Ep. 71 will.i.am Reveals All: Money-making, The Price Of Fame & His Secret Recipe For Creativity

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0:48Always family. So pull up a chair and join us at Fremont Avenue, a world premiere play only at Arena Stage. Performances start October 8th. Tickets at arenastage.org.

1:02Hi, friends. Grace from the Working Hard podcast here. When you're stretching every dollar, Alilla goes a long way and Walmart Business is here to help. They make it easy to order what you need from tech and cleaning supplies to everyday essentials, all at low prices and with helpful tools like spend tracking and tax exempt purchasing for eligible organizations. Because when your operations are smooth, your impact can be bigger. Visit business.warmart.com to get started.

1:31it is a big one today on working hard hardly working we have the one the only will i am he is a multi-platinum artist he's won nine grammys an emmy and is an all-round incredible musician both as part of the black eyed peas and as a music producer but what you might not know is that he's also a tech entrepreneur and has been leading and investing in tech companies for over a decade now, including being one of the founding investors in such a huge company and what ended up to be an enormous, very big news deal in Beats by Dre. I wanted to speak to Will today about kind of navigating two separate, intertwined, but simultaneous careers.

2:15How they intersect, what brought him to where his kind of career is now. it is such an honour to have Will on the podcast. I'll be honest with you that I was, you know, I was a little bit starstruck and it is so clear from talking to him how much of a purely creative person he is. Please, if you do enjoy this episode, make sure to like and subscribe or rate or literally whatever it is on the current platform that you are on. It helps the podcast, it helps us get amazing guests and most importantly, it helps my ego. There are some truly fantastic gems of moments in here. And I really enjoyed speaking to Will so clear, as I said, just how creative he is.

2:56And I hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed recording it.

3:02Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. I always like to ask guests about what they believe their formative experiences were. What do you feel those experiences were for you? School. Finding out what my superpower was in school. And that was like my creativity. My teachers that I had. My classmates. My neighborhood that I grew up in. There's not one like, yo, that one time when I was like coming home from school. That developmental, the rite of passage, becoming adolescent to teenage, going to school. Really helped develop the things I'm into now. Tech, music, expressing myself.

3:40because that's how I really got through school. I know that school's not always the easiest for people whose superpower is creativity because it's based around kind of academic performance. Was school easy in that way for you or did you find it a struggle because your concentration was more on creativity? I was lucky to have awesome teachers and I loved asking questions. I was a guy that's like, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, me, come on, come on, me, me, me, me, me. I just always liked asking questions or answering them. I'm putting my creativity, my curiosity, and my pattern matching to the test. And I brought those things that I loved about that to my adulthood and my practice.

4:21But creativity, my teachers really encouraged that. Did you realize first that you were artistic or musical or generally creative? Just generally creative. Applying that creativity and writing, the questions I would ask, I pushed back on, hey, but wait a second. If you said that last week and you're saying this this week, well, shouldn't it be this? That type of pattern matching. And would you say you've always had a kind of entrepreneurial spirit? I think anyone in the hood has an entrepreneurial spirit because they're surviving. And whether you're surviving in life or you're surviving in business and trying to find new ways to survive, that's entrepreneurial.

5:07You know, there's a lot of similarities in going from ideation to manifestation to scaling. It's about the art of surviving. And you talk about your neighborhood and growing up where you did as a very important part of who you are. Could you talk to me a little bit about where you grew up and what that neighborhood was like? I grew up in an all Mexican neighborhood. We were one of the only black families there. It was beautiful to be around a different culture. Well, it's the only culture I knew growing up. And then going to all-white school and having being raised in an all-Mexican neighborhood and on surface to folks, they probably thought I came from an all-black neighborhood.

5:49So when I spoke in a Mexican accent, they thought maybe I was from Dominican Republic or Panama, because very rarely do African-Americans sound Mexican. And then dressing the way I dressed in school, because we were poor. You know, wearing secondhand suits to school, they probably thought, like, why do you talk that way? Why are you dressed that way? My foundation gave me my uniqueness. My uniqueness was not like, hmm, I'm going to do this. It wasn't contrived. It wasn't thought of. It was just circumstances. If I go back home to my neighborhood, it'll be like, hey, what's up, fool? Ah, not even, dog.

6:26I came here last week because last week I wanted to go shopping, but you weren't even here, fool. So why don't we get together next week? Not even, fool. No mames, wey. That's how I talk. This was my accent before I started traveling. Everyone was like, hey, why do you talk like that, Willy? This is how I talk. But, habla espanol? Claro que sí. Por qué? Porque mi barrio, todos mis amigos, mi familia habla espanol mucho. That's how my family spoke. and then I started traveling and my accent changed. But I love my neighborhood. That's why I make the music I make, the style of music I make. And so you talk there in a few different instances of how you felt different in each of those settings.

