54: Ian Rogers: Never a Spectator

Summary

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Dialectic Episode 54

Ian Rogers: Never a Spectator

August 10, 2026 | Host: Jackson Dahl

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Overview

Episode 54 of Dialectic features a wide-ranging conversation between Jackson Dahl and Ian Rogers—a digital innovator whose career has spanned the frontier of music, technology, business, and culture. From his punk rock roots to his leading roles at Yahoo, Beats, Apple, LVMH, and Ledger, Rogers has stayed close to the edge of what’s new (and often controversial) in digital transformation. This episode dives deep into Rogers’ philosophy of "never being a spectator," his approach to technology and culture, building brands for the long term, the importance of agency (human and machine), and practical lessons from music, parenting, and failure. It's a reflective, fast-moving, and philosophical discussion, packed with stories, insights, and quotable moments.

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Main Themes & Discussion Points

1. Punk Rock, Individuality, and Agency

• Punk Rock as Spiritual Foundation:

  • Rogers discusses how punk rock shaped his sense of agency and participation. The punk ethos is about being a peer, not a spectator—a lesson he’s applied consistently.
  • Quote: “Spiritually, the thing about punk rock is you’re all peers and you are judged on your contribution. You are not a spectator. You are a participant who is meant to engage. That was the unlock for me.” (12:54)

• Individuality as Mass Business:

  • Anyone helping people express individuality—through tattoos, fashion, or beauty—has thrived in the last 20 years.
  • “A Louis Vuitton handbag and a Slayer T-shirt serve exactly the same function in society.” (06:43)

• Notion of Agency:

  • Internalized agency as a core value (“You can poke the universe and get feedback”—Steve Jobs quote referenced at 15:05).
  • Participating (not just consuming) drives Rogers in music, technology, and now AI.

2. Scenes, Subcultures, and the Internet's Evolution

• How Scenes Form and Fade:

  • Scenes used to be shaped by media friction (vinyls, zines, skate videos); today’s frictionless Internet makes subcultures harder to define and sustain. (17:03–21:13)
  • The “cozy web” or closed group chats may be the modern version of scenes, though their permanence and influence are uncertain.
  • Boundaries, not just interests, create belonging and meaning.

• Cultural Derivation and Innovation:

  • Rejects the “end of cultural history” narrative—everything is derivative to some extent; innovation persists at the edges, though the web has scattered attention.
  • “Everything is derivative by definition. Our job is to find the 1% that’s awesome. 99.9% of all music, all movies, all books...are garbage. Do your job, find me the 1% that's awesome.” (30:00)

3. Taste, Discovery, and Modern Media

• Efficiency and the Blockbuster vs. Snowball:

  • The Internet enables “niche at scale” (the snowball) instead of blockbusters—unlimited distribution means media must be polarizing or extremely high quality, surviving on word of mouth.
  • Quote: “All I’ve ever wanted is efficiency...That inefficiency is what I’ve always wanted to fix. If you would like this, I want it to reach you.” (45:09)

• Taste-Making and Sharing:

  • Rogers champions only recommending “the good stuff,” avoiding mediocrity and negativity.
  • “No three-star reviews. If it’s three stars, just leave it out. Who cares? The only things I care about are: One, I didn’t know and it’s awesome. Two, warn me if I’m about to waste my time.” (39:02)

4. Brands, Legacy, and Building Value Over Time

• Selling Culture, Not Product:

  • You must first sell a feeling or idea (culture), then the object. Even utility products (e.g., Dr. Martens) are sold on cultural resonance. (54:00)
  • “The front of the box is for the heart, the back is for the head.”

• The Longevity of Brands vs. Individual Creators:

  • Brands (like LVMH’s) take generations to cement value.
  • Patience, storytelling, compounded over time, is essential—brand building is fundamentally different from chasing viral individual fame.
  • “If you think now’s your time, you already missed your window...your time is always yet to come.” (64:43)

5. Technology Frontiers: Music, Crypto, AI & Beyond

• Chasing the Next Hated Technology:

  • Rogers repeatedly embraces emerging tech that faces skepticism (file-sharing, streaming, crypto, AI). His career: “What’s the technology people are going to be really angry about tomorrow—how do I get into that one?” (00:00/72:41)
  • Luck, sponsorship from others, and seeing himself as “lucky more than visionary or patient.”

• Ledger, Crypto, and Security in the Agentic AI Era:

  • Ledger is built on ideological non-compromise (security, self-custody).
  • Hardware security becomes even more critical as people delegate powers to agents/AI—he predicts “a new computer security perimeter” is needed for this era. (117:45)
  • Human agency must remain in the loop; AIs can suggest, but policies and approvals must root in real people.

• Resisting AI Personhood:

  • Strong stance against granting machine “sentience” or legal personhood: “You can unplug it from the wall. You can RM -rf the weights. It can’t have human rights.” (123:43–125:18)

6. Personal Practices & Life Lessons

• Skateboarding, Failure, and Resilience:

  • The ultimate life skill: be great at failure. Pro skateboarders are skilled at falling safely and repeatedly—“If you can metaphorically be 10 feet above an 11-foot ramp, upside down, and unafraid of failure, you are untouchable.” (133:53)
  • “In all cases, there’s only two outcomes—you win, or you learn.” (135:51)

• Parenting and Relationships:

  • Be clear about values; your kids may ignore you as teens but will return to your ideals when life gets hard. Only say “no” when it matters.
  • In relationships, focus on the magic over imperfection and realize lasting partnership is partly about deliberate choice (“If the cat’s bigger than the ___, keep the cat” – advice via Jimmy Iovine’s dad, 147:37).

• Curiosity and Fighting Inertia:

  • Rogers credits a restless, creative curiosity as his north star.
  • “We’re all crazy—I feel lucky to be crazy in a way that’s useful.” (128:42)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On taste and discovery:
  “Anytime anyone tells you something sucks, you can just say, shut up and do your job...Find me the 1% that's awesome.” (30:00)

• On building brands:
  “Storytelling plus time equals value.” (59:27)

• On inefficiency and the Internet:
  “I could recite for you so many songs that I dislike...because of limited distribution we were inundated with things we didn’t want to hear. I’ve just wanted efficiency.” (45:09)

• On agency/AIs:
  “Every action needs to be approved—either by a policy, or a human. Every action an agent takes must be approved.” (104:53)

• On falling and resilience:
  “I think it’s beyond ‘Don’t be afraid to fail.’ It’s becoming skilled at failure. Because once you’re skilled at failure, you are untouchable.” (135:33)

• On resisting personhood for AI:
  “Can AI achieve human consciousness? The answer is patently no. And no other definition matters, frankly.” (125:06)

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Key Timestamps & Segments

• [00:00] – Ian’s “never a spectator” ethos; chasing hated tech
• [05:23] – Punk rock, tattoos, and how scenes are made
• [12:54] – Participation > Spectating; spiritual meaning of punk
• [17:03] – Media, friction, and the nature of scenes then and now
• [30:00] – Filtering for the “1% that’s awesome”; taste discourse
• [39:02] – Only share “good stuff”; ignore mediocrity/negativity
• [45:09] – Snowball vs. Blockbuster, niche-at-scale media
• [54:00–68:12] – Brand-building, patience, long-term thinking
• [72:41] – Patience in tech; music on the Internet journey
• [90:40–99:53] – Security, Ledger, and agentic future of AI
• [104:53] – Human in the loop: AI approvals, policies, workflows
• [117:45] – Hardware vs. software security; human sign-off
• [123:43] – AI personhood, legal, and philosophical dangers
• [133:53] – TED talk on skateboarding and failure
• [143:03] – Working with friends; family vs. business lessons
• [144:56] – Parenting advice: values, boundaries, scaffolding
• [147:37] – Relationships: choosing to see the magic over flaws
• [150:41] – Zappa, individuality, and resisting the herd
• [154:52] – Staying curious, inspired, and “never a spectator”

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Tone & Language

• Rogers is candid, reflective, irreverently optimistic, and points often to the practical and human side of the digital world. The dialogue is intellectual yet rooted in lived experience, often circling back to music, failure, and curiosity.

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For Further Listening/Reading

• Sly & the Family Stone – Fresh; The Stooges – Funhouse; Willie Nelson – Spirit; Television – Marquee Moon; Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique.
• Umair Haq’s "Blockbuster vs. Snowball" essay (2003)
• Mustafa Suleiman’s “AI for Humans Not to Be Human” essay
• Ian’s essay for Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton

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Closing Thoughts

Rogers is a champion for agency—of embracing failure, seeking out the margins, and fighting inertia. Whether discussing AI, music, or parenting, he returns to the notion of participatory life—never just observing, but making, sharing, and iterating. As Dahl summarizes near the end, the challenge and the reward is “holding on to the punk rockness or the curiosity” as long as you can.

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“Are you a spectator or are you a participant? … That’s what punk rock means. That was the unlock for me. And I feel like everything I’ve been a part of after has been that in some way.” (12:54)

Transcript

[Ian Rogers]

I've always just tried to find, like, what's the technology people are going to hate next? From like, file sharing to streaming to crypto to now. AI, what's the technology people are going to be really angry about tomorrow. How do I get into that one? I remember Jimmy calling me. I was locked out of my own house, sitting on my back steps. Jimmy. Ian, what are you doing? Ian, you're a major league player. Why are you playing in the minors? Jimmy saw something in me that I didn't see. One of the things that Jimmy Iovine and Ben Otter no share is they see something in people and I don't know, is the wealthiest man in Europe and probably 85% of the population are not his customers. That's okay. The goal is not to appeal to everyone. Anyone who is in the business of individuality has had an amazing 20 years. You know, a Louis Vuitton handbag and a Slayer T shirt serve exactly the same function in society. Anytime anyone tells you something sucks, you can just say, shut up and do your job. It's so easy to find things, things that suck. 99.9% of all music, all movies, all books, all human beings, all NFTs. Yes. Are garbage. Find me the 1%. That's awesome. Spiritually. The thing about punk rock is you're all peers and you are judged on your contribution. You are not a spectator. You are a participant who is meant to engage. That was the unlock for me. And I feel like everything I've been a part of after has been that in some way. All the way up to today with what's going on with AI. Right. I feel like a part participant, not a consumer. The great Ted Nugent, he said, I've got news for you. I don't watch anything. I do.

[Host]

Welcome to Dialectic Episode 54 with Ian Rogers. I met Ian in early 2020. I was in Paris just before things got weird. We were building an esports team called 100 Thieves. Ian was the Chief Digital Officer of LVMH at the time. There was something he said that stuck with me, which was to not forget that ultimately you are selling culture before you are selling product. I think that was relevant for what we were doing, but I also think it's broadly representative of Ian in his career. He has had a career that's probably too long to list here, but to give you a sense of his path, he started as a skateboarder and kid who was into punk rock. In Goshen, Indiana. He created a fan site that became the Beastie Boys. Website and he became their webmaster. He worked with Justin Frankel and co on Winamp and Nutella. He then went to Yahoo Music where he created the first streaming all you can eat music subscription, was at top Spin for several years as the CEO and then joined Jimmy Iovine as the CEO of Beats Music before and through their acquisition to Apple, which became of course Apple Music in some sense. Ian spent the first 15 years or so of his career trying to get music on the Internet and certainly succeeded alongside the folks at Spotify. Shortly after joining Apple, Ian zagged and was recruited by Bernard Arnault and LVMH to become their Chief Digital Officer, helping the various maisons modernize when it came to E commerce and the Internet. He then zagged again and joined Ledger as the Chief Experience Officer. Ledger, if you're not familiar, is a crypto hardware wallet company where Ian still works today, although he changed his role recently to the Chief Human Agency Officer where he is focused on thinking through we will manage and work with wildly powerful agents, especially when they have access to secrets, information and value. Ian has spent his career at the frontier of technology and what's cool and I spoke to him about this and much more. We talked a lot about music as that is his first and true love and this was an honor. If you enjoy the episode, please share it with a friend. As Ian says, the best way for creative works to spread is through word of mouth. Thank you so much for listening. Before we get into the episode, I'd like to thank Notion Dialectic's presenting partner. Notion is a collaborative workspace for your life's work. Many of you are probably well familiar with it as an amazing note taking tool, collaborative database tool, and much more. And they have spent the last year and a half or so integrating AI and agents in a way that feels native and obvious. The reason Notion, I think, is so valuable when it comes to working with AI is that context matters not only when you're using it alone, but especially when you're using it with your team and collaborators. Being able to have a single place where all of your context and data is where you're actually doing the work, and where you can work with increasingly powerful agents and models, whether that be open source or the most powerful frontier models in the world. The day they come out is truly powerful. It's also been amazing to watch the Notion team evolve over the time that we've been working together and get to work with some really special people. Notion's co founder Akshay Kothari recently told Me that There are nearly 50 ex founders now working at Notion, which I think Speak speaks to not only the quality but the level of scrappiness and resourcefulness and agency amongst the various people who work there, many of whom I get to collaborate with. If you are interested in working with the team there, whether it be on product and marketing, engineering, storytelling or otherwise, please reach out to them directly or to [e-mail] youm can learn more at notion.com dialectic and by supporting Notion, you support Dialectic and me and the show with that. Here is my conversation with Ian Rogers and.

[Ian Rogers]

And so I was like, well, you know, a, if I have tattoos on my fingers, B, I'll never be able to hide from myself.

[Host]

Yeah, right.

[Ian Rogers]

Can't like grow up and be normal and then.

[Host]

But better than the eye drop or something?

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. I've always said I'd only get a face tattoo if. If Antoine Dixon and Lil Wayne were in the room. If the two of them were both in the room, I'm down. But that hasn't happened.

[Host]

What is, what are the. I assume they're Chinese characters or Japanese.

[Ian Rogers]

It says to become a dragon. I always say it means I'm a jackass. I tattooed my fingers.

[Host]

Are most of the rest of the tattoos that also that old?

[Ian Rogers]

No, like the back, I'm just trying to finish now.

[Host]

Oh, cool.

[Ian Rogers]

I won't get to it until I don't do it in the summer because you got to keep it out of the sun.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

So I'll finish the back. Also though, I have to say I'm feeling my age. Like when I did the back like last, last fall, I was like, oh, man, I might be done, but I gotta finish it.

[Host]

I think you gotta keep going. Have they been pretty? It'd be fun to see the like, line chart of age to tattoo volume.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, there would. There would be. There would be a, A drop off during my second marriage and a pickup during. After divorce that would be otherwise constant. Nah, not really. Not really. To be honest, I wonder if tattoos

[Host]

are trending up or down.

