Scooter Braun: The Lie I Chased Almost Broke Me... You’re Probably Chasing It Too!

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There's parts of your life where there's these big question marks that I'm hoping you can answer for me.

Okay, but I want the full truth.

Now I'm nervous.

Scooter Braun is the man behind some of the biggest stars in the music industry.

And he built one of the most disruptive entertainment empires on the planet.

I've never really said this out loud until right now.

At this age, I feel a lot of guilt.

Because I worked with so many young artists and we were all kids moving so fast.

And we all wanted to succeed so bad.

And it wasn't until I was 40 years old doing some intense therapy that I realized I was so driven by the fear that I wouldn't be enough.

So let's go back.

As a kid growing up, I wanted to prove that I could be more than the privilege I was born with.

And I created this character scooter because I didn't think Scott could achieve these things.

And that mask made me absolutely relentless faking it till I make it.

Like, I have no right convincing Justin and his mom to be on the first plane they had ever been on and meet me.

So what were they dirty alone?

My ignorance.

But it was also realizing that so much of insecurity drives us and makes us great.

Like, now that I'm here, I can't fail because then everyone will see that I shouldn't be here.

So, let's go for it.

And then, it had such extreme success.

The whole world thought I was crushing it.

But I had built this mask so big, I didn't realize how far away I'd gotten from the sky.

So, here I am, at the top of my game.

I wanted to kill myself.

I went to a very dark place and I broke down crying because I spent so much time trying to impress people who didn't love me instead of realizing how many people already did.

And I was so desperate to do the thing I had never done before.

What was that?

Quick one before we get back to this episode.

Just give me 30 seconds of your time.

Two things I wanted to say.

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Thank you so much.

Back to the episode.

Scooter.

When I look at your life and I look at the things you've achieved,

so much of it makes sense.

But then there's these other parts of your life where there's these big question marks that I'm hoping you can answer for me.

And maybe the earliest question mark that remains in my head is

what it is that drives you?

Because from an exceedingly young age, there was this dog in you.

There was something.

For me, when I was going through the research, it looked like a chip on your shoulder or something to prove to someone and so that's really where i wanted to start i want to understand your earliest context so i can understand the cauldron that scooter was shaped in and and the way that that made the boy turn to a man big question but that's the um the starter right burning question in my head you know it's funny because you started by asking scooter what drives you

And it took me a long time to figure out as an adult that it was actually Scott, my real name, that was the real driver.

And I really created this guy's scooter when I was an adult because I didn't think Scott could achieve these things.

So I almost like created a mask.

And it wasn't until I was 40 years old doing some intense therapy that I fell in love with my name again and realized the answer to your question, which is

part of it was shame of why

with my family's background

am I getting all this privilege.

My father's a refugee from Hungary.

My mother, her dad died when she was 11, you know, and her mother struggled to raise them with family help in the Catskill Mountains.

My grandparents were Holocaust survivors.

And here I am, first generation born in America.

And I wanted to prove that I could be more than the privilege I was born with.

And so I had that chip on my shoulder.

I wanted to prove my value.

I wanted to prove I was worthy of this.

Who's told you you had to?

No one.

I think, you know, as a kid growing up, I read it that way because, you know, you're hearing the stories of the Holocaust.

And my dad, every night before he put me and my brother to bed, would say, hey, boys, you're different.

You're special.

I hold you to a higher standard.

Every night before we went to bed.

And we started to really believe him of like, we need to hold ourselves to this higher standard.

We need to do more.

The idea of failing, the idea of looking at my parents and not achieving it, that's what drove me.

And years ago, I was on a podcast, probably 10 years ago.

I was doing a podcast with Complex, with this guy, Noah.

I watched it.

Do you remember the baseball analogy?

I literally wrote it down in my notes.

Well, I will tell it again, but I will tell you on your podcast the difference I hold today.

Okay.

They asked me what it takes to be successful.

And I made up this analogy with baseball.

And I said, imagine Cy Young Award winner Cece Zavathia at the height of his career is in the middle of Yankee Stadium.

And they invite everyone to come hit a home run.

And they say, you get as many of bats as you want and whoever hits the home run wins like the, you know, billion dollars, million dollars, whatever it is.

And you can imagine everyone flies in from all around the world.

People are fulfilling for New York City.

The line is crazy.

And I said, the person who's successful is not only the person who finally gets up to the plate and swings and misses.

but stays at the plate.

And now people are saying, are you kidding me?

There's lines of millions of people waiting for their turn and you're going to stay there.

You're going to stay there and swing again.

And they swing again.

And then everyone's booing and they swing again.

And they literally keep swinging as everyone is booing them and booing them and booing them for hours.

They're the most selfish person in the world.

You don't deserve to be here.

Get off that plate.

This is not.

And then they finally hit that homer and everyone cheers because, oh my God, they did it.

And I said that years ago.

And it wasn't until recently that I realized.

There's one difference in the story.

I never understood who the crowd was.

I always thought the crowd was being able to shut out the outside noise.

I always thought the crowd was the naysayers and all the people who in your life will tell you you're never going to achieve anything.

And that's part of it.

But the crowd, all those people waiting in line, is actually you.

That's what I never realized till now, that that's the difference.

I always thought

when people asked me what drove you, I thought it was all the outside noise.

I thought it was the fear of failure, the fear of letting them down, all these different things.

And it wasn't until recently, when I hit some hardships as an adult and really had to look inward that I realized everyone's got the same crowd and everyone has their own issues and everyone has their own stuff.

And what actually brings you to success and self-worth and happiness is actually understanding how to stand at that plate and shut out the noise that's here.

Not the millions of people around, the millions of people are in your head screaming at you, telling you you're not enough.

the deep, deep lie from the most confident people, they have it.

So

I'm glad I get to finally publicly say the difference because I've had it wrong all these years.

And in that analogy, you talk about how most people come up to the plate, they swing once,

they hear the boo, they leave, they go back to their sofa or wherever they're coming from somewhere.

Or they swing two, three times.

Everyone's telling them they're selfish and they get, you know, oh my God, and they're embarrassed and they leave.

It takes a lot for someone to stand there in the middle of the noise.

shut out the noise and understand the opportunity was given to me.

I deserve this.

I'm going to keep swinging.

Going back to your early context, context, Scott,

your dad, Irvin,

he sounds like quite a tough guy.

I was reading about some of the things he was saying to you when you were a kid and I was like, dad, Jesus, like when he called you a liar

that day and told you about living with integrity, et cetera.

My dad grew up tough.

And it was almost like when you're being raised by two people who live through what they live through, they were raising him for a world that took everything away from them.

They were so loving, but they still raised him that way.

And then he was so loving, but he still raised us really tough.

And I was the firstborn son, so I'm the oldest of all our kids, all the kids.

So he was very tough on me.

You're referencing this time when I was, I was probably 14.

And he

caught me in like a white lie.

And usually he would punish me, and his punishments could be severe.

But this time he just said, hey, come here, I want to talk to you.

It's not going to be a punishment this time.

I just want you to know you got the gift for Gab.

You could talk your way out of anything.

And in life, I used to tell you, if you lie, you're not going to be successful.

I want to tell you the truth.

You're so good at it.

You might be successful, but you're going to be a liar.

And I'll know you're a liar and you'll know you're a liar.

So do with that with what you want.

And I was so beaten down and ashamed because it wasn't like raining down fists on me.

It was just like the guy I admired so much called me a liar.

And I walked away.

I was messed up.

And I went back to him and I said, Dad, I want you to know I'm not going to lie.

I'm going going to be a man of integrity.

I'm,

yeah, I could do that, but I understand this opportunity and what you're saying.

And he just looked at me and said, okay, good.

And he walked away.

And it was one of the best lessons ever, you know, because

he was right.

Like, you, you can win certain ways, but you're going to know how do you, how do you want to win?

You want to do it the right way.

And

that.

that tough love, I'm appreciative of it.

You go to college?

I went to college.

You went to college?

You started a business at college doing events?

Yeah, well, I started selling fake IDs.

That's what I started doing.

Yeah, I sold fake IDs because my friend sold fake IDs and I thought he had a bad business plan.

So I was like, I'll market them.

You make them.

And quickly

he broke my golden rule of not keeping in touch with people we sold to.

So I stopped immediately because I didn't want to get caught.

And I walked by a nightclub and said, how much would you give me if I brought people here the next week?

And that was the beginning of my Atlanta party promotion days.

Why did that succeed?

What is it about you, as you look back in hindsight, your skill set, your ability that made your party promotion days so successful, which eventually sort of parlayed into music?

A combination of things.

I think one,

I wasn't a threat to the freshman girls.

I had a high school sweetheart at the time.

I was very committed to her.

I was a decently cute kid and I could dance.

So I was a good person to go out with and have fun.

So that was one thing.

Number two, I was playing sports.

So I had a lot of friends in different teams and different arenas.

And three, I was in the right place at the right time.

You know,

that first party I threw was successful.

And at that first party, I was approached by a guy named Jason Weaver.

He's an actor.

And he was in this old Michael Jackson movie I used to watch as a kid where he played young Michael.

And he came in and he said, this is crazy because Atlanta at that time was very segregated in the club scene.

So it was like, if you were black, you went to a party, you know, a club that played hip hop.

And if you were white, you went to a club they played techno but i didn't grow up in the south and i wanted to listen to hip hop and rock and roll and we played that and when jason came in he was so fascinated to see a mixed crowd listening to hip-hop that he was like you want to see how the other half lives and jason brought me to a club called velvet room on tuesday nights in atlanta georgia it was ran by a guy named alex getawan alex was so fascinated to see me in the line he said you know let this kid in here and alex taught me how to promote he taught me what the value of the door actually was, what I should be getting from the bar.

And I would start moving my parties and I would spend all my money that I made on Thursday nights at the college party on Alex's Tuesday night, meeting people, meeting rappers, meeting singers, meeting different people, faking it till I make it and getting people to come back and forth between my parties.

And that's how I started.

That's how I met Jermaine.

That's how I met Luda.

We all kind of came up together.

Relationships.

Why did he give you a foot up?

So many people are early in their careers and they're having these chance encounters, but those aren't converting into a relationship.

And when I look at your life, there's people you meet along the way who end up being really, really pivotal.

And it appears to me as an objective observer that you have an ability to form good relationships, loyal, lasting relationships with people.

One, I think it's important to pay people respect.

You know, I came from a household where you respect your elders.

And when I was coming up, I was 19.

So I was very respectful of the people that are giving me an opportunity.

And I never forgot who helped me along the way.

I think the other thing that was a big part of my philosophy was let your work be the reason they want to meet you.

I didn't want to be that kid who was going, hey, give me an opportunity.

And by the way, sometimes that works.

But I wanted them to see what I was doing and then say, come over here.

I didn't approach Jermaine Dupree

to work at SoSo Deaf.

Jermaine heard about me and my parties and he met me and he said, you have more potential than parties.

Why don't you come work for me?

I didn't approach, you know, Ludacris who was coming up as a rapper and say, let me do that.

