribute my own music, so I wanted to have the complete thought. I wanted to make the music, have the artists that make the music, distribute the music, and then have the instrument you listen to it on. So that's moving laterally. I, I would've also wanted, which I'm doing now with Complex, to have e-commerce, so artists can communicate in different ways with their audience.

David Senra 38:52 So these businesses that other artists, let's just use musicians, for example, are starting now, you were the only one that did it inside of a record label.

Speaker 38:59 That's right.

David Senra 39:00 So you have this idea for, for, um, Beats. You see this opportunity. Obviously, Dre's known for the best sonics ever-

Speaker 39:08 Right

David Senra 39:08 ... so it makes perfect alignment with him. This was Steve Stoute's point to me, where he's like: Jimmy's just a phenomenal marketer. I'm gonna come back to Beats real quick. I wanna close that loop. Where he's like, "Ask him about the fact that he's bringing these super controversial artists at the time. They're not that well-known," I think it was Dre and Snoop, "and they wouldn't play them on the Top 40." And he says, "Jimmy did something genius to get Dre and Snoop played on the Top 40." What did you do?

Speaker 39:31 Well, I, I just considered it reflex. You know, what, what we did was, I said, "Okay," you gotta understand, i- whenever there's gatekeepers on anything, your job is to figure out a way around the gatekeeper with something you really believe in. Whether the gatekeepers are people at your own company or [chuckles] people in, you know, at radio stations or at... Wherever the gatekeepers are, your job is to skate around 'em, right? So I said, "Okay, let's do this. Let's make a minute commercial of 'G Thang,'" which was Dre's first single with Snoop, right? I said, "Let's make a 60-second spot. Now, I don't want anything said before it or after it. I just want it to play."

David Senra 40:19 "The, the radio's not gonna play my song, that's fine. I'm going to buy ad space [chuckles] on the radio-

Speaker 40:24 Yeah

David Senra 40:24 ... and play the song." [chuckles]

Speaker 40:26 Yes, and we did on the 50 top markets, spent a fortune doing it. And then we simultaneously, we got it on MTV, 'cause they didn't play rap m- music either. They played MC Hammer, but they didn't play, I guess you'd call it gangsta rap or whatever music is today, they didn't play that then, right?

David Senra 40:43 How'd you get on MTV?

Speaker 40:45 I said, "This is the same thing as Guns N' Roses, period."

David Senra 40:49 You've said that twice now. You said Snoop and Dre is Mick and Keith. You say, "This is just like Guns N' Roses." What does that mean?

Speaker 40:55 It means that it's counterculture, that people are gonna relate to it, people that feel marginalized, and feel isolated, and feel angry, and it represents an entire culture that people are gonna relate to. And that's what Guns N' Roses did, that's what the Rolling Stones did, that's what Nirvana did, that's what James Brown did. It's that thing, you know, that moves people. So yeah, I instinctively felt that.

David Senra 41:22 So who do you go to at MTV? You just go to the top guy, like-

Speaker 41:24 Yeah

David Senra 41:24 ... well, how do you actually get it done?

Speaker 41:26 I s- I said, "Play this." He goes, "I can't play this," and he had the remote in his hand, and his TV was on behind him. I said, " I can't because we play this," and it was three women singing, and then the next video was a guy, and, you know, and all this, but it was pure pop music, right? And, uh-... I said, I said, "I don't know how to program." I said, "Put it next to Guns N' Roses, and if it doesn't work, please never play an Interscope record again."

David Senra 41:53 Wow!

Speaker 41:54 So he put it on.

David Senra 41:55 You had that much belief?

Speaker 41:56 You don't have to be talented to know that. I mean, it's just fucking obvious, you know what I mean? You know, ask Rick Rubin, he knew it before me, right? [inhales] So but what it caused was all these kids, sons of senators, daughters of senators, c- congresspeople, business people, they, they came home and wanted those records. And when that happened, that's what led to the whole falling out with Time Warner that we had when we, when Interscope got thrown out of Time Warner over lyrics. Because Bob Dole, uh, Dolores Tucker, Bill Bennett, right, who was the education czar, or whatever he was at the time, you know, all those guys... Bill Clinton went on the floor of the Senate and, you know, Bob Dole said we were, um, well, uh, some- somebody said we were a mustard gas factory or something like-

David Senra 42:52 Yeah. [chuckles] I remember that.

Speaker 42:53 Yes. But I've been involved with... And I, and I was involved with John Lennon. They tried to throw him out, but I was- when I was doing his album, Nixon was li- he had to go to court every day during Walls and Bridges, 'cause Nixon was trying to throw him out of the country. That was real.

David Senra 43:06 Yeah, that's, that's insane.

Speaker 43:07 That was real.

David Senra 43:08 Yeah.

Speaker 43:09 'Cause he was against the war, right? So I'm, I'm used to that. I'm like, "So what?" You know, I mean, yeah, I didn't, I didn't care what those people were saying. Yeah.

David Senra 43:17 So you got him on MTV, you got him on the radio. Once you played the ads on the radio, then people start calling-

Speaker 43:24 Of course. [chuckles]

David Senra 43:25 ... They start calling the radio stations-

Speaker 43:27 Of course

David Senra 43:27 ... like, "Play that song-

Speaker 43:28 Of course

David Senra 43:29 ... that is an ad." No one else was doing this.

Speaker 43:33 Only because I wouldn't do anything illegal, 'cause I'm psychotic about doing anything [chuckles] that, like, is illegal or anything. So I just said, "This is legal. Let's do this!" I mean, the record business, God knows what they did to get records played, but they weren't gonna play these records. There was no chance. And look, there's nobody better at this, no one, the greatest record executive of all time, of all time, is a guy named Berry Gordy. And-

David Senra 44:01 I've heard that name, but know nothing about him.

Speaker 44:02 Well, he founded Motown.

David Senra 44:04 Oh, okay.

Speaker 44:05 During Jim Crow, [chuckles] you know what I mean?

David Senra 44:08 Yeah.

Speaker 44:08 So his artists weren't even allowed off the bus. They was w- they were considered race records. He had to get those records played. He had to get that into the white market. What he did, talk about wrestling the earth from fools, Berry Gordy, miracle what he did. And he made the greatest music in the world, so when he got... When he pushed, it stuck. See, if you know what you have is gonna stick, and if you are passionate about it, then just break through that wall, 'cause there's gonna be a lot of resistance, but if it sticks, you win.

David Senra 44:46 Yeah.

Speaker 44:47 It has to stick, though. [chuckles]

David Senra 44:48 There's a- there's actually a, a lesson o- o- uh, uh, for entrepreneurs in there, too, because, um, I reread Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters, like, three or four times. He's, like, one of the people, one of the entrepreneurs I most admire, and he realized he had a sticky product with Amazon. Because he saw that once you become an Amazon customer, you not only do you order, but you reorder, and then you ask Amazon to carry more things. And so he tells a story of this guy emailing him, or he emailed, like, you know, a thousand customers saying, "Hey, you know, you bought a book. What else did you buy?" And one guy goes, "Can you sell me windshield wipers?" And he's like, "Oh, my God, we're gonna be able to sell anything like this." And so he goes, "Okay, if we have high retention with my product," which he knew at Amazon, "that means I have a winning system. That means I need to invest heavily in introductions to new customers."

Speaker 45:30 Right.

David Senra 45:30 "Because the ten million," or whatever the number is, "let's say you spend a hundred million in new customer introductions in advertising, marketing, and this year, it's like, that's... These people are gonna be with me next year, the year after, a decade."

Speaker 45:39 Well, if you, if you're an entrepreneur and you see something work, you can extrapolate what else will work, right? And that's what he did. But, I mean, these, these guys have built businesses that dwarf anything I've ever even dreamed of, you know? But they're- they can extrapolate, you know, like, for example, Beats, right? We have this... I was always frustrated that the music industry didn't have customers. It drove me crazy.

David Senra 46:09 What do you mean, they don't have customers?

Speaker 46:10 They don't have a customer. They still don't have a customer.

David Senra 46:12 They don't have a relationship with the

David Senra 46:14 end user, you mean?

Speaker 46:14 Right. Instagram does, TikTok does-

David Senra 46:17 Right

Speaker 46:17 ... MTV did. Constantly, the music- the streaming services do. For some reason, the music industry is allergic to a customer. [chuckles] Okay? And I don't know why, but they don't have a k- end user.

David Senra 46:33 What was the first time they outsourced the, the relationship with the end customer? Is this just-

Speaker 46:38 Always.

David Senra 46:38 So even when you're selling it to, like, rec- through record stud- uh, record stores back in the day?

Speaker 46:42 Record stores, radio, MTV.

David Senra 46:44 So you would have controlled every... So when you said you want to go lateral, the, the entrepreneurial version of this, the business version, you want to vertically integrate.

Speaker 46:50 Yeah, yeah.

David Senra 46:50 You want to vertically integrate all the way down. So you would have even had Inter- Interscope if the, there's-

Speaker 46:55 Yeah, but I want to vertically integrate, if you call it that, to fashion. I, I, I mean-

David Senra 47:02 'Cause you guys are controlling the culture. They're having the influence.

Speaker 47:05 We're causing it!

David Senra 47:06 Causing it, ooh.

Speaker 47:07 My artists are causing the culture. Artists that I work with, rather, uh, putting it clearly.

Speaker 47:13 For example, we put Beats in all of our music videos-

David Senra 47:17 Mm

Speaker 47:17 ... when we first started.

David Senra 47:18 You were insistent and relentless with this. [chuckles]

Speaker 47:22 So what? But, you know, I-

David Senra 47:23 [chuckles] No, I'm not gonna say-

Speaker 47:24 But I put a lot more money in the videos. Everybody benefited, you know what I mean?

David Senra 47:28 Yeah.

Speaker 47:28 And, uh, it was a time that the r- industry was desperate. So yeah, man, you know, we did that, and it worked.

David Senra 47:35 Worked is an understatement.

Speaker 47:36 Yeah, yeah. It worked, you know, and we built the number one headphone company in the world. We were num- when we sold to Apple, we were number one in 50 countries. Man, we were number one in Germany, and Sennheiser was number two. We were number one in s- in Japan, and Sony was number two. I, I, I still can't believe it, to be honest with you. [chuckles]

David Senra 47:53 This is, goes back to, like, you have this instinct. I'm still trying to figure out-

47:56 ... you know, your, your, like, web of really special talents, and marketing is definitely one of them. You have this weird instinct to just

David Senra 48:03 make the right-

Speaker 48:03 Marketing is empathy.

David Senra 48:06 Say more.

Speaker 48:06 It's empathy. Marketing is understanding who you're trying to communicate with and understand them, and understand from where they click and cop. That's all marketing is. Uh, you can call it marketing, what I do. I don't think it's marketing, I just... I have a f- I guess I have a feel for the market of who I wanna sell things or communicate with, right? I'm not Bob Dylan, by any stretch of the imagination, but Bob Dylan, to take it to an extreme, had a feel for an entire generation, and he made his product. He made it 'cause he, he was a purist. He wanted to do something great, but it turns out that was marketing. The product is marketing, if you make the product great. Steve Jobs was a great marketer. So yeah, if you know your product and you know your audience, I guess that's a great marketer, but all it is, is empathy, understanding what somebody else is feeling on a massive scale.

David Senra 49:07 All of the founders and extreme winners that I have studied have this one trait in common: they have excessively high energy levels. If you're going to be the best at what you do, you need to maximize your energy and output, and that's why I've partnered with Function. I signed up for Function long before they were a sponsor of this podcast, and when you sign up, they ask you what your health goals are, and my response, in all capital letters, was, "MAXIMUM ENERGY!" Function provides access to comprehensive blood tests and other lab testing to help you improve your health so you can perform at your highest level. Function has made it easy for me to monitor and improve my internal health markers so that I feel at my absolute strongest. As a member of Function, you get access to test over 100 plus biomarkers, from hormones to toxins, to markers for heart health, inflammation, and stress. Function gives you a straightforward analysis of all your results, along with advice from expert doctors on how to improve things like your testosterone, your stress hormones, how to reduce toxins in your body, and much more. The platform is absolutely beautiful and provides an easy-to-understand picture of your overall health. Once you try Function, you will immediately understand why it's the fastest-growing health platform in the country. You can now join Function for just three hundred and sixty-five dollars a year. That's a dollar a day. Learn more and join by visiting functionhealth.com/senra, and use code SENRA25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. That is functionhealth.com/senra.