[Ian Rogers]

Well, I, I would say trending up and I would say that there's a specific reason for that. I think that anyone who is in the business of individuality, helping you distinguish yourself as an individual, has had an amazing 20 years. Right. And that doesn't matter if it is, you know, beauty. And I thought about this when I was at lvmh because, you know, at Sephora and lots of beauty brands and, you know, you just realize that, like, instagram was crazy and they really expanded the total addressable market because it's not like, it's not like you had like, children as, you know, beauty influencers, you know, before Instagram, right. Or TikTok. So anyone who's in the business of, you know, so again, that could be beauty, that could be tattoos. Anyone who's in the business of helping you say, I'm a member of that tribe and not that tribe. And that's what I realized too, is that, you know, a Louis Vuitton handbag and a Slayer T shirt serve exactly the same function in society. Is there a start to this podcast?

[Host]

Yeah, I think, I think we're in it.

[Ian Rogers]

I was going to say when it starts, I'm going to open this.

[Host]

All right, let's rock. Let's get some fresh. Can open.

[Ian Rogers]

So first of all, like, my disclaimer is off a flight from Tokyo yesterday morning. I've been up since 5am I've been, I guess working since.

[Host]

Got a nice 10k in.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, working since 5am we ran it, we ran a 10k. I made it through.

[Host]

Thank you for joining me.

[Ian Rogers]

I finished my last meeting at 7pm and that's why we have these delicious Mexican lagers from the beer store road. Yeah, beautiful.

[Host]

That last conversation we were having started with me asking about your tattoos. My first question is, what does punk rock mean to you in a spiritual sense?

[Ian Rogers]

I'll tell you exactly what it means to me. And I apologize because I've told this story before, but I mean, I grew up just loving rock and roll. I, you know, my, I have a brother and sister eight, nine years older than me. And you know, my, my brother outgrew his Kiss records and handed them down to me. And that was like, also my first experience with art, right? Like think about the COVID of Kiss Destroyer. The COVID of Kiss, Rock and Roll over. They're like really amazing pieces of art. Especially like you're a sick five, six year old kid. You're like, what is happening in this universe, right? So, and then, you know, my, my journey through music was kind of rock and roll, right? ACDC in like first and second grade and then junior high. I like Rush and Led Zeppelin and read like, you know, I remember like the book I read when I was in seventh grade was, you know, the ha, the Gods, the Led Zeppelin Saga, which by the way, a child should not read. But then, you know, I, I, I saw those bands. My mom took me to see Kiss when I was 13 years old and she took me to CACDC it was WASP opening for KISS. It was Fast Way. Yeah, a fast Way opening for acdc. I saw Rush at Cobo hall in Detroit, you know, but. And I'm like 13 years old and these are my first experiences, you know, with, with like seeing the music that I love and in person. But also like I'm sitting, you know, we don't have much money, so we're sitting in the bleachers. You know, the, like my favorite band is like a postage stamp like somewhere down at the bottom. But then I started skateboarding and getting into punk rock. Like, you just, you just find your way to that music. You open Thrasher magazine and you see Agent Orange and TSOL and like, how do I get those? And then this kid moves from, from Florida. And not only does he drive a black Firebird with the gold, the gold eagle on the COVID on the front, on the hood of the car, but he has amazing punk rock cassettes. Minor Threat, Agnostic Front, mdc. Somehow we get into Straight Edge, which is, you know, I like drinking a beer and talking about Straight Edge. But like, you know, don't drink, don't smoke, don't. At least I can think as, as Ian Makai, famous that was introduced to

[Host]

you specifically by this guy. Like most or even all these things.

[Ian Rogers]

Like, this is like, this is real like rabbit hole stuff.

[Host]

Okay.

[Ian Rogers]

You know what I mean? Like, it's no. What I do today. Like, I realize now that like you're either that person or you're not. And I always was, but I didn't know that other people weren't right. So anything worth doing is worth overdoing. So if I'm into punk rock, then I need, I want to know all of it. Like I go, I drive an hour to Tracks Records near Notre Dame and buy a copy of Maximum Rock and Roll. And then you read every review and you ask your, you take your allowance and ask your mom to write checks and mail order albums from.

[Host]

I was going to say the rabbit holes are a lot harder to get. Get.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, yeah, the rabbit holes are hard. Like you would read a three line review in the back of Maximum Rock and Roll. And then I asked my mom to write a check because I don't have a checkbook. I have allowance and I had a job even. But you know, because you work, you're. When you're a kid in Indiana, where the work ethic comes from. But so I had money, not much, but enough to buy 7 inch vinyl and you know, so you ended up like in this rabble, one of The Rabbit holes was, was Straight Edge. It's actually Straight Edge is like worth talking about, right? It's. It was a movement. It was an anti drug movement by teenagers in the 80s. Crazy, you know, and it's incredible. And I, and I super identified with it. So I'll find my way. 15 and I jumping around a little bit, but it does fill in pieces of the puzzle. Ian Mackay from Minor Threat, Fugazi, Embrace, Discord Records. I saw him in a, in a movie that was on television. Night Flight showed a movie called Another State of Mind that was really about the band Social distort. But Ian McKay like appears in the middle and he has this line where he says, yeah, I didn't know what I wanted to be, but I knew I didn't want to be like the football players at my school. And for me at 15, I was like, yeah, that guy is talking to like I, I identify with that so deeply. And so, yeah, I mean, don't drink, you know, don't smoke, don't. At least I can fucking think. Was like, okay, I'm with you on this, man. And I was primed for it.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

Okay. So to come back to punk rock and what does it mean spiritually? We were 15 years old. I think the band, the Straight Edge Band, Youth of Today is playing in Chicago. It's a four hour drive. We convinced Ryan Timmons dad to drive us there and it's an all ages show. You go to the show and there's four bands. Bastro, Soul side Youth of Today and the Henry Rollins Band. And we were like, isn't that the guy from Black Flag? Like we didn't really know much about Henry Rollins in 1986 or 87, whenever that was. But while we're watching the other bands in this teeny club, Henry Rollins is just standing to my left. The guys in the band I love are standing to my right. This is the difference between being a spectator and being a participant. And that's what it means to me. There's a great, you know, the, the great Ted Nugent, who is a colorful character from Detroit, played in a rock and roll band called the Amboy Dukes and also his eponymous Ted Nugent Ness. He said in a grand royal interview in the, in the 90s, they were asking about MTV and he said, I've got news for you, I don't watch anything. I do. And like that also resonated with me. So to me that spiritually, the thing about punk rock is you're all peers and you are judged on your Contribution not. You are not a spectator who is meant to, you know, buy a ticket and buy merchants. You are a participant who is meant to engage. And I think that's what. That, to me, is what punk rock means. That was the unlock for me. And I feel like everything I've been a part of after has been that in. In some way all the way up to today with what's going on with AI. Right. I feel like a. A participant, not a consumer.

[Host]

It's funny, it's. I think that's just a message that could be quite resonant with many young people today. It also, like. I mean, the first thing it reminds me of, despite him, at least on the surface, not being a very punk rock person, maybe is spiritually. There's that old Steve Jobs video where he's like, when you realize that the world was created by no one smarter than you and that you can, like, poke the universe and, like, get some feedback.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah.

[Host]

Like the. It's the meme of the. You're sitting back in the chair and you lean forward in the. Playing the video game. Like, what? Call it Agency? Call whatever you want. What a. What an amazing thing to, like, internalize.

[Ian Rogers]

Totally.

[Host]

And probably not something that really leaves you once you get it, regardless of how you get it.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, I think that's true. You know, one time working with Jimmy Ivey, and I asked him, like, why do you do this? I think it was right around the time of his 60th birthday. And I was curious. I'm like, why do you get out of bed in the morning, man? Like, because he was the hardest working person in my life. He was my first phone call at 7 o'clock in the morning. He was my last phone call at 11 o' clock in the morning. You ask my daughter, you know, she'll say, oh, yeah, we were at Jimmy's house every weekend, right. Because there's always a reason that we were meeting somebody for lunch on Saturday and we go to Jimmy's, like, nobody works harder than Jimmy. And I was like, what's your motivation? Why do you do this? And he said, once you've moved culture, it's a high. You always want to get back. He said to me, he said, there was a before Eminem and an after Eminem. And that's a feeling. And once you've done it, you just want to do it again.

[Host]

You'll move any mountain.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. And so I think it's that Steve Jobs thing. And I think that Steve Jobs and Jimmy really shared.

[Host]

So there's a Culture Mag profile on you from a little while ago. And in it it says, despite hopscotching across fashion and music and crypto, Roger's skill set remains singular. He gets to know a cultural scene, then he brings more people into it, maybe to start what makes a scene.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, that's a great question. And how has what makes a scene changed? I think it is a function of media in some way. Right. There's a McLuhan. The medium is the message thing in here somewhere where, if you think about how hard it was to create a scene with the technology of fill in the blank and how that's changed.

[Host]

Right.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, what's an interesting example is skateboarding. Think about, like, the business model of skateboarding in the 90s. It was there. Nobody made money in competitions really.

[Host]

Right.

[Ian Rogers]

So the. What you had to do was sell boards. How do you sell boards while you get popular with kids? How do you get popular with kids while you get seen in a VHS cassette that gets passed around, you know, and. And so, yeah, that. That's when you think about it, like, wow, you.

[Host]

Friction at every step of that process.

[Ian Rogers]

Exactly. Yet you could actually kind of build a career that way. And people did.

[Host]

Yes.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, and then also that of course, determines, like, what kind of skateboarder is popular, you know, because, like, you've gotta. You've got to be popular. No one's gonna buy your boards. Right.

[Host]

So when maybe to go back to McLuhan, you even have to be the type of skateboarder who can pop on a vhs.

[Ian Rogers]

Exactly. You've gotta, you know, and by the way, like, the amount of work that they would put into those parts. Yeah, right. Because that's literally. How am I going to eat for the next 24 months? Is going to be based on, you know, if I can do some in this video that no one's done before. Right. And a really interesting way to move things forward. Right. Think about, like, the difference between that and, you know, NFL.

[Host]

Right.

[Ian Rogers]

It's very. It's like a very different business model.

[Host]

Very.

[Ian Rogers]

I think that, like, my. My point really was that, like, technology is. Is in here somewhere because, you know, I think your interview with Yancey actually covers this pretty well, because you ask him, like, what is a label, Right? And a label is just sort of a group of people gathered around an idea, and then that can create a scene like that that could. So the, you know, it could be a particular, you know, an artist or, you know, for example, you know, Andy Warhol in the Factory with Velvet Underground, you Know, et cetera. It also could be an artist in the sense of the Beastie Boys, you know, created really a diaspora that I'm proud to be a part of. But it, it, we really. It really was like kind of a global, like minded group. I was just in Tokyo and I spent a lot of my time with Rip Zinger, who I know through the Beastie Boys and is sort of like part of that. Just being with him. It's obvious that we're both part of that scene even though we're in our fucking 50s. Right. You know what I mean? So I think. But I don't know and I guess I'm not sure what that means today. I think it might mean a lot less today because I think that we were much more tied to the scene either like in or out of it. I don't feel that from kids today, but maybe I'm just. Maybe I'm just old.

[Host]

I've had this conversation with a few different people, maybe with Anca. I can't quite remember. The meta point that I think a lot of people have made is because everything's so much less frictionful, it's harder for the boundaries that sort of create a scene to hold.

[Ian Rogers]

Makes sense.

[Host]

So any, like, yeah, maybe you could have a Discord server or a thing here or there, but like everything on the Internet is much more legible. And one of the theories that I have and I think others have spoken about is like, that friction is part of what, like creates the, the, the connection that says we're, we're part of this group, we're not part of that group.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah.

[Host]

When everyone can move super freely, it's, it's harder.

[Ian Rogers]

I wonder if it's also, you know, if you think about kind of moving from living in public on Instagram and like setting up your beacon to being in group chats, you know, like, is the group chat a scene or is it not a scene? Because it doesn't need to advertise itself. You know, it's closed by default. Right. To be a scene.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

Does it need to advertise itself? Does it need to. Does it need to recruit?

[Host]

My initial response would be it depends on what stage. Like, my sense is that there are a lot of group chats that have started as these sort of private containers and have gained a lot of power over time. Yeah. This is kind of the classic Yancey thing is this sort of like, I forget who first come. It was Venkatesh Rao, somebody like this. They're talking about, like you have this kind of cozy Web. Or you have this group of people, and then when they go participate in the public arena as the gladiator or whatever, it's almost like there's this conspiracy of, like, people. And you don't like people responding to the tweet who you don't know they're actually already in cahoots with. Yeah, but it's a different thing for sure.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, the responding to a tweet is such a great thing to say because you realize, like, we just don't know at this point, like, if they're like, that has very little purchase at this point, because that response is probably a bot, most likely, you know, and so now. Now that, like, it's the. Those waters are so muddy. I was thinking about, like, what is a scene in this term? Because, like, Harper Reed has an amazing AI builder group, and I love it. It's like a really an honor to be a part of it. Also, you know, there. There are some of these, like, kind of Silicon Valley, you know, groups that I'm in where you're. You know, for me, I feel like I'm in there with, like, people that are building things that I use every day, you know? You know, and. And so is that a scene or is that a professional networking group? You know what I mean? Like, what. And what's the difference? Exactly. And I think about, like, the Beastie Boys example is actually an interesting one, because I feel like they were a part of scenes. Like, they were part of the punk rock scene in New York, they were part of the hip hop scene in New York. And to me, the greatest part of the Beastie Boys book is, like, really getting a feel for what it was like to grow up in New York in the 80s when, like, culture happened there. And everything that I experienced in Indiana was downstream of those things that were happening there on the ground every day. And they were really a part of those scenes.

[Host]

Yeah, meet me in the bathroom. Same idea.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, yeah. Like, those are real, real scenes. At the same time, the scene the Beastie Boys created, I almost feel like it was almost like reluctant. Like they, you know, they. They kind of. They created Grand Royal because in Check youk Head, they put a little note that said, if you'd like the lyrics, send a dollar to this address. And they ended up, by the way, that's some friction. Yeah, exactly. Well, and. But also they kind of thought like, well, we'll see if anyone does that. I remember, like, we had trash bags full of those dollars, those envelopes in the Grand Royal offices. And, you know, it was quite a, like, a difficult thing to respond to all of them. And I think that also to their credit, they looked at that and they went, if we just send these people lyrics, we're idiots. There's more we can do here. And they created Grand Rail magazine out of that impulse, right? Out of going, like, wait, we have an audience here. And so now. Was that a scene? I guess so. They created it, but it also included X Large Mike D. Used to have a record store on Vermont. It include, you know what I mean? Like, you. You start, like, then you. Then you start putting pieces together. But yeah, I think technology has always been a limiting factor. And maybe now. Yeah, to your point, it's. I think it's really like. I think that's a great way to put it. I hadn't thought of it before, but, like, because of the lack of friction, then the. You. The these. The friction was kind of the guardrails that kept it. And I have to say, like, I was always a part of scenes. Like, I was like, very much, you know, if it wasn't on these labels, I wasn't going to listen to it sort of thing. And then there are these two, you know, friends I made in high school that just taught me that. That actually it's all nonsense. Like 99 of every genre and every scene is garbage. And actually your job is to find the. The 1% of everything. That's amazing.