I didn't, a lot of people in my life,

I never really approached them.

And then even as my life changed and I got older, I made a lot of relationships and I have a lot of relationships now that I've never done business with.

And people go, well, you have that, why don't you?

And it was because I never wanted anyone to feel.

Probably my insecurity is I never wanted anyone to feel like I needed them.

I never wanted to feel like a user.

It was like my own insecurities of how they might see me.

But I think on top of that, I just,

it was that same old thing of never wanting to be in a position where you're begging somebody for something.

I called Jermaine

and we spoke to him and I listened to the recording again just before you arrived.

But what Jermaine said in that voice recording is also pretty similar to what your dad said, which is they both saw something in you.

You're this young kid who doesn't have an extensive track record of decades of work, but they're all betting on you in some way.

As you look back on your life, what were they betting on?

Because they all seem pretty sure that you had something.

My ignorance.

Ignorance.

I think

no one told me I shouldn't be there.

And he offered you a job for working at his company, which meant you had to drop out of college?

I didn't have to drop out of college.

I did because

I went to work for Jermaine and now I'm traveling all the time.

I'm still throwing parties.

You know, we're gearing up for Usher's album.

We're doing this.

We're doing that.

I'm working with the Youngbloods, Anthony Hamilton.

Like it's, and I'm 19, 20 years old.

And my grade point average went from a three-point something to a one-point something.

And they brought me in on academic probation and they said,

you know, what's going on with you?

Is there a drug problem?

Are you being abused?

And I said, no, no, no, no.

I'm an entrepreneur.

I'm building this.

I want to build a record label.

I'm working for Jermaine Dupria, you know, and this guy's looking at me like I'm insane.

And he's, this dean looks at me at Emory and he says, do you know the story of Robert Woodruff?

And I said, you know, Robert Woodruff.

He goes, yeah, the founder of Coca-Cola, the Woodruff Center, the largest endowment in Emory.

And he tells me this amazing story of this entrepreneur who created Coca-Cola, who is the largest endowment in our university.

And I'm so hyped.

I'm like, this guy gets me.

He gets me.

He's going to help me.

I'm going to be at the school.

And just when my hopes are really high, he looks at me and goes, you know what we're going to do, right?

Because we're going to to stop all the nonsense.

You're going to focus on school.

You're going to get a degree because the chance of you being like Robert Woodruff without an MRE degree is like one in a billion.

And the moment he said it, that's when I dropped out of school.

What did your father say?

Before you ask me about my father, I want to ask you a question.

Okay.

You made a face and you paused.

Yeah.

Because you have your own story of something happening like this.

I just have a...

I just have a real hate for dream busters.

Yet, every great story we have of success, people tell of that pivotal moment, whether it be this dean or Michael Jordan being cut by his coach, the varsity coach when he was younger.

We all talk about the dream buster as a catalyst to our success.

And, you know, in life, I've, I've kind of feel like everything, even, you know, it's like I have this tattoo, amor fati, you know, from Marcus Aurelius.

It's the concept, love of one's fate in Latin.

And it's this concept that you have to love the sorrow as much as you love the joy.

You have to love the pain as much as you love the success.

You know, it's if it wasn't for that dean, I wouldn't have had that on my shoulder in that moment.

I would just push you on the fact that, like, you hate these dream busters, but I am so grateful for them.

I'm grateful for the dream busters.

However, and this is actually something I was talking to my friends about in our group chat this morning.

Is it okay, in your view, to be driven by haters?

It's so funny because if you're only driven by haters, no.

But I think that everything plays its role at the time.

Like

Robert Green,

he talks about this idea of embracing your dark side.

And

I think that there's truth in that.

Like, you know, if

you continue to fight something that's naturally inside of you, you're going to really struggle with it.

If you can accept that's part of you, you can use it as fuel and you can move right through it.

So yes, there are things that drive me.

My curiosity is a big driver for where I go.

My children now are a big driver for where I go and how I live my life.

The people I love, the joy that I find, the introspective voice that now I can go to when I'm meditating or, you know, working on myself.

But doubt from someone who dislikes me or doubt from a hater, I can pretend like I'm Zen as much as I want.

But if I'm being really honest with myself, sometimes that's the fuel that I need.

So I think if it's solely one thing, it's not healthy.

But I think if you can admit, you get fuel and different influences from different places and don't try and be ashamed of the one that doesn't fit in your narrative of how evolved you are,

you know, then it's okay.

You established SB projects, I believe, after leaving Jermaine, when you were 24, 25 years old.

24.

And I read that you'd kind of had this plan to sign three different types of acts.

Yeah.

First one, Asher Roth, who's a very famous rapper.

Yeah, I wanted to sign three types of acts.

And Asher fit the mold for one, Justin for the other, and the other one I never found.

So Asher, Asher,

for people that don't know, is a very successful rapper.

What was the mold you were trying to fit?

Eminem was a very big rapper.

He was one of the biggest rappers of all time.

And I was in college and I'm watching all like these,

at the time, these frat guys,

but they loved hip-hop.

And I don't think they had anyone who spoke to their life.

So I wanted a kid who could speak to college life, who had the skills.

to be credible within the world of hip-hop.

Why did you think you could find talent?

Did you believe

ignorance?

I'm telling you, every aspect of my life, if we talked about every little thing that I've been in, you said earlier, I've been in all these different things, and probably your listeners have no idea the hell I am.

So they're like, what is he talking about?

But every time I put myself in that next arena,

it's this, why not me?

I had no right contacting Asher.

on my space.

I mean, at that point, I could say, okay, I came from SoSodaf.

I was the youngest vice president, music because of Jermaine when I was at SoSoda.

I was 20 years old.

So I had the right, you know, some credibility other people didn't have.

I definitely could do that.

But to tell him to drop out of college and move down to Atlanta, Georgia for be the first artist on my record label to, you know, find Justin in Canada and convince his mom and him to be on the first plane they had ever been on to come down to Atlanta and meet me.

I mean, it was,

I was 25 years old, 24 years old.

Like these are,

I was insane.

It's interesting.

When we talk about belief, we ask if, you know, Scooter, did you have belief?

But in your case, you had the lack of limiting beliefs, which shows up the same as having belief.

There was just like nothing.

It wasn't even because I was so driven by also the fear that I wouldn't be enough that back then I would have lied.

I would have said, oh, I had such a deep belief in my conviction that I could do it.

It was partially that, but it was also,

why not me?

And no one told me I can't be here.

And also, now that I'm here, I can't fail because then everyone will see that I shouldn't be here.

And so it was this

fear, excitement, fear, excitement, conviction.

That's what I always tell people when I meet them as young people.

I'm like, you don't have kids.

You can starve a little bit.

Your parents want you to go the easiest route because they don't want to see you suffer.

But now is the time when you should be suffering.

If you want to go for it, now's the time when you don't have anyone to support where you can really,

really go for it.

Because later on in life, you got to think about other people.

And

back then 19 years old to 24

i'm let's go for it

and the second artist that you signed was called justin bieber who's justin

justin beber you were 26 years old when you came across justin 25 25 and he was 12 13 13.

damn

You discover Justin by watching

a SoSick video by Neo.

Yeah, well, I saw a bunch of videos from his church, his mom had posted, and the one that moved me the most was So Sick by Neil.

You must have been asked this a gazillion times, but the actions you then took based on seeing a kid on a video are bizarre.

Yeah.

They are bizarre.

Yeah, I like googled the background of the church to look up the businesses and then called the regions of Canada, school boards to figure out where he was because his mom had a different name than him because her name was Millette.

His was Bieber.

So I went a little crazy to find him within within 24 hours.

Once I saw him, I kind of knew.

In person?

No, I knew.

When I saw online, I was like, this is the kid I've been looking for.

And I felt the same way about Asher.

I mean, I relentlessly kind of pursued both of them.

I had a clear vision to like

what I could do and what he was capable of.

And it was funny because no one believed me.

I mean, even after we met and we did the deal and we started working together, literally no one believed me.

And YouTube was not a big thing back then.

So when I took him from 60,000 views and we took him to like 60 million, million now he's like one of the biggest youtubers in the world and everyone's like yeah you youtubers don't turn into musicians though what were the first principles that you saw in him like what were this because when i think about having those moments where my intuition just says yes to something tone okay charisma um it was like

he had incredible tone and he had soul and he had charisma he was doing like there was one where there was an instrumental and he was like jumping around and i just believed in him instantly and then when i met him he had even more charisma he was funny and i was like all right this kid let's go and he was an athlete so he was competitive he was a very special special talent and a very unique individual and uh

those were special times and you flew in to meet him and his mother no they flew to me oh okay i talked to her for like an hour and a half that night and uh first plane ride they ever went on and i remember he was so excited that there was a fridge inside his hotel room

his mother said,

speaking of you, Scooter really believed in Justin from day one.

He put everything on the line for us.

And they put it on the line for me too.

You know, they believed in a 25-year-old kid.

And

we were able to achieve some amazing things.

And I'm very proud of what we achieved and always rooting for.

How was your relationship with Justin now?

Not the same that it was.

I think, you know, these things go with ebb and flows.

I think there comes a point where

I understand he probably wants to go on and show that he can do it.

I mean, we worked together for so long and we had such extreme success.

And I think you get to a point as a man where you want to show the world you can do it on your own.

And I completely respect that.

And I think at this point,

that's what he's doing.

And

myself and everyone from the old team is rooting for him.

But I stopped managing two and a half years ago.

And now I'm a cheerleader from the side.

And,

you know, I want everyone that I worked with to do well.

I think sometimes when you walk away from management, I've heard managers, which I never understood, they'd be like.

Deep down behind closed doors, they don't want to see them do as well without them.

It's almost like,

you know, them succeeding is tarnishing your legacy.

Every artist that I worked with, I believed in them because they were great.

And if they continue to be great,

I think that's the best testimony to that belief.

So to see

Justin move forward and succeed, to see Ariana, you know, with what's happened with Wicked in this past year,

to see Tori Kelly, you know, to see everybody that I've ever had a chance to work with, to see them go on and do great things on their own

it's awesome

is there anything that these individuals have in common at all

these people that pain pain yeah I think it's pain personally I think

to be able to convey emotions on the level that it touches people around the world you have to understand emotions and I think

I think great artists, great performers are able to draw from different places.

And sometimes it's joy and sometimes it's pain.

And sometimes it's just a natural God-given gift.

How important is hard work?

Oh, it's very important.

I think, especially in the beginning.

In the beginning, you're stepping into a pool where everyone talented wants to be seen.

And you have to work incredibly hard

to break out of the noise.

So, and by the way, I don't think that's particular to artists or music or film or TV or anything I've done with entertainment.

I think that's every business I've ever been a part of.

The first three to five years of any business I've ever built in any arena or worked with anyone who's ever achieved anything great, those first three to five years are the most important.

Sounds like something I said to my girlfriend.

It sounds like, you know, same thing with relationship maybe, put in the foundation those first three to five years and really be there together.

I really believe that.

