Jimmy Iovine on AI: “The Great Artists Will Show the World How to Use It”

**John Coogan** (0:00)
Up next, we have Jimmy Iovine in person.

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:02)
Nice to see you.

**John Coogan** (0:03)
He is the co-founder of Interscope Records.

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:05)
How are you doing, man?

**John Coogan** (0:06)
We're doing fantastically, how are you?

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:08)
Good, good, yeah.

**John Coogan** (0:08)
Thank you so much for coming on down.

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:10)
Hey, it wasn't easy. You're far from my house, but it's cool.

**Jordi Hays** (0:14)
Coming in from?

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:16)
Malibu.

**Jordi Hays** (0:17)
There we go. I do that drive every day, too.

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:20)
Are you in Malibu?

**Jordi Hays** (0:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Senra, me, Huberman, you know, we got a little podcast dynasty out there.

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:29)
Oh, great. Great. I'll give you my number. We're out there. I mean, we're family.

**Jordi Hays** (0:32)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Ben, too. Ben Taft. Really? Yeah, yeah.

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:35)
Fantastic. That's great.

**Jordi Hays** (0:37)
We're all out there.

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:37)
That's great.

**John Coogan** (0:38)
How are things going at USC?

**Jimmy Iovine** (0:41)
Well, we started this. We started the school. You know, it's called IYA. And it's really a school of innovation. What happened was in 2014, we sold Beats headphones to, and Beats music to Apple. Yeah. And at Beats, we had a similar experience where we couldn't find people that could collaborate the way Dre and I wanted them to collaborate.
You know, so, we kind of got into that. It was very, very difficult. They were an engineer, design, business. It just, they couldn't speak the same language. They didn't understand the why of the other person. So when we went to Apple, it was that on steroids for us. You know, they're a great company, the best company, you know, but we found that at every company. We went to that everything was very silos and communication. Understanding was siloed. Not some, not just people, but understanding. And so one day I woke up and I just called Dre. I said, Dre, you know, the problems that we're having, you know, Dre and I really didn't go to school much, you know.
And I said, but I got a feeling that this is a problem in education.
People are learning in a siloed way. You see, 19 to 25 and 26, I don't know about you guys, but that puts a big imprint on your life, you know. It's like, you learn a lot in the formative years. Those are really important. They were really important for me. And I guess that's kind of why the age of college.

**John Coogan** (2:27)
And getting like varied experiences, I feel is so important. When I think about my era from 19 to 26, I studied economics, I learned to program, I started a business, I filmed videos, did marketing. It helps to blend all these things together.

**Jimmy Iovine** (2:42)
How old are you?

**John Coogan** (2:44)
I'm 37

**Jimmy Iovine** (2:45)
Yeah, so you're young enough to grow up in a really multidisciplinary environment.

**John Coogan** (2:53)
But importantly, a lot of that was on my own. I just had to go learn. Yeah, I had to do it myself.

**Jimmy Iovine** (2:58)
That's my point. So now when you come out of high school, they silo you.

**John Coogan** (3:02)
Yeah, totally.

**Jimmy Iovine** (3:03)
OK, you're going to go work with 60 engineers every day. You're going to go to Wharton, but you're going to be with 45 accountants every day.

**John Coogan** (3:11)
Yeah.

**Jimmy Iovine** (3:12)
And there's something wrong with that.

**John Coogan** (3:14)
Yeah.

**Jimmy Iovine** (3:15)
So we stepped in, went to USC.

**John Coogan** (3:20)
How do you map that to or match that with this idea of putting on the blinders? Why does a racehorse wear blinders, right?

**Jimmy Iovine** (3:27)
Well, because we live in a world now. It's worse than ever with social media. Everyone cares so much about what somebody else thinks.

**John Coogan** (3:38)
That's interesting.

**Jimmy Iovine** (3:39)
I mean, we have people just all day. What do they think of my post? What do they think of my orange juice?

**Jordi Hays** (3:47)
Who cares?

**Jimmy Iovine** (3:49)
Would you go to a grocery store and ask everybody what they think? So anyway, I'm an older guy, so it doesn't make any sense to me.
But that's the blinders. The blinders are very simple. Run your own race. But enter that race with the understanding and the empathy of other disciplines. We all have that problem in any company you have. The extreme tech side and the extreme design side have trouble communicating. Maybe not everyone at every company, but most people at most companies. And then when you remember, we brought 300 people from the creative business into Apple, basically, and Apple is an incredible company.