[Host]

Traverse.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. And to traverse. So I think that, you know, there's also, like, you know, I think some people are just more oriented that way. Right.

[Host]

Another cut on this would be There's Been People. One person as an example. I don't know if you're familiar with him, is W. David Marks, who wrote Status and Culture. And he has a new book kind of on like, it's called Blank Space

[Ian Rogers]

right now, the name, but I haven't read it.

[Host]

He and many other cultural commentators have kind of made this point that, like, we're sort of like an end of history for culture. Like, there's no new culture being created. Everything's derivative. One theory for this, if it's true, which I think is probably a grand statement, is the lack of subculture or the lack of scenes like this. To what extent do you see new culture forming, particularly at the edges, like, where one theory behind this could be, like, it has to be low status. That's harder for those things to materialize. Maybe it's good when something like crypto is less popular than whatever. But as someone who seems to have been very much on the edge of what was really interesting. Or cool is a challenging word, but the edge of cool for many years, long after you were 19. I'm curious if there's anything or where you would even look, man.

[Ian Rogers]

I mean, I. I haven't heard his argument, but I couldn't disagree more. I. I mean, I think that sounds like a. Like a really typical old person argument to me. Like, things were better when I was a kid and.

[Host]

But I think he's probably late 30s.

[Ian Rogers]

Okay, well, you know, he's old well beyond his years.

[Host]

I.

[Ian Rogers]

Because, I mean, I would let me. Let me approach this in a couple ways because I just think it's kind of patently false. First of all, my challenge would be name one culture that's not derivative. I can't think. I mean, that's not how humans work, right? Like, everything that we do is derivative. Right. We're always building on the shoulders of giants in every aspect of life. Without. And you know, without. Without Robert Johnson, there's no Rolling Stones and without next, there's no iPhone. Right? Like this. All of these things are true. We're always.

[Host]

We're all.

[Ian Rogers]

Everything is derivative by definite. By definition. Also, I would argue that, like, there's so much subculture on, you know, look, on Instagram and YouTube. It's like the humor is so specific. Like, by the way, doom scroll forever, please, ladies and gentlemen. How about fake music Br. On. On Instagram. Like doom scroll. Doom scroll forever. I don't know if the comedy is made only for me, but it's my favorite thing on the Internet, period. You know, and, and really, I would say we have so much more subculture. Like, you know, you know, if you're soup, whatever you're super into, it's on yout Right? Right. And it's some of it's super deep.

[Host]

Right?

[Ian Rogers]

Like, you know, you think about like whatever. This thing's been around forever. Fan fiction and this. And this sort of, you know, and this fanfiction.

[Host]

Sorry to interrupt you. Fan fiction's may be a great point to latch onto though, because I think part of the. The point here isn't that there's infinite depth on whatever. I want to also talk about Internet niche. I think I totally agree with you there. I think the point is less like you can go infinite YouTube rabbit hole on anything you want, but that it's sort of regurgitated. Like it's. It's like compounding in on itself versus progressing culture forward.

[Ian Rogers]

I'm still not sure I agree.

[Host]

Like, I In a way that feels like.

[Ian Rogers]

Honestly, I really think it feels like somebody saying, media used to work like this when I was a kid. And it doesn't work like that anymore. Yeah, right. You know what I mean? Because media physics changes. It reminds me of even, like, you know, I remember I was at the JP Morgan conference in 2021, and I remember just this moment of watching these, like, old billionaires sit on stage and ask, like they were. They were furrowing their brow and asking, like, when do we go back to a more centrist political dialogue? And I was like, you just asked, when do we go back to three channels on television? Like, the answer is we don't go back to three channels on television, therefore we don't go back to a more centrist political dialogue. You know, you'll always encounter old people saying, oh, there's no good music anymore.

[Host]

Right, right.

[Ian Rogers]

I'm just. I'm not saying that's what this guy's argument is. I'm just saying it's. This is like, you will encounter this in your life, and it's a sort of a similar argument. Okay, so here's what you do. Always. In that case, say, what year would you say music was great?

[Host]

They're 18.

[Ian Rogers]

So first of all, the answer is when they were in college. Like, invariably don't lead them. But I'm sure that'll be the answer. Then what you do is you pull out your phone, you type in Billboard Hot 100 that year, and then you show it to them and they will go, oh, but yeah, that's not what I was listening to. And I would say, exactly, in those days, you were looking at the underground. You were looking for the good shit. And now you are judging music based on the Billboard Hot 100.

[Host]

Right, right, right, right.

[Ian Rogers]

And so this is the problem with these things. Like, anytime. And by the way, also, anytime anyone tells you something sucks, you can just say, shut up and do your job. It's so easy to find things that suck. 99.9% of all music, all movies, all books, all human beings, all NFTs. Yes. Are garbage. Right? Do your job. Find me the 1%. That's awesome. That's what I would. That's what I would say to him. Right this year. It's Twisted Teens. Fucking greatest band I've heard in 10 years. And what are they? They're New Orleans steel guitar, punk rock. Are they a part of a scene? Are they even a part of a genre? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, but it's awesome. And that's all that matters.

[Host]

Part of this maybe too, is that you have to be looking. I think I was texting you about this. I recently interviewed Tyler Cowan and my friend Nabil, and I currently have a viral Instagram reel going crazy because Tyler was saying. I think he literally said rap is basically dead and electronica is kind of born out. And he's like, waiting for AI music to get good. I think part of the implication here, too, is, like, you can't look in the spot you were looking prior.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah.

[Host]

And there is something really fresh and interesting and new, but it's probably not quite 2025 shaped, let alone 2015 shaped.

[Ian Rogers]

It also might not be your taste.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

You know what I mean? Like, I'm experiencing that with. With. With hip hop generally. Right. I was like a. Like a 90s hip hop nerd.

[Host]

Right.

[Ian Rogers]

I listened like, you know, Pitchfork tells me this is a great new rap record. I put it on, and nine times out of 10, I'm like, oh, this is not for me. And that's probably just me. Not. It's not that.

[Host]

Well, maybe. Do you think it's possible that hip hop is significantly less artistically innovative than it was 10, 15 years ago? It makes sense, given how. Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

But I think you could say that about every genre, right? I mean, like, just actually start with the oldest, right? Like, go. Go put on, like, a new blues record from Alligator Records. Is it innovative?

[Host]

Right?

[Ian Rogers]

No, it is not innovative in the slightest. Right. There's always these moments when art forms are new and the best thing about them is there's no rules. Like, I would argue that hip hop is dead, since you could say that's not hip hop, you know what I mean? And then everything else is exceptions to the rule, you know what I mean? Like, as soon as you could say, oh, that's not hip hop. Like, well, now, actually, now you've made a box and you tried to put the art in a box, and it's only the people that escape that box that are going to be interesting. Right. And so I. But I. And I think all, you know, certainly electronic music is that, like, electronic. Like, electronic music was so exciting when it was new and it was like, what is this? Like, the first time I heard, you know, Richard D. James album by Aphex Twin, I was like, this is the future of music, period. Like, I don't even know what.

[Host]

For what it's worth, Tyler was definitely praising Effects Trend.

[Ian Rogers]

But it's a great example because, like, if you. If in the 90s, you were like, oh my God, this is going to be so exciting. And then ultimately you realize that electronic music wasn't even a genre, it was just an excuse to take drugs. Then you were super disappointed, right, Because Apex Twin really felt like the future of classical music, you know, like, wow. And so now you're just like, oh, no, it's just like, you know, it's just people, you know, like four on the floor. Like, like getting high in a 90

[Host]

of everything is boring.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So in other words. Yeah, exactly so. And I think. But I think it's the same, the same with, the same with hip hop, right? Like, like every other genre, most of it's terrible. It's not like a genre is good. It's not like hip hop good, country bad. No, most hip hop is terrible. Most country is terrible. And guess what? There's amazing in both too, if you're willing, you know, to do the filtering and, and look. And also, like, I also, I love the exceptions that prove the rule, you know, the one for the past year is Clips.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

Best record. You know, I mean, I don't. Best record. One of my favorite records of, of the past couple of years is the Clips record. I mean, Push is so talented as, as like just a rapper. He has everything that I want. You know, he's, he's, he's, he's clever, he's wordplay, he's swag. He's smart. He's also dumb. You know, he's not dumb.

[Host]

He's.

[Ian Rogers]

He's super smart, but he knows when to play dumb. To like, have it be about drug talk or, you know, and you know, it's, it's. To me, it's like everything that I want, like having Malice back, like, everybody, I could tell you, like, we saw clips in LA and like when Malice walks out on stage, it's like I felt like everyone in the room wanted to start crying, you know, because. And to me, like, Clips doesn't even sound contemporary. It sounds like the hip hop I grew up, you know what I mean?

[Host]

Between that feeling like something you used to love also new versus just feeling, Feeling nostalgic.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, I think, and I think, by the way, I'm comfortable at age 53 saying I don't know. And I don't feel like I need to know. You know what I mean? Like, it's all about tier one to you, and having kids teaches you that as well. It's like I don't care what they listen to. I just love that they love music, you know, and so we all realize that, you know, like, there is not a. There is. There are no absolutes there. You know, there isn't a. There isn't a good. I mean, I'm a music snob, but I also know there is no such thing as good or bad. I think Old Dirty Bastard is the most talented vocalist of the 20th century, and I probably will be hard pressed to find anyone who agrees with me, but that's okay.

[Host]

Why do. We're dangerously close to the taste discourse, but why do across artistic mediums. It's almost a recursive question, but the people with good taste seem to converge on similar things.

[Ian Rogers]

Mojo magazine, I read my. I don't know if you know the magazine, but British magazine, it's been around for I don't know how long. 50 years, I think. I feel like I. There was a Joni Mitchell cover a couple issues ago that I think said 50 years on it.

[Host]

I, I. Oh, cool.

[Ian Rogers]

Hey, Mojo, I don't really know how old you are. I apologize if I got that wrong. But, I mean, I read it cover to cover every month.

[Host]

Wow.

[Ian Rogers]

And. And they are. I say that because they are kind of like we converge on good taste in a way. And, you know, guess who's on the COVID this month? The Rolling Stones. Right. Like, you know, like every other year. And. But it is things that are worth following, you know, and, and oftentimes I discover things through that channel that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. And that is why it's important to me that that is what Pitchfork. That's the role that pitchfor for a very long time. Less so today, unfortunately, but still sometimes.

[Host]

But it's kind of outside of scenes. The people that I think are the coolest or the smartest or whatever seem to generally trend towards. Even if they're coming from very different scenes, they seem to converge on similar types of stuff, which I find really interesting. The fact that Tyler Cowen can talk to Rick Rubin about music, granted, maybe they both just truly love music, but, like, the fact that those two guys who are very dissimilar, maybe they're similar in age, have converged. You and Rick is maybe less surprising. But.

[Ian Rogers]

But I think Rick and I probably converge less than you might think. You know what I mean? Like, one of my favorite things to do when I visit him is to just sit and play songs. And I've never heard most of the songs he plays me, and he hasn't heard most of the songs that I play for him. Also, I was just talking to someone about this and we were talking about kind of where we come from. And that's actually why I went down the path of talking about the rock and roll first side, because it's like, you kind of have to see the arena rock to appreciate the punk rock.

[Host]

Totally.

[Ian Rogers]

And. And also, like, I came from heavy metal, so I never got pop punk. And you know, that doesn't mean pop punk is bad. It just means that, like, if you, if you, if you were into like, you know, Britney Spears and then you discovered no effects, that makes sense to me. Right. Like, you know, whereas, you know, when I was. Since I came from, you know, heavy heavy, then, you know, I'm more likely, you know, so I think that we all just have this personal experience and, you know, you. That. That's why I think tier one to the individual is. Is really much more important for me, you know, all the music stuff. I did digital music for 20 years, and for me, what was important was that we enabled people to do whatever they wanted to do with music. I never wanted to be a music critic. There's a. There's a time for that. You're sitting with friends, you're like, I love this record. Have you heard it? You know, you want to share, but like, what I loved about Winamp was you could just play anything you wanted to. And I don't care what you play. I just want you to love music. And so if you're loving it, that is. That is. That is fantastic. And I think that then the other side of it is like, it really should just be about sharing. Another. Another way to put this is no three star reviews. The only, like, whenever. Like, that's what pisses me off about Rolling Stone. It's like, like every. You look through it. I don't know if it's still the case. I haven't looked at Rolling Stone in God knows how many years. But it used to be all three star reviews. And I'm like, you guys are three

[Host]

out of four or three out of five.

[Ian Rogers]

Three out of five.

[Host]

Yeah. This is why I love the four star scale is you have to choose. You have to go thumbs up or thumbs down.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. Which is all the. It's only if you're. If you really want to do me a favor. Yes. If it's three stars, just leave it out. Who cares? There's only two things I care about. One is I didn't know about it and it's awesome. Awesome. Please tell me about that. Yeah. The other is I might have wasted my time on it. I would in the Old days would be wasted my money on it. Right. Like, in other words, like, if that new record from that artist that I was probably going to buy really sucks, please warn me those are the only two things you need to do. This is kind of okay. Like, I don't have time for that, you know, I'm too busy trying to find the good stuff.

[Host]

I was right about it, man.

[Ian Rogers]

Don't tell me. Don't tell me something is mediocre. What is the point?

[Host]

Totally agree.

[Ian Rogers]

But I would also say don't tell me something is bad. Duh. Just tell me the good stuff. Really? Like, people just talking about shit they don't like. It's really, at this point, like, what is wrong with you? What's the point? Like, tell me stuff that. Tell me something that's worth watching.

