Jimmy Iovine: Building Interscope Records & Beats by Dre

I want to start with what you were just saying before we started recording. I was like, “Rob, hurry up and run the tape.” You said, “We live in a corny world.”

We’ve gone from fame replacing great, right? It became more important at one point to be famous than to be great, because there’s a currency. You had to be great at one time to get a record deal, to do all that stuff, and then that sort of dwindled as time went on, which is fine.

But it has absolutely replaced great—what you can do on the internet, market yourself, and all this other stuff—because you can make a lot of money just being famous. But now it’s taken another leap, which is fascinating. It’s gone to attention, and sometimes that leads or contributes to a very corny world.

I think social media has had the biggest impact that I’ve seen in my lifetime.

And that contributes to people being corny for attention on social media, you think?

Yeah, because you can make money. The people who don’t need money want attention, and they want to be at the top of the news or go viral. Most of my friends, if they go viral, they’re devastated. They’re like, “Oh, shit!” Or they don’t even know.

I think not even knowing would be the place that I would aspire to be in. I want to make great work. Obviously, I’m public-facing because I happen to be obsessed with podcasts, and I want to make some of the best podcasts in the world.

But I try to just—I mean, it comes from you. I did this video. I obviously did the Founders episode on you because you’ve been one of the people I’ve most admired for a long period of time. We did this clip that got almost 2 million views of your advice about why horses have blinders on them.

Yeah.

It’s one of my favorite things. Every time I post it, it still resonates. I post things to remind myself: “Hey, I’m chasing after greatness. It doesn’t matter. I can’t look left, and I can’t look right, and worry about what people are doing.”

This is one of the things I most admire about you. We spent a few hours together at your house yesterday. You were very kind to invite me over there again, and you pulled up this insane video from you from 2004, which is 4 or 5 years before Spotify was founded. You were essentially talking about what you saw as the technological shift happening in the music industry. What was that video about?

I always wanted Interscope to move laterally. I didn’t want to keep drilling the same hole. I hate drilling the same hole. That’s just me. I get bored drilling the same hole. That’s kind of why I’ve jumped around industries a little bit and gotten to learn on the fly a lot.

That was around 2000. We had this little TV show called “Jimmy and Doug’s Farm Club.” It was about uploading your music to Interscope, and we would put you on our TV show. It was fantastic, and it worked. What I really wanted to do was have an all-you-can-eat music streaming service.

But this was before it was invented. You were talking about the ideal situation before it was actually founded.

Yeah, but I see online all the time people talking about shit before it happens. You know what I mean? That’s 10% of the game. The game is getting it right. MySpace was ahead of its time, but it lost the race.

So I was very fortunate to be at least early enough to have Apple Music get on the board. I had Beats Music, and it went to Apple Music, so at least we became number 2. Daniel, who’s extraordinary, had the wherewithal and the ability to get the licenses from a record business that didn’t understand at all what he was talking about.

The fact that he wrestled those licenses out—I mean, you can prove it. If you look at those deals, they’re reflective of the iTunes download market: 70/30. That was the same business as the download market, so they just copied that, which is not a great business model for that.

Why? Because you don’t have enough money in the streaming service for it to really live, so they’ve got to go out and find different versions of revenue, right? And they pay 70%, or whatever it is now—72%, 70%, 60%. I don’t know what the negotiations have been since then.

It’s structured in a really odd way. Let’s say, for example, you’re married, you have 2 kids, and you have a family plan. You and your wife play the Clash, the Police, et cetera, but your kids play Drake and Kendrick Lamar all day. Most of the money from your house goes to Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

What you’re hearing about is that artists used to be able to earn a living like that. But now, unless you’re in that top chunk of heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy streaming, the money’s not really meaningful. So that’s a problem they have to fix. There’s no question about that.

But there’s a lot wrong with streaming, in my opinion. It’s one-dimensional. It’s an ATM machine: You put your money in, you get your music. They don’t do anything for the artist.

The artists want to communicate with their fans, period. That’s what they want. They want to communicate, they want to market themselves, and the streaming services are still saying, “We’ll put you on our list if you’re nice to us or if we like you.” That’s bullshit. You’ve got to allow them to have their audience and let them breathe.

That’s what TikTok does—not for philanthropic reasons. That’s what Instagram does. You can somewhat promote yourself. So the streaming services, to me, are minutes away from being obsolete because of that. You can’t rub against the artist like that. You just can’t. You’ve got to give them what they want. They’re driving this ship.

I learned that in 1973. I came from Red Hook, Brooklyn. My dad was a longshoreman. I walked in the studio with John Lennon, I did 3 albums with him, and I got my own apartment. I realized, “Okay, for the rest of my life, I’m going to try to meet maybe not John Lennon, but people that can do this, with real talent, and my life is going to be okay. All I’ve got to do is not get thrown out of the fucking room.”

And you looked at it even back then as an act of service to the artist that you were working with?

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

You have this great line in “The Defiant Ones,” which I’ve told you I’ve watched probably at least 10 times. You’re like, “99% of this, when people say, ‘I did this’ or ‘I did that’ in the music business,” you’re like, “It’s complete bullshit. It all comes down to the artist that you’re working with.”

Yeah. And today, by the way, a lot of artists are producers, like Dr. Dre, Timbaland, and some of the younger guys, whom I’m just not that familiar with. I’ve been out of the music business for a while. They write the songs and make the records, but in my day, 80% of it was the artist.

Bruce Springsteen wrote the songs, had the idea, had the vision, and you helped. So that’s where I was coming from.

That’s a great point. I’m glad you brought up Bruce, because you and I were talking about that yesterday. I told you I went through his autobiography, and I really think that book changed my life in many ways.

I watched one of your interviews. You said one of the best pieces of advice that you ever got was from Jon Landau, because they were working you like a dog, and you were thinking about leaving. He said, “Let me tell you.” He’s like, “Stay in the saddle.”

Bruce was torturing me. He said himself in an interview—I think maybe in that documentary—“An artist needs to be indulged.”

Yeah.

Right? Or something like that, when you’re striving for something. The truth is that we would try to do something, and I couldn’t get it right. It took 3 weeks to get a drum sound, like a simple thing. It was really hard.

They brought somebody in to help, and I let my pride get in the way. So I went to Jon Landau, and he said, “I’m going to tell you something you didn’t learn in that neighborhood of yours. Your mother and father didn’t”—because he knew my family—“your mother and father didn’t tell you this. This is not about you. This is about Bruce Springsteen and about the record we’re making.”

I’ll tell you, for the rest of my life, that just stopped me in my tracks. For the rest of my life, if you apply “This is not about me,” you can really get somewhere, even if you’re not that good. Just being humble enough to say that, and not thinking that because you had one success you’re the Beatles, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or whatever, is—this is not about you. If you can follow that, it’s really good.

One of my favorite lines from the history of entrepreneurship actually comes from Henry Ford. He said, “Money comes naturally as a result of service.”

Some of my favorite entrepreneurs—and what I’m trying to do in my life, too—is just focus on making something valuable that makes somebody else’s life better, and so create an act of service. Then, once you do that, just try to serve more people. Spread the product, the service—in this case, the podcast—to as many people as possible, and then the score will take care of itself. I won’t worry about the value coming back to me.

The whole thing you’ve got to do is—look, there’s a certain amount of feigned humility that’s good, and it works. If you practice it long enough, you actually become somewhat humble.

Do you consider yourself a humble person? I think I have a humble side.

Say more about that.

I do. I come from a family—my father was a humble guy. He was a dockworker, a longshoreman, manual labor. I don’t know a lot of people whose fathers really worked manual labor, where, if it’s 90 degrees down the pier, it’s 120 in the hull of the ship.

When you’re carrying coffee bags, they were 100 pounds apiece, all day.

Mm-hmm.

But he had pride, and he was humble.

And if you're willing to give yourself up for a greater cause—in my case, when I was younger, it was an album, right?—if you're willing to do that and set your bullshit aside to get someone else's vision, it takes humility to do that. And if you're truly doing that, yeah, I have some humility that I'm proud of.

Every single person I've either read about who worked with you or who has given interviews says that you want Jimmy in the room because he'll tell you the truth.

Yeah.

I want to tell this story because it's hilarious, and then I want to ask you about this. I'm reading Bruce Springsteen's 600-page autobiography. The book's so big, you can work out with the goddamn thing.

There's a story in there where he's struggling, and he's trying to do something new, and he's in LA. He's like, “My good friend Jimmy Iovine comes over. We play this new album for him, and no one else has heard it.” He said you sat there silently for 80 minutes. He turns it off, and then you just say one thing. He goes, “So when are you going to record the vocals?”

Right. Well—

Because the music was so loud. But he said, “That's why you want Jimmy in the room, because he'll tell you the truth.”

I'll give you the setting. He was doing the album for about 2 years. It was “The River,” and they worked really, really hard on that. Because I engineered his album, I knew he had a tendency to bury the vocal, right? And I knew those guys really well. I knew Landau and Bruce pretty well by then.

Actually, part of the story he didn't tell, which was funny, is that Tom Petty was sitting next to me.

Oh, he shouldn't have left that out.

Because I was producing Tom Petty at the time.

Yeah.

We went over and visited, right? So he plays us a double album, and the vocal was buried. I just said to myself, “I got one line to penetrate,” because I saw Bruce's face, and he was serious as a fucking heart attack. You know what I mean? He's at the end of an album; he's exhausted.

So I just said, “When are you going to sing it?” And it was very funny, but it was very clear. And they did—they went back in and remixed the whole album, which was the right thing to do.

But where did you get the self-confidence? How old were you when you started working with John Lennon—20, 21?

20.

Yeah. You told him the truth, too.

Yeah.

Where did that come from? Because—

Not out of arrogance or confidence; it's comfort. My father really drilled into me from when I was a little kid that wherever you go, the place is better because you're there, because you're a decent person. He used to say, “You're a humble person, you're a decent person, you're a good person, and you're not going to screw anybody,” in his language, right?

So wherever I went in my life, I always feel comfortable. I'm very insecure in my personal life, which I've grown out of in the last—at 72, hello? Right, thank God, you know? Who the fuck wants to die that insecure, right?

But in work, I always had a certain amount of confidence because it came naturally to me. Nothing came naturally to me before that, but when I sat at a console and put the faders up, the balance came very, very naturally, and people liked it.

So that's where I got some of the confidence from. I was always willing to say what I felt about music to anybody, at any time. What's the point of asking me a question if I'm not supposed to give you my answer? I don't understand that philosophy.

It's one of the funniest things. I played this clip for you.

One second.

No, go for it. Interrupt as much as you want.

One of the reasons is, I really don't think I walk in trying to get you to like me, because I believe you do.

Say more about this. You told me this yesterday. I feel the same way, by the way. Explain.

That shouldn't sound egotistical, because let me tell you something. When you meet a lot of angry people, they think people aren't going to like them, and it's not true.

So I'm not saying that I'm arrogant. What I'm saying is that I deal with a lot of people who are very defensive and aggressive because they think people don't like them. And you know that. We know a lot of people who are very visible right now who I can smell think everybody hates them.

