Ian Rogers

26:33I sat on the stand in ASCAP and BMI versus AOL, Yahoo, live C365, etc. once upon a time because the statutory licensing that was set up to serve radio didn't serve internet radio. And so new technologies come along and we have to rewrite the rules. And I think that my point is we probably aren't post -copyright. I'm not sure we want to be that as a society. I feel like - And there'd be no incentive to make anything. Exactly. We would like for creative people to be rewarded for their creations. I think that we can say that that would make us feel good as people and acknowledging that there will always be people who want to steal.

27:13we should make stealing from creative people sufficiently difficult. At the same time, it's constantly evolving, the technologies that we have available, so we're going to need to just lay down some rules of engagement, but also I don't know how that happens. I don't know. What would be your guess? Let's just say make up what could a framework look like? I think this is so unknown because we don't even know what the pricing around AI might look like in the future. What is society willing to pay for pricing? Like, think about how early innings we are in this. There isn't even really an ad supported model around consumer AI tools yet, but there certainly will be.

27:53And it took us a very long time to sort that out in kind of round one of the internet where we went from Google being a search engine to Google being an ad engine basically, right? The internet's ad engine from Facebook being, you know, a way to like meet your peers at your university to it being one of the biggest ad engines on the planet from Instagram being a way that you could put a cute filter on a photo to it being the way that you discover a new product. Those are very long roads and we're just at the beginning of that journey when it comes to AI. In each one of those cases, from the original idea to where it is now, does the ad model ultimately undermine and destroy the original function?

28:41I don't think so necessarily. You know, what people on the internet have pointed to a thousand times, you've heard this in a lot of pitches, but I don't think they're wrong. Whether it's Vogue or Thrasher, the ads are part of the content. I'm not saying we like them. It's not always so obvious what's an ad now though. Yeah, and even that's evolved. I mean, just a couple weeks ago, Instagram presented me with this option to subscribe or see ads that actually stopped my feed. So it's still evolving. At the same time, I have discovered interesting products through Instagram ads. I have to be honest.

29:18And really Google Shopping, which is that bar of images that comes above the search, it's often pretty good. that there is a market incentive, I believe in markets and I believe in free markets. And I think there is a market incentive to have a good balance. So as consumers, we find ads annoying. I actually, I loved what Bob Pittman had to say about this. He was making the comment that in radio advertisements are considered differently than in television. I think it's important for people to understand that it's not just black and white, ads bad. Especially if your choice as a consumer is to see ads or pay.

29:59I think without that we don't have Spotify. And Spotify has to really push people towards pay, push toward pay, of course. But we wouldn't have managed to get on this slippery slope without it. I was in a store in a grocery store in New York, like a small health food store in New York a few weeks ago. And I heard the Spotify ads over there. I'm like, oh my God, do you guys please pay for Spotify? You know, so I don't have to hear advertisements when I'm in your store. But they can have free music. I'm not saying it's legal even, but you get my point. And so I think there is some value to being able to offer content to more people and not have a paywall.

30:33At the same time, I mean, I truly don't understand people who have YouTube without paying. YouTube is such a great resource. It's got, you know, every concert you could ever want to see on it as an example, and it's so easy to get it without ads and on a relative basis, considering what my mom used to pay for cable. And what I can today pay for YouTube is what I mean. So I understand everybody has their challenges. But if my family could afford cable when I was a kid, then people that I'm talking to on this topic right now can afford YouTube. And getting that without ads is such a luxury, like a true luxury in a way.

31:11So I don't know, I don't think it, but at the same time I would never pay for Instagram. I don't value it enough or look at it enough. And you get a benefit from me ads. So that's a win win. Yeah, exactly. And the ads don't kill me. Considering I look at Instagram for a total of 15 minutes per week, advertising is the right model for that. So again, to come back to the original point, I think we're in the early innings of this AI thing. We don't even know what the business model looks like. So how would we decide what we're going to charge for input into that model? That's also really dangerous, right?

31:41Because that means that every media publication that is becoming an input to that brain is effectively giving it for free today. I guess in some level though, I have a belief that as Bob Pittman said, people don't fall in love with robots. They fall in love with humans. I would say don't bet against humans. I think the more time we spend on our phones, the more time we value in person, you know, meetings and relationships, the more time we spend looking at a screen, the more premium being off the screen becomes the more we get content, which is created by robots. That's the more special hearing, Gileon Welsh and David Rawlings do what they do is, just in general.

32:25So I don't think there's anything that AI could do that would make me want to see David Rawlings play his guitar less. I don't think it's possible. I don't think that technology risks that in any way shape or form. And if AI happens to come up with something different than that that you like, that's fine. Yeah. And I think also there probably will be entire classes of things where the creative classes removed from it though, right? If you're listening to FM radio and you hear a jingle, you know, well that jingle be created by a musician in a studio tomorrow. That's hard to imagine, you know, but you could also imagine that if it is it's a premium that it is.

33:06The theme music was created by and the fact that it is will be like, well, that's cool. That makes me feel like this is a more premium channel or podcast or whatever. Someone was telling me there was a, I think it was a musician who wanted to buy the music company in the 60s to. In the 70s and you know who it was. Who? Ted Mugin. To destroy it. To destroy it. To buy it, to kill it. That music is such a great study for people when they're thinking about AI music. I really, I actually think, I'm glad you brought it up because if you are right now complaining about robotic music, then go study music, right?

33:43It used to be, and probably still is, I don't know, you walk into the grocery store, and you're going to hear an instrumental version of Barry Manolo Mandy. Elevator music. Yes, Elevator music. That was dulled on by a company called Music. Now search the words, music and Ted Dujent, and you'll find like maybe one of the best publicity stunts of all time, Ted Dujent offered, I can't remember the number, but a lot of money at the time to buy music, and he was clear, I'm gonna buy it, and I'm gonna destroy it.

