What Happens When You Get Famous Young

0:00Girl, winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cut-offs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang-on-the-patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope? It's time for a little in-person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. Welcome to We're Talking. In this episode, AJ McLean and Cody Simpson pull back the curtain on the darker side of the music industry, where fame comes fast, but the consequences can last a lifetime.

0:52Hey there, I just want to share a content warning. This episode includes discussion of addiction. If you or someone you know needs support, we've included resources in the show notes. Please take care while watching.

1:10So the group though was found, was it Lou Pearlman? Lou was the entrepreneur that put this whole thing together. There was a thing that went around Orlando back in the day called the blue sheet, which was essentially the classifieds for entertainment. And I was perusing through the blue sheet one day and I saw this banner that said, local entrepreneur looking to put together a vocal harmony group, a la Boyz II Men meets New Kids on the Block. And I asked my mom and she's like, if you want to audition, sure. A couple of days later, I met Lou, auditioned at his house with my mom, signed on the spot.

1:50On the spot. On the spot. and then that was the beginning of now 33 years for me so just on the business side though i mean you are so you're 15 you said i was 14 you're 14 so you're 14 your mother hasn't been in the business it's just you and your mom do you read what you're signing is there any well there so then there was no it was more like a like a handshake then okay it wasn't till the group the final group was formed that then it was you know signing a contract making it official then we signed a record deal and all these things but it took us three years to get a record deal but wow but we didn't our parents and us as all young kids kevin was the oldest at the time he was 21 nick was 12 so we were just excited to be doing something like this so no we didn't read the fine print we didn't realize that lou was one-sixth of the band plus 25 commission as manager plus getting a kickback under the table from promoters so he was triple dipping wow um as well as hiding the biggest ponzi pyramid scheme in record history that we didn't find out about till after we parted ways.

3:14But, yeah, it was insane. And, you know, we were the guinea pigs, really, because then he started NSYNC and then Oatown and this and that. So they all kind of saw our track record and saw kind of what not to do. By doing that. We were the guinea pigs. We were the ones that had to go through hell and back. So I don't know if this was rumor, but I've always wanted to know the answer to this, is that when, so Lou... not leaves. Well, yeah, he leaves. You guys kind of kick him out. We part ways. He then becomes the founding or founder of NSYNC. Does he found NSYNC specifically to compete with you all, with Backstreet Boys?

3:55I don't know if that's really at the epicenter of why NSYNC and him became something, but we were told from, because we had the same management, we had the same label, same producer as max martin jive records we were told that they wanted to manage in sync so that they could basically manipulate the situation where okay we're gonna if we have control of in sync we can keep them out of your way but in turn anything we turned down they got they got And essentially, because we turned down a performance on Disney, NSYNC took it. And that was the kickoff of their career. JC and Justin had already come from the Mickey Mouse Club.

4:49So they already had a relationship with Disney. Right. And they were on the Mouse Club with Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. So they all came out of that world. but that had we done that show i don't know if things would have happened for the sync the way they did maybe eventually but that was the catalyst for them uh and then it just was like this constant icky feeling for us like you're really shitting where you eat kind of thing like this is our own backyard now like we're all from orlando same this same that and it it became really frustrating and that's when we parted ways with everybody.

5:31With everyone. Now, Lou Pearlman was later sentenced to 27 years in prison for money laundering and fraud and then he dies in 2016. What do you think his legacy is? I mean, look, at the end of the day, we will always be grateful because without Lou, we would never be anything. Nobody would have known who we were. we wouldn't have even met. Like, he is truly at the epicenter of our creation. But everything we've done since we parted ways from him has been all us. Continuing to grind, changing management companies multiple times, literally going through it. Yes. Both in the industry and in our personal lives.