And some of them say that privately.

I'm sure.

Yeah.

I'm sure.

Yeah.

But you can smell it.

Mm-hmm.

And that's not ego, thinking that people are going to like you. It's because I came from a home in a neighborhood where that was it.

You have this brutal honesty.

Well, you're leaving one word out.

What's that?

Brutal honesty, but an enormous amount of respect.

Yeah, I don't think you do it in a disrespectful way.

No, you can't do it in a disrespectful way.

I don't even think you'd be in a room with somebody you didn't respect, because you have complete control over your environment.

What happens is, you think you build these walls, and you get over these fences, right? And you go, “Okay, I'm on the other side. I'm insulated. I'm this, I'm that,” and then you have kids.

Mm-hmm.

And the kids bring the world back in, and all of a sudden, if you want to get your kid into school, sometimes you're going to sit across from an asshole. You know what I mean? So the answer to that question is no. Once you have kids, you just go back to zero.

But Bruce Springsteen said it best. He says a lot of things best. He said, “When I was making music, when I was on ‘Born to Run,’” in particular, when he was flat broke.

When I met John Lennon, it was 3 years after The Beatles broke up, right? So I did 3 albums with him, but he was already John Lennon. He already had “Imagine,” so he was John, right?

Bruce was broke—I mean, dropped from his label—and his career was in trouble, right? Publicly, he said, “I didn't want to be rich. I didn't want to be famous. Man, I didn't even want to be happy. I wanted to be great.”

When I was 20 to 25, I got to work with Bruce Springsteen on 2 albums, John Lennon on 3 albums, Patti Smith on 1, and Tom Petty, at that point, on 1. I spent my college years, those impressionable years, with those 4 people.

And it was unbelievable. It was such an education about culture, about life, about what's important, about all those things, and I just sucked it in because I was really—You know Etch A Sketch? I had nothing going on. I didn't understand anything.

So everything that they taught me, I just breathed in. I was lucky that it was them. I just took it all in, and it really set the tone for my life.

Why? Because these are some of the most culturally relevant poets of the 20th century. And when I say poet, I mean the person, not just that they write lyrics. They had the right attitude about their work and their product.

What was the right attitude about their work or their product?

They weren't thinking about how to promote it. They were thinking about how to make it. And it's what I liked about Steve Jobs when I met him.

I met a lot of these guys since the year 2000, because I'd gone on the road. Once Napster came out, I was like, “Oh, shit, what's going on? I better learn something new,” because this trick isn't going to work anymore.

The whole music business, I felt, was going to be upside down, and it has been. But in those days, I wanted to get a feel for what I called, at that time, the other side. So I met with a bunch of tech companies, and then I met Steve. He was the only one who had soul.

Similar to the soul of the artists that you worked with in music?

Yes, absolutely, but he was the only one. He had soul and feel. We bonded over John Lennon and Bob Dylan. We would talk about that all the time. And he had the same attitude that they had.

Now, he was a businessman. He was a lot of things that they're not, and they were a lot of things that he isn't. But how it translated to me was, you can be in this world and have soul, and you don't find that a lot.

Why did you say that when you met him, you thought, “He’s the only one who’s going to get this done”? I think this was pre-streaming. This was, I think, iTunes.

Yeah. It was iTunes.

So you said, “Why did you—”

I helped him get the licenses for iTunes.

You did?

I helped him, but yeah.

But why could he do it and no one else?

Because he understood. He understood what made artists tick. He understood the why. Most engineers that I’ve met in my now 25 years of playing in that world don’t understand the why of the people who do what I used to do. That’s why it was so interesting.

I knew from then that tech was going to buy all the media companies. Media companies move in different ways. They don’t move like the tech business. When I met him, I said, “This guy gets it.” Is he tough? Is he ruthless? Maybe. I don’t know. But I can tell you what: He gets it. He gets it.

Most of the people I meet in that world know how to do what they’re doing, but as far as the particular thing that Steve had, I haven’t met another one who has that.

Mm.

Not that they’re bad people or anything. They just don’t have that. By the way, you can like music. All these guys are always saying, “I love music!” I love chocolate, but I don’t understand Hershey’s. I really don’t understand who makes chocolate and how they make it.

Yeah.

So you could like music all day, and it’s completely different. One engineer told me once—we were working on something, and there was going to be video involved—he said to me, “I know how that should end. I love television.”

That’s not the same thing, man. Anyway, Steve called you one day to congratulate you because he said there were all these people trying to make hardware, and they weren’t successful at it. You were one of the few people who, despite having no experience making hardware, made hardware successfully.

The interesting part about that is, first, I want to hear more about it. But second, why did he call music “software”?

You’d know that answer better than me.

I’ve never heard anybody say that. I guess it is.

I mean, it’s treated like ones and zeros or whatever, because that’s how it comes across.

Yeah.

Whatever that is.

He was like, “All these software guys want to make hardware, and they can’t.”

Well, he always felt that what was unique about Apple was that a software company could make hardware.

Let’s talk about the schools. Why are the schools important to talk about?

Because it ties into all that is. Occasionally, I run into someone who says, “He’s the next Steve Jobs. She’s the next Steve Jobs.” Well, let me tell you something: There’s not going to be another Steve Jobs. There will be some great people, and there are some incredible people around today who are doing something extraordinary— inventing, creating companies, and so on.

But to be Steve Jobs, you have to truly understand the cross between technology and the liberal arts, where those 2 things meet and interact. When I had Beats, I realized that the collaboration between engineering, design, and culture wasn’t happening the way I thought it would. I thought everybody in the world of tech was like Steve Jobs because he got it. He got the why of everything that I was doing and the people around me were doing. He understood it at its core. It was in his instinct.

What I realized when I met a lot of other people in the tech business, across all the companies, is that they’re fundamentally engineering societies. You can’t generalize it; there are people who aren’t like that. But for the most part, the reason software companies don’t make hardware is that they don’t truly understand design, and they can’t communicate with it. That’s what I think. What the fuck do I know? But that’s what I think. That’s what I’ve observed.

How did you know there was a need for a new school, though?

Because I realized it was education. I realized it was siloing in education. Again, what do I know? I know the feel of young people and culture. I see the way kids are being brought up. They’re being brought up with multiple disciplines. For the last 15 years, they’ve all been brought up with multiple disciplines: tech, music, culture, and design. They’re all fascinated by that.

So when you go to school, when you go to college, you get siloed. You go to Wharton, you’re an accountant. They have an engineering course you could take, but you take that engineering course with 50 other engineers. Now you’re seeing schools—

Remember, we started this school 14 years ago.

That long ago?

Yeah.

Wow!

Absolutely.

And it was you and Dr. Dre. You endowed it with 70 million dollars to get started.

Yeah.

Okay.

Neither one of us went to school. We’re not afraid to do things we have no idea how to do, and we put our own money up. I don’t care who you are, that’s a lot of money. But I knew there was a problem, and we wanted to fix it.

Siloed learning—and you’re hearing a lot of people talk about it now—is something they’re trying to fix by bringing in all the disciplines. But what they do is bring it in through the side door. At any other school, you could take a course in another discipline.

Our school is a school of collaboration, which you saw. If you lean toward tech, the arts, entrepreneurship, or design, you get to work in concert. You innovate collaboratively, which is what these big companies don’t have. They don’t really sing in concert, in harmony. That’s what I observed. I don’t know that; I observed that. It’s the problems that I had communicating and the problems they had communicating with me.

When’s the first time you had that problem? Was it when you were trying to build a product?

Beats.

Beats was a product, not by accident, like the iPod. I wanted culture, design, and music. I wanted it all connected. So I met Steve Jobs, and he was like, “Oh, this guy gets it all.” I figured everybody did.

Did you pitch him on doing the headphones together?

Yeah.

What did he say?

He just said, “I don’t want to do headphones. You do them.”

We went out to a restaurant once—I’ll never forget it. We went to this Greek restaurant, and it was after he was sick. It was one of those restaurants where they put down the paper thing and give you crayons for the kids so they can draw.

We were in the middle of lunch, and I said, “You know, I want to build this headphone company.” He goes, “You can do it. You build a headphone company.” I said, “Why don’t we just do it together?” He said, “I don’t want to do a headphone company. You build a headphone company.”

So I said, “Okay.” He goes, “Let me show you how.” He called a guy and had all the food taken away. Good thing I don’t care about eating one way or the other. I like food, but it’s not the most important thing in my life.

He said, “Give me a marker,” and the guy gave him a marker. He drew distribution and inventory and said, “It’ll kill you.” In China, you can make things that are made in China, but they can’t look like they were made in China. I said, “Holy shit!” Then he guided me along the way, and he was fantastic.

But I thought when I started Beats—I’m naive in a lot of ways—that I could find people like that. I found people in design, engineers, and people in popular culture. I wanted them all to understand how to collaborate, and I just said, “Siloed learning is bullshit.”

Now we have 5 or 6 high schools, and they’re great places. It’s considered one of the best interdisciplinary schools in the country, and I’m really proud of that. But again, what do I know about education? Not a lot. I’ve learned a lot in the last 15 years, but really not a lot.

Yeah, it started with the instinct that you just didn’t think it was being done correctly, and you’d just learn—

I know how to get something done.

Yeah, because this goes back to you just being a natural-born entrepreneur. You’re just like—

I just know how to get something done.

I met this great dean, Erica Muhl. I met her and said, “Oh, she could do this.” She was from the Roski School, but I just felt instinctively that she could do it.

What’s that?

It’s an art school at USC.

Okay.

Then there was the president, Max Nikias. He was an engineer, but I knew he got it. We built it, and now it’s a fabulous school. A lot of people want to go there. It’s fantastic.

Look, I work on a lot of things I don’t know how to do, but I can get them done. I don’t claim to be some great technologist, but I made a great headphone.

I think I’ve studied you a lot. I’ve talked to you now for hours and hours and hours, and I’m still trying to figure out what your highest talent is.

I just ran into Steve Stoute at a friend’s birthday party, which was really funny, because he worked for you for a long time. I was like, “Dude, I’m seeing Jimmy soon. Can you give me some stories?” You’re obviously a phenomenal marketer. Let me ask you: What do you actually think your talent is? Then I want to tell the story that Steve told me.

My talent, whatever it is, I’m learning more about it now because I’m not running the companies. When I used to run the companies—when I ran Interscope, when I ran Beats, and when I ran what became Apple Music—I just woke up in the day and did everything by my instinct, whatever that was that morning.

It’s a little more difficult to do that at Apple than it was when they were my own companies because they have a giant infrastructure. I always felt like I was a bit on the tail that’s wagging the dog. I used to live on the dog, and I…

But when you were running the company, you'd wake up and just use instinct.

Purely. Or I'd listen to people, grab a piece from here and a piece from there, and just synthesize.

Did you go after difficult things on purpose?

I only went by what I felt.

That was one example, because Dre comes to you, he plays—was it “The Chronic”? What is he playing for you the very first time, or is it some song?

“The Chronic.” Finished.

And I think you ask him, “Who engineered this?”

Right.

And he's like, “I did.” And you're like, “Well, who produced it?” And he's like, “I did.” Then you're like, “Oh—”

Right.

