Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Ian Rogers

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Beginning with being the webmaster for the Beastie Boys in the early 1990s, Ian Rogers’ career took off and helped forge the digital music landscape as we know it today. In 2003, Rogers was plucked to head up Yahoo’s $140 million music service and spent the next twenty years bringing digital music to the mainstream—after Yahoo, with Beats and then Apple. In 2015, he helped launch Apple Music and Beats 1, their digital streaming channel. Soon after, he stunned the tech world when he left Apple to become the Chief Digital Officer at LVMH, working with a portfolio of nearly one hundred brands across luxury, including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Sephora, and Hennessy. After five years at LVMH, Ian made another interesting career shift, joining the crypto security firm Ledger, where he is currently the CEO. ------- Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Get a free box of Dry Roasted Namibian Sea Salt Macadamias + 20% off Your Order With Code TETRA ------- Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------- LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with your order.

Tetragrammerton. You know, kind of when I was eight, nine, ten years old, I was taking computer classes. This place called the Creative Loop Next to G ocean college, which is I grew up in G ocean Indiana, 20,000 people in Northern Indiana. But there's a men and a night college there. And near my house, there was somebody had a computer class in their garage called... Was it a men in Night neighborhood? Kind of, yeah, I go shouldn't really have this personality

crisis that's definitely like in my personality where the North Side of town was kind of the rougher side of town and it's a very like factory worker town. There are, you know, it's the, there's Johnson controls was there and my mom, my uncle, my stepmom, and my grandma all worked at Johnson controls Like a real factory town. My dad was a fireman on the north side of town But then the south side of town there's Ghoston College and it's a small men and I college and I don't know that much about the

Men andites even to this day But I only have fond thoughts of them because they're very like peacenic missionary Kind people and so it's it's like I'm a yes of them because they're very like peacenic, missionary kind people. And so it's like al-Mesh, yes. It very, yeah. And so we had al-Mesh also nearby. My dad lived in the country and had al-Mesh neighbors, lived on the farm.

My dad had a log cabin in the woods. We lived on this, my mom lived on the south side of G ocean near, very near G ocean college. So the kids I went to school with were either the kids of factory workers or the kids of men and a night Gossian College professors. So there's this amazing combination of, you know, blue collar and college town in a way, but you know, it's men and night college town. So creative loop was a computer class that was in someone's garage. And I finished the class and then taught the class. What year was this?

So I have a card. I think it says I'm a level two computer programmer and it's 1983. I can show you. So in 1983 does everyone have computers? No, I mean, whether they're not. Nobody has computers. I was gonna say everyone had an Atari,

but that was three, four years later, even. Okay. So like it really was, the Apple II was, you know, I think it was really expensive. I would love to know kind of what percentage of my... I'm stupid. The Apple II have the kind of green screen. It was a one color screen and it was just text.

You know, in that day, we had a color screen on that Apple II Plus. I'm remembering what happened was we had an Apple 2 Plus, and then my stepdad got an Apple 2E, and the Apple 2 Plus moved to my bedroom. There's a photo I should show you that's so funny. It's me, probably age nine, sitting at an Apple 2 with like, you know, some music poster,

but my head I'm wearing big brown costs headphones, K-O-S-S, with the volume slider on the side. There's a shitty guitar here. There's like a Yoda puppet wearing 3D glasses. I showed it to headvig and she was like, oh my god, it's all there. And that was what I did. I just like, I played around on the computer. I played games, but I also did like basic programming. And that was it. Do you think your place in the world has more to do with being a first mover and being early, or does it have something to do with the way you think in the way you see the world? I think it has to do with the way I think in the way that I see the world.

You know, I grew up in this, in this small town and I never felt like I fit there. I felt my parents the same way, you know, neither of my parents live in that town anymore. My mom did that our kind of ancestry and found out that one of her ancestors was married to someone who was on the Mayflower. And I think about that, especially now that I live in Europe, because so often I come to Europe and people are like, what's it like to be the American? The Californian is actually how they think of me, the Apple guy, who came to Paris. I'm like, you know, I did my 23 and me and you know what it says? He says, I'm European. And I think when

you reclassify America. You feel more like you've gone home. I feel more like, again, if my mom's ancestor was married to someone who was on the Mayflower. Those people were crazy, crazy people. They left comfort to come to Total Mad Explorers. I said this to Gary Vaynerchuk last year, because he's got a stadium full of 15,000 digital asset collectors at this Vcon conference that he does.

And I said to him, I said, do you feel like you're bringing people to America 300 years ago? Because it is undoubtedly the land of, the future and the land of opportunity. And also, a lot of them are going to die. That's what it was like to come to America 300 years ago, but that's exactly what our ancestors did. And I feel this sort of restlessness in my mom, especially. My dad was looking for sort of perfection in a way. He wanted to get like, how do I get more of what I like, I would say. My mom is just restless, always moving. So there's definitely that in me

But also we lived in this small town and I really you know I've gotten over my bitterness, but in my 20s I had a lot of bitterness toward where I grew up because I really felt like I Had to unlearn what I was taught there. I felt like they wanted me to conform and I just couldn't do it I you know what happened and the way it connects to the computer story is my mom and my stepdad divorced when I was around 14. And we went from having computers in the home

to not having computers in the home, from having a little bit of money to not. My mom quit the factory because it was moving to Mexico and went back to college to become a nurse and spent five years doing a nursing degree. But during that time, she's working nights. I'm going to school, you know, a lot of macaroni and cheese and frozen burritos. And for me, I was just skateboarding in punk rock then.

It just fit. And, but that was so different. We were the only skateboarders in our town. Like, you know, our culture was thrasher magazine, Transworld skateboarding. How do you get into it? How do you get into skateboarding? If you're the only one, it's hard to even know about it. Exactly, so this is pre-internet.

Exactly, so Northern California, my stepdad's sister lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And Ann Arbor was actually super influential on me. Because, first of all, my parents are all music fanatics. My dad, my mom, my stepdad, my brother and sister. There's just always music in the house, always, always, always. It's the only thing I remember. And what do you remember the music in the house

being growing? It really dependent on the person. So my dad was... You were the baby. I was the baby. So my brother, my brother was... Right, your brother and sister were way older. Eight and nine years older than me.

Exactly. Half brother, half sister, eight and nine years older. So for my brother, I mean, I literally got a record collection for my brother because he outgrew his kiss records, handed them down to me. But I also remember my brother like reading me Rush lyrics

because he thought it was like high poetry, right? And like rap, listening to my older brother, tell me what he's doing. My sister was all this kind of great pop at the time, like early Sammy Hagar and the Romantics. And I can remember like driving around in my sister's Mustang listening to the first Brian Adams record, which was like, I still think it's like,

well, these are great. This is a great pop songwriting a great... Great pop songwriting. Yeah, exact pop songwriting, exactly. Now, my mom is still an Americana music expert, truly. And my dad, like a country or... I say Americana because the way Americana stands in opposition to radio country.

Americana, I think is interesting because it's one of the only genres that's defined by what it's not. Like it's basically, if it's not radio country, then it's Americana. And that can pull in everything from Taj Mahal, to Bonnie Rate, to Lucinda Williams, to Jimmy Dale Gilmore, and the flatlanders,

to, and, you know, so my dad had every willy Nelson record and every Bob Dylan record. I mean, I didn't know the story, but I had to ask my mom and she told her the way that my mom and dad kind of met and got together was at like 3 a.m. at a diner after the late factory shift. And I can't remember which one of them, I think my mom had a copy of Blond on Blond. And it was, do you want to come over and listen to it at three o'clock in the morning? And that's how my mom and dad met. And then my stepdad, he would come home every night and just sit in this striped chair

and listen to music. He was a music fanatic, a record collector. His taste, so he was into contemporary music. And he had an amazing record collection. The, it was his taste. Serious. So he was into contemporary music. He had an amazing record collection. The guy was a dealer. I'll tell you what I mean by that. He really knew how to drag me along. But he was buying new music.

So in the 80s, he was listening to the talking heads and the arrhythmics and R.E.M. And I never actually liked that stuff as a kid in a teenager because it was like, well, my parents listened to you, you know, my parents listened to REM. I wasn't gonna listen to REM, but, you know, I was into heavy metal, and I remember my stepdad, it was like, have you ever heard blue cheer? I was like, no, he gave me a copy of Vincenbus erupting.

You know what I mean? And my head exploded, right? Yeah, I remember hearing that for the first time and my head exploding. And I mean, I don't know, I remember being like 13, 14 years old and he was like, you ever had development underground? And I was like, no, you know, and then, and then I also had friends in high school,

Chad and Greg Miller were super influential on me. They were, because I was much more like, when I got into straight edge and minor threat, then I got into straight edge. I was like, all the way. But still pre-internet, how do you know about it? How do you even find out about it? Well, first of all, magazines.

So, it's Transworld Skateboarding Magazine, you could buy it the whole Mark Store. And then we found Thrasher. And I do think this is important because, then I found Maximum Rock and Roll. But you had to drive an hour from Goatheon to South Bend, to South Bend being where Notre Dame is, and you go to Tracks Records. And for there, you could buy the newsprint Maximum Rock and Roll.

So I would make my mom- That was monthly? Yep. And I would make my mom, and it came out of Berkeley, right? It just felt like a portal into another world. And I would make my mom drive me to Tracks, and like, if they had anything I wanted, but they didn't, an entire record store with nothing I was interested in. No, it was mainstream music.

Because it was mainstream music. So I would get a copy of Max from Rock and Roll instead and then you read the... Oh, like mail order for you for singles. I would have my mom write checks. Yeah. I would give my mom my allowance or the money I made washing dishes or like cleaning up the fairgrounds or whatever. I did to make money and I would give her my money and she would write checks and I would

just... Should you order like direct from SST? Direct from SST, alternative tentacles, but also all these, like I have the first operation, I have you seven inch because I remember when it came out, it was in Max from Rock and Roll and the review was good. So you ordered it from look out, you know, look out records in Berkeley, California, and along with isocracy in the first, like,

neurosis seven inch or whatever, you know, I mean it was it was just punk rock but so I was there and I did you know any punks at this time no no nobody and there was you know we made a punk rock band that no one ever heard you know what did you do in the band I played guitar cool I can show you that video it's funny I mean we just did covers of misfits and black flag songs. Misfits, black flag, minor threat, and then like three originals. What's the first punk show you ever saw? The first punk show I ever saw was my friend Ryan Timon's dad drove us to Chicago to see

it was Bastro, which was actually used to be Squirrel Bate, and it was very Louisville. Dagnasty. The Dagnasty's last show, actually I didn't find out until a few years ago, but I was like trying to find the flyer for the show and I found it on Dagnasty's site. Youth of today and Rollins Band. But it wasn't Rollins Band, it was the Henry Rollins Band. It was lifetime of just come out. So it was Rollins Band, but it was billed as, and for us it was like, isn't that the guy from Black Flag? You know what I mean? Like, Rollins' who Rollins

means to us today, it was like the most recent Black Flag vocalist. It was really what he meant to us. We went to see Youth of Today. We were straight-edge kids. You know, and it was at the Covey Bear in Chicago right across from Riggly Field. And to me, it was like, you know, there's 50 people in the audience and you turned your right and wrongs of standing next to you while you're watching youth of today. And that was life-changing, totally life-changing. And by the way, I'd seen lots of concerts at that point. I'd seen everyone from KISS with Wasp opening up, ACDC with Fastway opening up, you know,

and then the concerts that my parents took me to, Linda Ronstadt and Ted Nugin and whatever, but that was so different, right? Sitting in the bleachers in an arena, you know, watching Black E. Lawless hand out posters of his dick, compared to being in the room in a tiny room with the band that you're listening to at home and you feel like, ah, I could be on that stage. It's easily as them. We're just all together here. So yeah, that was, you know, super influential on me. But then I was just gonna say that another thing that was really key for me

is Chad and Greg Miller because where I was very narrowly focused on scenes in a way, right? Like I went from kind of heavy metal to skateboard rock in a way, you could say. And skateboarding and punk rock were together for you? For sure, that was definitely because, but it was just because of the people. I mean, I was listening to heavy metal, but there was, you know, TSOL and Agent Orange in Thrasher,

so I'm like, well, what's that? You know, what's that? And then this kid who had a firebird moved from Florida, and he had minor threat out of step on cassette, and he had agnostic front on cassette and dead Kennedys, and it was just like, wait, and then you just keep going. I remember, it's hard to imagine the era of the internet, but I remember seeing Steve Cavallero, skateboarder, where a misfit shirt. I think I spent two years looking for a misfits recording after that. That's how hard it was to get, especially in Ghost Indiana. It wasn't like you could walk into the record store and buy a misfits, seven-inch.

It didn't exist. But Greg and Chad Miller, they were into music. And that was, like mine, expanding, they were into Johnny Cash and the Stooges and Digital Underground and the Gettle Boys. And this is like, you know, as I, what time I remember, like driving to community college, my first year of community college or IUSB, my mom tells me not to call it community college, with Greg Miller listening to the ghetto boys record that you made. To them, it was all the same.

How the wolf and the ghetto boys were the same to them. I learned that from them. James Brown, Sline the Family Stone, Parliament Funkadelic, fit together with the stooages to them. I didn't see that, and they did. You know, they could also be like, oh yeah, dear prudence is the greatest song ever made and here's why.

They could bounce from the first digital underground record to dear prudence, and that, almost like musical athleticism, which I feel like Mojo Magazine represents today in a way, that I learned that from those two. So then to put the book ends on this, and I do think that this probably does some of my personality, like if we've covered G Ocean Indiana and then like having computers for this period and then not having them and just being skateboarding, punk rock. And also really feeling like pretty oppressed by Goshen and Dianna, like I didn't fit in at all at my high school. Like I remember, you know, teacher in my face,

you will never amount to anything. Like really, she was sure of it, right? I remember like, you know, the jocks from the high school literally trying to run me over in their car when I was skateboarding. It felt like as a teenager, it feels very real. It feels like war. It sounds like it actually was.

Yeah, and then my girlfriend gets pregnant when we were 17, totally had overheels as well. She's always mom really felt like this huge respite from this city. She's cool and smart and she didn't feel like you met her at school. Gochene, Indiana. Actually met her through a brother.

I skateboarded with her brother. Long story short, and I met her through a brother. And so, but she's pregnant. So, okay, what do we do? Wait, no, we didn't know what to do. We just sort of put one foot in front of the other. I ended up going to IUSB, Indiana University, South Bend, because my mom did. No one in my family anywhere went to college before my mom.

And okay, if she can do it, I can do it. And my friends were taking these computer classes. And I was just helping them with their homework. I was still in touch with my pre-my former stepdad, still I'm today. And I was like, you're not gonna believe it, but I'm actually like, I still remember this stuff. I'm like helping, you know, my friends with their schoolwork,

computer programming. He was like serious, a heart attack. He goes, he had changed your major right now. I was like, oh, no their schoolwork, computer programming. He was like, serious as a heart attack. He goes, he had changed your major right now. I was like, oh, no, no, I don't even, I'm looking at these computers. I don't even know what they are. Like, I've never seen these things before. Like, we've had these apples. These are these IBM clones.

It looks like total foreign world to me. He's like, they're all the same. And so, as always, mom was the valedictorian of our high school. We actually went to Indiana University, Bloomington, proper on her scholarship. I walked into the guidance counselor's office and said, I want to change my major to computer science. The woman said, enemy or business card and said, email me. I nodded my head and walked out there and was like, I got to figure out what email is.

I had no idea. And that was it. You know, it just took the classes. And that is who I am. I mean, I was always that music, fanatic, record collector. But then I had this love of technology. So to answer your question, I don't think it was necessarily about being on the forefront, but I guess I feel like,

I guess that's where it's exciting. You know, even now, you know, even even now, you know, doing crypto stuff when it's incredibly unpopular. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. It feels like where I'm supposed to be. And you talk about the Mayflower and that kind of You're looking for something that does that isn't there yet that we don't know is yet. You're looking at you're an explorer And I like it fits with with the fact that you've done as many things as you've done, different things, all really interesting, and somewhat different

than the last thing you did. Yeah, and to me, I'm always looking for the foundation. Like, where does this come from? And I also just think I have a belief that things will change. There's something in that, you know, that the fact that, you know, so one of my high school teachers told me I would never amount to anything. It goes together to me with the fact that, you know, in 1999, everyone told us, well, the

internet will never scale. Everyone will never have broadband. And in 2008, people told us, wow, I mean, everyone will never have a smartphone. You know, and then when Uber came out, people said, well, that's a nice thing for rich people. And so, to me, this is all the same. It's like the validation that people understand how important the stooages are today, right? Where, at own point, it wasn't. These things are the, what is it that people say about the velvet underground?

Everybody who sold 2,000 copies, but everybody who bought one started a band. It's an interesting thing. I had a conversation with Iggy and I said, the stuages were at the same time as the Beatles. Yet we think of the Beatles as 50 years ago and we think the Stooges as, it's current in some way. And I asked him, why is that? And he said, it's because we weren't popular when we were together. It's like, we're more popular now than we were then, whereas the Beatles were popular from the beginning, so we knew, everybody knew about them then. Yeah, they're a part of the culture of that time. Exactly. Stooges are a part of the culture of the late 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s.