David Senra 50:28 So how long did you have the headphones before you decided... You bought, like, a small streaming service, right?

Speaker 50:34 Yeah, it was about, I bought it in probably, um, 2011.

David Senra 50:39 Like, how, how long were the headphones gone?

Speaker 50:40 Three years into it.

David Senra 50:41 So three years into it, and it's called... What was the... I forgot the-

Speaker 50:44 MOG.

David Senra 50:44 Okay.

Speaker 50:45 Yeah.

David Senra 50:45 And you rename it Beats.

Speaker 50:47 Yeah, Spotify had three million subscribers at the ti- at the time we sold to Apple. I renamed it Beats Music, but I realized I couldn't scale it on my own, because, as you know, with Spotify, it costs a lot of money to do that, and I realized I can't do this on... W- we, me and Dre, we can't do this on our own. So we brought Trent Reznor on, right, who's an incredible talent. Talk about understanding tech- technology and the arts and culture and, you know, and his partner, Atticus Ross, they make some of the greatest music in the world right now. So, you know, there's all the movies and everything he's doing.

David Senra 51:27 So you try to run it, and then you realized you had a-

Speaker 51:30 I can't scale it on my own.

David Senra 51:31 Can't scale it on your own.

Speaker 51:32 I wanted it to be at Interscope, and for one reason or another, we couldn't get that done. The guys running it at the time weren't in charge, really. There was the whole Vivendi thing and all that stuff. I went to them early on. I said, "I wanna build businesses with your artists," and the guy actually said to me, he goes, "Jimmy, I, I, I hear you. We paid a lot for your company, I have respect for you, but we wanna sell CDs, and that's what we do." So, uh, that's how... Part of my story that no- not a lot of people know is, I was a CEO of Interscope. I had to get the right to start another business. I asked Vivendi to give me $100 million to s- to Interscope, to start businesses with the artists inside Interscope. And in fairness to them, they didn't see that. They didn't wanna do it. So I said... My contract was up, and I said, "I, I'm not gonna be the guy to sell the last CD. I got no interest in this. You know, I'm gonna do something else."

David Senra 52:40 They didn't see it at the time, that they were in a dying or a dwindling business?

Speaker 52:44 Because it was, and this is 2003.

David Senra 52:46 So you saw it early?

Speaker 52:48 It scared the hell out of me. For some reason, the day it started, Mapster, I said, "This is toast" 'cause I understand the market. I understand why the audience would say, "I'd much rather be doing my homework and not have to ask my mother to take me to a record store." [chuckles] Okay? That simple impulse... And it's free? That's a feel that an entrepreneur has.

David Senra 53:13 Once you see it, you can't put the genie back in that bottle.

Speaker 53:15 Y-

David Senra 53:15 There's just no way it's going away.

Speaker 53:16 So I knew that, and then I went and met with people at Intel and places like that, and I heard these guys talk, and I'm like, "Holy shit!"

David Senra 53:26 What were they saying that made you say, "Holy shit?"

Speaker 53:28 One of the things the guy at Intel said to me is, "Jimmy, I gotta tell you something. Your story is compelling." He said, "But not every industry was built to last forever." I was like, "This guy's smarter than me." [laughing] Yeah, you know, where do you wanna start, right? And so I'm like, "Oh, shit!" Right? So-... So I, I, I went to the, I went to them and I said, "I can't just be in the record business."

David Senra 53:53 The music almost goes like something you sell to something that markets another product, is how you actually monetize it.

Speaker 53:59 I don't know what it is, I just call it lateral. I don't- I can't break it down to what it is, I just know the feeling.

David Senra 54:05 You told me yesterday, you were like, "I'm just a, a hustler." [laughing]

Speaker 54:08 I know how to hustle.

David Senra 54:10 Oh, I do, too.

Speaker 54:11 That's not a bad word.

David Senra 54:11 I know. I love it.

Speaker 54:12 By the way, my-

David Senra 54:12 I feel the exact same way.

Speaker 54:13 The greatest baseball players in the world were hustlers. That's what I call a hustler.

David Senra 54:19 I don't think it's a pejorative. I don't think it's a negative term.

Speaker 54:21 Well, people think it is.

David Senra 54:22 Oh, not me and you, though.

Speaker 54:23 It's not. What I'm saying is, I know how to hustle, meaning I'm willing to work harder than the next guy.

David Senra 54:28 What you did for Dre, when you first met him, Dre and Suge, you were like, "Well, th- this guy's great. There's an asset in front of me, and the asset is, is a big, hairy problem that no one else wants to solve, and if I solve... If I can kill the T-Rex that's sitting on top of this genius-

Speaker 54:41 [laughing] Right

David Senra 54:41 ... then I get to work with the genius."

Speaker 54:43 That's right.

David Senra 54:43 And that is hustling, that is being resourceful. That's the same thing.

Speaker 54:46 As Dre would say, "It's a little bit of street knowledge."

David Senra 54:49 Yeah.

Speaker 54:49 You know?

David Senra 54:50 And what, what is street knowledge? It's an understanding of people as they actually are.

Speaker 54:53 Well, because you have no... The, what street knowledge is, is you have to move around because the world isn't... It's, it's tough. You know, in any neighborhood, I don't know, what you call it, lower class or whatever it is, you know, uh, my dad was a longshoreman. We lived in an Italian neighborhood in Red Hook, Brooklyn. You know what I mean? So-

David Senra 55:11 You lived in a neighborhood with actual gangsters.

Speaker 55:14 Well, yeah-

David Senra 55:15 Mafia

Speaker 55:15 ... but I wasn't, I mean-

David Senra 55:16 No, I know you weren't, but, like-

Speaker 55:17 My family weren't, you know?

David Senra 55:17 Yeah, I know, but you were in the neighborhood that-

Speaker 55:19 Yeah

David Senra 55:19 ... you know, the Mafia was everywhere.

Speaker 55:21 Oh, yeah. Well, my neighborhood was an Italian neighborhood, only in America. I mean, everything was the same. You know, there's four fish stores on a restaurant, there's three pizza places on one street. You know, it was like that, you know? So... And my father worked down at docks, and everybody worked down at docks.

David Senra 55:38 I know you were saying it's instinct. Maybe you weren't... Like, there weren't words around this idea, you just understood it, but you saw it's like, uh, if I'm a college kid, and I was at this time, and I was using Napster and Kazaa and all the other- Limewire and all the other ones, like, I don't have to go to the store. I'm definitely downloading this. And now we have MP3 players, so, like, the record store's gone.

Speaker 55:54 Well, one of the, one of the hardest things that I had to do when I look back on my career, life, whatever it is, had a lot... Well, we all have a lot of hard things. One of the hardest things was getting Universal Verveende to give me permission to build Beats. To build, no, to build products with my artists. Beats came three years later.

David Senra 56:15 This is, this is when you- your response to them was, "I don't want to be the guy that sells the last CD"?

Speaker 56:19 That's it. I just, I just... This, this thing is not gonna work the way it is right now. We have to move laterally, and I just instinctively knew that, and I wasn't gonna do it. I was gonna quit.

David Senra 56:32 That's an interesting idea if you sit down and actually think about what's happening. For the, the whole time of recorded music industry, you made the music, you record it, and then you sold it physically, right? And you're so- already understanding, oh, well, once it's digital and free, that means we have to sell something else, that we're not gonna be able to sell the music anymore.

Speaker 56:48 No, I knew we were invaded.

David Senra 56:51 Invaded. [laughing]

Speaker 56:52 Okay?

David Senra 56:53 [laughing]

Speaker 56:53 And [chuckles] I knew that something had to change, and I didn't know what it was, but I knew we couldn't just do only what we're doing. And that's like a music instinct. You know who knew that? The Beatles knew that. If you listen to The Beatles, every album was new and different. They reinvented themselves on every album, you know? And if you, you, y- they keep it moving. You know, the great company, that's why Apple was so great, it kept it moving-

David Senra 57:23 Mm

Speaker 57:23 ... kept innovating and moving it. And I felt that the record business needed to stop doing, not just do what they were doing. And that was really hard, because they were paying me a lot of money, they just bought my company for, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars, right? But I wasn't gonna do it. I knew it was not what I wanted to do. And the problem is, people say, "Well, the record business turned out okay." Well, it did and it didn't. Of course, Spotify-

David Senra 57:58 [laughing]

Speaker 57:58 ... is worth 150 billion-

David Senra 58:01 [laughing]

Speaker 58:01 ... and the entire record industry is worth half that together.

David Senra 58:06 And it, it's really smart. It's like, for the longest time, we sold it. Now, you can't sell it anymore, I'm talking about music, so it... And you're not gonna agree with this, it becomes advertising or marketing. These songs become advertising and marketing for another product you can sell, whether it's, you know, concerts, they were selling concerts back in the day, products, all this other stuff that they're doing. Like, you had that insight before, in the music industry, before anybody else.

Speaker 58:26 No, not before anybody else. Hip-hop saw it.

David Senra 58:33 You're right, because they were doing the shoes-

Speaker 58:34 Yes

David Senra 58:35 ... the sneakers, the alcohol.

Speaker 58:35 Yes. Def Jam, Adidas, man, all these-

David Senra 58:39 Did they influence your thinking on this?

Speaker 58:40 Absolutely! I get-

David Senra 58:42 Oh.

Speaker 58:42 I owe African American culture so much. I have a debt to Black culture.

David Senra 58:51 Why do you think rap... Because I grew up on hip-hop. I told you, like, uh, it's, it's still almost all, all the stuff I listen to now. Why did they figure out how to monetize, I hate using that word, or make money off music through other... Besides selling music, before anybody else did?

Speaker 59:05 Because they're practical, and they see the truth, and they saw what it was.

David Senra 59:09 What's the next bite of the apple?

Speaker 59:11 The record industry now can rewrite the in- gets the, the luxury of rewriting the book with AI. They can-

David Senra 59:19 AI-created music?

Speaker 59:21 Yeah, creative music, interac- many things. It isn't just creating a song, it's, it's how you listen to music, everything. It affects... It, it can affect everything. So there is, let's say, hypothetically, I'm buying the record industry, the word wrong is not fair, didn't take advantage of it as... Didn't optimize the streaming thing. Uh, what, what would optimizing be? They, they would have their own distribution.... That would be optimizing, and they don't, right? They have another bite at the apple right now. It could start all, ring the bell all over again, Etch A Sketch, [whooshing] and go back into it. But where they can make a giant mistake, in my opinion, okay, is if they start licensing their music to every dog in that comes in the door!

David Senra 1:00:14 Which is their normal route of doing things.

Speaker 1:00:16 Yes! You've gotta build enterprise around AI now. You can't just give the enterprise to someone else.

David Senra 1:00:25 But you know everybody in the music industry. When you tell them this, what's their response, the people in power right now?

Speaker 1:00:29 Well, all I can tell you, Will, I can't tell you everything that I'm doing, because I think the labels are now realizing, and they're getting really... But all I can tell you is, Universal Music has invested in a project that we're doing called Complex, that has the ability to go on and do a lot of these things that I'm talking about. It's media, it's live, creating Complex Con, it's, a- and it's e-commerce, right? I wanna help the labels, if I can, you know, um, build enterprise around AI, and not just be licensors. I just, it- I didn't f- I felt that way about streaming, and I feel even stronger about that. They shouldn't be afraid of the tech. They shouldn't be. You don't have to understand something fully to do it. [chuckles] And I'm proof of that. I don't understand fucking anything, [laughing] you know what I mean? But I know how to get it done, you know? I knew how to build a... I didn't know how to build a headphone. People say to me, "Well, you're an- you're a recording engineer." I said, "Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards are the greatest guitarist players, and, you know, my favorite, you k- you know, Keith Richards, incredible. If you gave him two pieces of wood, he's not gonna come out with a guitar."