Within a few minutes of meeting him, you said something like, “He's going to define Interscope.”

Right.

But then he had a very hairy situation you had to get him out of, right?

It was impossible. It was everything you think it is when you're watching these shows and stuff.

Okay, so what was going on?

Tenfold. What happened was, I connected dots, which I think I do really well. I saw him and Snoop. I finally heard hip-hop with the 808 bass, that big bass sound. Producers couldn't harness it. All the records, whether it was Public Enemy or any of those records made in New York, they couldn't harness that in a way that I understood.

Dre was the first person to really harness it and give it the power that it deserved, because he gave it the clarity that it deserved. It's very hard to do. So, I understood that, and when I saw that combined with Snoop and Dre, the image they were projecting, and what they were talking about, I said, “This is The Rolling Stones.” I said, “This is Mick and Keith. It scares you, but the music brings you in.” So, I'm like, “This has to work.”

I didn't have to understand the music, which I didn't in the beginning. Now, I think I do—not as much as some of the pioneers of hip-hop, but I understand it.

Were there lawsuits? Were they signed? What did you have to untangle?

There were 3 lawsuits. There was a RICO lawsuit, right?

RICO?

That came with Sony. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wait, I thought—is RICO money laundering? What is it?

About gangsterism.

Gangster. Okay, okay, that's right.

That was from the Eazy-E thing.

Oh, okay.

Right? This is in the older movies. I'm not talking out of school. There was a RICO lawsuit. There was a guy in prison who supposedly put up the money for one of the albums, the first album, so he was suing them from prison. There was Sony, and there was a company that distributed Eazy-E's label that was suing as well, or challenging it as well.

So, I had to settle all those things, which is kind of like if you see something great, but there's a T. rex sitting on it. Most people would avoid it and say, “Look, there must be something else to eat.”

And you just know, “I only want to work with great”?

If I see something new and great and unusual, I can't stop. That's why Beats attracted me so much. I looked at it and said, “Oh, shit. People are wearing these things on their head, and they look like medical equipment.” There's nothing attractive about headphones.

The funny thing about that is that there was opportunity hiding in plain sight. You're like, “What's our competition, guys? Bose? There's no music. It's like silence.”

Well, their marketing thing was, “You can go to sleep with us.”

Yeah.

I'm like, “That's ridiculous.” What a marketing thing, right? So, I said, “No, no, no, no. We want to wake you up.”

Okay, hold on. I want to pause here, because I texted Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, and I was like, “Tell me, give me some ideas,” because he's known you forever. He told me, “The first time we ever had dinner, he's like, ‘I only lost 2 deals in my life, and both of them were to Jimmy Iovine,’” which is hilarious.

Well, that just means my bullshit was better than his. It doesn't mean anything. He's so—what he did in the music business, man, no one has any idea how hard it was.

Patti Smith had an incredible line. It is, “People have the power, the power to dream, to rule, and to wrestle the world from fools.”

Ooh, that's good.

Okay? That's what Daniel Ek did. Anytime you get a guy like that, I didn't beat him at anything. I just must have been slicker than him, that's all.

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

Yes.

So, hardware first—that was the initial idea?

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

Well, what do you mean by lateral, though?

For example, Interscope was a music company, right? I wanted to make the hardware to listen to it. I wanted to have a streaming service. I wanted to distribute my own music. So, I wanted to have the complete thought. I wanted to make the music, have the artists that make the music, distribute the music, and then have the instrument you listen to it on. So, that's moving laterally.

I would've also wanted, which I'm doing now with Complex, to have e-commerce, so artists can communicate in different ways with their audience.

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

That's right.

So, you have this idea for Beats. You see this opportunity. Obviously, Dre's known for the best sonics ever, so it makes perfect—

Right.

Alignment with him. This was Steve Stoute's point to me. I'm going to come back to Beats real quick—I want to close that loop—where he's like, “Ask him about the fact that he's bringing these super-controversial artists at the time.” They're not that well-known. I think it was Dre and Snoop, and they wouldn't play them on the Top 40. And he says, “Jimmy did something genius to get Dre and Snoop played on the Top 40.” What did you do?

Well, I just considered it a reflex. What we did was, I said, “Okay, you've got to understand: whenever there are gatekeepers on anything, your job is to figure out a way around the gatekeeper with something you really believe in. Whether the gatekeepers are people at your own company, people at radio stations, or wherever the gatekeepers are, your job is to skate around them, right?”

So, I said, “Okay, let's do this. Let's make a 1-minute commercial of ‘Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang,’ which was Dre's first single with Snoop, right? Let's make a 60-second spot. Now, I don't want anything said before it or after it. I just want it to play.”

The radio's not going to play my song? That's fine. I'm going to buy ad space on the radio and play the song.

Yeah. Yes, and we did it in the 50 top markets. We spent a fortune doing it. Simultaneously, we got it on MTV, because they didn't play rap music, either. They played MC Hammer, but they didn't play—I guess you'd call it gangster rap, or whatever music is today. They didn't play that then, right?

How'd you get on MTV?

I said, “This is the same thing as Guns N' Roses, period.”

You've said that twice now. You said Snoop and Dre are Mick and Keith. You say, “This is just like Guns N' Roses.” What does that mean?

It means that it's counterculture, that people are going to relate to it—people who feel marginalized, isolated, and angry. And it represents an entire culture that people are going to relate to. That's what Guns N' Roses did, that's what The Rolling Stones did, that's what Nirvana did. That's what James Brown did. It's that thing that moves people. So, yeah, I instinctively felt that.

So, who do you go to at MTV? You just go to the top guy? How do you actually get it done?

Yeah. I said, “Play this.” He goes, “I can't play this.” He had the remote in his hand, and his TV was on behind him. He said, “I can't, because we play this.” It was 3 women singing, and then the next video was a guy, but it was all pure pop music, right? He said, “I don't know how to program it.”

I said, “Put it next to Guns N' Roses, and if it doesn't work, please never play an Interscope record again.”

Wow. You had that much belief?

You don't have to be talented to know that. I mean, it's just fucking obvious, you know what I mean? Ask Rick Rubin. He knew it before me.

But what it caused was all these kids—sons of senators, daughters of senators, Congress people, business people—they came home and wanted those records. And when that happened, that's what led to the whole falling out with Time Warner that we had, when Interscope got thrown out of Time Warner over lyrics.

Because Bob Dole, C. DeLores Tucker, Bill Bennett, who was the education czar, or whatever he was at the time—all those guys—Bill Clinton went on the floor of the Senate, and Bob Dole said we were—well, somebody said we were a mustard gas factory or something like that.

Yeah, I remember that.

But I've been involved with John Lennon. They tried to throw him out, too. When I was doing his album, he had to go to court every day during “Walls and Bridges,” because Nixon was trying to throw him out of the country. That was real.

Yeah, that's insane.

Yeah, that was real. Because he was against the war, right? So, I'm used to that. I'm like, “So what?” I didn't care what those people were saying.

So, you got him on MTV, you got him on the radio. Once you play the ads on the radio, then people start calling—

Of course.

The radio stations like—

Of course.

“Play that song that is an ad.”

No one else is doing this.

Only because I wouldn't do anything illegal. I'm psychotic about doing anything illegal. I just said, "This is legal. Let's do this." The record business, God knows what they did to get records played. But they weren't going to play these records. There was no chance.

And look, there's nobody better at this. No one. The greatest record executive of all time, of all time, is a guy named Berry Gordy.

I've heard the name, but I know nothing about him.

He founded Motown.

Oh, okay.

During Jim Crow, you know what I mean? His artists weren't even allowed off the bus. They were considered race records. He had to get those records played. He had to get them into the white market. What he did—talk about wrestling the earth from fools. Berry Gordy, a miracle of what he did. He made the greatest music in the world.

When he pushed, it stuck. If you know what you have is going to stick, and you're passionate about it, then just break through that wall, because there's going to be a lot of resistance. But if it sticks, you win.

Yeah.

It has to stick, though.

There's actually a lesson for entrepreneurs in there, too, because I reread Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters three or four times. He's one of the entrepreneurs I most admire, and he realized he had a sticky product with Amazon because he saw that once you become an Amazon customer, not only do you order, but you reorder, and then you ask Amazon to carry more things.

He tells a story about emailing 1,000 customers. He said, "Hey, you bought a book. What else would you buy?" One guy said, "Can you sell me windshield wipers?" And he's like, "Oh, my God, we're going to be able to sell anything like this."

He said, "Okay, if I have high retention with my product"—which he knew he had at Amazon—"that means I have a winning system. That means I need to invest heavily in acquiring new customers, because the 10 million or whatever the number is—let's say you spend $100 million on new customer acquisition, advertising, and marketing this year—these people are going to be with me next year, the year after, and for a decade."

Well, if you're an entrepreneur and you see something work, you can extrapolate what else will work, right? That's what he did. These guys have built businesses that dwarf anything I've ever even dreamed of, you know? But they can extrapolate.

For example, Beats. I was always frustrated that the music industry didn't have customers. It drove me crazy.

What do you mean they don't have customers?

They don't have a customer. They still don't have a customer.

They don't have the relationship with the end user, you mean?

Right. Instagram does, TikTok does, MTV did. Constantly, the streaming services do. For some reason, the music industry is allergic to a customer, okay? I don't know why, but they don't have an end user.

What was the first time they outsourced the relationship with the end customer? Is this just—

Always.

So, even when you're selling through record stores back in the day?

Record stores, radio, MTV.

So, you would've controlled—so, when you said you want to go lateral, the entrepreneurial version of this, the business version, you want to vertically integrate. You want to vertically integrate—

Yeah, yeah.

—all the way down. So, you would've even had Interscope if there's—

Yeah, but I want to vertically integrate, if you call it that, to fashion. I mean—

Because you guys are controlling the culture. You're having the influence.

We're causing it.

Causing it. Ooh.

My artists are causing the culture. The artists that I work with, rather, to put it clearly. For example, we put Beats in all of our music videos when we first started.

You were insistent and relentless with this.

So what? I put a lot more money into the videos. Everybody benefited, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

It was a time when the industry was desperate. So, yeah, we did that, and it worked.

Worked is an understatement.

Yeah, yeah. It worked, and we built the number one headphone company in the world. When we sold to Apple, we were number one in 50 countries. We were number one in Germany, and Sennheiser was number two. We were number one in Japan, and Sony was number two. I still can't believe it, to be honest with you.

This goes back to how you have this instinct. I'm still trying to figure out your web of really special talents, and marketing is definitely one of them. You have this weird instinct to just make the right decision.

Marketing is empathy.

Say more.

It's empathy. Marketing is understanding who you're trying to communicate with and understanding them—understanding where they click and come from. That's all marketing is.

You can call what I do marketing. I don't think it's marketing. I guess I have a feel for the market, for who I want to sell things to or communicate with, right?

I'm not Bob Dylan, by any stretch of the imagination, but Bob Dylan, to take it to an extreme, had a feel for an entire generation, and he made his product. He made it because he was a purist. He wanted to do something great, but it turns out that was marketing. The product is marketing if you make the product great.

