Julian Dorey Podcast - #66 - M11SON: Record Labels & Music Suits; Taylor Swift & Scooter Braun; When "Things Got Dark"; Lil Durk's Process

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

M11SON ("Mason") is a recording studio executive, sync expert, songwriter, and artist. Currently he is the Co-Owner of Studio Breed, a high-end recording studio in Philadelphia that works/has worked with prominent artists including: Lil Wayne, Post Malone, Lil Uzi Vert, Cordae (formerly known as YBN Cordae), and Lil Durk. Mason also has sync deals with various brands including the PGA Tour, Fox Sports, Comedy Central, EA Sports, and Paramount. In addition, he regularly writes songs for other artists and records his own music (under his stage name, M11SON). Finally, you can see Mason on the HBO MAX Series, “The Hype.” ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Labels and Suits; The Radio Music Business; “Delusional” Artists 24:00 - The Taylor Swift Scooter / Scooter Braun Masters Story; Mason explains the difference between Masters and Publishing; Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney; Taylor Swift’s music writing; Scarlett Johansson “Black Widow” dispute 40:29 - Kanye West and branding in music; Listening to yourself & also listening to criticism; “Analysis & Logistics”; Julian walks Mason through his target marketing approach with the Podcast 1:08:48 - Staying Independent in Music vs. joining a major label; The psychology behind why most people don’t ask for what they want; Features in rap and what artists’ prices say about value 1:26:09 - Mason talks about the creative process in the studio; Billie Eilish and Finneas’ writing process; Mason’s morning ritual; Mason talks about the concept of religion 1:50:04 - Mason tells the story of how he was planning to commit suicide and how he came out of a the dark place he found himself; Self-Care; Energy in creativity; The ridiculousness of society’s expectations 2:20:35 - Mason tells a story about the first time he fell in love with music; Julian tells the story of how Eminem was almost rejected by Interscope; “And’s and Or’s” 2:39:33 - Mason tells a story about Lil Durk’s studio rituals; YBN Cordae’s personality; Julian tells a story about Jim DiOrio & Post Malone ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  ~ Get $100 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover: https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey  ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io  Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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i'm asking the engineer like yo how does he like what and he just goes like this and raises his hand for people to be quiet everyone shuts up scraps his part when he's done everybody goes back to talking same thing over and over again so he just raises his hand raises his hand everyone's quiet raises a hand again everyone can talk again and it's like it's as if you the teacher just walked into the room what's cooking everybody if you are on YouTube right now, please hit that subscribe button, hit that like button on the video, and thank you, as always, for checking out the channel. To everyone who is listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I really appreciate you checking out the show there. If you haven't already, hit that subscribe button on the show's page, and I hope to see you again for some future episodes. Now, if you have not used the link in my description, along with the code TRENDIFIER at checkout

to get $100 off either the 8 Sleep Pod Pro mattress or the 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover, check it out. Every week I talk about the cover because it's what I use. It's about half the price of the mattress and technologically it does all the same things. But if you're somebody who is looking for a new mattress right now, absolutely get the full-blown 8Sleep Pod Pro mattress. It's phenomenal.

It has everything built in. You might as well. Back to the cover, though. The cover comes in queen or king sizes. It goes right on top of your current bed. And what it does is it ties into 8Sleep's proprietary app and then optimizes your sleep schedule around you, measuring things like your body temperature, your REM, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I'm not

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So for one thing, Mason is the co-owner of Studio Breed, which he said Breed Studios. I've heard it both ways. They marketed as Studio Breed. Either way, it's one of the biggest recording studios in Philadelphia. They are right across the hall from the legendary Milk Boy Records, and it's a place where some of the biggest stars on planet Earth come through to record music. So among the people that Mason has worked with in the past over there

are Post Malone, Lil Durk, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Wayne, YBN Cordae. I'm gonna stop there because I'm gonna start forgetting people. So either way, a lot of major people come through there, and this is what Mason does. On top of that though, Mason is also an artist and a phenomenal songwriter himself. This is a pure creative guy, like through and through understands the whole deal. He just happens to be great at business as well. Finally, he's also an expert in syncs, which is a little more complicated and we talk about that a bit today so i'll let him explain that the bottom line is the guy's moving around the music industry if you want to talk to someone who knows what they're talking about with this stuff listen to this guy so this conversation

went absolutely all over this guy tells a story beautifully and when i was finished it was almost like it was like a it was like a high i mean it's when when you have a deep conversation like this that flows and it's it's simple and covers all this different ground and talks about stuff that a lot of us are interested in within pop culture even because obviously there's a lot of music in here. It's a beautiful thing. So I really, really, really appreciate Mason coming in. I'll have some of the links in the description so you can check out some of his stuff. But awesome guy, awesome conversation. Hope you guys enjoy.

That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Trendfire. Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where is the news? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this,

but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. They have relationships already at the radio stations. And with the relationships at the radio stations, they get a certain price. They charge you a certain price, which is tacked on a little bit heavier now i have known and i do know artists that have done independent radio campaigns where they had an investor who was willing who was able to pay each of the radio

supervisors in all like the major cities where they wanted to broadcast and then also another person who's a who's a music manager or something of the sort like a publicist that's well connected at radio to get the proper prices and by proper prices i mean even lower prices than what a major label artist would get and that's that's a lot of handshake stuff because when you're independent handshake is everything uh these relationships are are going to count for way way more than you see right now especially because the dj every single dj that is famous in the us from radio dj was the guy that had the 3am slots yeah you know what i mean that just hustled his way to getting his or her way to get to a better spot. And that's true about everything in the industry. Everything in the music industry is a growth process and a lot of the time it's a long growth process. these music managers and these people that, like publicists and people that basically make money off of their network, their value cannot be understated. And that's basically kind of what

I was saying about the artist services and development, which is, you know, just having those connections, knowing the best photographers, and then getting the best photographer's business enough that you can get a certain price for your clientele or get a certain price for your own work. And those kinds of things come in handy. And with radio supervisors, it's the same thing. Yeah. You're looking at all the people, though. You make the point about they started on the 3 a.m. slot and they grinded their way.

Maybe they're like Charlemagne and they got the huge morning show in new york or you know they're the they're the weeknight dj whatever it is the way that people still have to operate though in that seat is they have to play stuff that people like you know so i could be the best this is the wild part to me like i could be the best artist in the world i could be drake right and let's just say not that he's ever done this but i just shit out a few bad songs and i go to put a lot of money behind them people you know it's drake so like some people might be like okay it sounds okay because it's drake because they know it but there's that part where it's like that's not a banger that's not what they're they just heard two songs on the radio in front of that that were way better by whoever. And so the disconnect here that I'm wondering about is you do still have, and it happens all the time, artists blow up based on something organic, right?

And it's hard to do. Very few people are able to do it, but it happens. And so these people, whether the the more modern day story is they started to get traction on a platform like soundcloud or something like that and then it just got pushed to the mainstream where they were pushing radio djs like fans to play it or you know it got it got moving on social media whatever it is these people are able to actually get there without putting the money behind it what i'm curious about is that even a lot of those people who per se blow up, in order to stay there, your point holds true.

Because now in future music, what are the chances they're going to make a banger like the first one they made that happened to get 300 million streams or whatever it is? Now they have to actually still put money behind their music and now we get to the point where you have these radio djs who are their job is to keep people entertained with good music and they're balancing that with the business as well you understand what i'm saying yeah and i would say more often than not what we're seeing are not people that have these random blow up blow ups what we're seeing is people that put in years and years of trying a bunch of different things and then something blows up and they didn't expect that particular

thing to blow up and then they stick around. Now, mind you, you do have people who blow up off of something and they don't really have talent, but they were talented in that one way. And usually even those people will be able to parlay that into something else um luckily there's so many ways to blow up there's so many ways to catch eyes there's so many things that are seen as talent that could be utilized to gain more and more money and more and more traction and more and more of an audience um i think i think that um it's no different now than it was when the music industry first started and the reason why i say that is because now there's uh there's more opportunities but there's more competition so uh and you know back in the day

they would say the talent rules well first of all how many people never were able to afford to be able to record there's that part then um you know even just the ability to record if you had the money you know one song is costing you crazy crazy amounts of money so you don't even get to get in a constant stream of consciousness. So not only is there more to draw from now, but there's more inspiration-wise, right? There's artists that are all around you. But you can, inside of yourself, be able to hear full ideas by the minutes, which was kind of impossible before. So I feel like the blowing up thing,

yes, you can find like fame or whatever, but it's fleeting if you don't have some kind of talent to back it up. And therefore, like the artists that we know that kind of blew up and it seemed like they blew up overnight, was never overnight. And something was going to catch. If it wasn't now, it was going to be 10 years from now or less.

Rick Ross had a really famous interview recently where he just talked about the 12 years prior to him getting his first deal. And it's just like you never form, you're going to win. That's the key. You have to, there, there's gotta be, over the longterm, there's gotta be something there. You have to see, like when you make some adjustments or try something new and you see, like, even if it's just a little bump, right? And now now there's some people who are like, hey, I'm waiting for the next thing It's it's very incremental, but there's some quote and I can't remember the exact words but it's spot-on and it's something along the lines of My overnight no one saw the ten years before my overnight success story or something like that

Because we say this like someone does blow up overnight and that's not it's rarely ever true you know you know who it's true with it's true with like the cash me outside girl who goes away you know like because she was she blew up for being stupid and so then it's like well that wasn't a talent it was funny for a meme we we go our separate ways whereas even someone like bieber who blew up at 13 or 14 whatever it was that kid was making videos for years like basically from when he could talk you know and he was putting it out there like he was doing all these things when you and i were going to school even outside of music like a logan paul i cite that one all the time this kid was making these unbelievable five to six second vines that

required so much work and creativity while we were all in high school like just screwing around not to say he wasn't having fun too but that was his priority and so then he got there and i i appreciate that you understand the process that it is for for most people because there's nothing worse than seeing people who have a ton of talent stop you know like not you know they're maybe they don't feel it but you know they're close and then they stop and that pains me like you can't believe as somebody who sees it like stopping is not an option i just go you're not built for it that's like the way that i that's the way my outlook is it's just like you're you're you just weren't built to do this and um like with the catch me outside girl she parlayed that she parlayed the hell out of

that she didn't make money she and i mean she made she's still making tons of money she turned 18 on her 18th birthday she made over a million dollars on only fans come on i didn't even know that yes over a million dollars my example is moot on that one well it's like like what i was saying was is that even like a fluke to get to a fluke there's usually something there and most people don't completely drop the ball of it yeah and i'm sure now she's making even more and more money on only fans i don't even know i only know from the headline story of when she turned 18 which was i think a couple months ago um bro look look behind you hold on i just lost it where is it she's got 16.8 million followers oh yeah and she's my example just went out the window no no it's actually it's actually a great

one because we're you know that's kind of what i was getting about about the parlaying into another industry because she did that but she um she also i i like she loves rap music and so when she got the opportunities to become a rapper she was in the studio regularly like you if you at people that followed her on social media saw her in the studio constantly um there's been a lot of different examples that of people who like popped in the music industry and then some of them like really drove themselves to just get better like a little baby for example little baby was just a drug dealer that was around a bunch of rappers and music people that were like yo you should rap um and it was more like the thing that they saw in him was the star power first right which would be the same thing with her the star

power first all right people are attracted to you That might not be a talent if undeveloped, but it's a talent just as much as a kid that can throw faster than everybody else, right? If you can throw a ball faster than everyone else, you might not have the accuracy, but if you know that you have that arm strength and you find it out, you can hone those skills into being a major league pitcher. And it doesn't matter if you were the kid that found out you had the better arm when you were a junior in high school, or if you're the kid that found out when you were a kindergartner. Um, you found out, you cultivated it, you fed that... beast that you had inside of you to make it grow bigger

and work for you. Um, and it's a beautiful thing. And now Lil Baby is arguably the biggest rapper in the industry right now and wasn't he i i have to look into like the full come up of his some more but wasn't he making like a fuck ton of songs for i don't want to say how long but for some years there and then he had one of the albums kind of catch and then boom um i think the minute that he moved into the rap world right he was he was he was straddling the streets and rapping and famously um famously he was paid to not do both and then he just kept making music but he never stopped making music he never ever

stopped making music and and never ever stopped making music. Just for people out there, can you explain that he was paid to not do both? He was paid by people who had interest in him being a rapper. They paid him to not sell drugs. They paid him to not sell drugs because they were like, yo, there's legal ways that you can make more money than this. It's a little bit longer term of a game.

Let's show you this. That's awesome. And that's what... And those stories are kind of like everywhere. Who were those people who did that? Was that a label? Quality Control is like who he's with now, the people around him. But this young thug is probably the most famous person who has those relationships um you know he has a similar relationship with gunna who's like

another big rapper that and but basically when it comes to talent or skills there's so many different ways man there's there's a lot of different ways and going back to you know full circle to the major label thing. It's like so many, like sometimes it's right. Just take the bag. Sometimes it's right. Take the bag and parlay that. If you, if you think that getting signed to a major label is going to be the worst thing for you, but you don't have anybody on your team let's say you're somebody that just i've been in my room

the whole time making my music posting my stuff on tiktok and it just blew up on its own you need a team and what if they're saying what's the amount of money yeah what's the amount of money that they're offering what kind of marketing are they what you there's not one way to do anything in the music industry anymore not at all it's not even close and it's not one way to do anything in the music industry anymore not at all it's not even close and it's not that way for the suits and it's not that way for the artists i think it's a sustainability thing too i i think your point's well taken in that if you really want it like if you're built for it as you said i like how you put that you can get to that point and it's going to take a while to do that.

But there does come a point where it's like, okay, this is not this process I have right here. Like I could even relate it to what I'm doing here. If I was three years from now doing all the things I'm doing for this on like a detailed basis every day, we got a problem. Right. Right. I can do – I can handle this for three years. That was my thing. Now that I'm in the midst of it i feel pretty good about that but like if this were five years

big issue same thing in music because every i mean every little detail matters to what you do i mean you can have you can get the smallest thing wrong on on your distribution on a drop and like you're done you know what i mean like the whole thing's a waste so i do think it's it's this simultaneous world we have where the ability to create in anything is far more at your fingertips than it ever has been so the excuses to not start aren't there but the overhead of what it takes to get to that next level once you're actually staring at it and have put in the work to be there is also among the highest it's ever been because you've created this decentralized world where you don't necessarily need the middleman like – and I'm talking about labels and stuff like that for the start of the process. But you still need them to be able to use the power of the dollar behind that to be able to get the attention for people who are going to fuck with the product. I think a lot of that has to do with delusion.

