Jimmy Iovine spent his career working with the very best people we can.
People like John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bono, Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor, Eminem, and Jimmy knew just like Steve Jobs knew, just like Jeff Bezos knew that you always bet on talent.
In fact, Steve Jobs said that you must find the extraordinary people that a small group of A plus players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.
And Jeff Bezos set the tone from his very first shareholder letter when he said that setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success.
You must build a team that pursues the A plus players.
That is exactly what Jimmy Iovine did and that is exactly what Ramp did.
Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast and Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry.
Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible.
In the last 12 months they have hired only 0 .23 % of the people that have applied.
This means that when you use RAMP you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24 -7 to automate and improve all of your businesses financial operations and they do this on a single platform.
RAMP gives your business easy -to -use corporate credit cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control.
The longer use ramp the more efficient your company becomes.
What kind of products can a team of A -plus players build?
A product that creates so much value for their customers that the customers never leave. Ramp is an example of that.
Last year 12 ,059 businesses signed up for ramp and only 8 of the 12 ,059 businesses decided ramp wasn't for them.
I run my business on ramp and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs I know.
I hear from people that listen to podcast every day that has switched to RAMP and have raved about the quality of the product.
Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to RAMP .com to learn how they can help your business today.
That is RAMP .com. I've been wanting to make an episode on Jimmy Iovine for years.
If you would ask me who would you most like to meet and have a conversation with he's towards the top of the list of people that I'd love to meet and have a conversation with.
The four -part documentary on his life in partnership with Dr. Dre, It's called The Defiant Ones.
It's one of my Favorite documentaries of all time.
I've rewatch it all the time I've probably seen it more than 10 times and there's certain parts and clips from it that I've seen over a 100 and what is fascinating to me is like if you go and search for Defiant Ones You can read the description of the documentary and it would say something like The Defiant Ones tells of the unbreakable bond of trust and friendship between music legends Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre two street smart men from different worlds who together defied traditional wisdom and transformed contemporary culture in the process.
Yes, it is undoubtedly about the life and the partnership of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre over multiple multiple decades but what I really think The Defiant Ones is about, it is really a documentary about entrepreneurship.
So to make this episode for you, I re -watched all The Defiant Ones and I listened to every interview I could find by Jimmy there's no biographies, there's no autographies of Jimmy Iveen, yet I hope you I would love if he wrote an autobiography, and so then what I did is took notes on all this combine this into one outline and that's what I want to talk to you about.
And just before we jump in, like one of the reasons he's really special is like, Jimmy is one of these super talented people that the general population probably don't really know.
They're most likely not familiar with him at all, but the top people in his industry know and admire him going way back from like John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Dr. Dre, Eminem, David Geffen, countless other music executives.
And so hopefully by the end of this you'll see why those people, and me, admire and study and learn from Jimmy Iovine.
He's got two of my favorite ideas that I've ever heard. Which I'll point to point out to you as we go through this, and I want to start with the fact that he was born in Brooklyn, and his dad, when he graduates school.
The plan was that his dad set him up to get him a job at the docks.
So Jimmy's dad was a longshoreman.
These are the people that obviously moved the cargo from the ships to the port and back and forth.
And Jimmy didn't want to be a longshoreman.
He actually does something.
Jimmy does something right from a very young age that's really smart that would actually make Charlie Munger proud.
Charlie Munger would always say, Invert, always Invert.
And so Jimmy says, I was thinking not what I was going to do, I was thinking what I wasn't going to do.
I wanted to do something that was special.
He did not want to have a normal life.
Just having a normal job.
He admired his dad.
His dad was his best friend.
We'll talk a lot about that.
But he didn't want to be a longshoreman, and he didn't have a lot of interests.
But one thing that he was interested in from a very young age is the fact that he would sit in his room and listen to music for hours.
He says in the documentary that he would read the back of album covers and so his family at the time says that Jimmy has a skill that actually come in really handy later on in his life and career is that he was able to make you a superfan of whatever he was a fan of and at this time it was just a people the music that he was listening to so through a family member he minds of meeting this young talented singer -songwriter named Elie Greenwich and it was Elie Greenwich who got him his first two jobs in the music business and really it's a stretch to say he was in the music business because his first
job in the music business was sweeping up in the recording studio.
Somehow, he managed to get fired from that job.
She gets him another job in a recording studio.
This job comes with a 90 -day trial period.
Jimmy gets fired on the 89th day and so he's walking home I forget in fired he calls Ellie and he's crying and Ellie gets him another job this one She got him a job at what will become a famous recording studio called the record plant what I love about Jimmy's ability to tell stories he will talk about what happened You know he outlined his career and what happened to when he was younger and then he'll tell you what the important lesson from that Was and his point was like hey when you're in a position to help Somebody you should help them if you feel they deserve help and they deserve a break
you should do whatever you can to help them because he was really talking about Ellie.
What would have his life have been if the second time he got fired from a recording studio, she decided not to try to help him get another job.
That one act by her changed the entire trajectory of Jimmy's life and it winds up being his first big break because at the record plant is where he meets Roy Sechala.
Roy Sechala is a legendary engineer and producer, winds up becoming Jimmy's mentor.
Jimmy talks about this.
He says, when I was younger, I was scared to death.
I didn't know where my life was going to go.
And then I met Roy Sehcala and John Lennon, and they gave me a shot.
And then I worked with Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, and that was my college education.
I felt freedom, freedom from what I didn't know.
And one of the best things that Roy Sehcala did, remember, he's a legendary engineer and producer, he would teach you by working through you and so what working through you means he would literally sit Jimmy down at the board and said hey hit that button push down that lever see how the sound changes when you do that now do this now when you do that do this at the same time by working through Jimmy it gave Jimmy a feel and how to actually make a record he says Roy Roy gave me my skills and so Jimmy's first big break comes from answering the phone he's gonna describe what's about to happen here
later on as the first day of his life.
So he got a big break because Roy Sakala calls Jimmy on Easter Sunday and says, hey I need you to come in and help out in the studio.
Jimmy's living at home with his family.
He comes from a very traditional, you know, New York Italian family, and his mom's like you're crazy, you can't go it's Easter Sunday.
But Jimmy said I'll do anything, I will do anything to make this work.