7:13How do you feel like that affected you as a kid? I'm so happy I was raised in the 90s. Because if I was raised in the 2000s, then you had the whole world's opinion in your face on your phone. and because of that I think a lot of people are not tolerant to perspective they want everything to be the way they want it to be you can turn off notifications you can block people how you block somebody in real life it's called a restraining order but to get a restraining order they had to have done some pretty bad things to you for the police to be like, you can't come five miles around this person or this community.

8:01That's a real block in real life. So in the 90s, you either had to deal with the BS or you had to remove the BS. And by removing the BS is to make sense of the BS. So you're a lot more tolerant to BS. gives you thicker skin. And if somebody made fun of you, you needed to up your skills on making fun back. Like, look at this fool. You need some, look at your knuckles. Were you punching the walls? Like, oh, my knuckles are kind of scarred. Well, look at your knees, fool. What you, you running on your kneecaps? That was my upbringing. Somebody made fun of you, you made fun of them back. It was jokes.

8:45And we had a really good time identifying our flaws, living with our flaws, and then pointing out somebody else's flaws in hopes they could deal with their flaws and either adjust them or live with them, accept them. My flaws are what make me unique. No disrespect to people raised in the 2000s or the teens. The 90s, growing up in the 90s was like, yo, samplers, MTV, right? TRL, hip hop, everywhere. 90s was dope. And how do you feel you'd be different if you were brought up a decade later and had your career with, I guess, starting where social media was already very much a thing? 2000s, like the internet, bitches, what?

9:33Internet. We're going to look back at social media and be like, wow. what in the hell did these kids have to go through with all this hate in their face, all this perversion everywhere, all this distortion, algorithm chasing? Well, I'm really happy that my career started in the 90s and we sold records in the 2000s because making a career in streaming, although everyone has access to be able to do it, It's not like the golden era of like the success of Lana Ritchie, Michael Jackson, Prince, light years as far as income. Kings and queens of streaming versus kings of queens of recording and broadcast never really saw the importance of being a mogul and bringing other products to life.

10:26Your product was selling that record or CD. The streaming kings and queens are like, yeah, I'm probably not making that much money on the streams compared to the sales. Did you see my makeup line though? Yeah. Oh, you see my sparkling beverage line? You see my champagne line? You see my fragrance line? That wasn't the thought process of the recording broadcast. Jimi Hendrix was recording. He played the shit out of the guitar. Prince was too. If they were in this generation, Jimi Hendrix would be selling Hendrix guitars. Prince would be selling Prince guitars, not just playing a Gibson or a Fender.

11:08He would have his own guitars. Michael Jackson would have had his own penny loafer shoes, not just wearing penny loafer shoes. He would have made his own glittery freaking diamond socks, and he would have collaborated with Swarovski. Or De Beers or Cartier or Tiffany. Are those Michael Jackson Tiffany socks? Oh, I love the Michael Jackson Tiffany collab. Oh my gosh, I got them too. I got the Black Simons. That would have been if Mike was around in this era. And you've kind of actually straddled both of those in a way because you've obviously been very much part of the sales era, but also you've done a huge amount of entrepreneurial kind of work.

11:51Where did that all start for you? Like even going back to like the Beats by Dre founding investment, how did that even come about? So like when you're successful in music in the 90s, 2000s, Nokia and BlackBerry wanted the Black Eyed Peas to help them sell their products. And I'm always curious. Hey, I got a question. How much did it cost to make this product that we're helping you sell? Wait, what? It only costs? Get out of here. Three million bucks to develop this product. And now you're set. Wait, how is it? Three million dollars to develop it. But I bought it for this much money because I'm curious.

12:27Then we help sell Dr. Pepper, which is a drink. And I ask that same question. How much does it cost to make a bottle? Because you guys paid us all this money for a 30-second commercial. And we made more money from 30 seconds than making an hour and a half of music with four videos. That's crazy to me. So 30 seconds of an advert for a brand versus our product, which is a CD with 15 songs on it. and each video we do is for like four minutes long, this shit don't make no sense. So that type of thinking made me realize that yeah, we are a band, but we're not a brand. Yeah, we have a product, but it's not really a product.

13:12And we only sell shirts at a show. How come our shirts don't sell at a store? Why is it only at the venue at our concert? Our shirts are just as cool as those shirts that are at Target. And the only brand that was doing that at the time was Kiss and the Rolling Stones. You can buy a Kiss and the Rolling Stones shirt at a regular store outside of the concert. So I started seeing these patterns of like how brands work, how bands work. So one year I come home from tour and I tell Jimmy, like, yo, let's make our own hardware. Let's use our music to sell our own stuff. Why are we selling everybody else's stuff?