With what? Delusion. We all have to be a little bit delusional to try and have success in these pockets, or at least that's a way, society has always driven us, right? Which is like, if you were a person that thought that you could have a career in show business of any kind, you were considered a dreamer of sorts. And you still are. And I think that the people that have success are just not as delusional they have a piece of something in them that grounds them a little bit that adds to their ability to move forward because some people have no measurement of like you they would look back on the past three years and they would some people would never even

think about where was i three years ago where am i now and i've seen people who don't look at it on either side who are like i they hit the gas and they never look back and that's why would i look back and their success is just obvious to everyone else but they don't even think about it and i think it has a lot to do with you know just creative people and those suits that we were talking about are they're the other thing they're going oh oh wait no no no no like don't get too close to that cliff and they're like yeah but i'm a cliff diver you know what i mean and and so that they need that person who's yeah you're a cliff diver but there's rocks on this side just move a little bit to the left um that's it by the way just to i'm sorry to cut you off for a second but i want to make sure we don't miss that that's an important

point too because it's like we do talk about it like the dreaded suits all the time and there's a lot of bullshit there no doubt but when you have some of the right people there who balance with a little bit of pragmatism and actually have your best interest in mind that can help big time especially with like you know creative minded people it's amazing like some some of the people that i would consider suits are like some of the best and most important people in the music industry in my opinion and their art form is their ability to see how far that jump is and to know how good is this diver and you know what i mean how deep is that water and they're gonna analyze it so well that even the most talented and most experienced jumper might go well what's your opinion on that and even nine times out of ten they might not even

need it but they they're like i don't want to miss that temp time because it's life or death and um i i think that honesty is probably the the trouble with the suits most of them you know what i mean it's uh and then also a lot of people who are parlaying their fast talkingness into the industry so like their their real skill is manipulation and then they get in the industry and when your work when all you're working is manipulation if that person's manipulating for you eventually they're going to run out of people to manipulate it's going to be you if they haven't been if it hasn't been you the whole time um but that's in any industry you know what i mean i i was having a conversation uh the other day where it was just we were just

talking about the music industry just having a little bit more opportunity for people to get taking taken advantage of but like only the people at a company that are like in accounting are going to be able to steal in the accounting department. But if you open that up all the way to the mailroom, somebody's going to steal. And there's probably somebody in the accounting office that's stealing that just didn't get caught yet already. So it's just more of a bunch of independent entities mingling together um and therefore like less protection i think a lot of people when they're especially like once they're blowing up that's where the carelessness with that can come in because once it's once once you're getting fed and everything you're like okay well you know

maybe i had nothing before this i was a starving artist quote unquote now i'm not you know what it'll take care of itself and it's tough because that's how some of these deals happen like i think there was the one and i don't know enough about this to really fill it in so if you don't no problem but there was the one with taylor swift where she signed away i think some of her rights to music that she owns such that it was then be it was it was able to be sold to scooter braun who bought it who doesn't like her and she doesn't like him and yet you now you have one of the five biggest music stars on planet earth at this point who based on some deal that she signed I don't know when she was 20 whatever. Now is in this war of words and also war of ownership over her own art with someone who, frankly, fairly, based on what she did, went out and bought it. You know, and you hate to see that because then it's like the artist doesn't even get control of what they painted.

And that's never good. Right. And there's technology, you know know blockchain technology and stuff that's coming to start to protect that you know um but can you fill us in on that well you know obviously like i know uh i guess for people that don't know we met through dill who's like you know the bitcoin nft guy but basically crypto dude right the guy the the and the basis behind um blockchain technology in general is just keeping a filing system and a filtering system that goes back to the creator always so your penny might keep getting cut down but it's always coming to you

sure um when it comes to the Taylor Swift situation, and probably some of what you wanted to get into, is about how owning a song works. And there's basically two sides of a song. There's a master side, and there's a publishing side. And the way that I would explain the mastering side is, that's the ownership part of it that's the i get to decide what gets done with this okay um and that's what she didn't have

because she was a major label artist um and she was young too right and very young uh you know people say i don't know if you know about michael jackson and the beatles same thing happened i'm blank i've heard that before i'm blanking though what was notoriously michael jackson bought the beatles catalog when uh and asked um him if and asked paul mccartney if he owned it and while paul mccartney was trying to figure out like work out getting ownership of it back he kind of like bought it out from under and now this i this is the most the most i know about this is watching paul mccartney videos on youtube where he's explaining what happened on like i think jay leno and like a couple other interviews or whatever where he kind of explains what's what happens there and um that's some cutthroat it's it's tough man it's like uh it's part of me goes

it's the nature of the beast part of me goes it's not fair um and it's so hard to say what you what you can do like one of the most common things that people say in the music industry is that everybody gets screwed here you're lucky if you get to pick which way and you're lucky if you get to pick how many times um and so it's like one of those it's one of those things where she has she's still taylor swift um and obviously there's some utopian world where this didn't happen and some people just got paid. But who are you going to tell to take the pay cut? What do you mean by that with hers? Because are you getting at the fact that somebody had to pay to get that in the first place?

So therefore it is a free market type? I mean, from the beginning of it, somebody had to pay to get that in the first place so therefore it is a free market i mean from the beginning of it somebody had to pay to just make it just somebody was paying for her studio time somebody was paying for now the what i didn't know about taylor swift for the longest time which i was really shocked that i didn't know this is that she writes almost all of her own songs or she writes writes them with the producers i think is the only time that she writes them it's like mariah carey's like an artist that's like that does the same thing cooks every buys the ingredients right yeah writes everything and i mean taylor's an extremely extremely talented writer like as somebody who loves writing like loves writing she's so so good at that um and so people like to hate on her because it's easy to

hate on somebody who's the superstar you know pop star queen but she's she's incredible dude she she pumps out and i i know she's got the full machine behind her now as you were alluding to earlier but like her music's great and she does it over and over and over again and to your point her writing is phenomenal just i mean go read it like if you can't if you can't tell that that's great writing i can't i can't help you read it it reads just beautifully yeah i've and i've done that uh fairly recently because i was just i've i'm actually pretty regularly like on top of just like what's an artist i need to know more about and so you know i kind of just dove into and i'm just

reading her lyrics man she just blows me away it's just hard to it's just hard to decide where you know what i mean we see it in sports too it's just like okay like these athletes are getting huge huge paychecks but they're getting way way less than owners but the owners are facilitating like it's the system already and i'd almost i almost lean towards so what man like you're too swift now like you're either gonna eventually have to be able to buy back your own catalog or you're gonna make a new catalog that isn't owned and be like even the beatles you know what i mean like if the the Beatles went through it, how much further do you want to go back to realize

that that's the way that this thing works? It's a trade-off that I think if you ask an artist day one, you're going to have to do that to do this. Where do I sign? You know, that's probably what they say. It's the hindsight 2020 of once you're there. And I'm not even saying like taking it for hindsight 2020 of once you're there and i'm not even saying like taking it for granted but once you're there of course you want it i think it's

just difficult to know that just like when you were a kid and sat down and i don't know drew a fucking picture or something like that the same part of your brain created this thing that you made and yes you had a lot of help doing it as far as resources and things like that. But the writing, the music itself, the way you performed it, you did all that. That's yours. And the idea that like you'd have to question if – and this is not a real example, but I'm just putting the image on it. You'd have to question whether or not you could bump it at like a party that you sold tickets to whether or not you're allowed to do that i think that's crazy in in something in art you understand like in an artist's head that's got to

be like a crazy thing i think it's dumb and the reason why i think it's dumb is because there's no examples of somebody who took indie all the way to the taylor swift level there isn't because and there's a reason for that is because like you need a ton of money to be that big oh i see what you're saying you know what i mean you're there's no artists out there that went from nothing and stayed independent the entire now mind you i do believe that there are artists that are that are eventually going to get there which is because we're moving in that direction more and more, right? Streaming was the first level of elimination of gatekeepers, right? And then the second level is, well, I guess even before streaming, it's just social media and the internet in general right because the main thing is is that like think about it

before the internet and before social media to get a coca-cola sponsorship would be everything right and now you can just like message somebody from coca-cola and like look at this commercial i did for you or you know i mean or look look at this show that i played wearing a coca-cola shirt the whole time and you might get a million dollars from it um and so and the big companies had no incentive to make sure that they only worked with this label for this thing because the labels were charging them out the ass and then you you aren't giving that now they just now it's just a streamline now they're directly going to to the artists and all those people that have to get paid along the way

don't gotta get paid anymore so it's just there's nothing there's nothing holding um large portions of the money from going directly to the artist so streaming is one of those ways but branding and marketing is the next highest what was the because i think i got you off it for a second i just want to make sure we don't miss it you were explaining the difference between mastering and publishing and you were saying mastering is like the process and like what you have to do to make it but then publishing i think we stopped there the masters masters is the is the ownership of the song. And publishing, think about publishing as like the use. Can you give an example on that?

Right. I always get confused with this. Yeah, no problem. So if a company buys your song, right? And let's say me and you made a song. I own 50% of the masters and 50% of the publishing. You own 50% of the masters and 50% of the publishing. You own 50% of the masters and 50% of the publishing. Proceeds I'd get from those respective things.

Right. If they bought 49% of the masters, you and I could veto any decision. Right? And let's say they take, they say, we want to make a deal with Cocaca-cola and put your song in a coca-cola commercial we can both say we own 50 51 we drink pepsi sorry no can't take that money um and on top of that when coca-cola buys they're gonna pay a bunch of money up front to use a song. As that song is getting played around the world, there's money that's getting collected per play, per time that somebody's watching the commercials or so. And usually your deal is going to work out on upfront money and backend money.

The publishing side is only going to see the backend. The mastering side is going to see the upfront. Okay, this is where I get confused to i want to stay with you here so so they say to eat to look at uh every song as 200 rather than 100 okay so 100 on the master side 100 on the publishing side and then um but basically the like if i we if we sold the masters to that song right which is a very major label artist, a lot of the times the masters are owned by the label, and then you own a large portion of the publishing.

Now, one thing that we can get into, remind me to get into this in some kind of way, is that the music industry for a long time, I would say for seven years or so, maybe even before that, falsely started putting a lot of weight on the publishing side everything was publishing publishing publishing publishing publishing and hid to try to devalue the masters and i'm still i'm still a little confused here okay um i guess you ask the difference i'm i that line has always been blurred for me. It's one of those things like, is it up or is it down? I can't tell if I'm like looking sideways.

Okay. So I guess the best way to describe it, because like, how do you want to know? Do you want to understand it fundamentally? Yeah. Fundamentally. So like you were just saying, the example you just gave of someone buys in 49% of the masters, let's say it's the company Coca-Cola. Right.

If they then have an opportunity to use the song to pump something and you want to drink Pepsi, just make sure I'm repeating this. Oh, no, no. So I wasn't saying Coca-Cola owns it. I was saying a company, like a label owned it. Okay. And they own 49%. We could join forces together and say we drink Pepsi. We don't want to take the million dollars that Coke was offering the label.

Got it. Right. If they own 51%, they can do it. Yeah.i we don't want to take the million dollars that coke was offering the label got it right if they own 51 they can do it yeah and we don't have a choice but now let's say the master side that's the master side but now let's say let's just to make the numbers easier let's say it was 60 40 right so the deal that we signed for this particular song 60 40 on the masters and we keep 100 of the publishing right so we get 40 i get 20 you get 20 and they get 60 okay they can now go to coca-cola and get that million dollar deal right they got the right to make the deal with coca-cola we then still get paid 40 off of the upfront money and 100 of the back end because we own a hundred percent of the publishing and what's the back end so they made that's the per play per ad and all that kind of stuff money whatever whatever deal that they are going to make that deal is going to

include both upfront and back end money oh okay so when they say we're giving you let's use let me think it's like movie sales really you know what i mean it actually kind of yeah so like as an actor like all right you know that what happened recently with scarlett johansson right she had like a bonus involved fill people in on the scarlet okay so scarlett johansson signed it signed a deal to do the black widow movie and in the deal that she got a bonus if they hit a certain level of movie ticket sales um and then they offered it through streaming sites and where they were able to make money as if it was tickets but she they didn't count as ticket sales so she didn't get her bonus um and what ends up happening so basically they cheated her base but they own the masters yeah right and

she don't right and now she owned the publishing and now her argument is well i some of that money is publishing money that's not master's money so when she owned the publishing that's like per stream in that case in a way yes okay so back to the song example and then maybe we'll even circle back around to that because i like that i like the parallel there but back to the song example, and then maybe we'll even circle back around to that because I like that. I like the parallel there. But back to the song example, if I have – if I'm selling Fairtrade from CLB right here for a Coke commercial, and I sell the rights to it to be used for a million dollars, that's the master side and so they pay us a million dollars up front and you're saying the back end is every time that commercial plays let's say that that commercial is just on youtube we'll make it simple and it plays on youtube 10 million times for every single one of those streams there's a set rate that is paid to the artist based on the agreement that is publishing money yes got it wow okay that's wild how complicated it is yeah i mean i think it's a little outdated but um

it's a it's it's a movement towards how the industry was set up from the get-go um and there's a difference between like you usage you know what i mean like how do you measure how do you measure how someone should get paid for usage it's hard you know like that's that's an of an intellectual property it's like i don't know i don't have a replacement option and and you know to be honest i'm not sure how much i understand of it you know what i mean it's like uh you know you just read there's a book called uh was all you need to know about the music business it's it i think that's what it's called all you need to know about the music business and they put it like every two years this guy puts out a version

of this book um so he updates it all the time he updates it constantly and um you know there's drastic changes uh you know what i mean that happened in the industry on a regular basis where you know you you gotta stay on top of it to stay in tune while you're trying to build your business, while you're trying to build your brand, while you're trying to do whatever. And it's like, you know, it's not easy. Well, the biggest change that happened, I think, maybe of all time in the industry, but correct me if I'm wrong there, is the move that happened from the 2000s into the 2010s especially where we went to streaming so i had kevin gallagher in here like a month and a half ago something like that and he was talking about in the context of a broader conversation he made this awesome point that i had never really thought of it this way but he said when 50 cent blew up in 2003 for the first time with get rich or die trying

and then followed it up in 05 with the next album and he was the biggest thing in the world that was like the peak of the music industry of like the old school music industry because it was right when things were starting to move to iTunes with buying music on there like buying an album 99 cents a song whatever but people were still buying music and it was also right when there was some more mainstream adoption of services like limewire which you know I remember when I was like a little kid of course in like oh 506 going on there like what you mean I can download a file a a song? This is wild. And so music had to start realizing that because it's a digital product, the internet's a beast, man.

They're going to get a hold of it. You can't just stop it from happening. You may be able to stop platforms from allowing it to be shared, which they obviously do all the time, to be able to use it to make money that's not coming back to you. But for people to just get files, you can't stop it. And and so they move to this model and then a company like Spotify was born and then obviously things like Apple Music where they even went away from you know what it's not even iTunes anymore where you got to buy an album or buy 99 cents

a song we know people are already gonna do that instead you're gonna pay a monthly subscription model and come in here and listen to music. But what that does is it creates a set rate, right? So if I'm Post Malone and my songs are, and this doesn't happen, but let's say my songs are responsible for 60% of the streams on Spotify, I'm probably not going to make anywhere near the money off that, that I would if we were still in a model where that were album sales instead. And so you saw a lot of artists here have to pivot. And one of the things that I think they've done a really good, like artists as a whole have done a really good job with to supplement income is that the beauty of the

streaming era is that it came in with the internet 2.0 era. And so now all these people who were reliant completely, completely on the label marketing and the label distribution for all those years, now at the very least, they had the ability, even if they needed the help of that, to build their individual profile online on Instagram and stuff like that and get millions of followers if they're pretty big and now have those people who are your people who fuck with you to appeal to directly and therefore make money off things that hopefully make sense for you and products you actually use. So they created overnight also a new stream of revenue there to supplement it but as far as like the move that went there i'm always

confused like a i know it's you're paid a certain amount per stream and everything but what constitutes like an album sale where how they measure that like against historical metrics and what is like the big like how bad is this for artists on a monetary basis and is it getting worse i think it's a 1000 i think it's 1000 streams equals a download i'm not sure um i'm not sure uh because i don't even i'm not i don't like even hold on to that anymore i also don't hold my breath waiting for streaming money because uh it just doesn't equate um and i like you know i had projects in the downloading era where like you could watch the downloads and they did actually make a ton of money um it's it's just it's exactly what you said and kind of going back

to what i was saying about the industry being the same even though it's so different it's just like every with every obstacle comes another opportunity um and the price markup for a cd versus the price markup for a t-shirt is relatively the same except uh if you're the way that fashion and artistry have combined now people are buying 350 pairs of sneakers all the time and um and if you're selling you know a million pairs of sneakers with that kind of who cares about Who cares about the album money? But you also aren't selling it without that.