[Host]

I agree. We talked about it, or at least we talked around it a lot. You've been a strong advocate that the Internet is maybe, way I put it in the past is like, it's about niche at scale. It's not about the mainstream. There's an idea that you, I think, talked about with Rick some, a couple of interviews ago, which is the Blockbuster versus the Snowball. I'd love to hear you just riff on that briefly, because I thought it was one of the more interesting cuts on this. And it just, like, so, well, feels like it's every year that passes, it's describing modern culture better.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. And all credit on this goes to Umer Haq, who wrote this piece called the blockbuster versus a snowball. And I think 2003, really prescient. There was actually something that came before that. There was somebody around 2000 who basically was saying that the popularity of Fox News was due to the Internet. And the point was that, you know, if. When you only have. When you have limited distribution, you have two newspapers in a town that to get the most viewership, they're going to drift toward the middle. But the. The point was, you know, well, when you have unlimited choice, then you've got to stake out a position, I actually think. And John Higgs, who's my favorite author, he has a contemporary theory on this to kind of bring this all the way to today is. Is. And it. It really does. You know, you really do ask yourself, like, okay, how do you get the viewership? Right? So again, limited distribution, two newspapers in a city. If you want the maximum viewership, you've got to be centrist, right? Well, now, on the Internet, if you want maximum viewership, what do you have to do? You have to Be polarizing. Right? And so I, like the way John put it, I find it actually very optimistic because what he's. What he says is, is like those two centrist newspapers didn't really represent any of us, right, because they were more centrist than any of us as human beings actually are. Now, his. His theory now is that media is so polarizing that it doesn't actually represent any of us.

[Host]

Oh, it's optimistic in that way.

[Ian Rogers]

It's optimistic in that way where we

[Host]

were deluded prior into thinking, because I was gonna say it was more optimistic when they were converged because we got to all believe we were really similar. But that was an illusion.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, it was. It was an illusion. And by the way, I, you know, maybe it. Maybe that is a positive way to live. I mean, I fell for it, right? I mean, I grew up in, you know, all White Ghost Indiana watching, you know, Sesame street and Different Strokes, and I really believed that, you know, we were all the same. And it took me, like, you know, moving to big cities, you know, to realize, like, that racism was real. You know what I mean? Like, I. I really. I didn't feel racism when I was growing up, because me, it was over. So I. I agree. There's something positive in that. I was talking with. With, you know, one of my. One of my daughters. Oh, she was like. She made the comment like, you know, everyone's mad about Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. And my. My thought was having the John Higgs thing in my head. My thought was, well, but are they like, in other words, like, if I walk out on the street right now and start asking people, are you upset about Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl? My guess is they're probably going to go like, no, Bad Bunny's cool. Right? You know, but, you know, the. The polarizing algorithm, which. Which is polarizing by definition, right? Like, intentionally would make you think that everybody's bad about Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. So what Umair had said in 2003 with the blockbuster versus the snowball is the way he put it was. It is media physics. I know. Don't. I don't know if that was his term or mine, but that was the way I thought about it in that, you know, and because you. We went from limited distribution to unlimited distribution, so the media I grew up with is limited distribution. There's only 13 channels on television. There's only so much FM spectrum. There's only so many magazines you can fit at the Hallmark store, you know, like that. Limited distribution. But the Internet is I'm going to make, you know, Mr. Tatemyballs.com and guess what? I have, you know, I'm, I'm now memorific. Right? Like that's the, that's the unlimited distribution, Internet.

[Host]

Your TAM is 8 billion.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. And, and so what, what Umair said is that, you know, in that we're in the old world, when you're making a movie, you know, especially in the 80s or, or 90s, you're. You're not trying to make Citizen Kane. You're trying to get people to go to theater A instead of theater B this weekend. So if you've got an extra $2 million, where do you invest it? Do you invest it into making the movie better or do you invest it into marketing? Right, you're going to put it into marketing because I just need people to go to theater A instead of theater B. And then his point was, you know, in the new world, and he said this in 2003, he really predicted House of Cards. Yes, I would say. Right, because he, he said it's, it's quality is hyper efficient, not marketing. If you have the choice, you're going to put that money into making the product better, because the only thing that actually works is word of mouth.

[Host]

And you're competing at a global level. This is Reed Hastings talking about Netflix completing with. Competing with sleep, in a sense.

[Ian Rogers]

Exactly. Yeah. And I. And you know, if you listen to, you know, the history of rock and roll and 500 songs, which I recommend, you know, you'll hear him say every episode, if you enjoyed this show, please tell just one person, the best way for creative works to, you know, to, to, you know, to reach people is word of mouth. And that is definitely true today. I'm actually okay with that. Like, I think that that's not a. Not a terrible outcome. But I. You know what? Coming back to this is what I was going to say earlier when I started saying that about people enjoying whatever music they want. All I've ever wanted is efficiency. And that seems silly, but I grew up with like this pop music radio that, where I could, I could recite for you so many songs that I dislike. I know the whole song. I know all the lyrics. And then if you said, do you like that song? I would say, I hate that song. Right. And that's because we were just inundated because of limited distribution. We were inundated with things we didn't want to hear yet. There's incredible stuff that's not reaching us. And that inefficiency is Always like, what I've wanted is. I've just wanted everybody. Like, if you would like this, I want it to reach you.

[Host]

Kind of a beautiful cut on efficiency, like. Yeah, yeah. It's a meritocratic. Yeah. In a sense.

[Ian Rogers]

And if you don't like it, okay. I don't want to force it on you.

[Host]

I don't.

[Ian Rogers]

I don't want you to listen to it until you, like. Except for Twisted Teens, you're not going to like it the first time, but by the 10th time, you'll be hearing the melodies in your sleep.

[Host]

This happened to me a couple. That happened to me with Yeezus. For sure, that happened. Did you listen to Cameron Winter?

[Ian Rogers]

Winter, yes.

[Host]

Having to me initially with him, I was like. But I just couldn't, I think, by

[Ian Rogers]

the way, I, I'm. I definitely. I agree with you on camera Winter. Those were genuine earworms. Really creative. I felt like the Camera Winter record is sort of like Astral Weeks for, you know, this year or something. Like, it had that kind of like, I didn't know when a song was over, you know, sort of feeling.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

Like. Like on Astral Weeks. And I. I love the Geese record, I think, like, you know, I mean, the. The previous record I thought was great, but I felt like it was almost like a bunch of talented musicians in New York that were sort of like. Yeah. I was like, oh, well, that's the Radiohead reference, and that's the Thin. Thin Lizzy reference. And like, you could feel it. Yeah. The new record, I. I mean, the latest one, I. I mean, I know people love to hate on them. And I. I'm like, what are you talking about? This is genuinely challenging. Like, you put the most challenging song at the front of the record. I love that. That's like a wean move. And the one. One real, like, key is the guitar. Melodies get stuck in your head. Same for Twisted Teens, by the way, there's steel guitar, so you got two melodies. The guy. The guy who writes the songs, amazing melodies. And then you've got the steel guitar in the background. There's like this second melody. I think that's why you hear it in your sleep. It's really insidious. But. Yeah, the, the. But I, I. Yes, I think that, that, that thing, Yeezus, by the way, I hated that

[Host]

album when it came out.

[Ian Rogers]

Oh, I've. That is. And it grew on you.

[Host]

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's. Yeah. But I. I literally hated it. Like, I was like, kanye, I love this. This sucks.

[Ian Rogers]

Can I tell you can you tell you my personal story with that record? First of all, I don't think I've ever said this publicly, but I. There's a project that I think that I would like to do. If anyone would like to do this with me, please contact me. I'm afraid I'm actually gonna have a lot of people contact me because we all have stories. The book is called People who Tried to Help Kanye.

[Host]

I know at least a few.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. Because he is truly, truly talented. Right. So the first time that. That I met Kanye, Guy Osiri asked me if I would come over to his house and talk to Kanye, because Kanye wanted. And it was. Guy was smart on this. He's like, I think what Kanye's trying to do is like, his grand royal, like, will you come talk to him? I'd love to. So Dark Twisted Fantasy had been out. I just, like, Dark Twisted Fantasy blew my mind.

[Host]

Much more palatable on the first list.

[Ian Rogers]

I think it's still. Yeah, true. And. But that's why the story's good, because. So I go over there and sit with Kanye. We have a pretty cool conversation. Interesting conversation, actually. One of the things, talking about boxes, he said, I feel like music is a box and I need to get out of it. He's like, I'm done. One thing. One funny thing from that meeting with him is he goes, yeah. I mean, I made a record that's a 10 out of 10 on Pitchfork. Dark Twisted Fantasy. He said, my punishment is that I have to do press and tour, you know? He's like, I made a record with Jay Z. He's like, there's nowhere to go from here but down. I was like, you made a record, Jay Z? He's like, yeah, you don't read the news. And I was like, so you could put it on the timeline, because I guess he'd made the record and people were talking about it, but I didn't know about it. And the record wasn't out yet.

[Host]

This is Watch the Throne.

[Ian Rogers]

I watch the Throne, exactly. But I left Guy's house that day thinking, Kanye is never going to make music again, because that's what he told me. He told me he wasn't going to make music anymore. Music is a box. He said when he was in Chicago, he felt like he was doing a box. He had to get out of the box. Music is a box. I've got to get out of the box. And I was like, wow. Wow. Kanye's not going to make music anymore. Wow. Okay. That's how I left. I left There believing and feeling that one day Mike D. Told me, you know, Kanye's up at Rick's working on a record. Like, you know, Mike's in Malibu. Rick's in Malibu. And I was like, oh, really? Huh. I didn't think he was going to make music anymore. So the fact that what came out of that is Jesus makes perfect sense to me. As soon as they like you, make them unlike you. Because kissing people's ass is so unlike you. Only rapper compared to Michael. I mean, Yeezus is. It's punk rock. It is so fucking punk rock. It is just from the moment it starts, like, it's hard. It's difficult, and. And he is as good an emcee on that record as almost ever. Although one Kanye thing. My daughter would be so bummed that I'm, like, big up in Kanye because, like, she's so disappointed with swastikas and. Yeah, you know, for good reason.

[Host]

Yeah, I think you can hold.

[Ian Rogers]

There's nothing cool about a swastika, man. Like, dude, come on. But the. If you. If you're ever interested, like, there was a art of rap. I think it's called Search Art of rap, Kanye. And watch him do. He does a verse from Dark Twisted Fantasy. I promise, you never knew how good that verse was until you hear it acapella. I mean, wow. So anyway, yeah, I just wanted to say that Jesus is amazing.

[Host]

And that kind of Gmail account for the. For the book.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I know this is a controversial topic. It's not so controversial to me. Like, I have Sly Stone tattooed on my arm. Like, I like music, and, you know, so I. I think, you know, we don't always. We don't always share political views with our. The. With our. With the people whose music we enjoy. Like, those are. Those are not. I don't know. Those are strange bedfellows.

[Host]

Do you think I'll ever make anything that good again?

[Ian Rogers]

I don't know. I mean, I hope so, but I don't know. I mean, I think that this is. This. I mean, it's not. Not for me to. Not really for me to pontificate up. To me, the more interesting question there is, like, how does kind of the machinery interfere with. With the art? You know, and I think there's. That. That's a lot of the story, right? I mean, so a. There's. There's personal issues. You know, he's. You know, he's. You know, he's a human being with his own issues at the same time. Then there's like, everything's around. That's why I think that the, the, the people who tried to help Kanye book, which, which is a, which is a joke, obviously, but I also think that that's one of the things that I find sad about it because there's so many people that, that really believed in his genius, that wanted to help and, you know, that just couldn't.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

And that's a, that's, that's, that's unfortunate.

[Host]

I want to talk briefly about brand. We, we briefly met in early 2020, and I was building this gaming thing, and there's this line you said that stuck with me for years and years, and I don't even know if we totally followed the advice as much as we should have. But you said, never forget you're selling culture, not product. What does that actually mean?

[Ian Rogers]

Well, I think that selling culture is a prerequisite to selling product is sort of the way that, that I thought about it and I really, I, I really loved working at LVMH to see that. The great thing about LVMH brands is that in some ways they're caricatures of, of brands, you know, where. Whereas. And what I mean by that specifically is, you know, I, I work with Dr. Martens today, and you can, you could be excused for saying, like, well, sell. There's a lot of utility in what we sell, right? It's a black boot, it's comfortable. I. You know what I mean? Like, there's, and, and, but, but, but that's actually like, you're kind of doing yourself a disservice when you do that because you're missing, you're, you're missing the real reason that that motivates someone to buy something. There's a, there's a great human being, David Slew, who, Who worked with Tony Fadell for a very long time, still works with Tony, and he taught me something about, about consumer electronics, which is that the front of the box is for the heart, the back of the box is for the head, right? And so, you know, the front of the box is that lizard brain. Like, I want that. Oh, that's cool. Shiny object, right? The back of the box is. I've got to justify to my partner why I spent, you know, 500 on this. Well, look, it's got blah and it's got blah, and it's got this feature and it's got that feature. Look, it's a great buy, you know, and, and, and so I think. But it's that same thing, right? You're selling the Part that touches you first. Right. And then once you've crossed that barrier, well, now I can sell you the product.

[Host]

It's also funny, it's telling that Apple products have very little on the back of the box.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean the, the Apple, the Apple, the Apple thing over the past 20 years is just crazy. Yeah, you could, you couldn't have. I mean, in fact, the think that that's a 20 years interesting timeline to look at it because if you'd have told me in 2006 that if you'd have described the iPhone to me, you'd have said there's a mostly proprietary platform that's going to take 30%, you know, from anybody who wants to have an app on their platform. I would have said that's not the Internet. You know, the Internet is like open and available to anyone and we're about open source and we're about, about, you know, open access and blah, blah, blah. And I just would have bet against it. I'd have bet against it all day long and obviously I'd have been very wrong. But yeah, I think it's a, there's so many, so many lessons lessons in that. I think though that the bigger lesson in, in Apple is the, the Clayton Christensen one. The, you know, the, when the technology is not yet good enough, the integrated solution always wins. And they had that combination of software and hardware that, that, you know, a company like Sony never knew how to do.

[Host]

The funny thing is that I would agree with you and there's this classic, I don't know if you ever read, Ben Thompson has this piece, what Clayton Christensen got wrong about the Apple, not about the iPhone not getting compressed from the bottom and, and basically it was almost both of those things. Yeah, it's really unlikely thing to your point in so many ways.

[Ian Rogers]

No, I mean, and, and by the way, like it's super personal for me because when I was at Yahoo in the 2000s, you know, we were our, our kind of, our whole M.O. was yeah, yeah, yeah, Apple's killing it right now, but the disintegrated solution comes next.

[Host]

Right?

[Ian Rogers]

And so like, you know, I, I took the trip to Japan with Dave Goldberg in 2005 to try to convince Sony to join Yahoo and Microsoft on the fight against, you know, the disintegrated solutions that were gonna, you know, ultimately overtake the ipod. But I think that that's actually what Apple. I think it is. Clayton Christensen, I would love to talk to Ben about this because what Clayton Christensen says is the integrated when, when the Technology is not yet good enough. The integrated solution wins. As the technology becomes better, the integrated solution must move up market to solve bigger problems. Now I think they, they did create. Create a lock in with, with FaceTime. You know, I. With FaceTime iMessage AirDrop, which has prolonged that like, you know, and that, that's probably the lesson is that there are ways of, you know, of creating network effects that create lock in.