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35:50How do you use AI on a daily basis, you personally? I feel like I'm still playing with, you know, with... Do you use it every day? For sure. I use it multiple times every day. And what I'm generally doing is trying to offload some task. Let me give you the professional use case for me. My day is full of meetings. I try to prep every one of those meetings with AI. Who am I talking to? What could I learn about them? What questions should I ask? Then during the meeting, we use the G Suite, the Google All the Google Tools at Ledger. So you've got the note -taking. There's also a really great tool called granola that I've tried, but now I just use the Google one because we're already giving all our data to Google is the best way to say it.

36:33So we just give them that. It's amazing how good it is at taking all of our kind of gibber jabber in the meeting and then pulling out action items, notes. What if you get a sort of an office after every meeting? Yes, exactly. And you can share it with someone else. have to say you want a particular note, it just takes whatever seems important. Yeah. And you can then query it, ask questions about it. It'll provide you the full transcript. And then it's nice for me because if I can take the meeting, but my head of marketing or our head of technology can't, then I can copy paste the summary of the meeting into Slack and they're going to get some kind of ambient knowledge out of it.

37:12So there's that. I think are very practical use cases that even as a professional who's not a coder or anymore, that's super useful. On the coding front, I have done some things where I just wanted to prototype something or something that I want to exist for me. My daughter, my challenge chart, to build a better gallery for our NFT art collection. Just these kind of things. I'm just showing yous. Yeah, and I would have maybe waited for a commercial tool to come available. But it's almost like, oh, I've got a vision for what I want. If I can describe it well enough, then Claude can probably help me build it.

37:45That sort of thing. To be honest, I don't have time to do that much of that. I've done a little bit of it just to see what's possible. I'm saving tool. Yeah, and that's the kind of creation tool. The most used though is for me is just that replacement for Google. The search or smart search, I would say, right? It's like what, had Vigil and I were just doing on this whole road trip has basically been planned in partnership with ChatGPT. We've got this many days, we're going roughly these places, and we even told it we're interested in these things because we're not trying to do tourist things. We're interested in architecture.

38:23We're interested in specific kinds of architecture. We're interested in nature. We're interested in music. And it's amazing what it's found for us. And then you have this kind of smart companion. We want to stay in places that aren't too fancy, but aren't dirty. You're not going to get that out of Google. And the amazing thing to me is, I remember 10 years ago when voice was the future, right? And we know that Siri is laughable. It's not even a good kitchen timer, especially if you have an accent, like the difference between 15 minutes and 50 minutes is something that it's always had a problem with, right?

38:56So that's pretty basic. But with Chachi PT, I can literally mumble into this thing and it will give me something pretty damn good. I can say draw a picture of and then just start talking and it will draw a picture of that thing that is better than you could have imagined in the past if I wanted to know something and I did a Google search. I would get a list of responses and they wouldn't all agree with each other. They would say different things and depending on how low you went, how many pages you would willing to look down, you could see a variety of information. And then from that you would kind of decide, and this one seems like the way I want to go.

39:37Where's now, if you ask an AI, it gives you the answer. And for some reason, everyone I talk to who uses AI treats it like it's the answer. Yeah. Now, it's the same one of 10 answers you might have gotten from Google, but now you just don't see the other nine. I think this is super concerning. I think it's a moving target. For example, Chatship T5 is one of the things they talk about is that it's improved for sickle -fancy. What does that mean? Meaning it doesn't just agree with you as much as it used to. It used to just say like... I'm sorry. Yeah, exactly. A result of that improvement in sickle -fancy is that it takes a point of view more often.

40:25It used to be if you asked it, do you think this or this? And it would end up giving you pros and cons of each. Now it seems a little better, you know, it's early returns on Cheshire PT5, but it seems a little better at picking a point of view and going for it. It doesn't mean it's right. I think that we are, we have to remember that we are very early in this and it's as bad as it will ever be. I think the really amazing thing about AI that I think we wouldn't have predicted. I think AI is far more capable and amazingly intelligent than we would have imagined if we would have described it today 10 years ago.

41:02I also think that it is wrong far more often than we would have imagined if we could have imagined it's as good as it is. So it's amazing how amazing it is and it's also amazing how wrong it can be on just basic, basic stuff. I just tried to build this a mini ramp for skateboarding and my building partner was my planning partner was chat GPT. I wish I hadn't done that. It was wrong on basic math. Yeah. And I should have checked the math harder. Yeah. Because there were things I then stumbled into at build time where I'm like, oh my god. You just had that amount of wood totally wrong. Right? And so we can't really rely.

41:47Now, at the same time, when you talk to enterprise customers, companies about AI adoption, the amazing thing is, is that over the past 12 months, it's gone from less than 50 % to vast majority of companies are investing heavily in AI. Another thing that they say, though, is that their number one concern is accuracy. Also remember, these AI companies are the most well -capitalized companies on the planet at the moment. And if the number one concern of enterprise customers is accuracy, you can bet they're working on solving this problem. So it's easy for us to criticize it today and say it's often flat out incorrect, but I would, I see it as a non -problem because that will be solved.

42:33That's like saying the internet is really hard to use in 1990. Yes, it was, but it is not today. I think it's the same thing. We hear about the AI arms race all the time. Every few weeks, a new version of one of the big six comes out. And the world stops and everybody switches from this one to this one. For most people in the way that they use it are all AI's the same. I think it's still really early. I just think that we're at this moment where it's probably only us nerds that are really paying attention to it. That's why I think ChedGPT are opening out. It's very smart to kind of make. They made a version of ChedGPT now that is going to annoy a lot of the power users, but be much easier to use for the average user.

43:21And I think that's smart, like, directionally makes perfect sense to me. And I think ultimately there probably is, and this is why it is such an arms race. There is a Google -like winner. And I think that's quite scary. They probably is quite winner -take -all. Everyone's got to find their lane. one will be built into more things. Are some of them better than others at certain things? That's definitely been the case. Yes, even within companies, certain models are better at different things. That will continue to be the case. I actually think that's what we can expect. The interesting thing will be when every app we use has the AI built into it.

