 You know, $1,000 a week, times four weeks, times 52 weeks. That's $52,000. That's a starting salary at a nice consulting job. So I'm like, hey, I'm all the way to the good. What I learned very quickly about projections is that we often believe that the market will be more receptive to our offering than in reality it is. Baw, what's up, everybody? Once again, it's Brand Man Sean. And today, I got a special guest for you guys, none other than Ryan Leslie. Now, we talk about things from his early beginnings all the way into hacking his way into Harvard at 15 years old and at one point living in the basement to him breaking into the music industry, tricking P. Diddy into thinking his song was a hit before it really was a hit. And of course, his app Superphone, which has been used by so many artists from Cardi B, Rory, and a lot of other artists you wouldn't even expect. And then we end with Ryan Leslie telling you how to text him, because it wouldn't be Ryan Leslie if he didn't. Now, let's hop into it. Is I know it couldn't have always been that easy, right? So you see Smart Guy, this guy went to Harvard. You see, he's been through the industry and now he's in this tech thing, he keeps winning. How did it start off? Started off, seriously, with my parents. My parents are musicians. So my dad actually started a band. So they could get my mom to come rehearse for him and with him. And I mean, I believe that when you're talking about relationships, relationships are really built on two main elements. One is frequency of contact and two is proximity. So even before I had Superphone, my father already had figured this out with my mom and we said, look, we need to be in contact. I need to figure out a system or structure in which we'll be in contact frequently and we'll be close together and we'll spend a lot of time. So he started a band and made her the lead singer. Wow, so you're probably at a game. Yeah, I mean, he figured it out. Yeah, he figured it out. And I think, honestly, they were, they, being in the Salvation Army, they're also administrators and officers in the Salvation Army. Being in the Salvation Army, they wanted myself and my sister to have a different life path. And not that they weren't advocates of a service career. They just knew that for generating wealth, yes, you can be in the service business. The nonprofit service business is antithetical to generating wealth per se. So which is why you find a lot of folks, they make a lot of money and then they become philanthropists afterwards. And so even though the Salvation Army generates, I think, $4 billion a year in donations of revenue, the thesis in the spirit of the Salvation Army is sacrifice yourself in the service of others. So every Christmas, everything's giving, before we even ate, we always serve the community. So yeah, I mean, that means that I basically grew up eating government cheese and having the same meals that were provided to the people that the Salvation Army served. And we made it happen. My parents actually, I think you're right, a lot of folks don't actually know the backstory. My parents made it happen, raised a family of four on the equivalent of about $800 a month. And so for folks that are out there struggling and folks that are out there that are counting their money in penny pension, I know what it means to make ends meet with a very, very limited budget. And so my father wanted a different life for me. And so he believed, as many parents did, that education was gonna be the way to get us there. Right. And when I say us, I'm talking about myself and my sister. So my sister has her master's degree. She went to UC Berkeley. Myself applied very early to Harvard, got in, finished. At 15, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How the hell does a 15-year-old get into Harvard? Listen, anything is possible. Any goal is possible as long as you set your mind to it. And I think my father had a really, really specific compass and direction for me. And so anytime I come in, oh, I'm done with my homework, he would say, well, I got this SAT practice test you can do. And one of the, I guess in reading and researching the SATs, he realized that standardized tests are mostly a function of how familiar you are with the test, as opposed to how smart you are. So the more practice tests you take, the more familiar you are with the actual test. And what they found is that folks that are more familiar with the kinds of questions perform better on standardized tests. And so I took a lot of practice tests. I scored very well and got into Harvard very early. And my parents were kind of devastated when I told them I wanted to do music. And I looked at them and I said, well, you know, I was born out of music. Your romance was kindled on the foundation of this musical chemistry. And they said, well, you know, music is a hobby, man. You know, music, it came really easy for us. As parents, my mother's a classically trained pianist. And so they, you know, especially in the Caribbean island, everybody does music. They play whatever they play brass instruments, et cetera. So they really looked at it as a hobby. And I think also most parents, if you're listening now and you have this idea that, you know, people don't understand your dream of wanting to do music or be an entrepreneur or create, most parents, they just have an innate instinct to protect you from the personal risk of trying to do a career that's highly competitive. And music, as you know, I mean, you talk about this on your show all the time, the independent grind, deciding to do music is very, very, it's a challenge and it's a challenge that, you know, it takes a certain mentality to want to be able to do that kind of work. So speaking of