He shows up to the studio, and Roy tells him I just wanted to see if you'd come in.
It was a In the studio with Roy Sekel on Easter Sunday was John Lennon.
And so almost overnight Jimmy goes from sweeping the floors to working the board with John Lennon.
And so on all these other interviews, on all these other podcasts, Jimmy tells these incredible John Lennon stories.
The interview that Jimmy Iovine did with Rick Rubin a few years ago was the best single podcast episode I heard all year.
And a lot of the stories that Jimmy tells this period is just like taking this extremely serious doing whatever was necessary not to get thrown out of this room.
Remember, he'd already been fired two times before, and he says, listen, I was just like how do I not get thrown out of this room, because I've been thrown out of a few rooms. I was sweaty.
Talking about being very, very nervous.
How could you not be nervous?
John's a Beatle for God's sake.
I'm sweaty. How can I just overdo it?
How do I just serve?
How can I be of service?
I learned, and he talks about not only running the board, setting up the mics, making sure this sounds good.
He's learned how to make John Lennon's tea.
I got so good at making John Lennon's tea he wouldn't let anybody else make it.
I timed it exactly right.
The way I am about everything, I was about that fucking tea.
And so there's another example of somebody further down the line, more successful, trying to help Jimmy.
He says John Lennon would just give me a shot on anything and everything.
It wasn't because I was talented, it's because he liked me and he felt he could trust me.
And so John is the person that's going to send Jimmy for the first time to California because John's gonna fly to California and work with this legendary producer named Phil Spector.
There's a bunch of crazy stories are about to happen here four decades later after I tell you these stories four decades later Phil Spector is going to actually murder somebody and he's going to die in jail.
But one of the things I have to point out to you is one of the things that Jimmy talks about that's one of my favorite ideas and I'll this with you?
It's just like everybody feels fear.
If you're trying to do anything new, if you're trying to be successful, if you're trying to change the trajectory of your life, you are going to feel fear.
You've got to be able to step forward when you feel that.
And I want to give you some background here.
John Lennon puts Jimmy Iovine up at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Jimmy Iovine is 20 years old.
He had never been on a plane before.
He had never stayed at a hotel before and now he's going to find himself in a room and have to figure out a way to help Two of the most well -known people in the music business, and this is where he just tells crazy stories.
So he sets everything up It's very difficult to get the sound exactly right.
Phil Spector shows up at the studio Jimmy's already been there, you know for hours and hours and hours and Phil Spector walks into the studio He's wearing a white butcher coat and he's got two guns strapped to his chest Remember, this is a guy who four decades later is going to murder a woman at his house and die in prison And so Jimmy is telling a story.
Remember he's 20 years old.
Has no experience, has a lot of fear, has a lot of insecurity.
He said it was complete chaos.
Phil was yelling at people.
He was calling Cher a whore.
Cher was in there singing backup.
There was alcohol. Gallons of alcohol.
They're drinking the whole time.
Phil Spector is yelling at everybody and it's crazy.
We have to record for three weeks like that.
One day Phil comes in, goes to the bathroom in the recording studio and starts shooting the bathroom up.
Another day, David Geffen shows up at the studio.
At this point, David Geffen is dating Cher.
So 20 -year -old Jimmy Iovino, who has no experience a lot of fear, a lot of insecurity, finds himself in a tiny, tiny room, and he's got David Geffen behind him and Phil Spector next to him.
And Phil is drunk and chaotic and yelling, and so he tries to start yelling at David Geffen, and this is the way Jimmy tells the story.
Phil is yelling at David, so David says something very David.
David says, I don't know about you but right now I have the number three, four, five, seven and eight top songs in the country.
This induces Phil into a state of rage and Phil decides to try to attack him physically.
He says Phil jumps into a karate stance, which made me laugh.
And what also made me laugh is Jimmy's interpretation this.
Remember Jimmy's from Brooklyn.
He grew up in a rough neighborhood and now he's around all these famous and really successful people and he goes, oh these people do this too?
This is stuff I see back in and so the main point here and what I really thought about is as he's telling these stories and I was watching documentary listening to his interviews like imagine being this is young kid it you're have to work through this you have to work all this you're in a very turbulent environment and you know if you fuck this up it's not like you're gonna get another chance and so that leads me to one of the two favorite ideas of Jimmy I mean I mentioned earlier in the fact that you need to use fear as a tailwind this is what Jimmy says fears a powerful thing it's got a lot
of firepower if you could figure out a way to wrestle that fear to push you from behind rather to stand in front of you that's very powerful I always felt that I had to work harder than the next guy just to do as well as the next guy and to do better than the next guy I had to just kill it that is still with me and how I work I just go in and he would say over and over again you have to train yourself that anytime you feel fear you have to take a step forward and I think one of the most important things it definitely you know Jimmy talks about this over and over again it's like one most important
and influential relationships he has in his life is with his father.
And I absolutely love what Jimmy's father did for him his father gave Jimmy confidence and this is what he said about his father, my father was a real cheerleader he always told me whatever room you go into is better because you are there, so I never felt no one wants me here or I don't belong.
I think that's really important because Jimmy said in another interview that when he was younger like had a lot of insecurities and a lot of fear.
I was one of those guys like, o man, I hope they don't hit the ball to me.
And so he gets to work with Bruce Springsteen.
There is so many great ideas that he learns from Bruce, but I think the two most important ones is the fact that this, for the first time in his life, he sees what a real work ethic looks like.
He says, over and over again, I learned my work ethic from Bruce.
And then the second most important thing that comes out of this is the fact that they become lifelong friends.
This is like 1975 or something like this.
I think Bruce is like 80 now.
Jimmy's in his 70s and they're still friends.
And so the way I think about what Jimmy is about to witness here is I can summarize this in one of my favorite maxims. Mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.
Jimmy says, Bruce Springsteen taught me a work ethic.
Bruce taught me that you don't stop until you get it right.
Bruce's parts in the documentary about this time are some of my favorite ones.
This it is a bunch of quotes I want to read He says, if you want to accomplish what hasn't been accomplished before, you have to be relentlessly and unapologetically determined.
You had two kinds of guys that we ran into at that time.