6:19Deaths in the family, rehabs, you name it. open heart surgery brian had when he's 23 like we've been through shit yes and have overcome every single adversity every time different lengths of time to get through it but we've gotten through it but we did a documentary back in god i feel like it's five six years ago now show them what you're made of i don't know when that came out now i can't remember but one of the things in that doc that we we were so close to coming into fruition was the production company reached out to the prison that lou was at and at first they got the green light for the five of us to visit him oh my goodness but we wanted to go simply to ask one word one question why some of us had already made peace with the whole thing and kind of you know wrote it off closure i was one of them okay you know again beyond grateful for the opportunity that was given made my peace as soon as we parted ways i was like okay you're a piece of shit and i want nothing to do with you and that's in the past that's fine but some of the guys even too i would say some of them to this day still somewhere in here have still a little bit of a chip and that's okay that's their choice you know to have that it was nasty man and and i think i think fully understanding what happened gives us even more appreciation for where you are right today yeah once everything transpired we were an open book about it like we were you know we were in i think we were in sweden about to go back in the studio and brian was the one that's that basically really started doing some digging and finding out like this isn't adding up we're out here busting our ass leaving our families you know touring traveling and he's making the same shit we're making and he's not lifting a finger plus this this this and this so he was the one that was like okay i'm putting together a lawsuit you guys can hop on board with me or not wow so brian brian was the catalyst for that and the minute we did it lou's instant reaction was to shut down shop all of our gear he locked it up in storage um like everything was like shut down for a minute he still owned the name so he was threatening to keep the name so we would put basically money aside in escrow which was his one-sixth bullshit and essentially we just said you know what let's just cut him the check and for all intents and purposes i won't disclose the amount but we cut him the check done that was it and that was it yeah we basically paid for our name and got our gear and got our stuff and we were done.

9:29Wow. And, you know, thank God, because I don't know what would have happened with the name. We would have had to come up with some other something boys. I don't know. Bone boys. The bone boys. Yeah. Yeah. Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with Epglyss, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLIS, LibriKizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema.

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10:54There's one stat that I want to throw out here and I want to get your opinion on. Is that, so this is a 2019 study. It found that 80 % of 18 to 25 year old musicians said they had a negative mental health issue with anxiety and depression being the most common. right so now there is not one person i've ever talked to who has experienced extreme fame at a young age and there's not been a negative consequence to it yeah yeah it's um

11:30Cody Simpson:i absolutely went through my my valley you know after the the hot you know the mountains yes um there was this there was this doctor this uh neurologist or neuroscientist i i i don't want to title him incorrectly but i met him through miley when we were together because she would do these brain scans on her brain um that would kind of show all kinds of activity um and uh we we i met with him a couple times into these brain scans and and show it would show certain um you know where different parts of your brain are activated at different times and um there was sometimes an issue with frontal lobe activity and dopamine or something because of i guess as he would explain it he did a lot of research on fame on the brain and he's worked with like beaver he's worked all these other guys especially at a young age pre your brain being fully developed to your frontal lobe being fully developed as an adult and having that amount of dopamine it's like dopamine flooding as a child fame is fame is a form of of dopamine flooding in a way and going up on stage and having this this amount of admiration it's it's not a natural right it's not something that you're really supposed to experience particularly as a teenager um and so you do a lot of work on how to kind of reset that and and kind of come back to this a healthy baseline because it's so easy to kind of get caught in this immense you know immense high and immense low cycle especially as somebody who as a young person has experienced these really really immense highs it's hard for your brain to then kind of re re-regulate to a place in which like normal life is enough yes um and i think that's something that a lot of people who have experienced that kind of fame young have struggled with and that's what that's why you see a lot of people going and fall into addiction and um and substance abuse and stuff just to like main to try and maintain that what they felt what dopamine hit yeah like what you felt out on stage doing that thing to then come back and like normal life is is not enough no you know it's gonna sound crazy but i i moved out around 16 17 i bought my own place and i moved in i i ended up moving in with my like i had a young a younger day-to-day manager to a manager at the time who was also my best friend and we spent every day together work or not um and he moved in with me because I bought this a place here in um I bought a place in in West Hollywood when I was 17 and uh I that's when things started to slip for me and I think it's because I rebelled a little bit against my family and my parents as which is I think a natural thing to do at that age it's not an uncommon thing for a teenager to want their own space and then to have to go and kind of learn their own learn your own lessons in a way sure um but that was also around the time that i started to rebel from 17 18 was around the time i started to rebel from what i'd built um and i started partying and kind of fell into the trappings of kind of having access to like whatever i wanted at an age that was far too young to to be you know allowed that i suppose you know like you can you can get in anywhere and you can get anything and people just say yes kind of thing it was like that amount of autonomy is unhealthy i think at that age yeah because power is also has effects on the brain as well in that way in the same way that fame does it's sort of coupled yes um and so too much of that too early is also easy to abuse um so i felt like i was at the mercy of that a little bit yes um was there an emancipation attempt yeah yeah early which I didn't know no this was like oh this was before at the start almost oh really like I yeah when I was still um when I was really early on like a very a very early um management company pre pre-scooter and everything that that were trying to I think tried to claim claim my parents were unfit parents and and and to legally emancipate me so I could work because there were limits on the amount of hours I could or days I could work and my schooling and um I think under 18 you're considered a minor in the I'm not sure exactly what the entertainment industry laws are but they were trying to uh finesse those you know just just really so you could work longer yeah really yeah yeah more money more whatever um geez so I I was fortunately sheltered from all that at that age my parents didn't tell me what was going on but they had days in um legal offices about it and all that stuff and i had no idea it was shielded from it so look at that you they didn't tell me till i was probably 19 or 20 so so so they were really protecting you but then by 16 you stepped out yourself yeah yeah yeah yeah and now you had to so for a couple years there I think my mom like I just I just it was a couple years there where my mom had to put google that's on her phone because it's the only way she knew where I was really because I just wouldn't I was just rebelling in every sense of the word and I wouldn't talk to her and not because she ever did anything wrong I think it was just my my way of going to find who I was outside of everything I'd been through and feeling like my identity and my life and my everything was had been imposed on me which is like a really which is ironic because I built it for myself and wanted to build it for myself and in that rebellion if you will hmm I've heard you describe 17 to 20 as messy years yeah yeah absolutely the messiest absolutely when you think about the darkest period for you so we can understand what you were going through what was that what was happening um to preface it it wasn't all bad because i was doing a lot of musical and creative soul searching at the time i was like discovering all this music i didn't know i was actually practicing a lot of guitar like i was there it was directed in some ways it was just that it was all very angsty and I was partying a lot and I was doing drugs and I was treating people poorly and it wasn't who I was it was like this layer on top of who I really was that was just me trying to I've been trying to find myself you know like I just I I'd realized that I've I felt trapped in what I'd built and I I was just felt like I needed to clean the slate or something you know um I felt a lot of it was a creative and musical angst I I felt misunderstood musically because I felt like I was growing a lot as an artist and I was trapped in by being a teen pop star.