I remember seeing a lot in Thurston and reviving the stoooges in the 2000s, doing it on stage at UCLA. So, yeah, yet feels totally contemporary. I think another theme for me is that, you know, technology, we like to think of ourselves as these like sovereign creatures and technology as a tool that we use. But I actually think that the lens that I look at the world through is that technology continues to reconnect humanity. Whether that's the printing press or train travel or automotive or air travel. It's always about the nature.

Yeah, it reconnects humanity. And when you reconnect humanity, you change humanity. Also, I think that the growth of population means there's no way to go back. You know, there were a billion people in the year 1900, 8 billion people today. You cannot go backwards. So a combination of technology and just overall growth continues to push us into new places. And I think when you believe that, then, well, now you go, well, where does it go? You know, what is new?

Of course, it will be different tomorrow. I think some people would like tomorrow to look like yesterday, and they I fundamentally do not. I know that tomorrow looks different, and then the question is, well, how is it different? Welcome to the house of macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood, sustainably sourced directly from farmers.

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no preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar, House of Macadamias. I roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate. Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacademias.com slash tetra. How did you first connect with the BC boys? So when I studied computer science at Indiana University,

and I had a kid, a baby, I needed a job. So I went to the work study building, and you fill out this form. What are you interested in? Oh, I was actually, what are you studying? Computer science, what are you interested in? Music. I think that was literally all I wrote on the paper.

I got a job at the Indiana University Music Library. There was a guy, Dr. David Fensky, who had this vision. He was talking, you were talking 1991 now, but he had this vision that we were going to move from reserve listening materials behind the desk. So you want to come, you're in M101 and you need to listen to Wagner and you put your headphones on and listen to all of that being on workstations throughout the library. It was a crazy vision in those days, but he was paying me for a work study job, and I said,

I would build it. So you just start coding. There was a card catalog. We put multimedia records in the card catalog. So there was already, say, an album in the card catalog, and then we would just add a little URL to it. And then, you know, we would stream that URL first from a computer under my desk to a computer on top of my desk.

At an IBM RS6000 under my desk with a multimedia file system, which was a new thing, and a next computer, next slab on my desk. And I wrote in next step this basically client that would search the card catalog and if it found a multimedia record it would stream the song. The first songs we did were also Sprock by Wagner and then Freddie Freelotor from kind of blue. I remember it because I did a demo for IBM.

IBM was kind of sponsoring the research program at, you know, Comdex. And I was in a booth kind of next to IBM, also had Gallagher on stage. So every hour Gallagher would do this show where he would put everything into a trunk. And then a think pad would come out, right? It was like, what if you had a way to write

and a way to, you know, like, it would all go to the trunk and then I think, and then he would smash a watermelon, of course, and then we would go into the parking lot and smoke a joint together. But I was just like wearing, you know, a polo shirt and playing Freddie Freelotor for people. So I had written all of this on next step and then OS 2, which was an IBM operating system.

And everyone was like, well, you're going to write this for Windows or Mac, right? Like for a platform that people actually use, I really didn't want to. But there was this brand new thing called the World Wide Web. I think only existed for X Windows at the time. It was invented by this college student who was about my age, maybe a year older, at a neighboring somewhat in university, University of Illinois, Mark Andreessen. And we got like early copies of Mosaic, I think it was called, for Mac.

And then there was a different one for Windows, but my idea was if I can make this thing a web application, then I won't have to write it for Windows and Mac. And so we ended up making the second ever music-related website for the Indiana University music library. You have to imagine it's like, there's nobody doing it. There's no audience. There's no audience.

You're making something for nobody. Exactly. My audience was just the library. Yes. I was like, OK, and if I can do a job. Exactly. If I can make it in this way, then I won't have to port it. Exactly. My audience was just the library. Yes. I was like, okay, and if I could be a job. Exactly. If I can make it in this way, then I won't have to port it. Yeah.

Right. That was the impetus. But then, I was, okay, so I was the keeper of the Beastie Boys FAQ on UZNet. FAQ being the frequently asked questions list. The way the internet worked in those days, it was just a bunch of message boards, like Reddit, basically. So I was like very active as you can imagine in, there was Alt Fan, Frank Zappa,

there was Alt Rap, was the guy, the Homeboy from Hell would do these amazing reviews of every new album that came out. Is that stuff still online if you wanted to read it? Yeah, all this stuff's been like archive. Yeah, the homeboy from Hell Reviews would be funny. I would love to know what that guy's doing now. I think probably in those days, all the David Bowie lyric transcriptions on using it, probably half of them had come from me. This is just what we did. It was like,

we felt like we were archivists, and we had to do this work. So anything you were interested in, you would figure out a way to document it and put it online. Yeah, and the BC boys to me actually, I remember I was a fan of the punk rock. I first heard the BC boys on the New York thrash compilation, the Roar cassette. So that's where I came from,

and I remember when Lysa said, What song was on that? I was a riot fight. A riot fight. A riot fight. And maybe they had B-S-T had BSTI on that one as well. I can't remember. What else was on that set, do you remember?

Yeah, it was definitely bad brains. That was life-changing. And that was because it was a roar. And then there was the bad brains, Rorcuset. So it went from Newark Thrasher to the bad brains Rorcuset, which was just like, I didn't realize then, but that's as good as it ever got. But you also had like,

was that just called Bad Brains, the workset, yellow cover? Yep. It was just called Bad Brains. It was just called Bad Brains. And then it's been called the Rorca Set, since then, but that's what it was. But also on that New York thrash cassette,

you had like, I can't remember all the bands. I mean, there was that song, I hate music. I love noise. I can't remember. I was like, you know, I mean there was that song, I hate music, I love noise. I can't remember. It was like, you know, but then there was a song, like China White, there was, it's a great, it's actually worth listening to. I feel lucky to have had that cassette.

So when license ill came out, I was actually, what happened, you know, I thought, fight for your right was totally cheesy. Yeah. It was years later that I appreciated license ill. And actually, I became a BC boys fan because of Paul's fatigue. You know, you mentioned yesterday, I love when you said that you remember buying back in black and germs GI on the same day.

Well, I remember buying an SST record by the tar Babies called Honey Bubble, 1989. We were driving to Lake Michigan. My friend Ryan bought Paul's boutique. I bought Tar Babies Honey Bubble and off we go to the beach. Turns out he hated the record for some reason. I think he wanted fight for your right and he got Paul's boutique. So he gave me the cassette, and I just remember

sitting on my floor, headphones on, reading the lyric sheet, and I didn't know what happened. It was so cool. Who are these guys? They made a record out of my record collection. You know, at that time I was into like, James Brown and Parliament, Funkadelic, but also Hendrix, and also the Beatles in my past.

And you know, there was so much, you know, here's a little Johnny Cash snippet and I was like, oh my god, someone in hip-hop, you know, like, you know, throws in Johnny Cash into a hip-hop record. What? And so I just became a fan and then when I got to college, one of my best friends was, as big came to college, a bigger Beastie boys fan than me and then you know I went to college from 90 to 94 so 92 check your head came out and we were just like Whoa, it went further, you know like they're playing instruments They did a hardcore cover of a Sline the Family Stone like Sline the Family Stone small talk is one of my favorite albums I grew up listening to punk rock.

And I actually loved hip hop as well, starting again from skateboarding. Like I remember going skateboarding at Cranbrook with a kid who was playing public enemy and just like, I heard it for the first time. I remember hearing Jennifer by De La Soul on like Notre Dame radio, and just sounded like it came from outer space to me, right? Jennifer by De La Soul on Notre Dame Radio,

and just sounded like it came from outer space to me, right? I remember hearing NWA for the first time, and I didn't know you were allowed to say these things. And so I already had all of that, but to me, check your head went even further and kind of packaging it into something that really felt relevant like to me. It didn't feel like I was observing someone else's culture.

I felt like it was really my culture. And so that was what I did. I kind of kept up with the BC Boy stuff online. And then there was this new thing, the World Wide Web. And I started putting everything that I knew about the BCie Boys into the site, and I'm an obsessive person. I think anything worth doing is worth overdoing. And I just, it became pretty much, it was, I think, I'm just guessing, you know, being

as objective as I can, but I think if you were just come on the internet and say 1994, and you were looking for things to see, The Beastie Boys website was probably something, even if you weren't interested in the band, it was something that you saw because it was clearly the work of a crazy person. It was like every magazine article scanned and put online. And then what happened was, we had recorded me and my friend Nate

and they were on Letterman, we were in Indiana. And this is again, just, all you're doing all this as a fan. Just as a fan, absolutely. And we, they were on Letterman and we recorded it into his computer and made a little quick time movie of it and we had it on the internet before it aired on the West Coast. And then the next day, I get an email from Bethan Boutimbom. Do you remember Bethan? She worked for Silva in those days and said, hey, the Beastie Boys manager would like to talk to you.

I was like, oh shit, the jig is up. You know, like I figured it was copyright infringement, but I also figured it was the internet. The internet nobody cared. I'm like, okay, and that was it. I mean, I, John called me and I'm like, okay, and that was it. I mean, John called me and I was like, yeah, you want me to stop doing this? He was like, are you kidding?

He's like, will you do this for all of my bands? And I was like, sure. He's like, all right, well, let me know what you want, what I need to pay you. And like, he had like the breeders in Sonic Youth. And then there was other weird stuff at Gold Mountains There was this like comic book thing called rocket comics They had Bonnie Raite they had you know as Gold Mountain entertainment and so me and my friends started

Building websites for them for eight dollars and fifty cents an hour. That's what we charge them I remember we had a Fistful again is what we called our company, named after the Kung Fu segment in the Kentucky Fried movie. And we had a whiteboard that said fistful of yen, turning rock stars movie into fun since 1994. And that was what we did. We thought it was an amazing gig because to be honest, building websites, the easiest

thing I'd ever done with a computer. You know, like just putting in it was fun. Putting text and image on a page. And it was fun. And we started, we did a bunch of, I mean, we had really had fun. We, I met this guy, you know, Jim Evans, who did the TAS poster art.

And he had a real vision for what the internet would become. And then the Beastie Boys were summer of 94. Beastie Boys came through Indiana, Beth Encauls, and she says, you have tickets to Lollapalooza already. You know, because remember that Lollapooza was supposed to be silver plusa, was supposed to be Nirvana Beastie boys, turned out not to be Nirvana Beastie boys

for tragic reasons, it was smashing Pumpkins Beastie boys. But also, it's kind of over it to be honest with you. Like I wasn't the biggest fan of ill communication and I don't, I liked punk rock shows, I didn't like big shows, I'd seen the biggest fan of ill communication. And I don't, I liked punk rock shows. I didn't like big rock big shows. I'd seen the Beastie Boys so many times on the Check Your Head tour and it was amazing. And I was like, there's no way Lollapalooza's like that.

And just I was that punk rock kid that wasn't interested in Lollapalooza. And so I said, no, no, thank you. Thanks, though. And they were like, what? They thought I was the biggest Beastie Boys fan on the planet. So of course, I'm gonna wanna go to La La Plusa.

I just, I still love the band. I just didn't think La La Plusa was for me. Also I didn't wanna be the guy, I'm like, how many Keto Major website, you know? I got, you never met the band at this point. No, not at all. And I'd talk to Silva, but mostly I dealt with Bethan, even, you know, I mean, I just kinda did what they told me to do.

They would send me a FedEx package with some albums in them and I'd put them on the internet, in a way. So much of today's life happens on the web. Square space is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using of square spaces best in class templates. With a built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus, so your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with fluid engine, a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

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No, no, no, no. What you made, your fan site turned into their website? No, no band had a website in those days absolutely nobody You know the one thing that existed that was related to you was the ultimate bandlist You know Geiger and Steve Rogers Had had done that and that's how I met them because there were like five of us doing music on the internet. Charles Como in LA, Rob Lorde in Santa Cruz, Steve Rogers, you know, through Geiger. And I got found through Jason Fiber who worked down the hall from Silva in Dave Allens at World

Domination. So there was one computer in the building and it was in Jason Fiber's desk in Dave Allen's record label. There was no body on the internet, it was in ghost town. But it was exciting. Anyway, they called back and said, the band has never seen the internet. They're really curious what you're doing. And when you come to the show, nobody had. Nobody had. Nobody had. Yeah. Well, and, and so I was like, oh, of course, like, if they're actually interested in it, I would love to come show it to them.

I would love it. So I go to Indianapolis, had one of the craziest days of my life, like, sort of like this foreshadowing of the rest of my life. Yauk was the warmest, most welcoming human being. You could imagine. And I think back on his warmth and the way that he just sort of brought, he's like, you're here now, basically.

Gave me a skateboard that day, wouldn't let me leave. I mean, literally by the end of the day, after I had played basketball at Billy Corgan, had George Clinton feed me spaghetti off of his fork. I'm like, where am I? Well, where are my in? I was like, guys, I came to show you the internet. Do you want to see it?

Yeah, I was like, come to Detroit. Well, it just come with us. I have a three year old. I need to go. I drove back to Bloomington, picked up my daughter, drove with Bethann to Ghost Indiana, dropped Zoe at my mom's, so I could go with them to Detroit. And then in this room showed them the internet on a slow dial-up, monochrome, apple laptop with a track ball in the middle, Mike, Tamra, Yauke.

Or if it's probably not in the room, didn't care. And then two people in the room who had seen the internet before, Mark Geiger and Matt Swini. Geiger saying that the internet was a year away, which is totally fits with where Geiger went after that, right? Because he was so sure and spent all that energy on artists direct. He had the vision. He was just early,

and then Swini being Swini was, hey, have you ever been to something.nl, which is the Netherlands slash Tilda Four, it's like black metal resource, like he had, I'd never met anyone who had URLs memorized like that, like I did actually. So that was 1994, summer in 1994, and the L7 women were in the room as well,

I don't remember, because they were on that tour. So that was it, and that was just the start of it. And to their absolute credit, the Beastie Boys got it immediately. I understood why they were actually interested, and they didn't just see it as something for nerds. They come from punk rock, and I always say that if you ever made a zine with a sharpie and a photocopier, then you understood the internet the moment you saw it.

And that was them, Yauke, Mila, Repa, and Mike had ground royal. And they both wanted to know, how do we talk to people without the radio and MTV? We want to talk to people directly. We want digital fanzine, essentially. Exactly. They saw digital fanzine. I think they deserve a ton of credit for that. Summer of 94, they were all in.

Y'all wanted to do everything on the internet. The first thing we did was millirepa. That was how we got started. I actually moved to LA to work at Grand Royal. And with Grand Royal, the magazine, the record company, and it was more than that. Yeah, I mean, it started as telling T-shirts, right? And then I think that actually,

the genesis of Grand Royal is very internet-like and I wish we could start it today with today's technology. Because really, Grandville started because... And stores too, no? Kind of. They were more, not really. I mean, I really think that the Beastie boys and all the people around them, Spike, Eli Bonner, etc., like they...

What they did was... Which is the same thing that a great designer like Jonathan Anderson or what Farell does for Vuitton, etc., is you're building the culture around your band in a way, or your brand, right, in the case of what Jonathan does. You know, Jonathan Anderson as an example, with his brand, J.W. Anderson, or with Loébet, he gets involved in adjacent cultures, photography, ceramics. And Jonathan can do a collaboration with a ceramicist who makes tiny ceramic penises, and then the very next day do a collaboration with Uniclo or Converse.

That feels very Beastie boys to me, you know. And it's not I only do this one thing, like with Kanye when he said it when I was in Chicago I felt like I was in a box with music. I feel like I'm in a box. I've got to get out of the box. I think there's something similar there to the way the BC boys did their thing and for that, for them it was totally natural to do X large and top shelf records and grand royal and a magazine and a record label and I think it was all just sort of, you know, what I was gonna say is they said, if you would like the lyrics, she,

I can't remember if it was just send a self-addressed stamped envelope or a dollar. I think it might have been a dollar to this address in Glendale. In Check Your Head it said that. And Mike told me there were like garbage bags full of envelopes, right? And they didn't know what to do with them.

And I don't know if it was Mike or who, but one of them said, if we just send these people here at Shete, where it is. Like, there's something here. Like, we, and I think that's again that punk rock thing. That's where Grand Royal magazine came from. They're like, let's make a magazine. And all of us, myself included, I can remember opening my mailbox in Bloomington, Indiana and getting that little card for Grand Royal

issue one. It was like, would you like Grand Royal issue one? Send $9 here, right? And that's kind of how it went. And then, you know, their friends, you know, Gabby and Vivian had Lusha Jackson. This is a great record. No one wants to put it out. Why don't we put it out? You know, and then Mickey from Winging had a side project called Moist Boys. Like why don't we put this out? Still a great record. Grand Royal, which I was a part of, it's final incarnation along with Silva and Gary Gersh. Like the magazine, though, the more serious it got, the worse it got. The further you got from the source. Like that the magazine issue one, the more serious it got, the worse it got. The further you got from the source,

like that the magazine, issue one was underprinted, issue two was overprinted, then they had a distribution deal and there was supposed to be a calendar and it was sort of like, okay, well, now we're on this treadmill and we have to do a magazine every quarter and the same thing with a record label, right?

I'm like, oh, well, now we're a record label and we're not just stumbling in anything anymore, to go look for things. So I think that, you know, it cuts both ways. So once you have that pipeline and you have to fill it, it's different than when you're making something out of inspiration. Exactly.

I was lucky, I actually, you know, did a tour with them in 95, it actually might called me and said, hey, we're going on tour in May. I'm just in grad school for computer science. And I had a kid. And he said, we're on tour in May. You know, they're still living in Indiana. They're still living in Indiana.