They're the kind of guys that wanted to go home at five o 'clock and their interest in what you were doing didn't exceed the normal day for them.
And those guys never lasted.
Because when you're trying to push the boundaries on things, and when you're trying to move into different types of frontiers, you need to be surrounded by people who really believe in what you're doing." Damn it, that is such a good point and a great quote.
If you're trying to do something new, if you're trying to push the boundaries, I would say if you're trying to live up to your potential to fulfill your potential, you need to be surrounded by people who believe in what you're doing.
He continues, we were just very, very determined.
If you were new to our you.
It was simply understood that you were there because you believed what we were doing was worth it.
And so all these people are talking about what it was like working with Bruce back then and he says that Bruce would simply lose track of time.
Bruce said, we spent three weeks trying to get drum sounds right, which is indulgent, but sometimes you need to be indulged.
Jimmy talks about us that Bruce would stand over him and say one word over and over again.
DICK, STICK, STICK...
and what Springsteen meant by that is like hit it again the drum was not producing what he called size and power.
It is producing the wrong sound.
It is not good enough.
So do it again for three straight weeks.
And then Jimmy has this great quote from Bruce Springsteen.
There's quotes sometimes where a person reveals their inner belief and they can do it in a sentence or a handful of sentences and you immediately understand who that person is.
And this quote is the most important quote for me.
It's the reason why it's next to me is this giant book that I'm gonna read, which is Springsteen's autobiography called Born To Run.
I heard Jimmy say this quote that he heard from Springsteen and then I immediately ordered the book.
This is what Jimmy said.
Bruce said something brilliant.
He said, I didn't want to be rich. I didn't want to be famous.
I didn't even want to be happy.
I wanted to be great.
Do you have any idea how many of the founders that you and I have studied in this podcast that that applies to?
And so I went through Bruce Springsteen's autobiography, and I wanted to see all the mentions of Jimmy Iovine in Springsteen's autobiography, and I found this excellent quote on what Jimmy Iovine was like at this time in their life.
And Bruce writes this line almost like he's writing a song.
Jimmy Iovine, brilliant imposter, young studio dog with the fastest learning curve I've ever seen.
So Bruce is applying relentless pressure on top of a young Jimmy Iovine, he says Jimmy would fall asleep at the soundboard. He was under so much pressure, and so sleep deprived, he almost quit.
And Bruce's manager gave Jimmy some of the most important advice.
This is when Jimmy thought he couldn't take it anymore and he tried to quit.
And Jimmy said this is one of the most important things that anybody ever told him.
He said, Jimmy stay in the fucking saddle.
You are missing the big picture.
What are we here for?
We are here to help Bruce make the best record he can.
That's the job. We're not here to make you happy.
We're not here to make me happy.
We're project. If you go back in there, and you say to Bruce, I am here to support you.
This is not about me, it's about the album.
You will have a friend for the rest of your life and you have learned a lesson.
That is the big picture.
The idea to always stay focused on the big picture is the piece of advice that Jimmy would repeat and would apply for the rest of his career.
This is Jimmy's key takeaway from that advice and this experience.
He said ,you were there to make their project better, and part of that is caring as much about their music as they do.
I just said, if these people are allowing me in this room, I'm going to do as much as I can to be of service to them.
That's what it was built on.
It's funny some of the best investors I know actually speak exactly like this and how they view the founders they work with.
In fact, I was talking to Josh Kushner at Thrive, and he said almost this exact same thing to me.
I'm going to or my interpretation of his view of the founders that he works for, you're there to help make their project better and part of that is caring as much about their music as they do.
I just said if these people are allowing me in this room, I'm gonna do as much as I can to be of service to them.
That is what it is built on.
And so Jimmy doesn't quit.
Jimmy goes back in that room, he helps Bruce do whatever he can to make the best album he possibly can and the result, the album they are working on is Bruce's album Born to Run, Which goes on to be the massive success and to this day which I think the album's been out pride for 50 years If you go and look at any list of you know The top hundred top five hundred greatest albums ever made born to run is on those lists And so Jimmy's life changes now He's like oh I want to work with the same guy that worked on born to run and Jimmy talks about the fact that This is success could be one of the most
dangerous things that can help to happen to you He says you have success and you start feeling yourself.
He says I call this breathing your own exhaust. The maximum I have for this.
Breathing your own exhaust is a great one, but if you go to sleep on a win you'll wake up with a loss.
Stick to the routine.
Stick to what got you there.
What was great was that they locked themselves in a studio and didn't leave until it was perfect, and so Jimmy talks about making mistakes at this point in his life.
He's like, oh, like, I got hired by this band called Fogg Hat and, you know, he goes, I wasn't good at my job yet.
I didn't understand.
He goes, I brought my girlfriend to some of the sessions.
So he starts living the lifestyle not realizing that that's not what it is.
It's the work. It's the routine.
And so he winds up getting fired off that project, and then he has this great line about this, which is also another great idea.
He's a college dropout kind of from the streets of Brooklyn, but he's got so much wisdom about.
He just has a fundamental understanding of human nature and how to to add value to other people and how to be successful.
And he says, you know he got fired he was on like the top of the mountain right it's like we just did border run now my next project I got fired now I'm down in the valley and he says I was embarrassed you think everyone else is paying attention to your life and they aren't it's complete bullshit and it was one of the most important things to happen to him because what does he do he recommits he's like I'm not gonna go sleep on a win and wake up a loss I'm not gonna breathe my own exhaust I'm gonna get back to what made me successful and so starts working with this artist named Patty Smith and she's
describing working with him at this point in his life.
Jimmy worked all the time, he would stay for hours he'd study.
This is such a genius idea.
This is his form of professional research and practice.
Jimmy would find old tapes and see if he could improve them.
I'm gonna take a song from ten or twenty years ago and see if I can actually reproduce it and make it even better.
And this is what Jimmy said at this point in sight.
I said to myself no fun, no life, no nothing.
You are giving up everything.
You will put a hundred percent into this.
Jimmy's like this by the way with whatever he does.
This is another reason why I find him so fascinating and why he's one of the people I most admire and keep in mind he likes to pivot.
He'll talk about this like you know record producer that's starting a record company then launching businesses with his artists.