David Senra 1:01:44 [laughing]

Speaker 1:01:44 You know? [laughing] So, you know, I wasn't... Building a headphone was as far from me and Dre as you could possibly imagine. But we figured out how to do it. So that's how, I think, is a possibility how to rewrite the book. But if you start seeing licenses pop up to all these other companies, they're gonna feed a dragon that is absolutely gonna eat them. Absolutely.

David Senra 1:02:12 Five years from now, do you think we're gonna have AI, complete AI-created music that is at the top of the charts? Isn't it already happening?

Speaker 1:02:19 I don't know. The- let me tell you, though, I don't fucking know. If I could predict the future, man- [laughing]

David Senra 1:02:25 [laughing]

Speaker 1:02:25 ... You know what I mean? I, I wouldn't have health insurance.

David Senra 1:02:29 [laughing]

Speaker 1:02:29 You know, it's like, [scoffing] you know, I have fire insurance on my house.

David Senra 1:02:34 Yeah.

Speaker 1:02:34 I can't predict the future. I have no i- i, I, I overpay for everything. I'm a retail guy.

David Senra 1:02:38 [laughing]

Speaker 1:02:39 But, you know, it's like I do know one thing, but I don't understand. I hear a lot of these artists coming out against AI. So I come from a place where to get a record deal, I'm going back to my, when I was a kid, right, in the music business, you had to sing. You had to really sing. Sometimes you had to write, but if you're Barbra Streisand, you had to sing. If you're Frank Sinatra, you had to sing. Those people could really sing. You know, Sam Cooke, woo! Could he sing. He could sing and write, you know what I mean? Incredible, right? Stevie Wonder. There's a lot of people out now on the charts right now, or being really successful, selling out arenas, that can barely sing "Happy Birthday."

David Senra 1:03:18 [chuckles]

Speaker 1:03:20 So what I say to the people that are challenging AI, and they're doing that because of technology-

David Senra 1:03:25 Yeah, like Auto-Tune and stuff like this.

Speaker 1:03:26 Whatever the technology is.

David Senra 1:03:28 [chuckles]

Speaker 1:03:29 So my question is, what's the difference between somebody who can barely sing "Happy Birthday," which is all over the charts right now, to someone who can't sing Happy Birthday at all? Who's just a marketer and a really clever guy or girl that sat in their mirror and did all the moves that everybody does. You know, they watch Madonna and, like everybody else, and say, "I, I can do that. I can act like that." So I don't understand the difference, so-

David Senra 1:03:55 Yeah, 'cause the amount of technology invented for the music industry since you've been in it, it's... Like, you, you told me, uh, yesterday that Prince did a whole album without a drummer.

Speaker 1:04:05 Well, he's one of the-

David Senra 1:04:05 And I was like, "What does that mean?" [chuckles]

Speaker 1:04:06 Well, he's one of the first people to, um, to use the Linn drum machine. See, the Linn drum machine, I was d- I was producing an album in the '70s, and I brought this guitar player in who, I think it may be the first computer I ever saw, but he had a computer on the session. It was 1977, right? And he had a computer on the session, and in between takes, rather than listen with the rest of us, he'd go put a pair of headphones on and go on the computer and do all that. And he looked at... I said, finally I said to him, I said, "Hey, man, what, what are you doing? I mean, y- y- you know, this is a session. We're, we're paying attention to the music." He says, "Well, I'm, I, I'm creating a, a drummer. I'm creating a machine that's gonna play the drums." I said, [chuckles] "Well, thank God, because I, I, I, I always had very... I always had difficulty with drummers." You know, I always felt the way you sit on the beat is impossible. You know what I mean? 'Cause everybody hits where the one, hit, hits it on, or before, or after. Uh, it, it just drove me crazy working with drummers my whole life, you know? And he said, "I'm, I'm making a dr- making a player drum." The guy's name was Roger Linn. Roger Linn's a guitar player.

David Senra 1:05:18 That's who made the drum machine?

Speaker 1:05:19 The Linn machine.

David Senra 1:05:20 I didn't know that.

Speaker 1:05:20 The Linn drum machine.

David Senra 1:05:21 Oh, wow!

Speaker 1:05:22 Yes. I've seen technology. I grew up with it. So everybody's afraid of AI. AI is gonna make music better. AI is not gonna thwart great people. There will always be the next Billie Eilish. There will always be the next Kendrick Lamar. There will always be the next great talent. But there's also gonna be a lot of bullshit.

David Senra 1:05:45 Yeah.

Speaker 1:05:45 Right? So I think the bullshit will get better. I really do. I think AI is gonna help-... Those people that work like that, and by the way, a lot of people that we know right now, great talent, are using AI, AI. They're just not telling anybody.

David Senra 1:06:03 Mm.

Speaker 1:06:04 AI will never be able to write Blowin' in the Wind by Bob Dylan, not in anyone who's listening to this or [chuckles] in my lifetime, for sure. AI will take the middle of music, the average music, I believe, and make it better, 'cause they're great tools. I- I'm all in on AI music, all in, and, um, I don't think it's gonna hurt the greats, but more importantly than anything that I think, is that now it's time for the artists and the labels to get on the enterprise side of it.

David Senra 1:06:40 And this is what I wonder if you would agree with or not, 'cause when you were just telling the, the, the story of the person who invented the drum machine, he was inventing it out of necessity. He needed a sound for what he was making. I worry that if these are, like, professional managers in the music industry... Like, think about the difference between a professional CEO and a founder.

Speaker 1:06:57 Yeah.

David Senra 1:06:57 Right? Like, you thought completely different 'cause you're an entrepreneur. Like, you were instinctively an entrepreneur. You were an entrepreneur before you even knew you were an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1:07:03 Well, a record producer's an entrepreneur.

David Senra 1:07:05 Record producers, but the people running the big companies-

Speaker 1:07:07 But I was a record producer.

David Senra 1:07:08 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, you had that instinct. What... But, like, there's, one, almost they don't see the necessity for it, and two, I don't even know if, like, a professional manager can then reinvent their business to survive the next technological wave. You disagree with that?

Speaker 1:07:24 I think what's happening is the music industry is finally moving into things they're afraid of. They just need some light. What you don't wanna do is license the next AI Spotify and say, "Give me 3% of your company." That is the greatest deal anyone's ever made. Who gives a shit who owns 3% of my company, if your company's Spotify, right? [chuckles] I mean, it's absurd. So they have to grab the enterprise value of the new technology.

David Senra 1:07:59 But don't you think it's gonna come outside? Like, one of my heroes is James Dyson, who I told you about.

Speaker 1:08:03 Who?

David Senra 1:08:03 James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner guy.

Speaker 1:08:04 Oh, yeah.

David Senra 1:08:05 And one of his... [chuckles] Who? [laughs] God, I love it. And one of his heroes was Buckminster Fuller, and Buckminster Fuller, uh, has this quote where it's like, "You don't fight the... Like, if you want to change things, you don't fight the existing system, you build your own. Like, you build a new version of that." And I almost feel like what you're talking about has to be done outside.

Speaker 1:08:23 Anywhere there's not a founder, usually it has to be done outside. You don't usually see big companies innovate.

David Senra 1:08:29 That's my point.

Speaker 1:08:30 I'll tell you what, I don't know this company, I don't know the guy, I don't know anything, but I try to... I, I, I, I tried a pair of those new Facebook Ray-Ban glasses. They made a good product.

David Senra 1:08:42 Yeah.

Speaker 1:08:43 So that's... But that's a founder. Big companies always have the advantage. They just don't... They have bureaucracies, and they don't have the entrepreneur as the leader anymore. So can they innovate? That's the que- Can they innovate? And, uh, look, I'm a terrible businessman. I had to learn business at Interscope.

David Senra 1:09:03 You are not a terrible [chuckles] businessman.

Speaker 1:09:05 I know how to do what I know how to do, but I had to learn business for defense when I got into the record business.

David Senra 1:09:11 Oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 1:09:12 1990, I had no fucking idea how to run a company. None, zero.

David Senra 1:09:19 This is when David Geffen sold Geffen-

Speaker 1:09:21 Geffen, yeah!

David Senra 1:09:21 Can you tell that story?

Speaker 1:09:22 Well, David Geffen is brilliant, right? He comes from right near my neighborhood in Brooklyn. He's exactly 10 years older than me. He's, like, 5'7". I'm 5'7". He's Jewish. I'm Italian. We were buddies, right? He was great with artists, you know. He signed Joni Mitchell, and The Eagles, and all this great shit, right, in his life. So I felt real camaraderie with him. I'm producing records. I'm actually in the studio for 20 years making music. They go on, they sell all these records. I wake up one day, he sold his company for $500 million. I'm like, "I'm from Brooklyn, you know. I wanna, I wanna make a lot of money." I'm not embarrassed that I... My, my whole life, I've been like... You know, I, I, [chuckles] right, but I, uh, I didn't have any money.

David Senra 1:10:17 Yeah.

Speaker 1:10:17 I had money as a record producer, but that's a certain amount of money. I wanted to live like I saw on TV, [laughs] you know? [laughing] Well, you were like a... Hold on, I, I-

David Senra 1:10:28 What I love in The Defiant Ones, 'cause everybody feels this way, especially if you didn't grow up with money. I know exactly what you're talking about. And you were, I think you might've been an engineer before you were a record producer. This story comes from when you were an engineer, not a record producer. The producer comes in. He's got, like, a leather jacket. You're like, "What the hell is this?" He's got a fancy bag, and then he's got a beautiful girl.

Speaker 1:10:45 Yeah.

David Senra 1:10:45 And you're like, "That's-

Speaker 1:10:47 That's it! [laughs] Yeah, you bet that's it. I mean, look, I'm not... Look, let me tell you something, man. You gotta tell yourself the truth. I'm not Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, so I felt the next best way in. I got into producing and engineering, right? That was my next way in, right? So I'm like, "Well, this feels really good." Then I saw Geffen, and I said-

David Senra 1:11:14 That feels better. [laughs]

Speaker 1:11:15 ... Oh, shit! He's doing the same thing out... He's not even in the studio all night. He goes home at six o'clock. I'm, like, three o'clock in the morning, still working on the drum sound, you know, like, doing that. So I said, "I bet I can do that."

David Senra 1:11:28 And then you go talk to him. What does he say?

Speaker 1:11:30 He said to me, "Oh, you could start a record company. Do you know how many stupid people [chuckles] there are that have record companies?" I said, "Okay," so I started a record company.

David Senra 1:11:44 I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high-quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night, and as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high-quality decisions, and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is Eight Sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of Eight Sleep, Matteo, and we live in the same city. A few months after I started using Eight Sleep, I randomly ran into Matteo at a restaurant, and I was with some friends.... So I go over and say hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, "Who was I talking to?" And I said, "That's Mateo, the founder of Eight Sleep." And my friend replied, [chuckles] "He looks like he gets good sleep." Mateo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an Eight Sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my Eight Sleep ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth ten times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe Eight Sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use Eight Sleep. I would recommend getting the Pod 5, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress, and it is next-level sleep tech. It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night, independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to eightsleep.com/senra, and use the code Senra to get three hundred and fifty dollars off. You can try it for thirty days at home and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my Eight Sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at eightsleep.com/senra. People were willing to give you money and back you right away. Why? Did you have previous relationships with them? What did they know about you?

Speaker 1:13:44 No. Uh, well, I- D- Doug put up half the money.

David Senra 1:13:47 Yeah.

Speaker 1:13:47 Geffen was gonna put the money up, but he sold his company, so he was very generous with me. And I... No, sure, Ted, Geffen was gonna distribute the money, and Ted Field was gonna put the money up. But Doug volunteered to put up half the money, Doug Morris at Atlantic. So I went to David, and I said, "David, he only put up half the money." He goes, "Jimmy, I want what's good for you. Go do it over there." All good. Really helpful to me, but I knew nothing about running a business or, you know, I didn't know you s- buy vegetables for less money than you sell them. I had no idea of anything regarding business. I had an instinct of how to move and what was important.