that mentality then, like how do you take graduating from Harvard? Like everybody's already looking at you as like some kind of, they're praising you at that moment, right? You're young and you graduated from a school like this and you're going the complete opposite direction. Most of those guys, consultants, lawyers, things like that. How do you kind of take up the gravitas to actually say, no, I'm going to go this completely different path. Like that's big for anybody, but you're only 19 at that age. Yeah, listen, I believe that you should, when you're young, take the biggest risks. Take the biggest risks when you're young. Did you think like that while you were young though? Well, I gave the Harvard duration when I graduated. So the way that works is Harvard at the time, and I don't know if it's changed since, there is no valid Victorian at Harvard. So if you want to give the speech, the Harvard duration where you actually speak to your classmates, you just have to compete and win a speech competition. Whoever has the best speech wins. And so I wrote this speech and my speech was really about doing what you believe in, believing in what you do. And really was written specifically to, I mean, almost coached myself and coached myself to overcome the apprehension that I had about striking out on my own and saying I wanted to do music versus the more traditional pathway that education would have taken me. So what was the first step then? Once you graduated, now you're out here. You haven't been spending time really training for this field. Had you been building connections? What was the first thing you did to get into industry? Man, I really, I think looking back, I really thought that the music business, because my favorite artists were multi-instrumentalists. So Prince and Stevie Wonder. Okay, yeah. And also when you think about the songwriting prowess of Michael Jackson, I believe that, and just the dancing talent and the vocals of Michael Jackson, I just believe that music was a meritocracy. So what I meant, what I mean, just to slow that down for people who don't understand meritocracy, that's just basically saying that it's all about talent. Yes. And the best wins. Yeah. And you're saying it's not that. Yeah, well, that's what I believed. And so you asked me what my steps were and my steps were become the greatest music producer that I could possibly be without a teacher. So, and this was even pre, I mean, right now, I mean, if you think about how I started and how I started to communicate my art to the world, it really started to take off when YouTube began. Right, right. And when YouTube began, I was able to actually film my studio sessions and put them online. So when I was coming up, these are the kinds of videos I wish I could have seen. I was learning how to produce music by just listening to my favorite producers, Timbaland, Jermaine Dupri, my favorite records, Usher Records, et cetera. And these are guys that were same age as me and were already killing in the music industry, like Usher and I at the same age. And so seeing somebody like that and listening to the sound that Jermaine Dupri had crafted for him was really, to me, very, very inspirational. And I wanted to be able to emulate that sound. And so I really believed that, listen, if you were good enough to make that sound, you would just make it. And so that was, for me, the guiding principle in my mind. And that really, I had to learn some hard lessons about just being great as a musician. When you're just great as a musician, when that is disconnected from networking, like your first question was, hey, are you already networking and having connections? I believe that there's now a more prevalent understanding that in order to be successful, you need to really be intentional about your relationships and your relationship building. Back then, as a late teen, early 20-year-old, I really truly believed that it was just all about skill and talent and that someone would just plug me out of obscurity and give me a chance and it would work that way. Man, so how did you, I guess how'd you say you would learn that lesson and who was that person who really did finally bring you in or did you just wake up one day and say, all right, this isn't working, I gotta do something else? Yeah, I made a very crude business plan and the crude business plan was, I was gonna sell beats for $200 a pop and the projection that I had was I could sell five beats a week, so it would make me $1,000 a week. And back then, we talked about late 90s, early 2000s, man, $1,000 a week times four weeks, times 52 weeks, that's $52,000. That's a starting salary at a nice consultant job. So I'm like, hey, I'm all the way to the good. What I learned very quickly about projections is that we often believe that the market will be more receptive to our offering than in reality it is. And so I really was more selling a couple of beats per month and the economics were upside down and I found myself just hanging out on my dad's couch. I mean, first of all, I was moonlighting in the Harvard dorms after I graduated, cause my key card still worked and I was living basically illegally in the basement of one of the Harvard dorms and using the studio and sneak it upstairs and use the showers and still have my key card for the laundry, just trying to figure it out. And I believed that it was gonna happen and so now thinking back, I won a competition with one of my good friends from Berkeley College of Music. His name is Latif, Corey Latif. He got signed to Motown and really it was directly correlated to relationships. So that competition got us in front of a bunch of record executives at the Apollo Theater, Corey performed, killed the performance and there