43:58I think that's the next step that comes. That's what we see 12 months from now. Right now, if I want to build something, I'm going to ask, Claude or ChatGPT how to build it. And then it's going to help me through it. But this is where coding is leading, right? Because coding is already built in. There's a window where I can basically code with the English language. And it's going to change my computer code in the other window. And that would be the same thing in Photoshop and in Figma and in Pro Tools. Well, that's what it will be. There'll be just a chat box in Pro Tools and you'll tell Pro Tools what you want to do.

44:32will AI eventually replace Pro Tools? Now we're talking about user intervals. So, is there anything Pro Tools can do that AI can't do? I mean, in theory, no, right? Because I could tell it, you know, move that selection, you know, kind of one millisecond to the right or the left, which is what you can do when you're dragging away form, right? Just about. We could use microphones individually and show them to me in a grid pattern and where I can move them around. Yeah, and I think really it's just about precision of language, right? With computer code, I could be very precise with my language and say, okay, I've got a variable, I'm going to store this number in that variable, now increment that variable by 10.

45:17That's very precise language. It's not very open to interpretation. Whereas if I say something more generic, I want to build an app that identifies plants. Now I'm using very broad language. Okay, it's open to interpretation. But would it ask you questions back? Like, in that case, I want to identify plants, and it would say, are you going to show me pictures? Are you going to describe the plants? I think that's the best way to think about it, is you think about it as a partner. That's the way they're describing Chatchy PT5. It is an amazing pair programming partner. Pair programming is a thing that two people do together.

45:55They sit together and they program together. And what they're doing is they're saying, You can pair program with Claw and with Judge PxT. You're interacting with it. You're telling it what you want to do. You're doing some of the things yourself. It's checking your work with you. It's making suggestions. When you make a bug or an error and you can't find it, you can say, hey, can you help me find this? And it goes and helps you find it. And I think you can think about that for all kinds of things. If you're editing, maybe you're working on a research paper and you're editing tons of facts and figures.

46:24You can ask it, do you find any inconsistencies and these facts and figures. If you were my professor and you were reading this paper, what questions would you ask me? One thing we haven't talked about is when it comes to AI, people talk about how, oh man, now we have AI, no one's ever gonna learn anything, right? It's exactly what they said about books when they were created. No one's gonna remember anything. It's true. Now that you can, but it's true. I don't know, you can write it down. It's ridiculous. You know, my 11 year old goes to school in a French school. My French is pretty poor. She comes home one day and she got a test tomorrow.

46:59Can you help her with her homework? Well, sure. So what I did was I took pictures of all five pages of homework. They're all written in French. Thankfully, they have very good handwriting in French schools. And I asked, Chad Gbt, I said, okay, first of all, tell me what each of these things says in French and in English. Translate it funny. Like, first of all, read it in. Tell me that you know what it says. Now, translate it to English for me. Yes. Then I said, okay, you know, she has a test tomorrow. Can you please build an interactive study guide for her? Make it fun for her. Yeah. You're asking her questions until she learns the material.

47:34And it did. It kept your attention for like 90 minutes. Wow. And then I said, okay, now give her the quiz as you imagine it will appear in school tomorrow. And it did. And then I said, okay, and please tell me the five questions I should ask her when she wakes up tomorrow morning so that I know she's ready for the test. And it did. And I said, hey, how did you, you know, give me a report and it gave an incredible report. She spent this much time. She went from here to here. Here's what she, what she understood well. Here's what she understood less well. Here are the things you need to work on.

48:09And Sal Khan from Khan Academy talks about this very well. Like, when he started Khan Academy, what he thought was how much of what a tutor brings. Yeah. And we do with technology. But I hazard to guess that instead of chat GPT robbing her of her ability to learn, I bet she knew that material better than any other kid in the class without question. Her stepdad, who doesn't speak French very well, was able to help her study better than I could have even if I was a native French speaker. And she probably enjoyed it more and spent more time doing it than she would have otherwise. Okay, I have a question.

48:47There's a redundant step in the story you told. Why did she have to go to school? And feels like that defeat. You just told me she learned it better than she would learn it in any other way. And now she has to go and show somebody that she learned it. Why? Yeah, I believe me. So, you know, my eldest daughter was homeschooled at this age. My mental daughter went to a progressive school in Los Angeles, which I think does much more than and the kind of industrial education system we were talking about earlier does. And I think that French schools are pretty stuck in the past, unfortunately. I'm told the French schools are the best of all school choices.

49:27They are rigorous, but they are old fashioned.

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51:03When AI hallucinates, does it know it's hallucinating? I think this is something where it does not know today, but it will know tomorrow. And even if you look, there are some metrics that came out about ChatGPT 5 where hallucinations are way down. Like, it's hard to measure, but they try, right? And that's my point is that those hallucinations are, I think, a number one reason that people will not use AI, therefore they will work hard on fixing those things. And it's very doable. You can even do it as a user. I was using, I'm just give a very simple example. I was using it to look for hotels on a road trip, and it would give me a bunch of hotels that are sold out.

51:43It's a month of August, and it's a waste of my time. And you also say, and you can say, go look and please double verify. Paper, that rooms are available. That rooms are available and provide a link. This is also where it will surprise you by how bad it is because it will give you a link on Airbnb, which is just either not a link or the wrong link, can you just like, wow, you actually went to the trouble of making up a link on Airbnb. That's crazy. I'm trying to think, how does it even do that? I can understand giving me a broken link. I can understand giving me no link, but giving me like, you imagined a link?