Like he does not want to do the same thing forever but whatever he's into he's into it 100 And so this is the result of him recommitting.
He winds up having this massive top 10 hit, so Patti Smith is gonna do the song called Because the Night.
That wouldn't have happened without Jimmy because Jimmy got that song from Bruce Springsteen.
So Bruce Springsteen would write all of these songs and never use them.
Bruce was prolific and being prolific is highly correlated with greatness.
Just because you're prolific won't mean that you're gonna be great, but if you're great it's highly likely that you've been prolific too.
And in fact, I got one of the greatest examples of this recently.
Daniel Eck, who's the founder of Spotify, actually sent me this excerpt on Prince.
Let me read it to you.
It says, reduced every track and released 39 albums. While others chased hits, he stockpiled greatness.
By the time he died, his vault held over 8 ,000 unreleased songs, enough for a new album every year for the next century.
Prince didn't just master music, he let it consume him.
That's what made him immortal.
And so Bruce Springsteen was like that too.
Bruce talks about Jimmy Iovine convincing him to give one of his songs to Patti Smith.
This is what Bruce said, There is the talent of Jimmy Iovine.
He eases in, and he greases the wheels so things happen at a certain moment, and Jimmy Iovine works his magic.
Bruce gives the song to Jimmy.
Jimmy gives the song to Patti Smith.
Patti Smith writes some more lyrics to it.
It's called, Because the Night, actually went through.
I also went back and every time they mentioned some of these songs they made, I went and listened to him.
This songs like 50 years old, still sounds great, and it becomes this massive hit.
And then I loved Patty talking about what it was like working with Jimmy, again, going back to, it's an act of service.
I am there to make your project better, I'm there to do whatever I can to help you, you know, if that means being stuck in the studio for three weeks, hearing Bruce Springsteen say, stick, stick, stick, it means making John tea, it doesn't matter.
There's no ego involved.
I'll do whatever it takes to win.
So, Patti Smith, on working with Jimmy Iovine, it wasn't that Jimmy wanted to be the number one guy, he was ambitious for you, he was ambitious for me.
You always felt that his whole goal was for the world to see what he was seeing.
There's another great interview and it talks about just the, the sheer amount of time that Jimmy would invest into his artist. He says, you were notorious for phone calls and long phone conversations with your artist. What was the significance of that?
And so they record all day and usually into the night and then they've talked for hours.
And Jimmy says as a producer you have a responsibility to understand the person's record you're making, to understand what they're trying to get out.
I would spend a lot of time on the phone after the sessions.
I would spend a lot of time just talking to them.
Again that's another piece of just very simple and profound wisdom.
Take some interests in other people.
It takes time to deeply understand anything, people are no different.
And so now another example of opportunity to handle the world unlocks more opportunity.
Tom Petty wants to work with him.
And so Tom Petty does a great job in the documentary and he gives a lot of good insight into what Jimmy Iovine's like and what it's like working with him.
He's like listen, Jimmy is very very convincing, he's very very persuasive is what Tom said.
And he says he's also obsessed.
And so another reoccurring theme that this advice that Jimmy gives out and I think, you know, obviously he said part of the way he learned This is through Bruce Springsteen.
It's just like you don't just record a song once.
You don't just do it five times You do it a hundred you do it two hundred times.
He later on works with Bono and U2 I think they're they said in the documentary like the one track.
They recorded 250 times and so Tom Petty says, Jimmy became so obsessed with getting the right take on a song that we did over a hundred takes.
I think we should do more Jimmy would repeat let's do more and so two of the songs they make are the songs called Here Comes My Girl and Refugee and this is hilarious.
This is Jimmy talking now.
Tom played me the songs Here Comes My Girl and Refugee.
I looked at Tom and said get another eight songs quick cuz we're done we're gonna be millionaires.
Tom thought that was such a strange thing to say about a song and then one thing they notice is it's not just creating the work.
Jimmy was also really good at marketing.
One of the best marketers I've ever come across.
They call him a tornado of promotion.
He wanted to have influence, he wanted to have control on marketing.
Because he says the problem is, you'd come to these these record executives and you'd play them like the new Tom Petty song or the new Bruce Springsteen song.
And they would just say the dumbest shit.
They're like yeah that doesn't really sound like your last record. And hearing that in the documentary, this induces Jimmy into a state of rage.
He goes and Jimmy would say of course it doesn't sound like the last record, it's not supposed to sound like the last record. The whole concept That is to not sound like anybody else.
Jimmy just didn't want to make a song like everybody.
In fact, he has a great line.
He says great is success.
That that is the North Star.
Make something great.
If you can do that, then after that you can figure out how to get how to get exposed to more people.
But the first thing is great is success.
And that applies to not only the products and the songs that Jimmy wanted to work to work on and to make, but it's who he wanted to work with.
Tom Petty just nails what is one of Jimmy's, what was one of Jimmy's superpowers.
He says, one thing about Jimmy Iovine is he's always known which people to hang around with.
That is spooky because Steve Jobs said literally the same thing about himself.
Steve Jobs said, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with.
You must find extraordinary people.
So one of the main things I take away from studying Jimmy Iovine is Jimmy worked with the best. You always bet on talent.
He worked with John Lennon, Springsteen, Tom Petty, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Trend, Reznor, he's going to talk about this over and over again just to find the best people and then he just empowers them.
He talks about this like producing the producers, is I think the way he puts this.
I'll get to this in a little bit.
So, but he's also, you can see he's a learning machine.
Remember who Bruce Springsteen says, guys got the god damn fastest like learning curve anybody I've ever seen.
So he's like, okay, well what did I do last time?
I built a relationship with Bruce Springsteen.
This guy's prolific.
He's writing all these songs he's not using.
I say, hey this is a good song you're you and you kind of give it to Patti Smith.
Tom Petty same thing, very prolific, writes all these songs, doesn't use, you know, not even half of them.
So he takes the idea that worked with Patti Smith, and he convinced you, you know, Bruce Springsteen to give one of the songs, and he says, he's starting to work with Stevie Nicks, who was super famous.
I think she was in this band called Fleetwood Mac, but now she went on her own.
And so Jimmy starts producing her records, her new solo album, and he's also dating her at the same time.