David Senra 1:14:27 I wanna pause the story, because then, when I went to your house the first time, just a few months ago, you told me something I haven't stopped thinking about. You, uh, you said, "Every great- anybody that's great is bent."

Speaker 1:14:38 Yeah.

David Senra 1:14:39 What does that mean?

Speaker 1:14:40 Well, to be really brilliant, I call it, there has to be a bend in the pipe. You know, whether it's through trauma or through your interp- your interpretation of, of yourself, of how... That it could happen, you can come from the greatest family in the world and have trauma. You know, just, it's, it's your sensitivity compared to the environment, and put it all together. So the, the ones that I know that are truly brilliant have a bend in the pipe [chuckles] you know?

David Senra 1:15:11 What's the bend that you see normally?

Speaker 1:15:13 It's usually trauma from when they were younger, family stuff.

David Senra 1:15:17 It's always the childhood?

Speaker 1:15:18 Yeah, it's all... Yeah. But they had the gift to, to write or produce or film or paint, right? I mean, they were the one, the chosen ones. That, that, you put that trauma compared with an innate talent, [chuckles] and it makes Picasso, you know? [chuckles] So, uh-

David Senra 1:15:41 But your bend was, "It has to be," which brings us to the founding of Interscope, because there's, there was a ton of people after Geffen that had your same idea, were like, "Well, I can do that-

Speaker 1:15:52 Fourteen, fourteen labels started with fifty million dollars in funding in 1989, '90.

David Senra 1:15:57 And how many survived?

Speaker 1:15:58 None.

David Senra 1:15:59 You.

Speaker 1:16:00 Interscope.

David Senra 1:16:00 Yeah.

Speaker 1:16:01 Me, Ted, John, and Tom Wiley.

David Senra 1:16:04 When you say, "It has to be," what does that mean?

Speaker 1:16:06 When you grow up like I did, and you did, and other people that I know-

David Senra 1:16:11 Yeah, the first time we met, you were like, "You're definitely bent." [chuckles] That's what you told me.

Speaker 1:16:13 When you're wa- when you're walking forward, right, the sidewalk behind you is caving in, so you have no choice but to walk forward, no matter how scary it is, how much it hurts. So what you have to learn at that moment is, "How do I take this fear and make it a tailwind instead of a headwind?" A lot of my friends and people I know and I watch, the fear stops them, and the ones that succeed is the one- the fear that propels them forward. If you could harness it, learn how to harness it, and take that... Because fear is energy.

David Senra 1:16:54 Mm.

Speaker 1:16:54 It's massive energy. It controls your entire system, and if you can learn to take that fuel and have it propel you forward, it's a powerful thing.

David Senra 1:17:06 Some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet that I've met, I'd say it's like, what drives them is not a love of success, it's a fear of failure.

Speaker 1:17:15 Whatever your fear is, you know what I mean? Well, let me-

David Senra 1:17:17 So when did you, when did you, when did you have the insight about, uh, fear, though? Like, when did you... You said, "I trained myself that when I feel fear, just to take a step forward." When?

Speaker 1:17:25 Well, the o- look, I was the kid in right field playing baseball, right? I come from a neighborhood where physicality, sports, and tough was the currency. I didn't have any of those things. So I had to go learn a whole new set of tools for my toolkit. But when I got to the studio, and I sat there with the guy, Roy Socala, who was my boss, who talked through me, and they put me in with John Lennon, and all of a sudden, all that fear, I, I was able to, I don't know why, flip it into energy to learn.

David Senra 1:18:04 So you're, like, 20 at the time?

Speaker 1:18:05 Twenty.

David Senra 1:18:06 You have a simple genius about you. I wanna go back to, "It has to be," and the bend. Um, and this is why I think it's so important to make the documentaries that you made, to do the podcast that you do, because, like, then somebody that you've never met, that is in a different industry, that's lived at a different time, reads that and like, "I'm like that, too." And you said something about your early life where you just felt it was all fucked up, but all you knew was that if you just went to the studio-... The more time you went to the studio, the better your life got. That is exactly how I feel. Like, all I-

Speaker 1:18:33 Yeah, let me tell you something-

David Senra 1:18:34 All I can control-

Speaker 1:18:34 That's not genius.

David Senra 1:18:36 No, it's a sim- it is a simple genius. It's very... There's a- it's practical wisdom.

Speaker 1:18:39 It, you know, you, when you- people talk about ge- there are real geniuses out there that are freaks, but people talk about people that are successful and stuff like that, it's basically, you're blessed that your instinct drives you in the right direction. And your instinct, Bob Dylan's instin- though Bob Dylan is a genius, but Bob-

David Senra 1:18:59 [chuckles]

Speaker 1:18:59 ... Dylan's instinct drove him for an entire generation to f- to, to, to lead. You know, Steve Jobs, or, or even people that I know, my friends, that their instinct is commercial or works.

David Senra 1:19:15 But that simple genius of, "I do more of X, and my life gets better," it's very, very smart, especially when you're 20, you're not, like, you're not experienced. You're in the room with legends. The, uh, I heard the interview, yeah, the conversation you had with Rick Rubin, and you both agreed, there's like, there's never been other famous people like the Beatles. It's not like, "Oh, yeah, that, that-

Speaker 1:19:33 Right

David Senra 1:19:33 ... Taylor Swift's kind of like the Beatles." Like, no, no, you don't understand how big this phenomenon is. And you're, uh, by your own admission, know nothing, insecure, and you're in the room with them, and you still... There, there, there's something very, again, I'm gonna use the word simple genius of, like, your ability to just, like, this is-

Speaker 1:19:48 Well-

David Senra 1:19:48 ... I just stay here, and my life will get better.

Speaker 1:19:50 It's also to know which pole to start reeling in. You know, when I was, when I got permission to, at Interscope, to make our, our own businesses with the artists, I had a bunch of things going. But soon as Dre said to me, [chuckles] "I want to sell sneakers," and I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, speakers," [chuckles] right?

David Senra 1:20:14 [chuckles]

Speaker 1:20:14 And I saw him, and I saw his credibility in sound, and I said, "Oh, shit," and it all came together, you know? I dropped all the other poles. I just said, "Okay, let's go."

David Senra 1:20:24 But there's also a simple genius of the way you move that I admire, and I'm not, like, trying to just overly compliment you here. Like, I really learned from it. Where that story, Dre tells the story of that conversation. He said this conversation, well, the entire time was, like, 10 minutes.

Speaker 1:20:37 Mm-hmm.

David Senra 1:20:37 Once you had that realization, you dipped out, you just left, and you call him, like, a week later to come to the office, and you have, like, 30 prototypes already done.

Speaker 1:20:45 Well, because I'm very lucky to be able to connect the dots. I can see something, and my little computer in my brain connects all the dots. I just c- and the things that I can see, and I don't do the things I can't see. But I saw the headphone thing, and I said, "Okay." And then I started to see, oh, man, not only do these guys make ugly products, they don't know how to market, they're not cool, they don't-

David Senra 1:21:12 Back to corny. [chuckles]

Speaker 1:21:13 Oh, the corny is a curse.

David Senra 1:21:15 [chuckles]

Speaker 1:21:15 Some people that are corny are really nice, but, you know, too corny is just, I don't know, it's not for me, you know what I mean?

David Senra 1:21:22 It's not for me either.

Speaker 1:21:22 I'm not... Uh, y- you know, it's like they don't know how to lay in the cut, you know? [chuckles]

David Senra 1:21:27 What does that mean?

Speaker 1:21:28 That means they don't know how to lay back and just watch something happen. They're always like, they want to be noticed, and they don't have a natural feel for, like, you know, for themselves, you know, I think. But what do I know?

David Senra 1:21:38 I think that's it right there. Let's go back to the Interscope. When you started Interscope, you're like, "My bet is, it has to be." Uh, like, the way you described it to me is just, like, this, there's no... Failure wasn't an option. There wasn't, like, a pl- you, you said plan B didn't even enter your mind, where it's just, like, "I'm doing this. It is- will work."

Speaker 1:21:56 Because if you think like that, it's an uncomfortable life, you know? So that's kind of why at 65, I'm 72 now, at 65, I was at Apple, and I said, "I can't... This is not for me anymore." You know, first of all, Apple's a great comp- company, company, they treated us great, and we did some great stuff together, but I couldn't just wake up in the morning and do whatever I wanted to do, 'cause they're a giant company, and they don't want the... I'm in the music side of it. They don't want the tail wagging the dog, you know? And I don't blame them, right? Because I come from a world of breaking things. You know, I would try anything, you know? And they have a very structured, fabulous business, [chuckles] right? And, um, so I said, the combination of it having to be successful how I see it, plus m- my team, like Trent Reznor, ex- et cetera, and Dre, and, and not being able to do anything to get it to work, and that combination said, "You know, you're 65." You know, I met Liberty, and we were gonna be together, and I just said, "You know-

David Senra 1:23:18 Were you already married-

Speaker 1:23:20 Uh-

David Senra 1:23:20 ... at that point?

Speaker 1:23:22 Yeah.

David Senra 1:23:22 Okay.

Speaker 1:23:22 I le- I retired in 2018. I got, I got married in '16.

David Senra 1:23:27 Okay.

Speaker 1:23:28 But why I came, started working again, I was dabbling, but why I started, I'm not running any companies right now.

David Senra 1:23:34 You said you don't want the bit in your mouth anymore.

Speaker 1:23:38 Yeah, I don't want it in my mouth. I have to have somebody with that energy, that's crazy, that runs the companies, you know?

David Senra 1:23:45 Do you feel you were cra- the version of you that started Interscope was crazy?

Speaker 1:23:50 No, I was obsessed. Uh, I'm obs... We're all sort of obsessive people. I was really obsessed, and, you know, and-

David Senra 1:23:57 You, you considered Interscope an i- a very intense mission that had to succeed.

Speaker 1:24:01 It was obses- I had to be obsessed, and you know what? Obsession doesn't make for a great partner at home.

David Senra 1:24:08 No, for sure.

Speaker 1:24:09 You know what I mean?

David Senra 1:24:10 Yeah.

Speaker 1:24:10 It's like, so, you know, I'm like, "Okay, I'm 65 years old, you know, how many summers do I have left?" As, uh, Tom Waits would say. You know what I mean? [chuckles] It's like-

David Senra 1:24:19 But, but how old were you when you started Interscope? 30, in your 30s?

Speaker 1:24:21 I was 38, 7, 8.

David Senra 1:24:24 And so does that mean every minute of the day is-

Speaker 1:24:27 Yeah

David Senra 1:24:28 ... on making sure-

Speaker 1:24:29 Interscope, yeah.

David Senra 1:24:30 When did you feel the relie- was there any sense of-

Speaker 1:24:32 No

David Senra 1:24:34 ... [chuckles] I love that you need me finish the question. That's-

Speaker 1:24:36 No.

David Senra 1:24:37 Till when?

Speaker 1:24:38 Till I was 65.

David Senra 1:24:40 We talked yesterday, you said something like, "You're always, like, a happy, uh, optimistic person-

Speaker 1:24:44 Well, I-

David Senra 1:24:44 ... but miserable at the same time."

Speaker 1:24:46 Yeah, because I remember-

David Senra 1:24:47 Explain that, though.

Speaker 1:24:47 I remember waking up with Liberty one morning, a, a, about months after I, I left Apple and s- decided I wasn't gonna run companies anymore or anything, start whatever. I said to him, "Do people wake up not thinking of something?" [chuckles] 'Cause I was waking up, and I had nothing on my mind, and I'm like, uh, what... Do people really do that? You know, and, and that's when I started to feel... I felt really good, and I feel really... See, the whole, the whole goal to me in life, I think it's most people, but some people don't admit it, is the search for peace. You know, and a lot of people lie to themselves about what peace is. I meet somebody, they run companies, and they don't wanna quit, "And I love what I do!" You love, you love that more than sitting on a beach somewhere? I mean, yeah, you-

David Senra 1:25:46 I do, for sure. I don't wanna sit on a beach.