were a lot of interested parties and had I known then what I know now, I think that the trajectory would have been greatly accelerated and I wouldn't change anything at all because I believe that that pathway was requisite for me to actually have the knowledge and the learnings that I have now and the ability to actually productize it now so that a whole another generation of musicians and entrepreneurs can learn from my story and actually accelerate their success, reduce the dependency on luck in their success trajectory and I believe in that. I believe that you can create your own luck as long as you're intentional about the relationships and so I think that is great in this interview that your first question in terms of how someone achieves success is who are you networking with because it is really success. A happens at the speed of communication is directly correlated to who you know and not only who you know, but how well you're communicating with those people. Interesting. So I mean, I guess that leans towards why you're basically focusing currently on Superphone, right? Everything centered for Superphone is relationship, relationship, relationship. Let's keep in contact with people. Describe Superphone from your perspective. Yeah. And the mindset that got you into creating it. Yeah, yeah. Initially Superphone for me was just based on the idea that social connections are weak. I started with YouTube and Myspace and then all of a sudden when everyone migrated away from Myspace, where were all my friends because I had all these Myspace friends and then I started to build on Facebook and then Facebook caps you at 5,000 friends and if you have more than 5,000 friends you have to get a page. And then there was the admin of Twitter and Instagram and I had all these social connections, more than a million followers across all these platforms that I felt ridiculously disconnected from all of these social connections. And when you really think about the activity of liking a picture or maybe leaving a comment, the expected response time is really low. So if you left a comment on DJ Khaled or you left a comment for Drake or you liked the Chris Brown picture, do you really expect a response? And what I found is that because my fans didn't expect a response, the actual relationship was very, very weak. And so when I decided, hey, check out my latest video, check out my latest song, check out my latest project, the response, yeah, maybe I got some lights and comments. I felt like I was very, very disconnected with the people that really wanted to be connected. And so I started giving my phone number out because I just wanted, I feel like the phone number is overlooked as one of the greatest, most powerful social handles. And what I mean by that is once you get someone's number, and I mean, that's why when, you know, when you first start dating, you go out, you know, it's all about, yo, I got her number. You gotta get that number. And nowadays, I mean, I guess some people will say, yo, you know, let me get your gram. They follow on the gram. You're stealing my reel until you got the number. Exactly, exactly, right? Because you're not making phone calls over Instagram. So for me, it was really just about, I wanna be able to have that kind of relationship at scale with all the people that wanted to support me. And I needed to be able to build some automation and leverage technology to be able to have that kind of personal one-on-one touch at scale. And when I say at scale, I mean across thousands and tens of thousands. So today in this phone right now, my conversation feed, I have over 76,000 active conversations with people who have ever texted me. And if Instagram shuts down tomorrow, Twitter shuts down tomorrow, Facebook shuts down tomorrow, I could literally spend the rest of my life just calling every single fan, thanking them. And I could also, if I wanted to, if I wanted to just press a button and send a thank you text to everyone that's ever supported me, because I know the difference between people who bought my album and who have it. So that's where it started. With that being said, because I think it's a very loose idea. It sounds cool for anybody just hearing it from the outside, but kind of walked me through like a scenario because when I first, I already had a perception I was used to CRMs and things like that. But when you showed me some of the back end, it blew my mind to a whole other level. Like the example of you going, you can see what city they're in. And then if they were working at Starbucks, things like that, walk people through what it's like, the super phone experience. Well, I mean, this interview is directly correlated to super phone, right? So I'll say this, I check my messages every morning, just like anyone else, you know? And someone asked me one day like, hey, Ryan, I want to sign up for super phone. I said, well, how'd you hear about it? Well, I heard about it from Brandon and Chantel. So then the beauty of that is that I could then just go look up that we had met, whether it was A3C or wherever we had met, we'd exchange information. I could shoot you a text. I mean, it's very, very powerful when you have a direct phone number on people because you're able to make that success happen very accelerated. And so the super phone experience is very simple. People text you, your phone knows who is already in your phone book and who's new. For everyone that's new, your phone automatically says, hey, let me get some more info with your name, your email, your city. And then at that point, I can also integrate my e-commerce. So I have mzrt.com where I sell all my experiences and merchandise and everything. And it will tell me how much every single person in my