And he realizes that Stevie has great songs, but she doesn't have a single, And he found a song that Tom Petty had that he wasn't using, and this is going to be the song called Stop Dragging My Heart.
He convinced his Petty to give Stevie Nicks the song and perform on the record, and Tom Petty has this hilarious description of Jimmy Iovine's sales pitch to him.
He's like, give her the song and this is gonna buy you a house, which again, Tom thought was just like a weird thing to say about a song.
So that song, stop dragging my heart around, becomes a massive hit.
It goes to number one on the charts.
I love what Jimmy says here, but this time in his life, and this is how I feel, I resonate with his story.
This is the great thing about, you know, you and I going over these stories all the time.
It's like, yeah, we're learning about other people, we're really seeing reflections of ourselves.
The kind of ideas that resonate with them.
We see, oh that resonates with me too and this is one of them.
He says, I only knew one thing that every time I went back to the studio, I felt better and my life would get better.
It was that simple, this idea really resonates with me and I think just think about what we're saying.
Just focus on making a great product.
And that product should make somebody else's life better.
That's step one. Then you find a way to keep making a greater number of other people's lives better and your own life will get better automatically.
Jimmy Iovine was fundamentally uncomfortable with anything else but being in the studio and part of this is because he's one of the most relentlessly competitive people you ever come across.
He's insanely driven.
In fact this is Doug Morris on Jimmy.
He says, after everything is said and done, Jimmy wants a win.
So he's super focused and only wants to be in the studio.
How does a super focused workaholic date?
He winds up meeting, which is going to wind being his first wife.
This is actually a really important part of the documentary, and I'm going to bring this up several times, of how do you have personal relationships with people like a Jimmy Iovine or a Dr. Dre or really any, you know, super driven workaholic.
Somebody just like is chasing after some somebody who's on something that's so important to them, is on a mission, that they have a hard time taking time away from that.
We see this from the very first time.
Jimmy's going to wind up being married to his wife for 25 years.
They have four kids.
Unfortunately, he sends in divorce.
And there's a lot of lessons that I'll go over about that later.
But there's kind of an indication here.
And so his first wife says, I met Jimmy at a party.
This is a paragraph.
This paragraph is a great summary of his personality.
I met Jimmy at a party.
He said, if you give me your phone number and I remember it, can I call you?
He called me 10 times the next day.
For our first date, he sent a limousine to pick me up.
Inside were napkins with my name printed on them.
But he's not in limo.
Then I realized we're on the way to his house to pick him up.
That should have been my first indication he doesn't want to wait for people.
And so Vicki is a model and a playboy playmate.
She's a TV host, she's an attorney, and as part of being a TV host she ends up interviewing a young Bono at the very beginning of U2.
And she's like, you need to meet my boyfriend Jimmy.
You guys would work really well together.
And so this is another one of Jimmy's superpowers.
It's like he first goes and sees, and hears about a young Bono and U2.
And so he says, when I first saw a young Bono I realized he had the same thing that Springsteen had.
He had The Edge. This identifying of the very best people to work with is really important.
Why is this important?
Because this is what Jimmy said, you're only as good as the artist that you're working with.
Any producer who says, I did this, and I did that, is full of shit.
99 % of what's going on in studio is the artist. And so at first, Bono was a little resistant to Jimmy.
He said their styles were so vastly different and then Bono has this great description of him.
Jimmy happens to you.
He's like a virus and it takes over your organs and your brains.
He just knows this is going to work out well for both of you.
He chased us all around the world until we agreed to come to the studio with him.
He would not take no for an answer.
Does this sound familiar?
This is the way he signs talent, works on deals.
This is he dates it's exact same thing uh there's a hilarious uh for some reason this popped in my mind when it's like hey this guy would not take no for an answer this guy's chasing us all over the world until we signed with him we just decided to work with him the founder of visa d -hawk actually described his sales technique one time in this autobiography he wrote and he said i held fast to the notion that until someone has repeatedly said no and adamantly refuses another word on the subject.
They are in the process of saying yes and don't know it." And so Jimmy starts working with Bono and he just realizes, oh there's a lot that Bono and Springsteen have in common. They have this extreme work ethic.
And he said, Bono and U2 work like Springsteen, they just go.
And on Bono's part he describes one of the benefits of working with Jimmy.
A great idea has a lot in common with a great melody, and Jimmy's gift is the clear thought.
He hears the clear melody and applies that wherever he is.
So he starts out as an 18, 19 year old kid sweeping the floor in a recording studio.
We are now 12 now. He's 31 years old.
So we're 12, 13 years into his life.
He's had massive success.
And then the single worst day of his life occurs.
He says, in 1984, I went with my father to his father's funeral.
The next morning, I flew back to L .A.
I get a phone call from my sister saying that my dad had a heart attack.
I rush back to New York.
Six weeks later, my father's mother died.
Two days after that, my father died.
My father, his mother, and his father all died within six weeks.
The day that my father died was the worst day of my life.
It is still the worst day of my life.
We were very, very close and I had no idea he was going to die.
He was my best friend in the whole world.
He is still my best friend in the whole world." He's destroyed, he's lost. At the same time he loses his father, he starts his own family.
Minds of marrying Vicky.
They have their first child and he realizes, I need a pivot.
I can't do this anymore.
He's starting to love business more than producing." Jimmy talks about this point in his life.
He says, "...I was focused and miserable.
I was working 24 hours a day.
I never did anything other than work.
I didn't want to do anything other than work.
I wanted to stop producing records.
I was 18 years in, and I was burnt out.
I didn't want to be out all night producing records and not see my kids." Tom Petty, who was good friends with him at the time, says, "...
Jimmy's heart was in the business.
He had a calling. His calling was to be a great businessman, even though he was a producer.
He was an even better entrepreneur, and that is exactly what happened.
And so we go back to this reoccurring theme in Jimmy's life.
Seeking out people that are willing to help you, willing to, that are further down the line, they're willing to teach you and reach back and help you.
So he sees that David Geffen sold his company and Jimmy has this great, Jimmy has this great observation.
He says, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I think he does what I do, but he just made all this fucking money.
So I went to see David Geffen to seek his advice.