You know what I mean? Like Kanye's never selling the Yeezy brand without his talent. It was just about parlaying that talent into something else. And that's a talent in itself. And the days where artists don't do that,

it's over. If you're not even thinking about, because let's say you've put in years to become really, really talented in one facet of the music industry. If you're not already after, I prefer people to become a master at one thing first. Because if you're not a master at something, it's hard to get in rooms, rooms right it's hard to get in rooms when you're like the okay rapper who like who wants to get their everybody knows an okay rapper like why would they put you in that room or you're the okay producer you know what i mean but if you're the guy that's like an okay producer but you're insane at guitar like when i need a guitarist i'm gonna going to be like, yo, come in here. Or I know really, really good producers who made their first big record off of just playing guitar.

And that's because nobody even wanted to let the door open for a really good producer, because they are a really good producer, and they don't want to give that opportunity. But they can't really play guitar that well, so do that. So become a master at something first but get your place together start studying something else or where you're going to parlay this um because well for one that's how you grow and for two we don't know what the next innovation in music is going to be that might eliminate the directions that you're going in that That's key. Being ready, like keeping yourself relevant. And there's a lot to pick off the bone here. And there's been a lot all day. I'm like trying to remember some things and we're going

to miss some stuff that I'm sure I'm curious about. But you look at the Kanye example, to me, obviously, I'm a big fan of his music music but he's been so far ahead of the game in the sense that he hasn't even like leveraged i mean his twitter is interesting but he hasn't even leveraged like social media to the maximum extent by any stretch of the imagination what he's leveraged is the fact that people are – I mean they'll even – some people will cult follow his music. And he recognized as the calendar was turning here and Web 2.0 was coming in that culture was running everything. There was a line he had I think in his first interview with The Breakfast Club back in 2013. It was hysterical where Charlamagne was calling

him out for saying he was more important than Obama or something and he goes no one gives a shit what what Obama's wearing or whatever he's like they care what Kim and I are wearing and they were arguing that like well they care about which Michelle's wearing but the point was taken you know if they're if they're commenting on that they're commenting on her Vera Wang dress or something like something really high-scale with with kanye it could be something as simple as you know a basic clog or something like that you know it's really funny too because um crock i'm sorry that one nah i wouldn't be surprised if he had a clock like i wouldn't be surprised if kanye just came out with a wooden clog. What did they say about Obama, right?

One of the greatest things about Obama being president was that kids that were black or just people of color in general had somebody to look to to say, okay, now when I hear you can be president one day i see that in that role right so how much more influential can you be then if they're dressing like kanye because think about it when you're a kid and you're going to debate that might be the first time that you put a suit on or you know what i mean or oh you look like a little president you know like kids are dressing up like little kanye all day and then and then talk about him like not capitalizing off of social media i would say he capitalized off of social media a lot because but and he just took the spousal route well you know what this is like oh i don't need to if i'm married to the social media i may have stated that a little wrong it's not that he hasn't he has i mean you look at no well you know what this is like oh i don't need to if i'm married to the social media

i may have stated that a little wrong it's not that he hasn't he has i mean you look at no no i know exactly what you mean though like i mean if you look at his instagram there's probably two posts there are three posts he's following two people like he's like and with his level of creativity he's he could go i mean he's been through phases definitely on social media where he could maximize it you know know what I mean? Yeah. Like, he could, he has the power to do hundreds of millions on these things, and he doesn't. He's kind of like, and don't get me wrong, your point is absolutely correct. He's also married to a Kardashian.

There's a ton of look-through you get for that, so you're right. But I'm saying, like, he could even maximize that on his own end. It's like he's kind of, he'll stay away from some of those things and the allure of who he is and that he basically runs what the trends of foot fashion are to say nothing of he's also soiree'd or messed around however you want to say it in different facets that weren't even necessarily like always tied to business models just straight fashion statements he would make with his own clothes that then he drove it downstream to culture over the years and it just happened to be in line with the fact he was making all these albums over the years as well it's like it's almost like the timeline is tied to the music he was making at the time

because he's changed it so much as well right he out jordan jordan in like a quarter of the time yes and said it on a song he single-handedly brought adidas past nike like single-handedly like i don't care what anyone says he left nike went to adidas and all of a sudden everyone's wearing adidas again which is great i like both companies personally um but yeah i mean his level of create and he but it's it's knowledge it's it's him he he had these plays in his head way ahead of time yes um because he was prepared to do do more and he was prepared to parlay his talent and his abilities into different lanes. He was talking about having a choir in a church for forever ago. And I mean, if you want to think about it, right, listen back to his old beats,

like his old beats was like, were like these soul samples of like these choirs and these groups that were playing music that nobody makes anymore so now i just can't afford to like hire a choir to go everywhere he goes and now the stuff he's hearing in his head he's just like oh yeah yeah track this i do you know what i mean and it's it spins into more money um did you see his rollout for don? Like all the stuff that he was doing? Of course. When you're that guy, when you're on that level of creativity, the world will always be in a place where they got to catch up. What do you think of him?

I always ask that to people. I mean, I think he's a genius i think that he he he it's almost it's really difficult for me to say that he should have a filter right because i am one of those people that very strongly believes in any press is good press true um and i realized that like years ago uh i was at thanksgiving with um my girl's family and her grandmother was talking about kanye west and i was just like if she didn't hate him she would never be like who's what rapper is getting talked beside aside from snoop dogg there's like he's the only one that's like crosses that many generations like literally the only one like it's something that even jay-z doesn't cross there's i know tons of younger kids that are like i don't know who jay-z is like flat out um now mind you he doesn't want to be like you know jay-z jay-z took a different lane

obviously um and he's uh he's the i'm gonna stay mostly out of the limelight until I need to come into the limelight. When I have an album coming, that's when you're going to see me. When I have a big project coming, that's when you're going to see me. I'm going to make my money and stay out of the limelight and do things behind closed doors. And that's what he enjoys. But that's going to cause some kids to not know who you are. Everybody knows who Kanye West is. Everybody knows who Snoop Dogg is.

And that's from like age 70 to age two. Yeah, man. And like you have to have, in order to have that level of attention, you have to have a lot of lovers and a lot of haters. And you have to do things that cause that to happen. And you got to be comfortable with that. Except Snoop, right?

How the hell does Snoop do it? That's fair. How the hell do it that's fair how the hell doesn't have a lot of haters he says some really outrageous shit sometimes too and he like people just sweeping under the rug like and i mean they do with kanye though too let's let's be honest like kanye can get past a news story within a year and sometimes sooner kanye says worse shit he's definitely yeah he definitely takes it he takes he takes it to further extremes um he gets way less of the benefit of the doubt and he's just less likable than snoop as a person like yes talking about like if you're in a room with snoop or you're in a room with kanye snoop's energy is going to be way, way different. Oh, yeah.

He said that too. He said I can be very – he knows – that's one thing Kanye is pretty self-aware about. It's just one of those things. I think it's a part of what makes him him though. You know some people like this. They're just so – Steve Jobs was one of them as well. They're so wired into what they do, they miss on people skills. And Kanye at least knows that and he said before i'm not good like i think he said the reason he went with jay-z when jay-z

and dame broke up was because even though he may have understood dame more he wanted to be with jay-z because jay-z knew how to be likable and he's like i didn't know how to be very likable i i when i'm talking to people i don't try to be a dick on things but sometimes that's just what it is and i'm not trying to be that but that's not how they understand it yeah dude like the people that i know that have known kanye since before fame they said he was i've heard so many stories of just him they're like yeah he was exactly the same way this entire time he just had less eyeballs on him um which i always think about as far as like the makings of uh what people want to label as a

monster because if you know that you're kanye west the whole time and you're gonna do and you're a guy who's planning what you're gonna do next what, what you're going to do next and go and watch me, watch me. Or like, you know, in that famous interview, he's flipping out on Sway. It's a pain. You question yourself in this industry constantly, right? You have to. If you're the one of those people that is a cliff diver, that's also going to check on yourself to see you're checking on yourself and you're saying, can I make this? Can I do this? Can I do that? And then you're going, yeah, yeah, I can. And if somebody that you trust says, no, you can't, you're going to think about it another time and another time and another time. And that weighs on you. It weighs on you to not have the approval of the people that you love. It weighs on you for people to doubt you. It weighs on you for people to not see the

same vision as you. Sometimes when you make art and the person that hears it first what about the person that hears it first just doesn't like the song and it's a hit and you know in your heart so you have you're constantly in this place where you're balancing do i listen to the people around me or do i not listen to the people around me and trust my own taste when you have kanye west level taste musically stylistically in women you better listen to yourself like just listen to yourself most of the time and then when you're right all of those times who's gonna tell you when you're really wrong and how do you know when you're actually wrong god damn man you just hit it you hit that that was beautiful you just nailed that whole thing on the head it is a total constant push and pull and i don't know

that any human being has ever nailed the exact fine line tightrope walk to stay right on the edge like you're supposed to where it's like you hear criticism and know when it's right and when it's just some asshole who doesn't know what they're talking about versus you're also honest with yourself like y'all am i good at this or am i not and it's like even in this it's something i struggle with all the time i i i've never been like a meditation guy so to speak though I should probably do that. But there's a level of like slight meditation I do not on a daily basis, but it happens at least once a week where I kind of sit back and assess some things happening in here. And I really assess my side more than anything because the guests are all different.

It's a conversation in that way but i'll assess what i'm putting out whether it be little bits of marketing pieces or the full podcast or things i did within it or didn't do within it and i'll i'll kind of put it all together in my head and be like okay where are the things and then also like things that were said to me maybe that week that were negative or positive where are the things where it's like all right there's just some people giving me positive reinforcement to do it also there are just some people that are hating to hate also where are my abilities and where do they need to go it's really hard because all the while you're doing this you're also picking out a strategy right and that strategy can adjust

but you are riding a wave based on a vision that frankly and you said this earlier with something and i agreed with it a thousand percent and i want to point it out again right now frankly it's only a vision that you're gonna have because it's your thing right and so it doesn't mean you're gonna get everything right you will get some things wrong but how do you balance that line of staying honest about adjusting when the audience tells you to adjust certain things versus no, no, no, I'm going to go and I'm going to keep giving you something. And like Steve Jobs comes up all the time when this type of topic comes up, because he was a guy that said, fuck you to your face. I'm going to keep going. And that's why I

think Kanye has a lot of comparisons with him because he he was so great that he knew that even if he got one or two things wrong he was gonna get 99 right and they were gonna be like you know this thing like the iphone you never thought you needed it two years later your grandpa has it like he knew that kanye has that same thing now would i vote either of those guys presidents hell no like there's a certain they have that gene where it's like this is where they need to be they need to be creating things right once you start to get to the other side of the world i'm not sure about that but i try to like i try to relate it on my own end to be honest with myself and i just respect the fact that they have guys like that have had the fortitude to know when criticism is bullshit without totally missing the boat on adjusting when there is criticism that makes sense.

You understand what I'm saying? Absolutely. Do you have somebody that you go to that does podcasting that maybe does it on a higher level or has experienced it longer than you or like do you have people in your network that are like either doing what you want to do or have done what you're doing now or anybody that you can relate to on that level not when it comes to podcasting specifically not really i don't know like i used to be subscribed to 137 podcasts when i had time to like listen to podcasts, which I don't anymore. But any of those that I was, like even bigger ones, I haven't really known anyone. There is one guy and he's – to call him a podcaster would be – he's got a big podcast. But to call him that would not be telling the story.

He does a lot of different things. So that is somebody who it's a totally different model, but I'll talk with him from time to time about different market strategies and stuff like that. He knows that shit so well. So yes, I do have that. But when it comes to like a day to day, like the content itself, I don't have it in podcasting, but I have people in my life who, some of whom have had success creating content massively themselves and other things or people who i've known for years like for a very long time over time demonstrated understanding of content and what's good and what's not and so i will go to these people and i'll go to them with some of the most exact shit and then some of the most broad shit. But I find myself doing more of the exact questions now because I've been doing this long enough that like the broad vision, it's formulating.

And I realize like now I've – a year in, I'm almost a year in, like in a day now i'm at a point where i can recognize the things that even if for a while i was adjusting and questioning some stuff and listening to more opinions i can recognize the things where it's like oh nope that's working that has happened i can see it there's numbers to back it and there's there's also faces there's people reaching out to back it. So like, as an example, I sat down, it was a week process. In the six months that I built this podcast, I did a whole bunch of different things, whole bunch of research, whole bunch of just tinkering and figuring things out. But there was one thing I did for a week that I would describe as torturous, where I formulated, it was like 80 questions of what was going to be a demographics chart, and it was – the first five were short answers.

It was like who – what are the – what's the age range of your listener, like the core? Are they more likely to be male or female? Of course I'm a male hosting a podcast, more likely to be male. But then it got down to starting to get into personality, and it started to get to like random questions like what's the last three types of books they read when did they read them how long did it take and why I mean like some crazy shit and I wrote up this I think it was 53 pages worth of answers where I had to get in the heads of other people from other backgrounds and other walks of life who might all have certain traits that tie each other together together and this is why they would

like a podcast like this and then find a way to create the product naturally and do it without thinking about any of that which was interesting and i say that because now when people reach out and i ask them some basic questions about their life or who they are some of them i get to do that with it's really creepy how it matches up with that document. And so when certain people who don't match any of those boxes, whether it be age, personality, likeliness to listen to podcasts, whatever it is, when they're giving me opinions, I tend to not give a fuck what they think because they don't have any fucking idea what they're talking about. So right out in one ear out the other.

Right. That's so funny because what I was going to say was one of the things that Kanye or Steve Jobs has or and people that, you know, are able to parlay their talents is a combination of analysis and logistics and what what you're constantly if you're really analyzing yourself your content and then the people like you and you just said it you know you're filtering through so if somebody it's the same if if somebody hits you and they hit none of those demographics and you're like okay i, I'm still going to listen because you could be the outlier. But I'm assuming that if you don't hit me with some outlier information, I'm going to throw it out, right? And then all 53 of those are vaguely probably sitting in your head and somebody's going to hit 13 of them and somebody's going to hit two of them. But somebody might hit two of them and they're two big ones and being able to quickly on the spot analyze that and and then take value of from the direction or even if you're listening

to a podcast that is like maybe giving you information you're analyzing it or your ears are just kind of perked up and ready to hear it. Now, where logic comes in is like, hey, how much does this apply? Like what I'm analyzing, how much does that apply? And then how much does the overall, that broad view apply to what my end goals are? And how much, and then, so that way when information is coming in if if enough information comes in to change your broad vision and say oh well i thought i was going to do this i'm going to do this now you'll move it and it doesn't mean it doesn't mean anything to you because like you said the numbers prove it so now you're not somebody that's just like wandering

and figuring out like and wandering and like stumbling upon the next direction to go you're not somebody that's just wandering and figuring out, and wandering and stumbling upon the next direction to go. You're somebody who is only kind of going through the proper channels to get to your end goal. And if you're shifting drastically, it's because something that you analyzed told you to do it. Yes. One of my favorite things to tell people in the music industry is walk through whatever doors open because you got some good one-liners i like it there's a lot of

them i have to say well i mean it's luckily like i'm i'm around a lot of people in in the music industry and a lot of people who are on all different kinds of different sides and i've been doing this for a really long time and i made a lot of mistakes um and one of the biggest mistakes is like over analyzing what like walking through some doors sometimes like a lot of stuff in the industry doesn't hurt you so but because of like horror stories and things like especially of horror stories of contracts right which is kind of what i was getting getting at earlier which is like i hate when I'm in a conversation, definitely a public conversation where it seems like, I don't think that we were really shitting on major labels at all. But I try to avoid doing that specifically because I've watched kids turn down $500,000 and it was the worst decision of their lives. And they had no idea. And if I was in a position to go,

hey, don't do that, I would. I would give anything to go back in a time machine and be like, no, don't do that. And do that for myself as well to say, hey, listen, it's a hard, hard road to hold on to your masters it's a hard hard road to do that and maybe this one might might be easier but um at the st since i took the hard road and i'm

and i know i'm going independent right and in your situation you're in a like i can't imagine you not you're seeing so much progress from your independent path that it's like i'm gonna you're gonna ride that out for a little while right and there's ways to create revenue in that independent path now for you and that's the dream too and you're creating you can understand yeah and not just creating it but like everyone's dream is to be able to never have to have the man right right i think the balance that you're giving here that's important is that that doesn't mean that that's going to be your situation based on where you're at your your timeline your ability to i mean let's just call it what it is leverage money to take care of very necessary things you know there's questions that have to happen so like even on my end yeah it'd be great

to keep it rolling and never have to work with somebody but i do look at some of these people who they allow their their podcast to get a rev share and be purchased for three years or something like that and i'm like that's not the worst thing in the world it It's often not. It's often not. But you're in a position now to, instead of walking through the doors, you have enough information to decide which doors to go through. And a lot of the times, to know what's in the room, you just have to peek your head in. You don't have to walk through the door. You have to say, okay, let me see the contract. Let me ask for this. I have two friends recently, and they were both in really similar positions.