[Host]

Well and frankly, to go back to the question, like, it's also a cultural object.

[Ian Rogers]

It is a.

[Host]

Like how much of it is imessage and how much of it is having an iPhone? Like, like you could debate, I'm sure it depends on the person, but the fact that they've created a product that ultimately is like a vanity object in some sense and this ultimate utility object is kind of strange. Also on the brand note, you've kind of classic line. Maybe it's from you or maybe it's from Arnaud, but storytelling plus time equals value. I thought about this a lot and I thought about this a lot while we were building this gaming thing. Hundred Thieves in part because we had so much of the brand was we had the brand and then we had all these influencers and creators underneath it. We live in the age of the individual in so many ways. How can brands accumulate value or maybe accumulate meaning in a way that people can't? Because it's so much easier for Mr. Beast to get the low hanging fruit of attention compared to a brand or a label whatever whatever. And Mr.

[Ian Rogers]

Beast is an individual, not a brand in this conversation.

[Host]

Well, so this introduces an interesting sub question which is notably, Perhaps most of LVMH's signature brands were originally namesakes. And so maybe there's an element of that, but I don't know. The metaphor I always use is like, it's really cool that Louis Vuitton is like this camera and Virgil can hold that camera for a little while and then Pharrell can come in and hold that camera or whoever. Jonathan Anderson comes in and holds the Dior camera and you get a. It's Dior, it's super Dior and it's Jonathan. To me, Mr. Beast is not that. Maybe at some point you, you talk with Rick Rubin about this at one point where you're like, could this be done with the Beatles or with Daft Punk or something? But it seems very few new brands are being created. It seems to me. And it almost feels like brands have this lineiness that you can't even. Like there's the. I realize this is A very convoluted question, but there's this tension between if your goal is to succeed in the near term or even the medium term, you're way better building around a single individual. If your goal is to last 10 years or 100 years, you're way better having a brand or a label or whatever.

[Ian Rogers]

I love this question. I don't find it convoluted. I think it is that challenging of a question. I think actually maybe it always starts around an individual. And I think that you're right that I think there's always few brands that get created relative to the number of people who try. It's just like music where you're always going to have more aspirants than you have success stories and the winners are maybe also somewhat unlikely. Has to do with timing, has to do with other things. In other words, you're right. The brands that you're talking about probably did start out as individuals and then over time they live on. You know, I had that conversation with Rick and I. I really, I would love to see people do this with, with music.

[Host]

Probably harder with music than a product.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. I think though that like, you know, for example, the Beatles is just a great example where, you know that, that the Beatles could come to represent love, you know, like, like they could, they could be just spreading love and joy. Right? It's. And, and also, yeah, I mean, Louis Vuitton gone a long time. Dior gone a long time. Christian Dior gone a long time. Yet the brands are bigger than ever. So first of all, I think there is something mechanical to that. You know, if you look at, you know, brand marketing for a great brand and I would say Louis Vuitton's interesting, right? Which is. Which are there more people of. In the world, people who love Louis Vuitton or dislike Louis Vuitton? It actually might be dislike. I don't know the answer to the question, to be honest. And that's not a diss at all. I'm just saying that that's okay. You have to remember that Ben Adono is the wealthiest man in Europe and, and probably 85% of the population are not his customers. Right. So that's okay. Like, you don't need to. You, you, you. The goal is not to appeal to everyone. Right. The goal is to appeal strongly his product especially.

[Host]

So.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. But I think for all brands, I don't, I don't think even when, look,

[Host]

even when this to go back to Mr. Beast, perhaps this is the tension. And also I. Mr.

[Ian Rogers]

Beast doesn't appeal to everyone.

[Host]

But he's trying to.

[Ian Rogers]

I don't know, Izzy, I would, I, I'm not sure. I gotta look when, when the most popular, it's like, oh, everybody loves Britney Spears. You know, like when I was running Yahoo Music. But still, if we put her on the homepage, like less than 30% of people would click, right. You put a picture of a dog and a cat hugging on the homepage and 70% of people would click right. So I just think it culturally, like culture never appeals to everyone. You know, great Seth Godin quote. If you should find yourself a nickel anytime you use the word everyone or nobody because the moment you say it, every word that comes after it is wrong. Right? It's not true. There's never an every. There's nothing's for everyone. Nothing's for nobody. And so then you're, what you're, you know, what you're doing is you're trying to, to make a business out of what you love to do. I always point to satisfy because I've had a, like a close up view of watching Bree build, satisfy, running. And he's just had incredible patience. Way more than I would have had if I were doing it. He has, he had a great, great thing. I heard him say to another brand, a young brand owner recently where he said, look, if you think now's your time, then you already missed your window. You're you always as the brand, you always have to have in mind that your time is tomorrow, your time is yet to come. And I just thought that's such an amazing way of, of looking at it. Because what that means is that you have an expansive vision and you know it can go somewhere else. The other is like when you look at the marketing of a Louis Vuitton and you look at, you go, well, look, they do magazines, they do outdoor, they do online, they do Google shopping, they do all this. What works, you know, where's the leverage? And when you do the research, the answer is everything. You know, at different levels. Of course they all have different roi, but they all have positive roi, which means it's literally a machine where you can, you put money into the marketing and it makes the brand bigger for tomorrow. And, and that, and so I would

[Host]

argue that nothing is compromising tomorrow perhaps.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. And, and so you, and, and, and you have to have that very long time horizon. I think the, the biggest problem that people have is they, they don't really understand what it means to build a brand. And building a brand is like building an artist. You Know, artists are rarely popular in their lifetime. Well, I mean, look, I. Golden Goose is a. Is a great example. I was introduced to Golden Goose through Virgil. Right. Because Virgil was a Golden Goose fan. I didn't know Golden Goose before. I don't know the exact numbers. I think I maybe talked about it on Rick's podcast, but they, you know, it was a slow go for 15 years. Like, let's say it. Let's say it took 12 to 15 years to get to 20 million. Just roughly. I don't know if it's 15 or 20 or, like, you know, order of magnitude. And then over the next 15 years, it went to 500 million deep in the compound, you know. Yeah, exactly. So. But I think that, to me, that's also generational. Right. It's. It's like it. It kind of takes a generation to prove itself, and then what can't grow too fast can. It's impossible. So anyone who thinks there was an entrepreneur who started a fashion brand here in Paris a few years ago, and I sat next to her, she's a good friend, but I sat next to her at a. At a dinner, you know, and I, you know, the brand was going, okay, but. And I was like, you know, how are things going? And she said, there's something you said to me when I was raising money that rings in my head every day. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. What was it? And she said, you said to me, fashion brands are not venture businesses. And what I meant by that was, you know, venture has a certain time horizon, but to build a brand. And I don't think it's fashion brand. I think it's brand. This is like a generation, like, and you're not really there until a Virgil can say, yo, that was my shit when I was 15. Like, that's how long it takes.

[Host]

Yeah. You know, it's almost like 10 years is the. You know, it's not even a conversation until you're 10 years in.

[Ian Rogers]

It's not even a conversation because you have to have.

[Host]

Yeah. One. One other look at the row.

[Ian Rogers]

Mary Kate and Ashley, who took them seriously. They had to stick around long enough that people were like, I guess you guys aren't going away. You know? And then it's like, oh, well, now we can look at the quality.

[Host]

Right. Before it was the gimmick.

[Ian Rogers]

Before it was a gimmick. And, like, maybe you got luck. And, like, I'm sure you can't do it again next year. Yeah. But after that, like, 15 year mark people are like, you know, yeah, it looks like you guys know how to do this, you know, and so I just think that that's human nature also, by the way. And I'll tell you, like, you know, knowing Breeze at satisfy. I mean, I talked to Breeze today because I talked because I knew he was going to go to the Kevin Morby show last night. I was like, how was the show? He was like, oh, I gave my tickets away. I was in the office till 11. He's 11 years in on this brand, right? And you find me somebody that works harder than Breeze. They don't exist. Right. And like, people, People discount that. People think like, oh, well, he's just like, you know, how. How hard can it be to make running shorts? You know, like, how hard can it be? But no, he's like steering that ship 247 with a singular vision that, you know, no matter if it was up or down yesterday, it's on tomorrow. You know, like, people don't, most people simply don't have what it takes

[Host]

for people like that. Obviously, him at a. At a very kind of targeted focus level. Maybe someone like Bernard Bernardo. No, at the kind of, like, larger scale. The defining trait, at least as you're describing, his patience. I think that sounds right. When and how. My assumption is, certainly for Bernard, but probably for Breeze too, is that there's a intensity and aggression that shows up amidst the patients, for sure. Is that true? And if so, yeah. How does that, how does that show up?

[Ian Rogers]

I think that's a, That's a. That's a great, like, what a unique combination of traits. Right? And that's why I, I kind of look at them with a lot of awe because I don't have the patience, you know, and also I think partly coming from tech, that, that, that's a, you know, like, where, you know, doesn't

[Host]

love history or time.

[Ian Rogers]

I mean, look at what we've been through in AI this year, where it's like we went from token maxing to token economizing in 30 days, right? Like, the whiplash is severe in our industry. And also, by the way, that's why a lot of those kind of people have a very difficult time in this industry, right? Like, you're either, you know, not everyone's not built for everything. I realized that just being a startup, and I've done 13 startups, and what I realized is I'm kind of built for it, you know, I'm built for, like, guess what? I'm coming in tomorrow, working hard, and I don't care if yesterday was. I'm coming in today with a smile on my face and I'm telling everybody everything's going to be great.

[Host]

Right?

[Ian Rogers]

Like they're not everybody is built, is, is built for everything. But I, I think that yeah, those people that are, that are great at, at, at brand, they, they do have, I mean Jonathan Anderson is certainly one of those people where he has, has all of the creativity, but he's also, he's competitive, he's intense, he's hard working. Like those are. You know, though there's definitely a special mix of traits that makes people great in that, in that world. And like, you know, there are very few people that really have it. You know, the, the, you know, the, the Galliano's and the Jonathan Anderson's and the breeze partouches are few and far between.

[Host]

I think you said you aren't patient and my sense is that in some sense you are definitely impatient, but in another sense you've actually been like very patient, particularly on the technology side. You've had the right level of patience to see out maybe things that felt inevitable to you but certainly weren't inevitable on an obvious time horizon, not the least of which crypto and streaming music or Internet music. Really like you basically wrote Internet music for, for 15 years, maybe longer.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. Do you?

[Host]

Yeah. I don't know. I, I, how do you. You clearly are a patient in some

[Ian Rogers]

dimension that, that's maybe the, the obvious one because, you know, it's, it's. But, but also I think there's just personal things in that. Right. Like it. I didn't know how to do a business at all. Right. So the fact that someone wanted to pay me to make websites was just like, okay, great. Right. And then, and all this dot com stuff was happening and I was like, what's going on? Like, I don't even know what public company means. You know, I, that's not part of, you know, my mom, you know, worked in a factory and then became a nurse and my dad was a, was a fireman. Like we didn't, we didn't have like investments in public companies in my family really. You know, and I didn't know what it even meant. So I just never had that like, you know, I just didn't know what, what else and you know, so what was I doing?

[Host]

You did it for another 12 years after you had already.

[Ian Rogers]

Right, but Evie. And then that. So before the do. During the dot com bubble, I was making music apps. After the dot com bubble I was making music apps simply Because I didn't know how to do anything else and I was just passionate about it, I think, to be honest. But, but let's say Yahoo.

[Host]

You're trying to do it. Yah. You're trying to $5 all you can eat subscription music. You're trying to do Spotify at Yahoo in 2002.

[Ian Rogers]

2004.

[Host]

2004. And then you guys sell to Beats or to sell to Apple. Excuse me. In 2013. My sense is it wasn't like that was the only thing you could do for the next. Yeah, but eight years.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, that's a, it's a, it's a good question. I wouldn't say it was patience, though. I think it was because it was at the time it was frustrating. You know, like when I was at Yahoo. Music and I'm arguing with Lior Cohen about music streaming rights, like that wasn't patience, that was genuinely frustrating.

[Host]

You have a great thing on your blog about the, the context talk.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah.

[Host]

2007 or 2008. It's kind of like right in the middle of that period, you're like, come

[Ian Rogers]

on people, that, that one keeps coming back to me. The, the content versus context thing. Yeah, that's a, that I was definitely onto something there. That is like, I didn't realize that I would still be thinking about that one today.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

But yeah, the, the. Well, another way to look at it is like I've, I've always just tried to find like what's the technology people are going to hate next? You know, from like, you know, file sharing to, you know, to streaming to crypto to now AI like, like what's the technology people are going to be really angry about tomorrow. How do I get into that one? That was never intentional. I just like new disruptive things and it turns out that new disruptive things are, are, are, are often disliked. But I, I mean, look, music is. And obviously I'm like, I talk a lot about music here because it's the only thing I'm qualified to talk about. Like I'm genuinely qualified to have a conversation about music. The rest of it, I'm like sort of armchair, you know, armchair historian. But, but I, so I think that's why the music one makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And also I, I, that's why I'm very lucky that, that I got to come work at lvmh because I'd also reached a level in the music business. I had three nice outcomes in, in music, which is, you know, that's what people look for. People that have Won before, and I'd won a couple times.

[Host]

You kind of did it.

[Ian Rogers]

I mean, from my perspective, I. I did what I wanted, what I set out to do do. Like, I built this thing in college that was a streaming. You search for music, you could stream it. And it was the early 90s, and then in 2015, it was on every iPhone. I couldn't have been more proud. I was like, that's a career. I've had, a career. I could be done now, and I would be. I'd be quite satisfied with what I did.

[Host]

That's my point, is you were patient enough to see that through. Whether or not it was fully.