So I said to David, hey I want to start a record company and Geffen told me you should do it there are a lot of record people a lot dumber than you are which which I thought was hilarious but Jimmy's response I was like that's that was actually inspiring for him to tell me that and he says I've always been a fan of David we became friends and he just constantly stayed in my life and it helped me David Geffen taught me the art of business in music I was going in not knowing anything about business.
And again, this is what Geffen says about Jimmy.
If people think you're serious right and you're easy to understand, they will help you.
John Lennon understood that Jimmy was serious.
Bruce Springsteen understood the Jimmy was serious.
Geffen sees the same exact thing.
He says, my first impression of Jimmy was that he was a sponge.
He picked up everything he heard or saw.
That sounds exactly like what Bruce Springsteen realized about Jimmy when he first met, now we're just like you know years or 18 years later so this is the big push.
This is when Jimmy decides to found his own record label he's going to start Interscope Records.
Which is going to become one of the most successful record labels of all time.
So after David Geffen sold his record company I think he sold it for like oh 400 or 500 million something like that.
There was a ton of people realizing oh wait I need to start my own record label.
Just like Jimmy had that same realization right and so Jimmy needed to find his edge and I thought what he his observation here really, really brilliant.
What is the edge for Interscope going to be?
And so Jimmy says, I didn't feel comfortable around executives.
I felt comfortable around artists and record producers.
Producers know how to get the best out of artists.
So I found my niche.
I got to find great producers and I'll produce them.
One of these is going to be Trent Reznor, the lead person in this band Nine Inch Nails.
So at the time Nine Inch Nails was signed to an independent record label that they absolutely hated.
They're having a lot of success.
So all these other major record labels are saying, hey, Trent, we'll fund the lawsuit to get Nine Inch Nails out of the contract.
And Jimmy didn't think that would work and said you have to you should actually work on convincing the owner of the independent record label to partner.
And in this case, what the partnership would look like is you're going to transfer that contract to Jimmy to to so he could start working with them.
And the way that Jimmy did this was very interesting and And I think it also talks about why he was so talented.
He deliberately chose a different path.
So every day for a year, starting at 6 a .m. Jimmy would call all the parties involved and work towards a solution.
And so as they're describing this in a documentary they cut to Bono. And Bono says, the phone is Jimmy's theater of war.
That is where he is deadly.
His wife said that Jimmy just locked himself in the bathroom and it didn't come out and was on the phone all day long.
She said that Jimmy had a red hot focus.
It was nuclear. Jimmy wouldn't give up.
And then Jimmy describes this, the main advantage he has.
Besides thinking, he was very empathetic and looked from other people's personal point of views to figure out what they wanted, how he can reconcile all these different parties.
But he just said, I can outlast anybody.
It was just a war of attrition.
By endurance we conquer.
I can outlast anybody.
And so they interview the person that had signed Nine Inch Nails, the owner of the independent record company.
And he described why he agreed to go with Jimmy.
took a long time. But why great, he says Jimmy is really good at empathy, at understanding the other person's motivation, their primal, their primal motivations, their desire, what is going to move them.
And so he winds up getting the contract getting Trent Reznor nine inch nails out of this.
And he was doing this for a year, he just knew that Trent was super talented.
He had never even met Trent in person.
And this again, just speaks to one, I want to think the most fundamental superpowers of Jimmy Aveen.
He's like, find the very best people to work with, work like hell to get them to partner with you and to get you on your side and then once you do, give them the keys and say, go drive.
He does something, he's very consistent with.
He repeats over and over again and I'll give you an example of this.
So Jimmy goes to meet Trent Reznor.
Let me pause, let me go back because I think this is really important.
Again, one of the most things I admire about Jimmy.
The clarity of thought.
Unbelievably simple understanding of the most important thing.
A simple way to explain it so you understand what's going on so he he just worked on this guy's deal for a year he understood and you really with all these these freaking geniuses these musicians these filmmakers these entrepreneurs it's the same thing they're obsessed with control and Jimmy just keeps it simple goes up to Trent and says what do you want and Trent says I want you to give me an advance for now and then just leave me alone and I'll give you the album and the singles and the artwork I have an idea please don't try to ruin it as it's trying to come out of me and Jimmy said okay, what else
do you want and Trent said I want a record label where I could sign other bands if I felt like that.
And Jimmy said okay what else do you want and I couldn't think of anything else.
And so from another interview Jimmy talks about this.
He goes, I come from a place where the artists get to do exactly what they want and no compromise.
I'm not gonna sit down there and tell Tupac or Trent Reznor.
Why don't you change the lyrics or change this or change that.
That is a bunch of bullshit!
When you have great artists, when you have great talent, what you do is you give them the keys and you say drive.
And so, at this point in Jimmy's life, he is now pivoted, he does not want to produce records anymore, he wants to make a successful record company and this is what I mean, he just always keeps the main thing the main thing, this is how they describe him at this time.
Jimmy had this mad obsessed focus on the big picture.
Remember the advice he got 15 years ago when he almost quit on Spring Scene, focus on the big picture.
The big picture is we're going to make the best record label in the world.
And he had an actual.
like almost everybody you and I talked about he had.
And he had inspiration from somebody that did what he was doing, but did it in the past. So 20 years earlier, he's like, hey, what I wanted to do is I wanted a record company in the spirit of Atlantic Records in the 1970s.
Back then they had Ray Charles, Led Zeppelin Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones.
They those were the greatest artists of their time.
That is what we're trying to do.
what is he doing? We need the best. We're going to bet on talent.
Bruce Springsteen talks about this time in Jimmy's life.
People become successful and they get locked into the behaviors that led them to be a success.
Jimmy was very very good at letting go of what might have made him a success to this point.
Remember, he could have just been a record producer for the rest of his life.
He's willing to shed that and to go for something else.
He is not afraid to partner with other visionary people.
Jimmy's career is based on a tremendous lack of fear of moving forward. And then Jimmy has a meeting that changes his entire life.
Jimmy is going to describe for us the first time that he met Dr. Dre.
Dr. Dre comes into Jimmy's office to play his album The Chronic.
The Chronic has not been released yet.
It would go down to be one of the greatest hip -hop albums of all time and this is how Jimmy described it.
It was one of the greatest recordings I'd ever heard. Dre's music is not like anybody else's.