And we didn't email then, right? With those guys, you called. And usually you left a voice message and you got a call back, right? And so might calls. And he's like, you know, we're going on tour next year and we've got, we're taking Milo Repo with us for the listeners. Milo Repo was a BST Boyz not for profit that was dedicated to promoting compassion through music. First of all, how cool is that? But that's what they had in 94. But they knew that no one really cares about the not for profit and we wanted,

they wanted something exciting to draw people over. Do you have any ideas? I don't know, let me call you back. So I call back, leave a voice message. I'm like, okay, you know what would be cool is we're working on this CD-ROM. We're working on a BCBOY's CD-ROM that was like a collection of videos. It was a QuickTime VR of G-Sun Studios, and as you moved around and clicked on the pictures

videos, we'd play. And that was kind of like a video game. There's a QuickTime VR of G-Sun Studios, and as you moved around and clicked on the pictures videos, we'd play. And that was kind of like a video game, a BC Boys video game that played videos. So why don't we take the CD-ROM and we get old video game machines and we put Apple computers inside of them, and we make them like a BC Boys video game that you can walk up to and play. So I get a call back from John Cutcliffe. He's like, okay, the band loves the idea. that you can walk up to and play. So I get a call back from John Cutcliffe.

He's like, okay, the band loves the idea. We're gonna need a budget, pre-production's in April, Universal Studios in LA, so we'll need you there. We're gonna need to actually buy these video game machines. So I don't know if you can help us source those. And I was like, oh wait, there's been some kind of misunderstanding.

Mike called, he asked me for an idea. I gave him an idea. Yeah. I'm in college, I have a kid. for an idea, I gave him an idea. Yeah. I'm in college, I have a kid, I don't even know how to do it. Yeah. You should probably find someone who knows how to do it. And John Cutt Cliff changed my life in one sentence. He goes, you want to do this kid, we'll figure it out.

And I called Zoe's mom and I was like, I think the BC boys just asked me to go on tour with them. And to her credit, and we're not together, we live across the street from each other basically. She goes, you gotta say yes to that. We'll figure it out. And I just felt like, okay, how old do you? How old do you?

21. And we did it. A lot of it thanks to JC, by the way, because I didn't know how to do it from a production standpoint. But they were really fucking cool. We had these like plexiglass things A lot of it thanks to JC by the way, because I didn't know how to do it from a production standpoint, but they were really fucking cool. We had these like plexiglass things,

we like took these old video game machines that I bought in Indiana. And- But also nobody would know how to do it. That's the thing, it's like, it's not like you didn't know. It's like you're doing something new, you're making something new. And not knowing was-

It's part of it. It was part of the gift. It's part of it. If we'd have known how to do it, we wouldn't have done it. Of course. Because those things were not road worthy. Yeah, imagine this too You know how you go to a place like Madison Square Garden and it's all union and you're not allowed to touch your gear So it's may have 95 I've got homemade

video game consoles that you have to take out of an Anvil case, these Apple computers, and I have to direct these Union guys how to connect it all. Like, okay, take that box, put it there. Okay, take that cable, no, not that one. Yeah, you're gonna plug it in, no, no, the place where it looks like it goes. Yeah, there you go. Okay, like me for an hour, because I'm not allowed in, you're you. You're not a toucher. No, not toucher gear, it's union.

So this is like Bizarro land. I did it again for the 98 tour and I knew what I was doing. And we put everything in an anvil case. Like so you could just literally roll them off the truck, pop the faces off, plug them in and everything worked. Right, but in the first time it was really janky, but really fun. In dealing with big companies, whether it be record companies or any of the

corporate entities that you've had to interact with, tell me about those experiences. So I've worked in I guess three or four big companies. In 1999 we sold Nullsoft which made Winapp shout cast in ultimately Nutella to AOL. So we worked for AOL. My business partner and I started another company after that called Media Code that we sold to Yahoo. And I worked for a great human being named Dave Goldberg for a number of years and I took over for him as the head of Yahoo Music.

And then with Jimmy built Beats Music, sold Beats and Beats Music to Apple and then went built Apple Music at Apple and then went to LVMH, which you could also say is a big company. So I guess that's four big companies. But you also dealt with record companies, every regarding rights. You dealt with a lot of big companies. Absolutely. And that was, you know, in the 90s, that was really, really, really interesting for me. Actually, I think I got a lot from it.

First of all, I came to LA and I'll never forget my first feeling was when I dealt with capital records was, oh, wow, I care more about your product than you do. I was like, you guys go home at night and watch television. Wow, I don't. I go home at night and listen to records. And on the weekends, I go to Aaron's, and listen to records, and on the weekends I go to Aaron's records, and fat beats, and I just remember that realization that record label people were often people with jobs,

which I thought record label people would be people that were obsessed by music like me. So that was one revelation. The other thing though is there's great people. The man went away from me, because there were great people who really took care of me. People like Liz Heller, when I came to LA, we did the very first time that music had been streamed live. A live concert had been broadcast on the internet.

It was spearhead at the House of Blues. I don't tell you the date because it was my birthday in 1995. And Liz of course shows up with the birthday cake, right? We were doing this work thing, which was streaming a broadcast from the House of Blues on the internet, but Liz cared a lot about me as a human being. So when you talk about big companies, I think of that.

I think of the time that, you know, that those people put into me as an individual. You know, even Gary put a lot of, Gersh put a lot of time into me as an, Silva for sure. You know, Silva was at my daughter's wedding a few months ago. You know, it's like, so you really, you know, they're big companies,

but it becomes quite familial. There were also times when you really felt like it was a big company. So, 1998, the 1998 BC Voice Tour was incredible, and I wish all of it was recorded, because Mixed Master Mike made it so fun. The band had no idea what he was going to do until he did it. Every single night they'd make a set list, Mike would look at the set list and he would decide he was dropping things

that you were hearing on Power 106 at the moment and the band would have to do slow and low over it. Right? It made it really fun for them, and there were so many moments. It was like jazz. It was like free improvisation. There were so many moments when the beat would drop, and they would turn around and look at Mike like, no, you didn't. And he would look at them like, yes, I did. And then they would have to go with it.

It was really magic. It was fun to watch every single night. That's great. So I started recording bits of it and making MP3s, which was a very new thing, this is 1998, and you had to tell people what to do with it. It wasn't like, hey, I made an MP3. It was like, this is an MP3,

you've got to go get this program called Winamp, and then you can listen. People didn't know how to do it. I to, I remember being on the bus at night and I would encode them from the command line. I would take them out of the dat player, or it was like a mini disk maybe. I don't remember, you know, then you had to encode them and then post them

and then tell people what to do with them. But then, Capital Records, who I thought were my friends and my thought they were his friends, were like, you cannot do that. We like you, but this sets a terrible precedent. You are not allowed to do this. We were like, what?

I remember Mike got his, got one, I was really jealous. He got one of those Wall Street Journal, like, dot drawings of his face. Wall Street Journal, I don't know what those are. Wall Street Journal, you know, in the Wall Street Journal, like, dot drawings of his face. You know, Wall Street Journal, I don't know what those are. Wall Street Journal, you know, in the Wall Street Journal, if you get a cover story inside, they do like a little drawing of you. And this story about, like, capital records versus the Beastie Boys, because the Beastie Boys were releasing MP3s on their website,

it became... Oh, I see. And they were releasing Beastie Boys music on their website, it became, oh I see, and they were releasing Beastie Boy's music on their website, whereas Capital owns that and sells that. Exactly. And you're not allowed to give that away. Exactly, and it was more than that too, because what I was putting up was like,

Mixmaster Mike opens the show doing two copies of Tom Sawyer. Right. I wanted that to be out there. I was like, no, it's her this. You know, you gotta hear this. But that was a record label being a record label. Now, I didn't really experience it though

until I was at Yahoo Music. And I saw so much terrible record label behavior in those days because post 2001, things, and I actually, really, I was in a very weird position because Napster happened, and I was really I was I was in a very weird position because You know Napster happened and we were at I was at Nilsoft We knew Napster Sean Fanny well. We all hung out and I RC together I was the one that called the IRRI AA and said hey, are you gonna let this pass? Not because I wanted to tell on Napster

But just because I was like if you're gonna this go, then we're gonna be in this business. Right, you know, when you want to understand the lay of the land. Exactly, I'm looking at this going, there's no way this is legal, but here it's happening, and they didn't even know about it. They're like, oh shit, we ended up then creating Nutella, which we were like, wait, you're just suing Napster,

like this makes no sense. I was trying to license MP3s from the record labels. I had the biggest MP3 community on the planet with Winamp.com. And I was like, why don't we just sell MP3s? Sort of naively. And the record labels first said to me, well, what's an MP3?

Second, absolutely fuck no. And I remember saying, I remember who I had the conversation with, but what do you think you're going to do? L-M-N-T. Element electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? You want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add element electrolytes to your daily routine.

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remember someone the music business saying to me well we're gonna sell compact discs forever I was like no you're not I was like it's easy it's as easy for me to make an MP3 from a compact disc as it is for me to give you an MP3, like this is over. Yeah, it's the same. And so we made Nutella, so at Nilsoff, Justin Frankl made the Nutella protocol, and it was completely distributed. He just gave the code away.

So it's basically open source. Yeah, he opened source it. That is a story under itself, because what we realized was that there was no way to sue Napster, right? And I think that this is quite just the same way there's no way to shut down Bitcoin. There are these things that are fundamental. For me, as a technologist, I was like, wait,

distribution is trivial. And that's a technological reality. And it's almost like physics at this point. So unless you're also going to shut down email and the web, then you're not going to shut down the fact that it's trivial for me to transfer bits to you. So what you can do, though, and maybe probably should, is make sure that people can't run a business on copyright infringement. I remember when Napster raised $70 million, which was a ton of money in those days, I

remember texting on IRC, chatting with Sean and saying, Sean, don't take the money. You cannot build a business on copyright infringement. I just was like, you're gonna drive the car off the cliff. Like it was just... So it didn't take money, what would have happened? Well, I think that you had this incredibly unique moment where there was this thing that was technologically possible and in many ways inevitable. And it was completely misaligned

with like the business realities of the moment. And Sean, I think in so many ways, was perfect because he was smart enough to build the program, but not smart enough to not do it, right? Not smart enough to say, oh, this is probably copy-writing for engagement, and I shouldn't build a business on it, and I shouldn't take a big check from venture capital because then I put a big target on my back, right?

At the same time for us, we'd already sold our company big check from venture capital because then I put a big target on my back, right? At the same time for us, we'd already sold our company to AOL, so we were just sort of interested in like, where does this go? We know that Compact disks go away, but we don't know where this goes. It was brand new. There was no iPod. Did you have any thoughts of where it could go? I'm trying to be honest about what I thought at the time because I know by 2000 or 2001,

I knew it was subscription. But in 1999, what could the record companies have done that would have been smarter? Well, 100% and what I told them every single day is, listen, I have an audience of people who like MP3s. This is a new format. They want music in this format. Just treat it like another new format. Exactly.

They're telling you they want this format, you should give it to them in this format. It was that simple. For me, the answer was sell MP3s. And nobody wanted to do that. They all wanted to find some way to use digital rights management. Microsoft was pitching them on this digital rights management. You had, I mean, at the time, Rhapsody was getting started around 2000, 2001.

I mean, you had MP3.com, which was like, what did Rhapsody become? Rhapsody, that's, it became Napster, actually. Really? Yeah, because Rhapsody was Rob Reed and Rhapsody was, I believe standalone, going from memory here. I believe it was standalone. Then I think it got sold to real networks.

Then once Napster was just a brand, Chris Gourag, I don't know if you remember him, bought the brand. And then there was a point, and I'm trying to remember now if this was Rhapsody or not, or MTV bought the whole thing. You know, everybody wanted to try to find their way into some kind of a subscription service. Here's the lineage from my perspective, and I do think this relates to where we are today with crypto and blockchain. You had this thing that's technologically possible, therefore inevitable.

You know, Napster was just kind of exploiting that in a gold rush moment, right? You had this thing that's technologically possible, therefore inevitable. Napster was just kind of exploiting that in a gold rush moment. There was this perfect timing where there was a gold rush, so you could raise money for copywriting infringement. That's insane. But there was a moment in time when you could do that. And Napster did. But then all the pieces come crumbling down

and they have to get picked up. With Nutella, it was in some ways a bit of a nail in the coffin. Because, and that was our, for me at least, that was intentional. I didn't write Nutella, it was Justin Frankl, but spiritually for me, I was like, guys, you cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Let's just fast forward to the end of this as quickly as possible so we can move on to what's next. Time magazine called and got Tom Pepper from Nullsoft on the phone and said, isn't this for trading music and movies? And Tom said, no, we built this to trade recipes. Which is so clever, it was his way of saying, this is about so much more than trading movies and music.

It's about everything. It's about trading everything. Distribution of bits is trivial. And you have to accept that and now build the industry with that assumption. And I think that just took a very long time. And there are a lot of machinations. And I think so, so much of this story is so interesting because you know, Tony, Fidel and Steve Jobs built the iPod, but then the iPod, the Apple Store.

And it was really Steve Jobs with a lot of help from Jimmy actually convincing the industry to do this. But if Apple hadn't been only 2% of the market, it probably wouldn't have happened. You know, I mean, Jimmy convinced the industry that, guys, why not? You know, Steve Jobs guy knows what he's doing and he's good at marketing. It's a great product. And it's only 2% of the market. And they're not going to do it themselves. Exactly. So let's let it, let's take a flyer and see what happens. Right? And all the rest of us, and I say the rest of us, because I was at Yahoo building on this Windows Media ecosystem, but other people were as well. Rhapsody, Virgin had a music service at the time.

You know, it's et cetera, everyone trying to compete with with the iPod. But the iPod had this advantage because they own the whole stack. Clayton Christensen in the innovator'smma says that when the technology is not yet good enough, the integrated solution always wins. Right? So Apple was the integrated solution, and the stack that we were on was this disintegrated solution. You know, we were Windows, plus Windows DRM, plus music net, plus Yahoo, plus a media player from Toshiba, Samsung, Iriver, creative, Rio, you know, all of those totally disintegrated, more like Android, where Apple was more like iPhone.

And I think what I find so interesting about this is that you knew it was coming, but you couldn't predict what it was. And there were so many people doing it. If you went to a music tech meetup in San Francisco in 2001, 2002, there were 150 companies there. Most of those companies would be out of business in just a few years. And if anybody would have told me in 2002 that the company that would crack the model that we all believed in Would be Swedish and they would start with Europe. I would have laughed my head off

Yeah, insane that'd be like you telling me that you know the kid in the wheelchair from to grassy high who lives Who's from Toronto is gonna become the world's biggest rapper? I'm like no fucking way. That makes no sense Maybe Atlanta. Yeah, but if not New Yorker LA, it's not gonna be Toronto. I'm like, no fucking way, that makes no sense. Maybe Atlanta. Yeah. But if you're not New Yorker, LA, it's not going to be Toronto. I'm sorry, right? But that's what I love about these things. Is it, in 2007, it was impossible to predict the iPhone would be a success. Yeah. I love that.

And I always, I think of that today, like, okay, we just had EathCC conference, you know, the big crypto conference in Paris, full of amazing companies, probably most of them will be dead in 15 years. When did you first hear about crypto? 2009. And what was your immediate take? So yeah, Parker Brooks in my office told me about Bitcoin and was like, this is so cool. I was like, what is it?

And so, you know, I did the deep dive and got to the point where I said, well, this can't exist because this threatens state sovereignty. And if they got rid of Napster, Lymewire, Bear Shayer, etc., then they can get rid of this. And I really believed it was a parallel because they didn't get rid of file sharing. You know, torrents and everything still exist. They did get rid of it as a business. There was no business operating on the business of copyright infringement anymore. It had been put into the penalty box, right?

Like so, yes, there were still plenty of ways to get free software and free music. But they had said, that's not a business, that's illegal, and we're gonna throttle it, and we're gonna promote these industry-approved ways of getting music like Spotify, et cetera. So this is 2009, so Spotify would have been new. And also, the internet was becoming not the internet, at that point. That was another thing I was afraid of and believed,

and what I mean by that is, we have it today. If Apple doesn't like your app, then your app doesn't exist, right? And so that's not the internet. The internet is free. Yeah. Everything's open. Everything's free. Anyone can try anything. Exactly. You register a domain name. Yeah, who.com. If people come to your domain name, you win. That's not the app store environment. So I, I didn't still do it, but you will be in the app store. And you won't have distribution. So I, I, I didn't still do it, but you won't be in the App Store. And you won't have distribution. So 2009, 2010, when I saw Bitcoin, I was like, this is super interesting.

I think that they'll put the Kibosh on this the same way they did Napster. But there's not a company to sue in the case of Bitcoin. But there wasn't a company to sue in the case of Nutella either, and they had managed to get rid of any company that had built on the Nutella platform, on the Nutella protocol. So that was what I thought was, well, you can't get rid of this Bitcoin thing, but you can make sure that nobody in the financial world touches it. And so then what happened, which I thought was incredibly interesting is it just got ignored long enough and in the meantime got big enough that Game Theory came in in a way where, well,

now it's too big and there's too much value in the ecosystem. So there's too much at stake in shutting it down. What is the value in crypto now? It's around a trillion in the total market cap. It was over a trillion when things were hot last year and it's under a trillion today, but it's on that order of magnitude. And it'll easily be 10 trillion, easily.