I think

you put in that time in the beginning and you can break through the noise and set a foundation for everything else.

When I think about Justin's career, he had a wobble where he was involved in lots of sort of,

you know, it looked like he was going through a bit of difficulty.

And I reflect on one of my friends, Liam Payne.

and who was on this podcast and who's sadly passed away now, but he also around the same age was thrown into the public eye at a very young age.

He joined One Direction, went on the crazy, crazy, wild roller coaster ride that is One Direction.

And he admitted on the podcast that he struggled.

He struggled with addiction.

He struggled with lots of pain that he was dealing with.

And his story is an inspiring one, ultimately, but also a tragic one in many respects.

Why does this happen to so many young artists, childhood stars?

You know, when you asked me this question,

at this age, I feel a lot of guilt.

I feel a lot of guilt because I worked with so many young artists, and like I told you, I hadn't taken the time to look at myself or

do the therapy myself until I was older.

So I didn't understand at 25 years old, at 27 years old, at 30 years old,

that

they each were coming from very unique backgrounds of their own stuff with their own families and their own childhoods and growing up this way and being seen by the whole world and being judged by the whole world at a very young age.

And I think it's two things.

I think one, human beings are not made to be worshipped.

I think we're made to serve.

And I think that when we worship human beings, it changes something within us.

It messes us up a little bit because that's not what we're built for.

And I think that can be very confusing.

And I think being able to transcend the childhood of, you know, people cheering your name and everything else at that level and get to the place where the artists I've worked with are, where they are in healthy relationships and with their families and still working through stuff, but like having a human experience, I think it's a testament to their strength.

So I think that's part of it.

I just think the nature of being on that stage, you know, that young and people chanting your name.

And I didn't realize that till, you know, I got older.

The other side of it is I never understood even without me, I didn't have that childhood, yet I broke.

And what I think also is important is

I don't think we can

push everything.

I think adversity is important.

We can't just talk about mental health and say adversity shouldn't exist.

But I do think I understand the importance now of

really putting in the time to make sure sure mental health is addressed and that we have an outlet to speak to someone outside of the crew.

And there's a lot of things that I learned within myself that I wish I knew back then.

I met those Run Direction kids when they started.

They came to LA and actually the whole group, because Niall reached out to me.

They came to my house to hang out in the backyard when they were first starting, before they really blew up, like their first U.S.

visit to LA.

And I met Liam back then.

And I met met the excited young kid with the voice.

Yet each one of them has had a different experience.

Each one of them has had a different

story of perseverance and tragedy.

And that's the thing it's like with kids.

Like you just never know what the cocktail is going to make of life.

And I think.

I think,

you know, that idea of we're not made to be worshipped, that can play funny things on the mind.

The brain isn't even developed until you're 25, they tell me.

I don't even know if mine's developed at 43.

But I've sat here with so many neuroscientists that have said that to me, and also addiction scientists that say the brain is still learning and building its sort of like dopamine receptors and stuff.

So Liam was telling me that he was up on stage in front of 100 odd thousand people in Dubai.

huge adrenaline rush, huge surge of dopamine.

Then they drive him back to his hotel.

He was like, they lock the door.

And it's just me in there with the mini bar.

And then the next day, it's the exact same thing: stage, car, hotel.

And then without the stage, you were looking for that dopamine hit.

Yeah.

No, it's, it's,

like I said, it's,

I'm very proud of

the job that we did and how much we cared and how much the team cared for all the years that we did it.

But it doesn't mean I don't look back and wish that I knew what I know now.

How would you have been different?

Hmm.

I think I would have had a therapist on the road for all of us.

You know, I think that's the biggest difference.

I think I would have slowed down all of us.

I think I would have made every single one of us stop and do that hour, you know, because we were all kids and we were all moving so fast.

And we all wanted to succeed so bad and we all wanted

the excitement and we wanted to make kids dreams come true and bring them down from the upper decks to put them in the front row, and you know, to help Justin get that number one, and you know, to help Ariana do this.

And we all wanted it, and we were excited, and we were doing something that was so unique.

And everyone in the world was so excited for us.

You know, oh my gosh, you guys are a part of this.

This is so cool.

I didn't know,

I didn't know to go inward for the dopamine hit.

And I wish I would have known that and been able to share it back then

when Justin ultimately said that he wanted to kind of go it alone and do it himself does that hurt no not at that point I think I was also at that point you know at that point

it had been a couple years where I knew I wanted to do something else and I I wanted to find out who I was I wanted to experiment with you know a different career and we were both communicating enough with each other everyone the writing was on the wall how many clients oh my god that we would know a lot because when i was doing my research i was like no surely not carly ray jepson and then um martin garricks

kanye

yeah can you give me the top 10 off the top of your head that you work with i never say a top 10 a good manager knows how to do that i got i got to work with a lot of incredible artists a long time i mean from

zach brown band to black eye piece to justin to ariana to you know martin Gehricks.

We signed while he was at ClubMed with his parents.

We contacted him because he had the song Animals and we heard it.

To Dan and Shea, I mean, just to so many over the years, it was pretty incredible to be a part and so close to so many incredible stories, you know, and to see, you know, going to a coffee shop to see Tori Kelly sing, to seeing her walk on a Grammy stage.

It just, I got to see really incredible moments in people's lives to, you know, Demi telling me, I want to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl, you know, and showing me a tweet that she wrote this years ago to seeing her actually perform, you know,

you know,

at the Super Bowl, you know, so it's,

it's just been a really cool experience, but I got to see it in so many different arenas.

And you're only there for a flash, right?

You have this little tiny small moment here, a little tiny small moment here.

But to get to witness so many different rides,

it's a really cool thing i remember as a kid i heard this great saying don't just read stories try to be a part of them try to be a story and i think i've always tried to take that into my life crazy crazy why i was i was there was a second ago when you were talking and i was just i stepped into your body for a second and i ran the highlight reel of your life just as justin's um

sort of manager.

I was thinking, God, like the places you must have been and the things you must have seen, just as his manager, let alone working with all of these other great artists.

It's not just a lifetime of experience.

It's multiple lifetimes of fortune to get to even see those things.

I met a guy years ago and

I'll name drop here.

So I got invited to meet Charlie Munger.

Oh, yeah, the investor.

Yeah.

And everyone was asking him questions about business.

And I asked him a question about life.

And afterwards, his guy contacted me.

He goes, Charlie liked your question.

He wants you to meet this other guy that he really likes, who's a brilliant businessman.

And I meet this other gentleman, and he tells me he's a statistician by trade.

And the reason he's excited to meet me is because people in my world who are part of so many different stories live in dog ears

because they get to be a part of kind of so many other people's things.

But

it's a unique thing.

But I told you,

the biggest lesson I learned from all of it

is that at one point in my life, I received so much praise.

And then the next moment,

without me expecting it, I received so much hate.

And

on the other side of all these experiences, I've come to learn that both were not deserved.

The people who were praising me did not know me.

And the people who hated me did not know me.

And it's like one of my favorite,

I saw Tom Hanks say this on like an actor's table one time.

He goes, this too shall pass.

You remember that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's so great.

He's like, you think you're killing it?

This too shall pass.

He's like, you think it's going to be hard?

This too shall pass.

Like, it's true.

So what do you anchor in then?

If so much is transient?

At this point?

In life generally, what does one anchor in?

If everything is transient, if, you know, this too shall be.

You don't have kids yet.

I have a major anchor in three kids.

Major anchor.

What if you don't have kids?

If you don't have kids, that's when you should definitely do the self-work because your anchor is you.

And the truth is, I've really gotten to a beautiful place of I fully expect to be misunderstood in the future.

I expect tomorrow something can happen where, especially because my life has been somewhat in the public eye, you get misunderstood all the time.

People make up stories, they twist things, someone's hurt, and it comes out this way, that way.

I could get pulled into this stuff.

It's happened to me already.

And so I've come to terms with that.

What I've realized is being on the other side of it already happening to me, all it does is end up making room for something else.

So for me, what anchors me is

I no longer think I'm in control, but I think I'm participating in one hell of a game.

I can't control the outcome.

Steph Curry and LeBron could be at the height of their game, but even they can't control the game.

They can influence it.

And so, that for me, it was like the first half of my life was, I'm manifesting, I'm manifesting, I'm doing this, that youthful energy.

And then you turn 40 and this stuff happens.

And you start the other half of your life, you're like, you know, Michael Singer, I need to surrender.

You know, you're at their surrender experiment, you know, like everything, surrender.

And then I realize there's a balance.

There's this balance of

I'm participating in an incredible game and I can bring what I bring to the table and I'm not going to be able to control this game, but maybe I should start enjoying the game a little bit.

I'm out here.

I'm participating.

That's pretty freaking cool.

And I think

that is what anchors me at this point, that I have no idea what the next five to 10 years of my life are going to look like.

I used to think I did.

Now I know it can change like that.

And I think I'm excited for love in the future.

I'm excited for adventure.

I'm not looking forward to the pain, but I know if it comes, there's a reason for it.

So tell me about

an artist that you believed in.

You don't have to name them, of course, but an artist you believed in you were wrong about.

Something you really just, your first principles were off.

And in hindsight,

I had an artist

who was,

honestly maybe the most talented artist I ever signed.

His name was Spencer Lee.

And

Spencer Lee got brought to me by a buddy, my name, Freddie.

And we did a deal for Spencer.

And Dave Appleton, who I told you about my buddy, was trying to handle in management.

And Dave started calling me, saying, Hey, there's some real addiction issues here, and we're really struggling.

And we put him into rehab, and then he wrote one of the most incredible songs, River Water.

River water

wash me easy,

send away my worries, please.

River water,

take me eat down.

Show me the dreams that I never

found.

Piffle water smell water to

about

addiction.

And when he got out, we thought, okay, he's going to be clean and everything great.

We made this video and we started getting going.

We made the Spencer Lee band and we started putting him out there, like paying for everything to kind of get it going.

And he started doing festivals and we started getting phone calls of like, hey, people are coming to see this insane talent with this voice.

And

he went back to drugs and

he overdosed last year.

And he's no longer with us.

And we got the news because his grandmother, who's the sweetest, she called to say thank you for trying and everything else.

And that was the love of her life.

And she lost him.

And

that one I got wrong.

because

I thought, you know, maybe if we get the records right, if we we get the music, if he gets on the road, you know, he gets out of rehab, like, you know, this would be enough.

It's one of the biggest tragedies because I can't tell you how good he was.

I mean, he just a special, special talent.

You listen to this guy's records.

Sometimes I always say I want to reach out to his family and be like, let's just release the records, like the ones that I have, that the world's never heard.

And I, you know, I've, all the money should go to, you know, a cause, you know, to help people in a similar situation.

I wish we could do that.

I'd love to get permission to do that.

Because he was one of the most special talents I ever came across.

They don't want to release the records?

It's complicated.

Last week, I was in New York interviewing one of the world's leading addiction experts.

And

for anyone that hasn't been through addiction, it's a very confusing thing to observe.

Because as an onlooker, you just go, just stop that.