One of them already had a job, and he was deciding whether or not he wanted to stay with the company because he felt that he was being undervalued. And we had conversation after conversation of it. And he kept getting overlooked for a position that kept needing to be refilled. And we're having a conversation, and I'm like, well, you know, just stick it out and see what happens until something permanent happens. And he, you know, came to that. He was on his way to that conclusion, but he's talking it over with a friend who can, who he trusts, right? To analyze it, how he would analyze it and just get that second opinion he ends up getting a crazy raise like 50 grand higher than what he thought about thought he was going to get paid for the position by just peeking his head in and saying all right like i'm i'm

there's nothing for me to do sometimes waiting is the best move yeah the best move forward is to wait in the music industry it's like you're not you're never you should never be stagnant but if you're waiting some sometimes you need to wait to analyze sometimes you need to just make music and not put any out sometimes you need to market the hell out of an album for two years because it's that album. The album is just that good that you can market it and keep waiting is, is, is a seriously underrated thing.

And another friend who just, you know, he was looking for new companies and he didn't want to work at this company. So he said, instead of saying, I don't really want to work at this company. Let me see if I can just keep on asking to get rid of all of the things that i didn't like about the company right right i want more money you know what this is this is it's

inconvenient travel wise yeah i'll take take that money but can i have more money and could i can i get rid of the trap and he just kept doing that over and over again until he got the dream job of his at the job that he didn't want because he asked the questions he he he properly analyzed it and didn't make any firm decisions in one way or another that he didn't ever even have to make and i think a lot of the times we're taught otherwise right we i feel like we grow up we're at least i did i grew up really afraid of things that i should not have been afraid of. What do you mean? Even from, like, I think about when you're getting in trouble as a kid, right?

Like, let's say, you know, you have a curfew. I'm coming back in. Coming back in on curfew. You might get a job offer that's, overnight as like as a kid right that if you like talk to your parents and said hey i got this job but it's you know i'd have to be past curfew and your parents might be like well okay fine we'll just change your sleep schedule you don't even see that as an option and then when people get pushed into work opportunities, it's the same exact thing where we have this mom and dad mentality with the companies that we join instead of just like asking logical questions. And why there's so much innovation in business now is because there's tons of people that keep asking those questions.

And the people that we look up to that have the most success, they're the ones that ask those questions. Why? Why does it have to be this way? Why does it have to be this way? And then you just see that there's more options available. And now you can carve your path out more. And the creatives and why there's so many people that are following creatives, because we want to follow our own paths. And when people say, sometimes when people say, I don't want to work a nine-to-five five they mean they don't want anything to do with what nine to five jobs are sometimes the people that don't

want to work a nine to five are like i would much rather have a ten to six yeah yeah you know what wow i've never heard that one before but that's awesome it's there's a world difference between the two and you never and it could be either one it's it is you're pointing out perspective on all of it so god that mom and dad thing was perfect because I think a lot of us and I'll even speak for myself here one of my struggles I'm getting better at it I think but I got a long way to go is obviously I love asking questions i do that on everything but when it comes to myself i'm very very self-conscious about asking people for what

could be appearing to me as like a favor or something like that i'm very very not about the fact that there are people who want to help there are people who are like they're waiting for you to ask them like on this thing or whatever. And I'm pretty good at it when it comes to just like talking over something, like asking someone to check out content. I'm pretty good at that. When it comes to business or it comes to peeking into those doors, as you put it, I think a lot of people are just – they don't even think of that as a possibility. I definitely haven't in the past. But the way you just put it there, like if you just kind of keep asking and you do it in an honest way, not a dick, not like throwing your balls on the table to show your power.

Just like, well, I understand what you're saying. I was thinking something more like this. I think I'd be really effective if we did that. Now you're creating an incentive for them to want to do it because like to use the job example you were giving when people are trying to hire you they want you there's something that you do in value that they want if someone comes to you and says i want you to write six songs on my next album it's because they've probably worked with you before or seen your work and they're like yo this guy's flames i want to work with him so now you're in a position to be like, well, I have, let's say you have three other things booked right now. I would really need to do this eight weeks from now. Well, they already wanted

you. And now they're going to be like, all right, well, I wanted to get my album out sooner on a, on a quicker timeline. So I really wanted to start writing in four weeks. Is that possible? No, not really. Cause my schedule is filled, but I love what you're doing. I want to work with you. Okay, boom, eight weeks because they came to you. And then the other side of it is like if you go in to ask for the raise or something like that, you know if you have the evidence behind you. You know if like you've been mailing it in and leaving it 430 instead of five if it's a nine to five or something like that. Or you know if if like hey my metrics speak my numbers speak for themselves i know i know what i'm giving they can't lose that and it's

by the way it's not being greedy it's fair it's a it's a common thing that i talk about with uh with my female friends about and job opportunities because um and i want to i want to be clear right i don't it's not a it's not a thing of you it's your fault for not asking for the raise it's more a thing of everyone being aware of the mentalities the societal mentalities that are pushed upon us right and so um there's constant inferiority complexes that will cause you to not ask for something. And that's what we're talking about undoing. You know what I mean? And there's a lot of those lines. It's a conversation I have all the time where I'll have a girlfriend that I'm just like, yeah, but like, you should be getting paid more. Or like, my girl was in a job position

where every single guy in her field was, or in her position, was getting paid more than her. And then when it came time to say, yeah, this isn't fair, I'm doing the same job or I'm doing a better job, there's this hesitation. And that's the mom-dad thing. And I think we all have them in all different kinds of

ways that we and we really we have to find ways to get past i well you were talking about as far as like somebody reaching out to you for a job it's because you have value right but sometimes you just have to demonstrate your value in other ways and sometimes you have to demonstrate your value period right you're coming sometimes you're to demonstrate your value, period, right? Sometimes you're in situations where this person doesn't know my value. That's sales, right? Sales is like when the person doesn't know your value at all and you're showing them value anyway, right? You're bringing, you're showing, you might sometimes you're even showing them their need and your way to fulfill that need. Like my worst thing is that wanting that willingness and want to

to help always even if i'm undervalued in the situation um and that's it it's a really hard thing it's a really hard thing to do um and i know that i don't do it right i know that there's tons of mistakes that I've made in music, in business, in music business, in life in general based around that. And I know a lot of the reasons behind that are like stuff that's just so deep in me

that I'm going to be working my whole life to push that down. You know what I mean? And hopefully not go the other way and hopefully not be like, well, I don't want to help anyone now because who, you know what i mean and hopefully not go the other way and hopefully not be like well i don't want to help anyone now because who you know what i mean and that's and i think that going back to kanye i think he's doing a damn good job at not doing that after all the no's that people gave him and saying you can't do this um and in the music industry man that's the hardest

hardest part is just hearing the no's and getting back up again. But you got to be built for it. There was a list I saw. I won't say how I saw this, but I got a hold of a, through somebody, it was basically a spreadsheet. And I'd imagine it wasn't though. It's definitely not the only document of its kind, but it's the kind of like insider

industry spreadsheet and it was think of every rapper that has had any attention whatsoever over the last 15 years they were there were i think there were there might have been thousands on there i forget but every rapper imaginable listed on this spreadsheet this is like two years ago it had their who they were obviously so you could see some big names as you went along smaller names and then also what their ballpark probably not exact on all of them there's always a little business but what their ballpark fee was for a feature so like if you wanted them on your song here's what you got to pay and what blew me away is some guys who haven't had any attention for or haven't made like great albums in a long time were charging above what guys making great music right now are.

And then you'd go and I'd look through and I'd see these motherfuckers are doing features, right? And so obviously they're getting paid this. And I wouldn't recommend stop – not that they need to because they were all wealthy guys. But I wouldn't recommend like stopping creating and then just expecting the market to get to you or still come to you with the same value. But it does go to show you that as long as you create some form of scarcity on what you do and have a willingness to say no, people will eventually just continue to want it because you create a a damn that they got to get past and then chances are if you were great you have the ability to create something great for them and so then they end up happy afterwards even if you're not the hot thing right now so there are guys out in the music industry right now who were making music for a long time who maybe aren't and aren't really known but they do the they live off of these features for fun probably for you know they

get paid well they get paid their value so they they get something out of it but like they don't need to do that but they do it and they maintain that level of financial value that comes with it because of the way that i'm guessing here because of the way that they play now are there probably some who lose some opportunities because people look at and go fuck that that would have been a 10 year ago price sure but for every person that looks at it like that there's another person who's like yo like some rapper i grew up listening to that guy i want a moment fuck it 200k let's do it you know what i mean well it depends right that's they're trying to figure out where their value is in the marketplace and when

one thing that we can guarantee though going back to our conversation was there's not a single rapper that's on that list that hasn't done features for less than the price that they had listed. And that's sure. And that's like a huge part of it too, right? Like if, if somebody's telling me that I'm going to put the highest number there, because you're, if you're in the industry, you're going to be around people all the time. You know what I mean? And if somebody's a good music manager, and let's say you rep an up-and-comer, you're going to negotiate. You're going to call and be like, hey, listen, I know that this is what you normally get paid for a feature. This is the budget we have. This is what we put behind here.

Or I got you. You want $25,000 for this feature, right? We're going to put up 15. Do you mind drinking this alcohol in the video? Cause they're going to pay you 10. There's a million different ways to put it together and it goes back and it's, and it's, how do you think about it? And so if you're strong minded about your goals and you're like, all right, this is my main goal. I want to be, you know, I want to have a number one billboard record. I want my name credited as a number one billboard record.

I don't care if I'm the artist, or maybe you do care if you're an artist, whatever it is. But for the sake of the conversation, I want to be involved in a number one billboard record. There's so many different ways to get there. You could be the guy who learns how to play guitar the best and plays guitar for everybody in the industry, like Mike Dean or something like that. Or you could be the producer, you could be the songwriter, you could be the artist, and you could find yourself in camps of people that write number one hits, you know what I mean? Or you could study under one songwriter that's really good, like a Pooh Bear or something like that.

There's so many different avenues to get there. And if you're headstrong in that one goal, and that's the thing that you want to accomplish, then you're willing to just kind of move and find your way there and trust in yourself that you're going to be able to, from any position, eventually get yourself there. Mike Dean's a phenomenal example to bring up though too because like now he's especially now after the whole donda thing now way more people know of him which is wild to me that they didn't before but

you know he's been massively successful behind the scenes regardless of publicity for years now obviously like he's the guy but mike bean i mean he he was producing pock back in the day you know he and and before that he was producing guys you've never heard of right he worked to and this is something you said way earlier too and it's just another way to tie it in he worked up year over year year over year even it adjusted his sound left and right it Basically, in my opinion, is definitely not all the way, but is a big piece of being responsible for the shift in like genres of rap themselves. I mean, you look at what that guy's done to create sounds and then support artists who I won't even, when I first described them, I don't describe them as rappers.

I'm talking about like a Kanye or Travis Scott. They curate a sound. It is a thing. It is like that comes on. You don't even hear their voice yet. You know, like, yo, that's a yay or yo, that's a Travis Scott, right? Well, who's in the middle of guys like that?

Mike fucking D. Right. And it's Rick Rubin. Yes. There's a lot of those. Rick Rubin is like a god. He's a god. Yeah. There's a lot of those things Rick Rubin is like a god. He's a god. Yeah.

There's a lot of those things. And then there's guys like Timbaland who's just like, he's just going to bring you, he's going to enhance whatever it is that you got. And he's going to bring his own thing that time. And he's going to evolve through the eras. I mean, there's just, yeah, there's just like forces, man. There's these musical forces that are just no joke that really help people to figure out when they're going to open and close those doors. It's a beautiful thing, man. It's awesome.

Well, running a label, not a label, I'm sorry, running a recording studio, that's another, and I can't believe we haven't really touched on this yet, but that's a whole other thing that I think a lot of people don't think of and i'm i'm used to thinking of it i think correctly now but like for a long time i never thought of it the way it is which is you think about these recording studios and the assumption that the average fan like me until i was exposed to it myself with some projects, the assumption is that like, oh, if you're with a label, it's just the label studio or something. And that is not the case at all.

You have all these companies that run recording studios that are, you know, like yours is among the highest class there is in the country. And then there's some that are all the way down to lower class and lower quality where these labels who have client artists they just they pay for time there and then you also have all the independent artists who and you mentioned this in something earlier they got to pay for time to do it like you want to go in and record at the best place with the best sound quality which is absolutely critical like you have to have the best well you're going to pay a lot an hour and so there's it also creates a pressure on the creativity because you can't just sit there and

and you know all right let's smoke until we think of something no you're on the clock man yeah um although i we have a lot of clients that do just smoke until they think of something something but um yeah actually what what i do is if somebody's working on an album i give them completely i give them off the clock rates so for that exact reason because if you're going to work on an album i don't want you constantly looking at your clock wondering when we're uh you know when we're supposed to be out of here. And I'm telling you, nine times out of 10, it takes less hours. Oh, definitely. It takes less hours than it does for somebody rushing.

Because they're not thinking about it. They're open to creating. And I push people to create on the spot. A lot of the times when we when uh when we bring people on to do projects let's say that it's projects where i'm the executive producer or the writer or both that's awesome by the way that you had like you have the talents too so like you have the studio and then you're in the middle of the process and you got it. You got a tool chest to work there Oh, yeah, absolutely. And then not only that I'd like being the person who's like in charge of putting the producers in in the room and the engineers in the room I

also then am able to micromanage it in that way where Where I'm like, okay, I know this artist, this sound, they have these kinds of skills. They need to be in this kind of mind state. Let me put them with this person. So now it's usually, it's a three person team almost always. So as a producer, writer, I mean, there's a producer engineer there, me as a writer and the artist. And then there's other people that are added to, sometimes it's other producers, sometimes it's other writers. It's just groups. But that balance and creating the mood in the room and creating that belief. I think a lot of the times a lot of artists need that push to know that they can do it.