There's just no question. Maybe the part that people will find interesting is, because it's hard to remember, we look now, we're like, oh, Spotify and Apple music and YouTube. But man, there was a time when YouTube was the most illegal thing on the planet. Everything on YouTube was copyright infringement. I think a lot of it still is, honestly.

Well, and they've backed, but if you think about it, they're the only company that's ever done the Indiana Jones, like bag of sand in the amulet. Trick, right? They've gone from being totally illegal to being legal. And there is a way to make money behind it, but that was not a foregone conclusion at all. And again, you have to remember all the naysayers, all the way through.

You have to remember, the internet's never gonna scale, everyone's never gonna have broadband. I had a senior AT&T executive tell me in 2002 that we'll never do video on the internet. It wasn't built for that. It's too lossy. Apple stock took a hit when they launched the iPhone

because everyone's never gonna pay $500 for a smartphone. Like when Google paid what they did for YouTube, everyone thought they were idiots. When Facebook paid what they paid for Instagram, everyone thought they were idiots. When Facebook paid what they paid for WhatsApp, everyone thought they were idiots. And I love what they paid for WhatsApp, everyone thought they were idiots. And I love this, of course, because, you know,

when I, you know, come all the way back, like when I were, like, Bermuda shorts in the sixth grade, I got made fun of, and five years later, those same people were wearing Bermuda shorts. So I feel like I've seen this movie so many times. And that, I think, is the, that's the pattern matching that I'm always looking for. And also why I say like, I'm always looking

for the fundamentals. You know, it's never a trend. It's always actually an anti-trend. But you go like, what's real here? Isn't there something real? It's the stooages. It's so fucking real. Like of course, Fun House is gonna be something

worth listening to 30 years later. It's so fucking real. Yeah. Of course, Fun House is going to be something we're listening to 30 years later. It's so primal. And I feel like that's where these things are the same. In I was in 1992, I was making beats with a next computer, like copying, pasting, sampling, movies, sampling, David Bowie, and copying and pasting and making songs that I liked. I was like, why doesn't everyone do this? Like why are people using these eight-second samplers?

Like, shouldn't you be doing all this on a computer? I thought I was just like young and dumb and there was something that the smart music people older than me knew. Later I realized, oh no, they will eventually. I'm just like a little early to the party. And so you have to look for it and you go, oh yeah, this is real. This is totally doable. I feel the same thing today.

I was trying to pay somebody using my banking application on my phone with the, I'm using a French bank account to pay someone in another country and typing in the e-band and the BIC and then I'm getting denied and then I'm waiting three days and then, I'm like, oh my god, of course this isn't the way this is done 20 years from now. Of course. We're in this place today where the technology that I use to get into a party at an NFT conference is superior to the technology I use to enter America. That changes.

You know it does. I don't need any old person to tell me no, it doesn't. I don't care what you say. Of course it does. But then the part I love is we don't know how. You can't predict that it'll be Spotify. Everyone would have bet against the iPhone. It was more logical that Microsoft would shrink the computer and windows into a handheld

device than it was that Apple would upscale the iPod into the smartphone. You wouldn't have bet on that in 2003, 2004, even 2007 you would have bet against it. Even after you used the iPhone, you would have bet against it. That's the part that I love. You know directionally where it's going, but you know you're going to be surprised

by the possibilities. I also think in many ways that's very scary, because I think the internet has taken us to places, you know, as excited as I was about the internet in 1995. There's this moment in a boardroom in LVMH, LVMH CEOs on one side of the big conference table, managing director of LVMH Tony Belloni next to me, Benara No in the room. I know myself and so I leave my cell phone at my desk, right? Because if it's in front of me, I'm going to pick it up. Everyone in the room is including Benara No is on their phone. And Tony Beloni stopped the room and he's like, hold on, hold on, hold on. I just want everyone to notice that the only person in this room,

not on their cell phone right now, is our chief digital officer. And I said, Tony, I was one of the first people on the internet and I intend to be one of the first people off. And he goes, always an innovator. But there is something about it. Like to me, it's not just about the technology.

It's like, where is this going? What is this doing to us? How is this reconnecting humanity and what does that mean? Do you have any projections for what do things look like in 20 years? I always like to. Ask this question of my daughter and I just did a podcast series and at the end of every podcast,

we ask people, what do you think that thing is, that seems crazy today, but we'll just be taken for granted 20 years from now. First of all, big picture, I think it's worth mentioning. I think reading the network state by biology, certain of awesome, I don't know if I'm saying it's the last thing correctly, is important. I think it's an important read, it's very challenging,

whether you like biology or not, is important. I think it's an important read. It's very challenging whether you like Belagio or not as you're relevant, but this notion that we're moving from God to state to network, that if we were alive in 1500, the final arbiter of truth would be God. After you know Nietzsche and the French Revolution, that became the state. It's not thoughts and prayers. It's let someone should make a law. And now the final arbiter is the network. And that seems futuristic until you realize that a few years ago the networks unseated a sitting US president. They silenced sitting US president and you're like, oh yeah, that's already here. The network already has a bigger constituency and more power than the state. And then you also realize, you know, you would say,

okay, well then the states aren't gonna go quietly. So that means there's probably gonna be warfare between state and network. And that seems future. And then you go, well, wait a minute, isn't anonymous, Sean Carosov would be proud. At war with, you know, the Russian government, they are. You know, they're doing very real things in a combative way,

network state, anonymous versus state state, Russia. So I think that directionally is correct. We're already in a place where we care more what our network neighbors think about us than our physical neighbors, right? You and I are Americans, deaf American, American recording American, American music American, love Kid Rock, friends with Kid Rock Americans, we're real Americans, yet we don't, you and I don't really live

and exist under the American government for the most part, right? We pay our taxes in the U.S. and spend part of our time there. And, you know, but we're very much network citizens. So I think that that is, 20 years from now, that is probably the biggest thing for society. I think there are these smaller things that are just fun, though. And to me, this is where I think about, because I think about product direction and what's the next most valuable thing to build. So do you think that the idea of the digital nomad is like, that's where things are

going? You know, I think that the internet fundamentally moves us from mass market to massive niche. I think this is where the world that you and I like love, and I think we sort of share this love of what media has brought us in a way. But that... Explain that, I don't understand.

What I mean is like, you know, whether it's music or, you know, the television that we grew up watching, like we're very much products of the technology that was available at every moment in our life. You know, I don't want to speak for you, but I certainly wouldn't be who I am without cable television and VHS and HBO and then ultimately Spotify Apple music, right? Or like, you know, and to me there is, but there is this like very consistent progression. In other words, like, let's say that the moment was the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, like where everyone watched the same thing. And you actually can't separate that from the popularity of the Beatles. The Beatles were as good as they were, so that's what allowed them to keep going.

But everyone knew who the Beatles were because of technology, in fact. It's a moment that cannot possibly come back. And this plays out in other realms. When I was at the JP Morgan conference last year, and I'm watching a bunch of old white billionaires sit on stage and pontificate on, when are we going to get back to a more centrist political dialogue? That's like saying, when are we going to get back to the Beatles?

That's like saying, when are we going to get back to a world where there are only three channels on television? Well, guess what? We're not. Yeah, the example that I give often is when the Godfather came out, everyone you knew saw the Godfather, and then at the Oscars that year, it won best picture. Now, if you find out what are the pictures coming,

you know, the best picture of the year Oscar, they'll be 10. You've never seen any of the 10, and no one you know has seen any of the 10. That is a great example. That is a great example. Yeah, because everything everywhere at once, we didn't see it until after it won the Oscar.

And when we saw it, we couldn't believe it won an Oscar. We loved the movie, by the way, but it just seemed too far afield from the mainstream. We're like, wait, other people love this movie as much as we do? In some ways, the mainstream stopped being the mainstream. Okay, like, wait, other people love this movie as much as we do? It's right, in some ways the mainstream stop being the mainstream. Okay, so Jeff Jarvis is the best spoken on this, I think. And I love him as a voice on this, because Jeff was the editor of People Magazine in the 80s for sure, maybe even 70s.

And what he says is that it used to be that you could just take whatever was on television and put it on the cover of the magazine and it sold. But I think it was in the 80s when he's like, that just didn't work anymore. We had to create this new thing called celebrity, right? And what I like about it is he talks about how culture started to move away from mass before the internet. And he attributes it to VHS, cable television, because what you had was an expansion of consumer choice.

Right? And so I think, we were learning about Stacks records earlier, and you can't separate who they were from the distribution of the time. And they had to get into that, but they also weren't Motown. And Motown was Motown partially because of distribution. Stacks wasn't Motown, partially because of technology

and distribution and access to capital and access to other things, and Atlantic was Atlantic, right? Like these things were not only about the music, they were also about these very physical things, it was difficult to get things in front of people's ears. So now you have this infinite consumer choice. So I think that just keeps going. You ask if I thought digital nomadism was the future.

I think the future is just tribalism. So there will be tribes of digital nomads. There will be tribes of true Americans. And there will be tribes of like true Americans. And I think that this is what is happening. You know, I had this realization many years ago, and I think I'm wrong. I'm just kind of oversimplifying so that I can make sense of where we might go. I was like, well, if you just sort of follow this out,

there's only two possible outcomes. One is global government. And the other one is, everyone relocates to kind of fit their ideals, which also sounds crazy until you think about a ski town. You know, like the example I always use is that I think, you know, very difficult to elect someone who represents the ideals of Goshen, Indiana, today, the way it was possible when my dad was a kid. At the same time, you could probably elect someone

to represent the ideals of a ski town. Everyone's there for roughly the same reason. Yeah, we're a surf town. Yeah, in any place where people get together for a shared interest. Exactly. I think to tie these things together, I feel super lucky that I didn't grow up loving mainstream culture

because I think if what was on NBC on Thursday nights was what I was into growing up, then the internet would have been really confusing to me. But because what I wanted was a skate video that you had to mail order and a seven inch that you had to mail order. The internet felt like a means to an end. To me, the internet wasn't, I mean, the late 90s, I was totally confused by the gold rush.

I was like, what is going on? I don't understand any of this stuff. Which is funny, as technologists, people would have thought like, I had my finger on the pulse, but I didn't at all, because I wasn't an opportunist in that way. I was just trying to solve problems, and I just loved music.

And the same thing when I worked at LVMH, I was a chief digital officer, which is kind of meaningless, right? I'd never used the word digital before. It's like using the word oxygen all the time. And I think the same thing now, as we're kind of entering, I mean, I really look at the internet as this revolution of information and blockchain and crypto as a revolution of value. And you just go, oh, well, it's just the same kind of progression.

You know, like Clayton Christianson says, there haven't been new human problems in 100,000 years. You know, we just hire new technologies to solve old problems. So then you're just going, oh, well, what's a better way to do what people naturally want to do? Well, if we're naturally tribal, then we're going to... You connect with the people of your tribe. Exactly.

And it makes sense because you grew up in a school where you were the only punk rocker. I grew up in a school where I was the only punk rocker. If I had the internet at that point in time, I would have had friends all over the world. Exactly. But I didn't. I met people who liked the same music as me on the internet in the early 90s.

A lot of those are lasting friendships. And when I wanted to research something, I would go to the library and research something and look at old microfilms of old newspaper articles. And now I go online. Exactly. New technology to solve all problems. Up until LVMH, you had many different jobs.

You did a lot of different things. All of them, they seem all to be music related. Yes. All music related. OK. Tell me about the jump from the world of music to the world of luxury. You know, if you think about it, that I described that first streaming music application on the early 90s, and then we did Winapp and kind of 98, 99, Robin I did Media Code after that.

We sold that to Yahoo. We built Yahoo Music Unlimited, which was a music subscription service. The first $5 a month, all you can eat music subscription service. We had launch cast, we had other, you know, media projects. It tops bin with Peter Goacher, who invented Pro Tools and Digit Design.

Which was a great idea. That's when you and I met and... I feel like we met before that. I met, but when we, yeah, I remember, because I remember you coming to the top spin offices and it was when you were making the Metallica record, I remember that. Because I was like, is it Master of Puppets, please? And I always say San Francisco's wax and Master of Puppets.

And then we did Beat's music and Apple music. And really, I couldn't have been more proud. I actually really loved working with Jimmy. I loved working with Trent. I loved working with Luke. I loved working with Zane. Love. When it went from beats to Apple, how was that different? You know, it was completely different. I mean, working with Jimmy is so exciting. I remember when I was at Topspin, you know, Jimmy really wanted me to come work at Beats. I was like, okay, buy my company, that's easy, but he didn't want to do that.

He just wanted to harass me. I remember one time sitting outside of, I was locked out of my house waiting on my wife to come home and my phone rings and pick it up. It's like a block number, I pick it up. Ian, what are you doing? Why are you still in the minor leagues? They're a major league player, Ian. What are you doing in the minors?

Like, Jimmy, man, I'm working my ass off at my startup. Like, come on. I have to say, he was right. Like, the work that we did at Beats was a different level. Like, sitting with... But describe what top spin was, because I thought it was a really great, helpful idea and revolutionary at the time.

You know, and I'm really a big lesson for me because it was a commercial failure. But to me, the idealism and the spirituality of Topspin lives on, and actually at LVMH, I leaned more on my Topspin experience than anything else I'd done in my career. Because Topspin was a platform for direct to consumer marketing and retail of music.

You know, aimed at music, but it still would do the same thing for whatever you put in it. And you know, really, like, I would say that the people that did Topspin better than us, number one is Bandcamp, because they did exactly what we were trying to do, but it's what Bandcamp is today. What Bandcamp is today, and Bandcamp did a bunch of things that I never would have done that made them successful,

but I would have bet against. Again, are those things. Bandcamp.com. I thought it was artist.com. I never, and templates. I never would have had it. For me, an artist wants to. We always have all of the personality.

Everything would start with the artist. Exactly. The name on it would be the artist's name, and everything would stem from there. Exactly. It would be with the artist, exactly. The name on it would be the artist's name, and everything would stem from there. Exactly. It would be the artist and the fan. My point of view was there are two people who matter in the music business.

People who make music, and people who love music. So, band camp would be invisible in your world. In my world, there would be no band, I would have never, today I actually find out a lot of new records from band camp, because whether it's Subpop or 4AD or some label that no one's ever heard of, I get the notice from Bandcamp.

I never would have thought we would get to that point. I thought Bandcamp would be like MP3.com, a backwater for people who can't release somewhere else. So I had it wrong. And also templatized, right? Come on, where's the creative expression of the artist in this page? It can't just be a distributionized, right? Like, come on, where's the creative expression of the artist in this page? It can't just be a distribution network, right?

I was wrong. And so we built tools, and I also thought that the commerce part of it was sort of commodity, and that we really needed to be about communications and marketing. How do you reach people? And this is a theme that's really come back for me, and actually, LVM H helped me solidify it into sort of a grand theory of brand marketing and

retail as two sides of the same coin. I wish I would have understood that as clearly in those days. I had an inkling of it, but I was trying to boil the ocean. I was like, artists want to leave labels and go direct to their consumer, so what's all the tools they need to do that? And that was just more than we could accomplish. So it's all the tools they need to do that? And that was just more than we could accomplish. So it's almost like what Bandcamp could eventually turn into would be what Topspin was. Yes. Here's the best way to, in my brain, Bandcamp is a part of it. At Topspin, we also, we wanted to be Bandcamp kickstarter and patreon right and kind of you know ticket

master or direct to consumer ticket master you know what I mean like that was just too much you know those companies have all been smarter than us because they did something very specific instead of trying to do it all and that's a great lesson for an entrepreneur I think but then at beats like it really was the big leagues which in me right because I right? Because I think we had started building, I had started building Beats Music. Let's see, I joined the company in December in March. Jimmy calls me and is like,

Ian, can you come in the office at 8.30 tomorrow? I've got a meeting I wanted you to join. Yeah, of course. I didn't know what it was. I come in the office, it's Tim Cook and Eddie Q. Like, Jimmy, what are we doing here? He's like, show him what we're building with beats music. I'm like, really?

Like, we're just gonna give it to them and we also haven't really built it, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, show him, show him. That was Jimmy, right? Masha from Softbank wanted to buy the entire music business at once, by the time. Like, when we were building beats music, and so sitting in the room with Jimmy and Masha,

and basically Masha asking me, what's it going to cost me to buy the entire music business? I was like, yeah, I'm definitely playing in a different league at this point, right? So that's what it was like to work with Jimmy. And Trent and Trent is, I think, a true renaissance man, true creative genius, and just incredible to work with. Now then when we sold to Apple,

we were really like, we were on a short fuse. And I learned very quickly, Apple works on these two events that they have every year. And everyone in the company knows when their event is gonna be on stage and you bust your ass to get your thing there. We knew about the deal in March of the following year from the story I just

told. The deal leaked in May, let's say, we closed the deal in June and we made it through kind of like the regulatory closures and everything and we were actually allowed to be inside of Apple August 1st. Eddie Q walks into the room with the Apple engineers and he says, okay, this is going to be on, Apple music is going to be on stage in June, so get to work. And the Apple engineers, Jeff Robin, who had been, when I worked with Tony Fidel on the original iPod iTunes, it was like, absolutely no way, Eddie, there's no way we can build this thing between now and June. And Eddie said, well, Tim's going to announce it, so you better figure it out and walked

out of the room. So that's what it was like to be at Apple, and they throw the building at it. And it was really fun, actually. If you throw the building at something, can it be done? Yes. We announced Apple Music on, let's say June, I'm going to make it up June 6th, and we launched it on June 29th. So we were three weeks late, but we're in a year late. There are lots of things about it

that I don't think were perfect, but you know, Zayn and I built radio station that was in three cities, you know, and on 24 hours a day. And that's been over since. And has never turned off ever since, you know. That part was extremely fun. And you have a lot of resource.