[Ian Rogers]

I would say, lucky enough to see that through, really, because it was not my idea. It was Dr. David Fenske at the Indiana University Music Library who gave me a job with the task of move the reserve listing materials to, you know, from behind the desk to workstations throughout the library. I kept doing that over and over for a lot of years. There were a lot of people who cared way more about my career than I did. John Silva, probably Mike from the BC Boys, Jim Evans, Dave Goldberg, Rob Lord, and ultimately Jimmy. I remember Jimmy calling me. I was locked out of my own house, sitting on my back steps. My phone rings. It's a 3.10 number. I answer it, jimmy, Ian, what are you doing? Ian, you're a major league player. Why are you playing in the minors? And like, oh, Jimmy. I'm like, I work my ass off of my startup, man. Like, why don't you just buy my startup? Why are you being mean to me? I'm already locked out of my house, too, dude. Like, why are you yelling at me? He's like, you're get out of the minor leagues. You know, but my point is, is like, Jimmy saw something in me that I didn't see.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

So that's why I would say I was lucky to be able to do it much more than I was, you know, visionary or, Or. Or patient. I had. I had something. And, And. And I think that that is. I, I. I really have a lot of pride in that, because I think one of the things that Jimmy Iovine and, And. And Ben, I don't know, share is they see something in people. You know, it was. It was, you know, this. The story of Ben, I don't know, hiring John Galliano is that, you know, Galliano comes into his office, as it was described to me. It was leather vest, no shirt, dreadlocks, flip flops. Mr. Arnault's assistant tries to send him away. And Mr. Arnault's like, no, no, no. I've heard good things about this guy. Send him in, and Mr. Arnault hires him on the spot. You know, I watched the, you know, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen documentaries, and you see Jimmy yelling at them, and it makes. Gives me, like, a pit in my stomach because I know what it's like to be yelled at by Jimmy. But then I'm like, hey, I was yelled at by Jimmy, too. And that's what Jimmy does, is he takes people that he thinks have promise and he gets them to do things that even they didn't know they were capable of. And so the fact that people like Jimmy Iovine and Benotto. No. Have like, tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, I think you can do more, that's kind of like the real. The real honor.

[Host]

I think you are someone who's spent your career communicating these new technologies that. That might be inevitable in some sense, but are certainly not here yet to the world. And I think you've done a good job of communicating, particularly outside of the existing kind of community. It's, in my sense, is that while there are some notable exceptions, most people in the technology world are decidedly bad at this, at talking to the rest of the world. Yeah. Why do you think that is? And what do you think has made you good at it?

[Ian Rogers]

I mean, it's really funny in AI these days, right? Like, you're. I feel like, you know, like, you would think that, like, the AI people, they should start with, like, let me tell you why this is going to benefit humanity. And then. And then, like, once I've told you, like, look, this is going to be incredible for. For, you know, for learning. It's going to bring new opportunities to, you know, people around the world that didn't have them before. Like, once we've gotten through all that, we can state, and also there are some risks. And then let's talk about those risks. And seems like the. The. The heads of the Frontier labs have just gone the other route now.

[Host]

Started to change the tone, but, man.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, yeah. Sam has started to reverse course a bit. And, you know, maybe part of it

[Host]

is they were just. Weren't talking to any. Like, Sam was writing these blog posts in 2018, and nobody.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. Nobody was listening. And. Yeah, yeah. So, But I think. I think for me, like, first of all, I've always worked with artists, and that's also easier. Right. It's like, I want to help your artistic vision come to life.

[Host]

This is in service of that. Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

It's in service of that. And that can't possibly be wrong. You know what I mean? There's no way it can be wrong. It's a beautiful thing about art. Art is an incredible shield. Right. As soon as you've said it's art, it automatically doesn't appeal to everyone. And so it doesn't matter if you like it or not. So. So I think that that's one thing also. The punk rock thing does come into it a bit, because for me, technology has always been. I've always been interested in empowerment through technology. And I don't mean that in some, like, corny political way. I just mean, like, I didn't have a voice and I didn't have a way to reach the people that might like what I do, and now I do. You know, that's what I mean by that. And those things are like. Like quite easy to. To explain in a way. And they're also easy to identify with if you're talking to the right people. You know, I always say that, like, if you ever made a fanzine with a Sharpie and a photocopier, then you understood the Internet the moment you saw it, you know, but that's not everybody, you know, But I. Those are the people that I talk to, you know? And I mean, I. I'm like, hey,

[Host]

look, you can use obvious tech people.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, critical, right, Exactly. But they were people that were. That still kind of got.

[Host]

Were primed to get it.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, they were primed to get it. Exactly. They were primed to get it. I do think that's a very key part of my worldview. And I realize this more as I get older because I think that where I really don't connect with people is when. Because if people sort of think about, like, mass culture, then there's no way for me to get my message across. And we're probably not going to relate to one another either.

[Host]

It's back to the guys talking about when we're going to go back to the center.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. Like, that's. That's kind of like. And I think that that's probably true. Like, I grew up, like, mail ordering records and. And watching, you know, skateboard videos on vhs. Right. So therefore, the Internet, like, spoke to me. Now, if you loved, like, top 40 radio, right? Then you were the person that was like, why do we need the Internet? Right, Right. And so I think that's the other. That's the other part of it to me. And I. I've. I heard a great quote, Sal Khan from Khan Academy was on David Eagleman's podcast last year. He did like a two parter on AI and education, which was super good. And Sal Khan just said this offhanded remark that I, I think about every day, which is he said Khan Academy is great for the 15% of people who are curious. And there's some other stat, I'm going to get it, it precisely wrong. But the idea you'll get which is that, you know, I can't remember the numbers. 85% of people die within 20 miles of where they were born.

[Host]

Yep.

[Ian Rogers]

Okay, so does this mean that 85% of people are NPCs? You know, on some level that like if you're not a curious person. Yeah, right. Then the things I say probably are, aren't going to appeal to you.

[Host]

So I think that that world is motivation constrained. Yeah, for sure.

[Ian Rogers]

Exactly.

[Host]

We've gotten. I, I struggle with this though because on one hand biology has this thing he talks about. It's like the Ramanujan problem, which is Ramanujan was happened to be is this mathematician who was kind of Einstein like brilliant person and he happened to be discovered in India by some British professor and it was like pure luck that he got pulled out and turned out to be an Einstein like figure. And the biology ramonogen problem is like how do we make sure all those people are discovered? It's kind of your thing, which is 15% but they're not even. Yes, it's efficiency. Conversely though, like there's a, this relates to the agency thing which is like maybe there's agentic people and there's non agentic people. Although my theory is that it's actually closer to like Elon Musk is a 10 out of 10 on agency and a lot of people are 1. But you sit somewhere on the gradient and critically at least one of the things that gets me excited about technology and media and so many other things is that you can move people up. Like going and living San Francisco in San Francisco will raise your bar. And so I totally agree with you on one hand. Like just look at the numbers. It's so clear that Khan Academy, like access to education is no longer the bot. There's some wrinkles here. You need to have an interconnection. You need to be able to have the time to study whatever, but it's not how it used to be. And I'm like, man, are we just going to let 85% of people like I want to go shake them. Yeah, that's my monologue.

[Ian Rogers]

But no, I I agree with you, you know, but I mean, you know, you, you, we know this in, in our lives in so many ways, right? Like, you can't help somebody who doesn't want to be helped. Yeah. My positive model for humanity is that every single one of us has magic and imperfection. And then the other side of that is you choose what to see. You know, I had a, you know, you have a super frustrating experience in a coffee shop or a airport or whatever, right? And you can choose to see the imperfection or you can choose to see the magic in that moment. And for me, like, one of, you know, my practices in life is to see the magic. And I think we need that. The place we need that the absolute most is like in our personal lives and with our partners and our business partners. You know, I mean, look, I've, I've been divorced twice, right? And you, if you're, if you're looking for something, you're going to find it, right? And so if what you want to see in me is the imperfection, there are plenty of them. Yeah, you're going to find them all day long. If you want to see the magic, it's there too. And, and you can, you know, so you really, it's like we, we all choose. So I, I think that on that 85 thing, I think that is how we bring it out of people, right? Is by seeing their magic and pointing them at their magic. Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think that's where education is important too. And where, you know, the, the way that we educate, you know, that we are. The fact that we're still educating people for industrial industrialization is huge disservice. The fact that we aren't investing in different kinds of education, the fact that only the rich are going to get to go to Alpha School, like, you know what I mean? These are, I think these are some of the biggest. These are where we just have a really simple choice as society. We know that, you know, investing in education leads to a more successful society like the. And I think this is what creates the 85% problem. Because if you, if you are resourceful, then you're like, well, I'm not learning what I want to learn in school,

[Host]

but the best time ever for me.

[Ian Rogers]

Look at this Khan Academy. I can get, I can do everything. I can, like learn all this stuff I didn't know before, you know, but yeah, I think the, the education is probably the only actual path out of what you just said.

[Host]

Why are you so into interfaces? Maybe you wouldn't put it that way. But there is a through line of your career that is maybe the LVMH side a little less so. But it seems that your particular cut on technology is like, I'm going to help people. Maybe part of it is that it's these obscure technologies that aren't quite ready yet.

[Ian Rogers]

But yeah, I think that, I think that, you know, the best example of this is like when I, when I came here to Ledger and I, I told Tony Fidel, you know, I'm to go run the consumer business at Ledger. And he said, there is no consumer business. That's not B2C. It's B to G business to geek. And your job is to build a consumer business. So that speaks to what you just said, which is like, you're going in early y when there is no interface. I mean, when I started building for the web, there were no background colors, there was no css, there was no layout. It was like an image was a character in like, you know, you, you laid it out like as if you could lay out the letter A or you could lay out a J, you know, a gif, not even a jpeg. So I think when you're starting in those days, then you're like, now you're, you're in the business of building a better ui. Yeah. You know, it's just kind of what you're in what you're in the business of whether you want to be or, or, or, or not. But also, I think since you are trying to like, bring the technology to more people, you know, and I think it's hilarious that like, when we thought we were doing big stuff at Yahoo in the early 2000s and we had, you know, the number one music video service before YouTube and the number one radio service before Pandora, you know, we were like, we're huge. Right? But like, you're just getting people to listen to music on a Windows PC. Like, what kind of interface is that compared to. I remember the first time that I heard that people were like just driving to work with Pandora on in their car. You can't imagine how absurd that sounded. It you're like, wait, first of all, you're getting that good of bandwidth to your car? Like, whoa. Second of all, what's your data plan, dude? Like, like, can you do that for what, two days? And, and then it's over. Like, you know, I mean, that was just insane.

[Host]

Yeah, the kids are never going to know how good.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, it's just like, man, the fact that I can like download lossless, you know, while I'M walking to work is just.

[Host]

I remember counting text messages.

[Ian Rogers]

Oh, my God.

[Host]

Brutal.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, yeah, people, it's people can't, can't remember, can't understand. But yeah, so I think when you're in those days, then you're in the business of interface, right? Because, I mean, I can't even tell you. Like, I, I built like, music app, just trying to play a song on like an old flip phone. We're talking like 2002, you know, like a phone that, like, what they call it wet, you know? You know, so. And, but you know, at that point, though, you are like, okay, I don't even say it's interface. You're at that point, you're just like, can I make it work? Like, is it possible? But yeah, that's. And I like that part of it. Like, I feel like we're there with AI right now and I'm, I'm, I'm having more fun right now than ever in my career. But a lot of it is like, like, can this work? And then, you know, you know, it's funny, like, we're talking with one of the guys on the team yesterday because we're finding things in cursor that are just don't work at all. And you're like, this company just sold the SpaceX for 60 billion. And you know what I mean? But we're just in such the early days, you know, we're. Yeah, it's so new. We're. We're in.

[Host]

And by the way, you, you have. On one end of the spectrum, you have a thing that doesn't work at all. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the craziest capacity that has, like, ever been.

[Ian Rogers]

Had ever been ever. Like, you can't even imagine that it's. That it's real.

[Host]

Which kind of explains why some of the things might not work.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, well, I mean, this is, this is just like where we've been with AI for a while, you know, where you're like, how can you be so stupid and so outrageously smart now, you know, the outrageously smart is like, you know, is starting to really dominate the feeling. Right. Whereas a year ago. But a year ago, it wasn't at all. I mean, I remember, you know, coding with AI last summer super well, and it was like, so frustrating. Like, fist on mouse, like, oh, what are you doing? Why did you do that? And, and then it was, you know, end of last year that it became like, no way.

[Host]

Wow. Yeah. Get on.

[Ian Rogers]

Wow.

[Host]

Hang On, Yeah, well, I want to talk about the agent stuff, but maybe first on the kind of broader theme of, of Ledger and crypto, you, we, we talked about that old piece about convenience and your kind of argument is like, convenience, there's so much hubris. Like you have to trust that people ultimately are going to go where the thing is convenient. It seems to me that consumers have voted with their feet, certainly against privacy and to a lesser extent against security in favor of convenience. Ledger almost by definition is a product that is about offering, hopefully offering you a fair amount of convenience, but really saying like, like security is. We're going to be almost ideological. How do you think about that? Like, how is that the, the, the, the, the Depending on who you ask. In crypto for the last, and Maybe soon in AI, like for the last 10 years, there's always been the people who say we're going to find a way and the other people are just saying like there's just no way everybody's going to have a hardware wallet.

[Ian Rogers]

I don't think we've ever thought that everybody's going to have a hardware wallet. Again, like find yourself a nickel anytime you use the word everybody. Right? And also remember that, that the richest man in Europe is not trying to address the majority of the market. So that's never been my vision. My vision has always been that it's a very big sky and you want to make the premium product and you want, and a, it's just better business. Right? Like leading people down the wrong path is ultimately bad business. Business, you know, so if you're, if you're making a software wallet and convincing people that it's secure and you're kind of leading them into danger, then ultimately they'll get wrecked. And that's just a bad way to have a consumer relationship. And I also think that like, you know, the, the strength of Ledger has been that it's always, it has been ideological, that there's, you know, no compromise on security or self custody. Those are like the two tenets and it's really handy to have those because there are lots of times over the last 12 years we're kind of the only company in crypto that's been saying exactly the same thing for 12 years. Right? Like the wind blows. People move from this to that. There's lots of things that we could have done. You know, we could have done software wallets, we could have done mpc, but we've always said, look, that doesn't meet our security standards standards and also doesn't mean our Self custody standards. We've said if we stick to those two things, we think that those things, there's a cohort that will always find those things valuable. Interestingly, the choices that we made on those play perfectly into now where digital security needs to go broadly because that's another lens on it would be to say that actually what Ledger is, is it's a digital security company with where crypto was the need for digital security. So what is ledger really? It's a, it's a piece of hardware with a secure element chip in it. So it's the same chip that's in your credit card or your passport. The one that's in your credit card protects the secrets of the bank. The one that's in your passport protects the secrets of the government from you. By the way, that's the point. Like you're not supposed to have access. And the one that's in your ledger protects your secrets. So you have secrets as an individual. If you think you don't have secrets, then please email me the password to your email. I'd be happy to see it because I know you don't have secrets. So just email me your password to your email and I'll be happy to validate the fact that you don't have any secrets for you. We all have secrets, right? And we deserve a right to privacy. Privacy is, is normal. And that's fundamentally what Ledger does. It uses this technology that was created to protect secrets from us and it uses it for us. It's as if your credit card has an operating system which is over the air upgradable and you can load arbitrary apps on so you can make security applications. So, you know, if you build this level of security 12 years ago, 2014, what's the application, you know, for that ledger? I'm sorry, for that level of security. And that's where, you know, Bitcoin was the first and then other digital assets come after that. And by the way, I'm still a bitcoin bull, I'm still a digital art bull. You know, like these things mean a lot to me for the same reason that they did, you know, 10, 10 years ago. And you know, but there's, there's also, if you think about it as the only operating system and open development environment on top of smart card technology on the planet, then in an era where, you know, it's funny because last October I stood on stage here in this building in Paris and I said an agentic future is coming and an agentic future where you give your passwords your identity and your credit card to an agent is a security nightmare. And it was just crickets. Like, nobody heard.