You're self-destructing.

But if you've had friends that have dealt with addiction, you realize that it's not an attempt to self-destruct.

It's like an attempt to.

Yeah, it's like it's maybe the last attempt to do the opposite, to survive, to survive from something.

When I was dealing with addiction with someone I managed,

someone I really respect told me about Al-Anon.

Al-Anon is for a support.

It's like AA, but for the families.

And they recommend I go.

And I went to two Al-Anon meetings.

And it was very helpful at the time.

And one of the things I learned there was, one, this concept of it is not your fault.

This is not about you, that you have to love them where they're at.

But the biggest thing I really learned was be a rock.

You know, this person said to me,

home doesn't move around.

Home is a constant place that someone can come back to.

If someone beats addiction, it is because of them.

You know, they've made that choice and they deserve the credit.

But if you want to be helpful, this person said, just try to be a constant place.

They know that no matter what, at the end, they can come back and and you'll be waiting understanding your story you stuck around with justin when he went through his his difficult times and people were calling for you to drop him and to

maybe move on yeah i think it was an interesting time but like i said if someone beats that they deserve the credit so i don't i don't deserve any credit in that he does

you ended up posting that post on your instagram which sent a ton of headlines around the world saying that you were quitting music management 23 years after 23 years there was a little bit of a question mark though because I think you referenced in something you'd posted that part of your inspiration or a catalyst was a particular artist

had decided that they wanted to go their own way.

Yeah.

Who was that?

I prefer not to say.

There's a bunch of legal stuff around that and everything else, but

she,

she informed me, and I respected the hell out of it that she felt that way.

But I had had that conversation with others too.

And

I mean, I wrote it all in 23 years.

The reason I posted that at the time was I had already made the decision a year prior, but I'd never talked about it.

And, you know, when you're running a big company, there's all these, you know, legal things and we had to wait till everything was in order and then I could say it.

And

they were like, well, you've already been out of it for a year.

Why say it now?

And I just felt.

I need to say it for me, but I also need to say it so I hold myself accountable not to ever go back.

Okay.

And I, you know, it was way too long.

It was like 10 slides on Instagram.

No, it was incredible.

But it was, I appreciate you saying that, but it was from the heart.

And I remember waking up, posting it, and then just like falling down because I was like, oh my God, like this thing I've been doing since I was 19 is now over.

And what I wrote in there is the truth.

My entire adult life, that's all I had known.

So not being in that situation, I didn't know what a normal adult life was like.

I didn't know you could have a weekend.

Like, I didn't know, you know, like, that's what it was.

I was on call all the time for 23 years.

And it wasn't one.

It was a lot.

And

finding out what a normal adult life was like was pretty wild to me and also really interesting.

But I don't, I had some of the most incredible memories and I'm very grateful.

But if you remember, do you remember the Barry Gordy quote at the end?

No, I don't.

Barry Gordy is the founder of Motown Records.

Barry Gordy is a kid from Detroit.

Michael Jackson's theater play, Barry Gordy.

Correct.

Yes.

So before Barry Gordy, black musicians would make incredible music and a white person could come along and just cover it and make it theirs.

And

Barry Gordy took that back and gave us Motown Records and changed the entire music industry.

And I was at a dinner and Barry Gordy was placed next to me.

And I was just like freaking out.

Barry Gordy sitting next to me.

And we start talking.

And this is years before

he said, I'm going to tell you a story and you're going to need it one day.

And boy, was he right.

And he said, you know, do you know what the Motown 25 was?

And I said, absolutely.

It was the first time Michael Jackson did the moonwalk, Diana Ross.

And he's like, oh, you really are a Motown fan.

I was like, yeah.

And he said, well, do you know I didn't want to go?

I said, what?

He goes, yeah, I didn't want to go.

At the time, Michael had left for CBS Records.

Diana had left for CBS Records.

And everyone was saying that I took their publishing.

And I was like the bad guy for all these people that I had supported and lifted.

And like, I was so angry and I didn't want to go.

I said, well, what changed?

He goes, my family made me go.

And I said, yeah, because I remember you were in the balcony and I kept cutting to you.

And he goes, you know, the first, I get there and Diana Ross is hosting.

Michael's going to perform.

He's the biggest thing in the world.

I'm mad.

But as the night went on, I suddenly realized little Barry from Detroit would have lost his mind knowing this was coming.

He said, young man, it will never end the way you want it to, but it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

And I didn't know how much I needed that in the years to come.

You can plan it.

You can try and control it as much as you want, but Barry Gordy was right.

It will never end the way you want it unless you're Derek Jeter on the Yankees.

Or, you know, you're Messy.

But most of us, it's not going to end the way we want it.

However, it happened.

And how cool is that?

Like, how cool is that that like we get to do this and get to have this life?

And I thought that's the way I wanted to end 23 years because

me stopping managing and ending managing, and it didn't end the way I necessarily wanted.

I would have wanted a giant concert where all the artists come out, we celebrate everything we did together.

It ended pretty abruptly of like, oh, this is it.

And some want to leave and some want to stay.

And yeah, I'm done.

I don't want to do this anymore.

And some people understood it and other people didn't, but it happened.

And no one could ever take that away.

Did you ever feel betrayed?

Oh, of course.

But I'm sure that goes both ways.

Like, as much as I felt betrayed, like, music business can be heartbreaking.

Management can be heartbreaking.

If you watch David Geffen's documentary, he says, uh, management is like move the mountain over here and they say it was supposed to be there.

You know, like, but at the same time,

it must be heartbreaking the other way.

It's such an interdependent relationship and it's such,

I don't,

you know, people always say, stay on your side of the street.

I try to do that.

It's easier for me to move on with my life and be happy by staying on my side of the street.

So, yeah, I've definitely felt betrayed a hundred times.

I've definitely felt misunderstood so many times.

But I also try to give empathy of if someone is doing this to me, they must be hurting for some reason.

And maybe I did play a role in it, even if I don't know I did.

You know, so

do you feel betrayed?

Yes, especially in a job of service.

Yeah.

But yeah, you're right.

We all do have a preconception of how the run will end.

Yeah, we're all the protagonists in our own story.

Now that there's been some space between that decision.

Yeah.

Two and a half years.

Two and a half years since that decision.

Wow, two and a half years.

Wow.

It feels like it was...

Six months ago.

Well, it was two and a half years for me.

Okay.

It's been probably a year and a half since I probably posted that.

Okay.

You've had some space since that decision.

Correct decision?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Even high conviction now that it was the right thing?

Yeah.

And like I said, it happened.

In hindsight, it was what it was supposed to be at the time it was supposed to be.

I think the reason why I wrote 23 years and why I quit, I wouldn't say I quit when I retired and stopped doing that, when I moved on.

How about that?

When I moved on to something else, was because what exactly I wrote?

It was.

I was too afraid to find out who I was without it for so long that I probably should have left earlier.

But I finally got to a point where I realized either you do it now or something, you're going to have to learn the hard way again.

You know, so it was time.

And

it was time for some of the most amazing artists that I worked with to also spread their wings and do their own thing.

I think B2B marketeers keep making this mistake.

They're chasing volume instead of quality.

And when you try to be seen by more people instead of the right people, all you're doing is making noise.

But that noise rarely shifts the needle and it's often quite expensive.

And I know, as there was a time in my career where I kept making this mistake, that many of you will be making it too.

Eventually, I started posting ads on our show sponsors platform, LinkedIn.

And that's when things started to change.

I put that change down to a few critical things.

One of them being that LinkedIn was then and still is today the platform where decision makers go to, not only to think and learn, but also to buy.

And when you market your business there, you're putting it right in front of people who actually have the power to say yes.

And you can target them by job title, industry, and company size.

It's simply a sharper way to spend your marketing budget.

And if you haven't tried it, how about this?

Give LinkedIn ads a try and I'm going to give you a hundred dollar ad credit to get you started.

If you visit linkedin.com slash diary, you can claim that right now.

That's linkedin.com slash diary.

You sold your company for $1.1 billion.

That's what I read.

You can't confirm or deny it, but that's publicly traded, so I can confirm

it.

You sold your company for $1.1 $1.1 billion, which I don't think people realize.

It's a fucking lot of money.

At 39 years old, roughly.

I was about to turn 40.

You talk about laying on the beach with your belly out.

Yeah.

I mean, with a significant amount of money in your bank account, without the same

job that's sort of demanding your time seven days a week.

A lot of people are scared of that.

Not the money, but the gap, the uncertainty, the space

honestly the timing of when it happened for me

i was in such a place like i said of surrender that i really wasn't looking at it as like achievement or money or something like that i more looked at it as what are you going to do now Are you going to try and control or are you going to participate?

Like I told you earlier.

And I started to just be curious for the first time.

Instead of, I love this idea of a competitive mind versus a curious and creative mind.

A competitive mind is what I had and it's where I was of there's always something finite when you're competitive.

You know, it's going to finish.

There's going to be an outcome and then what?

But when you're operating from a curious and creative mind, there's no end.

You can just continue to create, you continue to build.

And I want, I want to be in that place in my life now of

what, how big can I think?

I saw this Jeff Bezos interview the other day and he just said, one of the biggest curses of an entrepreneur is not thinking big enough.

You know, and I think,

you know, think big.

You know, you only get one ride around this thing.

Think big, have fun, love your friends, love your family, dance, laugh, cry,

you know,

do all the things and

get to know yourself more and more every single day.

Just before that time, we have this whole Taylor Swift incident.

What happened?

Is this the moment you're talking about where you received bad press?

Oh, bad press.

Yeah, yeah.

That was.

That's the.

When I bought Big Machine, I thought I was going to work with all the artists on Big Machine.

I thought it was going to be like an exciting thing.

I knew that Taylor,

she and I had only met three times, I think in my life, three or four times.

And one of the times, it was years earlier.

It was really a great engagement.

She invited me to a pride party and we respected each other.

We had a great engagement.

In between that time, since I'd seen her last, I started managing Kanye West.

I managed Justin Bieber.

I knew she didn't get along with them.

I had a feeling, this is where my arrogance came in.

I had a feeling she probably didn't like me because I managed them, but I thought that once this announcement happened, she would talk to me, see who I am, and we would work together.

And the announcement came out and I'm calling Scott Borschetta and saying, hey, send me her number.

I just talked to Thomas Rhett and he's excited.

And I just talked to, you know,

this, you you know, this person and they're excited.

And I'm calling, you know, Florida, Georgia line next.

And, oh,

and then this Tumblr comes out and it says all this stuff.

And I was just like shocked.

And

it's been five, six years.

I don't need to go back into it.

But what I can tell you is everything in life is a gift.

Having that experience.

allows me to have empathy for the people I worked with who I would always say, yeah, I understand, but I never knew what it was like to be on the global stage like that.

I never knew what criticism like that felt like.

And like I told you, the biggest gift that I got from that was understanding that all the praise I had received up until that moment

was not deserved.

And all the hate I got after that moment was not deserved because none of these people knew me.

Yeah.