Steve Jobs is a great marketer. So, yeah, if you know your product and you know your audience, I guess that's a great marketer. But all it is is empathy—understanding what somebody else is feeling on a massive scale.

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Yeah. I bought it in probably 2011.

How long were the headphones going?

Three years into it.

So, three years into it, and it was called—what was the name? I forgot.

MOG.

Okay.

Yeah.

And you renamed it Beats.

Yeah. Spotify had 3 million subscribers at the time we sold to Apple. I renamed it Beats Music, but I realized I couldn't scale it on my own, because, as you know, it costs a lot of money to do that. I realized Dre and I couldn't do this on our own.

So, we brought Trent Reznor on, who's an incredible talent. Talk about understanding technology, the arts, and culture. He and his partner, Atticus Ross, make some of the greatest music in the world right now. There's all the movies and everything he's doing.

So, you tried to run it, and then you realized you had a—

I couldn't scale it on my own.

Couldn't scale it on your own.

I wanted it to be at Interscope, and for one reason or another, we couldn't get that done. The guys running it at the time weren't really in charge. There was the whole Vivendi thing and all that stuff.

I went to them early on. I said, "I want to build businesses with your artists." The guy actually said to me, "Jimmy, I hear you. We paid a lot for your company. I have respect for you, but we want to sell CDs, and that's what we do."

That's part of my story that not a lot of people know. I was the CEO of Interscope, and I had to get the right to start another business. I asked Vivendi to give me $100 million for Interscope to start businesses with the artists inside Interscope. In fairness to them, they didn't see that. They didn't want to do it.

So, my contract was up, and I said, "I'm not going to be the guy to sell the last CD. I have no interest in this. I'm going to do something else."

They didn't see at the time that they were in a dying or dwindling business?

Because it wasn't. This is 2003.

So, you saw it early?

It scared the hell out of me. For some reason, the day Napster started, I said, "This is toast," because I understand the market. I understand why the audience would say, "I'd much rather be doing my homework and not have to ask my mother to take me to a record store," okay? That simple impulse—and it's free? That's a feel that an entrepreneur has.

Once you see it, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. There's just no way it's going away.

So, I knew that. Then I went and met with people at Intel and places like that, and I heard these guys talk, and I'm like, "Holy shit!"

What were they saying that made you say, "Holy shit?"

One of the things the guy at Intel said to me is, "Jimmy, I have to tell you something."

Your story is compelling. But not every industry was built to last forever.

I was like, “This guy’s smarter than me.” Where do you want to start? So I’m like, “Oh, shit, right?” I went to them and I said, “I can’t just be in the record business.”

Music almost becomes something you sell to market another product. That’s how you actually monetize it.

I don’t know what it is. I just call it lateral. I can’t break it down to what it is. I just know the feeling.

You told me yesterday, you’re like, “I’m just a hustler.”

I know how to hustle. That’s not a bad word.

Oh, I do, too. I know. I love it.

I feel the exact same way.

The greatest baseball players in the world were hustlers. That’s what I call a hustler.

I don’t think it’s a pejorative. I don’t think it’s a negative term.

Well, people think it is.

Oh, not me and you, though.

It’s not. What I’m saying is, I know how to hustle, meaning I’m willing to work harder than the next guy.

What you did for Dre, when you first met him—Dre and Suge—you’re like, “Well, this guy’s great. There’s an asset in front of me, and the asset is a big, hairy problem that no one else wants to solve. If I solve it, if I can kill the T. rex that is sitting on top of this genius—”

Right.

Then I get to work with the genius. And that is hustling.

That’s right.

That is being resourceful. It’s the same thing.

As Dre would say, “It’s a little bit of street knowledge.”

Yeah.

You know?

What is street knowledge? It’s an understanding of people as they actually are.

Street knowledge means you have to move around because the world is tough. In any neighborhood—I don’t know what you call it, lower class or whatever it is—my dad was a longshoreman. We lived in an Italian neighborhood in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

You lived in a neighborhood with actual gangsters—mafia.

Well, yeah, but I wasn’t involved.

No, I know you weren’t, but you were in a neighborhood where the mafia was everywhere.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. My family wasn’t involved, you know?

Yeah, I know, but you were in the neighborhood where the mafia was everywhere.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. My neighborhood was an Italian neighborhood. Only in America. Everything was the same. There were 4 fish stores and a restaurant. There were 3 pizza places on 1 street. It was like that. My father worked down at the docks, and everybody worked down at the docks.

I know you were saying it’s instinct. Maybe there weren’t words around this idea; you just understood it. But you saw it. If I’m a college kid—and I was at this time—and I was using Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, and all the other ones, I don’t have to go to the store. I’m definitely downloading this, and now we have MP3 players, so the record store’s gone.

One of the hardest things that I had to do when I look back on my career, my life, whatever it is—I’ve had a lot. Well, we all have a lot of hard things. One of the hardest things was getting Universal and Vivendi to give me permission to build Beats, to build products with my artists. Beats came 3 years later.

This is when your response to them was, “I don’t want to be the guy that sells the last CD.”

That’s it. This thing is not going to work the way it is right now. We have to move laterally, and I just instinctively knew that. I wasn’t going to do it. I was going to quit.

But it’s an interesting idea if you sit down and actually think about what’s happening. For the entire history of the recorded music industry, you made the music, recorded it, and then sold it physically, right? You were already understanding, “Once it’s digital and free, that means we have to sell something else. We’re not going to be able to sell the music anymore.”

No, I knew we were invaded.

Invaded.

Okay? I knew that something had to change, and I didn’t know what it was, but I knew we couldn’t just do only what we were doing. That’s a music instinct.

You know who knew that? The Beatles knew that. If you listen to The Beatles, every album was new and different. They reinvented themselves on every album, and they kept it moving. The great company—that’s why Apple was so great—kept it moving.

Mm-hmm.

It kept innovating and moving it. I felt that the record business needed to stop doing only what they were doing.

That was really hard because they were paying me a lot of money. They had just bought my company for, I don’t know, hundreds of millions of dollars, right? But I wasn’t going to do it. I knew it was not what I wanted to do.

The problem is, people say, “Well, the record business turned out okay.” Well, it did, and it didn’t. Of course, Spotify is worth $150 billion, and the entire record industry is worth half that together.

I think it’s really smart. For the longest time, we sold music. Now you can’t sell it anymore, so it becomes advertising or marketing—and you’re not going to agree with this—for another product you can sell, whether it’s concerts, which they were selling back in the day, products, or all this other stuff that they’re doing.

You had that insight in the music industry before anybody else.

No, not before anybody else. Hip-hop saw it.

You’re right, because they were doing the shoes, the sneakers, the alcohol.

Yes. Yes. Def Jam, Adidas, all these things.

Did they influence your thinking on this?

Absolutely.

Oh.

I owe African American culture so much. I have a debt to Black culture.

Why do you think rap figured out how to monetize—I hate using that word—or make money off music through things besides selling music before anybody else did?

Because they’re practical, and they see the truth. They saw what it was.

What’s the next bite at the apple? The record industry now gets the luxury of rewriting the book with AI.

AI-created music?

Yeah, created music, many things. It isn’t just creating a song. It’s how you listen to music—everything. It can affect everything.

Let’s say, hypothetically, I’m right. The record industry didn’t take advantage of it as well as it could have. The word “wrong” isn’t fair. They didn’t optimize the streaming thing. What would optimizing be? They would have their own distribution. That would be optimizing, and they don’t, right?

They have another bite at the apple right now. It could start to ring the bell all over again, like an Etch A Sketch, and go back into it. But where they can make a giant mistake, in my opinion, is if they start licensing their music to every dog that comes in the door.

Which is their normal route of doing things.

Yes. You’ve got to build an enterprise around AI now. You can’t just give the enterprise to someone else.

But you know everybody in the music industry. When you tell them this, what’s their response—the people in power right now?

Well, all I can tell you—I can’t tell you everything that I’m doing because I think the labels are now realizing it, and they're getting really.. All I can tell you is Universal Music has invested in a project that we’re doing called Complex, which has the ability to go on and do a lot of these things that I’m talking about. It’s media, it’s live—it created ComplexCon—and it’s e-commerce.

I want to help the labels, if I can, build an enterprise around AI and not just be licensors. I felt that way about streaming, and I feel even stronger about that. They shouldn’t be afraid of the technology. They shouldn’t be. You don’t have to understand something fully to do it, and I’m proof of that. I don’t understand fucking anything, you know what I mean? But I know how to get it done.

I knew how to build a headphone. I didn’t know how to build a headphone. People say to me, “Well, you’re a recording engineer.” I say, “Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards are the greatest guitar players in the world.” You know, they’re my favorites. Keith Richards is incredible. If you gave him 2 pieces of wood, he’s not going to come out with a guitar.

Building a headphone was as far from me and Dre as you could possibly imagine, but we figured out how to do it. That’s how I think there’s a possibility now to rewrite the book. But if you start seeing licenses pop up to all these other companies, they’re going to feed a dragon that is absolutely going to eat them. Absolutely.

5 years from now, do you think we’re going to have complete AI-created music that is at the top of the charts?

Isn’t it already happening?

I don’t know. Let me tell you, though, I don’t fucking know. If I could predict the future, man, you know what I mean? I wouldn’t have health insurance. I have fire insurance on my house. I can’t predict the future. I overpay for everything. I’m a retail guy.

But I do know one thing, even though I don’t understand it. I hear a lot of these artists coming out against AI. I come from a place where, to get a record deal when I was a kid in the music business, you had to sing. You had to really sing.

Sometimes you had to write, but if you were Barbra Streisand, you had to sing. If you were Frank Sinatra, you had to sing. Those people could really sing. Sam Cooke—could he sing. He could sing and write, you know what I mean? Incredible, right? Stevie Wonder.

There are a lot of people out now who are on the charts or being really successful, selling out arenas, who can barely sing “Happy Birthday.” So what I say to the people who are challenging AI—and they’re doing that because of technology—

They’re like, Auto-Tune and stuff like this.

Whatever the technology is. My question is, what’s the difference between somebody who can barely sing “Happy Birthday,” which is all over the charts right now, and someone who can’t sing “Happy Birthday” at all, who’s just a marketer—a really clever guy or girl who sat in front of their mirror and did all the moves that everybody does?

They watched Madonna like everybody else and said, “I could do that.”

I can act like that. So I don't understand the difference.

Yeah, because the amount of technology invented for the music industry since you've been in it is incredible. You told me yesterday that Prince did a whole album without a drummer. I was like, “What does that mean?”

Well, he's one of the first people to use the LinnDrum.

See, the LinnDrum—I was producing an album in the ’70s, and I brought this guitar player in. I think it may have been the first computer I ever saw, but he had a computer on the session. It was 1977, and he had a computer on the session. In between takes, rather than listen with the rest of us, he'd put on a pair of headphones, go on the computer, and do all that.

Finally, I said to him, “Hey, man, what are you doing? This is a session. We're paying attention to the music.”

He said, “Well, I'm creating a drummer. I'm creating a machine that's going to play the drums.”