13:47Let's sell our own stuff. It was 2006. So in 2007, he's like, Beats with Dre. You want to be a part of it? I remember the conversation that we had about selling our own stuff. There's more context to that, but I'm not going to get into the details of our convo. But I'm like, yeah, hell yeah, I'll be down. I'll get down. What do you want me to do? We just need your brain, your curiosity, your imagination. I was like, I'm all in. I pitched other ideas to companies. I pitched a concept to Coca-Cola. My pitch was simple. I like making pitch decks to get the idea out and then go into a company and pitching it or investors and pitching it.

14:25To me, that's like making an album. It's a pitch for a sonic escape. Like, no, no, no, no. The bass got to go.

14:40That's a pitch. That's how I see the sound. That's how I hear the sound. It's in my head. I want to get it out into the world. So that same type of like designing something, whether it's frequencies, tempo, and melody, it's with imagery and shapes and geometry. And so I pitched this idea to Coke. I had like a perfect sentence like, yo, what's my elevator pitch? Because I remember people should be like, yo, what's your elevator pitch? I was like, what the fuck's an elevator pitch? Like, you know, if you're an elevator, you got a certain amount of time to pitch it. I was like, yeah, but what if the floor is like got 100 floors?

15:13That's different than an elevator pitch in like four floors. He was like, yeah, so keep it short. I'm like, yo, B. Perez, companies the size of Coke need to be verbs in society. If you don't believe me, Google it. She's like, wow, Google is a verb. I'm like, right? Coke should be a verb too. Well, what do you think Coke's verb should be? Coke in reverse. E-K-O-C for eco-cycle, eco-community, eco-concept, eco-creativity, eco-collaboration. We're going to take your base cloth, which is plastics and aluminum. We're going to take your waste, which is plastic and aluminum. We're going to create a new base cloth.

15:52And we're going to license that base cloth to other companies to execute their sustainability efforts. So EcoCycle, are those EcoCycle Levi jeans? That's the process of transformation and making it reusable and sustainable. Because waste is only waste when you waste it. I pitched this to them in 2008. It took us a year and a half or two years to get the deal on who owns Coke in reverse. I was like, but I came up with the concept. I can't. So I fought, fought, fought. So we ended up where no one can own it if we're not partnered. They can't do anything with it if we're not doing something around sustainability.

16:32So I love pitch decks. I pitched the concept to a football player friend of mine. His name is Jamal Anderson. He played for the Atlanta Falcons. One day I'm like, yo, I want to do a soundtrack to your feet. He's like, what? I'm like, yeah, think about it, bro. Everybody does soundtracks to movies. What about soundtracks to your feet? He's like, well, what are you freaking going on about? I was like, well, hear me out. How many weeks is your training to go and play pro? He was like, it's 12 weeks. 12 weeks, right? So for each week, I'm going to make a song for each mode of training that you do.

17:10Because your feet, you need your feet to play your sport. It's called football, bro. So I'm going to make a soundtrack to your feet. You're probably going to get a shoe deal, right? So instead of the songs, the 12 songs, which is an album, being sold at Tower Records or Virgin Megastore, we're going to sell them at Foot Locker, selling music at a shoe store because you're going to have a shoe. And it's soundtrack to your feet, which is really the freaking theme songs and commercials to your shoe that's going to be sold, bro. Brilliant. So he was like, yo, let's do it. I'm like, wait, wait, really?

17:44So I was signed up to do it. He gets hurt. So I'm like, dang it. My whole concept is gone. And so then I went to my friend. I'm like, yo, let's do a soundtrack to a beer. And so we went to, we flew to Colorado. There's a beer called Coors. This is 2003. Had a whole pitch. I want to make a soundtrack to your beer. And so they're like, we're not in the music business. I'm like, yes, you are. I don't know one bar that doesn't play music where people aren't drinking your product and listening to music for free. Who's going to go to a bar that doesn't play music? And what do they go to bars for? To buy music or buy your product?

18:29So you are in the music business. You just don't know it Because without music, your product doesn't get sold at certain locations. They gave me the gig. And if you go on iTunes right now, there's an album up there called Must Be 21. Because in America, that's the age for drinking. There's a song in there called Let's Do It. There's an artist on that compilation, Must Be 21, by the name of John Stevens. John Stevens' legal name is John Stevens. his artist name that he became after that project. It's called John Legend. There's a person by the name of Stacy that's on that project that then became Fergie.