phone has spent. And I also have the ability to apply tags to people and to conversation. So I can, if I wanted to right now, I could say, hey, these are the 312 people that are investors that I know. These are the 125 people I know who are photographers and videographers. These are the 60 people I know who are journalists. These are the 85 people I know who are DJs. And as I was doing this for myself, I started to realize that most people just don't have this kind of organization to the conversations in their life, period. And so I wanted to, and it really ignited a passion within me to build a product that was easy to use that was already taking advantage of a daily activity. Probably our most important daily activity is our communication. Yeah, we have to eat, we have to breathe. We have to use the restroom, we have to sleep. And then aside from all of those human necessities, our most important daily activity, I believe, is communication. And the fact that most people's communication is totally disorganized. And it's no fault of our own, most people's communication is totally disorganized and also the fact that most people that we meet jump into our phones, we exchange contact information and those contacts just fall asleep in our phones was a very, very curious challenge for me because when I sit down and I talk to young people or anyone for that matter that wants to be successful, the number one interchangeable reason for why they feel like they have a barrier to success is either money or they feel like they don't know the right people. And I firmly believe that if you know the right people, you can get to the money. You can get to investors or you can get to your customers, you can get to business development, et cetera. So it's really, really 100% about people. And so if you're a young person, you're watching this right now and you're thinking like, okay, why am I watching this? What am I gonna get out of this? The most important gem that I can leave for you is the fact that your relationship with people is going to shape your entire life experience. And you should treat every single person that you meet, every single person that has the honor of being in your phone, you should treat those people with the kind of respect that you would wanna be treated as a human being, as someone that is valuable to the world. And so most people I'll sit down with, I mean, we could run this experiment right now. How many contacts do you have in your phone? Let's take a look, let's take a look. Let's take a look, let's take a look. We gotta check it out. So does the Android, I see you got the new S8, how do you actually tell how many contacts you have? You can just go to your contacts and scroll all the way down, I think. Let me see, 643. 643 contacts, how many of those contacts did you actually talk to today? Today? Yeah. Maybe like three or four? Three or four, right? So that would mean that 1% of those contacts would be if you talked to six of them. So you talk to half of 1% of the people in your phone. The idea behind SuperPhone is that we found that 80 to 90% of the people that are in your phone, friends, family, loved ones, exes, new romance, whatever it is, investors, mentors, 90% of those people are just sleeping in your phone. And if there was a way for you to wake up those conversations and be able to extract the value of a great collaboration, even just 10% more of those conversations, 10% of your phone would be 60 people today. If you were having 60 conversations today, that's 60 chances for you to be invited to something that could enrich your life. Right, okay. Well, see, I'm thinking from an artist's perspective, right? And then I think of the almost just social perspective. From an artist's perspective, especially what you showed me on the back end, it's like, all right, so I can go to a city, I'm just stopping by, let's just say Atlanta, right? I'm on my way to Atlanta and then I can look up all of my fans in Atlanta that I have in my phone. Not only that, I can say, I wanna look up the fans that have spent $50 with me in the last three months and I can text all those fans and just say, yo, I'm gonna be here this time. Let's do a quick meetup. I would love to meet you or something like that. Absolutely. And we have folks that do that. So one of my little homies from Atlanta's name is Rory. He does concerts in the woods and he uses a phone number to actually distribute the location for his concerts. And so it's really, I mean, I can't tell you how really simple of a concept it is and it may seem foreign. And the reason I know that it seems foreign is because when people think about their cell phone numbers, they really think about it as some personal, sacred, important, guarded treasure in their life. A, they never wanna change their number and B, they don't wanna really give their number out. And also in hip hop, we're always taught like, no new friends, you can't have my number, don't speak to me directly, talk to my manager, talk to my agent. And in many ways, there are situations where that's important if you wanna be very, very focused because like I'm saying, your communication has to be intentional. So you don't wanna have a bunch of folks that are coming into your life and into your conversation thread and ringing your phone that are distracting you from being the successful, the most successful best version of yourself you can be. At the same time though, how did those 634 people even make it into your phone? At some point in time in your life, you thought that it was important enough for you guys to exchange information. And so for me, when we talk about it in the fan standpoint, it is important for me to exchange information because what I found is