She didn't know me.

This person didn't know me.

This person who met me three times, they didn't know me.

I can show respect for all of them because I don't know them.

So I can love them where they're at.

But the gift of pain

was

awareness.

And

the other part I was going through very, something very personal shortly after I was going through the divorce, my marriage, and all these different things.

And it just felt like one after another.

But I look back, if those things didn't happen, I really think they're all gifts.

Cause when something's fair, you don't respect it.

When something happens to you that you feel is fair, you're just like, oh, I deserve that.

You move on.

You feel justified because you saw it coming.

When something happens to you that feels deeply unfair and you can't fix it,

then you really got to look at everything and realize the role you played in this or maybe this or that or who do you want to be?

So

I'm grateful.

But how does one contend with an unfair world?

And I use the word unfair unfair as well because, you know, we've got investigative researchers here who looked through everything relating to that particular deal.

And then we also looked at what's written on the internet.

And there's this great disparity between what actually happened and what people say happened.

Yeah.

And there's actually, I think there's a documentary out there which goes into it in great detail, which Andrew Schultz was talking about on a podcast, which I saw.

So I looked at that documentary as well.

I mean, look, I'm grateful for a couple of things.

One, my kids were really young when it happened, so they didn't feel it as much.

It was very hard at the time.

It was hard on the marriage, it was hard on our family.

You can also,

yeah, but I also don't know what was being said on the other side, you know, because I never got to have the conversation, you know.

So, I think when people aren't communicating and refusing to communicate, a lot of things can get misconstrued.

And you, you know, I don't want to hold any hatred or like

everyone moves on, you know.

So, yes, I appreciate you saying that.

I appreciate you actually doing the research.

But for me,

I choose to see it as a gift.

I choose to see it as being able to have a perspective that very few people in the world have of knowing what that's like, of feeling that on a global level.

Pain.

Yeah.

And also just...

What does that mean in reality?

It just felt unfair.

It felt like, but so much, but of course, of course it happened to me, right?

Of course, because here I was thinking my value was from all this praise, you know, and I, and everything was me making sure that I was living up to it.

And then this happens and it's unfair and I can't control it.

And of course, the universe was like screaming at me, like God's screaming at me, like, hey, wake up.

You're not in control.

You can't navigate all of this.

You don't get to decide what your legacy is.

And you, you just get to decide who you are on a daily basis and who you choose to see in yourself and how you treat the people that love you and the people you can actually interact with.

Surrender.

But surrender surrender and participate.

You know, that's the big thing for me.

It's more than just surrender.

It's surrender and participate and just enjoy the ride.

That's why I got the tattoo.

You know, it was,

I can't worry about everyone's niece being mad at me.

You know, like, you know, it's what I got to do is show up for my niece, you know, and I got to show up for my friends and my family.

And I wish everyone involved across the board, whether I know them or not, nothing but good wishes.

When I say specifically that pain, people don't, like, think about how many people on earth have experienced such a thing.

And if I could be a fly on the wall that is actually just has CCTV for eyes, and I was watching you at that moment in time,

just for seven days, I got to watch Scooter.

What would I have seen?

Like I said, at that point, I hadn't really done the work.

Okay.

So resistance.

Resistance, trying to navigate it, trying to understand it, trying to

figure out how to fix it.

And then I couldn't, but then I did financially.

Like I couldn't fix the relationship that I didn't have.

But then I was able to figure out, okay, you know what?

We will sell it.

You know,

in a world of streaming, re-records will only help the old catalog as much as they help the new catalog.

Both will get a bump.

I presented that.

I showed, you know, how everyone can be a winner here.

And I was able to sell the catalog.

And

I don't want to go into too much detail, but I offered it.

It's now come out very factually that I did offer it.

There's evidence of that multiple times in that process.

They said no.

I sold it to someone else and I washed my hands of it and moved on.

And I actually sometimes look back at that and I go, the universe was trying to teach me something.

And I navigated out of it.

I found a way out.

So then the universe went, oh man, we tried to try to give you a warning sign.

We try to like,

you're sailing by in the Titanic and we're waving like iceberg.

And then the universe said, Okay, you really didn't pay attention and you still aren't doing the work.

Marriage.

Because that one got me.

That one got me to pay attention.

Losing my kids 50% of the time,

that one changed everything.

And

the world

still couldn't move me.

I was still able to figure out the chessboard.

But my kids and my marriage,

that one rocked me and woke me up.

What's really crazy is when I told you I did this Hoffman process,

I won't tell you the process because you're not supposed to, but I can tell you at the end of the week,

Can you give it context for anyone that doesn't know the Hoffman process is this one week, no phone, no email,

intense work on your early childhood to to understand why you are the way you are and give you tools to go out in the world and understand yourself.

The reason I went,

October of 2020, my marriage was falling apart.

The whole world thought I was crushing it.

Ariana's crushing it.

This, Justin's, all these people like were on fire.

And

I had a suicidal thought for 20 minutes.

Where I was like, if my marriage is going to fall apart, I'm not going to be with my kids all the time.

I can't control this.

I'm not going to be this perfect image that I've presented to the world.

And if I can't be this perfect image, I don't want to be here.

And it went to a very dark place.

And after 20 minutes, I said, what the hell was that?

That's not me.

I would never leave my kids.

I don't leave anybody.

Like, what was that?

And the next morning, I was on the set of a video shoot.

And a friend of mine called and he said, you know, what's going on with you?

And I told him.

I told him about that night before.

He called me back with another friend and they said, you need to go to Hoffman.

We did it.

It changed our life.

They told me that they could get me in in two weeks because there was a cancellation.

October 24th.

And that was the release of Ariana Grande's Dangerous Woman album.

It was the busiest week of the year for me in work.

And I started laughing in the parking lot of this video shoot.

And she goes, do you want us to pick another week?

I said, no.

I said, I've spent my whole life.

pursuing these things, doing this, choosing this, choosing scooter, choosing that life, choosing the clients.

And I'm the top of my game, yet I wanted to kill myself last night.

Something has got to change.

And I chose to go to that place instead.

And the hard stuff actually came after I got out of Hoffman.

You know, I ended up going through a divorce.

I ended up going through all this different stuff, but I never was depressed again.

And the most interesting thing that happened on the other side of it is

Six years ago, I was biggest manager and the perfect marriage and

everything I touched turned to gold and there was no negative press about me ever.

Six years later, I'm divorced.

I don't manage anymore.

I've had negative press and I couldn't be happier.

It doesn't mean it doesn't ebb and flow,

but I get to be the dad I've always wanted to be and the friend I've always wanted to be.

And it doesn't mean that things aren't going to go, you know, be hard and I'm going to suffer more things and go through them, but I'm in a place that I understand amor fati.

It's like everything is a gift and I'm being super long-winded, but that's the story.

That phone call the day after that to your friends,

did you tell him the truth on the phone?

The full truth?

Yeah, I did.

And what was that full truth?

That I had the night before thought about,

you know, just shutting it all off.

It wasn't even the idea that I wanted to die.

I just wanted the noise in my head to go away.

I wanted the failure, the disappointment, the fear.

I was going to fail in my mind.

I couldn't control it.

I'd always been able to navigate out of failure and head towards success, a pit stop.

But I had left what I found at Hoffman, I told you, is my name, the inner child, the Scott.

I had built this mask so big.

I wanted to feel like me again.

And I didn't realize how far away I'd gotten from that, building up this armor, building up the mask.

You know,

I want to tell you something funny.

I usually don't say names in these things, but I want to give him credit because I think it's hilarious.

Michael Rapino is the CEO of Live Nation.

He's an amazing guy.

I think he's one of the most impressive people in the entire entertainment industry because he wields so much power, but he also empowers other people so well.

And after

the divorce, after,

you know, the big machine and stuff that happened with that, all these different things.

And you know what Michael told me?

He goes, I like you a lot more now because you seem human.

You know, and he told me, he was like, before he's like, nobody goes on, like, it's like this.

He's like, you know, I just didn't, he goes, he goes, I didn't think you were real.

I thought you were full of shit.

And he was right.

I mean, I didn't know myself because I had no reason to do so.

And it wasn't until I had some real hardships and real pain and real scares and real rock bottom moments that I started looking at myself and started figuring out who I was.

And then everyone got to know me.

My best friends since I was 11 years old, they're the people I hang out with the most.

Two of them live out here, Mike and Vuk.

And I hang out with them all the time.

And people who know me, they know these guys because they've been my friends since we were 12 years old, 11 years old.

And

Mike and Vuke told me at 40 years old when I was doing this work, we've known you since you were 11, and this is the most we've ever known you.

And I'm not surprised or insulted because they say you haven't changed, but we didn't know you because I was always, even to them, presenting

what I thought they needed me to be perfect.

And then I broke.

And then I said, this happened and this happened.

When I was a kid, this was going on and this was, and they were like,

we love you.

And I really became one of the boys for the first time in my life.

I became one of the boys because the boys became vulnerable.

I thought it was the opposite my whole life.

I thought you had to be cool.

You had to be tough to be one of the boys.

And it was funny because they didn't, all the achievements

not only did they not give a shit about, I probably lost touch with them more so.

And when everything fell apart, they were the ones that were there, the ones who knew Scott, the ones who didn't care about any of it.

And I've never really even said that out loud to this extent until right now.

And I'm actually glad I get to say on here both their names because they

damn

They picked me up

in a really, really tough time.

And a time where I couldn't even look at my own brothers because I was too ashamed.

And

I never felt like one of the guys.

Like I felt like I had those friends, but I just couldn't let them all the way in because I felt, well, maybe I'm smarter.

Maybe I'm this.

Maybe I need to be perfect.

And it wasn't till

I really hit rock bottom that I realized that they always had my back.

And I made all these stupid ideas in my head and

they were

they were there and they weren't there for scooter.

You know, they were there for Scott.

And I see you getting a little emotional too

because you probably have the same type of friends.

So I'll, I did it so you can do it too.

Or what are their names?

Michael, Ash,

Dom.

Anthony, and Oliver.

But they are, they're the constant.

They're there through everything.

The up, the down, the up, the down, the up, the down again.

And they don't give a crap about any of this.

In fact, if your friends are like mine, they're brutal about this stuff.

My friends rip me.

Like,

if people saw the text messages between us, they would think we hate each other.

But we love each other deeply.

And the best part about the messages is the random, hey guys, I love you.

You know, it happens all the time.

I get a phone call.

I'll pick up.

I'll just see Paul.

Paul.

Hey, brother, I love you.

Just want to call and tell you.

I'm really grateful.

Like, I have so many different people I can name.

And what was really interesting is

before all this happened, I don't know if you can relate to this, but

I spent so much time

trying to impress people who didn't want to love me.

instead of realizing how many people already did.

I was just thinking, what a great shame it is that the amount of units of energy we exert on, as you said, like the external, like the audience.

Whereas when you ask me who would be there for me, irrespective of what was going on in my life, I can name them.

And then I ask myself, how much energy and effort am I putting into these relationships?