19:13So this Must Be 21 record was a soundtrack to a beer. But because the beer company funded it, they're not in the music business. So I ended up owning the masters to something they paid for. Fucking crazy. I always had this like looking at what's happening from an elevated view to then make sense of it and be creative and curious and pitch what's the worst going to happen you pitch something and somebody's like nah so the whole premise of it is to come up with the perfect pitch and when did you start realizing that actually kind of entrepreneurship was very much part of your job as a musician obviously you were in the founding investment for beats by dray did you expect that to go as well as it did no you never do you just try your best to make it work like writing songs like boom boom pow where the product is right there in the bridge i be rocking them beats and in the video i'm like wearing the beats headphones one of the first videos that had the beats in them, over pronouncing it by putting it in the song because I learned from like my Adidas.

20:25I learned from like Pasta Cavazier. The difference between the two is they didn't own Adidas and they didn't own Cavazier. While beats, you're an owner of. And so when you say, I be rocking them, it's like a different level of like, this is my shit. So emphasis on, I be rocking them. them hours and so as part of this when did you realize that actually that type of entrepreneurship and that type of ownership as a whole was actually what was going to get you to the next level in terms of your career in terms of what you actually owned versus music well before beats i was already out trying to invest in things so i invested in tesla before the beats right around beats i invested in Twitter, but then sold my Twitter later on.

21:18But I always was out looking for things to be a part of or invest in. There's a rap that I wrote when I was on our first album, that curious mentality. So Black Eyed Peas at one point in time were an underground group, and I still consider us an underground spirit, especially nowadays where nothing's underground in the digital realm. Right. But I always had this perspective of wanting to know more. So there's a lyric that I wrote on our first album that came out in 1998 on a song called A8. And the lyric goes, Yo, my man, I got a plan to do it all. I got a plan that none of y 'all ever thought about because underground n****s don't be thinking on going continental like Lincoln.

22:05How could you make moves when you always trap under? I'm trying to reach the surface to learn more about the thunder. I wonder what really makes the world go round. Not thugs, because thugs go round to bring other brothers down, to be in it for a quick blink. But when you stop the thing, and I forgot the rest. But yes, that wonder, that curiosity of like, yo, who made that? I just like to know what I'm interfaced with. What am I around? What materials is this? Is it made in China? Taiwan? Probably so. For example, if you don't know something, a lot of times people are afraid to admit they don't know.

22:41If they don't understand something, they're afraid to admit they don't understand it. So last year, I enrolled to go to Harvard because I just want to know more about business. So now I attend Harvard Business School. And so everything was going smooth sailing. I'm like, wow, back at school, raising my hand. Like, wow, this feels great. Now it was like heavy finance. and no matter how hard I tried, couldn't digest what the lesson was. I'm like, I felt defeated. Dang, I can't wrap my head around this. No matter what angle I came from, I called my finance department for my personal finances. Like, yo, I don't understand this, Thomas.

23:24Thomas is like, well, well, here's the reason why. Look at it from this perspective. I'm like, yeah, but that's why I hired your firm to handle my finance. I don't understand this stuff. I understand the basics, but I need to do spreadsheets. So I go to class the next day. I'm like, Professor Dawes, I just want to let you know, like, if you call on me today, there's a lot of things I don't understand about this. So he pulls me back. He says, you know, well, not that I was expecting you to know it. Do you think any of your classmates came to me and told me that they didn't know it? The fact that you're aware that you're having problems understanding it means you're going to know how to hire the right people for your business.

24:09Because that's part of knowing, is knowing when to delegate and trust in somebody that does. And that's what Harvard Business School is all about. It's not about you trying to know everything. It's about you being comfortable with knowing what you don't know and then reinforcing that. I didn't pass that class, but to me, it was a reinforcement. And it's a lesson like it's okay not to know. You just have to know who to bring in your foad that knows and then trust in that person's expertise. And so how have you made sure that you've kept the right people around you and like hired the right types of people?

24:50Trust. You know, you have to trust in the people you hire. Either you're the dream ideator, you're the one who ideated and manifested the dream, and now you have to go out and hire people to materialize and lift up that dream. And if you do that, then you have to trust in the people to call the shots where they feel they're going to contribute. And as soon as you start questioning them, then you're going to close them up. then they're never going to feel like, there's no need for me to bring this up because you have to let your Michael Jordan be your Michael Jordan. You have to let your Scottie Pippen be your Scottie Pippen.

25:33You need to allow for your David Beckhams to be your David Beckhams. Your stars are going to shine when you give them room to shine. And the moment you start stifling their concepts or their contributions or suggestions, it all starts there. who you pick, who you elect, who you delegate to, and how you encourage them to bless you with their gifts. They're the talent. They're not employees. Nobody wants to feel like an employee. They want to feel like talent because talent is irreplaceable if you're lucky enough to have awesome talent around you. I'd love to hear a little bit about when you initially started.