I said, “Well, thank God,” because I always had difficulty with drummers. I always felt the way you sit on the beat is impossible. Everybody hits the 1 on, before, or after it. It just drove me crazy working with drummers my whole life.

He said, “I'm making a drum.” The guy's name was Roger Linn. Roger Linn's a guitar player.

That's who made the drum machine?

The Linn machine.

I didn't know that.

The Linn drum machine.

Oh, wow.

Yes. I've seen technology. I grew up with it, so everybody's afraid of AI. AI is going to make music better. AI is not going to thwart great people. There will always be the next Billie Eilish. There will always be the next Kendrick Lamar. There will always be the next great talent.

But there's also going to be a lot of bullshit.

Yeah.

Right? So I think the bullshit will get better. I really do. I think AI's going to help those people that work like that. By the way, a lot of people we know right now—great talent—are using AI. They're just not telling anybody.

Mm-hmm.

AI will never be able to write “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan—not in the lifetime of anyone who's listening to this, or in my lifetime, for sure. AI will take the middle of music, the average music, I believe, and make it better, because they're great tools.

I'm all in on AI music, all in, and I don't think it's going to hurt the greats. But more importantly than anything I think, now it's time for the artists and the labels to get on the enterprise side of it.

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

Yeah.

Right? You thought completely differently because you're an entrepreneur. You were instinctively an entrepreneur. You were an entrepreneur before you even knew—

Well, a record producer's an entrepreneur.

—you were an entrepreneur.

Record producers, but the people running the big companies—

But I was a record producer.

Yeah, exactly. You had that instinct. But there's one thing: they almost don't see the necessity for it. And two, I don't even know if a professional manager can reinvent their business to survive the next technological wave. You disagree with that?

I think what's happening is the music industry is finally moving into things they're afraid of. They just need some light. What you don't want to do is license the next “AI Spotify” and say, “Give me 3% of your company.” That is the greatest deal anyone's ever made. Who gives a shit who owns 3% of my company if your company is Spotify, right? I mean, it's absurd.

So they have to grab the enterprise value of the new technology.

But don't you think it's going to come from outside? One of my heroes is James Dyson, who I told you about.

Who?

James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner guy.

Oh, yeah.

And one of his heroes was Buckminster Fuller. “Who?” I love it. Buckminster Fuller has this quote where it's like, “If you want to change things, you don't fight the existing system; you build your own. You build a new version of that.” I almost feel like what you're talking about has to be done outside.

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

That's my point.

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

Yeah.

But that's a founder. Big companies always have the advantage. They have bureaucracies, and they don't have the entrepreneur as the leader anymore. So can they innovate? That's the question. Can they innovate?

And look, I'm a terrible businessman. I had to learn business at Interscope.

You are not a terrible businessman.

I know how to do what I know how to do, but I had to learn business for defense when I got into the record business.

Oh, that's interesting.

1990—I had no fucking idea how to run a company. None. Zero.

Is this when David Geffen sold Geffen?

Geffen, yeah.

Can you tell that story?

David Geffen is brilliant, right? He comes from right near my neighborhood in Brooklyn. He's exactly 10 years older than me. He's like 5'7". I'm 5'7". He's Jewish. I'm Italian. We were buddies, right?

He was great with artists. He signed Joni Mitchell and the Eagles and all this great shit in his life, so I felt real camaraderie with him. I'm producing records. I'm actually in the studio for 20 years making music. They go on, they sell all these records, and I wake up one day—he sold his company for $500 million.

I'm like, “I'm from Brooklyn. I want to make a lot of money!” I'm not embarrassed by that. My whole life, I've been like that. But I didn't have any money.

Yeah.

I had money as a record producer, but that's a certain amount of money. I wanted to live like I saw on TV.

But you were like—hold on. What I love in The Defiant Ones, because everybody feels this way, especially if you didn't grow up with money: I know exactly what you're talking about. I think you might've been an engineer before you were a record producer. This story comes from when you were an engineer, not a record producer.

The producer comes in, he's got a leather jacket. You're like, “What the hell is this?” He's got a fancy bag, and then he's got a beautiful girl.

Yeah!

And you're like, “That's—”

That's it. Yeah, you bet that's it. Look, let me tell you something, man: you have to tell yourself the truth. I'm not Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, or Marvin Gaye, so I felt the next best way in. I got into producing and engineering, right? That was my next way in.

I'm like, “Well, this feels really good.” Then I saw Geffen, and I said—

That feels better.

“Oh, shit! He's doing the same thing.” He's not even in the studio all night. He goes home at 6:00. I'm at 3:00 in the morning, still working on the drum sound, doing that. So I said, “I bet I can do that.”

And then you go talk to him, and what does he say?

He said to me, “Oh, you can start a record company. Do you know how many stupid people there are that have record companies?”

I said, “Okay,” so I started a record company.

I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high-quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night, and as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high-quality decisions, and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is Eight Sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of Eight Sleep, Matteo, and we live in the same city. A few months after I started using Eight Sleep, I randomly ran into Matteo at a restaurant, and I was with some friends, so I go over and say hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me who was I talking to, and I said, "That's Matteo, the founder of Eight Sleep." And my friend replied, "He looks like he gets good sleep." Matteo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an Eight Sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my Eight Sleep ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth 10 times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe Eight Sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use Eight Sleep. I would recommend getting the Pod 5, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress, and it is next-level sleep tech. It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night, independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to eightsleep.com/senra, and use the code SENRA to get $350 off. You can try it for 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my Eight Sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at eightsleep.com/senra. People were willing to give you money and back you right away. Why? Did you have previous relationships with them? What did they know about you?

No. Well, Doug put up half the money.

Yeah.

Geffen was going to put the money up, but he sold his company, so he was very generous with me. No, Geffen was going to distribute the records, and Ted Field was going to put the money up. But Doug volunteered to put up half the money—Doug Morris at Atlantic.

So I went to David, and I said, “David, he only put up half the money.” He goes, “Jimmy, I want what’s good for you. Go do it over there.” All good. Really helpful to me.

But I knew nothing about running a business. I didn’t know you buy vegetables for less money than you sell them. I had no idea about anything regarding business. I had an instinct for how to move and what was important.

I want to pause this story, because when I went to your house the first time, just a few months ago, you told me something I haven’t stopped thinking about. You said, “Anybody that’s great is bent.” What does that mean?

Well, to be really brilliant, I call it, there has to be a bend in the pipe. Whether it’s through trauma or through your interpretation of yourself, it could happen. You can come from the greatest family in the world and have trauma. It’s your sensitivity compared to the environment, and you put it all together.

So the ones that I know who are truly brilliant have a bend in the pipe.

What’s the bend that you see normally?

It’s usually trauma from when they were younger—family stuff.

It’s always the childhood?

Yeah. But they had the gift to write or produce or film or paint, right? I mean, they were the chosen ones. You put that trauma together with an innate talent, and it makes Picasso.

But your bend was, “It has to be,” which brings us to the founding of Interscope, because there were a ton of people after Geffen who had your same idea, where they were like, “Well, I can do that.”

14 labels started with $50 million in funding in 1989, ’90.

And how many survived?

None.

You.

Interscope.

Yeah.

Me, Ted, John, and Tom Whalley.

When you say, “It has to be,” what does that mean?

When you grow up like I did, and you did, and other people that I know—

Yeah, the first time we met, you were like, “You’re definitely bent.” That’s what you told me.

When you’re walking forward, the sidewalk behind you is caving in, so you have no choice but to walk forward, no matter how scary it is or how much it hurts. What you have to learn at that moment is, “How do I take this fear and make it a tailwind instead of a headwind?”

A lot of my friends, people I know, and people I watch, the fear stops them. The ones who succeed are the ones the fear propels forward. If you can harness it, learn how to harness it, and take that—because fear is energy. It’s massive energy. It controls your entire system. If you can learn to take that fuel and have it propel you forward, it’s a powerful thing.

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet that I’ve met are driven not by a love of success, but by a fear of failure.

Whatever your fear is, you know what I mean?

When did you have the insight about fear, though? You said, “I trained myself that when I feel fear, just to take a step forward.” When?

Well, look, I was the kid in right field playing baseball. I come from a neighborhood where physicality, sports, and being tough were the currency. I didn’t have any of those things, so I had to go learn a whole new set of tools for my toolkit.

But when I got to the studio and sat there with Roy Cicala, who was my boss and taught me, they put me in with John Lennon. All of a sudden, all that fear, I was able to—I don’t know why—flip it into energy to learn.

So you’re 20 at the time?

20.

You have a simple genius about you. I want to go back to “It has to be” and the bent. This is why I think it’s so important to make the documentaries that you made and to do the podcasts that you do, because then somebody that you’ve never met, who is in a different industry and lived at a different time, reads that and is like, “I’m like that, too.”

You said something about your early life where you just felt it was all f***ed up, but all you knew was that if you just went to the studio, the more time you spent at the studio, the better your life got. That is exactly how I feel.

Here, let me tell you something.

Like, all I can control—

That’s not genius.

No, it is a simple genius. It’s practical wisdom.

People talk about genius. There are real geniuses out there who are freaks, but people talk about people who are successful and stuff like that. Basically, you’re blessed that your instinct drives you in the right direction. Bob Dylan’s instinct drove him for an entire generation to lead. Bob Dylan is a genius. Steve Jobs—or even people that I know, my friends—their instinct is commercial or works.

But that simple genius of “I do more of X, and my life gets better” is very, very smart, especially when you’re 20 and you’re not experienced. You’re in the room with legends.

I heard the interview, the conversation you had with Rick Rubin, and you both agreed there have never been other famous people like The Beatles. It’s not like, “Oh, yeah, Taylor Swift is kind of like The Beatles.”

Right.

No, you don’t understand how big this phenomenon is. You’re, by your own admission, inexperienced and insecure, and you’re in the room with them, and you still have something very—again, I’m going to use the words “simple genius”—about your ability to say, “Just stay here, and my life will get better.”

It’s also knowing which pole to start reeling in. When I got permission at Interscope to make our own businesses with the artist, I had a bunch of things going. But as soon as Dre said to me, “I want to sell sneakers,” and I said, “No, speakers,” and I saw his credibility in sound, I said, “Oh, shit,” and it all came together. I dropped all the other poles. I just said, “Okay, let’s go.”

But there’s also a simple genius in the way you move that I admire, and I’m not trying to just overly compliment you here. I really learn from it.

Dre tells the story of that conversation. He said this conversation, the entire time, was like 10 minutes. Once you had that realization—

Mm-hmm.

—you dipped out. You just left. You called him a week later to come to the office, and you had 30 prototypes already done.

Well, I’m very lucky to be able to connect the dots. I can see something, and my little computer in my brain connects all the dots. I don’t do the things I can’t see, but I saw the headphone thing, and I said, “Okay.”

Then I started to see, oh, man, not only do these guys make ugly products, they don’t know how to market, they’re not cool, they don’t—

Back to corny.

Oh, the corny is a curse. Some people who are corny are really nice, but too corny—I don’t know, it’s not for me.

It’s not for me.