52:20That's incredible. Well, it knows what a link would look like. Yes, exactly. I'll just put these letters after these letters. Yeah, because that's how many letters there are. Yes. So this will work. Exactly. You gave a great example of using it as a tutor for your child. I think the problem is because AI can do essentially anything. It's hard to know the point of access. How do you use a tool that can do anything? We know how to use a tool that does a thing and we know to grab that tool. But what you did was creative. You did a creative act. Many people might not realize that that's a possibility.

53:04Yeah. And I think that's a big question is, what are all of the possible use cases for a tool that can do anything? It's only as much as we can imagine. That's just one of the things that is the most astounding about this technology. Like I started working with computers when I was eight years old. I'm 53 soon. And I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen anything move this quickly. I've never seen so many people who have been predicting the future for their entire lives so surprised by what technology is capable of. It really does feel unprecedented. And then to the example that you just gave, what's interesting about this CHAT GPT -5 release is that people were sort of ho -hum about it.

53:48And the people that are truly impressed by it are the people who are trying things with it that they never would have tried with AI before. And they're amazed by what it can accomplish. And I think you're right, we don't have the reflex. Our children will, I hope. I also think there's a bit of a disservice that education is doing by kind of making AI this bad thing that's for cheaters. I think that will be the next stigma that's removed. We'll get undermines there. Cartel. Yes. And I think, of course, like the kids will figure it out. It's not something they're taught to use in school. In fact, they're taught if you use it, you're a cheater.

54:29Yeah. Right? Whereas the reality is is that if you're struggling with your calculus homework, that asking an AI to help you learn it, I remember the way that I memorized Shakespeare when I was in high school was to put it to Astrosombies by the misfits. So you could say I'm having a very hard time learning this material. Can you please, you know, make it a Nicki Minaj Drake and Lil Wayne Truffle Butter Part 2? And it would do it. And that could make you learn it and help you find your way there. Kids will figure that out. Kids will develop that reflex. In many ways, the more specific you go, the better it is.

55:12I think that's really also the root of creativity. When you see the thing that you're working on, and you can understand the detail to change, to make it go from not working to working, it involves being really specific in that understanding. When you say it out loud or not. I always say the best employee is somebody who says to you, I understand what it is you're trying to do, and now you don't need to worry about it anymore. That's great. And I remember being at your place in Malibu and watching Kanye work with his engineer, who he clearly worked with for a long time, and I was super impressed by how little Kanye could say.

55:56And then what he was able to do as a result, and you see the teamwork in that. So that is super interesting. And I think also, yeah, that, there, that's why we've been talking about prompting as a skill, right? And when I see it, you look on X, and you see people that are giving you prompting I'm always blown away. I'm like, wow, I'm a long way from that. But it also is one of those things where you're like, okay, well, and it's all out there. It's a really cool idea to research prompts that work for anything, just understanding the language. There are so many people sharing that right now on X, especially prompts for creating images, prompts for creating marketing plans, prompts for, it's all out there.

56:36And then it's how we built the web. You know, the great thing about the web was right -click few source. You know, so in the early days of the web, you wanted to know how someone did something. It also was pretty simple. It wasn't that hard to understand, but you just right -click few source. Oh, okay. Copy paste. You know, put it in your own context. Yeah. Giving me an example of Kanye and his engineer does AI remember all of your past interactions and it starts to know what you like, whereas when you're looking for a hotel in two years, it remembers last time he liked this when I did that. Does it consider that?

57:17It does, and it's incredible, and actually, if you don't worry some, when you think about the negative, potential negative side of that, what I did the other day just to sort of test that notion to see how it goes even kind of across your own conversations is, I just typed in, And give me a summary of what I've learned from you over the past week. And it did. And it was incredible. And it felt a little creepy in this like, yeah, well, of course, these are all the conversations I've had with you over the past week. But it just did an incredible job summarizing them. And you realize that it remembers more than you do, right?

57:51And that is a creepy feeling. You know what I did is I told my chat GPT to whenever possible make a wean reference, the band we, I can't get it to stop. I've now asked it many times to stop making ween references and I can't figure out it was easy to you can't undo a prompt I think you there must be a way I consider this more a bug than a feature But point is is that it will constantly make ween references my it seems like you want to be able to overwrite anything that over time Either your taste changes or you stop liking a feature I think it's going to probably pick up on your taste changes before you do my guess What did you learn about branding when you're at LVMH?

58:38That storytelling plus time equals value. You have these brands that have this incredible heritage. And one of the things I have just enormous respect for is that they're care about craft and quality is real. And that never faltered. Even when fashion was moving toward H &M and et cetera, they said no, no, our lane is over here. that builds heritage and builds value. You know, if you look at the mixed media modeling around the marketing money that they spend and you ask, what of this ad spend returns value? You do magazine ads and outdoor ads and online ads and fashion shows and all these other things.

59:21So which of these things returns value? The answer is all of it. And so therefore branding is this, if you get it right and you have a brand that resonates with an audience, then you can spend money, grow your brand, and make that money back. And I think that the other thing I learned is that that is a very slow process relative to say the adoption of a consumer product like the iPhone or CHET GPT. It can only happen organically or relatively slowly. You know, you can spend to make culture and then have more people enjoy that culture day over day But there isn't a way to just drive that from 10 million people to a hundred million people it happens Because you create things and people love those things and that can only happen Naturally because people genuinely love them and so that's where I feel super fortunate to have watched Breast Partouche build satisfied running over the last 10 years, because it's the first time I'm getting to see someone really do it from scratch.

1:00:27Tell me about that. I don't know anything about the company. Breast is a, he's French. He actually comes from a fashion family. His dad is a textile person. His dad was, you know, one of the people who brought jeans to France once upon a time as a product and a culture. And Breast actually had a jean brand throughout the 2000s called April 77. and then about 10, 11 years ago, he, like a lot of us, he changed his lifestyle and, you know, he grew up with punk rock and skateboarding. He's a drummer and he was in punk bands and had this gene brand, but, you know, as he got closer to 40, you know, he started eating well, he's a vegan, he's straight edge, he's picked up running and just realized that there's a gap in the market here.