that because people follow so many other profiles on social, it's very possible that I could have a concert in Atlanta or DC or LA or San Francisco and people wouldn't hear about it until they see every one of their friends. Oh yeah, I mean, you have to wait. I mean, you have this organic reach that's being suppressed. There's a lot of posts that people do not see. I know that from marketing all the time. So I mean, one thing when it comes to Superphone, do you know anybody who has used it for more, let's just say, trivial reasons like, I got all my X's in this list or I got, or just to keep better contact with whoever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are so many great use cases of that. And I mean, you could think of if you're a startup founder. So let's just say you have a great idea. I just came from CES and there's so many great companies, there are new technologies that are being built. I know for me personally, when I started Superphone, I was very much happy using it as a tool and a secret weapon for myself. And it was because of a conversation I had and an exchange I had with Tristan Walker, who was an entrepreneur in residence at a big venture capital from Coler Deason Horowitz, right? He sent me in text to say, hey, Ryan, you should meet my friend Ben. And Ben really was the guy that said, hey, you should productize this. And me being a self-made entrepreneur, someone who always bootstrapped, I didn't even have a single investor in my phone. That's number one. And number two, I didn't even have any idea how I could actually accept money from someone else and be a good steward of their investment. So for me, the utility of Superphone began to pivot at that moment because for the first time now I had a category of people that I could start tracking. And so that category of people and I knew what success meant for me. Success for me, for Superphone at that moment beyond making the millions of dollars that I had made as an independent artist. Now it was, how do I raise millions of dollars from a much, much, much, much, much smaller and more focused group of people? So to get to $2 million in revenue as an independent artist, it took me about 40,000 tickets. 40,000 tickets was probably bought by about 15 or 20,000 people, right? Because everyone that came to the concert brought a friend, bought three or four tickets. 40,000 tickets at 40 euros. The ticket is 1.6 million euros. Add that to the 17,000 records, add that to merch, add that to experiences coming to the studio, my New Year's Eve party, you're talking about a $2 million album cycle, no label, no manager, no music videos, no PR, straight off of the phone. The difference with raising millions of dollars from a venture standpoint is that there are very few startups, unless they've crowdfunded their investment that have 40,000 investors. And even for me, having 68 investors on my cap table, a lot of people and folks will look at me and say, man, that's so many people because in venture you want to have the most engaged, focused, directed group of investors because it takes a lot of time to deal with a lot of people. Right. Is that your phone? That's your phone. There we go. Superphone is going off. I see. So for me, you're asking about a case outside of the music industry. A case for me outside of the music industry was very specifically to find investors. And that was my metric of success. I wanted to find success. I wanted to be successful finding investors. And being successful finding investors has now led me to 312 investors that are tagged in my phone, 68 of which have invested more than $4.7 million into Superphone. Congratulations on that right there, man. Yeah. Thank you. Well, I want to do one pivot really quickly because Superphone is intriguing in itself, but just back to the artist, because I know a lot of artists watch this, the hustle that you had when you first started off. Yeah. Like, I remember that CNP Diddy talk about that he had never seen an artist really going out, building their own fan base specifically in Europe, going straight global. Well, what I learned is that a lot of international artists would go over to Europe and feel very entitled. You see, I'm already a big star in the United States. Everyone should treat me like I'm a big star. And I was always very, very respectful and thankful and grateful for the appreciation that I would get in different countries. Well, really, they appreciate I would get anywhere, but they appreciate I would get in different countries. And I would always make sure that I did every request. I would always make sure that my set length was longer than other American artists that came over, so I could differentiate myself. And maybe kind of for the first time, I started to see that the skill level of being a multi-instrumentalist, being proficient on many different instruments, breaking records down instead of just performing over my tracks, these kinds of elements, I found that people really appreciated. And so I understood first based on data and second based on being in the field and actually being on stage over there and sometimes playing four and a half hour sets that people actually cared and appreciated. And man, I mean, the internet is a very, very powerful tool to A, communicate to large numbers of people. I mean, you can through one YouTube channel, your perfect example, literally have an international an internationally accessible global content channel. And it's your responsibility to make sure that content is happening on a consistent basis. And so for me, starting out in the game, it was every single day for a year, running around New York City, working with Cassie, filming everything on my own, then setting up a camera on