Speaker 1:25:48 Right now, you don't.

David Senra 1:25:49 Okay.

Speaker 1:25:50 I'm talking about people that are 75, that don't wanna-

David Senra 1:25:53 Okay

Speaker 1:25:53 ... that can't give up the badge. You know, they have to have that badge to walk into a room. They're not that person. When I left Apple, I wasn't the head of Apple Music anymore or the head of Interscope anymore or blah, blah, blah, head of Beats.

David Senra 1:26:12 So you lose a status part? Is that-

Speaker 1:26:13 Whatever the fuck it is, I didn't care about any of that shit. I just wanted to stop feeling that feeling. You know what I mean?

David Senra 1:26:19 Yeah.

Speaker 1:26:19 So I didn't have that. That wasn't a currency for me. Uh, it's a blessing and a curse, but I just said, "I don't give a fuck." I don't wanna... I, I, I want this... I just don't wanna... I wanna get rid of the obsession. I mean, if you work- if you wanna work past 70, 75, 80, if you're a founder of a company like Phil Knight, I understand that he's still involved with Nike, do it if you're feeling it. It's not what I wanted to do, and it's what, not what I, I, I had to do for my own sanity. And, and I did-

David Senra 1:26:50 So this is, this is where I wanna talk to you about. So y- from the time, let's say you're 20, you start, to 65, you did not feel peace?

Speaker 1:26:57 No, not for one second.

David Senra 1:26:59 But, but you sell... You become a billionaire. You sell Beats to Apple. What'd that feel like?

Speaker 1:27:05 Felt great.

David Senra 1:27:06 Okay. No peace, though [chuckles] !

Speaker 1:27:08 Well, because-

David Senra 1:27:09 [laughing]

Speaker 1:27:09 ... a company like Apple pays you a lot of money. I'm my father's son. I got a job to do now.

David Senra 1:27:19 But you have a billion dollars in your bank account.

Speaker 1:27:21 That doesn't matter. What matters is there's a job that you're gonna do, that you're not gonna be... I, I, I have to get the job done right.

David Senra 1:27:28 But money is a p- a piece of peace.

Speaker 1:27:30 Money is a piece of it. It's really great. You know what I mean? But if I have your money, I'm fucked because I gotta do the job, and that's kind of one of the reasons I left, because I, I really couldn't do... I hate that this sounds really corny, I couldn't do me there.

David Senra 1:27:53 That's not corny at all.

Speaker 1:27:54 It's a great place-

David Senra 1:27:55 That's not corny at all.

Speaker 1:27:55 It's a great place, but I twitch.

David Senra 1:27:57 You're not... It's a big fucking company.

Speaker 1:27:58 Yeah.

David Senra 1:27:58 You're an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1:27:59 I couldn't have that compulsion, obsessiveness, insanity, and not have the wheel completely, meaning to make any mistake I wanted to make, to experiment, to just go. I couldn't, I couldn't do it.

David Senra 1:28:16 How does it feel when you're going through, when it's like... When you- your version of bend is, "It has to be," is it just you wake up with, like, overwhelming pressure every day? Like, what does that-

Speaker 1:28:27 You wake up seeing it. Yeah, you wake up, I mean, you wake up seeing what's wrong. Every day, you wake up seeing what's wrong. I, I never, I've never had a victory lap, lap in my life.

David Senra 1:28:41 You don't have any rearview mirror?

Speaker 1:28:43 I didn't have a victory lap. [clears throat] When we sold Beats, I mean, it's, it's very public. Dre felt great.

David Senra 1:28:51 Oh, that, the video with Tyrese? [chuckles]

Speaker 1:28:53 Yeah, I mean, Dre felt great. I, I felt great, but I didn't like... I'm like, "Oh, shit, these guys gave, gave us all this money, and now we gotta make a streaming service work, and Spotify's got the lead." And I'm like, "Oh, shit!" So then the next minute, I was thinking about that.

David Senra 1:29:12 How different are you and Dre in the way you approach your work? Because when I watch The Defiant Ones over and over again, there's a lot of things about him that I personally identify with, and there's a lot of things that I, uh, about you that I-

Speaker 1:29:21 Well, we're both record producers.

David Senra 1:29:23 Okay.

Speaker 1:29:24 Okay, so-

David Senra 1:29:25 He seems to need more solitude, though.

Speaker 1:29:27 Is he more comfortable?

David Senra 1:29:28 Well, [laughing]

Speaker 1:29:30 [laughing] Dre, I mean, uh, uh, I mean, solitude? Dre, I mean, Dre doesn't, Dre doesn't go anywhere. Every time Dre and I have to go do something, he calls me the night before and say, "We really have to do this? This is 32 years of it. Do we really have to do this? Why are we doing this?" You know? So yeah, no, he, um, he's much more, um, like that than me.

David Senra 1:29:54 I feel that way, too. Like, this is why I like small conversations like this, but if you say, "Hey, come to this group dinner or come to this public event," I'm like, "That's just not gonna happen. Like, there's just no way."

Speaker 1:30:01 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Dre's like that, but, you know, you gotta have a yin and yang to be partners, you know? It works, you know. So we're, we're very different, but we c- we, we both, we're both record producers. I can't explain it. There's certain, there's a certain kind of person that's... I always, I get along with every record producer I ever met.

David Senra 1:30:19 Yeah.

Speaker 1:30:19 Swizz Beatz, Timbaland, Pharrell, you know. I love all these guys, man. I get along really well with record producers.

David Senra 1:30:27 And you can't explain why? It's just the same kind of personality? What is it?

Speaker 1:30:31 I don't know what it is. I, I don't think about it, but I know that if I meet a record producer, that's always my favorite people I meet [chuckles] ...

David Senra 1:30:38 ... Yeah, I feel the same way about founders. Um, there's a, there's the founder of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, I read his biography. He said something that's interesting, where he, uh, I think reading between the lines, he tortured himself into greatness.

David Senra 1:30:50 I wanna go back to the bend of, "It has to be." Were you, like, torturing yourself into success?

Speaker 1:30:57 I don't think it's torturing myself, I just felt tortured. I don't know who was torturing me, but all I knew is that every day I would see what's wrong. What's wrong with the product? What's wrong with the business? What's wrong with the record? What's wrong with the guitar sound? What's wrong with, you know, how the headphones are being sold? What's wrong with the sound of them? What's wrong with... It's, I wake up every morning with seeing what's wrong.

David Senra 1:31:22 Your example is very different than most of the founders that I talk to or profile, because, like, Steve would be working on Apple no matter what. He just absolutely loved it. Work for you was always work.

Speaker 1:31:34 Yeah.

David Senra 1:31:35 It's like, I shouldn't say, like, you can't wait till it's over. Is that the right way to think about it, like-

Speaker 1:31:39 Uh, well, you see, the problem wa- that I had was [chuckles] if it sounds possible, it was the only place I felt relief, but, uh, but I was still tortured [laughing] so you know.

David Senra 1:31:53 This is-

Speaker 1:31:53 I don't know what the rest of my life was, but-

David Senra 1:31:55 ... But, uh, we had this conversation yesterday, and I, I told you I was on the phone with a friend, driving to your house, and we had the same conversation, where he was just, "How are you?" And I'm like, "I'm fantastic and miserable at the same time."

Speaker 1:32:04 Yeah. Well, that's possible.

David Senra 1:32:06 Yeah, I know, and, and we, we talked about-

Speaker 1:32:07 I'm always in a good mood. I've never... I don't think I've ever woken up in my life in a ba- except, except after my father died, I don't think I ever woke up in my life in a bad mood. I wake up in a great mood every day. I wake up happy.

David Senra 1:32:21 The two words you used are happy and miserable.

Speaker 1:32:23 Yeah, but there's a whole other side of you that wants to accomplish something, and, and accomplishing something in the world is not easy. There's everything working usually against you. The world doesn't wanna go the way you [chuckles] wanna go most of the time, right?

Speaker 1:32:41 So I'm really happy as a person. I got, I got my kids, and I'm really happy, and... I mean, now I'm really happy. My, I'm with Liberty, and we have six kids together, and everything is fantastic. I'm really happy. I'm at peace for the first time. But [chuckles] when I was running the companies or producing the record, I, I'd just see what's wrong, and it would just drive me bananas.

David Senra 1:33:07 You're the first person I think actually could explain that to me, about how I feel, 'cause everybody's like, um... I just was interviewed on another podcast, and he's like, "Are you happy?" And I was just like, "Yeah, I'm happy, but, like, I also, like, am striving to do something."

Speaker 1:33:21 I think Steve Jobs was tortured.

David Senra 1:33:23 Oh, for sure. Most of them are. But my whole thing is, like, I don't also wanna go through life like that. This is where Bruce Springsteen, y- you, I mean, y- you kinda pushed me in this direction, too, when you were like, "Go watch that movie," you know?

Speaker 1:33:35 Yeah.

David Senra 1:33:35 'Cause I, I didn't... When Jimmy Iovine says, "Go watch a movie," I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna go watch a movie." I thought I was gonna watch a biopic of his life. I thought it was gonna be like-

Speaker 1:33:43 Yeah

David Senra 1:33:43 ... he was born, and then he did this, he did that.

Speaker 1:33:45 Yeah.

David Senra 1:33:45 No. [chuckles] It's about the darkest time in his entire life.

Speaker 1:33:49 That's the only movie he would make.

David Senra 1:33:51 Why?

Speaker 1:33:51 He's not gonna make the Born in the USA movie. What I'm talking about is, I've always been a positive person, and I wake up in a good mood. So, you know, you haven't met me in those days, when I was running Interscope and stuff, but you would say, "Oh, he's having a great time," you know what I mean? But there was always this thing, this compulsion and this insanity that was just driving me constantly, and eventually I wanted to shake that. So I could say to you, "Yeah, I'm happy," in 1980-

David Senra 1:34:29 Yeah

Speaker 1:34:30 ... or [chuckles] something like that, but I wanted to be at peace. And I didn't give a shit about being the head of Interscope or being the head of Beats, a- I mean, that nonsense. I just wanted at peace.

David Senra 1:34:44 Do you think Bruce is at peace?

Speaker 1:34:46 I think Bruce has found a lot of peace. I, I don't ask, I don't speak for him, but I think he's incredible.

David Senra 1:34:53 I feel that's what he's searching for, too, in the book, where he's like, "I got this thing. I still don't have-

Speaker 1:34:57 Well, I mean, in the words of John Lennon, "I'm just trying to get me some peace, and, Christ, you know, it ain't easy."

David Senra 1:35:02 Yeah. [laughing]

Speaker 1:35:03 So you know, I mean, uh, I didn't invent this. [chuckles]

David Senra 1:35:06 No, you didn't invent it, but I, I think you, you, you, you just said something that I think is important. It's like, most people lie to themselves, and Bruce, in that book, was lying to himself for a while, and then he realized, "Oh, the actual source of his unhappiness-

Speaker 1:35:15 Well, you know, we all lie to ourselves, and then-

David Senra 1:35:17 Are you still lying to yourself today?

Speaker 1:35:19 I'm sure, about some things-

David Senra 1:35:21 You think so?

Speaker 1:35:21 ... but I try not

Speaker 1:35:22 to. I, I just want to... I just wanna find peace, you know what I mean? And, um, every day is a search for it, you know, and the monsters wanna come in, and you gotta make your shit bigger than the monsters' shit. [laughing] You know? My father would say, "As long as the cat's bigger than the shit, keep the cat."

David Senra 1:35:42 [laughing]

Speaker 1:35:42 "The minute the shit gets bigger than the cat," he went like this. [laughing] I must have been 13 years old, 12 years old, [chuckles] when he said that to me, and he was right.