1:01:12Like, running isn't cool. He's like, I love running and I think it's really cool. But then when I look at what Nike is doing or what Adidas is doing, it doesn't talk to me at all. And he just said, I'm going to make that brand. It is a luxury brand. It's the stuff's expensive. We go on SatisfiedRunning .com and you'll see $80 t -shirts and $150 running shorts, right? But the textiles are incredible. The quality is great. The storytelling is beautiful. He just released a new video that's about there for shoe and it's a dune buggy in the desert in Utah. It's branding. It's the kind of branding that a luxury brand would do.

1:01:55But it's in this world of running. In 2017, I know the year because the year I ran the Berlin Marathon, I went to the Berlin Marathon with Breeze and he had a little pop -up shop for satisfy the brand as a couple of years old at this point. And these people come in, they're Americans, I start talking to them, like, hey, what are you guys, you run the race? Like, no, where are you from? Oh, we're from Portland. I'm like, oh, you work at Nike? And I'm like, yeah, we do. You guys know about satisfying? They say, you wish, this is the brand we wish we could do, you know, because it's cool. Like this is about, you know, Scott Campbell running in the mountains by himself covered in tattoos.

1:02:34This is not about an Olympic athlete on a track. But also watching that, what I'm impressed by coming from where I come from and the kind of companies that I've worked with is his patients. He waited 10 years to launch a shoe. He waited 10 years to do a women's line. There's a lot of stuff that for me, I would have felt this like desperation, like, like, oh, am I moving too slow? Am I going to lose the market to someone else? Is Adidas's latest campaign looks a lot like satisfy? It's clear they're paying attention. Like, am I going to get swallowed by these guys? But Breeze is just so good at what he does.

1:03:11And he's just got this steady hand. And he's like, now worried. They can't do what I do. That's how you build a brand. You do it when the product is right. You never compromise on quality. And you have to have this, like, there's a magic. you know, and most people don't have it. Would you say efficiency is not part of the picture when it involves luxury branding? I think one of the things that was interesting about working with LVMH and Benado know is that he was willing to sacrifice efficiency for the brands having their own sovereignty. In other words, if he was given a choice, he could make an operational efficiency behind two brands, but it might come out of every corporate merger that you see.

1:03:56Exactly. But it might compromise the brand's identity. Yeah. He would always choose brand identity, go, go, go over that. And also just incredible patience. I think the best example of this was Jonathan Anderson, who now is, since we spoke last time, Jonathan is now taken on Dior. And he built Laueve over a very long period of time from a brand that was a couple hundred million to a brand that's approaching two billion. But you know, it doesn't work right away. It takes investment, it takes patience. I think the other thing that I grew an appreciation for though is having a business model that can do that.

1:04:32As consumers, we like to complain about prices and what the reality is is that if you want the company that you're buying from to be great, well, they have to make money and it has to work. And I think the thing that you and I have experienced in the music business is, in music business, it's not great at artist development because the business model doesn't really serve it. You know, you kind of get like one at bat, and if you're not that artist, then man, I'm sorry, I just can't continue to pour money into this. And it's not because it's just, I don't have an infinite amount of money. I think that a lot of times they want to think it's like the man and the man is keeping him down.

1:05:07And I think the nice thing for me was seeing the luxury business and going, oh wow, when the business model affords it, you can invest in creativity. And on some level, we should endeavor to have a business model that has enough money in the system to allow us to invest in creativity. I wish we had more of that in the music business so that we could do what Warner Brothers did in the 70s where they said, hey, Rikotr, we know that album wasn't successful, but why don't you make another one? Let's see how it goes. If you were to take over the Beatles business going forward, How would you think about that?

1:05:51I think about deaf punk. When deaf punk broke up, I thought, wow, that's a missed opportunity. Because when I look at the LVMage brands, I think, well, Christian, do your past away a long time ago, Louis Vuitton passed away a long time ago, yet these brands are more vibrant than ever. And they're not just referencing their past. They're bringing in new creative people, and they're continuing to create, but in a way that is actually quite respectful to the original vision. And there is something great about this model where you have a brand and then you have a designer, kind of like the New York Times, you have a mast head and you have an editor in chief.

1:06:28And that gives you some flexibility because John Galliano can come in and have years of doing just incredible work and then he can kind of go off the reservation and they have to excuse him and bring in someone else. And that's okay, like these two things can coexist. And I feel like there's something missing in music where we haven't allowed that to happen. Deaf punk could have said, look, we don't want to do this. So what if? What if we found the next couple of guys? You know, we know people. Let's say that on our last record, yes, it was us. It was also Pharrell and Nile Rogers. And I just think it would be interesting for someone to do.

1:07:07In the case of the Beatles, I definitely think the Beatles are a brand. Now, also, there's this incredible thing, right? There are just four incredible people, and it's almost limitless what you can do and learn about them and what you can learn through them. But I would argue that there is a way to take the mission of the family. The family looks after that brand today, and you could spread that music, and you could spread that mission in new and creative ways. You probably don't get like four new guys, like Menudo and have them go pretend to make the next Beatles record, that's probably not what you would do.

1:07:45And I think the cupboards are pretty bare in terms of going in like making anthology 12 or whatever it would be. I don't think that's the way either, but I think you certainly could allow creative people to interpret what the Beatles have done and bring it to new audiences. Well, in the 70s, there was a show on Broadway, very successful called Beatlemania. Well, and more recently, a Beatles love. And also, I think if you take that kind of internet analogy like we've been talking about and say, look, you could put the Beatles at the V &A in London, but why? You know, I want to make Brits love the Beatles more?