20:05Cody Simpson:So there was a lot of that. So I was like, I'm going to do everything I can so that people don't think of me as that anymore. There's a lot of that stuff. And if I have to go and party and do drugs and whatever, that was almost me going, I'm not. The surfer guy. Yeah, you know what I mean? It could have very easily gotten worse had my parents kind of not stepped in and helped me out. How did your parents know you had slept? They knew that I was partying a lot and I was abusing, I was drinking too much and I was doing drugs and all that stuff. I think I got to the point where it started to affect my brain chemistry.

20:52Like I started to get really paranoid and was having some psychoses and things like that.

20:59Cody Simpson:Like I thought I was, I don't know, I'd substance abuse my way into just detachment from reality in some sense. and I remember showing up at their house and just breaking down into tears and told them that I had a problem I wasn't an addict but I needed to change whatever I was doing it wasn't working

21:37Cody Simpson:and thank God they just were ready to take me in and help me, you know? Yeah. Now, how did you know? Because, you know, when I do, I've talked to a lot of addicts. And there's typically... And I can't claim to be one. I'm not. I never was. It was just this period of time where I took it way too far. But those, well, the addicts that I've talked to, there's typically an inflection point where something happens where they realize, okay, this path is to my demise. I need to get on a new path. but what was for you the inflection point that allowed you to then go to your parents for help I think I just had like a really big night and I was freaking out and I was coming down and realizing that I didn't want to live in this cycle anymore and and had just slipped from I'm too far from who I was and the values that I, you know, claimed to hold dear and went to them and just broke down, you know.

22:46Cody Simpson:My nervous system and my psychology and everything was suffering a lot. And I just realized I needed to and wanted to, you know, clean up and get back on track and actually keep working towards the things I said I wanted. And, you know, that when you're in that, like, that kind of state, the partying and the highs from that can be so seductive. Like, they become more important than, yes, the real thing. Yes. And if you want to hear the full unfiltered stories from today's guest, you can check them out on the We Need to Talk page. Drop a like, leave a comment, and hit subscribe. See you next week.

23:32Thank you.