a tripod, just like you have here, speaking into the camera, cutting it up, it was called Ennis for Life. Some of those clips might still be on my YouTube channel. And it was every single day for a year, understanding that fast, furious frequency of consistent content was gonna be the way that I could not only build, but also retain an audience, right? And then I can look at the insights. You can look at the insights on YouTube. You can look at the insights on Spotify. You can look at the insights on Facebook. You can know where your audience is actually developing. And then it's your responsibility to A, be able to communicate with that audience directly and B, play to the geographical locations where your audience is building. And that's what I leveraged in the beginning of my career. And the big thing about that is the biggest edge out of all that that you said kind of relates to some of the theme of Super Bowl, which is just treating people like they're human. Like you respected them and you treated them better than other artists who might have bigger names, more money backing, and you just said, I wanna treat y'all like y'all are amazing. So you had that hack. I mean, another story I heard was Pete Diddy said, what you said, I think you paid somebody off wherever he went. You were paid for your song to be played. So for him, I always talk to everybody on the channel about the idea of targeted omnipresence, which is being everywhere to target amount of fans, right? You did it to one person, wherever Pete Diddy went, he heard your song unknowingly that you were paying somebody off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What gets you like in the mindset of this hustle that you're constantly- Listen, a lot of it's trial and error, man. A lot of it's trial and error. And also I think so many people talk about trial and error and very few people talk about trial and success. People always look at trial and success in a Monday morning quarterback and they say, oh, okay, well, I was successful because X, Y, and Z. I understand that for every number of trial and errors that you have, there will be also a number of trial and success. And to get to success, especially in verticals where you have to be a trailblazer and really in the MySpace days between myself, my partner and one of my best friends, Rashid Richmond, we were trailblazers in that MySpace era. How do you take an artist from relative obscurity, a burgeoning modeling career from New London, Connecticut and leverage a social platform that was new, but nascent and vibrant and growing and take that artist, take her dream, make it come true on a platform that was emerging, being a trailblazer to be 100% truthful and honest, it took a lot of trial and error and there were those moments where we had trial and success. And so, I mean, it was rich dollars actually. Rich dollars was working on a bad boy street team and bad boy radio team. And man, he was really, I listened as much as I could. Being young and having success early, you could definitely have your share of arrogance. And there were moments where I just said, look, it's going to be a lot better for me to just listen. And if I listen to someone that's willing to work with me, then I'm going to accelerate faster. And so he was really the guy that had the idea and look, we in the mix show, we in the clubs and since I'm on a bad boy street team, everywhere Puff is going already know where he's going to be. So, Ryan, I just need that budget, you know, and we'll make sure that the DJs are spinning it. And that's how I went down, man. Man, okay, well, I have just two more questions. Sure. One, when I look at your career and even the things you said about your upbringing, you were in a foreign country for a period. You were early, like you went to college early and you were young, right? You did this music thing, the independent, super phone, my question, when I look at your career, especially when I said early on, you're like smart guy, music guy, successful. It's hard for some people to relate just from what they see as far as the narrative, right? It just seems like this guy, especially without knowing the things about the parents and things like that, right? But you haven't seemed to overwork in trying to communicate that you had such humble beginnings. Are you comfortable or do you even find comfort in being an outsider? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, listen, I think anyone that's made an incredible impact on humanity has been an outsider. I mean, look at Prince, right? Just look at the purple of it or look at Eminem or look at Wayne or look at Uzi now or look at Young Thug. I mean, the folks that are having this kind of impact on society or the people who are brave enough to take on the messaging and take on the communication that most would be apprehensive and communicate the message that most would be apprehensive to communicate. And I think now more than ever in a world where we are so connected, where we have so much access to data, where we have so much access to tools that can make us smarter about the decisions we make, it's important for us as that next useful generation. I mean, I never wanted to be someone that took flight and didn't teach others how to fly. And for me, my life is an open book. My stories are very, very clearly can be transparently communicated. And I really wish that more folks, I wish more people would have the courage and the honesty to really just say like, look, I wasn't necessarily self-made. I don't think really anybody is self-made, right? And I think, so what makes that just so interesting though is just because you're so transparent. But again, the public is so unknown in a lot of these things