And I'm embarrassed about how much energy and effort I'm putting into these relationships.

I'm like embarrassed by it.

I'm like, that makes me a scumbag.

And they'll still be there.

Yeah, they don't care.

And that's the best part because when you do start putting energy, it becomes even more fun.

It's really, it's really,

it's really difficult for me to understand.

And this is my naivety.

The part that's difficult for me to understand is

family meant so much to you.

Don't you have a tattoo that says family?

First one.

I was 18.

You got a tattoo at 18 about your future family.

Correct.

So family has been this dream and ambition of yours.

So it's surprising to me, as someone who is naive in this context,

that it had to be threatened for you to care enough to.

No, I cared.

I just

childhood trauma is a hell of a thing, man.

It's

and we all have it.

That was the thing.

The reason I didn't think I had it is because I had friends who, you know, had parents who are alcoholics.

I had friends who had parents who this.

So I always thought, you know, both my parents are here.

They love me.

Like the stuff I dealt with, that's not real.

You know, I come from an immigrant family.

Like, we can deal with this.

Like, we're strong.

You know, that's not real.

And what I realized is

everyone has trauma.

That's the human experience.

And the faster we value our own trauma and stop trying to downplay it because we don't think it equals someone else's, the more we can work on ourselves.

Because all you get to do is work on yourself.

You don't get to work on the other person.

Like, you can really only work on yourself.

You can help the other person, but the work, that's only here.

And

I think that I saw my life as perfect.

So why change anything?

And that's why you're smiling.

So stop calling me out.

Yeah, you're smiling.

It's so true because you see your life as perfect.

Everything's going fine.

She's screaming at you and trying to, and you can't see it.

She's not screaming just yet.

She is

increasingly expressing to me, yeah, in her own way, that there is

an issue.

And I, I'm going to be completely honest, because this is why I started this podcast, was the diary of a CEO.

So this is what would be written in my diary.

the alarm is getting louder and i'm still in a a state where i think i've got a lot of time before the alarm is so loud that i can't fix it i got you i see you buddy trust me i see and here's the funny thing i don't want to go into details i have a lot of respect we're family forever

it goes both ways it's not like there was one thing happen it both people have to play a role in where we got to you know things happen on you know both ways However, Chris Rock says something really special.

He goes, relationships are actually quite easy.

You know, you ever try to pick up a couch with two people?

No problem.

Pick up a couch by yourself.

And that was the thing.

We both went to pick up the couch at different times.

And

we were made to be amazing co-parents.

We were made to come into each other's lives to help each other be better in different ways through the heartbreak of our relationship ending.

And

we were brought together to make three incredible souls.

And now whoever gets me next is in for a treat

because I'm a better version than I was before.

And in hindsight, what are those warning signs for someone like me who might be

the choices that you make that you justify?

Oh, I got to do this because, you know, if I don't do this one, it could all fall apart.

No, it isn't.

Oh, God.

You know, if I don't, if I don't stop everything I'm doing and choose this, it could all fall apart.

Or, yeah, okay, you're saying this to me, but you don't really mean it because you don't understand what I'm going through because I'm in this grind.

I'm in this hunt that no one can understand because only I can achieve this.

You're smiling because you literally.

Can I ask you some questions?

Sure.

How long have you guys been together?

Six years now.

And why are you smiling so big?

Because how many times have you made those choices?

I just justified bullshit.

And there's always going to, i know logically there's always gonna be something else there's always there's never gonna be a perfect time so i know logically that i have to pick imperfect moments and do you guys want kids yes

do you use that as an excuse well the kids aren't here yet so i need to grind now

i've i've i've certainly thought it as a way to justify to myself to self-rationalize i don't think i've ever said that to her but i have said to her i've said internally yeah i've said it to myself internally i've said to myself, like, this season of life, up until I'm 35, I'm going to go for it.

And then,

you know, she's looking at you thinking, I want to be able to trust you to have children.

Yeah.

Listen,

a long time ago, someone really smart ran this little exercise with me.

And I wish I would have paid better attention to it, other than just thinking it was a cool saying to like use in the office.

He said,

if I told you someone you loved was sick and you had a billion dollars, how much of it would you spend to save them?

A billion dollars, yeah.

Correct.

And he says,

is your loved one, is she healthy?

Does she love you?

Is she here with you right now?

Everything you're working to achieve

with that perspective, you already have it.

Yeah.

And they said it to me and it sounds great.

And I'm seeing it on your face.

You're a smart guy.

It's logical.

You're like, yeah, I get it.

And then you're going to go repeat the same stuff because that's what we do.

And what I realized when I went and did this work was it's not going to change between you and her or me and my ex.

You know, that wasn't what it was about.

It was actually something deeper, deeper underlying that had nothing to do with the current relationship.

It had to do with that lie that I'm not enough, that this person actually doesn't really love me unless I do this.

Were you happy before the marriage fell apart?

I think so, but I also didn't know who I was.

I think I was happy because everyone in the world told me I was doing great and I thought that that was enough.

And I feel like looking back now, I feel like I was asleep at the wheel.

I feel like I didn't know myself at the time.

But I had so much success at such a young age.

So everyone was telling me I was doing great.

So I just chose to believe them.

And it wasn't until I, you know, the foundation broke and there was nothing underneath it that I was like, oh shit, I'm actually not happy.

And I never knew.

And it's like, I wouldn't go back to that before all the crap in a million years.

I want to stay here because now I'm like, I'm awake.

What is the practical advice you would give me?

Because you can identify where I'm at in your own story.

So what is the practical advice you'd give me now to avoid myself getting into a situation where one day I have regret because I didn't listen to the alarm?

A couple of things.

Okay.

Number one, turn the cameras off and go do some self-work.

Stop being nudged.

Just go do it.

Stop being, with all due respect, a pussy.

Okay.

I appreciate it.

And

I mean, it's just, there's no good time in the future.

There's no when I get to 35, when I get to 36, when I get to 40, there's when I achieve this.

Go do it.

One to two weeks out of the year will not kill you.

It will only make you stronger.

Because what you're dealing with, with what you're telling me, has nothing to do with the two of you.

It has more to do with your stuff.

And she has to go do her stuff.

You have to see if she wants to go do the same thing and work on herself in the same way because it's a constant thing.

The second thing is go on vacations together.

And when the kids come, go on vacation.

That's something I think we forgot to do.

We did the vacations with the kids.

We did the vacations with friends, but we didn't do vacations together because we were so, we had three kids in five years.

And I think,

you know, that's something I think about.

But then also just trust that, like, if it's supposed to be, it's supposed to be.

My journey was supposed to be exactly the way it was.

Even when I found out things and she found out like

about ourselves, it was exactly when we were supposed to find out.

So I just, I'm a firm believer, you know, you're here to learn exactly what you're supposed to learn.

Have you read Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss?

Easy, quick read on a weekend, you'll enjoy the hell of it.

Brian Weiss was the head of psychology at University of Miami.

And he was recommended a nurse from the hospital.

Would he see her?

And he saw her and she had deep trauma and couldn't figure it out.

So he goes, we're going to do hypnotic regression.

She does hypnotic regression.

She goes into something from like age zero to six that she couldn't remember, very traumatizing.

He's like, oh, this will make a difference.

She comes back the next week.

It's even worse.

That makes no sense to him.

He does hypnotic regression again, and she goes into a past life.

He calls bullshit.

He does another hypnotic regression.

She goes into another past life.

And he realizes her educational background could not know the things that she's saying that he's looking up.

So what happens is he just writes a book about this patient and how she changed his entire practice.

And what was really interesting about it is

it made me look at death differently and life differently.

We're here to learn.

And then if we don't figure it out, we leave and we come back again.

And if we learn that one, we come back and this transitions.

But it's never, it's not ending.

It's all about coming here to learn.

But I feel like I have so much to learn.

And at least I know that.

And I'm such a mess and I'm figuring it out every single day that if Brian Weiss's book is right, I'm not going anywhere for a while.

But it's a really amazing way to look.

And what was interesting is when I told my mom had read it, when I told my dad, he actually goes, well, you know, we're Jews, we don't believe in reincarnation.

And when I started studying Kabbalah, I realized that actually Kabbalah teaches reincarnation almost the exact same way this woman was describing it, which means Judeo-Christians

actually believe in reincarnation, but many of us don't know it.

And it was just a really interesting way of looking at life.

Do you believe in reincarnation?

I do.

You do?

Yeah, I do, especially if reading this book and then studying Kabbalah.

And I started studying Kabbalah about a year ago.

I like some of the principles I've learned from Kabbalah about this idea of being a custodian,

that

nothing is actually ours, but we're custodians.

You know, that God, Hashem, is what they say in Kabbalah.

But this idea that we're supposed to give 10% to charity, but no more than 20.

You know, because the belief is if God is giving you this, he's asking you to hold on to it because he has a purpose for you.

But if he chooses to take it away, you should be just as joyful because it was never yours in the first place.

You are a custodian.

And I think that's a really great way of looking at materials, looking at life and understanding, like I said, participating.

And I'm getting to play in this game.

But you have your moments, right?

Yeah.

Still today, because you're someone that's done so much work.

So it's interesting speaking to you because you're someone that I would seek advice on in everything in my life, but

you still have work left to do.

You said I still have things left to learn.

Well, I think I have a lot of things left to learn.

I find myself

sometimes needing to defend myself, sometimes not defending myself when I should.

I feel like sometimes...

I feel misunderstood or not loved.

And I, you know, have that moment.

And then even on the other side, there's times where you feel like, oh, you're doing all this work and people see you as someone someone who's done the work.

And then you don't want to be seen as someone who's failing at that work.

And the truth is, that's all part of the process.

It's like a constant surrender to your, your human experience.

The work for me is

life is going to throw the things you need at you.

So like I said, tomorrow something could happen that, you know, I'm being ridiculed again and I'm having to learn again, you know, or a praise could come and I'm having to learn how to handle that.

Like I don't know what tomorrow is going to bring.

It's always a new experiment.

But it's almost as if, like, when you're doing this work, people call it, it's as you're swimming in the waves, and now you have the skills to get through the wave.

The waves still come, but you're just going through them differently.

Do you wish they wouldn't come?

Hell no, that's life.

You know,

I asked,

you said I'd accompany Ithaca.

Do you know where it comes from?

No.

So some people think they're like, oh, Ithaca, New York.

No.

It comes from a poem by Caffafi.

I asked David Geffen

years ago

with his extraordinary life and career, when did he feel like it was like enough?

I was 30 years old when I met him and I asked him that question the first meal we ever had.

And he looked at me and he said, that's not how life works.

It goes up and down this hat.

And he goes, I want you to read a poem.

And he gives me Ithaca by Caffafe.

And

I named my holding company.

I had SB projects, but then when I did the holding company and started doing other things too, I named it after this poem because I was so moved by it.

And the concept of the poem of Ithaca is: you're on the way to the island of Ithaca and the Greek islands.

And along the way, you're going to see so many different things.

And you're going to meet scholars and you're going to, you know, learn wisdom and all these different things.