I remember when Virgil first joined Vitaon, he said to me, he said, it's the first time in my life when my only constraint is time. I felt a little like that. We didn't talk about budgets. If we needed something for the studio, we got it. Zane wanted something, we got it. We got it done. So time was the constraint.

Nothing else. Does it ever work the other done. So time was the constraint. Nothing else. Does it ever work the other way where by time being the only constraint, it ends up, the palette becomes too big to focus. Is there any benefit to having the constraints? I mean, I think creativity loves constraints. I think time is a great one though. In something like this, also I'll speak for as being a software developer, you could always make it better in software. And reducing scope, they call it an MVP, a minimum viable product in the world of software. And that's a great exercise.

I can't remember where I read it. I read all the software books, kind of Joel and software rework, all these things. And the trick is to build the simplest thing that could possibly work. And then you go from there. And I iterate better over time. Exactly, I like that as a notion. What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?

I would argue Justin Franco, who is the only person to ever touch the Winham II code, the only person to really write Nutella, he made another thing called Waste, he made ShoutCast. He made Reaper.fm. He's probably the absolute king of this. He builds things that are very simple, very clever, very powerful.

And so, I don't know. There's something in that, you know, for me. And then to come back to the music to luxury questions, again, so proud couldn't have had a better career. As you know, digital music was a bloodbath. Very few people had success in digital music. There were a lot of us who were passionate about digital music, but the actual successful outcomes were few and far between. And I was lucky to have three of them.

And I'll soft to AOL, media media code to Yahoo, beats to Apple. And I really felt like, if you're playing Blackjack and you keep winning, stand up and walk away. And that's what I felt. I was like, wow, okay, here I am in Apple. But also to feel like you cracked the code, like you did it. You went to do a thing. You know what I remember?

And you'll appreciate this given that you know him well. First of all, this is a great story. There was this amazing meeting at the So House in West Hollywood. So House was new, it was in the middle of the 2000s, and it was a real come to Jesus meeting for the music industry. And kind of everybody was there. And I remember Geiger saying, streaming is a future, and we all know it, but the game hasn't started yet.

Until Apple's on the field, the game hasn't started yet. Still in the locker room, right? So, Moscone Center, announcement of Apple Music, I'm sitting 10th row, Tim Cook walks out on stage, the words behind him are, we love music. I love music, as Zappa said, music is the best, right? So just, I'm just, I'm in heaven. And I'm thinking, wow, I started building

streaming music in the early 90s. And now it's on every iPhone. It's literally a part of the operating system. And I said, well, thinking of Geiger's words. And I was like, the game is starting right now. And I remember I called my wife that night. And she was like, how was it? And I was like, honestly, it's like, my life's work. And I said, I think it's also the

finish line for me. Yeah. I don't think there's anything for me to do here anymore. Yeah. You know, we're not going to start the next sound cloud or it's done. But I had no idea what I might do. You know, and you got golden handcuffs at Apple, like, you know, you're going to sit there and do your job for three years and get your money. You know, and I get a call from a recruiter asking me if I'd heard of LVMH and I said no. So I hadn't asked me if I'd heard of the Arno family

and I said no because I hadn't. But in the, look at the brands, like, oh, I listened to hip-hop, I know the brands. Of course. As Mike D said, you know, and everything you learned about, know about fashion, you learn from J. Z songs. Pretty much true. But what I saw with LVMH, I did the research, you know, starting with Wikipedia and then I went to all the brand websites, I read every article I could,

and what I saw was, I was like, wait a minute, the fundamentals of the internet to me are that we're moving from Mastiniche. I also believe that we're moving from a world where marketing is hyper-efficient to a world where quality is hyper-efficient. And that was written by a guy named Umar Hock back in 2004. He had a piece called the Blockbuster versus the Snowball. And I've used this example many times, but it's straight to the point. I love what you just said. So it's incredible.

I stole it straight from Umar. And what it meant to me was, you know, if you and I are making pirates of the Caribbean 12, and we have $2 million extra dollars, do we spend that money making the movie better, or putting Johnny Depp's face on the Cops at Burger King? And the old media model was for Cops at Burger King, and now it's making the movie better. Exactly. And is that because of social media? Well, yes and no. It's because you have unlimited consumer choice.

And in the old world, you had limited consumer choice. Right? So in the old, you and I grew up in, you weren't trying to make Citizen Kane, you were just trying to get people to go to theater A instead of theater B this weekend. There were only four movies on when we were kids too. And so you just had to get people to go to theater A instead of theater B this weekend, right? There are only four movies on where we were kids too. And so you just had to get people to go to that one instead of that one. So that's why marketing was hyper-efficient. Now, you know, I mean my 16-year-old

doesn't even like movies. She thinks she'd rather do almost anything else. You know, she'd rather watch four episodes of The Gilmore Girls or Brooklyn 99. Yeah. And it doesn't matter what it is. It's just that she has a choice to do anything she wants. And that is the difference. And you may have nailed that in 2004. And that I've never been able to unsee it. And so when I looked at Alviam H, I went, okay, these guys are a collection of very valuable

niches. So they have very few customers and very high revenues. And they are genuinely focused, obsessed with quality. And that's real, and people don't really believe that. I think people think like, oh, it's self-image, it's a factory, it's so not true. One way that I always put it, and I kind of stole this from Derek Edward Schloss, he wrote a piece that was about attention generation and value capture.

These are the two sides of the coin. This is where the universal theory of brand comes in that I learned at LVMH, but if you think about it, the value capture of LVMH is extremely efficient. So I actually was having this conversation with Ben on a note earlier this year, where I said, everything is about attention generation and value capture. And that's why Drake, Louis Vuitton, Damien Hurst, and people are all in the same business. And Louis Vuitton's value capture is much more efficient than Drake's. Right?

Drake has to, I mean, A, Spotify, very inefficient way. You don't make money, but... inefficient. ...inufficient number of customers relative to revenue. Touring, sure, you can make money, but wow, you got to... A lot of work. Yeah, a lot of work. A lot of time. Yeah, you're dead, drag your body around. And it's limited.

There's only so many days that you can do it. And you literally leave your family and like on the road for 200 days a year to pull it off and a lot of mouths to feed and all that, inefficient. There are not that many customers of Louis Vuitton. You know what I mean? If you put the number of Louis Vuitton customers over 8 billion people, that fraction is very small.

And if you go to Damien Hurston and people, then the fraction gets even smaller, right? People is incredibly efficient at value capture. When you think about a number of customers over revenue, the other piece of it, I remember when LVMH was launching the Fenty Beauty brand, which is Rihanna's Beauty brand. And this is where people

I think would be surprised at the care they put into the product itself. I was in the room and the team wanted to show Ben, I don't know the marketing for Fenty. And he was just like, it's okay, I trust you guys. No, no, it's going to be fine. He only wanted to talk about the product. Where is it made? See it, feel it. He wanted to make sure the very best formulators in the world were making that product. And I'll never forget, he said, guys, we're going to do fine in year one. It's Rihanna.

I'm sure the marketing is great. Question is, do we have a business in year 15? We only have a business in year 15. It's quality. If it's quality. And that is where I think I had had it right. Mass of niche, LVMH understands that to grow the business, they don't just make Louis Vuitton Nike. They make Louis Vuitt go from A to 10 A, they buy Ramova and they grow it from $400 million to a billion.

So you go wide, not deep necessarily, not tall, and they are obsessed with quality. I watch them bring every part they could into France instead of sourcing things from China, those sorts of things. So I think that that is just fundamental physics and that works on the internet. You have a, we're living in a world that goes from Mass to Niche. We're going from the world that you and I grew up in

or marketing is hyper-efficient to the world of the future where quality is hyper-efficient. And that doesn't mean like, okay, everyone's gonna start listening to classical music. It just means that whenever my daughter likes is what she gets to listen to. She's enough to compromise. Tell me what did you specifically do at LVMH and did anyone do that before you were there?

So they had somebody who was focused on digital. They call it digital. Calling it digital was a way to just take all of his stuff that was new and put it in the corner where they didn't have to think about it anymore. And so what I had to do was get it out of the corner, go through it. Hey guys, all this stuff isn't the same actually like social media and e-commerce. And by the way, can we talk about China for a minute?

Because it's also completely different. So I had to parse it all apart and go, okay, well, this is actually about attention generation. This is about value capture and this is where things go. And does it make sense for LVMH to do that from a corporate place instead of based on each house? Yeah, sometimes yes, sometimes no because technology loves scale. So the things that we did, there are really three main things. One is e-commerce. The second is putting better tools in the hands of the sales associates so that when you

get the great service that you get from LVMage, they have good tools to do it from, and then there's data. You know, LVMage should know more about the luxury customer than anyone on the planet. And do we? No, we don't. Okay, how do we? Let's figure that out. And if you look now at LVMH, most of them are on the same e-commerce platform.

So there's a benefit of that. Most of them are using the same client telling software. And most of them are using the same data platform. And that does provide a lot of scale. But the implementation of that needs to be brand by brand. So the brand is never compromising. In the records, you've got distribution, and then you've got making records.

Making records is very vertical, but distribution is very horizontal. So their technology can solve a lot of the horizontal problems, but then you have to make sure that you never compromise the creativity that's in kind of the vertical slot there. So that's really fundamentally what we did. And I really see the benefit of it because now I'm on the board at Dr. Martin's

and we are a standalone company. What was it founded, do you know? Dr. Martin's? Yeah. 50s. 1950s. Yeah, I couldn't tell you the exact year, but yeah, 50s.

I only know it as Doc Martin's. I never heard it called Doc Martin's. Is it actually called Doc Martin's? It's actually called Doc Martinens. I never heard it called Dr. Martens. Is it actually called Dr. Martens? It's actually called Dr. Martens. And it's an interesting story because there was a boot company and then there was a soul that was brought, I think from Germany, Dr. Martens, who brought that sort of bouncing soul, the soul and it became sort of the iconic brand.

Great example of a brand too that really had just incredible organic marketing and was very Seen driven or kind of culture driven. You know, you had to Pete towns into skinheads wearing dr. Martin's right, you know what I mean? It was the punk rock boot of choice exactly. I mean, I saw him at the alley in Chicago first right so in place I knew you could get them in the same place you could buy a misfits in a Nazi punk's fuck off t-shirt if you wanted right in place, you could buy misfits in a Nazi punk's fuck off t-shirt, if you wanted, right? They also sold Dr. Martins. But it's a standalone brand, and we, you know, the tech side of what we need to do is to

be a modern brand is quite expensive. And so at LVMH, we can really mutualize that across and amortize the cost across a lot of brands, which is interesting because, I mean, LVMH is not really about advertising cost, the same way that a Proctor and Gamble or a Lorry Al, Lorry Al and Proctor and Gamble are very much about advertising costs and being kind of command and control. LVMH is much more like, if you're a brand, do what you need to do. I don't even care if it costs more. I need you to be you.

But technology I found was a place where people really wanted help. So based on what you're saying with Doc Martin, it would be interesting to create that service, not just for Doc Martin, but for all of the Doc Martin's in the world. Exactly. I think that's what Farfetch has really tried to do. So if you look at Farfetch and you talk as Jose, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think very much the current direction of the company, which is being this sort of infrastructure layer for the fashion industry. And I think the challenge is it's also very mixed up in a little bit of the topspin conversation,

right? Because Farfetch is the brand. Exactly. Where do you want the customer to go? Is it Bandcamp or is it Topspin? Exactly. Where do you want the customer to go? Is it bandcamp or is it topspin? Exactly. Is the customer going to bandcamp.com, aka farfetch.com, or is the customer going to Drake or Ovio, which is more the topspin model and more the Louis Vuitton model? When I started, China is just incredibly interesting.

It's like a different internet and a very different e-commerce culture. People told me, if you're not on T-Mall, then you don't exist. And we proved that wrong. I mean, we really built Louis Vuitton's own channel and deores own channels into places where people buy. But that's because things that are craft and desirable, I mean, look, if Kanye with the next Yeezy Drop

was like, okay, you can get him, but you have to drive to a warehouse in New Jersey to get him. People would drive to the warehouse in New Jersey. But it's so funny you say that. I had a conversation with him years ago where he was unhappy with the deities because they promised to open all these stories,

these stories for him, and then they weren't going through with it. And I said, wouldn't it be interesting to have one big factory that's like Yeezy Mecca? And if you want to see where Yeezy's are made or if you want to buy the new drug, you have to go to this one place somewhere in the world. And that's the only place to get it. That's kind of better. It's Lego Land, right?

I mean, it's, yeah, I totally agree. I think it's all supply and demand. Like, that's what LVMH really understands better than most is how to make supply and demand happen. I think Nike does as well, right? Because they've got that full spectrum between the shoe you buy at Foot Locker and then the one that's really hard to get, right? Because they've got that full spectrum between the shoe you buy at Foot Locker and then the one that's really hard to get, right?

But I also think that that's also about aspiration. It's about signaling. And I don't think that the fact that it's a physical shoe is the reason that it has value, which brings you into that sort of physical digital world, which is also about supply and demand. You mentioned that there are short runs of collectible things made by LVMH that are all basically pre-sold forever.

Yeah, tell me about that. I don't know anything about it. I think one of the things is very underappreciated about Louis Vuitton is that they really do novelty at scale. If you walk into a Louis Vuitton store, first of all, that store has relatively little inventory relative to another business, relative to the Nike store, I would say. In other words, if there was nothing new coming into the store next week, within a month, they would run out of product. Also, you pick up that shoe, there's probably a few hundred

other shoes that have ever been made. And then what they're doing is they're introducing new products very frequently. That's really difficult. Product development standpoint, from a supply chain standpoint, and they're doing it at a very high quality and a very high craft. Now you've also got a full spectrum where you've got a bag that costs $700. And then you also have a bag that costs $15,000 that's made of crocodile and et cetera, right? So, and they do that, that spectrum incredibly well, which is no different from bandcamp.

So, is everything collectible? I feel like this is where it crosses over into your book a bit, right? All of culture is in agreement. I mean, Americans have a very hard time understanding luxury. I was just having this conversation with Vanessa Friedman, who's saying that her editors are sort of perplexed at how Ben A don't know can be one of the richest people in the world,

because they just don't understand what he sells. The realization for me was that Louis Vuitton Handbag and a slayer t-shirt serve the same function in society. They say, I'm a part of this tribe, I'm not a part of that tribe. So you could say that the richest person in the world on some days, Benado, no,

doesn't really sell things that are either useful or necessary. What LVMH sells on some level is culture, right? No one spends $3,000 on a Deorhan bag because of its incredible utility. They spend that money on the bag because Deor means something in culture. And when you use that bag, you feel it, you feel a part of it, and it expresses to the rest of the world that you are a part of that culture. You know, it used to be that if I saw a kid at the mall wearing a thrash or t-shirt,

you would go up and talk to him. It's not quite the case anymore, but it still exists. If I saw someone wearing a crummy squiggle, I would go up and talk to them because I know they're a part of a very specific culture that I'm also a part of and I want to talk to them. So is everything collectible?

No, not everything, I suppose. But I mean, even if you go to the realreal.com or vestiercollective.com, you see. I don't know those. What are those? They're resale for luxury. So that's where you'd go to buy a used Chanel or a free-tone handbag.

So I guess in that way, they are collectible. Someone will buy it. It has a resale value. And so. So I guess in that way, they are collectible. Someone will buy it, it has a resale value. And so yeah, I guess in that way, you're pretty much always selling something that has value today and should have value tomorrow. And in that way, Elvim H takes a 100 year time horizon on their brands. I had the former CEO, Louis Vuitton, tell me,

a little bit tongue in cheek, but I think there's a lot of truth to it as well that everyone in the company has taken an oath against short-term revenue. I also think that it plays an interesting way into creativity and the way that they support creativity because Elvim H's investment thesis is we back creativity with operational efficiency and they take a very long term belief on creativity. And one of the things I really like about it is they will bet longer on an artist than I saw in the music business. At the music business you get kind of one at bat and then on to the next if you don't

hit a home run, whereas they will nurture talent over years and years and years. Because the business model supports it. When I left the music business, the record of music business was a $15 billion business. I went to LVMH, which was a $30 billion plus business, and became a $50 plus billion business during the time I was there. So you actually have enough capital to support creative people. I really, really enjoyed that. When did your love affair with DJ Lart begin? capital to support creative people. I really, really enjoyed that. When did your love affair with DigiDalart begin?

So I started at ledger. I was actually, you know, I came to ledger really because I believed in the cryptocurrency narrative, specifically Bitcoin and Ethereum, because, you know, I really felt like we had gotten to a place where Bitcoin had become unstoppable. It was too big to stop. Let me know what is ledger.