Yes. Is everything. There's a ton of producers that are in my direct network and I push them all to create on the spot. Like we're going to make beats right now and we're going to write the song right now and we're going to record the song all right now. We're going to do it together. And I like to do it that way because we feed off of each other's energy. And so what seems like an impossible task through inspiration, which is kind of be, in my opinion, at the center of all creativity,

through inspiration, you speed everything up. Yes. You know what I mean? Like, it's, any writer would know that, like, sometimes you hear beats and you're like, like, I'm not really feeling that. Or, oh, I like this, but nothing's coming to me right now. When you're in the room and it's being created at the same time, it's like, I'm not really feeling that. Or, oh, I like this, but nothing's coming to me right now. When you're in the room and it's being created at the same time, it's like these producers are

often like making stuff and they're like watching for your reaction or they're listening for you to go, oh, I like that or whatever as it's being built. And so it's the difference between somebody like bringing you a Lego house and being like, hey, do you like this house? And sometimes you can be like, Oh yeah, well, I like an old Victorian style house. And they might bring you that Lego house and, and, and somebody just building it in front of you with them. And like, sometimes you can come and put some blocks in and other times you'd be like, well, I would like it to be like this. I would like it to be like that. And now you're in every bit of the music no matter what position you play and that level of inspiration opens people up and it allows them to create in ways they never have before and every single person that i've ever created with that way said that this is what i'm doing right now

but they're hesitant because when they don't do it that way they're like it's gonna take so long it's gonna be so it's gonna take me forever i need to come in i get this all the time a writer is going i need to come in with our stuff written already i go okay just don't be attached to it let's see what happens what you do what you can do and after that and most of the time they start out with more and more writing and then they get away from it further and further until they don't need it. And they're like, yeah, it is a different thing being in the room. And a lot of it is the room, the atmosphere, and the people that makes the studio great.

Because you know what I mean? Like Billie Eilish is in a room with her brother making bedroom pop, what I would call the birth of bedroom pop, right? Incredible what they pulled off. Right, what they're able to do. Tons of talent. But they have years and years of love and understanding of each other. And probably the influence of what one listened to while the other one was younger just running around. All of those things.

The conversations that they've had at the dinner table. All of those things come up. They're the ultimate, like, what if we did? Yo, what if we try? the conversations that they've had at the dinner table all of those things come up and um they're the ultimate like what if we did yo what if we try yo what if like i know yo hear me out this is great like that's that's billy eilish's music that she and phineas have have curated right you know the shit they put in there i i really i love how you're talking right now like you're speaking my language it's beautiful it's beautiful shit man it's it's like you it's it's it's it's so awesome to watch that kind of process it's um it for me like it feel it's like church it's like church it's like even are you a religious

guy i am i grew up very religious and now i'm somebody who i pray every day like first thing i do is every day is i pray and meditate and work out those three things are what i do and they come in different orders sometimes i don't know why some days i work work wake up and i just well first thing i do is i turn my coffee bottle very you were pumped up when i had that cooking when you came in yeah man yeah like i you know i asked for a coffee and you give me this this guy and i'm like there we go yeah that's it but um yeah i first thing i do is i turn my coffee pot on i make my coffee and and but then you know i pray and meditate in the mornings and um and i studied religion really strongly like uh kind of throughout my whole life.

But, you know, about like seven years ago, I really, really got into religion. I grew up in a religious household. And now I don't subscribe to any religion wholly. But because I have a Christian background, I just don't complicate it. I don't complicate it by, it by worrying about the verbiage. You know what I mean? Yes. At all. You know what I mean?

I don't feel uncomfortable saying God. Sure. Even if I mean what I mean. When most people say God and they think man in the sky and what more spiritual people might say the universe that connection between us all i just feel comfortable saying god even though my thought process is more universe you have your own relationship with the idea of meaning in a higher power and what you're saying is you don't have you don't tie yourself and it's not to like rip things i respect people people who love religion

it's a big part of their life as long as they're not a radical about it and dragging it on to people with certain ideas that i don't agree with or whatever as long as it's like their thing that gives them peace love that but what you're saying is for you it was more like hey this needs to be my own individual relationship so that i can it's like your creativity i can constantly be open to things i can be open to like well wait a second it might be like that or it might be like this rather than nope this is how it is read that i still at i still end my prayers saying in jesus name right i love who jesus represents i also read the Tao Te Ching, and the Tao Te Ching, which is like Taoism's Bible, basically.

You know what I mean? What is it? 3,000 characters. It's very small, but like pahotan, pahotan reading. And there's no way that you read that. Well, I mean, I can't say there's no way for other people,

but for me, I read that, and I'm like, oh, that's Jesus. Like, this sounds exactly like Jesus to me. I don't know. And it's older than the Bible. I don't believe, like, I believe in Jesus as a representation of somebody that was like really, really close to that thing that connects us all. Somebody that was diving deep.

The same thing I was like, hearing a preacher talk or hearing a monk speak or hearing an opera singer sing, really. They're tapping into something that's unseen or they're tapping into something like that regularly or seeing Steve Jobs have the success he has. He's tapping into this unseen force and following it in a certain kind of way blindly. And some of it is just in a humanitarian way or in a loving way it's like based around love and when it's based around love that's the religious part you know what i mean so a lot of times and what and one of the things i i believe in prayer meditation super heavy i know earlier you said i need to be in in getting into meditation and i've never been you know what i mean like the idea of sitting alone and just chilling with your

thoughts it's I do that but not where it's like the planned it sounds like you have a routine of hey I'm going to shut everything out for 10 minutes or whatever it is in the morning and you have a a system you do I've never really done that I think that's a thing that people don't understand about meditation is it's sometimes it fails it's like everyone's like waiting for like that moment now i will say this one of the things that got me hooked on meditation is i did a guided meditation for the first time on a plane and i was coming back from south by southwest and i'm like tripped i was gonna say how many shrooms were still in your system there were no shrooms in my system at the time i Just as potent as any of the many shroom trips that I've been on was this first time I meditated

I did a guided meditation on YouTube on a plane didn't know what I was doing Just kind of listening to the person and just guiding and then all of a sudden I am in the stars Mmm, and I'm just like whoa and the power of it and it was easy for me to recognize because I had done hallucinogens before okay like this is something special because I'm stone sober and this is like you know it's the end of South by Southwest so I'm like I never even want to see another drink again and that kind of you know and and just found my way there and some sometimes it's that and then other times you're going oh man i wish that truck outside that's delivering because you know i live in like center city center city

and it's like oh man sometimes it's that truck out there man i wish it would stop beeping or oh man what am i gonna where am i eating today what did i forget about the studio but it's the process of trying to calm the mind and eventually getting there that's like a big part of it and then the prayer part that i add is really it's key for me man and i wish that people could get past the what religious religion stands for right now because it's very hard for people to get past the war yes you know what I mean? Not alone. And it's just the hatred that comes from organized religion these days to see how much good is

in it. And one of the things I try to explain to people is every day I am asking God for help in areas right so you know I asked for under understanding and discernment I asked for I say things like help me be slow to anger and quick to love mmm right that was one that like manifests itself in my life the biggest because I had really bad anger issues at one point in my life and like prayer like completely got rid of them you know what i mean they didn't get rid of them of course like i can have a temper from time to time but

it's like no one would really describe me as an angry person anymore um but if you if you imagine okay let's say from an atheist perspective no god if you wake up every day and you're focusing on your the things that you do wrong and want to do better on and you're just asking outside source for help yes even if the outside source doesn't help you're reminding yourself every day so if you say every day god help me to be slow to anger quick to love there might not be a god helping me but every time i get angry, I'm going to be like, I was supposed to be quick to love right there. And then you get quicker and quicker and quicker to love. If you're asking, you know, if I talk about focus and determination, if you're thinking about being more determined every day, and that's how you start your day, when you start to slack off, you're going to

like slap yourself in the face and be like, oh, I got to work a little harder now to do that. At the end of my prayers, I pray for the people. I have a prayer list of people. Now, that's where it gets a little bit weird because my list of people are, it's like all based off intuition. It's all based. What do you mean? Some people are people that I've only met one time. How do you make the list it's all about the

intuition it's off intuition the at the list is mostly family you know what i mean and family friends um so like the closest people to me because at some points i don't know a little point so long ago that i don't even remember when where you know there was just like groups of people that i was like i need to be praying for them on a regular basis and i think a lot of it was from my dad praying for me right um but then there's just like some people where it's like they need prayer and a lot of them are people that need prayer in a moment and i just never stop praying for them and like they i i there's something cool about praying for people that have no idea that you pray for them every day

that you say their name every morning and they have no clue it's wild um it's a good feeling to just put that kind of energy out that's it and that's everything you're talking about is is energy that's what i like about it so much and that's something they don't teach you in college you have to you have to go experience this stuff and i feel like i do feel like sometimes and this is definitely generalizing because it is not always like this but i think people who are massively creative have a better understanding of that than people who aren't i mean i can't really put my finger on why maybe it's the fact that rather than having a list of like things to attack like in business get this shit done make

that deal do whatever which there is creativity in so i don't like when people right say they're you know what i mean like we generalize that and that's not what i'm doing i'm saying like when it's more office job whatever it may be you know you kind of tend to fall into the list of things and that's just how life goes whereas when you're making something from scratch there's it's not just a belief but it's a wave you got a ride that's why i was really listening and enjoying it how you've put all this stuff And then it even got to like your prayer in the morning right there in it and it continued some of the themes you were Setting in in earlier things you were saying but you mentioned Rick Rubin for example who I? Mean he's he's a he's a god he the things that he has been a part of in music every genre

Like he is all about let's feel it right and he has so many amazing quotes but there's one he had a few months ago that was i saw it i was just like that's one of the best things i've ever seen and i'm not one of these people who will like over attach myself to a quote like right but he's got a he's got a ton of whoppers i don't remember them all but i see them like you're talking about the white backgrounds, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Even just that aesthetic alone is just like...

He did one where he said... And I'm paraphrasing because I won't get it word for word, but it was phenomenal. He was like, many times when you're creating something, as you keep going, it's almost as if the universe starts putting things into place so unquestionably that it wants it to happen. And you can't get there unless you create that vibe to be in that zone.

And that same zone you were talking about, the spontaneity with the people who come in that you want to create in Breed Studios. Which, by the way, way not for nothing coming from the fact that obviously you do business but you're a writer by background you're a musician by background you understand what it takes to do that you have an intense appreciation for that the guys who are coming in there no matter who they are unknown known whatever there's a level of understanding and respect that they gotta have for that that they don't get at some other places they don't get that at all these studios that are just you know it's more business mindset and so i appreciate you're doing that but you can't get to that point

that ruben's talking about without understanding the power of energy like the power of even saying stuff to yourself which which I work on all the time. I, you know, one of the things that I do that I think I use for positive a lot, but you got to be careful not going too overboard is I'll shit talk myself. And I'll be like, you're nothing, dude, shut the fuck up and work. And there's an extent to which that's good. But when you then start dragging that into every little thing you're doing and then starting to tell yourself you suck over and over again it limits the joy you can get and create to be able to build something where at the end you're like whoa i don't know what just

happened but that's there and i dangerous dude it's that's a great word it's dangerous it's super dangerous i see it all the time and people um it's very very dangerous thing to to put yourself down it's a dangerous thing to hype yourself up too high without being able to look around and and having that analysis and just being aware of uh i i in i you know to go a little bit even more mystical i genuinely believe that it's not coming from me i believe that when i'm making a song i'm a conduit i'm connecting i'm i always describe it as a plug like i'm plugging into this source and and all And some people don't recognize that they're plugging in, right? So they're just fidgeting with the light that's unplugged. And then other people are just like, oh, yeah, you have to plug it in and switch the light to do it.

And if you know that, you don't have any trouble getting the light to turn on ever i never have trouble getting the light to turn on because i really just tap in uh i believe it was sylvia plath that used to say say that her idea she used to carry around a pencil and when a bubble she said ideas are like bubbles and if it hits you and you don't capture it right then it's going to travel and pop on somebody else and they get the idea and you just want to get it down and it's it's that's so important i really believe and then in that moment but if you have that faith that you're always being moved to your next great creation and like in me like one of the benefits that i think i have that makes me seem so sure is i truly feel a sense of purpose in being an artist i believe that i'm on this earth to create stuff and so everything i do is just to put myself in a better position

to create um but even then it's when you're not creating when you're whenever you're not creating or whenever you're you haven't created something as great as your as you possibly can in a while you're gonna have moments where you're like down on yourself about it yeah but those down roads are a part of it too the being hard on yourself is a part of it the the hurt that you experience is a part of it the loneliness sometimes that you have that's all apart every if you see everything as a part of it the loneliness sometimes that you have that's all apart every if you see everything as a part of your greater purpose then it's okay it's the fine line between what's what's the term i'm looking for not advocating making excuses and that's not what

i'm looking for but that's going to get the job done it's the fine line between making excuses for why when things are going wrong, it's just a part of the process, therefore it's okay, versus recognizing that when things are going wrong, it's a part of the process, but you can use that to make sure that that time stops and you get to a point where it's actually going well you'll get to a valley again but there are people who like as an example people will say i don't regret anything that's ever happened to me because it made me the person i am today certain people can say that and it's fine because they they actually took those experiences and leveraged them and corrected mistakes and understood like okay i did that let's not do that again other people use that as an excuse to just continue to do the same shit moving forward. Right? Another one of those fine lines where when you're creating and you have those lulls and you're getting yourself down into situations where you're not putting out your best stuff or you're not maximizing what you can do even.

If you start then saying like, like hey it's okay because i'm just staying consistent and i'll it'll come yeah but also how much and you said this about something earlier with like assessment and logistics or i'm changing the terms but no that's yeah that was exactly it no analysis and logistics yes exactly so like well how much are you doing that you know like are you just sitting here waiting for the world to hit you or are you like oh there's a lot of that in the music industry right are there people who are saying hey you know i'm not i know failure is going to happen along the way i'm not just looking forward to failure to say i failed i'm looking forward to saying like actually saying like okay what happened and now i'm just not going to do

that again right like the i think thomas edison had a line like i failed x million times and then i got it right based on that so he doesn't regret it whereas there are a lot of people who are like i love fucking failing and they never actually stop to say well why did it happen but they're lying i feel like most of the time they're lying to themselves like and if you when you're in that zen spot when you're in that Zen spot, when you're in that spot where you're connected, what ends up happening, you're not in denial, right? And you're facing it. But then the issue becomes dwelling, right? This is a conversation I had with my brother recently.

And I feel like I would say 2020 was the best year of my life. Absolute best year of my life. All mind state based and 2019 and 2018 were like a combination of like some of the worst right end of 2018 first last half of 2018 second half of 20 20 19 worst um i always tell people like 13 months, I was 13 months from the worst day of my life to the best day of my life, 13 months. What was the best day? What were those days?

The worst day was I was suicidal. I had gone down a path of being so tired. And a friend of mine had passed, and he had warned me of the amount of work that I was putting in. And he was saying, you're headed down a path similar to me. Trust me, you don't want to go down this path. And I didn't know what he meant because I thought that he was trying to say that I wouldn't be able to create anymore. And I'm like, you know, my ego was like,

I can create whatever, you know what I mean? Whatever. But it was this level of tiredness and indifference that just I had never reached before where I was literally, it was like three days a week, I would work 30 hours straight. And I would literally be asleep on the couch in the studio for like an hour and then wake up

and then from the night before and still have a little bit of a buzz on and have a beer and a coffee next to each other other and not that i i don't i never do that actually i'd never do that anymore i feel like i still could but no i never i never do that but because i'm not in that place but it's just a dark place that i went down and i just kept going down this dark place so far just grinding and working and working and working and I got away from being guided any which way. And so then I start getting away from my routine and I start to not understand why.

And at this point in time, so in 2018, I'm going into 2019, I'm drinking a lot. I had just lost my friend, I'm drinking a lot. And then in the start of 2019, I'm drinking a lot. I had just lost my friend. I'm drinking a lot. And then in the start of 2019, I go, I'm going to stop drinking for a year. So now I'm not drinking at all. Cold turkey coming.

Cold turkey, no drinking, no smoking weed. You know what I mean? I was dabbling in psychedelics, but for the most part, I was sober because I couldn't have a hangover because I was working too hard. And I just stopped hanging out with friends. Get away from hanging out with friends. Now, I'm like, this goal that I've been trying to reach for is the only thing that matters. And I'm just not reaching it.