And when you find Ithaca, finally, if you find her poor, she did not fool you because it was never about the destination,

always about the journey.

And I think right now, now,

if they're, if I get to this end game with you,

like, that's no fun.

Then it's over.

So like, keep the waves coming.

I made the biggest investment I've ever made in a company because of my girlfriend.

I came home one night and my lovely girlfriend was up at 1 a.m.

in the morning, pulling her hair out as she tried to piece together her own online store for her business.

And in that moment, I remembered an email I had had from a guy called John, the founder of Stanstore, our new sponsor and a company I've invested incredibly heavily in.

And Stanstore helps creators to sell digital products, courses, coaching, and memberships all through a simple, customizable link in bio system.

And it handles everything, payments, bookings, emails, community engagement, and even links with Shopify.

And I believe in it so much that I'm going to launch a Stan challenge.

And as part of this challenge, I'm going to give away $100,000 to one of you.

If you want to take part in this challenge, if you want to monetize the knowledge that you have, visit stephenbartlett.stan.store to sign up and you'll also get an extended 30-day free trial of stan store if you use that link your next move could quite frankly change everything

i i told daniel eck that i was interviewing you a couple of uh months ago and he sat me down in his la office and was like i've got to tell you a story about that scooter bronzer i've got to tell you something he said that when he made the forbes under 30 list when he was a young man in i think stockholm sweden he said he randomly got a phone call out of the blue from you and you had decided to call everybody on the forbes 30 under 30

oh the billboard just billboard 30 under 30.

oh i thought it was forbes and you decided to call all every single person on the list just to introduce yourself yeah i when i heard that i thought

wow

you know wanna know why why

Because every single time I met someone very accomplished and successful and they wanted to help me.

They'd say, well, who are you trying to reach?

And they'd say, oh my gosh, I've known them for 20 years, 30 years.

And they would pick up the phone call and their power was in a relationship that was expansive and long.

And they knew each other from the beginning, not that they had met some powerful club at the end.

And what I realized was

The real power is in community.

And I wanted to know my peers.

I wanted to grow with them, that we didn't need to go and find someone who already had it.

We needed to support each other.

How old were you when you did that?

27.

So you were 27 and you called everybody on that list.

Yeah.

Such a cool thing to do.

So many people are now going to go do that.

But it's such a cool thing to do.

By the way,

I am an early investor in Spotify because of that phone call.

He was just, I'm sure he told you this, he was just a company in Sweden.

He didn't tell me this part.

Oh, yeah, he was just, when I called him, he was, you know, they were talking about this new thing, Spotify, but it was in Sweden.

And

we met,

and I tried to get in right away after we met because I was like, what is this?

And he didn't let me in at first.

And then, you know, I went and met Shaq.

Oh, Shaq.

Yeah, good friend of mine.

I met Shaq in London.

We walked around and then D.A.

Wallach was like advising them.

And

I ended up getting to be a significant, you know, investor at that point in my life in this

new young company, Spotify.

And I have not sold a share in probably 18 years.

You haven't sold a share?

No, I'm a firm believer in that company and I'm a firm believer in Daniel.

And I, and I think,

listen, I hear all the time where people are like, oh, look, you know,

this is so unfair.

Daniel Eck, with his bravery and his foresight, saved the music industry.

He gave value to our industry again.

He found a way to make us go from going in one direction to the most successful we've ever been.

And I don't think people realize that and give him enough credit for what he did.

People don't understand the machine.

They just think, well, record sales went away and now we've got this streaming fee and it's lower.

So what is the context we're missing there?

What did that company do?

It gave value to our business.

It gave, you know, multiples on publishing and masters that we had never seen before because now everyone's music can be heard and heard for a long time.

You know, at the time Daniel came along, all I would hear going in the music business is, man, you missed the 80s and 90s.

Sorry, kid.

You know, this business is going down.

You know, and Daniel with streaming made it so that, you know, these major labels and these independent companies and, you know, these artists are able to do things they've never been able to do before.

One, on bringing that amount of revenue to our business, but two,

also, bringing our global community together.

And

that was Daniel's foresight and his vision.

and his,

I mean, he didn't have any relationships.

He didn't know the major labels.

Crazy, isn't it?

You know,

he saved the music industry.

And I think now that, you know, he's the biggest thing in the music industry, it's easy to point at him as like the big bad oh.

And yes, he's always trying to innovate and change, but he has brought more money back into our industry than we ever thought would be there.

And

I'm grateful to him.

And I think he saved a lot of careers.

I also would like to add a couple of words to that, just to say what an unbelievably humble, smart, kind human being he is.

It's an impossible story to do what he did out of Stockholm as well, not Silicon Valley, and for it to be the dominant platform and still to be the best platform, even as a podcaster.

It's my favorite platform by far.

And they've just decided in the last two to three months, which is actually while I was over at Spotify's office to meet him, that they're going to start paying podcasters revenue that we've never been paid before.

They're going to cut us in on the Spotify membership fee, which means that, again, it's going to fuel this whole industry.

Apple aren't paying us anything, but Spotify have decided to pay podcasters who upload on video, which is going to mean that people can quit their jobs.

And for me, Daniel's a very innovative guy, and

I remember him as the kid I called on that list and who, when he came to the United States a couple of weeks later, played me in ping pong eight times.

You know, and that's how we became friends.

And

he's incredibly humble, incredibly smart, incredibly hardworking.

And

he has changed a lot of people's lives.

What's next for you, Scooter?

Shall I call you Scott or Scooter?

Either one.

I'm proud of both now.

Okay.

I'm going to call you Scott.

Okay.

What is next in If We Sit Here in 10 Years Time?

Do you have any idea what that chapter looked like?

Or do you have any idea what would have had to have happened for you to consider it a success?

The only thing I want to make sure is that,

you know, I stay, I want to be the father to my children, right?

That I, that I want to be, that I continue, that that's the thing, like that's the one consistent thing.

I want to make sure that I put them first, that they are my priority because I get them until they're 18 and then, you know, they're going to be like, dad, we're out.

And I'm still going to obviously look forward to the next chapter, but

I got 10 years of that.

I think something I'm excited about in the next chapter is like, what does love look like?

What does relationship look like?

And then I'm excited to be a rookie again and try new things and get into industries.

Because I said to you before we started taping,

you know, you asked me about AI.

And I said, I feel like we're in the beginning of an industrial revolution and a cold war at the same time.

But there's just so much opportunity because things are shifting and things are moving and we're becoming a more productive society.

Because like you, I've gotten to see some of the things that are coming.

on the technology side and it's mind-blowing what's coming and it's mind-blowing what's already happening that people, a lot of people don't even realize.

And the innovation is going to get faster and faster and faster.

And I think the one thing that will never go away is humans want for taste, for human error, for experiences.

If anything, during COVID, we saw national parks explode.

People had time for experiences.

I think AI is going to make us more productive.

We're going to have more time for experiences.

And I'm excited for that.

And I'm excited for what that world looks like.

And I think there will always be growing pains when there's change.

But on the other side, societies have always been measured by productivity, not by wealth.

How productive is that society?

We're about to be the most productive society we've ever been.

It is quite scary, but it's also extremely exciting.

And I think both responses are quite natural.

I think excitement's often present where fear is.

And

the choice that I'm personally just making is to lean in.

and to mess around and to learn.

When we spoke earlier, you were telling me that you'll stay up all night long, like learning how to code with AI and you're trying to understand all the AI tools that are in front of us so you can kind of be first because you feel like, you know, you weren't at the right place in the dot-com boom and you want to make sure that you're in there.

Can I ask you what you consider success?

Is it you don't want to miss out?

Like, what is the success?

Why do you feel like you want to not miss out?

What do you want to be first to?

If you achieve something on the other side because you actually master AI and you are one of the first, what are you hoping happens?

So, I think I'm trying, I'm running from a fear.

And the fear is

I'm 32 now, and I've, I've been playing at the frontier my whole life.

So, like, my first business was in social media.

I rode that wave into Shore, it changed my life.

I was relevant.

It made me feel great.

I built on that frontier as the wave came into Shore.

Then the blockchain came around, started a company called ThirdWeb, valued $160 million.

Amazing.

I was on the frontier.

Then this AI thing comes along, and it feels like the wave is coming in and i'm i've got a surfboard and i've got to decide whether i want to take this wave or not and if i i feel like if i miss the wave if i'm not involved if i'm not building there then

it's quite existential it's like

then

i don't know what can happen and i don't like that i don't like the unknown and it goes back to many things we talked about but uh you ever swim in the ocean

Yes, I'm not the best swimmer in the world.

I'm saying, but you'll go in the ocean?

Yeah.

Not just on the beach.

Will you go out in the ocean and get in the water?

If I have my floating vest on, because I can't swim.

Which is interesting, though.

You'll get in, though.

Yeah, 100%.

I have a top I wear to go in the water.

No, I understand that, but I find that interesting only because the ocean is a place where you have absolutely no control.

You know, it's the ocean can do what it wants.

You don't know what's in there.

You know, a lot of people, like I see, when they want control, I realized there were years that I kind of just didn't swim in the ocean.

I'd swim on the beach, but I didn't really want to go into the ocean because I didn't have control out there.

You know, I didn't know what was in there.

I didn't know what could get me at it.

Like I couldn't see it coming.

I couldn't control the outcome.

And you talk a lot about this, like the need for control that makes you feel uncomfortable.

But you are also a very big risk taker.

I mean, you're 32 years old.

You've achieved all this.

You're pushing yourself to find out more.

You're defying all the odds.

You got the kid from home who's still talking crap because, you know, look at everything you're doing.

And I guess I'm intrigued because

one you don't give yourself the credit of how much you go into the unknown it's almost like you do it out of fear and necessity but i'm really pushing you on like what does success look like for you because you're on the surfboard you keep serving i'm trying to figure out like where where is what is success to you is it

you're you're 90 years old And you're looking back at your life.

What are the things that you could not live without?

You'd be disappointed if they weren't

I imagine it's going to be my kids.

I imagine it's going to be my relationship with my partner.

I think that's the going back to this.

Sounds like a crazy thing to say, but if there was a button on the table, then I had to press it to kill myself, or my partner, I'd press to kill myself.

And that was a really clarifying thought for me because I was like, I'd literally take my, I'd give my life to save this person, this other human being, my nieces, my brother,

my fam,

my family.

I'm confused because you haven't named all the achievements of AI

you haven't named you know all the things that you think you need to do

you know the um Ithaca yeah part of what I think makes the journey exciting is being like slightly terrified and having something that consumes you and that challenges you and that scares you a little bit and and building and experimenting and leaning in like when I was a kid in my bedroom, I'd turn my bunk bed into a business.

It'd be a salon one week.

And then the next week, I'd be dismantling my brother's radio and trying to sell the parts.

And like, so I've always been extremely curious, extremely experimental.

I've always tried to build things.

So I think that's my fun.

But I also, these days, the more I've done this podcast, the more I've learned to like question myself, question what I'm saying.