26:19as you say, it was kind of underground and that was where you were at at the time. When did you start to feel it all really blowing up? I was in high school when I got my first record deal. I was like 17. I used to go to this rap contest when I was 16, 17 and freestyle battle. And that confidence came from my teachers and my friends. One time in health class, I was doodling on the desk and my teacher's name was Miss Montez. She was teaching health, sex ed. And I was like a weird, I've always been this like oddball kid. I was zoning out into like my imagination world as class was going on. She knew I wasn't paying attention, thinking multiple thoughts.

27:10So she was like, William, do you want to talk to us about the lesson today, which is reproduction? And I'm like, yeah then I recited a poem and the poem went I remember it it was like impromptu and so I'm like yeah of course Miss Montez I said uh when I arrived on planet earth my arrival was rugged exiting the canals of the birth tubes I struggled through tight walls my fist balled up to the point where my strength transforming to lock jaw these are emotions of a fetus dying to escape so I began

27:58And so she's like, Wow, William. What was that about? I was like, that's probably the emotion of every child that's in a womb, screaming to get out, and no one hears its cries. fist balled up clunched to the strength transforms into lockjaw these are emotions of a fetus dying to escape so i began kicking the uterus i'm trapped in the womb there's no sharp object to puncture the blue liquidated room and there's no oxygen it's just liquid breath any sound i make don't be nothing because it can't escape the walls of flesh my cries for help seem to ricochet sinking in the cell cavities. I need a remedy.

28:42And so I passed health class with that poem because it's a different perspective. Yeah, I could have tried to learn what's in a textbook, but that doesn't mean I absorbed it. I'm just reciting the textbook. But if I could use it in a metaphor, well, then I really absorbed it. If I could paint a different picture, a different perspective, now I really absorbed it down to an emotional level. And so Ms. Montez gave me an A. I was like, yeah, didn't even have to read it. Which is, I might encourage people not to read textbooks if you're in class. But just expand your imagination and learn something.

29:25Use what you learned and speak it in a metaphor, a simile. And so from that, that gave me this other level of fearlessness and self-awareness and belief in myself that I started going to these freestyle battles and battling rappers. And then that gave me my record deal with Eazy-E. He started a group called NWA. They had songs like Fuck the Police. Yeah, Straight Outta Compton. And that's who discovered me when I was 17 years old. and there's a TV show called 90210 and there's a guy by the name of Brian Austin Green who's like the star of the show and when they weren't filming he used to let me record in his studio home so we had like all the Hollywood friends we would hang out at underground like jazz clubs instead of going to Hollywood clubs and so yeah that's how we we started we're a little LA misfits Leonardo DiCaprio was our high school friend, went to photography class with Apple, the guy that I started Black Out Peas with.

30:35So we were just like immersed in Hollywood teenage talent, talent pool. But we didn't want to just, you know, be typical Hollywood. So we really like going to like jazz spots. We were 17, 18, 19, 20, hanging out with 30, 40 year olds that played like jazz. We thought we were like, yeah. What are you doing? Oh, we going to bar one. Oh, yeah. I'm going over here to downtown on Vigness. First in Vigness, there's a cool little jazz spot down there. We're going to be on the mic and all the freaking rich white girls from Palisades and Brooklyn. They're like, oh my gosh, you guys are at what? At a jazz club.

31:18It's so cool. Like, yeah, it's pretty cool as shit. I got a fake ID. You got a fake Because it's like 21 and over. And so we used to be, we were so like, we thought we were so like diff. They know us at every college in LA. We played Dominguez Hills, Long Beach, Irvine, USC, UCLA. So in LA, we thought we were the shit. Because all the college kids knew Black Eyed Peas in 1996, 97, 98. Then we went on our first tour. We were like, yo, we are large. But we weren't. To us, we were large. Then people told us, you guys aren't big. I'm like, what do you mean we're not big? Well, you guys are opening act.

32:03You guys are going to headline your own stuff. We're like, wait, what do you mean? Yeah, you guys don't do your own shows. You guys are opening acts. So then we were like, oh, shit, we need to have our own shows. We shouldn't be opening. Yeah, right. Why are we opening up for other people? When are we going to headline our own stuff? then went on tour with Macy Gray and I'm like yo what you guys dang Macy because we kind of grew up with Macy Gray playing colleges and stuff we started seeing her gravitas and her like magnetism here in the UK and so Macy was the one who told me like yo there's more to the UK than London Americans they just think like yeah we're going to London we go to London we just played the uk like no he played london after learning that from macy i just wanted to go everywhere in the uk scotland wales you know just want to travel throughout the whole entire country not just london and when it really started to kind of you realized that it was kind of like international stardom how was that on your mental health oh that didn't affect my mental health no no because i have my best friends to be like you you know we can't take none of this stuff seriously like if somebody comes up to us and says oh my gosh you're so great that that could be poison because that means how do you know if they're just just saying that who's gonna tell us when shit is bad.