And I'm not reaching these goals, but I'm working so hard at them. And I'm not working aimlessly either. I'm doing what so many things say, but it's just not lining up. Because my clarity of, and man, it's so crazy how much you can work in different areas as hard as you want. And then if you don't have the connecting parts, it doesn't work for you. But long story short, it led me to a point where i was super depressed and i didn't realize it and i was um it just got dark and i was ready to check out and a couple of different things just kind of pulled me in the right direction to make it not happen what was that well i was getting ready to

be in my best friend's wedding and i I said, oh, my God, I'm going to ruin this wedding. Let me not do that. And at the wedding, it was a wedding where my aunt was the officiant and my brother was there. And my friend and his wife are people that I've known for my entire life and all the bridesmaids I've known for forever and the whole everybody I know for forever and I got to sit back and watch all of this love and beauty and I got to have a conversation his parents were really good role models for me when I when I was a kid um not that my parents weren't good role models but they were different kind of role models.

I grew up below the poverty line and these were very successful. And because I knew I was getting ready to leave, I got to have a conversation with them to thank them for everything that they did and the examples that they set. And just throughout that course of the night, it woke me up. that they set. And just throughout that course of the night,

it woke me up. It snapped me into, you shouldn't be doing this at all. That and a conversation I had with a friend who told me he was the only person that recognized that I was in trouble. He recognized it before I recognized it. And he said, he gave me the best advice I've ever gotten in my life. He said, you're on a team, it. And he said, he gave me the best advice I've ever gotten in my life.

He said, you're on a team, right? And I said, yeah. He said, when a member of the team fumbles the ball, everybody goes to pick it up. Not just the other team. He's like, you're not even playing against anybody. Drop the ball. Somebody's going to pick it up. And boy, was he right. I was

micromanaging every little thing just trying to cause no mistakes and so much felt like it was on the line, you know what I mean? I had just become, I had just been, it was just me and Tony at that point at the studio and I was just worried about so many different things and it just was driving myself crazy and just dropped the ball and there were so many people around to pick it up i just couldn't see it and so then i started that journey from that point forward and i right when i started to get back into it so you know you take a break because i started realizing all right this isn't good for my mental health you're you're never this person

got some sleep i was just about to start going back into my old habits of working hard again broke my ankle now i can't move now i'm on the couch and i'm stuck here and i'm like crap i can't move best thing for me now i'm sleeping tons of hours a day and i start working and then i'm on a real journey so i'm on a couple months journey of organizing my thoughts getting my head in the right place and I really think that I needed something to reset my chemical response to the lack of sleep and the hard work and then lack of friendship and these drastic changes that I was making to my life all at once to pull me back into it and then then about 13 months later, I just hit this pocket where I looked back at the first six months of 2020 and I go, you did more in these six months

while not doing like quarter amount of that time, probably. Probably a quarter of the time, right? You also had the pandemic right so everybody's like home home like i'm not even in the studio anymore and i wrote a play and i wrote two scripts and i wrote these graphic novels and i still wrote as many songs as i wrote before just faster now you weren't worrying about all the other stuff i wasn't i was just in a better zen place and then since then it wavers from time to time. But for the most part, I literally just feel like a little tingling on my arms that just says, I just feel like I'm on ecstasy, like always. Just happy.

It's amazing how you can go that, you know, in the context of time, that's a pretty quick length length 13 months to go from the lowest to the highest place but it's yet and this is maybe the sixth time today this has happened seventh time it's it's yet another really fine line balance that you're pointing out with especially with like creative people because when you're making something from scratch it's a wild thing like how did everything all these objects not the what they are but like all these objects in the studio how did they get here like how did someone make this shape one day and make a mixer right or how did someone make a fucking microphone like there was nothing there and then they did something right that process there's

no manual to it it just is and you described it way better maybe like 10 15 minutes ago i forget how you said it but you're just it formulates after you continue to just play around with it and and then start to figure out new paths that can form and you can only understand those new paths when you start driving down the main one but i think that a lot of people who are in that mindset whether it's with music or art of any kind acting whatever it is they can go down the path of being miserable on the way there because they're so worried about entertaining everyone else that they don't entertain themselves they don't they don't turn it back around and think about well what am i doing to myself to do this like

with me here making a podcast and spending so much time on it and it's it's my whole life right i think a huge advantage I have is that I have to create with other people. I have to create with all different other people. And you know what else I have to do on a daily basis? I better be talking to people all the time. It's what makes me able to do this in the first place. It's what gets me to have guys like you,

who I don't know, and I get connected to, to come in here and then connect with them. So I have this constant outlet to stay in the least by far the least social time quote-unquote of my life to stay unbelievably socially connected and therefore while I'm in here working and creating things and basically taking these hours of content we do and creating these 30-second marketing pieces in a way and adding all this shit to them, which I have fun with. I can step into that for eight hours and then I'm forced to step out of it in the other way and

bring in the world around me. And I do wonder sometimes, and it puts a little shiver up my spine, if I were in something where I were a painter or i were a musician and i think with the musician sometimes it can be like at least you're in a studio with people but still there's it's such an individual process right like even i have my buddy zach dubnoff in here who's a pro boxer it's a lonely sport right and it's a creative sport too you can get in your head with that stuff because then it's suddenly like you're you're you're forced to constantly focus on what you're doing and what you're doing that maybe other people aren't because you're finding your own way that you're you're trying to get that to other people and then you you forget like what it's doing to you on the

way there i mean we see these tragic stories with i've talked about this before but it's it's it's a sad thing to me and it's wildly interesting to just interesting is the wrong word it's just it's something I always look at because I wonder why why you know what what what gets you there but you even see it like on my wall. Cobain. Kurt Cobain was, when he wasn't doing exactly that right there, smoking a cigarette and playing the guitar, he didn't know how to deal with all the other things that came in, because he was just creating this amazing shit for all of us. Whitney Houston, who had a lot of other outside forces, let's be honest, you know, on her, like, that was tragic. But like, her life ended up being tragic and tragicallyically taken because there were so many things that like she just knew you put a mic in front of her and and she could get in there and sing that's when she felt good but like all the things that led up to that there's so much shit she was dealing with and and then maybe didn't ask for enough help or whatever that we kind of left her

behind like that's how i feel not that i knew her or anything but like i feel like society left her behind you know and it's it is a tough i'm saying a lot of different things right now but i hope you're understanding like i have such an appreciation for when people like you come in here and share something like that especially someone who's creating and is a writer in your case and a musician and all these things and allowing other people who may be listening right now to understand that when they, if, and when they get to that type of thing, they're not the first person who's faced it. There's a way out and the way out actually, it involves you getting very in touch with yourself and putting yourself first in that way, because in putting yourself first, you make everyone around you better.

It's a very weird thing, but it's true. It's so important. And in the Bible, it says something along the lines of, you can't take a splinter out of another man's eye when you have a plank in your own. Splinter out of another man's eye? Man's eye if you have a plank in your own. Basically, if you have a bigger splinter in your eye, how are you going to be able to see to take it out of another man's eye and uh it's um it's a hard thing to get to

um when i when i was talking about it you were saying that the interest is in like the 13 months of the turnaround and i had been since i had been on that really really hard recent like up until really recently i started to analyze another part of it which was i had never been depressed before that so even so like that was such a short period but for the entire my entire life i used to always say i want to be four i have this memory and it's probably my earliest memory of me being four years old the last day of pre-k it's me and a bunch of other kids wearing a purple shirt we had these purple shirts where you know at the end of the school last day school they gave every kid a t-shirt and we're in these purple shirts and we're jumping through one of those sprinklers

that goes like this with the water and it sprays it back and forth and we're just jumping over and i'm like life is never going to get as good as that it's so innocent and then i'm like the miracle is like not only did i go from get to that lowest low point, but I went to even higher than that after all of those years of just never feeling like you're in that perfect space. And the only thing I really needed to do was allow the time to change my thought and luckily i had like some situations that made me or like because i was indifferent right so i wasn't it wasn't like i was anxious i just wanted out i just wanted out and i was still the logic side believe it or not was there it's the analysis side that was really thrown off right so you expand upon that well logically i'm just going you know i already credited created enough art and people do this from time to time and some of the people that i admired did it and

um you know the world will go on and as you, you know, detrimental, it could be in one way, I don't really feel like I'm in a place where I'm going to be able to continue contributing to the world in a positive way. And so like, you know, unplug, but also, I'm not, I'm not at a point where I'm doing really toxic shit to anybody or doing anything messed up. So I could stick, you know, sticking around for one more day is cool. Doesn't matter. Allowing myself the time to like not make such a crazy decision and allowing myself some space to feel what I'm feeling and know that you can, your mind can be in a completely different state than what you're familiar with based off of the things that you do, like not getting sleep, like not hanging out with your friends, like drastically changing your routine. Like you ever, you know, when you're, when you're a kid and you get sick, right? My mom's a nurse. So

she always says that you look, you think about it from the standpoint of well what did you do differently lately right you have an issue like you know what i mean if you if you if you're like yeah my you know i didn't hurt myself but um you know uh i don't know my my arm has like this irritation right here you know what i mean and it's like well you know you switch to driving the truck this week and your arm is like held up like this way you know what i mean it's like ways to think about it staying in a constant place of analyzing yourself will it's helpful in that way too it's helpful to know like what routines are important um and i just

wish that i had what i want people to know is like have some preemptive things have some things in place to check yourself when you're really going off course and then have some people to check you too when you're really really start to wander off course um it's something i'm aware of a lot of in the other people i feel like a lot of my friends i'm like i have friends that i used to use i use this as an example all the time which is it's a messed up example right i have certain friends where and not so much i think i've upped my the category of friends but i had friends in my life where i'm like i would never trust you to not screw my wife right but like you're great in every other way so if you like wish to screw my wife i can't be angry with you because that's your in your character right you know what i mean

it's it's i would have never trusted you in that position right but like if you then like stole like money from me like let's say you did both right and some might be like i'd much rather somebody steal money from me yeah but you were never the friend that i would have never thought for you to steal what you're doing is completely out of your character it's not in within your weaknesses it's not and when you have good friends and people that get to see multiple angles of you they can check when you're starting to do things that are out of character for for my friend who saw to me he's just said yeah you're just not as personable anymore you're not um you're you're a glow you're you're never you don't seem like you're enjoying yourself he's like i watch you when you're making

music that's the only time and when you're not making music you're just blah yeah i don't i don't really see that it's important important, man. It's important. And when you're in a creative spaces, I think that you're giving that certain kind of energy to re- like, it's an energy that fuels you, right? But it's a push out and a pull back, right? Which is why most artists like want to be recognized for their work is because you're, we live in a world where we're constant consumption. So to create something and bring something into the world, it's really special thing to do. But it takes a lot of energy.

And so that energy back to you that you're, that you want to receive is like almost the praise for the work that you've done, right? The acceptance, then knowing that people were affected by the knowing that it wasn't off or not um holding on to those holding like if you don't get that energy or you're not giving yourself that to reach that to recharge you're probably gonna fall off in a different way we're talking about factory workers um or like people that work

the nine-to-fives versus creatives and then being in touch with it more how many guys do you know that are like a factory worker but like when they get home like they work on a car or like they work in their garden or they meddle with some thing that's in that creative realm and it's because those two juxtaposite juxtap uh those two things in juxtaposition juxtaposition uh those two things in juxtaposition are a yin and yang where they're like like you you have output on one and you need the input from the other there's it you know what though there's a little bit of a difference though if we go deeper into that example and i think this is important things like that like factory work whatever it is it's building something even if there's a set process that you have that it's like you learn to do this and you kind of do it over and over again, there's a little thing you still put on it. And that's why it's also interesting that a lot of those jobs are going away because of automation.

Whereby, what types of jobs are also getting automated but are the type that are being created out in the economy that continue to grow the types of jobs that put us under fluorescent lights in a cubicle and have a set system and maybe an excel spreadsheet that boop boop boop boop boop plug in the same shit and take away put up guardrails on everything and i'm generalizing there are plenty of jobs that aren't like that but i'm saying there are a lot of jobs like that and it's just the same thing and so i think a lot of those people who maybe maybe even some of them do go home and they do their hobby that involves a creativity and they just don't realize the difference there those people though have a higher chance in many cases of being unhappy and unfulfilled i find at least and this is anecdotal then people who work in some of the older school jobs

Where they're they're doing some shit That then to your point they they don't even realize they keep it turned on when they go home, too And it's like the spigot never goes off and that's what keeps them going back every day and being okay with it, too I've done i've done like all different kinds of jobs and I always say hard labor is if the number one choice for me Like other things like I would never like go to a cubicle job. Like I can't do it agreed Um, it's just it's brutal. It's really brutal I could imagine doing it in a field that I that I like but I but I really think it like even when in those Jobs, it's like bandwidth

You know what? I mean, it's like how much can you really like some people are built to take that right? And then the overall like the praise that they would get for instead of like creating is from like stability Right because they were just seeking stability to begin with and so they become okay with stability and that's their input What does that stability give them though? Really or what do they think it is and And if the trick works, who cares? Who cares? Agreed.

Right? You know what I mean? If the trick works in their mind, then they're fine. And there's a lot of people like that. I think there's a lot of people that are, but then there's a ton of people who want to be fulfilled more and they're not tapping into who they really are. And why are they doing that? Mom and dad told them him you got a bedtime

that's the that's the best that's the best answer you could have given that's it it's the symbol but i'll expand it then on that's exactly how i want to say it and then the logic though is that it's what society wants right you do this then you do that you work hard in school you get decent grades you do okay on the sat you go to college don't mind that you may be signing a bill that says 150k on and you'll figure that out later don't worry about it because then you get job and then you get job and you rise up in job to a certain ceiling level and you get married you have two kids by 30 you continue to grow your 401k you get to 40 now you play golf on saturday mornings with the boys to pretend you still have your youth to

you by the time you're 50 you're looking at the sunset package and they're starting to put you out on the other side of the company and saying like all right he's on the wrong side of the hill by the time you're 60 hey let's let's check the clock here five years away from florida pal 65 in florida staring up at the sun and waiting to die. There are plenty of people, there are plenty of people who have gone a route like that. And to your point, feel perfectly fulfilled because they weren't looking for something of other people's expectations. They wanted to find their own happiness. Maybe their marriage was phenomenal. And they're like, Hey, I like the means to be able to continue along the game and get there. I know plenty of people like that. And it's a beautiful thing. There's a reason why I think the average, the most happy people in this country

make an average at their peak of like $200,000 a year, which is a lot of money, but it's not like you're not balling in a Bentley there, right? I think it's because there are a lot of people who think that like, hey, this is what I want and this gives me a sustainable life. I have a great family and they have a great appreciation of the world. But there are so many other people who may look at that example, maybe even from their parents, and be like, well, that must be the way to go. And they don't stop to question like, well, what do I think? How do I feel? What am I about?

What am I getting out? Like how do I feel every day? Are there things that I'd rather be doing than this? And I feel really bad for those people because they convince themselves that they're trapped. And they never get out because they think that that's the only thing there is. And it's not, man. It's not. And the reason I'm passionate about that is because I can speak from experience on that exact fucking thing.

I can only imagine. Yeah. And it took me a while, even, you know, there's a video from a business meeting I had with my LLC back in 2019, early 2019, where I was still, I hadn't turned down my contract or anything. I was still going along. Right. And I said like that exact thing.