They don’t know how to lay in the cut, you know? They don’t know how to lay back and just watch something happen. They always kind of want to be noticed, and they don’t have a natural feel for themselves, I think. But what do I know?

I think that’s it right there. Let’s go back to Interscope. When you started Interscope, you were like, “My bent is, ‘It has to be.’” The way you described it to me is just like failure wasn’t an option. You said plan B didn’t even enter your mind. It was just like, “I’m doing this. This will work.”

Because if you think like that, it’s an uncomfortable life. So that’s kind of why, at 65—I’m 72 now—I was at Apple and I said, “I can’t. It’s just not for me anymore.”

First of all, Apple’s a great company. They treated us great, and we did some great stuff together. But I couldn’t just wake up in the morning and do whatever I wanted to do, because they’re a giant company. I’m on the music side of it, and they don’t want the tail wagging the dog, you know? I don’t blame them, right?

I come from a world of breaking things. I would try anything, you know? They have a very structured, fabulous business, right? And so I said, the combination of it having to be successful, as I see it, plus my team—like Trent Reznor, et cetera, and Dre—and not being able to do anything to get it to work, that combination said, “You’re 65.”

I met Liberty, and we want to be together, and I just said, “You know…”

Were you already married at that point?

Yeah.

Okay.

I had retired in 2018. I got married in 2016.

Okay.

I was dabbling, but I’m not running any companies right now.

You said you don’t want the bit in your mouth anymore.

Yeah, I don’t want it in my mouth. I have to have somebody with that energy who’s crazy, who runs the companies.

Do you feel the version of you that started Interscope was crazy?

No, I was obsessed. We’re all sort of obsessive people. I was really obsessed.

You considered Interscope a very intense mission that had to succeed.

I had to be obsessed. And obsession doesn’t make for a great partner at home.

No, for sure.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So I’m like, “Okay, I’m 65 years old. How many summers do I have left?” As Tom Waits would say, you know what I mean?

But how old were you when you started Interscope? In your 30s?

I was 37 or 38.

And so does that mean every minute of the day is—

Yeah. Interscope, yeah.

—spent making sure—

When did you feel the relief? Was there any sense of—

No.

I love that you didn’t let me finish the question.

No.

Until when?

Until I was 65.

We talked yesterday, and you said something like, “You’re always a happy, optimistic person, but miserable at the same time.”

Yeah.

Explain that, though.

I remember waking up with Liberty one morning, months after I left Apple and decided I wasn’t going to run companies anymore or start anything, whatever. I said to her, “Do people wake up not thinking of something?”

I was waking up and had nothing on my mind, and I’m like, “Do people really do that?” That’s when I started to feel—I felt really good, and I feel really good. See, the whole goal to me in life, and I think it’s most people, but some people don’t admit it, is the search for peace.

And a lot of people lie to themselves about what peace is. I meet somebody who runs companies and doesn't want to quit: “I love what I do!” You love that more than sitting on a beach somewhere?

I do, for sure. I don't want to sit on a beach.

Right now you don't.

Okay.

I'm talking about people who are 75 and can't give up the badge. They have to have that badge to walk into a room. They're not that person. When I left Apple, I wasn't the head of Apple Music anymore, or the head of Interscope anymore, or the head of Beats.

So you lose the status part, is that it?

Whatever the f*** it is, I didn't care about any of that shit. I just wanted to stop feeling that feeling. I didn't have that. That wasn't a currency for me.

It's a blessing and a curse. I just said, “I don't give a f***. I want to get rid of the obsession.” If you want to work past 70, 75, or 80, if you're a founder of a company like Phil Knight, I understand that he's still involved with Nike. Do it if you're feeling it. It's not what I wanted to do, and it's what I had to do for my own sanity.

So this is where I want to talk to you about. From the time, let's say, you're 20 and you start, to 65, you didn't feel peace?

No, not for one second.

But you became a billionaire. You sold Beats to Apple. What did that feel like?

Felt great.

Okay. No peace, though?

Well, because a company like Apple pays you a lot of money, I'm my father's son, and I got a job to do now.

But you have a billion dollars in your bank account.

That doesn't matter. What matters is there's a job that you're going to do, and you're not going to be—I have to get the job done right.

But money is a piece of peace.

Money is a piece of it. It's really great, but if I have your money, I'm f***ed, because I have to do the job. That's one of the reasons I left, because I really couldn't do me there. This sounds really corny, but I couldn't do me there.

That's not corny at all.

It's a great place.

That's not corny at all.

It's a great place, but I'd twitch.

It's a big f***ing company.

Yeah.

You're an entrepreneur.

I couldn't have that compulsion, obsessiveness, and insanity without having the wheel completely. Meaning, I needed to be able to make any mistake I wanted to make, experiment, and just go. I couldn't do it.

How does it feel when you're going through—when your version of “bend” is, “It has to be”? Do you just wake up with overwhelming pressure every day? What is that?

You wake up seeing it. You wake up seeing what's wrong. Every day, you wake up seeing what's wrong. I've never had a victory lap in my life.

You don't have any rearview mirror?

I didn't have a victory lap. When we sold Beats, it was very public. Dre felt great.

Oh, the video with Tyrese?

Yeah, Dre felt great. I felt great, but I'm like, “Oh, shit, these guys gave us all this money, and now we've got to make a streaming service work, and Spotify's got the lead.” I'm like, “Oh, shit!” So then, the next minute, I was thinking about that.

How different are you and Dre in the way you approach your work? When I watched “The Defiant Ones” over and over again, there are a lot of things about him that I personally identify with, and there are a lot of things about you that I—

Well, we're both record producers.

Okay.

He seems to need more solitude, though. Is he more comfortable?

Dre—I mean, solitude? Dre doesn't go anywhere. Every time Dre and I have to go do something, he calls me the night before and says, “We really have to do this? This is 32 years of it. Do we really have to do this? Why are we doing this?”

So, yeah, he's much more like that than me.

I feel that way, too. This is why I like small conversations like this, but if you say, “Hey, come to this group dinner or come to this public event,” I'm like, “That's just not going to happen. There's just no way.”

Yeah. Well, Dre's like that, but you have to have a yin and yang to be partners. It works. So we're very different, but we're both record producers. I can't explain it. There's a certain kind of person that—

I get along with every record producer I've ever met.

Yeah.

Swizz Beatz, Timbaland, Pharrell—I love all these guys, man. I get along really well with record producers.

And you can't explain why? It's just the same kind of personality? What is it?

I don't know what it is, and I don't think about it. But I know that if I meet a record producer, they're always my favorite people to meet.

Yeah, I feel the same way about founders. There's the founder of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang. I read his biography. He said something that was interesting. I think, reading between the lines, he tortured himself into greatness.

I want to go back to the bend of “It has to be.” Were you torturing yourself into success?

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

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

Yeah.

It's like, I shouldn't say you can't wait until it's over. Is that the right way to think about it?

Well, you see, the problem that I had was, if it sounds impossible, it was the only place I felt relief, but I was still tortured. So I don't know what the rest of my life was.

But we had this conversation yesterday, and I told you I was on the phone with a friend, driving to your house, and we had the same conversation. He was just, “How are you?” And I'm like, “I'm fantastic and miserable at the same time.”

Yeah. Well, that's possible.

Yeah, I know.

I'm always in a good mood. I don't think I've ever woken up in my life in a bad mood except after my father died. I don't think I ever woke up in my life in a bad mood. I wake up in a great mood every day. I wake up happy.

The 2 words you used are “happy” and “miserable.”

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

So, I'm really happy as a person. I have my kids, and I'm really happy. Now I'm really happy. I'm with Liberty, and we have 6 kids together, and everything is fantastic. I'm really happy. I'm at peace for the first time.

But when I was running the companies or producing the record, I'd just see what's wrong, and it would drive me bananas.

You're the first person I think actually could explain that to me, about how I feel, because everybody's like—I was just interviewed on another podcast, and he's like, “Are you happy?” And I was just like, “Yeah, I'm happy, but I also am striving to do something.”

I think Steve Jobs was tortured.

Oh, for sure. Most of them are. But my whole thing is, I don't also want to go through life like that.

This is where Bruce Springsteen—I mean, you kind of pushed me in this direction, too, when you were like, “Go watch that movie.”

Yeah.

When Jimmy Iovine says, “Go watch a movie,” I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to go watch a movie.” I thought I was going to watch a biopic of his life. I thought it was going to be, he was born, and then he did this, he did that.

No! It's about the darkest time in his entire life.

That's the only movie he would make.

Why?

He's not going to make the “Born in the U.S.A.” movie. What I'm talking about is, I've always been a positive person, and I wake up in a good mood. You never met me in those days, when I was running Interscope and stuff, but you would say, “Oh, he's having a great time.”

But there was always this thing—this compulsion and this insanity—that was just driving me constantly, and eventually, I wanted to shake that. So I could say to you, “Yeah, I'm happy,” in 1980 or something like that, but I wanted to be at peace. I didn't give a shit about being the head of Interscope or being the head of Beats. I just wanted peace.

Do you think Bruce is at peace?

I think Bruce has found a lot of peace. I don't want to ask, and I don't speak for him, but I think he's incredible.

I feel that's what he's searching for, too, in the book, where he's like, “I got this thing. I still don't have—”

Well, in the words of John Lennon, “I'm just trying to get me some peace, and Christ, you know it ain't easy.”

Yeah.

So, I didn't invent this.

No, you didn't invent it, but I think you just said something that is important. Most people lie to themselves. And Bruce, in that book, was lying to himself for a while, and then he realized, “Oh, the actual source of his unhappiness.”

Well, we all lie to ourselves.

Are you still lying to yourself today? I'm sure about some things.

You think so?

But I try not to.

I just want to find peace, and every day is a search for it. The monsters want to come in, and you have to make your shit bigger than the monster's shit.

My father would say, “As long as the cat's bigger than the shit, keep the cat. The minute the shit gets bigger than the cat”—he went like this. I must have been 13 years old, 12 years old, when he said that to me, and he was right.

When you were building Interscope, or really any time in your career, when you were younger, what was your inner monologue like? Was it negative toward yourself? Were you overly self-critical?

Only the product. I felt like…

So it wasn't... You're like, “This product's not good enough.”

Well, first of all, when you grow up not having a lot of money, with money being a concern, and the family and all that kind of stuff, my family was very generous.

Yeah.

But we had reality, right? When you grow up like that, that plays a big part in your brain. You think, “I'm going to be broke.” That's what you think of. So, that was a big driver of me.

When did you lose that fear of being broke?

I don't know, but I just know that when I sold to Apple, it didn't fix it.

Dude, I thought you were going to say when you were making tons of money at Interscope. That's wild.

No, because I had to get something right. That overrides everything. I knew I had a lot of money. I knew I didn't need money. I knew I was never going to be broke, but what overrode any of it was having to get the job right. That overrode everything.

You were able to separate criticism that the work isn't good enough or isn't done from “I am not good enough” in your mind?

No, because you beat yourself up. You feel that if you can't...

So, you were still beating yourself up even when you were in your 50s and 60s?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, because...

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you do it today?

No. No, I don't.

Fist bump on that.