Listen, I think you're an incredibly intriguing guy.

That's why I wanted to meet you.

And I love how much you push yourself and you question things.

But I find it very interesting that when I ask you about your 90s and when you look back,

you name things that are very attainable to you because you found someone that loves you and you love them.

Yeah.

And then when we're talking throughout this entire conversation,

it seems that when you actually open about your personal life, you spend a lot of your time avoiding that thing

and focusing on all these others that make you feel worthy to experience that thing.

And I guess like what I'm just trying to say to you, for as smart a guy as you are,

this is coming from someone who literally suffered from the same thing.

The thing that you want the most at 90, you got

the building in your room and the building with AI should be just fun.

It shouldn't be terrifying anymore.

It should be fun because the terrifying thing is turning 90 and not having the thing you really want.

That's when I woke up.

And

so what does that mean for me?

And what, what, for anyone that can resonate with that, what does that mean that they should do?

I know you said, like, turn off the cameras and, but can you do both?

I don't know.

I think everyone's journey is different.

I think everyone experiences things in a different way.

Some people are able to, like you talked about with addiction, some people are able to say, just stop.

And other people can't.

And other people have to go through a different process to get there.

So I'm trying to understand the balance, though.

Like, how do I know if I've got the balance right in that room?

I hate that word because someone I really admired said to me, harmonize, you know?

So how do I know if you're like, Jeff Bezos was the one who said it?

He was like, don't balance things, harmonize.

Why weigh things that you love against each other?

You love building in your room.

You love learning things and building things.

You love that.

You love your partner and you want to build a family with her one day.

It's not about balance.

It's about putting them together.

Bring her into every aspect of it.

Bring her into the fears that you have with this.

Bring her into, you know, that's what I, you know, I didn't know that.

You know, it's, it's bring every aspect of your life together and share and let them be with the up and downs and you do the up and downs and kind of go across the board.

And then also, like I said, do the work to find out why you ask all these questions, but still, with all the nudging that's happened, do the work to find out why you're so afraid to actually turn off the camera and just do it.

So are you saying then to get out of like competition and get into that curiosity that you described?

You said about these two states that you can invest in.

I mean, look, I think being competitive is always a beautiful thing if used in the right way.

I love that.

But I will say to you, when you talk to me about where the AI staying up at night, where building your company came from, it was a kid building in his room.

That kid wasn't competing with anyone.

He was having fun in his room.

He was building.

That's when you're at your best.

It's when you're actually just building for the joy of building.

And I think along the way, based on our fears, based on the I'm not enough, based on all these different things, we start to take that thing that brought us joy and we start to think: if I don't crush it now that people are watching me do it, I'm not good at it.

And

you're asking me for like this question is almost if it's like advice.

I'm trying to figure it out the same time you are.

Yeah.

You know, so I guess I'll pose it back to you.

You've done research.

You know a little bit about my life.

What would you say to me?

What should I be doing next?

What do you think I should be nudged to do?

I think

what you've done today is some of the most valuable work that you can do.

And what I say today, I mean is as you've sat here and the vulnerability that you've expressed, the honesty, the nuance to certain points, I think think it's one of the most important things you can do because many of us don't get to climb up to the top of the mountaintop and see what's up there.

And you're choosing to go up there and then shout back down about your marriage, about business, about your mental health and everything in between, about mistakes you've made, injustices, all these kinds of things.

Probably one of the most powerful things you can do because as you've identified, there'll be a couple of kids, maybe me being one, who will...

not have to be burnt, not have to hit the rock bottom to learn the lesson.

And there's actually very few people.

I do this for a living, there's very few people that have both that experience and the ability to articulate it in a way that is resonant.

In terms of this next season of your life,

I mean, you're doing so much well.

It was so nice actually hearing you on the phone to your kids yesterday when they came over and it was like, dad, I want a pencil or whatever he was saying.

And you were like, Stephen, you said to me, I've got to, you hung up the phone and you addressed your kid, you call me back in 10 seconds.

And I thought there was something really special and telling that you were willing to end a phone call with someone and put put the phone away and immediately be present with your child to have a conversation with him, to have a conversation, then call me back straight away.

Most people don't do that.

So I thought, okay, he's really, this really means a lot to him in this season.

You know, when, when you just said to me what I did here today,

I smiled because I was being really honest with myself and I really appreciated you saying that.

But I also smiled because I was being honest with myself of how funny it is that when I leave here,

all I've been doing lately when I'm away from my kids is thinking of what do I build next

so I can show my value.

I'm going back to that old habit because I'm excited to build something else.

But when I'm being really deep, honest with myself, really going deep, it comes from this place of,

well, if I can do it again, then I'll show him.

This time will be the one that I'm happy about.

This time will like, it's that same old thing that comes every single time.

And I still want to build something because I get joy out of that.

But while I'm giving you this advice, when you said that to me, I went, oh, man,

he's right.

This is the most valuable thing I could probably do.

But the reason I don't do it is because deep down, I feel not worthy of it.

I feel like,

who am I to tell anybody anything?

You know, all of us, we feel like a fraud when we're giving any kind of advice.

And that creeps up in me.

And I, I, get this very, from being very vulnerable, it gets this place of, I don't even want to say, oh, thank you for saying that at first, because I'm like, well, if someone's watching, they'll be like, this arrogant guy.

You get all the voices coming back in your head.

But the truth is,

I want to go and build something next.

I want to fall in love again.

I want to be present for my children.

And I want to be someone who can give advice from a place of wisdom and be proud that I give it, but also receive it because I've learned just as much talking to you.

And what I will tell you is you are way ahead of the game at 32 compared to where I was.

Thank you.

And I had a lot of success at 32, but I wasn't asking these questions and I wasn't pushing myself the way you did.

And I think it is an incredibly cool thing that this is what you get to do as a career because I think you get to help a lot of people.

And don't ever lose sight of the fact that the kid who was building in his room is now building in a lot of other people's rooms.

And it's really impressive.

Thank you.

That means an awful lot coming from you.

I've been extremely excited by this conversation, and I've been telling everybody in our team up because of the conversations we have on the phone.

And I knew that if those conversations are any reflection of the conversation we'd have on my show, it would be really pivotal for me.

And it has been.

It's been the nicest punch in the face.

Me too.

But,

you know,

people have probably wondered why

I

say all this stuff in public, but

what an unbelievable opportunity it is to meet someone like you and get to get to learn from you, genuinely to get to learn from you.

Like, what an unbelievable, really crazy thing from this kid from Botswana to get to meet someone like you and learn from you

to the point that my life has a chance of being better that I've spoken to you.

And then to get to share that with people who I know are struggling with the same shit, who are contending with the same battles.

So that is I make the decision to have these conversations in the way that I do.

And

by the way,

just because I struggle with giving myself credit, I want to say this to you.

The kid from Basswana is teaching me as well, the kid from Cascap.

You know, it's

as much as like that's an incredible thing.

I wanted to come on here because I've listened to your podcast before and I've been one of those listeners who grew and learned from it.

So thank you honestly and continue to give yourself the credit you deserve and continue to ask the questions.

I do want to blow a little bit of smoke up your ass for something else that you've done because I don't think people have

all of this information.

But when I looked at the breadth of philanthropic work that you've done, whether it's the support you gave to Manchester, which is the city that I consider my hometown

after the Ariana attack.

Oh, I'm glad you got a B

on your arm.

But all these other foundations, the list of philanthropic work that you've done is so long that

we'd have to do another podcast just to go through all of these things.

And you don't talk about it publicly.

I don't see you posting about it all the time.

So for me, that's always indicated that you're doing it for the right reasons.

But it's incredible.

So thank you for doing that as well.

And you deserve credit that

you never get for doing all of these things.

And this inspired me as well.

Because sometimes I think as entrepreneurs, we can fall into the trap of thinking we we cut down the forest then donate to the bees you know know my mom is the reason um she as i started building in college she said just promise me you know you'll do sadaka which is charity within our our culture to give back

and

i basically said every aspect of my business will have a give back component and shauna nepp who runs our family foundation like our job is to make the money her job is to help me give it away and um sometimes it's with money sometimes it's with effort but i've met so many incredible heroes unsung heroes in all this work um people people who really dedicate full-time their lives to this.

And I really, I always say, my grandfather before he passed, he said, if your glass is filling with water and you're one of the lucky people in this world that God continues to pour water into your glass, well, you better start pouring it into other people's glasses.

Otherwise, it's just going to spill and make a mess.

And I never forgot that.

Even when you sold Hype, there was this tremendous amount of money that you turned around and gave to all the employees, which a lot of people don't know about.

And you you also gave money to several of your artists.

And from what I've researched, tens of millions were given to your artists as well.

And you could have kept all that money to yourself.

So, when I hear that someone's gone around and given that much money to 264 of their employees and artists that have worked with them, you kind of get a picture of who the guy is.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.

And the question that has been left for you is

now I'm nervous.

Why do people always get nervous?

The question left for you is, if you could do one thing that fear of failure has kept you from doing, what would it be?

And why has it kept you from doing it?

Man, if I could do one thing.

That's a really great question.

You know, at first I was thinking it would be like, oh, say sorry to somebody or this, that, but I feel like I've gotten to do that with people in my life for the last couple of years for things that like I wanted to kind of talk about.

And some things you realize like it's just not the season for that.

You know, it takes two.

And I felt myself, it was almost the fear of saying this out loud.

Write, write a book.

Oh, thank God.

Yeah, I've always,

I think it's, it's, my brother wrote a book, a really great one, called The Promise of a Pencil.

And he was a New York Times bestseller.

And I was always like, that's Adam's thing.

And I've always wanted to write, but I always feel like my mind and, you know, the things I'm working on and myself, all these things, they change like every week.

And I've always felt like deep down, like, oh, yeah, you should write a book, but like, you're really not going to write a great book if you do.

And I think it's always held me back from actually just sitting down and doing it.

I got goosebumps then because as in that silence, for some bizarre reason, I swear on my mother's, I was thinking, I hope he says he's going to write a book.

I swear to you, that's what went through my mind.

I went, I hope he says he's going to to write a book.

That's why I went, thank God.

Well, I didn't say I was going to write it.

I said fear has been holding me back, but maybe, maybe you'll turn off the camera and go in your nudge, and this will be the nudge for me.

Well, we hope you do, Scooter, because

I've been so shocked and blown away by your wisdom and your ability to articulate things.

And the stage of life that you've arrived at is for me, as an objective observer, just the perfect moment.

I appreciate that.

We'll keep doing the work together.

And this is the beginning of a great friendship.

And I'm really honored to be here and really happy for all your success.

Thank you.

The feeling is mutual.

Thank you, brother.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

This has always blown my mind a little bit.

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Let's listen in on a live, unscripted second grade challenger school class.

They're studying Charlotte's web.

How would you describe Charlotte compared to Wilbur?

I would describe Charlotte as self-reliant.

I would rather have a self-reliant friend because then they would want to work for things that they get and they would want to earn it instead of just having it given to them.

Those students are seven.

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