33:38So we always got to just listen to us. And we always have to be honest to one another. All this other stuff, the praises, the hate, ignore that stuff. If somebody comes up to you and says, oh my gosh, you're so awesome. If you're going to take that seriously, that means when somebody says, oh my gosh, you suck, you got to take that seriously too. You can't pick which one you want to hold precious. There's truth in you suck. There's truth in you're great. And so that kind of doesn't affect your mental health once you're grounded in reality. That's reality. Sometimes when people say you suck, you suck.

34:20Sometimes when people say that show was bad, it was probably bad. Sometimes when people say your show was great, it probably was great. Sometimes when they say that was the best show you've ever done, maybe, yeah. You've got to be able to take them all. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert.

35:04That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. When it comes to what your family eats and drinks, you know your choices matter. You're the expert because you know what fits your life. And getting it right starts with good information. That's why America's beverage companies are sharing more information about our ingredients at GoodToKnowFacts.org. No spin, no judgments, just the facts straight from the experts for more than 140 beverage ingredients. Visit goodtoknowfacts.org. For a limited time at McDonald's, get a Big Mac extra value meal for$8. That means two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun, and medium fries, and a drink.

35:52We may need to change that jingle. Prices and participation may vary. And we thought we were international with words of love. And then we realized that that wasn't truly international until we got to I Got a Feeling. And so every time is a new time. And then after that, we realized that I got a feeling was big, but not big like Ritmo and Mamacita. Because now people in the Latin world, they are now singing songs with us because we have chosen and dedicated ourselves to write songs in a different language with the same passion of writing in English. and we were able to do that because I was raised around an all-Mexican neighborhood and that gave us a different level of international appeal.

36:40So you were always able to stay pretty level-headed no matter how famous you guys got? Yeah, because fame is a cocktail. You can't drink it when you're thirsty and the moment you start feasting on fame, it's going to distort your perspective on life. So yes, fame is there. But do you start drinking it like it's going to quench your thirst when you're thirsty? No. It's an alcoholic beverage. It will intoxicate you. So you have to be very selective of how many sips of fame you take. And you don't wear it as a necklace. It's heavy. It's going to rip the skin on your neck. Fame is cool. But it's not a cuddly, snuggle companion.

37:29eventually you're not going to be famous. And then what? You're going to be depressed. Fame is like you have a tamed panther or lion in your midst. Do you ride it like a horse? You probably shouldn't. Because eventually that lion is going to get hungry. And although it's tamed, it will eat your ass. So you don't use it as a method of transportation. I can imagine a lot of people listening to this who think yeah that's great but how do I know which of those people are I guess like real like which of them are gonna stick by you tell you when you're acting too much a certain way tell you when you're getting like too carried away by the fame how do you choose those people and how do you make sure you know you're keeping people you can trust by you You know, like when you go into a tube or airplane or public place and an old person walks in, an elderly person walks in or you say, excuse me, do you want to take my seat?

38:31Like, notice how everyone's voice becomes kind and gentle no matter what. Or if you if an elderly person is lost or needs help, your voice tone changes to address the fragility. to be mindful and kind of what they need and you put something above you. Very rarely, and the people that do do that, you know are dicks or assholes. If an elderly person is on a tube and you're sitting down and they come to you and say, excuse me, can I take your seat? I'm sorry, ma 'am, you see me sitting here. That's an asshole, right? It's clearly that that person is a dick and has no empathy. and that humbleness, you want to show up all the time, not just for elderly people, but for people.

39:25And if your friends that you have around you that you've selected have that humble heart where there's always going to be something above your level of success, that's temporary by the way, and you don't know if the person that you came across is going to be your boss five years from now, or you're going to be dependent on them five years from now. Your moment is a short moment. And the objective is to be kind when you're here. So people are kind to you when you're here. And when you're around Hollywood, you see that up and down, you know, roller coaster all the time, people that used to be large, eventually are not large.