1:08:25No, I would say, what are you taking to South America, and to India, and to Asia, where you can take this incredible culture of the Beatles? And by the way, this is what Christian Dior did, right? Like, look at the growth. It stopped recently, but if you look at the growth of the previous 15 years in the luxury business, it was geographical expansion, right? And so I think there's a lot of untapped things there. Beatles love is over. Like, what replaces that? But maybe you don't replace it with something in Vegas. Maybe you replace it with something that you can take to India and South America, et cetera.

1:08:57If Spotify is worth, you know, $10 or $12 a month, is there a Beatles app that's worth somewhere somewhere between one and five dollars a month? I would think yes. I think there's a lot to explore there with who they are, all the solo projects, everything surrounding them. There's a lot of surface area there. That's never been - There's a beetle station on XM. That's fantastic. I'll just do it all the time. Breakfast with the beetles on Sunday mornings in L .A. That's like a ritual for our family. Even now that we don't live in L .A. anymore, I have a playlist that gets shuffled every Sunday morning and we make pancakes and we listen to the beetles.

1:09:29And to me, it's just life and education. I mean, why wouldn't you have an app where I say, I'm going for a run and it gives you the perfect Beatles playlist for that run? Let's face it, it's a genre, especially when you pull in all of the solo. But I think if you approached it as... If you don't think of it as a band, but you think of it as a brand. It's a Christian to your or a Disney. I don't think either of those are perfect analogies at all. Well, it's the church carrying on after Jesus is gone. And they, I think they've done an extraordinary job, but already I think you're point about serious XM when they did Beatles rock band.

1:10:05I was shocked. Like at the time that felt like, whoa, what are you guys doing? Yeah. But what a great way to bring this incredible music to a new audience. And what's interesting is the Beatles are not the most streamed band on Spotify. And if you look at them, even among their peers, like even Queen and Elton John, because of the biopics, have had this huge resurgence. So I do think, first of all, you can expect, you know, there are four Sam Mendes biopics coming out within the next couple of years, and that will be a huge moment, and that will bring the Beatles back to a lot of people the same way that they believe.

1:10:36How could you mean four biopics? I don't understand. They're making four movies and releasing them on the same day. About each of the Beatles are four different movies. Four different movies, one about each of the Beatles. I see. So like when KISS did the solo album. They're doing the KISS solo albums as Sam Mendes biopics. Great. Yes. And I think that's also a very important moment for the brand, right? Because those biopics for Elton John and Queen were very important moments for those brands, if you will, right? Again, storytelling plus time equals value. And, you know, the Queen story, people understanding the story of Queen through the biopic helped them to enjoy the Queen catalog.

1:11:18I loved the John Higgs book about the Beatles and James Bond, and what I loved it for was his reverence for that, for the Beatles in particular, as individuals. That really came through. So John Higgs, who is, I think, my favorite contemporary author, wrote the book on the KLF, wrote a book on Timothy Leary of All People, but he wrote a book recently called Love and Let Die, because the very first James Bond movie and the very first big Beatles single were released on on the same October day in 1962. That's amazing. It's just an incredible fact. Amazing. And so what Higgs does, and he's just so gifted, because he uses that as a jumping off point to tell the story of those two cultural icons.

1:12:06Is it a nonfiction book? Yes, it's a nonfiction book, and it's really, all John Higgs books are not quite about what they're about. And so this book is really what do these two brands say about British culture over the last 50 years? And he just pulls out all of these little interesting things and even things that you just think couldn't possibly be connected, turn out to be connected. You also get this feeling of like James Bond is such an unlikely cultural icon in a way like very reprehensible in so many ways. and yet here the Queen is showing up at the Olympics in the helicopter with James Bond, because the cultural importance of James Bond is so entrenched and so undeniable that, damn it, that's just where we are, right?

1:12:56And you get that same feeling, but you also get a sense of the Beatles as individuals, and he does such a great job of talking about the heartbreak, really, of John Calling Paul's album, of granny music and Rolling Stone, like really looking down on Paul's music and Paul in the 80s, still struggling to find his, Paul McCartney got damn it. You know what I mean? And you sort of really feel it and the reverence is real. So that book is fantastic. And what I'm hoping with these biopics is that people really feel that and then they have this connection to it. Now the interesting thing is that's really different than for real representing Louis Vuitton, and bringing Louis Vuitton to a totally different audience.

1:13:42But I think all of these things are culture and they're all storytelling. If I can share one more thing that I've come to believe through all of these lenses that I've seen, the story that sticks out to me is a story of Golden Goose, where Alessandro from Golden Goose was a steward of that brand for the first, I can't remember, let's say 15 years, and he got it to a certain point. What is Golden Goose? Golden Goose is a shoe brand. They've got a star on the side. They are expensive sneakers handmade in Italy. And they've grown, I don't know the numbers. I know the numbers from years ago, but let's say that Alessandro got them to less than 20 million in revenue.

1:14:19The CEO that took over after Alessandro, Alessandro became the creative director. They brought in a CEO. They got investment. He took them above half a billion. Right? But I think that you have to spend, I think if you're building a brand, You have to spend that first 15 years building a brand. And then you can find an inflection point. If you've made it through those hard years and you're lucky and you've stayed around. It's also sort of the Amazon story. Like Amazon was just a loser for most of its existence. I think it's almost everything. I think when the world heard about arcade fire because David Bowie decided that he was going to shine a spotlight on them, Everyone thought it was an overnight sensation.

1:15:02They just didn't know about the first seven years. It just takes longer than you think in all cases. Why was last year Bitcoin's year? Because Bitcoin was 15 years old, that's why. You know, when Mary Kate and Ashley, the twins from Full House made a fashion company, everyone laughed at them. They have a lot of respect today because they persevered. They showed that they could stand for something. They showed that they could do it year after year with that they made up. Really beautiful thing. And they made beautiful things and they built consistently. They exactly. Based on the world today, is there something different about the luxury industry or the fashion world that's going to change going forward?