Ledger is a company that makes hardware that is secure for securing and working with digital assets. So, our belief is that there will be more, will lead increasingly digital lives and we will have digital value in these digital lives and that will be everything from, you know, digital cash to digital art and our identity itself, you know, the way that you move borders, you know, your passport will be digital and to move a border you will prove that you are the owner of the wallet that contains that passport. So if this is the world that we're moving to,

then you absolutely must have security and self-custody. Which the phone is not a secure device. Correct. So this reminds me of 2002, when I knew the internet was a big part of the lives of future humans. I had a cell phone. I had a computer where I did the internet. My cell phone was terrible at the internet.

Effectively didn't do it. And I had an computer where I did the internet. My cell phone was terrible at the internet, effectively didn't do it. And I had an iPod. And over time, all of those things converged, but in 2002, converging them was a pipe dream. And there are really big barriers to it as well. This is what people forget is, if you knew the mobile companies, you knew that the mobile companies didn't like the internet,

that was like a loss of control and a loss of lock-in and all these things that they held really, really dear. So I think that you have a lot of those similar dynamics now. So what happened to me during the pandemic, a Tony Fidel and I were podfamilies. So we would sit around and not only talk about music because we're both music fanatics, but also technology in the future of humanity. And what does this pandemic mean for humanity? Well, it means that we're all living increasingly online lives. And it also means that governments are injecting money into the monetary systems. Trillion and stimulus in Europe, two trillion and stimulus in the US.

in Europe, two trillion in stimulus in the US. So for us, like the case, for not only Bitcoin, but also blockchains like Ethereum, Ethereum being a world computer where you can write and run programs and also tokenize things like identity, like titles and deeds and et cetera. You know, that use case just felt like it was here. Like if you knew it was always coming the question was just like okay well how far away is it?

And the pandemic felt like it accelerated a lot of things. It accelerated our e-commerce business at LVMH but it also accelerated I think some of these other things. You know OpenC where you trade digital objects and digital art, it's kind of like having a place to show off your digital art. And it kind of accelerated the value. So the value is like an online gallery, where you can see everything that's there, and everything is for sale, whether it's for sale or not. It's more like an eBay for everything on chain, right? So it's a place where everything

on chain can be seen and everything on chain can be sold, bought, offered, et cetera. So you can almost think of it as like, imagine if your, you know, your record collection, you know, was suddenly just visible and everyone else's record collection was visible. And I could look at yours and you could look at mine. And I could say, hey, I'll give you $10,000 for that cough cool seven inch without you having to put it on discoggs. It just exists on chain. Therefore, I can make an offer on it.

And things trade hands. You can look into total collection. So it's a museum essentially. Yet, again, when I say whether it's for sale or not, like you can put your things in the museum like it's a gallery. I would actually say it's more like a swap meet than a museum. You know, you can create a museum using another tool, which is where you curate. So if I have, you know, a thousand pieces of digital art, I can curate 200 of them and put them into a gallery. I have a thousand pieces of digital art, I can curate 200 of them and put them into a gallery.

I mean, just like a gallery does, by the way, right? If you go to the road, one of the coolest parts about the road is you can actually look in and see all the art that isn't on the walls. You see where it's stored in those long racks. A lot of most of the world's art is not on display. It's like being able to see all of it and have it change hands.

Yeah, I think that digital value is what's confused a lot of people about blockchains. There's actually a utility here. There is value in Bitcoin because we all agree that there is and it's a very specific story and a very specific type of asset and we've all kind of agreed that it has value and more and more people will agree that it has value over time, which is why it will become more valuable. But I would argue that the technology itself is actually more like just digital stuff than digital value. I have a bad analogy. I think it's a good analogy, but it brings a bad connotation to people, so I need to come up with something else. But I say it's almost more like plastic. You know, when my mom was born, there wasn't a lot of plastic in the world, but there was a plastic revolution during my mom's life.

And now, turn your head any direction on the planet and you see plastic. You know, we can talk about whether plastic's good or bad, but the reality is, like, again, turn your head any direction and you see a lot of plastic. And most of it doesn't have value. But there are certainly ways that it can, if I put it together into this recording device, well, it's got some value,

and you can sell it to someone. It has a value. It's the same thing with digital stuff. We just have this construct, this tool, this ability to create permissionless digital ownership and scarcity. And that will be used for many things. The difference between ownership and being able to see it

is that if you own it, you can sell it, but if you don't own it, you can still see it. So let's say you own a piece of art. I can look at the art as often as you do. Yes? Correct. Absolutely. The only difference between how...

You could even like, right click save as. And then now you've got it and you can put it on your wall even. Yeah. So the only difference is, I can't sell it. You can. Correct. You can get a poster of, you know, the Mona Lisa and hang it on your wall, but you don't own the Mona Lisa. Yeah. That's a great example because it's a same idea, just because the Mona Lisa's physical

doesn't really mean anything. Correct. That's what I love about this, and I would really encourage people, regardless of what you think, I actually really deeply understand why people dislike crypto, especially after what we've been through in the past year. And it's the same reason that frankly, I disliked San Francisco in the year 2000, right? Because I'd lived through all these like bad parties with bad electronic music with really lame people in San Francisco who were there to get rich. So I totally understand. It's exactly the same vibe to me. Also though, digital music in 2001, 2002, 2003 was incredibly fun. Because we were back to this core group of people who care about music and care about technology.

We were building something. That's the world I live in in crypto. But I also understand how when we talk about crypto, that's not what people think of. They think of San Backman-Free, they think of FTX. It's like, you know, that's not what people think of. They think of Sandback, McFreed, they think of FTX. It's like, if you think of the internet, you think of pets.com and Digital Entertainment Network and White Tigers and Pedophilia, right? Which all were a part of, you remember this?

Some of which should make the Digital Entertainment Network documentary, by the way, but yes. And by the way, John Silver and Gary Gersh were accidentally wrapped up in that for a hot minute, because the light was bright, and the money seemed endless. And that feels like a platform, which is why people get sucked into it.

But again, come back to the fundamentals. There's no question that we live increasingly online lives. There's a new invention, which is digital value. There's so much that Canon will be done with that, just from the basics. But in the same way that paper money has no value other than we agree, if it says 100 on the bill, you can get this much stuff for this 100, same as true with bits. Exactly.

And if we are moving from a world, if we are, as Balaji says, moving from God to state to network, of course the network will have its own money in value. And already, if you're using credit cards, you're already using bits. It's already, it's no different. Exactly. You're already in the digital realm.

Well, and the difference is, I mean, so think about what's wrong with that system, right? I mean, the credit card story is incredible, by the way, worth reading about D-hoc, a mid-level banker in the 70s, created a not-for-profit out of a consortium of banks that made for more fluidity, you know, in the retail market, and it caused a revolution. And it also allowed people to have credit, which is, you know, think about it in the US, were completely over-indeaded. And in El Salvador as an example, they basically have no debt, right? They have no money. They spend their money as soon as they get it, because there's no, even they don't even have a bank to put it in, let alone a line of

credit, right? You know, and so what is the credit system at this point? It's a 3% tax on retailers, right, in the US, roughly. And who gets the benefit of that? Well, I'm one of the beneficiaries because I have a credit card that gives me points. And my wife and I stay in hotels for free because some people pay a 17% APR. And that's a very broken system that can be improved. So right now when I go to my local vegetable store in Paris, which by the way, before the pandemic would not take a credit card from me, unless I spent $20, now they only want a credit card, and they're paying about a one and a half percent tax on that, and we're

using a credit system, but I don't need credit. I'm basically paying them digital cash using a credit system. When digital cash with instantaneous international settlement already exists technologically, of course that goes away. Of course it does. It's so obvious to me, just like I said in terms of identity. Let me give another answer to the question, what is ledger? Ledger is a digital safe. It's a portable digital safe that you can have with you in your pocket. Exactly. And it can attach to your phone magnetically?

Well, think of it even in a different attachment way, it's a connected safe. So look at what I went through last night. I was telling you that I was up to 1130 trying to buy a plane ticket. And I had to talk to someone in the middle of someone in the middle to try to make a payment, whereas actually transferring value is as trivial as transferring bits using Nutella. Technically, it's as trivial and totally decentralized. So it's a connected safe. So let's like get out of the realm of value for a second. Just explain decentralized.

So I'm going to say this just because it's true. I had this debate with the Rizza two days ago. And he was pushing back on the notion of decentralization. And I said, I think I can convince you of this in 30 seconds. And I actually don't think I was successful and he had very good counterarguments, but I think in the end maybe we got there. But I would argue that without decentralization,

you don't have security. Security's not possible. And the way that you kind of get your head around that is to just go, well, if not decentralized, and I'll come back to maybe more specific meaning of that, but just tell me whose database would you like all of humanity's information to live in? You want it to be in Google's apples US government China government? What is a database a database is I put some value there and I trusted it's going to be there when I come back so that could be

I gave Rick $10. OK, so whose ledger does that go on? Does it go on the ledger of the bank, the ledger of the US government, or a decentralized ledger that actually no one owns, and I can always prove that this happened. And this is where the fundamental shift comes in. And so if the beginning of the internet

was logging with your username and password, log into what? Log into a centralized database where the user name and passwords are stored. And when you type in your username and then you type in your password, it asks in a centralized database if those two things match. Now, version two of the internet was log in your password, it asks in a centralized database if those two things match. Now, version two of the internet was login with Google, login with Facebook, login with iCloud. I mentioned that I moved from an Android phone recently and you really feel how someone

owns your ass at that moment. Everything my whole life is is in icon. My photos, my documents, all my logins, oh my god, wherever you are, I go, I'm bumping into the like, you're not in Apple World anymore. What are you doing, you know, thing? Well, where we're going is, I have a wallet, and I am the owner of that wallet, and that, therefore, gives me access. Explain why you shifted from Apple to Android. You know, I have kind of a long lineage with this where at Beats, I wanted to be the Android user because we needed a good Android client and just, I just wanted to test it.

You know, eat the dog food, as they say. So everyone else was an Apple user. Everyone else in the company was an Apple user, and we needed to have a good Android client, and I was like, I'll do it. You'll take the bullet. I'll take the bullet, and also, I'm just that kind of a nerd that's like,

I want to know, I want to know if it sucks. When I got to Apple, of course, I got an iPhone. When I went to Elvia Mh, I kept my iPhone, and maybe a year and a half in Google said, hey, we want to give you a Pixel phone and get you back on Android. I said, great, let's try it. And these phones look sexy.

I'll try one. I used it for about a month, and then I gave up. It was a productivity killer for me. You know, we used Outlook at LVMH. I couldn't just get simple things to work. Like, click on a phone number and it dials the number. You know, there was just basic stuff that I felt like I was missing.

And I wrote a long note to my friends at Google, dials the number. You know, there was just basic stuff that I felt like I was I was missing. And I wrote a long note to my friends at Google. It was like, here's my problems. Why I need to move back to iOS. I forwarded that note to someone at Apple. It's in a Wall Street Journal article. So you can find the story. It got forwarded to Tim Cook as sort of a see, this is why we need not to open iMessage and FaceTime because that was one of the things I mentioned and then it got discovered and I think like the Epic Games trial and then it got kind of, I felt really terrible because I was just trying to share my experience as a user. I didn't mean to cause trouble for anyone. But in a way, it's helpful information to be out there. Ultimately, your goal is we're trying to make good stuff. Yeah, let me tell you, I'm just a user. Yeah. Let me tell you my experience, put it in the mix with all the other comments.

Of course. And tell me what happens. I went back to iOS for a very long time. And then recently, we did a project at Ledger with Samsung. Samsung released a new and very sexy phone, again, the geek, sort of shiny object syndrome, right? And I have to say, so my very short review is, moving from iCloud to all things Google is a pain in the ass.

Not having FaceTime and iMessage is a real bummer, especially because I have a daughter who doesn't know anyone who doesn't use iMessage, which is interesting in itself. And third, not having air drop with my wife is a genuine hassle. Apart from that, absolutely everything about this phone is superior.

Superior battery life, superior processor, superior screen, more configurability. You know, I can actually buy things from the audible store as opposed to needing to go to Amazon and buy something and then go back to audible, listen to it because of Apple's stupid app store rules where they control everything and if you sell something digital, they get 30% or whatever the percentage is today. It really feels, apart from those things I mentioned, everything is actually better about the phone, which is interesting to think about,

where is the lock-in? What is it? Is it brand? Is it I message and FaceTime, which really don't get talked about all that much, but they are a big barrier to moving. First of all, I don't know when the right time to say this is, and I've said it to you without recording, but I'm going to back up and say,

this is a gigantic honor for me to talk to you about any of this stuff always has been to be able to just sit and listen to music with you, is like an absolute dream come true, because we're just music fans and I don't think we'd ever run out of fodder. And to me, you've done so many things that are genuinely important in culture. Obviously from me, the Beastie Boys, but also, I mean, I just think going from Beastie Boys to Cool J to Slayer is it's the same feeling I had with the Beastie Boys, which is like, okay, these are kindred spirits in terms of what we love about culture and what soul

means to us, right? What is the through line? It's me, it's like self-expression and soul and rebellion and all these things. All that said, I'm wondering if your book is not maybe the most important thing that you've done, because the way that you wrap up this big canvas of creativity is so identifiable to so many people. Slayer is not that identifiable to that many people. Even Tom Petty's record is going to appeal to this many people, right? But when you talk about creativity, it's hard to imagine

somebody who doesn't identify with those words in some way. And you mentioned digital art. So with that as the backdrop, to me, there's something you talk about in the book that is so wrapped up in this because there's many times when you really dance around what is art, and you actually encourage people to get out of their comfort of what they think art is and get into something else. Realization I had recently is that these words, music, fashion, art, they're actually distribution terms. They're not artistic terms.

Artists always defy those boundaries, right? They're like Kanye, we're talking about. And I want to be in the box. Music is a box. I've got to get out of the box. Great artists always transcend those boundaries. It's always the business that wants that boundary between music and fashion. If it comes on a little plastic disk with 72 minutes of music, well that and it's music. If it hangs on a coat plastic disc with 72 minutes of music, well that and it's music. If it hangs on a coat hanger, then it's fashion.

And if it hangs on a wall on a gallery, then it's art, right? And what I like about this digital realm is those things really fall apart. And I've been approached over the last couple of years by people who are doing digital music on the blockchain, or digital fashion on the blockchain, or digital art on the blockchain. And I find myself going, why are you making the distinction? Like, what is it really? Like, what are you talking about?

Like, isn't it just a creative person and a canvas? And that's why I like projects like MetaLabel where they're solving kind of a bigger problem that's not specific. It's like, well, how do we package together a lot of different kinds of things? Like text and images and videos and music and everything. We put it in one container.

How do we acknowledge that creativity is almost always a collaboration? And often when people collaborate, like, you know, if me and my friend make a seven inch to try not worth forming an LLC and registering the pub, you know, like, can't we just go, hey, we're 50-50 and after we recoup, that's how we split the money and it's all automatic in this kind of new. And you can do that on metal label. And you do that's exactly what metal label does. So I like to kind of zoom out and go, you know, not what is it

But what might it be? I've loved collecting digital art over the past two years I have probably wasted a lot of money doing it in my view that was always Okay, because I was gonna learn do it as an investment or did you do it to make you happy? I did it to make myself happy and to learn because I think too often people, they read about something in the New York Times, and then they form an opinion, which, honestly, I think that's idiotic. You and I have had the experience where a major publication that you trusted writes about something

that you know something about, and then you go, how could I ever read this again? How could I ever? Every time that experience with every publication and every channel and every qualified source. Only way to learn is to do. I would always say to the execs at ElviaMage,

they want to come talk to me about some technology, and I would just say, have you tried it? No, read about it. I'll go try it and come back when you tell me when you've tried it. Yeah, right. You know, I mean, it's hard to talk about AI art unless you've made some. And then you can come back and go, oh, actually, I like this. I don't like that. Okay, that's it's all. Tell me about generative art. So generative art is Code as art so you have people who make they make code that code Creates art in some way creates an image generally, but could be video could be could be just the code itself But you know, that's the thing. It's a creative canvas could be anything and then it's either you know

It creates imagery and the artist selects the images that they think are aesthetically pleasing, or maybe it just gets created and you roll the dice and hopefully it's aesthetically pleasing, or in the case of what Tyler Hobbes and Dandelion Whisted with QQL, they did something really exciting where they made an algorithm, they allowed the consumers to run the algorithm and then the consumer decides when it's art and when to kind of hit snapshot. It's almost like a process. Correct. They create a process and then whatever comes out of that process is a collaboration

with the viewer who gets to say, this is where I want it. This is my version of it. And I think looking at Tyler's description of it is a great way to explore it a bit because then what you realize is that it could be anything. It really is just new tools in the toolbox that are 100 million songs on Spotify. You and I, it's actually inaccurate to say we love music.

It would be more accurate to say we dislike most music. But we think, I love music. That's where you and I come from, because music brings us so much joy. Reality is probably a million out of those 100 million that we actually really like. Similarly, most of the output will be garbage, but another thing you say in your book is that art is an agreement and that's what happens is there's a creative person, the creative person has developed a craft, maybe they've even developed a community and then there are people who want to be a part of

that and they exchange value. And again, in a world that's moving from Mass to Mish, and from marketing to quality, I think that just fits. And I know it because I felt it, for me, the communities of art blocks, bright moments, crypto punks. They actually mean something to me. And I know that they don't exist in a physical world, you know, but that's okay. I mean, I think the fact that, you know, dear handbags are physical is actually irrelevant. If you say, why did you spend $5,000 for that? And

I say, well, you know, I really appreciate the craft. I find it aesthetically really beautiful. I love the brand. The brand has been around for a long time and they're kind of proven that they're going to keep going. And I want to be a part of that very small community that appreciates that. I could be talking about Richard Miel, the watch brand. I could be talking about Richard Neill, the watch brand, right? I could be talking about a luxury watch, or I could be talking about crypto punks, you know, art blocks and that community. They are

actually, nobody buys a luxury wristwatch to tell the time they buy it for those reasons I just watched, tell the time, they buy it for those reasons I just said. I have a lot of pride in being a collector in the art blocks community. I say that just because I'm personally astonished by it. If you had told me two years ago what that feels like, I couldn't have felt it until I felt it. Yeah. Also interesting, the example you gave earlier of Grand Royal and how in the early days, it was just like, this is what we want to do. And then eventually, a business grew up around it and then it became this is what we have to do.