40:06And on your way up, they're going to remember you on your way down of how you acted and how you you know treated people and we've seen that and I would say that I'm blessed to have the friends I have so do you think it's been incredibly important to your success to stay humble to stay humble meant I had an option to not be i don't know how to not be mindful is the right word because to stay humble is not humble like y 'all the most humblest motherfucker in the world for real though ain't nobody more humbler than me that's not humble but to be mindful of your surroundings and the people that you come across to realize that they have dreams too they have paths acknowledge everybody when you walk into a room, acknowledge that they have dreams.

41:01And maybe their dream, you could help them materialize that dream. Somebody received me when they walked into a room and acknowledged me, Ms. Montez, Jimmy Iving, Eazy-E. These people saw my dream. And so how do you, if you're a recipient of that type of energy are you going to duplicate and amplify that same energy that helped amplify you that's why i like to be that type of agent so i want to talk about your move into tech and first of all your new app fyi could you tell me a little bit about what that is fyi is a a solution to the status on how creatives work on their phone so there's a lot of creatives that have a whatsapp an imessage or a telegram and they work from it because there's no software for creative enterprise no matter what domain of creativity you create in whether you're an illustrator, a musician, a songwriter, a graphic designer.

42:18For some reason, we work from the messenger. And to work from the messenger, you need Dropbox and you need a WeTransfer. And to send large files and open large files, you're not opening those large files in the messenger. You have to then go to email to open up a large file. But you really can't send a large file on email so you then you have to zip it and compress it and so why are you doing all those different things if the phone tells you that you could send large files on some places and open large files in some places but why are other components and compartments limited in scope so it's like yo there needs to be a better messenger that allows you to send large files open large files keep all your digital asset um assets safe with digital asset management tools and keys that keep your data safe, like how keys keep your cryptocurrency safe.

43:16Why can't it keep my data and my conversation safe? So FYI is a singular interface for creative communication, collaboration, digital asset management, and elliptical curve cryptography baked in the core to keep all your assets safe with generative AI at the center to help you supercharge your strategies and your creative company flow and so it's clear kind of how the idea came about once you had that idea how did you make it happen like how did you find the right people to build the tech how did you find the team to build it so when we sold beats to HTC in 2011 I took my portion of my earnings and I went to go find teams because around this time Jimmy was like you know one day you're gonna realize that being the talent you should be collecting talent you collected us i'm a part of your collection of talent oh wow that's freaking dope i've never thought of that i never thought that jimmy collected talent like dre myself collect is a harsh word curated talent so i was like you know what i want to curate talent too but i don't want rappers and beat makers.

44:37I want to rock with developers. So I went to Bangalore, India and Israel to find developers to create solutions around 2012. And so I knew where to go. I started building AI solutions in 2013, 14, 15, 16, 17. Sold a couple of companies and technologies to big companies with the work that we were doing in Bangalore and Israel. And so in 2020, when I had the idea for FYI, I knew where to go to materialize the idea. I knew what talent that was out there. And it was a small team that was put together to materialize the vision of a singular interface, creative enterprise communication collaboration platform.

45:26I talk about productivity a lot. And I think productivity is incredibly important in terms of, you know, getting the most out of your day to day. I do also think that productivity can sometimes be the kind of antidote to creativity. Like it's tough to create in a pre-assigned time. Well, how do you balance being productive and being creative? I don't believe in writer's block. People that are crippled by this concept of writer's block are hard on themselves. They're the ones that have put themselves in creative paralysis. And they don't use time as an agent or gravity to get the idea out. So I like to use, if I'm ever having a block, is I use time.

46:13I got 30 minutes. Whatever I make in 30 minutes is what I make. However it is, is however it is. There's no need to judge it. Why am I going to judge it? I have to release it. And I got 30 minutes to do it. Go. And whatever I do in that time is what I do in that time. Later on, you'll be like, oh, wow, there was some gems that came out of that little exercise. Because your mind is critical for a lot of reasons. Maybe you're going through relationship problems. Maybe you're bloated. Maybe you've ate some food and you're not liking the way you're feeling right now. So now you're internalizing on things that are happening inside your mind.

46:49You're being extra critical. And you shouldn't be critical. Because no matter if it's good or bad, somebody's going to like it. If you think it's really great, you're going to have a heartbreak when somebody says that shit's horrible. So who are you creating for in the first place? Are you creating for yourself? For you to like it? Are you creating for other people? For other people to like it? Or are you just creating for therapy to get it out? And that's the healthy way for me to go about creating. I got this idea. I don't care what it is. This is for Coca-Cola Company. I got to get it out. If they like it, great.

47:26If they don't, whatever, I still got it out. I executed this idea. And that, that comes with no boulder. That comes with no stress if you create from that perspective. It's like a sponge. Imagine a sponge like, man, I'm just not feeling it today. I don't know how to release all this water I sponged up. A sponge, you'll never hear a fucking sponge complaining about that shit. As a matter of fact, you probably never talk to a sponge to know how a sponge feels. All you know that a sponge absorbs, and when you do this, it comes out. And if it doesn't come out, it's not a sponge. It's a rock. Now, which one are you?