David Senra 1:35:52 When you were building Interscope, or i- really, any time in your career, and when you were younger, what was your inner monologue like? Was it negative to, to yourself? Were you, were you, like, overly self-critical?

Speaker 1:36:03 Only the product. I felt like-

David Senra 1:36:05 So it wasn't, you're like, "This product, I could've-"

Speaker 1:36:07 Well, first of all, when you grow up, when you grow up not having a lot of money, and money being a concern, and the family and all that kind of stuff, you know, the-

David Senra 1:36:17 I... Yeah.

Speaker 1:36:18 My family was very generous, but, you know, eh, we had reality, right? When you grow up like that, that plays a big part in your brain, you know what I mean? 'Cause you don't think... You think, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna be broke." That's what everybody- that's what you think of, uh, you know. So that was a big driver of me.

David Senra 1:36:39 When did you lose that fear of being broke?

Speaker 1:36:42 I don't know, but I just know that-... when I sold it to Apple, it didn't fix it.

David Senra 1:36:48 Dude, I thought you were gonna say, like, when you were making tons of money at Interscope. That's wild!

Speaker 1:36:52 No, because I had to get something right. That overrides- I knew I had a lot of money. I knew I didn't need money. I knew I was never gonna be broke. But it was, that wh- wh- overrode any of it, was having to get the job right. That overrode everything.

David Senra 1:37:12 You were able to separate criticism that the work isn't good enough or isn't done, to I am not good enough, in your mind?

Speaker 1:37:21 No, 'cause you beat yourself up. You feel that if you can't-

David Senra 1:37:24 So you were still beating yourself up, even when you were in your-

Speaker 1:37:26 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah

David Senra 1:37:27 ... fifties and sixties?

Speaker 1:37:27 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because-

David Senra 1:37:30 Do you do it today?

Speaker 1:37:32 No. No, I don't. Today, I-

David Senra 1:37:35 Good stuff on that.

Speaker 1:37:36 Right [chuckles] [laughing] Today, I, I actually approach the job... Now, I get cranky, and, uh, but when I get cranky-

David Senra 1:37:42 [laughing]

Speaker 1:37:43 ... but when I crank, when I put the phone down, it doesn't travel with me. Like, right now, I do what I need to do with the CEOs that are running the companies and the people that work- I do stuff that I need to do personality-wise to get the job done, and it annoys me when people don't see things clearly or whatever. And, um, but when I put the phone down, I don't feel it. When I used to do that, I never stopped feeling it, 'cause I had to get it right.

David Senra 1:38:13 I felt like that for a while. This just changed, like, mmm, as a result of, like, the work that I've been doing. There's this guy named Brad Jacobs, who started eight separate billion-dollar companies. I did a bunch of episodes of Founders on him. He came to do this show. I've spent a bunch of time with him, and he j- he's 68 years old. He's been an entrepreneur for longer than I've been alive. Like, the guy is just absolutely incredible, and his whole thing is he just used to beat the shit out of himself mentally. And he's like: "You know what? For... This is not helping my performance." And talking to him, and then using some of the, the strategies in his book, like, now, I used to have a very negative fuel source, which is, I didn't like the way I was born, what- the environment I was born into. I'm gonna, you know, channel that, just like Bruce Springsteen, just like you, it's like I'm gonna channel that into achievement. I thought for a long time that, like, constant self-criticism of the work that I'm doing will only make it better, so therefore, that'll increase my likelihood of achievement. And now I'm like, you know what? I'm just obsessed with what I'm doing. Like, before, uh, when I woke up this morning, I was, like, giddy, 'cause, like, "This is gonna be one of the best days of my life. I get to freaking record a podcast with Jimmy. This is gonna be insane." Like, my now ne- my self-talk is just like, "Just love what you do and follow your curiosity, and you're gonna be obsessed anyways. You can't work any other way."

Speaker 1:39:21 Just know that you've handled, to a certain extent, a monster in your life, but the next monster is gonna come in a disguise, a different look, a different way, and it's gonna come in through this door, and you'll s- wake up one day, and that monster will go, "Oh, fuck, I feel like I felt... I thought I killed that monster, but this is a new monster, only it's changed its shape."

David Senra 1:39:44 Where do you think that would happen?

Speaker 1:39:46 It just happens to everybody in life, you know? Just some people like to admit it, and some people don't.

David Senra 1:39:51 So, like, might not be in your professional life, but it might be in your personal life, or something like that?

Speaker 1:39:53 It could be anything.

David Senra 1:39:54 Okay.

Speaker 1:39:54 Yeah, man, it could be anything. It could be one of your kids. It could be anything, you know? And for the first time in my life, I feel balanced. I feel kinda like... I feel okay. You know, I feel like I'm at peace, but I'm also not running a company. If I was running a company, I, I know that, I know that it's not for me. I know that I couldn't do it. I'm not that cured [laughing] You know? [laughing] Well, I take what I do serious. I don't take myself too serious, 'cause I, I, I, I love having a sense of humor. I think laughing extends your life. So my father was a really funny guy, you know, and, uh, and we lived like that, and growing up, every- everything was like we saw a sense of humor in everything. You know, I remember when he was dying, right before he died, he... Something happened [chuckles] and, uh, it was, it was like a person came in and did something wrong, and he, he just looked at me, and he, he, he made a joke, 'cause he, he knew it was funny, and he grabbed the moment. He had 28% of his heart left, but-

David Senra 1:41:05 Did he know he was dying?

Speaker 1:41:06 It was a crazy time in my life. Uh, I was 31 years old, or 30, 30, 31, and, uh, I went to my grandfather's funeral, his father, and the next morning, my father had a heart attack, and then he died probably seven weeks, eight weeks later, and then my grandmother, his mother, died the next week. So they, all three of them, died within eight weeks. So it was a really, uh, pretty crazy time. And my father was... I was so close with him. He just devastated me. But he always had a sense of humor, so I take what I do really serious, but I don't take myself too serious. I really don't, like-

David Senra 1:41:50 And you learned that from him?

Speaker 1:41:52 Yeah, yeah. My father was always a hard worker.

David Senra 1:41:55 He was your best friend?

Speaker 1:41:57 Still is, you know?

David Senra 1:42:00 Wow.

Speaker 1:42:00 Still is. It's his voice that really, um, if I ever get on the right page, it's always his voice that makes me on the right page. Yeah.

David Senra 1:42:12 That was the worst day of your life?

Speaker 1:42:14 It still is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, worst day of my life, by far [laughing] By far. Yeah, man, I... You know, when I, when he died, I made a Christmas album about him. I, uh, it was called A Very Special Christmas, uh, and, uh, we raised over $100 million for Special Olympics.

David Senra 1:42:33 I wanna ask you some advice unrelated to work. I just saw that you have on your wrist a bracelet with your wife's name on it.

Speaker 1:42:41 Yeah.

David Senra 1:42:42 How important has that relationship been in your life compared to your work?

Speaker 1:42:47 Well, you know, I, I, again, I don't look back-... Right? So I can only go by how I feel now, and right now, it's more important than my work. [chuckles] So, and that's part of why I have peace, 'cause we, we connect, we work on our marriage, we work on our friendship, we work on our bond, you know? And I'm not, I'm not kumbaya about anything. You know, I realize anything can happen at any moment.

David Senra 1:43:15 No, you're super, super intense. [chuckles]

Speaker 1:43:18 You know? So, so right now, it's more important than my work.

David Senra 1:43:24 You get more satisfaction out of that?

Speaker 1:43:26 Yeah. It's the only place I find peace, you know? And I, I'm, I'm really in search of peace, man. I... The rest of this shit, I... But I do think we can crack the code at Complex. I really believe that. I re- I believe that we can really do something in education. I really believe that, so I'm very passionate about that.

David Senra 1:43:50 Yeah, you need something to work towards.

Speaker 1:43:51 And not only that, I wanna see that I can get something done without being nuts-

David Senra 1:43:55 [chuckles]

Speaker 1:43:55 ... without feeling that horrible feeling, [laughing] you know? I mean, I wanna feel like I can get something done-

David Senra 1:44:02 You bet

Speaker 1:44:02 ... without feeling like that.

David Senra 1:44:03 Yeah, I do, too.

Speaker 1:44:04 You know, it, it really is the truth, you know? But, by the way, not everybody feels like that. There are some really talented people who are completely happy about their work.

David Senra 1:44:13 Who?

Speaker 1:44:14 I don't know, but- [laughing]

David Senra 1:44:15 [laughing]

Speaker 1:44:16 ... I don't know any of them, but I'm sure they're out there.

David Senra 1:44:18 No, you've met, like, I mean, y- y- your entire world, your entire life was surrounded by top performers, by geniuses, by people that are, you know, at the top of their profession. And I'm... That's why I would light you up with questions the last two times that we saw each other about, like, what these people are like because what you just said, "I wanna try to create something great without being nuts." Yeah, me, too, and I'd like one of these examples of that, um-

Speaker 1:44:38 Yeah, but I, you know, I, I wish I could've learned it at 52, but I think I got it at 72, you know? [chuckles]

David Senra 1:44:43 Why do you think it took you longer than you wanted it to take you?

Speaker 1:44:49 Um, I didn't go to therapy long enough, early enough in my life, 'cause to unring the bells of your childhood takes a lot of work. I'm very pro-therapy, you know. I really am.

David Senra 1:45:00 To unring the bells of your childhood takes a lot of work. That's a great line.

Speaker 1:45:05 It's true.

David Senra 1:45:05 And you think the only way to do that is through-

Speaker 1:45:07 It's not the o- It's my way.

David Senra 1:45:09 Okay.

Speaker 1:45:09 It's my... Not the only way.

David Senra 1:45:10 When did you realize, "Oh, shit, I need it?"

Speaker 1:45:12 I didn't take ther- therapy really serious till my 50s, and I wish I had done it earlier, h- honestly.

David Senra 1:45:18 And what does really serious mean to you?

Speaker 1:45:20 It means twice a week, but take it in, not just-

David Senra 1:45:24 Not just show up at the appointment and listen, but actually change your behavior?

Speaker 1:45:28 Yeah.

David Senra 1:45:29 Were you doing it, like, in your, like, in your 30s and 40s?

Speaker 1:45:32 I started in my 30s and 40s, but it, w- uh, I wasn't a good patient or customer or client-

David Senra 1:45:38 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Speaker 1:45:39 ... whatever the fuck they call it. [chuckles]

David Senra 1:45:40 So you'd go, you'd show up.

Speaker 1:45:42 Yeah.

David Senra 1:45:42 You would talk. They... You would talk, they would talk.

Speaker 1:45:44 Yeah, the minute I, the minute I walk on the phone, I grab the phone, hang up, like, you know, it was like-

David Senra 1:45:47 You just, y- you weren't ready to, like-

Speaker 1:45:50 No

David Senra 1:45:50 ... to take in information?

Speaker 1:45:51 No. No.

David Senra 1:45:52 What do you think made you ready, other than age?

Speaker 1:45:55 Well, my divorce. Very simple. I, I was in a marriage, and we were married, and everything was going along, and then when we got divorced, which people do, I realized that that was a time that I needed to get my shit self-contained. All of a sudden, I got an idea about life that I didn't see before, so I pursued that. [chuckles] It's no different than the school or the Beats or m- or streaming or any of the things that I-

David Senra 1:46:26 That's a great way to think about it.

Speaker 1:46:27 Yeah. [chuckles] If I had the idea earlier, I would've did it earlier. [laughing]

David Senra 1:46:32 Why did you tell me yesterday that you think I need to talk to somebody?

Speaker 1:46:37 Because of some of the things that you told me, you know? So some of the personal stuff you told me. I said, "It's a lot easier to, to go with a guide." It's a lot easier to learn how to play tennis with a tennis teacher. It's good to have somebody in your life that doesn't have a, an agenda. Everybody in your life has an agenda. If you find a person without an agenda, it's... You can get a lot further. You could have those other people who love you very much and care about you, but, but to have the one without the agenda, for me, uh, was very helpful.