[Host]

I was going to say October. It was like right before.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, nobody heard me. And now this year you've got Marc Andreessen running around saying, we are poised for a computer security apocalypse. Right?

[Host]

Yeah. Mythos is gonna.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So here we are, you know, in the computer security apocalypse. So having a, A, you know, a, A better security solution, you know, having, in other words, an operating system, an open development environment on top of smart card technology is extremely valuable. Valuable. You build something with that sort of ideology and then you, you end up finding different, different use cases for it. Right. I mean, why, why did you.

[Host]

Why this from lvmh? That whole, that whole ideology story is great. Hopefully somebody's going to build it. Ledger was already going like, yeah, we,

[Ian Rogers]

you know, for me, Covid had had something to do with it because I actually, my story on this is quite specific in that, that, you know, there's, there's someone in my office at Top Spin, Parker to Brooks, who told me about Bitcoin very early. I took a look at it and I was like, this is amazing. But like, the government, governments won't allow this to exist. That was my take, you know, but that means. Actually I went deep on it enough to like, yeah, have that feeling. Oh, yeah, this, like, I was like, I get this. And this threatens sovereignty. Right. And so that will be. I mean, I've lived through like Napster, Nutella. I'm like, they can shut that down. And my lesson from Napster, Nutella wasn't like, you can stop the code, but you can stop any business from being in the business of this.

[Host]

Yes. Right.

[Ian Rogers]

So I can't stop, you know, the government can't stop Nutella, they can't stop Pirate Bay, but they can say that, hey, guess what? You're not in the business of Nutella or Pirate Bay. So that was kind of my take on it. Then there was a point which it got kind of like, like big enough where I was like, hm, this is going to be hard to stop. Like, this is big enough. And that to me was around like 2013, 2014 is like kind of when I felt that. And I bought the, like, programming bitcoin book. The. The. And, and like I came at it from like a developer mindset. But, you know, I was like, still like, well, you know, okay, we'll. We'll like kind of see what this does. But during COVID I was like, this is it like, the technology's here. The technology is good enough. We had these ideas about smart contracts and stuff, but, like, now it actually exists, you know, and, you know, you've. The money. Money printer is like, fully on. Like, we were in. I remember, you know, the, the CFO of, of LVMH telling me, yeah, we are in unprecedented territory. Wow, 2 trillion of stimulus in the US a trillion in Europe or whatever the numbers were. But, like, no one knew what comes next. It's never been done before. Like, what are we looking at here? But I, I was just like, oh, yeah, this is the time. And by the way, we were right. You know, you look at 20, 21, you know, here at Ledger, we just couldn't keep the product in stock. You know, it was. It was. It was so crazy. And you had all of these, like, other narratives. You know, you had all of the altcoin narratives. You had the NFT narrative. There was just a lot, you know, a lot of. A lot of interesting possibility about what, what this could be used for. And I, And I don't. I don't. I think it's revisionist history to. To say otherwise, you know, so. And also, like, for me, talking to Pascal, who I'd made some friends here in Paris, one of them was Pascal Gauthier, first investor in Ledger. Other one was Tony Fidel, who's, you know, you know, inventor of the ipod, co inventor of the iPhone, creator of Nest, and we were talking about, like, what could this be? You know, and, and. And the interesting thing is that now I'm having, like, a bit of a deja vu moment relative to, you know, when we were. When we thought we were building interesting things on the Internet, but we were only building them for Windows PCs. And then 10 years later, and there's a proliferation of iPhones, you're like, oh, this is why we built it. I'm having a very similar thing now where it's like, yeah, we built the best digital security platform, and the first application of that was Crypto. And now we are entering, you know, again, what Marc Andreessen calls a computer security apocalyp. And there is for sure a use case for this technology in this agentic world. And the interesting thing to come back to your original question about ideology, is many of the decisions that we made have turned out to be very valuable in the AI world, where the fact that every time you connect a ledger, it phones home to an hsm, which checks. Is this the firmware I'm expecting? Is this the chip I'm Expecting that gives you proof of human. It's the basis for our technology for proof of human. You know, the fact that you have a secure screen and we've never compromised on the secure screen allows you to approve a complex transaction that an agent is signing, which is something that like a Yubikey couldn't do for kind of

[Host]

getting to pick all this fruit.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. You know, you've, you've made, you've made decisions for ideological reasons in the past, but it turns out that they paid dividends today and that, that's like, it's cool. Quite encouraging.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, to be honest, you've been

[Host]

at Ledger, I think for six years,

[Ian Rogers]

five and a half.

[Host]

You've spent a lot of your career in these sort of cycles that equate to roughly five years. Ledger's come a long way. This other stuff is starting to work. One could have taken the view that now would be the time for the next thing. You've instead taken on a new role at Ledger.

[Ian Rogers]

Well, I would argue that is the next thing thing. Right. I mean, so you know, when I was at, when I was at Yahoo, there was a moment where I was like, okay, I'm going to do something else. That thing I do might be at Yahoo. And I looked at that and I also looked at things outside and I left. It was similar at lvmh. You know, it was possible that my next job at LVMH was at lvmh. When I started at lvmh, I told them, I said, you know, I think this is a 10 year job and you should have me do it for five. Because, you know, after five, have I. You've heard all my jokes, you know, like I, I think that's normal. Like you've added to it what you're going to add to it.

[Host]

Your journey with the company.

[Ian Rogers]

Your point is exactly. Yeah, I think that it's great to have, you know, if, if somebody's been in a role for five years, you probably really have gotten out of them what they're going to bring to that role. And, and so now it's actually great to have someone else come in because they're going to bring something different, you know, so. And if you get somebody really complimentary, you get somebody even better. You know that I think it's a really good thing for a company. I think similarly for me here I came in to look after the consumer business. We've grown a lot over that time. We've gone from, you know, kind of these devices that look like USB sticks to these really nice touchscreen devices that are much easier to use. Actually, like, we've, we've achieved the goal of like, ease of use with, you know, with a secondary security device. And we've gone from a business that was kind of 0% services to 50% services. So buy, sell, swap, stake, lend, credit card, all of these services that you put on top of it. So we, we really accomplished something over that time. And then it's, it probably is good for the company to have, you know, somebody who wants to come prove they can do it better than me come in and that, that's a great thing. That's, that's the way it works it at LVMH as an example, right? If you're, if you're not performing as a CEO, they will bring in a new CEO. And you know what that CEO wants to do is to prove they can do it better than you. And that's great dynamic for the company, for the shareholders. It's not a personal thing. It's like that's the dynamic that works for the shareholders. And for me, look, I, I am, I've been delivered this incredible gift in my life, right? I'm an old command line nerd. Like, I'm ambidextrous. I know VI and Emacs key bindings. And that's just where I, I'm an old sysadmin. That's where I come from. And you know, like, I started, you know, I had a, I used to have an Rs6000 under my desk and a Next on my desk. And I lived at the command line. So last summer, you know, when, when I started using, you know, Claude code, if you'd have asked me like, is this the next big thing? I'd have said, no, no, no way. It's great for me because I'm that guy. I love, I love this interface. I love like typing at the command line and watching it think like, this is just perfect for me, for the normal person. No way. So I'm completely surprised that I, I was. Nobody was as surprised as me. As for sort of like Claude Code Winter, you know, you know, everybody that went away for a Christmas break and came back, you know, Claude Code con converts and you know, but what a huge gift. And so there was a point at the beginning of this year where Pascal, who's my good friend and the CEO of Ledger, he said, look, you know, we, we really need to triple down and figure out, like, how we can secure this environment. And I said, well, I'm really Glad to hear you say that, because this is what I've been doing instead of my day job for the last six months, because I'm just obsessed with this technology. So there was just kind of like, perfect fit there for us. You know, my title before was Chief Experience Officer, which was a. Which is a bit of a controversial title because people are like, what does that actually mean? And what it meant was, you know, the experience in crypto is pretty bad. You know, when you buy an iPhone, you're not buying a piece of hardware, you're buying an experience. You're buying blue bubbles instead of green bubbles. What's our version of that? How can we improve the experience in, you know, in, in. In crypto, my title now is Chief Human Agency Officer, which, you know, chief AI Officer. You might as well be called Chief Job Killer. Right. And. But we realize that our role is actually something different that every. The agents can only suggest. And every action needs to be approved either by a policy which has been set by a. By a human or by a human. Those are the only options. Every action that an agent takes must be approved.

[Host]

This is not happening currently. I think I should own at least my, My sense is that the, the classic. Just to spam approve on Claude.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, well, and, you know, I think that this is, you know, at the same time, there are, There is an attempt at policies which are baked into the system. Right now we have guardrails and myths.

[Host]

Yeah, we're trusting that's, you know, which

[Ian Rogers]

we know, know can be jailbreaked, but like that, you know, so there's an attempt at that. But I just think that's the wrong division of labor.

[Host]

Right.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, you, you, you should put a boundary or it's the wrong supervisor outside of that. Exactly. And, you know, you can. A much better outcome is that you have, you know, you have a. You have an. LLM can be what it is and it can do what it's good at, which is reasoning and suggesting. And then when it's time to take an action, that action is checked by a deterministic player in the mix, which is either a policy which has been set by a human, or a human. Those are the only two options. And that's why, you know, we talk about human in the loop, but I take that very seriously. Human in the loop.

[Host]

The challenge is, I think we're current, we're current, we're. I don't know when this will come out. We are hitting the limits on like, LLM as a kind of like, do this thing for Me and we're going to like, go off and do stuff and I'll check back in. How long does an agent run for? Whether it's an hour or two weeks, perhaps, we haven't yet felt, really felt the pain of letting it go human in a loop for a long time. But I guess my more functional question for you would be, like, if I have agents that can go run for two weeks, what does human in the loop even mean? If I'm controlling an army of Fables that are my developer team that I'm checking in with sometimes? Like, what is human in the loop?

[Ian Rogers]

Well, I, I like when Balaji says AI is middle to middle. Humans are end to end.

[Host]

Okay.

[Ian Rogers]

So what it means is AI is going to take a lot of the middle work off of our plate, but we still need to be there end to end. So the danger which you're pointing to is that we're kind of end, not end to end. Right.

[Host]

Like, we start.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, we put things in the front, front, and then we just, you know, we, then we just like, don't check

[Host]

in, don't make any mistakes.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, yeah, we don't check in at the end. I think that's kind of the, the, the failure case. Right. But, you know, we, we. I think we do need to stay, to stay end to end. You know, the piece, important piece last year written by Mustafa Suleiman at, at Microsoft. I think the title was we need to build AI for humans not to be human. Human. Right. And, and I think that, you know, this is where you zoom out and you say, what is it we're. We're actually doing? I think we'll get there, to be honest, because I think right now we're playing and, and I think that as we try to figure out, like, where does this actually fit into our workflows? And AI comes in at the workflow layer, not the data layer. Right. If you think about the work we did 15 years ago, you know, what Palantir is based on is that data layer, right. AI is now coming in at the workflow layer. How does it change the way that we, the way that we work, work? And I think as we figure that out, those will become, you know, practical questions. It either meets the need or it doesn't. I think that we will have extremely powerful versions of this. For example, you know, science, right? Like doing research and research, you know, auto research loops. There will be, you know, maybe less altruistic versions of, of that where, like, for me, there are a ton of things where a ton of places in the world where I would like to distribute ledger as. As a more secure signer. But I don't, you know, have the engineering manpower to get ledger into all those places. Well, you know, now I do. You know, now I. Now I can have, you know, a. You know, AI can discover those places. It can suggest, you know, the. The integration. That integration. You know, a human can just look at it and go, yep, looks good. Go.

[Host]

Right?

[Ian Rogers]

It can implement that integration. It can tell you when it's done. A human can, like, review the PRS or have multiple AIs review the PRS and give the. And give the results and then sign off. So I. This. These, to me, are like, very practical workflows where tons of heavy lifting will be done by AI. You know, I just had a experience where, you know, I've been. Been developing tons of. Of materials for the business that I'm building this year. A lot of those have been developed with AI. I. I hit the nuclear reset button this week, and I zoomed out and I said, I'm gonna write. I'm gonna write this now with all of my own words just the way I used to, right? You could say, like, okay, now I'm going Amish or something, right? But I did. But then once I was done, I fed it into Fable and I said, how could this be better, right? And it. It gave me a narrative suggestion that was actually pretty good. I probably accepted 80% of it, actually. And I went through. And then I said, okay, thank you for the narrative. I've.

[Host]

I've.

[Ian Rogers]

I've incorporated the parts I want to. I didn't incorporate all of it, but I took a lot of it. Now, let's go through word by word, go through every word in this presentation and make suggestions to me on how it can be better. And I did the same thing. I went through word by word, and I either, you know, took its. Its suggestions or I didn't, right? And. And then I went through. And I said, okay, look at these five documents that I've prepared in the past. Tell me what in these documents, like, is worth, you know, pulling into this, you know, et cetera. And. And so my point is, is, like, I'm working with it, you know, and we do this all the time, right? I mean. I mean, you know, we're working with pro Tools or we're working with, you know, any kind of technology. We're working, you know, we're working with it. A farmer is working with a combine. You know what I mean?