1:15:41I think it's already changed in a very big way. When and how? Well, I'm not the expert on this, but I'll give you my point of view. I think I was very fortunate at the moment that I came into LVMH because I came into on digital and I wasn't there for the denial years and I was there for the acceptance. Yeah, acceptance growth and change. There's a new world. Yeah, and that was just fantastic. And not only that, but kind of culture was moving that direction. My thesis was that things that are focused on storytelling and quality and creativity will really shine on the internet. And the internet is a great distribution from that culture.

1:16:24and then if we can plug that in to the commerce, that that's a great business. And I do think that that proved to be true. I think the other thing that happened though is that there was a bit of a bubble in the growth, probably partially due to COVID, and maybe even COVID stimulus, and these sorts of things, where the business grew kind of unnaturally over those years. And then why would the luxury business increase during COVID? There were a lot of people who had been wanting to make a luxury purchase. For a lot of years, it was an aspirational purchase for them. And when they got a stimulus check, they made their first luxury purchase.

1:17:03And those customers were not going to come back and make a second purchase anytime soon. If those were just my words, I would say you shouldn't listen to them. But then repeating something that was said to me by someone in the luxury business who I respect. who really knows. Yeah, who really knows. And so I think that that was real. Also, I think culture has shifted a little bit, right? You know, I'm on the board at Dr. Martens and you know, we make an amazing black boot. You as a customer have many choices of black boots today relative to the choices that you and I had when we were 16 years old.

1:17:39So you could buy a boot that's cheaper, a boot that's more expensive, a boot from that Instagram brand, you know, Dr. Martens is still the best, But there's a lot more choice and I think that is multiplied across kind of every brand You know even a small brand like satisfy running has three copycat brands And that's just kind of the world that we're in now how important was hip hop to the fashion brand world the luxury world I think it's the most interesting thing. I think it's an interesting thing about culture It comes towards you over time. I remember wearing long shorts in sixth grade and you know being made fun of and then a few years later those people were also wearing long shorts and I come to Elviemage and I realized that a lot of the same culture that I saw with Jimmy Iveen and Beats I'm seeing at Elviemage right there.

1:18:34There's much more crossover than you think. I guess you know, I'm not sure that it's for me to try to zero in on exactly what that is though. I think in hip hop we would say real recognized real, but I think it's a little more than that, right? Because it has to do with social status at moments in time, you know, coming from no money to to having more money than I grew up with. I understand newvo rich, you know, newvo rich is newvo rich, like there's I understand when you hear a rapper who probably just got money, talk about money to some people they think that's really gauche I say I understand I understand the feeling that that comes from when people talk about newvo reach in China 15 years ago I would say I understand if you are doing better than your parents did then you have a certain feeling if you're doing worse than your parents did you also have a certain feeling.

1:19:39So I think that it's probably it goes much deeper than, oh this culture is cool. Let's put it on the front of the magazine. But when Christian Dior did a women's ad with women skateboarding at the Venice Beach skate park, I texted the CEO at the time, Piotr Bacarii and said, and you guys just come closer and closer in my direction, don't you? So there is something about leaving edge culture. It's like in the post -grunge world when we saw the fashion brands all of a sudden doing flannel shirts. Exactly, leaving edge culture and fashion is cyclical. So these things definitely go, definitely go in cycles.

1:20:21Cultures that are really of the people they find their way of reaching broader audiences. Also though I think that we have to recognize that it's not generic. I mean, Farell is a really special character. It's not like you can like look at Farell running Lou Vitton and go, oh, it's that hip -hop guy. I mean, come on. By the time Farell was 30, I think you'd already have more hits than Elvis, right? And, you know, he's done so much. You just can't put him in a box and say, oh, it's that hip -hop guy. It was just people do that from the outside. They look at ASAP Rocky and Rihanna and they're like, oh, it's those rappers.

1:21:02They're culturally much more interesting and much more meaningful than that, right? So I think that's where you do come back to real, recognize real. Like where are interesting things happening in culture? Where are people breaking molds and bounds and creating? When Virgil was at Louis Vuitton and John Hennanterson was at Laueve, I would try to talk about John Hennanterson because I think that people come into a conversation about Louis Vuitton and Virgil with a lot of assumptions. Louis Vuitton has a bunch of connotations. Virgil's got this sort of hip hop street where Kanye association, whereas Jonathan Anderson, I think did exactly the same magic trick as Virgil, but it's like, you have to kind of build your mental model for it from scratch and that's quite helpful.

1:21:52And I think that that's actually just a great thing about luxury is that they really have historically, and I hope that they continue to really try to support people in the story of Ben, I don't know, hiring John Galliano, who walks into his office with a leather vest and no shirt and flip flops, and hires him on the spot, is a story I heard firsthand from the family, and that is what a creative, that's what someone I think the main thing to point to is that it's not only hip -hop, I like that it includes a feral at an includes a ryanna, but it also includes John with the Natterson and, you know, John Galliano and Matt Williams and looking for creative.

1:22:38Maybe even Marc Jacobs. Marc Jacobs, absolutely. How are the art world and the tech world similar and how are they different? At first thing that comes to mind is go to Escherbach, the Douglas Hofstetter book, with the eternal golden braid between mathematics and music and philosophy. But maybe that's a bridge too far. I mean, look, music is math that we know. And, you know, the brain is a... Well, let's say math explains music. Yes. And, you know, I'm not sure how to even pull them apart. I think you'd be selling music short to say music is math. Yeah, and what I mean by that is, well, I think math is beautiful, So there's no there's no there's no short sell on that from my perspective.

1:23:23You know the brain is a complexity simplifying machine and it's a prediction engine. And I think one of the reasons that we like music is because we think we know what's going to come next and it gives us some comfort. And when we really like it is when it surprises us. Right. We love that familiar with the twist. So it's AI with hallucinations. Yes, exactly. It's familiar with the twist, as Jeff McFetridge would say. We love that we can follow the beat and then the key changes and I go, oh, wow, what was that feeling, right? I think that's where they're similar. Just like with math is just knowledge and we're always building all that knowledge, I think this is where then I immediately think that AI, again, if we overestimate the impact in the short term and we underestimated in the long term, I would again quote Ian Hogarth and say, you know, look around you, everything you see is built by human intelligence.