that are occurring. So I always wondered if you might have ever take it upon yourself to say, let me push my narrative out there more because Kanye was one of the, he mentioned you as, in the video I did on you, right? He mentioned you and will I am as far as people who are product-focused and care enough, right? You actually learned code. What a successful rapper producer is gonna learn code to create a product. He mentioned you, right? But when I look at the difference between you and Kanye, it's almost like the difference between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, right? Both geniuses in their own right. But Edison was a better PR person, right? You got it out there. So, and you being inspirational, you being a person of color, especially, I always just wondered what that ever, like were you ever gonna take it upon yourself to say, all right, now let me push it out here. Do a movie or, I don't know, just any form of fashion. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I think A is about timing and B is about impact, right? So, am I interested in this for me or am I interested in this in terms of how it will impact the world? And when I have interviews like this one and I deal with the young team, super talented young team that we're dealing with at Super Phone and the idea is put forward that my story can be a catalyst to inspiring young people to really achieve the success that I believe that this next generation is gonna be able to achieve, then it becomes more crystallized and more of a priority for me to actually tell that story. So, yeah, I mean, let's, if we can look into a crystal ball, is there a book on the horizon? Is there a movie on the horizon? I think that's all within the realm of possibility. So, I guess that leads perfectly into the last question. What would you want your legacy to be as Ryan Leslie? Sure. I mean, my legacy, I actually just went to celebrate the life of a pretty pivotal character in my career in the music business. His name was Ed Woods. He was a music manager, attorney, music executive author. And I believe that everyone's legacy is just the culmination of how you impact people while you're alive. And every day I live my life that way. I live my life in such a way that the people around me, I want to make sure that anyone that's within the range of my voice, that I am planting seeds, that whether those seeds become fertilized at the moment I plant them or they bear fruit later on in life, I want to make sure that I'm planting the seeds that builds the kind of intelligent decision-making that help to accelerate success. Because I believe that when we accelerate success, we, as humans, we innately want to share that success. And so I was actually just watching them. I think I was watching, I think it was Antoine Walker I was watching. And he had made $108 million in the NBA and then, you know, filed bankruptcy. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard about that, yeah, yeah. And I think he has a documentary about it. One of the caveats that came from listening to his interview, he said, man, I wanted to share my success with my, with the people who came up with me. And so when I went on trips, I wanted everybody going trips. And so what I'm interested in doing is, it is changing that just a little bit so that everyone in the crew is successful in their own right. So I don't have to pay for everyone, they can pay for themselves. If I say, hey, let's go, you know, take two weeks in the South of France and get a yacht in Sardinia and you know, just enjoy the sun and think about what our next idea is gonna be. It's totally different when people can come to the table with the kind of success that's equal because we can elevate each other. And I'm interested in, from a diversity standpoint, from a youth perspective, I'm interested in just being as inspirational as possible. And not just inspirational in terms of talk, but inspirational in terms of delivering a world of utility that they can actually use a tool that can actually give them the insights and be a comfort for them so they can achieve success in whatever way the success means to them. Wow, dope, man. That was a very elegant answer. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you once again. Appreciate you, man. Guys, man, I hope you really benefited from this interview with Ryan Leslie. The guy has so many gems that he dropped throughout this. We're definitely gonna have to talk about this in the comments section you already know. Sure. Hey, you guys follow Ryan Leslie at, where do you wanna go? Text Ryan.com, just leave me your number. I mean, you can follow me if you'd like, but text Ryan.com, I know a lot of folks might have some questions based on this interview, so just shoot me, just leave me your number at text Ryan.com and I'll shoot you back a text. And yeah, I'm interested in seeing the kind of success that is achieved after this point in your life. Dope. All right, I'm back and I hope you guys got as much value out of that interview as I did. It was very interesting to see how Ryan went from being a producer in his room, thinking it was all about being the best producer in the world and then all of a sudden had that light switch that said, hey, I need to start getting people to know me. I need to start networking. I hope you guys have taken notes. Let me know what you guys think in the comments below and of course hit Ryan up. He said, hit him up, you have his number. Text Ryan, let him know what you thought about the interview at the very least and as always, if you liked this video, hit that like button, if you like it, might as well share it and if you're not subscribed, you know what to do, hit that subscribe button.