Dre's Sonics were far superior to any rock or hip -hop record being made.
It sounded better than anything else on my speakers.
So I asked Dre, who produced this?
He said me. I said, yeah, but who engineered this?
He said me. I'll never forget it.
I said, this guy will define Interscope.
And I said to Suge, he's, Dre is in this meeting with Jimmy, with Suge Knight and Dr. Dre.
And so I said to Suge Knight and Dr. Dre, give me three weeks.
They had all these, like, lawsuits that were getting in the way of them releasing the music.
So I said to Suge and Dre, give me three weeks and I can clear up all these lawsuits.
If you guys fuck around and go to a bunch of different labels I'm gonna hear about it and I'm gonna bounce, but they kept their word. This is the beginning of this three -decade long, maybe even longer now, partnership that Dr. Dre and Jimi Iovine have. Not only they're gonna make some of the greatest music, Interscope's gonna be an amazing success, but obviously it culminates in them starting a company together because eventually he gets tired of running a record label too.
He's like I want to build business with my artist. They wound up selling that business for, that's how they become billionaires, they sell it for like 3 billion to Apple.
But I want to go back to the early days of Interscope because we're still in the early to mid nineties.
And there is a lot of other startup record labels at the time, and yet Interscope was an outlier.
And they talk about like, what some of the reasons that Interscope was successful versus like the other startup record labels at the time.
And he says, Jimmy was an animal, the most driven and brilliant person at the same time.
He was never off and he didn't understand why everybody else wasn't the same way.
And Jimmy was remarkably consistent from the very first time when he's working with Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon, Tom Petty, Patti Smith.
Now, they signed Gwen Stefani, No Doubt.
And I forgot. No Doubt's record on Interscope sold like 17 million copies or something, that was just crazy.
But Gwen Stefani says that the feedback from Jimmy was very, very consistent.
Write another song, write another song, write another song.
as an artist you think you're done and in his mind you're never done why why is he giving that advice 20 years later because he saw what Lennon did he saw Bruce Springsteen did he saw what Tom Petty did I'm sure he saw what Prince was doing and he's also applying that relentlessness to his own craft of building the record label his first wife talks about this we knew that Jimmy's thing was going to be the thing that was going to change the world so it was worth it for me to make sacrifices this This is Jimmy on Building Interscope.
I was on a mission, a very, very intense mission.
Let's go to another brilliant idea that Jimmy Iovine had.
The fact that you should be optimizing for long -term relationships.
There was so many people trying to screw over Dr. Dre.
Jimmy could have been just another guy in the long line of people trying to screw him over.
Hey, I'm going to, you know, put him into a bad deal.
I'm going to make all this money on The Chronic.
You know, which is going to be obviously, if you listen to it, it's going to be a great album, but what?
You make a couple million dollars more by screwing over a guy and then you lose out on that relationship The relationship that won your close friends and will make you billions and billions and billions of dollars 30 years into the future loyalty and long -term relationships loyalty and long -term Relationships Jimmy finds his people and then just covers their back no matter what so when dr. Dre has a falling out with Suge Knight over death row record. He's like I got to get out of here, man I like I want to start my own record label.
Jimmy immediately goes cool.
Let's do it What do you want to name it?
Aftermath records? ok, done.
And so Dre is going to own 50 % and Interscope is going to own 50%.
Now, talk about loyalty, it really is easy to be loyal when everything's going right.
So that's not what loyalty is.
Loyalty's like you're there when shit hits the fan.
So everybody at this time, it's like Dre's one of the best producers, you know, putting out some of the greatest albums we've ever seen, producing some of the greatest albums I've ever seen, and yet the first two albums that Dre puts on his own record label for the first time, the one that he owns, he's not Partners, he's obviously Partners with Jimmy, but he doesn't have like Shug and I or anybody else.
And they flop. Both records flop.
Bad record sales means that Dre ends in a lot of debt.
And now you have Jimmy's corporate partners through Interscope saying, hey, you need to get rid of this guy.
And so Jimmy says, I was getting a lot of pressure corporately to get rid of Dre.
And I said, yeah, we could do that.
And then you'll save my salary as well because I'm going with him.
And so at one of the lowest points in his career, Jimmy helps Dre.
This is the maxim that opportunity is a strange beast, it appears after a loss.
Dre didn't have an artist to work with.
He had no successful releases on his own label.
He didn't know what to do.
So, Dre would go over to Jimmy's house and they'd have listening sessions.
Jimmy was trying to help Dre find an artist to work with.
Go back to Jimmy's niche.
I'm going to produce the producers.
So Jimmy throws in a tape.
Jimmy plays the tape and Dre says, what the fuck and who the fuck is that?
The answer to that is Eminem.
It is demo of Eminem that Eminem handed out at the rap Olympics to someone that worked for Jimmy.
Think about this. People are telling Jimmy to ditch Dr. Dre because he had two projects fail.
Ditch him right before Dre is going to help develop the artist that will go on to be the best -selling rap artist of all time.
Top ten best selling of all musicians of all time.
And so then Jimmy says one of the greatest things about this.
Great can come from anywhere.
Great can come from M &M was growing up poor in a trailer park in Michigan and so Jimmy says we weren't looking for a white controversial rapper.
We were looking for great.
Again, Jimmy is very consistent.
Great. Go for great.
Great talent. Great products.
Great marketing. And so Dre starts producing M &M.
M &M's first three albums are some of the best selling, I think, the best -selling rap albums of all time.
And he's getting all kinds of attention and he's saying a lot of controversial things.
And so he's getting boycotted.
There's pressure on Jimmy to like police, the lyrics, and yet even though throughout all this controversy the Eminem was getting at the beginning of his career, Jimmy was consistent.
He said let him be him, and it is during this time that Jimmy describes why he said that, that he says my second favorite idea of his.
So when I say that I've watched certain parts of this over 100 times, the pushing through fear and using it as a tailwind instead of a headwind was the first one, this is the second one.
I feel like I should make a poster with this quote and hang it on the wall.
And this is what Jimmy said, I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks.
When you're a racehorse, the reason they put blinders on these things is because if you look at the horse on the left or the horse on the right, you're gonna miss a step.
That's why those horses have fucking blinders on.