1:24:17We've never had a supplementary intelligence before. And now we do. Now we have an intelligence partner. Just the fact that everything we've made thus far is kind of building on the knowledge that we had previously. And knowledge moved pretty slowly a few hundred years ago. And science is this kind of, you know, zoom in. We used to think that everything revolved around the earth and then Copernicus and then Newton and then particle theory and then quantum theory and we just keep zooming in and getting a clearer picture of what's going on. And now with advancements in quantum and quantum computing and artificial intelligence, those microscopes that we're looking at reality with are getting pretty powerful.

1:25:11And they will aid us in our intelligence and understanding and very shortly surpass us. And I don't think we're even really capable of understanding the impact of that. What are your thoughts today on the metaverse idea? I've been to try not to sound smug. I feel a little vindicated on this. I'll just give a very specific example. When I was the Chief Digital Officer at LVMH, once a week someone would come in my office and try to sell me a virtual luxury experience. And I would say, we've done all the customer journeys in terms of what consumers want. and none of them land at 3D shopping mall.

1:25:53So I will believe that people want to inhabit a three -dimensional world that isn't a game when they do. So I think we have those worlds, Minecraft, Roblox, Call of Duty, there are many of them, and people love them. No question, but we have not yet made a kind of generic world that we want to live in. And so I think it probably has its place in very specific ways, but it's not something that I'm holding my breath for. Tim Cook said years ago that he thinks augmented reality is much more interesting than virtual reality. So I think we probably had more in that direction, the augmented reality direction than the virtual reality direction.

1:26:41I had an entrepreneur pitch me on an idea a couple weeks ago as a music experience where We actually go to a physical place and you put on goggles and kind of like the abbe experience, but with goggles. And I said, look, he has a great artist that he's working with on it. I'm sure it will work. There's a place in Paris where you can go and experience a virtual Paris and they put you on this pedestal and they make you feel like you're flying above the city. Okay. So that's kind of an amusement park attraction. You know, I agree. But I want to live in that world. No, I'd actually rather walk into a box where the artist comes to life and even if it's projection mapping and audio just feels alive and I feel like I'm inside of it.

1:27:25And I think that those are will be very specific things. You know, would I play an immersive Tony Hawk prosecutor? I probably would. Would I kind of live in a metaverse like Ready Player One? Not in my lifetime. Does pressure make you better or worse at work? I hate to say it, but it makes me do better work. What do you think that is? Well, the question is, where does the pressure come from, right? Because a lot of us put pressure on ourselves. So I think I definitely have that kind of pressure and I always have, when I was young, I would just stay up all night obsessing over some detail of something.

1:28:08I think I do that less now, but I put pressure on myself for just excellence. There's a bar for me, which is, it's almost an ideological bar in terms of what I'm proud of. But I remember this moment when I was the CEO of Topspin and my board was being really critical of me and very tough on me as a CEO. And I was, you know, as a little defensive, of course, you know, it's human nature. I thought these guys were my friends, you know, why are they being so mean to me? And then I realized that I was being more thorough and doing better work because of that. Because they were questioning me. They were asking me, why are you making this decision?

1:28:51Shouldn't you be doing that? I was having a different thought recently. There's someone I was talking to and hearing their professional story. They were having a hard time with the job that they were doing. And I realized that they had never failed before. They had always worked for big companies. They kind of moved from big company to big company and they'd never had failure. And I realized that they lacked this fear of failure that I have. I've had my company go bankrupt. I've lost my investor's money. I know that depression. I know what it feels like and that's the specter that I'm running from, right?

1:29:27It's not that I feel then comfortable losing. Success makes you feel like you're smart and you're not. And failure makes you really introspective and say, I fucked up. You know, what could I do better? I have that both personally and professionally. And so I feel like, you know, the pressure is good. Honestly, working with Jimmy Iveen was super stressful. that guy calls you at seven o 'clock in the morning. He calls you at 11 o 'clock at night and at any hour in between. The first thing he does when he gets you on the phone is knock you off balance, right? Like, he's gonna say something where you've got a react and it's how it's exhausting.

1:30:07Do you think it's intentional when he does that? I think it's his style. Is he thinking I'm gonna do this? No, I think it's just his style. It's what he knows how to do and he's incredibly effective. and it's stressful and then I think I'd stopped working with him for two weeks and I missed it already. You know, I'm like, oh shit. I was talking to Tony Parker the other night and I read Tony Parker's basketball player Tony Parker, ledger and now sponsors of the San Antonio Spurs. We had a chance to sit with Tony Parker and talk about life and business and I had read his book and I asked him, I said, when your book you talk about pop, coach, guy sounds really difficult.

1:30:48Like no matter how well you played, he was not satisfied, you know, one of these guys. But in the book, Tony Parker talks about him with a lot of reverence. Like basically says, I'm really thankful for what he did for me by pushing me that hard. And I identified with it a little bit. And I asked him, I said, what you said in the book, like you were really kind. How do you really feel? Basically, is what I ask him. He's like, that's how I feel. He's like, I know he did it with the absolute best of intention. It wasn't easy, but there's no way I could have performed at the level I performed without that.

1:31:22I needed that. And I think that that's really true. So with Jimmy, you know, I'll never forget Jimmy saying to me, and you're a major league player, what are you doing in the minors? And then watching, you know, the documentaries where he yells at Spring Seen and yells at Petty and feeling really lucky that I was one of the people that he yelled at also, just like Pop Yell and At Tony Parker. So I think there is something about feeling that pressure and being able to take that pressure that some people, probably not everyone, but some people really excel at.

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