And the fact that it took me even another seven months to understand that I needed to act on that and change my reality, and then the fact that it took me another year to even get to a point where I would start working on something like this blows my mind, and it makes me realize that you can even have all the answers and not know it because you don't even listen to yourself, and so even today when I'm out here acting on that and finding the thing I love and understanding there's going to be a time that sucks. And if you want to build something great, you got to be willing to struggle. I go back and I watch that video from April 12th, 2019. And I have to remind myself in those low moments that, hey, you knew

what this was. You knew what this was and now you're here. And so if you're having that moment, hey, this is just a part of what it is. Make sure you act on it like we were talking about earlier. Act on the failures and understand how you're going to fix them and make them happen less and less moving forward to the point where they don't happen in that thing, whatever it is. But understand, you signed up for this. And it's because you're not that person who's content with that plan that 401k that builds to the ultimate end which is you die yeah um I think and I think the reason is because Society starts from birth and um and and let's go back quickly to what you were saying about like what Society wants you to do that happens a lot right a lot i mean that's a lot way that a lot of people phrase it joe rogan uh it's funny to bring him up in the in a podcast environment but uh joe rogan when he references the government a lot i know

that i don't listen to him like religiously but i i hear in there and um you know he just said this again on like this most more recent one with Tom Segura. And he says, you know, government is only just it's just a bunch of people. And so they're going to only be as strong as people are like, you know, I mean, they have their weakness. That's what society is. It's like it's not society is like this thing that's pushing us to do it. It's just the majority of society doesn't know any better and everything built in society came from the society before it which is it's two sides of the same coin whereas like one like one of the

strongest things from religion is like dude like how many things did you learn from your parents tons how much more could you learn if you just read the diary of your parents parents parents parents parents and each of their diaries to read it now especially right now it would be super beneficial because so much has changed generation or generation where in the past you could go thousands of years and life was pretty much exactly the same for so many different people but on the other side of that is any wrongs that weren't like they talk about, they call them, you know,

especially in the black community, we call them generational curses, right? Generational chains, right? We broke a generational chain. What about societal change? These are societal chains.

These are things that need to be broken by great minds. These innovators that are going to say, but why? And then sometimes they're broken by great circumstances, right? Nine to five and going to a building almost completely got broken apart by the pandemic because there's people who turned up their performance at work and their efficiency at work from working at home. And they know now I need four hours. And the other four hours that I was spending at the office, I'm pretending to do work. I need four hours a day. And my productivity level is going to be higher than you ever guessed. Now they can take that extra four hours and pursue their dream. And everything's okay. It's like trial and error stuff and if you're not in that constant state of analyzing that's your that's where you can get in trouble and if you're analyzing and coming to the wrong results that's where you're going to get in trouble where you're going to say for either if

you're not asking yourself well this is what my dad did but is this what I want to do? Screwed. And every day, because you're in society and because you have years and a lifetime of society telling you that you should follow in your parents' footsteps, you need to unlearn that. You need to analyze a lot to unlearn that. We're unlearning way more than what we're learning. And I feel bad for people that just don't have the the opportunity or don't have the mind state to analyze or aren't coming like maybe

you know maybe it's a it's a nature thing like maybe now we've we i know i don't mean nature versus nurture but maybe it's something nurtured for so long that we can't do, you know, kids that just like, you know, like, how does this work? You know what I mean? That, that, uh, inquisition and curiosity was like, happens early enough. And you know what I mean? You've been, you get positive reinforcement from, you know, doing that. Who knows how deep it is. It's just hopefully conversations like this, you know what I mean or conversations that aren't being had anywhere there's one person that is listening and going yeah i need i need to

analyze it and or or like the one thing that was keeping them from doing it was like yeah but i don't know what's going to happen if i walk through this door oh you can just peek your head in like you never know what's going to speak to them. And this is why we do the things that we do. And song-wise, I always say my point of every song I make is to make people feel like they're not alone. Because the first time I fell in love with the song was when I felt like I wasn't alone, right? I'm 14 years old.

And I go. I grew up in, like, a one-bedroom apartment, a very, very small basement one-bedroom apartment, right? That in the bathroom, there was a hole big enough that you could see into the bathroom above it. And I was a young kid, and I lived in an apartment complex so i didn't realize that i was poor like i realized i had been evicted twice already so i i realized i was poor to a certain extent you know what i mean but i didn't i didn't see i was happy you know as a happy kid then i went to one of the most expensive schools in the country on scholarships and financial aid to the point where it was like the food that the how much it cost to feed me per year was more than what i was paying for tuition

where i got to live there and get fed and everything and i start to realize holy crap not only were you poor for the poor kids you're not there is a whole world of people that like like my roommate had like the third largest estate in all of Niger freshman year this kid had pet lions and pet gazelles and I'm like what like he comes into the room and he go oh man this is really small and I'm going I got my own bed like what the but I'm sitting on a school bus, and my friend Alex, who's also a creative, she runs a company called Alessandra Rivera, and she does, like, hats, really fancy, nice hats, you know, beautiful hats.

She's a creative person, always been a creative person. She's sitting next to me, and I had been listening to Eminem. And at the time, it was probably, like, I was listening to, like, Eminem's show or something. She's like, you, always been a creative person. She's sitting next to me and I had been listening to Eminem. And at the time it was probably like I was listening to Eminem show or something. She's like, you know, there's earlier stuff that's kind of better. And I go, no, no. And she takes one of her headphones and she shares a headphone with me and plays a song called Rock Bottom. And in the song Rock Bottom, all he's talking about is how fed up he is with being poor. And in that moment moment i fell in love

with music from that moment forward i was just like you said limewire i'm on i'm on remember the yahoo music launcher like i'm on yahoo yahoo like had a music launcher for video music videos where it was just like the youtube before youtube but only music videos really and was just like the YouTube before YouTube, but only music videos really. And I would like was on that watching, watching that over and over. Like I like lose yourself. The music video comes out. I'm just watching it on repeat over and over and over and over again.

He spoke to you. He spoke to me. Cause I did. I was in a moment where I felt like I was alone and there was literally no one to talk to that could relate. I'm isolated. I'm in this area where nobody around me is has had a similar experience to me and i'm hearing this song and i'm going oh he has it and he's saying i'm having trouble getting my daughter's diapers and i'm seeing you know he talks about um see

you know he says seeing ballers flossing like in the pathfinders or whatever and you're like man like these kids got like beamers ben's and bentley's like screw a pathfinder but like yeah but like you know that mind state where it's just like it was it was so much to relate to and ever like i didn't even know i was going to do music for years later you know what i mean right like five years later like 19 right but from that point forward in connecting with, it's analysis again, it's going to be going, that feeling, if I can create that for other people, and the mix is authenticity. The other thing, the other reason why it felt so real is because it was real to him. He was experiencing that.

He was expressing these thoughts that he might be scared to say in a regular conversation but he can express himself so then i was like okay just be authentic and true to yourself just talk about the things that are true to yourself and ever since then you know i've been able to dance you know sometimes i make songs i'm like i can't relate to this at all it's. The authenticity is in the feeling less than the words. How much were you, it's the question of how much, and you got to be honest with yourself about it. How much were you baking this towards an intended result versus the thing that actually happened? And that's the balance.

It's like, how much does this speak to what I'm thinking versus what I think other people think that they want me to be thinking? You know what I mean? Yeah. And what's people think that they want me to be thinking. You know what I mean? Yeah. And what's the goal, right? The goal is entertainment. So you watch movies and you're just like, yeah, obviously you want to add some razzmatazz to the whole thing, you know what I mean? And make it cooler.

Sometimes you want to let a thought wander and you're in this creative process where you know between dreams and reality but I say for any songwriter I think the most important thing is authenticity and making something where somebody else doesn't feel alone because you can hear a song about cheating on someone and relate to it as being someone who's been cheated on. Or vice versa. Yeah. Or you can be somebody who's never been in love and hear a love song and cry just from wanting to be in love. Yep.

And that's like the beautiful, great connection of art and entertainment where it can connect to you, to people on these ways that you can't pull. But if your output is creating stuff where people can connect to it even if their usage is the antithesis of that right so like if you're somebody that's building a machine like you're building a car the cars are built for people to drive sometimes cars are built for people to to admire but like let's say you're building the buick whatever it's built for a family to drive it it's just they're only going to drive it has a certain level of output of energy right you're doing this monotonous task when you're putting your feelings into something and you're

putting them into it so much so that it can connect with somebody who has the complete opposite feeling it's a lot of output just make sure that there's some kind of emotional input to change that balance. I think that all of us, and this is always, I mean, I've used this example before, but it's a mean way of putting it, but think of like the dumbest people you've ever known. Just not a hell of a lot going on upstairs. We've all known some even those people maybe not through social media when they're looking at people always or when it's something they're passionate about like a political issue or thing like things like that where they can be blinded based on their bias those people inherently when they are talking with someone else who is bullshitting them or hearing from someone else who is bullshitting them or hearing from someone else who is bullshitting them, if they don't have skin in the game, even their bullshit meter tends to be pretty incredible.

We have a very good ability to spot, nah, that guy's full of shit. And I wish we could do it in politics and stuff like that because then there might not be two parties and everyone would realize there's a lot of shit going on out there that's spinning them one way or the other. Well, if we did it in politics, there just wouldn't be politicians. A hundred percent. Because people hear the answer they want to hear. And then they're like, oh, you know what? I'm with that guy. And now it becomes tribal.

Whereas, you know, when it comes to things that maybe don't affect their outcome, it's just entertainment in that way. Like they're looking to listen to music. They know if someone's like trying to make a tiktok banger versus they really felt this shit and like with eminem there was a guy who was i'll say he was in the room told the story directly but the way that he explained how eminem was discovered speaks to exactly why he's so authentic and who he is Eminem was found at a time where Biggie and pocket just died and rap was at a crossroads and these two cultural icons were suddenly gone and an intern of the guy I know happened to come across Eminem got a hold of his mixtape because he was like holy holy shit, like the cassette tape. This is unbelievable. Drives back to the office and goes, you have to hear this. You have to hear this. You have to hear this. And he plays it for the executive and he heard it. And this guy's, I think, maybe the greatest talent evaluator in the history of the music industry. He's at least top three. And he was like's phenomenal but i don't know and i said well

when he's telling me the story i'm like well why didn't you know and he goes because the lyrics were insane he was talking about shit he never did like chopping up bodies how he was going to do it what it looked like putting it in the car putting it in a freezer sticking it out in the middle of the ocean what the blood looked like on the way all this shit and he's like he was also a white guy and we were at this was a culturally critical time and it's like we're we're gonna market a white rapper rapping about crazy lyrics right now after pock and biggie aren't even six feet below yet like this is crazy and so what he said is is he goes in his head he's like i know this is phenomenal though because i know like even if this guy wasn't doing

this he's known people who have this is one of the most honest raw things i've ever heard and maybe like some of it he can tamp down a little bit like for marketing but at the same time he never did right why because he said i'll tell you what take it down to andre and i'll go with whatever he says five minutes later dr dre's running up into the office like you get this motherfucker in here tomorrow because dr dre who is the purest artist like type person there is this is a guy who falls asleep for 72 hours at the fucking table sometimes making one bar of sound he heard that shit no more than five minutes and was like oh my god and he wouldn't have been saying that if eminem was like you know what i wonder what all these record level label executives are looking to hear right now yeah let me do that no eminem

said fuck it i'm gonna rap about this shit and they're gonna like it or they're not i'm gonna keep going no matter what and people heard that and they went that's gonna sell it did that's the that's funny because that kind of touches on the other side of it too is like that's that that's like the uh it's so i'm i keep on talking about output of creativity as if it's just for the purpose of consumption but like if energy doesn't have somewhere to go it's gonna explode so the other side of it too is like, that was his therapy. He's letting that out because he doesn't want to actually rob people and shoot police officers while he's getting chased from the bank. And so in order to do that, he's expressing himself in a certain way and that becomes therapeutic for him, which now it has that dual purpose. And a lot of what we're talking about throughout this whole conversation is a lot of

ors that could be ands. You know what I mean? Like it's authenticity and therapy that he can't afford. You know what I mean? And it's good timing. And instead of him going, well, I do need to wrap this stuff but maybe i should just make this also for the label like what think about it the

amount of money he's spending in the studio time is now split in half right because he's trying to he's he's trying to do both things right or he's at home writing his best and he can't relate the two now over time he ends up doing songs like not afraid right which is like america's became america's anthem of positivity off of the dude that made kim about like killing his wife and keeping her in the car like and it's just time like he just let it like went in that in that space where he wrote his life follow he just wrote his life and just followed followed through with it and what and while he was saying which is you know a lot of people are say well you know and we're never gonna get old and back yeah he doesn't have that life anymore but what he does do he parlayed all

of his time and all of his knowledge of becoming a rapper at being so good at what he does that nobody can do what he does so he still has a niche no matter what and i don't care what people say about all of his later albums there's at least a couple songs on there that nobody else can make yeah i don't get the hate on that you know what i mean so it's like yeah you have situations like rap god where it's just like yeah but like that song is going to be all over the radio it's going to be in a million different commercials going to be in a million different tv shows and mo and moments and movies and stuff like that where there's no like nobody could do it if they tried.

Yeah. Like, if you tried your absolute hardest, you couldn't make that. And that's growth, and that's, like, giving himself the space. And I'm sure, I mean, he talks about it, where, like, you know, other people's opinions get in his head, and he allows himself to be swayed in one way or another. So it happens to him. The reason why I know not to let it happen to or another so it happens to him the reason why i

know not to let it happen to me is because it happened to him and i hear him talk about it and so i have that reminder and i'll still do it right you like you said i watched i re-watched this video of myself telling me that it's going to be like this because i need the constant reminder yeah now it's going into that analysis and and logistics thing is awesome it's like it's important that's a lot that's going to be a new i might like write that down and have that sitting right there like where the notepad is because it's and because when you first said it i was like wait what i got the analysis i'm like logistics and then you explain that and then they came together and i was like holy holy shit, as this conversation was going on.

What was real quick, though? The thing you said at the front that blew my mind and then you came on to something else right there was you said it doesn't have to be an or, it can be an end. Can you expand on that a little more? Because I loved what you were saying at first. Right. Well, well, that it's kind of what we've been talking about this whole time where, you know, where we were saying, all right, let's go back to the friend that had that, you know, was asking for these other opportunities for the jobs, right? He's like, okay, he doesn't like the distance and he doesn't like to pay. All he has to do is ask to have, and he can have the better pay and the better distance.

And it's like that openness, right? Which is, which is the sad part is, is that a lot of the times that openness comes when you're holding all the cards, right? When you have the highest level of value, that's when you have that openness because you feel like you're holding all the power. Yes. But as you're growing your value, you're constantly changing how many more ands you get rather than ors, right?

So your amount of time that you're putting in right now, right? You're probably going to have to keep putting in that time and you might have moments where you have to put in more time. Sometimes for you to have more success, you need to take less time which seems insane right which is what exactly what i went through right i was like okay i worked my heart i worked my ass off in 2018 i was like i gotta go even harder in 2019 and i was at a point where i didn't need to go harder i needed to relax a little bit and analyze more and move move a

little bit more and then and then i would get all the ands that i wanted right i wanted i wanted more free time and i kept on going but i need to have more productivity i'm having so much more so much more success i need more success so i'll trade my time for success no i can have more time and more success i don't it's not it's not one or the other oftentimes and as you're growing you i think we gotta keep like looking at that and that's a way to really measure that's a huge way to measure your progress too and i think that that's something i you know when you were that's why I asked the question about other podcasters, like people to look up to, because I remember at a certain point too, where I was like so thirsty for mentorship. And Tony, my partner, is a huge mentor of mine.