And that's what people should have. When you're running after something, you should not look left and right.
What does this person think?
What does that person think?
No, go. I clip that from the documentary.
It's been on my phone for years.
I just sit there and list that over and over and over again.
It's one of the best ideas that I ever heard, and the way he says it and the intensity and the passion, it's just perfect.
And so now he's going to pivot again.
He sees that the music industry is, there's this unstoppable, technological phenomenon.
It's going to go from selling CDs to iTunes to eventually streaming.
He says something like, you know, I don't want to be the guy that sells the last CD.
And so his next pivot is, hey, I want to build businesses with my artists.
But at the same time this happens, he gets divorced.
And I think this is actually one of the most important parts for founders actually had dinner with a friend last night and a large Part of our discussion was around this the tension that he feels between the focus and drive for his work and his wife not wanting him to be just just why can't you be more normal?
And I think this part where Jamie Iovine's ex -wife Vikki describes exactly what's like to be married to people like this And she says look this is what we married.
If you're gonna say I want an ordinary husband Well then you can't marry a genius.
There's a lot of extremes because genius needs to feed itself.
It needs to make its own hours.
It needs to not talk to you when it doesn't want to talk to you.
I didn't want to get a divorce until I did.
And for Jimmy's part, he owns up to this.
This is after they were divorced, so the interview takes place after they were divorced.
He says, I would imagine it'd be very hard to be married to me because I was so focused on what I was trying to accomplish.
Because it's one of the most difficult parts of his life.
He says, I was frustrated with the music business.
I was frustrated with getting divorced.
And whenever I get sad or scared, I wish I knew some other therapeutic ways of doing things.
But the only thing I know how to do is completely bury myself to the point of absurdity in my work.
Going back to what he said earlier in his career, all I knew is that if I went to the studio, my life got better.
And so he continues, I wanted to build businesses with our artists.
I like to pivot. I get complacent and bored I got bored of producing records I got bored of running a record company and I wanted to move on that is how Beats got started and so Jimmy actually goes to dr. Dre's house in Malibu and Dre is telling him hey I have this offer to endorse a pair of sneakers and Dre wasn't sure it made any sense he's like I don't know anything about fashion I wear the same thing every day and Dre was just very selective with anything he'd put his name on but this point he turned down dozens of endorsements and Jimmy's hearing him talk and he interrupts me goes fuck sneakers
you should do Speakers, speakers and headphones and then Dre says Jimmy immediately gets up and leaves A few days later, Jimmy calls Dre come to the office and Dre comes to the office There's 100 different pairs of headphones with all different designs So again, I think there's like a microcosm of Jimmy's entire like his his mo how he approaches work speed all in do more reps reoccurring themes in Jimmy's life and so this is also the marketing genius of Jimmy Iovine, because he's talking about the positioning of the headphone market at the time.
He said, this doesn't make any sense, the most popular ones are Bose, right?
And what are they? They're noise cancelling headphones.
And Jimmy says, we don't want to put you to sleep, we want to make you move.
We were looking at it as motivation, we looked at it as emotion.
We wanted to sell you something that would get you off your ass.
And so Jimmy's idea for distribution was very simple.
If we get our headphones on the best musicians and then later they do the same thing for athletes, that will cause people to try them, and then the great sound will get them to stay.
Again, go back to that clarity of thought that Bono mentioned was obvious about Jimmy when he met him, and then Jimmy was absolutely relentless.
Everywhere Jimmy went, he would carry the headphones with him.
Every single meeting, he'd say, anything that person he met, he'd make you put on the headphones, and then he would take a picture.
That is the marketing.
And Jimmy says, I was obsessive about it.
Jimmy insisted that you put beats in Jimmy was so successful at getting athletes to wear Beats headphones that Beats were banned from both the 2008 Olympics and the NFL because Beats wasn't one of the official sponsors.
Again, that's just another idea from history.
When the first Michael Jordan shoes, the Jordan brand shoes, came out, the NBA tried to ban them.
They would fine Michael for wearing them.
Nike would pay the fine.
That generated all this attention.
And I think they wanted to, you know, make like a couple million dollars.
I think the idea was like we're gonna sell three to four million dollars worth of shoes by the like the fourth year.
And I think the first year they'd be over a hundred million.
This just works. And so in addition to making headphones, this is when Jimmy's like, Oh, I see what's coming.
Like, I don't want to be the last person to sell a CD.
He starts the Beats music streaming service.
A few years after that, Apple buys both the streaming service and the headphones for three billion dollars now what's fascinating about that is as he was working on the deal he was very secretive so he told Dre don't move don't go anywhere this absolutely can't leak obviously Apple is known for being super secretive and then Dre goes into the studio when I gets drunk with this guy named Tyrese, Tyrese films a video of them in the studio drunk talking about the fact that Dre is now a billionaire and Jimmy couldn't believe it he was worried was gonna spike the deal wind up not spiking the deal,
but what Jimmy told people at the time about, hey, are you upset at you know what what Dre did, he's like yeah I'm obviously upset.
But again loyalty and long -term relationships Jimmy said, but this is the horse I rode in with.
I ride or die with Dre.
And so after a few years he decides to pivot again, and this time he pivots into retirement.
This is what he says, I was very driven to the day that I retired, and that is why I retired.
I didn't want to be driven anymore, and it was a conscious thing.
Bruce Springsteen asked me, how come you're gonna retire?
I said look man. I just left Italy with you.
80 ,000 people yelling Bruce!
Bruce! Bruce! Yeah, if they were yelling Jimmy, I wouldn't retire either, but I talked to scumbags all day, and I don't want to do that anymore.
So then finally looking back on his life.
He's asked, do you have any regrets?
And he gives excellent, excellent advice.
So do you have any regrets?
I don't have a rear -view mirror.
With a rear -view mirror you're taking victory laps and those are a waste of time.
I'm more like, let's go, what's new, what's tomorrow.
That's what I was always about.
So I made a lot of mistakes.
Who doesn't? But I don't care about the mistakes.
I don't look at life like that.
I took the rear -view mirror out of my car a long time ago." And for me that parting advice is just like what he said earlier.
When you're running after something, you should not look left and right.
What does this person think?
What does that person think?
No. Go!