Right. Today, I actually approach the job. Now, I get cranky, but when I get cranky, when I put the phone down, it doesn't travel with me. Right now, I do what I need to do with the CEOs who are running the companies and the people who work there. I do stuff that I need to do, personality-wise, to get the job done, and it annoys me when people don't see things clearly or whatever. But when I put the phone down, I don't feel it. When I used to do that, I never stopped feeling it, because I had to get it right.

I felt like that for a while. This just changed as a result of the work that I've been doing. There's this guy named Brad Jacobs, who started 8 separate billion-dollar companies. I did a bunch of episodes of Founders on him. He came to do this show, and I've spent a bunch of time with him. He's 68 years old. He's been an entrepreneur for longer than I've been alive. The guy is just absolutely incredible, and his whole thing is he used to beat the shit out of himself mentally.

And he's like, “You know what? This is not helping my performance.” Talking to him, and then using some of the strategies in his book, changed me. I used to have a very negative fuel source. I didn't like the way I was born or the environment I was born into. I'm going to channel that, just like Bruce Springsteen, just like you. I'm going to channel that into achievement.

I thought for a long time that constant self-criticism of the work that I'm doing will only make it better, so therefore that'll increase my likelihood of achievement. And now I'm like, “You know what? I just obsess with what I'm doing.” When I woke up this morning, I was giddy. I was like, “This is going to be one of the best days of my life. I get to freaking record a podcast with Jimmy. This is going to be insane.”

My self-talk is just like, “Just love what you do and follow your curiosity, and you're going to be obsessed anyway. You can't work any other way.”

Just know that you've handled, to a certain extent, a monster in your life, but the next monster is going to come in a disguise—a different look, a different way. It's going to come in through this door, and you'll wake up one day, and that monster will go, “Oh, fuck. I thought I killed that monster, but this is a new monster, only it's changed its shape.”

Where do you think that would happen?

It just happens to everybody in life. Some people like to admit it, and some people don't.

So, it might not be in your professional life, but it might be in your personal life or something like that.

It could be anything.

Okay.

Yeah, man, it could be anything. It could be one of your kids. It could be anything.

And for the first time in my life, I feel balanced. I feel kind of like... I feel okay. I feel like I'm at peace, but I'm also not running a company. If I was running a company, I know that it's not for me. I know that I couldn't do it. I'm not that cured.

Well, I take what I do seriously. I don't take myself too seriously, because I love having a sense of humor. I think laughing extends your life. My father was a really funny guy, and we lived like that. Growing up, everything was like—we saw a sense of humor in everything.

I remember when he was dying, right before he died, something happened. A person came in and did something wrong, and he just looked at me and made a joke, because he knew it was funny, and he grabbed the moment. He had 28% of his heart left, but...

Did he know he was dying?

It was a crazy time in my life. I was 31 years old, and I went to my grandfather's funeral, his father's funeral. The next morning, my father had a heart attack. Then he died, probably 7 or 8 weeks later, and my grandmother, his mother, died the next week. So, all 3 of them died within 8 weeks.

It was a really crazy time. My father and I were so close. It just devastated me. But he always had a sense of humor, so I take what I do really seriously, but I don't take myself too seriously. I really don't.

And you learned that from him?

Yeah, my father was always a hard worker.

He was your best friend?

Still is.

Wow.

Still is. It's his voice that, if I ever get on the right page, always gets me on the right page. Yeah.

That was the worst day of your life?

It still is. Yeah, worst day of my life by far. By far. Yeah, man. When he died, I made a Christmas album about him. It was called A Very Special Christmas, and we raised over $100 million for Special Olympics.

I want to ask you some advice unrelated to work. I just saw that you have a bracelet on your wrist with your wife's name on it.

Yeah.

How important has that relationship been in your life compared to your work?

Well, again, I don't look back, right? So, I can only go by how I feel now, and right now it's more important than my work. That's part of why I have peace, because we connect. We work on our marriage, we work on our friendship, and we work on our bond. I'm not kumbaya about anything. I realize anything can happen at any moment.

No, you're super intense.

So, right now it's more important than my work.

You get more satisfaction out of that?

Yeah. It's the only place I find peace. I'm really in search of peace, man. The rest of the shit... But I do think we can crack the code at Complex. I really believe that. And I believe that we can really do something in education. I really believe that, so I'm very passionate about that.

Yeah, you need something to work toward.

And not only that, I want to see that I can get something done without being nuts, without feeling that horrible feeling. I want to feel like I can get something done without feeling like that.

Yeah, I do too.

It really is the truth. But, by the way, not everybody feels like that. There are some really talented people who are completely happy about their work.

Who?

I don't know, but I don't know any of them. I'm sure they're out there.

Your entire life was surrounded by top performers, by geniuses, by people who are at the top of their profession. That's why I would light you up with questions the last 2 times that we saw each other about what these people are like.

Because what you just said—“I want to try to create something great without being nuts”—yeah, me too. And I want these examples of that.

Yeah, but I wish I could have learned it at 52. I think I got it at 72.

Why do you think it took you longer than you wanted it to?

I didn't go to therapy long enough or early enough in my life, because to unring the bells of your childhood takes a lot of work. I'm very pro-therapy. I really am.

“To unring the bells of your childhood takes a lot of work.” That's a great line.

It's true.

And you think the only way to do that is through—

It's not the only way. It's my way.

Okay.

It's mine. It's not the only way.

When did you realize, “Oh, shit, I need to...”—

I didn't take therapy really seriously until my 50s, and I wish I had done it earlier, honestly.

And what does “really serious” mean to you?

I mean, twice a week, but take it in, not just...

Not just show up at the appointment and listen, but actually change your behavior?

Yeah.

Were you doing it in your 30s and 40s?

I started in my 30s and 40s, but I wasn't a good patient or customer or client.

Yeah.

Whatever the fuck they call it.

So you'd go, you'd show up.

Yeah.

You would talk. They would talk.

Yeah. The minute I walked in, I'd grab the phone, and then it was like...

You weren't ready to take in the information?

No. No, no.

What do you think made you ready, other than age?

My divorce. Very simple. I was in a marriage, and we were married, and everything was going along. Then, when we got divorced—which people do—I realized that was a time when I needed to get my shit self-contained.

All of a sudden, I got an idea about life that I didn't see before, so I pursued that.

It's no different than school, or Beats, or streaming, or any of the things that I—

That's a great way to think about it.

Yeah. If I had the idea earlier, I would have done it earlier.

Why did you tell me yesterday that you think I need to talk to somebody?

Because of some of the things that you told me—some of the personal stuff you told me. I said, “It's a lot easier to go with a guide.” It's a lot easier to learn how to play tennis with a tennis teacher.

It's good to have somebody in your life who doesn't have an agenda. Everybody in your life has an agenda. If you find a person without an agenda, you can get a lot further. You can have those other people who love you very much and care about you, but to have the one without the agenda, for me, I don't know, was very helpful.

Why do you think it works with this particular person?

I believe this person.

You trust their judgment?

Everything in my life is gut-level.

Steve was the same way, though.

But you have to know you’re wrong. A lot of times, you’re doing things for reasons that are controlled by that childhood, right? As you work through that, you start doing things for more honest reasons that are not driven by that voice of your childhood.

There’s another thing that you said to me about how you always kept a small circle of—

I still do.

These are true friends.

I try to have an infield.

That’s how many people? Seven?

No. Five, four.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

I haven’t seen baseball. I don’t know.

And by the way, I don’t need another shortstop until the other one dies, you know what I mean? I limit it. I don’t go for 6.

It just takes time to develop trust with these people.

Yeah. I trust other people, but not like that—not to where I connect like that.

Yeah.

I’m very lucky. When you get to be 72 years old, you have some friendships that are 50 years old.

That’s incredible.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s nice. It’s nice. But on the school thing, we’re onto something, and I like to do something that goes back to all the business stuff that’s going to catch on and grow on its own. I think the stuff we’re doing in the inner city—we have 5 schools now.

These are high schools now?

Yeah.

Okay.

Because, again, my debt to Black culture is enormous. I want to really help the inner city and give these kids an advantage through an education that no one else is thinking about. I think we’re going to build some extraordinary people that companies are going to really want.

So that’s the way you want high schoolers and people in college to learn. What’s the best way for you to learn something new now?

I was terrible in school. When I had to learn something, I just couldn’t do it.

How the hell did you learn to produce records, then?

Like anybody my age who was in music or around culturally, there was the Big Bang, which was The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I was probably 11 years old, right? I didn’t have a currency in my neighborhood. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t physically big. I wasn’t any of the things that worked in the neighborhood. When I saw The Beatles, I said, “Oh, there’s a currency I can have.”

Because you tried to create music first, right?

Yeah. It was terrible. I mean, I was in a band.

Yeah.

But I realized quickly I wasn’t going to be in The Rolling Stones. Then I met this woman through my cousin, Ellie Greenwich, who took me to recording sessions. That’s where I saw that guy with the leather bag—

And the beautiful woman.

—and the candles—

Yeah.

—the pretty girl coming to meet him. I said, “Oh, that’s it!” I had never seen anybody with a leather bag before.

And so you just learned by observing?

No. Then I went to get a job cleaning up the studio and setting up the studio. Repetition, putting this over there, figuring things out, being around it—the ability to observe.

I can see how you can learn to be an engineer in a recording studio that way.

But then you go to a much more creative part of it, which is producing.

Producing.

Well, because I had an instinct—again, for what the audience would like and what they wouldn’t like, what was good and what was not.

Based on your own personal taste?

Based on my taste, influenced by John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen. It was an intense, intense therapy, sitting next to them every day for 5 years.

And you were up close, and you saw what true excellence looked like.

Yeah, and they taught me what was cool and what was not cool, what was good and what was great—the difference between good and great, and what you do to get there. Then I was able to produce records because of those 2 people. I watched them. I watched Jon Landau. I watched John Lennon. I watched Bruce. I said, “Oh, shit,” and I just absorbed it and applied it.

That’s how, when Bruce gave me the song “Because the Night” for Patti Smith, I was able to translate that into a record where I was the producer. I always wanted a song that sounded like “It’s My Life” by The Animals and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” right? When I heard that song and heard the chorus, because he had the chorus, right, I said, “Shit.” Then I heard, “Because the night belongs to lovers.” I said, “Wow, if a woman sings that, that’s powerful.”

I said to him, “Are you going to use this song?” He goes, “No, it doesn’t fit on this album.” I said, “Okay, can I use it for Patti?” He was great, and he said, “Yeah.” She rewrote the verses and killed it.

But connecting the dots—you can learn a little bit about how to connect the dots, but you’ve got to be that kind of person who just sees that you can connect the dots. That’s as simple and as difficult as it is. I was always able to connect the dots and see what could be: what this is and what it could be.

But that’s what always tortured me, because I would see something and see what it could be, and then try to get it to be that. It’s maddening. Even with Beats, I saw the iPod, and when we finally decided to do it, I said, “Oh, wow, it could be that. It could be as cool as that. We’ve got to make it as cool as that.” Because the iPod was really cool.

Did you ever meet Akio Morita, the founder of Sony?

No, but I did—

But you observed him.