One of only two mentors that I have. It's good that you don't have too many cooks in the kitchen too. Yeah, definitely not. i have where and it's good that you don't have too many cooks in the kitchen too yeah definitely not even though i learned from you know the guys who i who are my mentees you know what i mean i'm open to learning from everyone but i have you know for me i'm a complicated person so i need that person first to get me to like understand who i like understand who i am and like and really know how to approach me you know what I mean and know what kind of moods I'm in you know what I mean to be able to and and and like you said Kanye and Jay-Z went with Jay-Z because he's a better people person like you kind of want the person that is going

to compliment your your bad sides you know what i mean but like also maybe understands and understands it all and like you know tony moore first of all the yin and the yang the yin and the yang and uh you know for people who don't know who tony moore is he was a extremely successful gospel artist and who you know just grew uh and like lives in the space of openness of just being a people connector and he's the he is the pinnacle of like walking through the doors that are open to you and then willing doors open and like trusting that some doors are going to open and you don't even realize it's going to be that and pivoting and all and all of those kinds of things that um make the majority of successful music business people right which are people that are like i'm evolving i'm moving

because the music industry is evolving and moving so fast um and luckily like a lot of this stuff that i'm saying is stuff that i see in an example or, you know, stuff that we even talk about, um, where, where we can, you know, I have someone directly to a community because of his style my style and the matching of it and the the age gaps between us and the age gaps between the people that we have working with us and um and just staying focused on being in that headspace where we can be open I I actually want to get to that though I'm glad you bring up the studio now and the vibe you're trying to create there because we haven't talked about that a hell of a lot today. I'm in a healthy way envious of you because you get to do what you love where you have a full spectrum of people, be it the guy no one's ever heard of coming in there trying to build something and you get to be there while he does it. And maybe he'll be one of the ones who, as you said, is built for it and is going to see it through and become something great. All the way up to some of the greatest artists on planet Earth.

I know we've talked a little bit about Post Malone's been through their little uzi vert a lot so a bunch of these guys and it's like you get to see all the good and the bad and you were you didn't say it like this a few minutes ago when you were talking about something else but it's that balance like the bruce lee line take what is good discard what is bad you can learn from both of them right Right. And so you get to see that. And maybe there's some guys you see come in there who are unknown or known who you don't really like. There's not much to take. And you're like, well, I shouldn't something, the way they make you feel and the way they make people around them feel and the way that that translates into them creating something great in your studio is like, oh my god. How did that happen and how can I catch that myself as well? You get to have that – I mean you're active in there too, but you get the best of both worlds because you get the front row seat. So I'm curious to know who's been in there, whether we have any idea who they are or not, or whether it's someone big. It could be anyone. they do it differently and you are enamored by by what they do and and how they make you feel when when they come in there and put in the work and in ways that other people who come through there maybe don't um one of the coolest would probably be lil dirk um who is you know he's

making a lot of street music um and you watch interviews and he you know seems like a certain kind of guy like a nice enough guy but i mean the level of professionalism and general kindness and the way way to control a room no matter how many people are in that room like he when he recorded he we have a booth and a control booth right so the booth is like this room that has like a piano and it's isolated for sound or whatever. And then the control room is like where the couches are, the engineer is,

and the engineer like pushes a button to talk to you into the other room because you can't hear from room to room. A lot of big artists take the microphone and they move it into the control room and just record directly next to the engineer. Wait, how's that? Well, because a room is already fit for sound

and it's pretty silent and the microphone's pretty good good so it's going to pick up just like how ours you know this is picking up right now you know what i mean the higher quality mic the higher quality amp it's it's almost becomes the same thing the emptiness of the room and how the room's treated for sound especially because like a microphone's mainly not they build the better the better the microphone the less the room matters right right but still still though like the control room i would imagine you guys have that built in a special way because like we've it is built in a special way we've recorded music in here before i have to you ever seen the documentary look mom i believe i can fly no travis scott oh yes i have okay so like you

know how he produced the end of that album in hawaii with mike dean and all them where he put he had to put like the the he was underneath the blanket with the mics and shit that's how we had to record music like i'll show you pictures and video yeah it all depends on the shape of the room like for so in our control room that's actually treated for acoustics that go directly with the speakers and everything this is like an ancient made room both that room and milk boy were made at the same time which is a studio across the hall by larry golden was so like the acoustics in that room aren't bad but also like you can't have like a certain kind of like bouncing of the vocals or else it'll sound like there's an effect on it but for the most part man like little wayne did classics in hotel rooms like classics it doesn't matter yeah

like it and a lot of it is engineer you know what i mean they're gonna be able to like you know offset whatever's going on there um so a lot of a lot of artists will just record in the control room so you're saying little dirk was one of these guys who comes and records in the control room however he's like 20 deep in this control room and literally i'm asking the engineer yeah and i'm asking the engineer like yo how is he like what and he just goes like this and raises his hand for people to be quiet everyone shuts up grabs his part when he's done everybody goes back to talking same thing over and over over again. And I'm like, that's talking about literal control of the room. So he just raises his hand.

Raises his hand. Everyone's quiet. Raises his hand again. Everyone can talk again. And it's like, it's as if you, the teacher just walked into the room. And the students actually listen. And it's right and um and just the love that team had for him and the interactions with like him and his manager and how kind they were and just like

professional was insane um and just like cool um and then to see uh yb previously ybn corday who now just goes by corday um we had ybn corday and ybn amir through the studio last year or something like that um and um and yeah i think it was like early 2020 because before the pandemic obviously um they like the the how on time they are right on time first off rappers are never on time never on time right which is you know whatever it's like a part of the nature of it but for them to be like just on time and just so in love with the music making process like corday was just so in love with i was in the B room just making music while he's making music in the A room and like, and like people from his team mingling with people on our team and just open to just being super, super creative and just focused on making some

of the best music that I had heard in the studio was just like, it was like a really special thing to thing to watch that. And just like, again, the politeness, like the, it's, I've come into very, very few situations through like shows or studio interactions where the people that are high up act like assholes or, you know, or rude in any way. Like there's a very, very few people that have been

and it has to do with most of it and there's also some that have been what has to do with um their success right because like you just can't be a dick like especially if we're talking about like controlling moods of rooms in any kind of way or being able to have conversations or be able to network or people wanting to work with you you just can't you can't be rude you can't be a jerk now that doesn't mean you can't you don't can't have a personality that doesn't mean you can't have a bad day either but like if you're day in day out just rude to everyone that manifests itself in one way or another that's great to hear because the narrative and it's just the negativity of society,

and I'm sure sometimes I've played into the narrative talking about it with things, but it's always like, oh, they're big, they're probably an asshole. Like so many people like that are assholes. And it's not true. There are. There's good and bad with everything.

You know, there are some people who, they're just an asshole. And it can be whether they're a star or a rich guy or a poor guy. It doesn't really matter. There's just people who are like that. But, you know, when you put the tag on it and figure out that this person is, he's a person just like you, or she's a person just like you. And they understand there's still, just like you said, in order to, in order to even get access and get people on your side and get people who are going to help you and help you

create great things, you better, you better understand their value and that starts with how you treat them. Every person on the way down to it. So it's refreshing when I hear stuff like that. I remember my guy Jim DiIorio who I had on here who's – read his resume if you go see that. But he's ex-FBI, ex-Ranger, ex-all kinds – undercover, the whole shit. And so he was going to do a job that he was running. It was the Maxim Magazine Super Bowl party right before the pandemic. And so I was talking to him like a couple days before.

Mind you, this is like West Point buttoned up, you know, regular kind of guy. And I was like, wait, who's headlining the party? And he goes through a few people and he goes, and then this guy Post Malone with all the tattoos and stuff. And I'm like, Jim, I'm not going to lie, man. I'm a huge fan of Post Malone. I love that guy. And he's like, oh, yeah. And I'm like, I've heard pretty awesome things from people who know him.

Like, he's the coolest fucking cat. Just like, have your mind open. And he's like, all right. Calls me back the day after the Super Bowl and he goes, oh, my God, that guy's the fucking man i'd run through a wall for him and i'm like and i'm like here you go you got this 25 year old dude with tats all over him and he and jim diorio are walking out of their best friends and that like you hear shit like that and you're like santa claus is real oh my god right you know what i

mean because you want these people to be who you want them to be and sometimes they're not and i've heard stories of people who are not and that sucks but like when someone is i'm gonna celebrate that i'm gonna tell that story to anyone i know you know what i mean the people who were who were bad by the way i expected them to be bad and they were like it wasn't a surprise that's interesting from watching them and other situations i'm not gonna bad bad mouth anybody but they no surprise at all um one of the things to industry wise though where people uh that people don't think about is that a lot of industry stuff is very stern right so two people one of the examples that people always use for the rider thing right which is like they're always like oh only green m&ms or something like that

right where it's like they all taste. Have you ever heard about that? No. Where they're like, oh, certain artists say we want a bowl of M&Ms, but they got to be green M&Ms, right? Even though there's no flavor difference, right? Those kinds of requests and those kinds of things have nothing to do with I'm better than you. What they often have to do with is I'm getting ready to, I'm a person that you're not used to being around. Let me get you and the staff that's not used to being around me prepared for the worst part, which is filling out this rider, going to six different stores to fill out this writer because depending on the situation i don't want

to have something go wrong right so i need you on your p's and q's and prepare before i get there and that actually becomes like a buffer for a lot of it because now anybody else the ancillary characters in in this story the engineer the you know the runner who's gonna go and get the waters and everything if they were in a shitty mood that day they're snapped out of it because they know they have to be on point right it's the same thing with like like a royalty you know what i mean or like a government official coming to town it's like a lot of the times the biggest part of the security is like a show to be like there's a ton of security here you're not gonna get away with your bullshit yes um and so in this in the industry it's a lot of that too which can

sometimes be taken as this person's stuck up or this person's rude or you know like sometimes um people get offended about like interactions before shows like right like so like opening up for certain artists some artists are like chill like the first big artist i ever opened up for was cypress hill right those guys were like come on in and like let's smoke it like literally can't see in the room i don't know to this day i've never seen a room that was smoked out as much as cypress hill room like you could not see i had to leave because i'm like i'm only breathing weed smoke there's not like there's no oxygen left in the room i can't see anyone anyway like i don't even know what send dog looks like and then um you know what and and

um then there's like there's there's people who where it's like snoop dogg who's just like he's got his routine you know what i mean where it's just like like you can't be around him because he has his routine and how many times has it has the opening act for snoop dogg just been a fanboyish or annoying or gotten him sick or like you know a bunch of different things right so like the security might be higher there or um you know like there's a or then you have like rjd too right a guy who's just like not only is he going to sit through your set he's going to ask you about the song he's going to be like the craziest nicest because that's his experience and that's the way that he's controlled

his but there's so many factors involved to how a person can interact and i always i never take it for granted either that a person could just have a bad day yes and when you have a bad day like a bad day for one of us like losing money is like what max thousands like you know i mean sometimes these guys like you know you might have a bad day where you lose a million dollars that's the thing you never know who's watching there was i don't remember which one it was it wasn't mickey mantel but there was some great yankee who used to run out every single play to first base as like he was running a goddamn track meet even if the ball was literally right there and one time i think it was a reporter asked him finally like listen dude why don't you want to like save it once in a while like we get it you

try hard and he goes no because there's somebody sitting on the first place line today or even up in the stands a kid who's never been there before and has never seen me play because it wasn't when games were on tv and this is going to be the first time they see me play, and it's the first impression. If I don't run out that ball, maybe they won't either when they play. You are what people see. And so it's unfortunate because people are still human beings. You have a bad day.

You do things. And I think sometimes we blow up somebody's bad day, and we don't realize that, like, you know what? That's not what they're like. And there's people who have been misunderstood because of that. It's just i think when it's patterns with people and they're always like that that's what that's where it's like okay that's who he is just like you said like certain people you just knew you knew they were going to be a dick and they were a dick they were what you expected but i like the example you bring up about like the green m&ms or something quirky like that

where the guy sitting through r2d2 sit is that who it was yeah rjd2 rjd2 sitting through the sets and like having to know every single thing in there because that's their process that's the you want the great art right this is what it takes i'm not saying you need to be like daniel day lewis and have everyone carry you around the set because you're pretending 24 7 you have cerebral palsy like he did in my left foot maybe that's a little over the top maybe it's not though but for him it's not and the mad people are like yo he's the best actor ever right you know what i mean for greatness and i mean you see the um what's the name the um what's it called the last dance with the michael jordan documentary you know i mean you're just like yeah this dude is a dick but he has to be like he had to be that

like it had to be that perfect and and there's all different kind of varying degrees there's some people who just they ain't and they're still but you know you know and you never know like what it took to get them there and what kind of we're we you know we spent almost the whole podcast talking about the patterns that we stick ourselves in you know what i mean and i think there's you know all levels of success that find the same yeah and it's you're never gonna we said this at some point but you're never gonna get everyone to love you no matter what you do so if if you try to be something else to appease other people you're gonna appease nobody because people will stick right through it and realize that real quick so the people who lean into some things that might even piss some people off and make them not like them but it makes them great and then we get the results to see that it did.

I fuck with that heavy and I respect it. So I appreciate again like that example because I think it puts a good visual on it as to something that you might put in a movie scene and be like, oh, fuck that guy. But then let things play out let things be seen but um listen dude we just did like three hours i'm looking at the clock right now so this i'm high right now i like conversations like this i'm feeling like i haven't had a drug all day i promise you but like i'm feeling like i did in like a good way and that was that's the beauty of doing it like this but the way you describe things is just so my fucking cup of tea so i appreciate you coming in here and doing it thank you man thank you for having me it's been great it's

been wonderful hell yeah and we'll put your links and stuff in in the description but you got so just tell everyone real quick everything you got going we've touched today a bunch that you write music we're gonna have to leave that to talk in depth another time right we didn't get to it none of it yeah but also you're writing for yourself in addition to running this goddamn studio and it's like one of the biggest studios in philly so congratulations thank you but what's what's the story with your music too um so i've put music out i put out 12 EPs so far in the past year, all under aliases. So one of the projects is called Sacred Wolves. It's S-A-K-R-E-D, Wolves.

And that was where we did an EP in a night 10 different times. It was a collaborative process where we got together from scratch. We wrote, produced it, spent late night mixing it, put some artwork together, threw it out there. The 11th one is done.

It's going to coincide with my own personal album, which is an album called Charming. That'll be coming out in November. Both of those will be coming out in November. And there's a story that kind of goes together with them. And then I have put out two sync projects, one called Future Coyote. That's me and my boy cam and my boy Jordan, um, a project that we did together.

Um, we, there was a song on there called get to work, which was the title song for the PGA tour this past year. Um, wow. And another project with a producer named Reed Stefan, who's,

um, people most know him for doing tutorial videos as a puppet on instagram he's the man uh and that project's called 808 kills um you can catch us most recently on episode three and eight of hbo's the hype which is a street streetwear brand show um so that's where you did that yeah that's awesome yeah you gotta you got, you didn't send me that. I gotta check that out. Yeah. I gotta show you.

Uh, yeah, I gotta, yeah, we, yeah, yeah. There's so much. That's going in the bio. There's a whole lot, uh, been going on. Yeah. So yeah. Sync wise, you know, just, just doing a lot of stuff for video games and, you know, TV commercials, movies, all that kind of stuff.

Um, but yeah, I mean, that's another conversation for another time i guess clearly clearly but yeah follow i guess m11 son that's the main thing and then sacred wolves s-a-k-r-e-d wolves if you're in the philadelphia area general area come check out breed studios dm me yeah i got I got some guys that off the top of my head right now I want to connect you with right away. Awesome. Dude, I love it. You're on the pathway. You've already accomplished a lot,

but you haven't even scratched the surface listening to you talk because you're in such a great positive mindset now too. And obviously I didn't know you when this other stuff was going on, but you got yourself there through the not peak peak of the valley you know what i mean like the lowest point and so to see you building and also having ownership literally like in like literally not just the music but like in what you do and curating the space and and having your name on that that's that's awesome man so i love the story thank you for sharing it and thank you this was a beautiful conversation thank you man likewise man i enjoyed it all right

we'll do it again all right yep everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace Thank you.