This art is still at that stage of if anyone's doing it, it's because they really want to do this. And they're, who knows if there's upside or what it means going forward, people are doing this out of love and curiosity. Yeah, and I think that's actually why, you know, today is a terrible market for NFTs. If you bought, you know, NFT collectibles at a high price in the fall of 2021, you are absolutely underwater today. So, there are a lot of... it makes sense that people would call it a scam. People would be ejected.

People felt like it was a gold rush and they got screwed. That's why I, much more focused personally on the stories of people like Matt Cain, who was an oil painter, who found that digital was a better creative expression of what he had in his head than what he could achieve with oil paints, you know, someone like Tyler Hobbs or, you know, someone like MP Cause, Mike Koslovsky, who he's, you know, I've spent time with him,

there's just no question this guy is an artist. He is a creator. Whether there was money in it or not, this is what he would be doing with his time. And when we saw in the first.com crash, there were a lot of people involved early. It got really big. It crashed. And now it basically runs the world. So there's a great book that has the very catchy title of technological revolutions in financial capital. I can't believe everyone hasn't read this book. By a woman named Carlotta Perez,

and the premise of the book, she goes through, it was actually written just after the .com crash. I think it's a 2002 book. And she goes through all of these technical revolutions throughout history, you know, from Railway to the Silicon chip to the internet and you know, she says that in every single technological revolution there is Promise and there's a gold rush and there's a bubble and the bubble bursts and then you have 30 years of sustained growth

And it's it's kind of clockwork. And I think also, you know, people call, they talk about Web 3. I'm not a fan of that term because it makes it sound incremental to Web 2, which isn't. It's a separate revolution. You know, the internet was a revolution of information. Information, when I was a kid,

information was scarce to me. I only had what was on the TV, what was on the radio, and what I could get on the magazine rack. Our kids do not know that world, right? I grew up in a world where there was nothing to watch on Sundays except golf. And it was like what, you wanted to pull your hair out. Like, can you imagine a kid today? Like, can't even get his hand around that. So the internet fundamentally burst that open and that's toothpaste that won't go back in the tube. Then what we have now is a revolution of value.

It's a tough word because again, this is where the gold rush comes in. You know, and this is why actually kind of crypto gold rush is maybe worse for humanity than.com gold rush. .com gold rush took a lot of money from investors. Crypto gold rush took a lot of money from average people because the protections weren't in place to protect them.

So that's why I say I understand there's a reason to hate this. And it's not just sandwiches go.com bro culture that, you know, I just liked in 1999. It is people lost their life savings to Ponzi schemes, right? So that is definitely a reason to hate. It doesn't change the fundamentals. The fundamentals are we live digital lives. We have a new tool in our toolbox and that is decentralized, permissionless, digital value, and digital code. That is a tool that we will use as humanity.

Things like digital cash, things like digital identity, things like industrial applications where an industry wants to share data without creating privacy concerns for their customers. These are the kinds of things that will be done using this technology. You've been through buying land in various parts of the world and trying to figure out who owns that parcel of land. How do you prove that that person owns it? And not someone else. There is new technology to solve these problems. There's something

very real under this. And actually, the digital art I collect, they're just like digital luxury goods in a way. Or maybe digital slayer t-shirts. It's just a way for me to say, hey, in this in my online life, I'm one of these people. right? You know, if you look at my gallery gallery.so slash ENCR, my friends would look at it and go, yeah, this looks like Ian. I see a bunch of art. I see, you know, old dirty bastard and Adam Yauke and Sarah Schaensborg and David Bowie. And you know what I mean? It looks like me. And that I think is

real but very like relatively small right. I have a funny, a funny anecdote about luxury goods. I tend not to buy any luxury goods of any kind. And I was walking in, in little town somewhere and I passed a Hermes store. And there was something in the window that Hermes made that I felt like I need this. And it was a Hermes rock. It was a rock that was painted orange, Hermes orange. And it said Hermes on it on the bottom. And it had no use.

It had as much use as any other rock, except this was a Hermes rock. And that was like, this is the one luxury good that I feel good about, like a rock, a branded rock. That feels right to me. Why did it? I don't know. I don't know. It was just like the, it somehow felt the most honest. You know? I mean, look, so many of the things that we've bought in our lives, value is relative. And when we say quality is hyper-efficient,

that really means tier one to me. What is it that I value? And a lot of what we do is we, and we say out loud what it is we value. Even if you're anti-fashion, then that's fashion. Absolutely. You can on escape it. Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm anti-fashion, and I care very much about the t-shirt, I'm wearing. Exactly. Yeah, Jonathan Anderson had a great quote about this where he was like, look, even if you're wearing a white t-shirt, whether that white t-shirt came from the gap or a uniclo, says something about you. Absolutely. You can't escape it. Absolutely. Tell me about censorship online.

I mean, this is a tough one, right? Because, again, I think to me, you got to zoom all the way out and say, who controls what? And if we're going from kind of state to network, it does come back to Nutella in some way, right? How do you control it? Where do you control it? So I think, you know, the internet kind of fundamentally makes censorship impossible, right? Because I can set up a server, that server can be on the internet. Now, China has really proven it's all wrong on that, you know, where they have actually a very controlled internet. Now, China has really proven us all wrong on that, where they have actually a very controlled internet. But it's still, it's almost a system

that you opt into or opt out of. You can say, I play the game, and I'm going to be fed what I'm fed. But if you want to, there's a way around it. You can leave the country. You can use a VPN. You can, in some ways, I would argue, it's just sort of, you know, fundamentally

impossible. At the same time, and then maybe the surprising part for someone who's kind of an original free software, you know, free not in free beer, but free meaning freedom, you know, kind of kind of person, the surprise and disappointment is that, you know, a few platforms do control everything. They can effectively, you know, control what people broadly consume through algorithms, through whose platform to de-platformed, et cetera. So it's, I think it's kind of interesting in that you end up with this world where censorship is fundamentally impossible because anything can be put online and found. But also, you can definitely kind of direct people at what you want them to see. In the way that TikTok,

to me, is just the same television I came home and watched every day after school, except it's personalized, right? And then, you know, instead of watching the Brady Bunch and Killings Island every day, they're putting you into a more and more and more narrow path, and really they are literally controlling what comes next for you. So I find this very challenging, and it's what I meant when I said I want to be one of the first people off the internet. If the product is free, you are the product. And I would like to opt out of that world. That also to me is a big part of what blockchain will help humanity with. I say wonder if the internet was already at its current state when Elvis came along.

The powers that B did not like Elvis, and I wonder if we would know about Elvis today, if the internet of today was in place, or in the 80s during the hip hop revolution, if the internet of today was in place, the powers that B did not like hip hop. of today was in place, the powers that B did not like hip-hop. There was a real concerted effort to ban it from existing anywhere. I think what's sure is that Elvis wouldn't be Elvis in the form that we have him today, because Elvis that we know was tied to all of the technology of the time from the big powerful radio show that he was first on.

Biting M radio show. Yeah, it was called the Hay Something. Hayride. The Hayride, I guess, right? All the way through movies, blue Hawaii, and all the way through to Las Vegas. And so, again, my worldview is you cannot separate the artist from the technology.

The technology created him. I don't think the internet would have censored him, but I think that he would end up appealing to a subgenre, to a, and if you think about it, it's already happened, right? Starting in the 2000s, pop music was no longer the world's most popular music. There you go, The fix is in. So what do you have? You have genres that are very big. You have rap music and you have country music, which are very niche. It's totally incorrect to say everybody loves rap music. It's totally incorrect to say everybody loves country music.

Yet they're gigantic. But what they really are is big niches. So I think you might have the same thing, right? If it was the Beatles or Elvis, it would be totally incorrect to say everybody loves Elvis, but he would, he probably has better ability to be directly connected to the people that he is with. You know, a perfect example of this is the Juggolo Convention. If you're a watch, wanna like the trailers of the this is the Juggalo Convention.

If you're a watch, you want to like the trailers of the show, the Juggalo show, it's so crazy because it's a whole bunch of artists I've never heard of. And then the opening artists are artists I've heard of. You know, Juggalo's being in St. Clampossi, they do a gathering of the Juggalo's every year. It just happened a few weeks ago, which is why it's on my mind. And it's been- Have you ever been? No. It was actually Adam Horvitz that first told me about it and like sent the video of like he's like, you gotta see this.

And it's one of those things where you realize like, wow, this is really big. Yet I don't know a single person who's into it. I've never had a single person go, you gotta hear this. Yeah. Yeah, it's gigantic. Yeah. And so I think those are the dynamics of an internet world, where our neighbors are network neighbors, yet we live life in physical space. Tell me about living in Europe versus living in the US.

Well, like I said earlier, you know, I was sort of like, what's it like to be the American coming to Europe? And I really felt like, yeah, there's a new frontier. You were kind of alluding to it before. And Tony and I have talked about this, Tony Fadal, who moved to Paris around the same time as me. We've talked about this as well, that we, you know, he's from Detroit, up in Northern Indiana.

We moved to California for 20 plus years for work. And then ultimately, we moved to Europe, Paris specifically. And it does feel like a new frontier. You really get out of your comfort zone, different culture, different language, as somebody who's like obviously talks too much, but I've made my living by trying to communicate complex ideas more simply. Well, okay, now through a big language barrier in front of me. So that part has been great, and personally gratifying, you know, just being uncomfortable

and trying to find comfort and exploring. But also for me, just getting out of that California bubble. Now when I go back to California, I do see people as sort of living in a bubble. I remember what it was like when you really never thought about the rest of the world, right? Like Americans don't think about anything except America. Californians almost don't think about anything other than California. Absolutely. Same in New York. New York's don't see past New York. And so just having just kind of gaining that perspective, you know, my wife grew up with communism in Estonia until 1992, and she didn't grow up speaking

the language. So, you know, the perspective is totally different, and I love that. You know, it gives her richness. I was mentioning the book, The Gene, and what that book taught me is that we spend all this time talking about our differences, but our similarities are far more interesting on a scientific level. And I feel like I've gained a bit of perspective on that. And that's why I really lament the kind of current us

against them. Bologgy basically says there's not a democracy in the US. It's a tribalism. It is like one tribe that's very dug in and against the other one. It's not like, let's discuss our point of views or differences, differences and points of views, and come to an agreement. It's like, I'm going to win and you're going to lose. Right.

And there's no debate. Can't be. And I feel like I've kind of escaped that slipstream a bit By exiting the US, being in a place that's very unfamiliar, and I see the differences. You know, at the same time, I don't think if I had a new startup, would I start it in Europe? Probably not. You know, it's genuinely difficult.

We were talking about this between our CEO at Ledger Pascal and the CEO of Medellable Yancey, who used to be the CEO of Kickstarter, and sort of sharing stories. Yancey has just to sum it up. Yancey has many ways that the US government helped Kickstarter exist. Help them not only exist but succeed. Right? There are examples of that. The example is that we were talking about is Kickstarter was hacked, and their data was stolen. It was the FBI who alerted them and helped them solve the problem.

Two and a half years ago, or three years ago now, ledger's data was hacked and stolen. The French government have only come to wave their finger at us and try to make it difficult for us. It's just an environment of sort of toxicity for startups. And no kind of acknowledgement that you need to learn to move forward. There's a system of checks and balances in the US

where legislation is quite hard to pass, right? I mean the frustrating thing about DC is that nothing happens. The great thing about DC is that nothing happens. You know from kind of a libertarian point of view that's that's that's not a bad outcome. Whereas the EU is fundamentally a regulatory body, right? They print regulation. And so you end up with, you know, just sort of, yes, it's thoughtful. Yes, it's meant to protect people and protect society. But the reality is you break eggs to make an omelet, especially if you're pushing forward.

And by the way, I, with all of this, I personally don't know what to do with it. When I listen to and read Bologna as an example and believe of a lot of what he's saying, but I don't know where to go from there. There's a book I was mentioning, the end of the world is just the beginning. Okay? Well, if you read that book, I mean, you might take away, it's funny because the author actually kind of famously hates Bitcoin, but might take away reading the book would be by Bitcoin, move to a remote place, probably in the US.

I don't know, that doesn't feel like I'm contributing to the solution at all, right? That feels like I'm just sort of running away from the problem. So I don't know what the kind of solutions to the directions that were going are, but I feel like moving from California to Europe has helped me maybe see some of it a bit more clearly. Yeah, sometimes when you move away, it's interesting thing about music. Like Led Zeppelin was playing American Blues music,

but it didn't sound like American blues music. And the reason is, because of the distance, it's like they got to fantasize what American blues music could be. No self-respecting American blues musician would play in such a bombastic way. Right. It'd be tasteless. Right. But weastic way. Right. It'd be tasteless. Right. But we love it.

Exactly. And insane with the spaghetti westerns. You know, like the spaghetti westerns are much more romantic vision of the Old West than the actual westerns. There's something about creating distance that allows, so the same thing happened in hip hop. Like, Curtis Blow, one of the earliest rappers was from Harlem. And he talked about wanting to be like the guy bragging at the party, whereas he was

around a lot of like gangster stuff, but he would never sing about that, that was because he was too close to it. Right. Whereas Rundee MC were coming from the suburbs. So Rundee MC could kind of get more gangster, because they were in the suburbs, and there was some distance where you could romanticize it, like seeing a dirty Harry movie.

Right, exactly. Yeah, I guess there's something about distance that makes it more more commentary than authenticity, or more, but yeah, it's fantasy. Fantasy is a better word. When you first got online, maybe not first, when you were online long enough to understand it in the early days, if that in projected to today, how different would your vision of what you imagined it

would be, be different than what it is? It's absolutely different in every way, and that's the thing I keep in mind, because you see this technology, and you see the possibility. I mean, this has been said a million plus times, but it's correct. We always overestimate the impact of technology

in the short term, and we underestimated it in the long term. So to put a very fine point on that, for me, personally, it was what we talked about. It was just about meeting people that liked the same music as me and enabling that passion. When I first saw the Internet Underground Music Archive, which was like a pre-web music service. My immediate thought was, this is going to change everything. The powers that be, you know, these middlemen in music, they're going to have their day of reckoning and everything is going to be like punk rock. Look at what we got even in digital music.

It's just a different set of oligopolies. It's Spotify, Apple, YouTube, you know, TikTok, whatever, plus, instead of five record labels, three. Right? So we thought that it was going to deliver us kind of DIY everything, but we just got a different set of oligopolies, right? So completely different. And I mean, if you have told me in 1995 that the Internet would one day lead to Donald Trump being president, that just seemed absurd, right? But those two things are impossible to separate, you know, without the Internet, you don't get Donald Trump as

a president. Like they're, they're, they're impossible to, to extract from one another in the way that it has impacted culture in a, in a completely irretrievable way. I also think that it's important to realize that this is not necessarily the internet. There's something, it's about like moving toward more consumer choice. Posner wrote a piece around 2001, where he was basically saying that the internet

has given us Fox News and the future looks more like Fox News because of unlimited consumer choice. And that point is that if you have two newspapers in your town, they're going to drift toward the middle to get the most listeners and most audience. If you have an infinite number of newspapers, they're going to try to appeal to big subsections. Again, rap music, country music, not analogy.

So I think that it was hard to see in the beginning that the internet would become so pervasive that everything could be unlocked. And then, in fact, we had a sort of a false negative because we had, you know, delivery slash postmates in the late 90s and it failed. So then everyone went, see, it's not gonna work, right? So we had this false negative that would have told a lot of people that'll never happen.

Don't worry about it. I would argue again, we're in that moment with crypto, everyone went, oh my God, look what's possible, look what's possible, here's where it's going. We're going to move away from banks. This is not about banking, the unbanked, it's about unbanking the banked. Look at El Salvador, they're becoming Bitcoin eyes instead of dollarized. Then Sandbag when freed, FTA, Excelsius, everything else, huge crash, and the world gets to go, see, that wasn't true, right? Just like in 1999, 2000, we all said, see, we're gonna sell compact discs forever.

This shit is bullshit. So now begins the 30 year, now begins the 30 year where people are like, okay, we can't go back to that. But, you know, where do we go? And I find it scary personally. Because I think that, I think it's just as real. I think that as the internet and I think it's just as unknown. So what is that big?

But it also could be good. It's not only I mean, it's scary. The unknown is scary, but it could be as wondrous as terrible. Well, and I think the big question is, you know, are we at the end of that kind of post-World War II dollarized world of peace and world trade? You know, there are many people that believe that and it's quite convincing. If you take a reader or listen to that book, the end of the world is just the beginning, you might be quite convinced that, you know, Bretton Woods set into place kind of, you know, an unprecedented era of peace and that that is coming to an end. I don't know. I'm a skateboarder from Indiana. So did you not going to turn to me for that?