David Senra 1:47:12 Like, why do you think it works with that, with this p- particular person?

Speaker 1:47:16 I believe this person. It's a-

David Senra 1:47:18 You trust their judgment?

Speaker 1:47:18 ... everything in my life is guttural.

David Senra 1:47:21 Steve was the same way, though.

Speaker 1:47:22 But you have to know you're wrong. A lot of times, you're doing things for reasons that are controlled by that childhood, right? So as you work through that, you start doing things for more of a reason, more honest reasons that are not driven by that voice of your childhood.

David Senra 1:47:43 There's another thing that you said to me about you always kept a small circle of-

Speaker 1:47:48 I still do.

David Senra 1:47:49 These are true friends.

Speaker 1:47:51 I try to have an infield, you know? [chuckles]

David Senra 1:47:54 That's how many people? Seven? [chuckles]

Speaker 1:47:56 No.

David Senra 1:47:56 But six-

Speaker 1:47:56 Five, four.

David Senra 1:47:57 Oh, okay. [laughing]

Speaker 1:47:57 Yeah.

David Senra 1:47:58 I haven't seen baseball in more than a year.

Speaker 1:47:59 And by the way, I don't, [chuckles] I don't need another shortstop until the other one dies, you know what I mean?

David Senra 1:48:05 [laughing]

Speaker 1:48:05 [chuckles] I, I, I limit it. I don't go for six, you know?

David Senra 1:48:08 And it just takes time to develop trust with these people.

Speaker 1:48:11 Yeah.

David Senra 1:48:11 Yeah.

Speaker 1:48:12 Yeah. I trust other people, but not like that, not to where I connect like that.

David Senra 1:48:18 Yeah.

Speaker 1:48:19 You know, I'm very lucky. Well, you know, when you get to be 72 years old, you have some friendships that are 50 years old.

David Senra 1:48:25 That's incredible.

Speaker 1:48:27 Yeah. Yeah. It's nice. It's nice. But, you know, on the, on the school thing, we're onto something, and I like to build... I like to do something, which goes back to all the business stuff, that's gonna catch on and gonna grow on its own, you know? So I think, like, the stuff we're doing in the inner city, we have five schools now.

David Senra 1:48:53 These are high schools now?

Speaker 1:48:54 Yeah.

David Senra 1:48:54 Okay.

Speaker 1:48:55 Because, again, my debt to Black culture is enormous.... I wanna really help the inner city and give these kids an advantage of an education that no one else is thinking about. And I think we're gonna build some extraordinary people, that companies are gonna really want.

David Senra 1:49:15 So that's the way you want high schoolers and c- people in college to learn. What's the best way for you to learn something new now?

Speaker 1:49:22 I, I was terrible in school. When I had to learn something, I, I just couldn't do it. I, I just-

David Senra 1:49:26 How the hell did you r- learn to produce records, then?

Speaker 1:49:30 Well, like anybody my age that's in music or around culturally, there was the Big Bang, which was the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. I was probably 11 y- years old, right? And I didn't have a currency in, in my neighborhood. I wasn't an athlete. Uh, I wasn't physically big. I wasn't any of the things that worked in the neighborhood. And when I saw the Beatles, I said, "Oh, there's a currency I can have."

David Senra 1:50:04 'Cause you tried, you tried to tr- to create music first, right?

Speaker 1:50:06 Yeah, I was terrible. [chuckles] I mean, aver- you know, I was in a band, you know, like-

David Senra 1:50:12 Yeah

Speaker 1:50:12 ... but I realized quick I wasn't gonna be in the Rolling Stones. Then I met this woman through my cousin, this woman, Ellie Greenwich, who took me to recording sessions, and that's where I saw that guy with the leather bag and the, you know, and the-

David Senra 1:50:25 And the beautiful woman

Speaker 1:50:26 ... and the candles-

David Senra 1:50:27 Yeah

Speaker 1:50:27 ... and the pretty girl coming to meet him, and I said, "Oh, that's it!" [laughing]

David Senra 1:50:33 [laughing]

Speaker 1:50:34 I never saw anybody with a leather bag before, you know? But-

David Senra 1:50:37 And so you just learned by observing?

Speaker 1:50:39 No, then I got a... I went to get a job as a cleaning up, you know, cleaning up the studio, setting up the studio, repetition, figuring- putting this over there, you know, figuring out, being around it, being a, a, the ability to observe.

David Senra 1:50:52 I can see how you can learn to be, like, a engineer, right?

Speaker 1:50:57 Mm-hmm.

David Senra 1:50:57 In a recording studio that way. But then you go to a much more almost, like, creative part of it-

Speaker 1:51:01 Producing

David Senra 1:51:01 ... which is producing.

Speaker 1:51:02 Well, 'cause I had an instinct. I had an instinct for, again, for what the audience would like and what they wouldn't like, and what was good and what was not. I was-

David Senra 1:51:11 Based on your own personal taste?

Speaker 1:51:13 Based on my taste, influenced by John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen.

David Senra 1:51:18 Okay.

Speaker 1:51:19 An intense, intense therapy, sitting next to them every day for five years.

David Senra 1:51:25 And you s- you, you were up close, and you saw what true excellence looked like.

Speaker 1:51:29 Yeah, and they taught me what was cool and what was not cool, and what was good and what was great. The difference between good and great, and what you do to get there. And so then I was able to produce records because of those two people. I watched them. I watched Landau, and I watched John. I watched John Lennon. I watched Bruce. I said, "Oh, shit," and I just absorbed it, and I applied it. That's how... When Bruce gave me the song Because the Night for Patti Smith, I was able to translate that into a record where I was the producer. I always wanted a song that sounded like The Animals, you know, "It's my life," and other, you know, that, that, and we gotta get out of this place, right? So when I heard that song, and I heard the chorus, 'cause he had the chorus, right? I said, "Shit." And then I heard, "Because the night belongs to lovers." I said, "Wow, if a woman sings that, that's powerful." So I said to him, "You gonna use this song?" He goes, "No, it doesn't fit on this album." I said, "Okay, c- can I use it for Patti?" And he was great, and he said, "Yeah," and, and she rewrote the verses and killed it. But connecting the dots, you know, and you could, you could learn a little bit how to connect the dots, but you gotta be that kind of person that just sees, you can connect the dots. And that's as, as simple and as difficult as it is. I was always able to connect the dots and see what could be, wha- what this is and what it could be. But that's what always tortured me, 'cause I would see something and see what it could be, and then try to get it to be that, is maddening. Even with Beats, I, you know, I, I saw the iPod, and when we finally decided to do it, I said, "Oh, wow, it, it could be that. You know, it could be as cool as that. We gotta make it as cool as that." 'Cause the iPod was really cool, you know?

David Senra 1:53:22 Did you ever meet Akio Morita, the founder of Sony?

Speaker 1:53:24 No, but I just-

David Senra 1:53:25 But you observed him.

Speaker 1:53:26 I observed him, and Steve would talk to me about him, and I saw, and... But I was always very into the fact that he- when I met Steve, I never understood instinctively why Sony had Columbia Records, the Walkman, PlayStation, and then the CD, and all this stuff, and how did Apple become Apple and not them?

David Senra 1:53:57 It's almost like they had all the components, but it was siloed.

Speaker 1:54:00 No, Morita died.

David Senra 1:54:01 Okay. But it goes back to your l- I, I see some kind of connection to the school you're doing.

Speaker 1:54:06 Yes, yes.

David Senra 1:54:06 'Cause like, you had it all.

Speaker 1:54:08 It was-

David Senra 1:54:08 You just had to-

Speaker 1:54:08 Yes

David Senra 1:54:08 ... have one person, like an Akio, who was, if he was alive, or a Steve or a Jimmy to put it all together.

Speaker 1:54:13 I am not as smart as those two people, and I'm just telling you the God's honest truth, man. They knew how to do what they were doing. I don't know how to do what I... I don't really know.

David Senra 1:54:21 Yeah, but you know how to put shit together.

Speaker 1:54:23 I do.

David Senra 1:54:23 Yeah.

Speaker 1:54:23 I know how to put shit together, you know, so that's really cool, but-

David Senra 1:54:27 Did Steve talk to you about the influence of-

Speaker 1:54:29 Absolutely!

David Senra 1:54:30 What was he saying about Sony and Akio?

Speaker 1:54:31 He would say, "That guy was really knew what he was doing. He, he really had a feel," and I, you know, it was obvious to me. You know, Morita bought Sony, bought Columbia Records, bought Columbia Pictures. He saw the distribution, the hardware, the software. He saw it all. But Steve took it, not literally, but it was part of the inspiration behind-

David Senra 1:54:58 No, for sure it was

Speaker 1:54:59 ... his chain of thinking, right?

David Senra 1:55:01 He, he talked, in interviews, he talks about how- what he loved about Akio and the Walkman in particular, because Akio had to fight to build the Walkman in his own company.... They're like, "This is the stupidest thing."

Speaker 1:55:11 I remember being with Bruce Springsteen, and he told me, he said, "You know, this guy, this guy from Sony came up to me, and, you know, and he's, runs the company." And, and he says, "The guy asked me to put these headphones on if there was enough bass," [chuckles] and it was him. [laughing] You know what I mean?

David Senra 1:55:36 Yeah.

Speaker 1:55:36 So this guy got it.

David Senra 1:55:38 Yeah.

Speaker 1:55:38 You know? And I never met him, but I know he got it. You know, I learned a lot from Steve. I learned a lot from John Lennon. I learned a lot from Bruce Springsteen. I got really blessed.

David Senra 1:55:46 Were you able to learn... Those are people... Well, I guess Bruce was your age, right? You guys are... He's a, a little older.

Speaker 1:55:52 He's three years older than me.

David Senra 1:55:53 Were you able to learn from younger people than you? Like, when-

Speaker 1:55:56 Yeah.

David Senra 1:55:56 Were you learning from

David Senra 1:55:57 your artists when you were-

Speaker 1:55:58 I learned from Bono, you know, a lot from Bono. Bono's 10 years younger than me. When I met Bono in 1983, and we did U- Under Blood, we did Under Blood Red Sky, I said, "Oh, shit, the framing of how artists are thinking is changing." I said, "Wow, look at this." The music was different, you know? And the kind of music that was going on, that they were doing was different. It was a take on punk, but it was, like, more ethereal and different. So, and also, he's an extrovert, whereas the other guys, a lot of the guys I worked with, weren't.

David Senra 1:56:39 They're introverted? Really?

Speaker 1:56:41 Dre.

David Senra 1:56:42 So what, what did you learn from Dre?

Speaker 1:56:45 Well, Dre brought back the Springsteen thing in me, which was the commitment to a vision and sticking by the culture that you came up in and servicing that culture. And, uh, and it was something that I really didn't understand in the beginning, so I was really hungry to learn about it, you know, about hip-hop and the culture and what it was doing and how it applied, and the, the true power of it. So I learned, I mean, I learned everything about, that I know about hip-hop from Dr. Dre, period. [chuckles]

David Senra 1:57:20 I feel like he was some kind of, like, prodigy as a young person, but then he just has this relentless work ethic. So he took, like, innate talent, and I don't... And seems to, like, just through an insane, like, day after day after day after day dedication-

Speaker 1:57:35 Yeah

David Senra 1:57:35 ... and made the na- 'cause he's the greatest hip-hop producer of all time. Like-

Speaker 1:57:39 Well, Dre and Bruce have a lot in common.

David Senra 1:57:42 How so?

Speaker 1:57:43 They are completely uncompromising, okay? Completely uncompromising. They will not compromise. You have to convince them to move to the left or right. They are com- they know completely what they do, and they don't compromise. It's just that simple. Bruce was the lead... When I met Dre and Bruce, it was very similar. They were both broke, and Dre was in trouble [chuckles] and broke, and they would, with that vision-

David Senra 1:58:16 And even back then, they weren't compromising?