48:12Are you a rock or are you a sponge? I'm a sponge. I absorb. I rinse out. There's no judgment. If you like it, great. If you don't, cool. my job is a sponge it's therapy for me i want to talk about ai obviously fyi uses ai um i know there's been a lot of i mean it's obviously very much a growing industry at the moment but also there's a lot of fear around it do you think we should be scared of ai i think we should be afraid of people and business models and lack of regulations and lack of governance. And if we are to fear it, we should fear it, how it's going to impact society the way social media did, how social media undermined people's civil liberties and privacy, and how social media affected democracies and people voting.

49:19So if we were so loose and careless with social media, let's make sure we are not loose with AI because it's just going to duplicate and amplify an impact on a greater level if we handle AI like we handle social media. Now with social media, like the culprit or business practices the culprit it's the business practices so we live in a world where who has access to your cookies what the fuck is a cookie anyway and why they call it a cookie why they call the most powerful thing on your phone the most cutest thing where you give access to your cookies to everybody all i know on sesame street there was this motherfucker called a cookie monster.

50:07And even he was cute, but he ate real cookies. These companies are different types of cookie monsters. And so I'm afraid of AI if the same cookie practice and data manipulation is being applied to this new realm that we're entering. So no, I'm not afraid of AI. I'm worried and concerned of people, greed, and misuse of power when today's power is data. And another name for data is cookies. Before we end, I want to ask you two specific questions that I feel like will really help some people listening. First of all, if you were speaking to a kind of version of you or like a hyper creative kid, what would you say that they should be focusing their time on or focusing their time investment in?

51:05Dream big and try your hardest to materialize those dreams. No matter what the dream is. Be audacious. and materialize your audacities into ideas that are magnetic. Be ambitious and surround yourself with other ambitious people that can add strategy to your ambitions. Those three. Dreams, audacity, ambition, manifestation. You know what that spells? Damn. Sorry. D-A-A-M.

51:48yeah talk to me about manifest talk to me about manifestation for a second why is that important to you because a dream without a path of manifestation is just like an idea that's just going to cause anxiety and depression later on so manifestation to you is like an action plan. Yeah, yeah. You manifest a dream. To manifest it, you need strategy. If you want to take a dream and make it real, you want to manifest it. How do you manifest? You need a manifesto. What's a manifesto? That's a manuscript. What's a manuscript? That's manually being strategic to materialize that dream. And the bigger the dream, the more audacious you have to be.

52:41The more audacious you have to be, you have to arm yourself with ambition. You have to be ambitious, audacious to manifest these massive dreams. And what would you say your most important habits are that have, I guess, made you so successful? It's a gift and a curse, meaning I don't know when to stop until it's materialized. That could be good and that could be bad. It could be bad if you're on a mission impossible. There's certain things that just can't be done given the level of technological advancements that you currently are in. So if I was ambitious in 1700 and I'm like, yo, I want to go to the moon, the technology was not available because you needed aluminum.

53:35You ain't going to the moon in wood. You ain't going to the moon in freaking stone. Certain types of materials needed to come first before man or our species could get off the planet to go to moon. So you could be ambitious all you want, but if the technology is not there, that's why you need to manifest technologies. And sometimes manifesting those technologies take time. So how much time do you actually have to materialize your dream? So you have to be self-aware. You have to be aware of where we are collectively as a species, technologically, scientifically. Some dreams cannot be manifested right now.

54:21Well, I think that's a perfect place to stop. Thank you so much. It's been really great to have you. I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in London. Hey, I have to say, this is a really awesome interview. Thank you. really really thank you yeah obvious probably why you have a successful podcast thank you um yeah you're really dope thank you I really appreciate that that's very kind

54:45thank you so much for listening to this very special episode of working hard hardly working with the incredible will I am I've never spoken to somebody who has kind of spoken so creatively like you can almost see how his mind works as he's speaking to you and it is so incredible to me now that we are getting guests like Will on the podcast and it's all thanks to you. So thank you so much for subscribing and listening to the podcast. It really means more than you know and I hope that we can continue to have amazing conversations with incredible people like Will.

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56:10You're invited to spend an evening on Fremont Avenue. For generations, this house has been home to soulful music, good food, and cutthroat card games. Saints and sinners. unexpected laughs and unspoken truths good times hard times and of course family always family so pull up a chair and join us at fremont avenue a world premiere play only at arena stage performances start october 8th tickets at arenastage.org