When radio head left Capitol Records was a big deal because they're one of the biggest groups in the world, leaves their major label. They go independent. They did it in a very interesting way to start with and had seemingly as much success as they ever had before. For some reason, it's now, I don't know, 15 years later since then. And it seems like all of the big artists are on major labels to this day. We thought that was like the straw that broke the camel's back and now it's all turning indie. That did not happen.

Now it's true. I remember when Drake released his record on Tunecore. Wow. And the music business was like, what just happened? Right? If that guy doesn't need us, then what's going on? Right? He's not on Tunecore anymore? Exactly. I think that, you know, and I agree with you. And that's a lesson I had to learn as well. By the way, anecdote that you might appreciate, the radio had paid what you want actually came out of Nilsoft and Win-Ampe. Wow. And I think that I know Chris Hufford would back me up on that, who was a manager of Radiohead. They, Justin Frankl, who I mentioned earlier, is a big Radiohead fan. My ex-wife worked with Radiohead

at Capitol, and we all got introduced. And they liked him. He liked them. We spent a bit of time with them. And also they understood Winamp. But Winamp was shareware. You got nothing for giving us money, yet people gave us money. We made a lot of money on donations, basically. We suggested $10, but people gave us, you know, we cashed $100 checks all the time.

You know, so the last radio had record for capital was Hail to the Thief and it leaked really early and The rumor was radio head Cates Capitol and they leaked their own record So I wrote an email the Chris Huffer and I said is it true? Did you guys leak your own record? His response was I wish we were that smart. What should we do? And I went oh man my response was Put a PayPal link on the band's website and say, we know you already have the album.

Pay us what you think it's worth. I was like, and you'll prove that people, I've said people. People would be to pay for music. People would happy to pay for music. They didn't do it because, of course, how do you settle that debt with capital at the end of the day if you do it? But then within rainbows, they did it. I had nothing to do with it. When in rainbows came out, I was as surprised as anyone,

but it definitely, Chris would tell you, was sort of like the idea, the seed was planted. But I totally also agree with you, and I think we all had a lot of disappointment. I know Radiohead was sort of disappointed with the percentage of people who paid. Remember Trent did that experiment with Saul Williams, as a pay what you want, and I know Trent was disappointed with the percentage of people who paid, remember Trent did that experiment with Saul Williams as a pay what you want,

and I know Trent was disappointed with the outcome in terms of like, you know, percentage. I thought people would be willing to contribute. At the same time, we see it in things like Patreon. Patreon shows there is an economy for patronage. So I think it's a little bit of both. I think artists also recalibrated. You know if you look at record deals 2006 to today, they're much more in the artist's favor.

Right? Then they were previously because people realize if I want an artist like Drake, there's certain things I need to do. He needs a label. He needs to be able to sign his own talent. He needs the rights need to revert back to him after a period of label. He needs to be able to sign his own talent. He needs the rights to revert back to him after a period of time. There are a lot of things that are in contracts today that weren't there before when an artist has leverage, which they can have leverage in a different way than they used to be able to. Cool. And the else you could think of that would be good to talk about. I was trying to think of the things that sort of nabbed from your book, those little points of intersection. Because I really wanted to talk about that,

like sort of genre defiance. I really like the way you contextualize creativity as something that anyone can do. At the same time, we know that just because you can do it doesn't mean that it has universal appeal. And for me, the thing I feel like I bring to the table with that is that that's always interactive with the technology you have at hand. Okay, so if that's the case, we are

moving into a very interesting era. And that is what I like about digital art and generative art. And this is that there's simply new tools in the toolbox. And you just said a moment ago, that's not necessarily bad. And I totally agree. And it's like we would like to talk about things as good or bad, is the internet good or bad, is crypto good or bad. My question would be, is fire good or bad? Is a brick good or bad? I mean, you can take a brick and throw it through a window

or you can build shelter from the cold, right? It's just tools. It's just tools. And so what we have what technology is Is tools in our toolbox at the same time? We underestimate the way that technology shapes humanity Because you know if you pulled the thread of technology out of the last hundred years Everything collapses, you know, and that's what I love about it is that we do exist separate from it, but

we also cannot live without it. And in a way, it's this exact opposite of what we thought it would be. If you go back to 2008, popular thought was smartphones are interesting tools for rich people. Now, you and I can afford to put down our smartphone. If we had zero money and we were hustling, you better get a smartphone. You know, the person delivering food needs their phone, you know, more. That's why I just encourage people to really think beyond that initial reaction.

I think the human brain is so incredible because we hate change, yet we are infinitely adaptable. And so that causes these two things. And the one is you've got to go, okay, I feel that I don't like the change, but let me just think about where this could go from possibility's perspective. And I think that your book really encapsulates that

in a lot of ways, like that keeping that young mind and really thinking openly about things. And then I think I just want to be sure I say, I want to thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure talking to you. Tell me the story of you sort of had a hand in the discovery of Kid Rock. So that's funny because I was just rereading the blog post yesterday because I sent it to you. It's funny that I wrote a post where I recounted it again right around the time when I first heard Rock and Roll Jesus and before it actually come out. But in the early 90s, I heard Kid Rock at College Radio

and then at Ground Royal, we were throwing around ideas for stories and I was like, I wanna do Kid Rock. And everyone except Mark Lumin was like, that's a terrible idea. And I said, well, let me just do it and if it sucks, then you don't have to print it. And Mark very quickly got in touch with his manager, very resourceful, uppercut management and Kid Rock was super happy to talk to us,

like the Beastie boys, getting a little bit of validation from the Beastie boys was exciting to him. He was alone in Detroit, raising junior at the time, junior was a baby. I thought he was going to be like some kind of fake white want to be something else and he just wasn't. We talked about Hank Williams, we talked about Bob Seeker. He was so honest. He really knew who he was. We were both single dads. We're both Midwestern. I just fell in love with him. He was like, well we're gonna shoot photos for the article and I was like, well, we're gonna shoot photos for the article and I was like, well, I don't mean budget at all.

He's like, I'll come to LA. He came to LA, Eric Matthews shot all the photos. Amazing. He and I rented a van and we went to Vegas. That weekend it was a weekend, biggie small style. I'll never forget. I could always put it on a calendar because I could just look up when big,

I mean, we're driving back into LA from Vegas and we heard the news. And that's my brother, honestly. You know, I mean, do we agree on everything in the universe? Of course not, but I love that guy like an absolute brother. So yeah, and I had Flom read the article, Jason Flom, Lava Records, Matchbox 20, read the article and called him up. But in those days Bobby taught me something that I did not know was true.

And that is that rock stars work. And good ones work hard. Flam offered him in advance. I think I know the numbers but it doesn't matter so I won't say it so I don't get it wrong. I so you know he called me up. He's like I just got this offer from Atlantic and here's the offer. I said what did you tell him? You know where kids sound like a lot of money to me?

He said, I told him to triple it. He was like, I can make that at home in Detroit. I don't need that money. And I was like, wow. I said, he said, I told him that I'm gonna work harder than any artist they've ever had on their label. And I was like, rockstar's work. Like, what are you talking about?

Like, I didn't even understand Atoll. But I get it now. And if you look at the story, you know, he made that record, the first record for Atlantic, people forget when that thing, I mean, that thing did what 12 million copies or more. When that thing came out, it was crickets. I saw him at the Trubidor when that record, like, maybe a few weeks after the word came out, the place was half full Trubidor. Eminem was there that night. And Bobby was so drunk, I was worried he couldn't walk on stage.

He delivered, of course, because he's a true performer, and I've seen him sick as a dog, and get up there, and you have no idea he's sick, right? Because that's what he does. He works like a Midwesterner, but his job is being Kid Rock. But if you go back, you talk to Lee Trink as an example and like what they put him through in the first year of promo on that record,

we need you at MTV Beach House at 2am, okay. He shows up. We need you at the radio station. And every radio station he walked into, he walked in and they were a doubter just like I was and he walked out and they were in love, just like I was. You know, and I just think it's something that like a lot of artists that I've seen since don't really understand.

It's not just about the art, it's about the work, it's about the shaking hands and the being human being. And I think, yeah, I think Kid Rock, most people don't, wouldn't even understand what I'm talking about because what they see is a guy shooting bud light cans on the internet. I can remember Michael's type telling me that they, their friends, you two, they hated them. I mean, their friends, friend of me's, because you two would do anything.

There was nothing for work that they would not do if it was gonna advance the YouTube agenda no matter what it was. And it was intimidating for R&M because they just wanted to make music. They didn't want to kill themselves, then it was a big difference. Like, YouTube would do anything.

Well, I think there is that thing that I learned from looking at fashion designers that someone from the past is about collection and someone from the future is about connection. And to me, that's in the REM and YouTube example that you just gave. YouTube is about connection and working all the angles that they could to get there, whether it was that MTV

live at Red Rocks or the whole, as opposed to, I just want to make music and I want people to buy it or to enjoy it or whatever. And by the way, I think that I always thought and I'd never talked to John about this directly, but to me, I see a difference, and this is just as a consumer, between Nirvana and the Veecey boys. It feels to me, I didn't know him, but it but to me, I see a difference, and this is just as a consumer, between Nirvana and the BC boys. You know, it feels to me, I didn't know him, but it feels to me like Kurt was almost resentful that people liked his music, right? Whereas the BC boys were actually like very,

they cared a lot about exactly how it reached the consumer. They cared about the music video. They thought that was part of the creative canvas. The lyric sheet was part of the creative canvas. Everything. Yeah, it's all part of it. Exactly, it's not just, you know, let me make this music and then please leave me alone. Yes.

Right, that to me is that, you know, collection connection, which is it. But also, as you know, like every artist needs to do, and I think you really, like, your book kind of oozes this without even needing to say it directly. It's whatever is true to the artist. And I really felt this working with artists on the internet too. It's like, you know, I would talk to artists who are like, I don't want to be a man diploma where I put my life on the internet. I think, okay, well, if you're Glendanzig, you shouldn't be.

You know, you actually please, like, give me mystery. Give me, you give me something else. It's not a prescription, but there are some ways. The way that you do it different from everyone else is part of what makes it interesting. Exactly. The same way I mentioned earlier that Americana stands in opposition to radio country. Why is it different? And knowing what you want to do is a lot of understanding what you don't want to do.

That's the more clear those boundaries are, the more considered the art will be when it gets made and delivered. However, that happens. You know, you've worked with artists all the time who had a point of view about what they wanted. You have a point of view as a listener in terms of what you want to hear from them. How do you square those two things, right? Because there's a truth in both. For the majority of my career, for the last, you know, 30 plus years,

it's the name on the front of the record is the default. It's like, my name's on the back. So ultimately, it's their record, and ultimately, they have to live with it. And I get to make probably three or four, five more this year, they get to make one and live with it for some times a few years. So ultimately, it has to be their say.

An agreement we make before starting any project is, we going to keep working on it until we all love it. So if it's a band, every member of the band has to love it and me, if three people like it and two people don't, even though it's a democratic majority, it's not enough. And the chances are, when all five people like it, it's better than when just three people like it. So it's worth the extra work. And we don't get there through compromise. It's not about compromise. It's about continuing working until it's just better. It's not, is it choice A or choice B and there's a fight?

It's neither choice A and choice B and there's a fight? It's neither choice A and choice B if there's a fight. We have to get to C, which is better than A and better than B and everyone signs up for C. And that's a... Well, that can't always work. It always works. I didn't know it like when I worked with the BCs, one of the first bands I worked with, for example, they really didn't like the Kerry King from Slayer, played a solo on No Sleep to a Brooklyn. I understood from a different perspective than theirs how cool that was because of where

they came from, they didn't see it. It was cool. I fought for that. Right. I like your ABC thing because I always think that nothing good ever gets built by a committee. It's not committee. Exactly. You're not in the same.

It's different than that. I understand. It's listening to your friends when they see something that isn't working as well as it can be, we want to get to where it's working as well as it can be. It's not by committees. Different than that. Committee is the settling. We're not settling. It can also be the dictatorship. Like in Competti's band, it was Competti's way. Everyone else could give us one. But he was the final arbiter in Competti and the

heartbreakers and that everybody in the band was school with that because it worked and they liked it. They liked being in that band and that's what worked. James Brown was like that. Right. Very much so. Yeah. Failure was like that. Yeah.

So it's no right way. It really just depends on whoever the group of people are and whatever agreement they make in advance. Right. The Tom Petty chapter of your life, I would love to know more about. Oh, answer any questions you have. I mean, I just can't, I mean, first of all, that's actually something that I got from my parents, right?

And I also was loved as myself as one of the few almost crossover points. I remember like getting the cassette of Southern accents and like what that album meant to me at that moment. But then where you went with them and the way that you wove that together with Johnny Cash almost felt like, because it was heartbreakers, but then it was really Tom's solo. I'm just going as a listener and thinking about the lineage, it was Tom's solo thing, but then the heartbreakers got woven in so much into the American recording stuff as well. I just don't really even understand how, like, what was it? It almost feels like

it was a collective of people who made lots of different kinds of music together. It turned into that. Again, it was an intentional that it worked out that way. When I wanted to work with Johnny, I asked, I was working with Tom on Watt Flowers, and I asked him what he thought, and he's like, you have to do that, that's a great idea. He was the only person in the world who thought it was a great idea. No one had any record company or no one thought that was a good idea, but Tom thought it was great idea.

And this is pre-American recordings, pre the first. Yeah, we hadn't made anything yet. Oh wow. Wow, so wildflowers actually predates. The recording of it, I can't remember what came out when. Because wildflowers took predates the recording of it. I can't remember what came out when, because wildflowers took about two years. Got it. And how many years did you work with Johnny?

The last 10 years of his life. The last 10 years of his life. And we made, we put out six studio albums, and then there's a box set called Unearthed, which has outtakes. And while there were six studio albums, we probably recorded, you know, more than twice as many of the things that didn't come out that came out. How did you choose those songs? It was a collaboration. Johnny would suggest songs to me. I would

suggest songs to him. And then, you know, sometimes we came together sometimes he would say like I love the song one rose I'd never heard the song before he brought it in thought it was beautiful we cut that old country song and then I would suggest you know obviously if it's a back song I suggested the back song the dance song you know or the dance song or whatever it was the Leonard Cohen song no Leonard Cohen might have been from Johnny. That's why I wondered. Okay. So he was versed in those. Absolutely.

He's well. Absolutely. Yeah. I think he brought in the sting song. He brought in the, there's a spring-steen song. I think that he brought in. Huh. It really was case by case.

Wow. And then some of the old blues songs I brought in. And just like thinking it would be interesting or the memories and made of this, I knew it as a Dean Martin song. Right. To me, there's something that you guys did with that project because what I remember is I was Johnny Cash fan.

And I remember seeing the Johnny Cash Walmart exclusive and really feeling like that's sad. You know, it kind of broke my heart. I was like, wow, that's where we are. In terms of our appreciation of a great artist, right? It's like narrow cast at a certain audience. Walmart, I wouldn't say as narrow, but it is. It's like type cast.

That's the right way to put it. And what you did is, I feel like you opened something up that then it's almost like an appreciation for these artists. I mean, you did it with Neil Diamond and other people did it in other ways, I think. And, you know, I wonder even if, I don't know, it's hard to say, like, you know, what brings what. But I do think that you brought like a reverence for... It definitely opened the door.

I had other grown-up artists contact me and say, based on what's happening with Johnny Cash, I now feel like I can try doing this. Like I can try to make something worth something. Yeah, I would actually say maybe even a great album. I've won my favorite really nice albums is Spirit. It came out around 96. I'd be shocked if that wasn't influenced by American recordings.

I have no idea. In some way, I think you look at like Merle Haggard on anti-records. Come on. That must be, and I think that's a great album. I think so too. If I could only fly, wow. But I can remember sitting down Johnny saying, you know, the goal, like the same thing was easy top Johnny saying, you know, we're the goal, like, same thing was easy to say.

You know, our goal here is to make the best out of me ever made your career. And they would look at me like I was insane. Right. How could I do that now? Yeah, it's like, that's insane. Like, don't you know who I am? Right. I used to be Johnny Cash. Right. Right. Yeah. Wow. Like, that's how they thought it, like, it seemed impossible.

Right. But just to allow that thinking of, if what if we make something better than anything you've ever made before? Yeah, who knows right anything's possible. It's crazy. I mean as a listener, I Really it's not wouldn't say never but I almost never listened to Johnny Cash stuff that you didn't record even though I love it and I loved it before yeah before but when I would I think of Johnny Cash stuff that you didn't record, even though I love it and I loved it before. Yeah. But when I think of Johnny Cash, I think that's why I'm stuck on it. I kind of keep asking about it because I think it's so unique. Yeah.

Thank you for the work that you've done. The BST was literally changed the course of my life, you know, and you changed the course of their life and we all put our hands in it. But also just on a personal level, like the amount of joy and possibility. And I also, for me, the way that you have covered that spectrum, the fact that the same person made the first Danzig solo record

and the Tom Petty records, that I feel, and it feels like something that the world tells you shouldn't happen, the same person doesn't make those two records and the Adele record, right? But it makes perfect sense to me. Yeah, because you like them. It's like we're making things we like. Exactly.

And music isn't in buckets like that. Right. Thank you. Respect. It's like just speaking to you and I'm recording more from you soon. It's super fun. Thank you. you