Speaker 1:58:18 Not even close. You couldn't rent Bruce Springsteen. You couldn't buy Br- nothing. You could rent me in those days, you know what I mean? [chuckles] Absolutely. [laughing] You know, but you couldn't anything with that guy. He just... He, he didn't, he didn't think about, "Well, where am I gonna sleep tonight?" It was like this. Bah. I learned that from him. It was, like, really, a really powerful thing. There was nothing that anyone had that he wanted, nothing. That's powerful. That's powerful when you're broke, right? It's like, well, [chuckles] you know? Like, I, I, so I admired that.

David Senra 1:59:00 So Bono is an extrovert. You were-

Speaker 1:59:03 Well, I'd say extrovert-

David Senra 1:59:04 How did you do that?

Speaker 1:59:04 I mean, he'll go out, he'll talk to people, and he's passionate. And by the way, he, he, in his book and i- in his play, a one-man show, he talks about the issues he had at home with his dad and all that stuff, but he is the most positive person I met in music.

David Senra 1:59:23 So his bend, same thing, comes from, like, this childhood trauma-

Speaker 1:59:26 Yeah

David Senra 1:59:27 ... but somehow didn't, fixed it along the way.

Speaker 1:59:30 No, no, no. He just is naturally positive person. He can s- he's tough. He can get, plow through things. He's, works... He has incredible work ethic, incredible writer, incredible lyricist, incredible performer, but he's positive. Whenever you see him, he's got an idea. He wants to do this, he wants... He's got very broad interests. I mean, you know, I didn't go on vacation till I met him.

David Senra 1:59:59 Say more about that.

Speaker 2:00:00 I'd never been on a vacation really until the year 2000, 'cause I was doing Rattle and Hum with him in 1988, and I went to the south of France. I remember, and I was like, "Whoa, what the fuck?"

David Senra 2:00:11 So you were just myopically focused on-

Speaker 2:00:13 [chuckles] Yes

David Senra 2:00:13 ... achievement.

Speaker 2:00:14 Yes.

David Senra 2:00:15 I love this story where you fly to California for the first time, right?

Speaker 2:00:20 Right.

David Senra 2:00:20 I don't think you'd ever been on a plane.

Speaker 2:00:22 No.

David Senra 2:00:22 You, you were 20? How old were you?

Speaker 2:00:24 20.

David Senra 2:00:24 You were 20.

Speaker 2:00:24 Never been on a plane, never been in a hotel.

David Senra 2:00:26 Never been in a hotel, and then, um, I, I don't know if this is the same trip or later. I think Tom Petty put you in a house. You had never-

Speaker 2:00:31 No, no, Lennon put me in the, in, um, the Beverly Hills Hotel.

David Senra 2:00:36 But that's when you started to be like, "Oh, wait, the world is huge, and I... There's a lot in front of me if I, if I focus on this relentless accomplishment."

Speaker 2:00:43 Well, I remember John took me to a guy named Richard Perry's house-

David Senra 2:00:47 Okay

Speaker 2:00:47 ... a very famous record producer, and, uh, John took me to his house with Harry Nilsson. With- they were going out. They said... He just was, like, really nice to me. He said, "You wanna come?" I, "Uh, sure."

David Senra 2:00:58 Yeah.

Speaker 2:00:58 You know, I had nothing to do. I was in the hotel, right? Takes me there, and this guy's got a house in the hills in Laurel Canyon, overlooking- or Doheny or something, overlooking the city. It was at night. Yeah, and-... tennis court that was lit up, I was like, "It's like seeing the guy with the bag." [laughing]

David Senra 2:01:20 [laughing]

Speaker 2:01:20 And I was like, "Holy shit!" You know, like, wow!

David Senra 2:01:25 Yeah, just opens up the, the-

Speaker 2:01:27 Yeah

David Senra 2:01:27 ... scope of possibilities.

Speaker 2:01:28 Yeah. You know, you see it for the first time... I'd never been on a plane. I mean, I've only been to Manhattan to f- you know, 'cause of the work, you know?

David Senra 2:01:35 Did you know this is where you were gonna spend your life? Like, when did you-

Speaker 2:01:38 Yeah!

David Senra 2:01:39 When-

Speaker 2:01:39 The, the minute I got off the plane, and my, my boss, Roy, said, "Let's rent a car," we rented a Cadillac, right? And we drove down Sunset Boulevard, and it was December, and it was 75 deg- 78 degrees or something like that. I said, "Are you kidding me?" He said, "No, this is the weather like, like in California, you know?" So I went to, uh, pull into the Beverly Hills Hotel.

David Senra 2:02:08 First hotel you ever stay in-

Speaker 2:02:09 Yeah

David Senra 2:02:09 ... is that. That's wild.

Speaker 2:02:11 Ever.

David Senra 2:02:11 That's wild.

Speaker 2:02:11 Except, except the Host Motel in Pennsylvania, where the car pulls up to the door. You know, that, one of those places-

David Senra 2:02:20 Yeah

Speaker 2:02:20 ... and the pool's on the highway, right? [laughing] So-

David Senra 2:02:24 A little different from where you are in Beverly Hills

Speaker 2:02:25 ... other than that, this, this was the first time. And, um, so I go to my room, and I come back, and I talk to the doorman. I said, "Can I ask you something? Do regular people live here?" And he said, "Yeah, I'm a regular person. I'm a doorman." [laughing]

David Senra 2:02:43 [laughing]

Speaker 2:02:43 I said, "I live here." I said, "My father's a longshoreman. Are there docks here?"

David Senra 2:02:50 Yeah.

Speaker 2:02:51 He says, "It's the port of California." [laughing]

David Senra 2:02:54 [laughing]

Speaker 2:02:54 "Yes, we're one of the biggest ports in the world," or whatever. I said, "Thanks." I go back to my room, I call my mother, I say, "Mom, how did you get this wrong? [laughing] We land in Ellis Island, and we live 30 feet from Ellis Island." [laughing]

David Senra 2:03:12 [laughing]

Speaker 2:03:12 "It's freezing. It's cold. It's m- "

David Senra 2:03:16 Yeah.

Speaker 2:03:16 "Why don't we live in California?"

David Senra 2:03:18 Yeah.

Speaker 2:03:18 So yeah, I knew I wanted to live in California from that day.

David Senra 2:03:21 So how long did it take for you to, to move here permanently?

Speaker 2:03:23 '79, Tom Petty, Damn the Tor... My whole life was controlled by, was, was documented by albums. I was Damn the Torpedoes when I moved.

David Senra 2:03:30 How many years later was that?

Speaker 2:03:31 Uh, six.

David Senra 2:03:32 Six years, and that's when you... He put- Tom Petty put you up in a house?

Speaker 2:03:36 Yeah.

David Senra 2:03:36 And you were kind of freaked out. You're like, "I'm in the-

Speaker 2:03:38 Well, 'cause it was n- I was in... Again, I never, I never had a house.

David Senra 2:03:41 Yeah.

Speaker 2:03:42 I lived in an apartment, right?

David Senra 2:03:43 Yeah.

Speaker 2:03:45 There was noises outside the window, you know what I mean? So I was completely freaked out, you know? But [chuckles] Petty was, uh, Petty was incredible.

David Senra 2:03:53 What'd you learn from him?

Speaker 2:03:55 He was the first guy I worked with that was my age. He was, like, only two years younger than me or something. But he was like, he was more of a contemporary of mine at that point. We were both trying to prove something, right? So we locked in, and he was just great songwriter, uh, and again, perfectionist in his art. He would never bring a song in... Tom Petty never brought an average song into the studio. He was a great self-editor. He would come in, that song would be complete and done. Bruce is like that as well.

David Senra 2:04:31 But that's another thing, his motivating factor was creating the best possible song, art that he could make.

Speaker 2:04:36 Yeah, he wasn't thinking about... And again, like everybody else, he wanted to have a better life, you know?

David Senra 2:04:44 Yeah.

Speaker 2:04:44 And here another guy that had issues with his father.

David Senra 2:04:47 But you had commercial instincts, 'cause there's a great line in the documentary where, like, he writes some song, and you're like... "I think you wrote a great song and two other ones." You're like, "Get seven more, we're done," or the, like, "This song's gonna buy you a house."

Speaker 2:04:59 Yeah.

David Senra 2:04:59 And Tom's like, "I've never heard anybody talk [chuckles] that way before."

Speaker 2:05:02 Well, because I, I, you know, sometimes I sound crass or whatever, just that I have a sense of humor. I, I, I know how funny that would sound.

David Senra 2:05:11 Yeah.

Speaker 2:05:12 You know what I mean? Like, Bono, one day, um, I didn't work on, on the, on Joshua Tree. I wanted to do it, but they chose, uh, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, which was a better choice, but they wanted to change their sound. But that was the right choice, but they would always bring me in to listen to the songs, like Bruce did that day on, uh, the River.

David Senra 2:05:33 Yeah.

Speaker 2:05:33 So I go in, and he plays me this song, and he says... This was the beginning of it. He says, "Jimmy, this is house music." I said, "Really?" I said, "Uh, I don't, I don't know if I like house music that much," right? [chuckles] So he plays me With or Without You. I said, "Bono, that's house music." He said, "No, it's not. You don't know what you're talking about." I said, "Bono, that other song, that's apartment music. [chuckles] You put this song out, you're getting a house." [laughing] Okay? So, you know, that's just the way I express myself, is just kind of, you know, I try to, you know... I can't help it. If the line is good, I say it, even though, even if it makes you look, you know, like, wow, you're gonna buy a house with this song, Tom Petty? I knew when I was saying it, that it sounded like that, but my father was like that. He couldn't resist a good line.

David Senra 2:06:28 Goes back to one of the first things we talked about, is, like, the fact that they want you in the room 'cause you tell them the truth. And what I love about you is, like, exactly, before I met you, exactly how I thought you would be, you are in person. And this started with, uh, when I sent this clip when you're on Ari Emanuel's podcast, and at the end, I sent the clip to Daniel Ek-

Speaker 2:06:46 [chuckles]

David Senra 2:06:46 ... and me and him were just laughing about it, 'cause you're like, "The production..." He goes, "This is Ari's podcast. This is the production value," uh-

Speaker 2:06:52 There was a velour couch.

David Senra 2:06:53 [chuckles]

Speaker 2:06:54 And he says, "It's not a velour couch." I grew up with velour couches, okay?

David Senra 2:06:58 [laughing]

Speaker 2:06:59 Only my velour couch had plastic on them.

David Senra 2:07:01 No, but you're like, "Production value sucks. It's hot. I don't got any tea. The water's warm. You got this goddamn light in my face." [laughing]

Speaker 2:07:09 Yeah, no, it felt... And Rick Rubin's sitting there in Italy, in this incredible house, backlit, he looks like Moses. [laughing]

David Senra 2:07:17 [laughing]

Speaker 2:07:17 I'm like, "What the fuck?"

David Senra 2:07:20 I'm gonna... Last thing, what did you think of the production value today? You happy?

Speaker 2:07:23 I thought it was good. When you, when you finally get going... I mean, the, the wood paneling is just not really for me. You know? [laughing] I'm not like... Tried, 'cause I had wood paneling growing up, you know what I mean? Everything was not real.

David Senra 2:07:36 Well, we got you the tea. I sent that clip to the team. I was like, "Jimmy's coming. We're not gonna disappoint him. We have the air going-

Speaker 2:07:41 It's a very, it's a very nice ti- it's a very nice place. It's perfect.

David Senra 2:07:44 I absolutely love you. I tell you this all the time. Uh, I- you're one of the people I most admire-

Speaker 2:07:48 This was fun!

David Senra 2:07:49 ... Well, you know, I wanna most be like, thank you so much for taking the time, dude.

Speaker 2:07:51 This was fun.

David Senra 2:07:52 It was so great. Thanks, man.

Speaker 2:07:52 Hey, look, you know-

David Senra 2:07:53 Oh, don't leave me hanging. Don't leave me hanging, Jimmy. Come on. [laughing]

Speaker 2:07:55 Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see that. I was looking for my microphone.

David Senra 2:07:58 No, you're good. Thanks, man. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.