I observed him, and Steve would talk to me about him. I saw it, but I was always very into the fact that he—

When I met Steve, I never understood instinctively why Sony had Columbia Records, the Walkman, PlayStation, and the CD—all this stuff. How did Apple become Apple and not them?

It’s almost like they had all the components, but it was siloed.

No, Morita died.

Okay, but it goes back to your—

Yes, yes.

Because it’s like you had it all—

Yes.

—you just had to have 1 person—

Yes.

—like an Akio, if he was alive, or a Steve or a Jimmy, to put it all together.

I am not as smart as those 2 people. I’m just telling you the God’s honest truth, man. They knew how to do what they were doing. I don’t know how to do what I do. I don’t really know.

Yeah, but you know how to put shit together.

I do. I know how to put shit together.

Yeah.

So that’s really cool.

Did Steve talk to you about the influence of—

Absolutely.

What was he saying about Sony and Akio?

He would say, “That guy really knew what he was doing.” He really had a feel. It was obvious to me that Morita bought Sony, bought Columbia Records, and bought Columbia Pictures. He saw the distribution, the hardware, the software—he saw it all.

But Steve took it—not literally, but it was part of the inspiration behind—

No, it for sure was.

—his chain of thinking, right? In interviews, he talks about what he loved about Akio and the Walkman in particular, because Akio had to fight to build the Walkman in his own company. They were like, “This is the stupidest thing.”

I remember being with Bruce Springsteen, and he told me, he said, “This guy from Sony came up to me, and he runs the company.” He said, “The guy asked me to put these headphones on to see if there was enough bass.” And it was him, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So this guy got it.

Yeah.

I never met him, but I know he got it. I learned a lot from Steve. I learned a lot from John Lennon. I learned a lot from Bruce Springsteen. I got really blessed.

Were you able to learn from younger people than you? You learned from those people. Well, I guess Bruce was your age, right? You guys—or he’s a little older.

He’s 3 years older than me.

Were you able to learn from younger people than you? Did you learn from your artists when you were—

Yeah. I learned from Bono—a lot from Bono. Bono was 10 years younger than me. When I met Bono in 1983 and we did “Under a Blood Red Sky,” I said, “Holy shit, the framing of how artists are thinking is changing.” I said, “Wow, look at this.” The music was different. The kind of music that was going on, that they were doing, was different. It was a take on punk, but it was more ethereal and different. Also, he’s an extrovert, whereas a lot of the guys I worked with weren’t.

They’re introverted? Really?

Dre?

So what did you learn from Dre?

Dre brought back the Springsteen thing in me, which was the commitment to a vision and sticking by the culture that you came up in and servicing that culture. It was something that I really didn’t understand in the beginning, so I was really hungry to learn about hip-hop and the culture, what it was doing and how it applied, and the true power of it. I learned everything that I know about hip-hop from Dr. Dre, period.

I feel like he was some kind of prodigy as a young person, but then he just has this relentless work ethic. He took innate talent and, through an insane, day-after-day dedication, became the greatest hip-hop producer of all time.

Yeah.

He’s the greatest hip-hop producer of all time.

Well, Dre and Bruce have a lot in common.

How so?

They are completely uncompromising. They will not compromise. You have to convince them to move to the left or right. They know completely what they do, and they don’t compromise. It’s just that simple.

When I met Dre and Bruce, it was very similar. They were both broke, and Dre was in trouble and broke. With that vision—

And even back then, they weren’t compromising?

Not even close. You couldn’t rent Bruce Springsteen. You couldn’t buy Bruce—nothing. You could rent me in those days, you know what I mean? Absolutely. But you couldn’t do anything with that guy. He didn’t think about, “Well, where am I going to sleep tonight?” It was like this. I learned that from him. It was a really powerful thing.

There was nothing that anyone had that he wanted. Nothing.

That’s powerful. That’s powerful when you’re broke, right? So, Bono is an extrovert. I interrupted you there.

When I say extrovert, I mean he’ll go out, he’ll talk to people, and he’s passionate. By the way, in his book and in his play, a one-man show, he talks about the issues he had at home with his dad and all that stuff, but he is the most positive person I met in music.

So, his bent, same thing, comes from this childhood trauma—

Yeah.

But somehow—he fixed it along the way.

No, no, no. He just is a naturally positive person. He’s tough. He can plow through things. He works; he has an incredible work ethic. He’s an incredible writer, an incredible lyricist, and an incredible performer, but he’s positive.

Whenever you see him, he’s got an idea. He wants to do this. He’s got very broad interests. I didn’t go on a vacation until I met him.

Say more about that.

I’d never been on a vacation, really, until the year 2000, because I was doing Rattle and Hum with him in 1988, and I went to the south of France, I remember. I was like, “Whoa, what the f***?”

So, you were just myopically focused on—

Yes.

Achievement?

Yes.

I love this story where you fly to California for the first time, right?

Right.

I don’t think you’d ever been on a plane.

No.

You were 20? How old were you?

20.

You’re 20.

Never been on a plane, never been in a hotel.

Never been in a hotel, and then I don’t know if this is the same trip or later, but I think Tom Petty put you in a house. You had never—

No, no. Lennon put me in The Beverly Hills Hotel.

But that’s when you start to be like, “Oh, wait, the world is huge, and there’s a lot in front of me if I focus on this [unintelligible] accomplishment.”

Well, I remember John took me to a guy named Richard Perry’s house, a very famous record producer. John took me to his house with Harry Nilsson. They were going out. He was really nice to me. He said, “You want to come?” I said, “Sure.” I had nothing to do. I was in the hotel, right?

He takes me there, and this guy’s got a house in the hills in Laurel Canyon, or Doheny or something, overlooking the city. It was at night. He had a tennis court that was lit up. It was like seeing the guy with the bag. Then I was like, “Holy shit. Wow.”

Yeah, it just opens up the scope of possibilities.

Yeah. Yeah, you see it for the first time. I’d never been on a plane. I’d only been to Manhattan because of the work.

Did you know this is where you were going to spend your life? When did you know?

Yeah. The minute I got off the plane, my boss, Roy, said, “Let’s rent a car,” and we rented a Cadillac. We drove down Sunset Boulevard, and it was December, and it was 78 degrees or something like that. I said, “Are you kidding me?” He said, “No, this is the weather in California.” So, I went to pull into The Beverly Hills Hotel.

The first hotel you ever stayed in was that.

Yeah.

That’s wild.

Ever.

That’s wild.

Except the Host Motel in Pennsylvania, where the car pulls up to the door. One of those places.

Yeah.

And the pool’s on the highway, right? So, other than that—

A little different from where you’re at in a bungalow.

This was the first time. I went to my room, and I came back and talked to the doorman. I said, “Can I ask you something? Do regular people live here?” He said, “Yeah, I’m a regular person. I’m a doorman.”

I said, “I live here. My father’s a longshoreman. Are there docks here?”

Yeah.

He said, “It’s the port of California. Yes, we’re one of the biggest ports in the world,” or whatever. I said, “Thanks.” I went back to my room and called my mother. I said, “Mom, how did you get this wrong? We land at Ellis Island, and we live 30 feet from Ellis Island. It’s freezing. It’s cold.”

Yeah. “Why don’t we live in California?”

Yeah. So, I knew I wanted to live in California from that day.

So, how long did it take for you to move here permanently?

1979. Tom Petty. My whole life was documented by albums. That was Damn the Torpedoes, when I moved.

How many years later was that?

6.

6 years, and that’s when Tom Petty put you up in a house.

Yeah.

And you were kind of freaked out. You were like, “I’m in the—”

Well, because, again, I never had a house.

Yeah.

I lived in an apartment, right?

Yeah.

There were noises outside the window, you know what I mean? So, I was completely freaked out. But Petty was incredible.

What did you learn from him?

He was the first guy I worked with who was my age. He was only 2 years younger than me or something, but he was more of a contemporary of mine at that point. We were both trying to prove something, right?

So, we locked in, and he was just a great songwriter and, again, a perfectionist in his art. He would never bring an average song into the studio. Tom Petty never brought an average song into the studio. He was a great self-editor. He would come in, and that song would be complete and done. Bruce is like that as well.

But that’s another thing: his motivating factor was creating the best possible song, the best art that he could make.

Yeah, he wasn’t thinking about that. Then again, like everybody else, he wanted to have a better life.

Yeah.

And here’s another guy who had issues with his father.

But you had commercial instincts, because there’s a great line in the documentary where he writes some song, and you’re like—I think he wrote a great song and 2 other ones—and you’re like, “Get 7 more, we’re done.” Or, “This song’s going to buy you a house.”

Yeah.

And Tom’s like, “I’ve never heard anybody talk that way before.”

Well, sometimes I sound crass or whatever; it’s just that I have a sense of humor. I know how funny that would sound.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Bono, one day—I didn’t work on The Joshua Tree. I wanted to do it, but they chose Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, which was a better choice because they wanted to change their sound. That was the right choice, but they would always bring me in to listen to the songs, like Bruce did that day on The River.

So, I go in, and he plays me this song, and he says—this was the beginning of it—he says, “Jimmy, this is house music.” I said, “Really?” I said, “I don’t know if I like house music that much,” right?

So, he plays me “With or Without You.” I said, “Bono, that’s house music.” He said, “No, it’s not. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I said, “Bono, that other song, that’s apartment music. You put this song out, you’re getting a house.” Okay?

It’s just the way I express myself. I can’t help it. If the line is good, I say it, even if it makes you look like, “Wow, you’re going to buy a house with this song, Tom Petty?” I knew when I was saying it that it sounded like that. But my father was like that. He couldn’t resist a good line.

It goes back to 1 of the first things we talked about: the fact that they want you in the room because you tell them the truth. What I love about you is that, before I met you, exactly how I thought you would be, you are in person.

This started when I sent this clip of you on Ari Emanuel’s podcast. At the end, I sent the clip to Daniel Ek, and he and I were just laughing about it because you’re like—

The production value sucks. There was a velour couch. He says it’s not a velour couch. I grew up with velour couches, okay? Only my velour couch had plastic on them.

No, but you’re like, “Production value sucks. It’s hot. I don’t have any tea. The water’s warm. You’ve got this goddamn light in my face.”

Yeah. No. Rick Rubin’s sitting there in Italy, in this incredible house, backlit, and he looks like Moses. I’m like, “What the f***?”

Last thing: what did you think of the production value today? You happy?

I thought it was good once you finally got going. I mean, the wood paneling is just not really for me because I had wood paneling growing up, you know what I mean? Everything was not real.

Well, we got you the tea. I sent that clip to the team. I was like, “Jimmy’s coming. We’re not going to disappoint him.” We have the air going.

It’s a very nice place. It’s perfect.

I absolutely love you. I tell you this all the time. You’re 1 of the people I most admire. You’re 1 of the people I want to most be like. Thank you so much for taking the time, dude.

This was fun. Hey, look—

It was so great. Thanks, man. Oh, don’t leave me hanging. Don’t leave me hanging, Jimmy. Come on.

Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see that. I was looking for my microphone.

No, you’re good. Thanks, man.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you’re listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I have obsessively read over 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.