[Host]

Like, this feels like A different technology. Somebody I interviewed. Her point, Jasmine, was that the point of these tools though, is not to be a tool. It's to one shot everything. Like in the end state, this is Sam Altman talking about we want to augment humans, we don't want to, to replace them. I hear you. And yet what I know most people are going to do with Fable 6 is just going to say like, press go. Make no mistakes.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, I, I, I just don't, I think that that's a nice party trick, but I don't like to do, to do what in the end I think is the question. Right, Like, I agree with that, you know, I mean, because look, I, you know, I've, I built so much, I've written more lines of code in the past 12 months than in the previous 20 years. Years. And you know, now I have personal code, you know, I have personal tech debt. So I don't, I don't think that's actually like what people want to do with this technology. I, I look at it a slightly different way, which is I wake up every morning, I look in the mirror and I say my job is to automate my job. And I do think that is comes back a little bit to the Clayton Christensen point. Right. Like, that's me moving up market. Yes, right, that's me moving up market away from there. There really is a lot of stuff that we do which would be better automated. I think that a lot of like the work that we do and I'm just like, you're just constantly context switching between email and WhatsApp and you know, whatever, like a thousand slack and a thousand channels and these are not great ways of working. It's not like we're constantly out of flow. Yeah, it's not, it's not like we're leaving something beautiful behind, mind that. It's just not factual. So I, I think it's just sort of trying to find that better way where as an individual I can move up market to the, the higher value. You know, either work or maybe experience. You know, I, I would love to think that we're going to be working less, but I don't see any sign of that. You know, I, I mean, I, I, I can't remember who it was. There was, you know, one of the, you know, top economists of, of the 20th century said in the first half of the 20th century that we'd all be working like four hours by 1950 or something. Right. I, like, I think that's, I can. You can, first of all, you can Understand why you would think that like, wow, technology is progressing so much that we can just accomplish everything that we're already accomplishing in so much less time.

[Host]

There's no ceiling.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. And absolutely no one did that. Right. I mean, except for, you know, you know, Tim Ferriss Paris Four Hour Work Week or whatever it was called. I just don't think that that's actually what we're going to use this for in the end.

[Host]

In some sense. Maybe Ledger. The future of Ledger in this regime would be a bit of being able to place friction between me and the machine where I want it to be.

[Ian Rogers]

I really think of it as a division of labor.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

That LLMs are probabilistic and that's their gift. That the code that I wrote 20 years ago or even five years ago. Not that I was writing a lot of code five years ago, but you were anticipating. You had to anticipate everything that might happen. Everything that my user might do. You know, you're making a game character goes that direction. It's because you built the framework so that if the, they pointed their mouse in that direction, they went that direction.

[Host]

You didn't model the entire world.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, you model the entire world. Now you have, you have computers that can see around corners. That is extraordinary. Just, just absolutely, mind bendingly extraordinary.

[Host]

Used to it. But.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, yeah. And so, but, so my point is don't handicap them.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

Let them be great at that. But when, but don't give them secrets. You know, for example, we have these command line interfaces for Ledger Wallet. What that means is that I can build like crazy portfolio management, you know, art collection management, all these crazy tools and I never have to worry. I can be like, do your worst. Like go crazy. Come up with ridiculous ideas. Try this, try that. And I know that before it actually moves any value, it has to ask me.

[Host]

Yep.

[Ian Rogers]

It has to go. Hey, Ian, will you please sign this?

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

And I can go.

[Host]

Yeah. It's obvious in the crypto sense and maybe we haven't really been made to feel it on the other stuff.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, but, but look, I mean the world that we're living in right now is bizarre land. Like, okay, we know what happens in, in London, right? Like you're on your, talking on your phone. I've heard multiple people I've heard this from. Right? Talking on your phone. Someone rides by on a scooter, they grab your phone out of your hand and they just do anything they can do while your phone's still open. Right. So the ironic thing is they're not going to get into your Revolut account anymore because Revolut solve this problem. But if they were to just open Claude, it's got access to your slack, your, you know, your, your confluence, your Snowflake, your like basically everything. Like, who knows? Like, I, I don't think we're, you know, the, the attacks are that sophisticated yet. But that, yeah, but, but give it a year.

[Host]

Y.

[Ian Rogers]

Right. And so it is not tenable that we have, you know, no security between agent, operator and agent or that you

[Host]

just trust open air.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. And, and now what are people building? They're building like an agent identity system. This is really as like short sighted as credit cards were for the Internet. Internet, right. What was, you know, credit cards were bearer tokens, but before the Internet. Meaning you get my credit card number, you call up, you know, L.L. bean and you can order yourself a parka. Right. I love this reference. For anybody who gets it, please, please text me the. And that was the way credit cards worked before the Internet. Now the Internet comes along and you're like, whoa, wait, this doesn't work because now I can electronically steal a credit card number and, and spend it worldwide. Right. So, so they had to come up with something that was transaction time security. So right now they're talking about, oh, I'm going to give this agent an identity. And now the agent can bank. No way. Without transaction time security, then you don't actually have an audit trail. What you have is like an invitation for chargebacks. Right, right. And so to me, like, there are just very basic security questions which haven't been addressed yet. How are you securing the connection between. You know, you haven't, you basically have a new economic player and you have no security between.

[Host]

It's going to quickly outnumber us.

[Ian Rogers]

Yes, exactly. You are going to very soon count agents per employee at a company. Right. And we have, we have no way to identify them, secure the channel between the operator and them, you know, control their access to resources. You know, this one and like, you know, we're doing this today with cloud routines, but anyone who's doing it knows this is not scalable.

[Host]

And why is hardware so important in this?

[Ian Rogers]

So where could you put the trust boundary? One, one way to think about this is, you know, every kind of technological step up over the last, let's say 50 years. You know, you've got the personal computer that led to McAfee Symantec right there. You know, there, there's a, there's a perimeter that needs to be secured in each one of These. Then you go to the Internet. Oh, it's a new perimeter that needs to be secured with the Internet. Then you go to crypto digital ownership. There's a new perimeter that needs to be secured. Now we have computers that can act on our behalf, and that's a new perimeter that. That needs to be secured. Okay, so then, well, how do we secure it? You could do it in the software, but again, I think that that would be. First of all, it'll never be a hundred percent because they're probabilistic creatures by definition. Prompt injection is a feature, not a bug. You know, this thing can take in arbitrary commands. That's what makes it powerful. Therefore, you have risk. So doing it in the software, not an option. You could do it on your phone or on your computer, but, you know, your phone or your computer are sort of like thick stacks of software that can be overtaken by attackers and overtaken by attackers more easily than ever, thanks to AI. So relying on, you know, Ledger's team, the donjon, broke 25% of all Android phones this year. Right. And that's, you know, if your phone has that level of a compromise, then there's no way to protect yourself. You could do it in something like a Yubikey, which proves, I have possession of this Yubikey, but it doesn't approve the transaction. It's still relying on your computer screen to approve the transaction, whereas approving on a secure screen, on secure hardware, with a secure screen means I approved this transaction. And that's really what you need, right? Because what you have is you have. Have an. An AI agent can suggest either a policy set by a human or a human by looking at the transaction needs to approve. And in either case, you get a transaction record of what was approved and by whom, either because of the policy, which is. Which ultimately traces back to a human who approved the policy, or because a human approved that actual thing. And now you've got an audit trace trail. Now you have something which could stand up to regulation. Right? And this is. This is where. Where we must be. I mean, think about what agents are capable of. Like, now imagine the court system tomorrow, right, of saying, like, your. Did your agent do this? Well, yes, it did. Was that. Was that your decision? Well, no, I mean, it wasn't me. It was my agent.

[Host]

Yep.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, that's like. It's a chargeback. Yeah, right. Like, yeah, you know, you. You. You paid 49.99 for this parka. Well, no, I didn't. Wow. It's your credit card. Yeah. It wasn't me. It's exactly the same. You, you know, if you, if you don't have human set policies or human approved transactions, then you know, like, going

[Host]

to be a weird world.

[Ian Rogers]

It's a weird world. You know, I, I, I really think if I could, if I could, could say one thing here. I wrote a piece for Rick's Tetragrammaton that, that I, that I'm proud of. So I'll mention it, which is that you know, again that the piece from Mustafa Suleiman was really influential on me, like, because I realized that like there is. So people want to rail against, against AI. I think that's very misdirected. I think what in most cases they're really doing is railing against rich people.

[Host]

People.

[Ian Rogers]

So, okay, that's, that's legit. But call it what it is. Like, don't say I hate AI. Say I hate rich people. Like, come on. I think what we can and should stand against is seemingly human AI

[Host]

personhood.

[Ian Rogers]

We, we won't because it's actually just simply more fun and more pleasant to interact with AI that talks like us. Us. But we should then recognize that we will be fooled by that same AI the same way that we are fooled by doom scrolling, fooled by sugar and salt and fat, fooled by nicotine, fooled by opioids. We will be fooled by these sycophantic characters that tell us what we want to hear and lead us into places that we want, we don't necessarily, you know, want to be. I think it's kind of inevitable. But, you know, awareness, I was going

[Host]

to say, it seems your, your argument in that piece, as I understood, is basically that we just must kind of fundamentally reject personhood amongst AIs from a legal standpoint. Otherwise it just seems so unlikely to me. Maybe we'll have a new classification. But if this is where agents are now.

[Ian Rogers]

Well, we're already, you know, Estonia has already like introduced something, I don't know if it's a law or bill or how they put it, but that grants kind of rights of people, some personhood rights to agents. And like this, this stuff is, you know, that, that sounds dystopian, but I understand how it creeps in. Like, you know, one of the most consequential things that happened in the 20th century is that companies got rights of people. People. So companies which can't go to jail, can't be killed, have a lot of the same rights as people. And this impacts society in very real ways. Look, the Mustafi Suleiman's piece from last year came about because Anthropic had posted some research that showed that AI felt distress under certain circumstances and Suleiman lost his mind rightfully so. He was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. You can say lots of things. Like, you can, you know, you call it something, but please, like, don't, don't say the AI feels distressed. People already are. It's, it feels like magic.

[Host]

This goes back to the Google engineer from five years ago, right?

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. We are going to have repeated conversations about, about AI, you know, sentience, right? AI. Yeah, consciousness. And you can unplug it from the wall, right? I mean, you can RM minus rf. You can, can change the weights. You can, you know, so we, I, I understand that we will feel like it's conscious, but that's different than consciousness, right? You know, can, can you, can you convince me that you feel like you're conscious? Yes, you, yes, you can, but are you? You are not. You are not, you know, and, and also, by the way, like, I, I feel like this argument is you people will ask, like, does AI Can AI achieve, you know, consciousness? I would just make the question simpler and just say, can AI achieve human consciousness? Because the answer is patently no. And no other definition matters, frankly. Right. You know, it can't achieve human consciousness and therefore it can't have human rights. Period. End of story. Like, you know, anything else is an, is an academic argument by someone who loves science fiction.

[Host]

I think your other point, though, is a, and we could litigate this forever. But your other point is a really important one, which is independent of how anyone feels about this right now, we will be persuaded.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah.

[Host]

It's inevitable by the, not only by some, if you want to say it, they're going to maliciously persuade. But we will be persuaded because the companionship is so good.

[Ian Rogers]

Yes.

[Host]

This is what my boyfriend is. AI.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And that's it. That was someone, someone said to me, you know, yeah, I, I, I, I make my AI, you know, feel more human because it's simply more fun. And like, I identify with that. I like fun, you know, I, I agree. You know, but that also means, like, you're, you're accepting a danger. Yeah, that, that, that's sort of like the, you know, I, I only smoke once in a while while, you know, sort of trap. Right? It's, it's a, it's a similar, you know. Okay, Just got to realize it's a trap.

[Host]

Yeah. A couple quick things on looking ahead. You said you're always looking for the fundamentals. It's never a trend, it's an anti trend. What's real here, what do you think makes you good at seeing what's real here? Something you've seemed to have done for a long time.

[Ian Rogers]

First of all, I'd say I'm not sure I'm good at it. But I, I'll tell you what I try is I'm just a, I'm a, I'm a, I like observable facts. I think that's just, you know, where, where I, where I, where I live for better and worse, you know, Quantum theory is quite difficult for me. Very difficult for me to, you know, it doesn't fit. I have the same. I wouldn't say that because that sounds immodest, but I, I understand when I hear that, you know, Einstein, you know, consistently, you know, argued against his, his own theories because he just felt they defied common sense. Like, I, I, I totally.

[Host]

God doesn't play dice with the universe.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, I, I completely unders, understand that because I, I just prefer to like to really look at, you know, what, what, what can we observe here and what can we learn from what we observe? And then try to expand that aperture, you know, like, expand it back through history, back through generations. You know, like how, what else could we learn if we expanded the aperture, you know, the aperture a little more? And also I think be very comfortable with not knowing. I'm often are usually actually when I'm correct, I'm not correct. I'm directionally correct. The specifics are actually way off. But the direction was right.

[Host]

Right. Music on the Internet.

[Ian Rogers]

That's like also being comfortable, actually being excited about being wrong is a bit of a superpower.

[Host]

You're like, that's more data.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, I, I know, I know, I know what direction we're going, but I have no idea how it actually plays out. I can't wait to see. Like, that's a, that's kind of a, a normal posture for me. That's why you're good at it in a way is like, you can go, okay, I, I see that this is going to totally change things. I can kind of feel the way the wind's blowing, but wow. I don't know where it's actually going. And I'm, that's exciting. That's not scary. That's exciting. Exciting.

[Host]

There's a word I got from Cyan Banister, who I interviewed, which is a French word. Derive, sort of this intentional drift. You said you're not an opportunist. I Think you said that to me earlier today, and yet you. And you seem to have had this kind of unlikely drift throughout your career, but it's certainly not an unintentional one. Your path has been very zigzaggy, but there's some kind of, like, thing that is drawing you in.

[Ian Rogers]

Why?

[Host]

Maybe, like, what are you motivated by? Slash, what keeps you pushing? Like, why. What keeps you working so hard?

[Ian Rogers]

I think I. I mean, I. I definitely. I. I just have a curiosity that I feel. I feel, like, lucky to have. And. And also I realize, like, there's, like, a particular kind of crazy, you know, that. That. And I know I. One. One thing I feel is. Is like, we're all crazy. So I feel very lucky to be crazy in a way that's useful, you know, to somebody who. To people who want to employ me. I don't know. There's. For me, it's always been a combination of things, right? Like, I love. Creation, and what that means to me is making something that wasn't there yesterday and that, you know, that could be music, it. It could be writing, it could be technology. Right? To me, they're all kind of in the same category. It's human beings, you know, doing just incredible things that, you know, that. That you didn't know were possible and. And really feeling that. And then. But just personally, I always. I just like fun, and I like cool, and I. And I don't.

[Host]

I don't. I don't know.

[Ian Rogers]

I almost feel like, I don't know, it's not the most useful way to look at the world, but for whatever reason, that's.

[Host]

I think if it keeps you going, it's probably worthwhile.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, it's. And it's just fun. Like, I'm always. I. I'm always. I really am always in search of fun. You know, even when I started this job, you know, with. At Ledger, with Pascal, I knew. I saw what he was trying to build. I thought, I think I can help. I think, like, what I. How I do things, combination of having the technical acumen, having the passion, knowing how to work with human beings to build things, which is what you do, you know, day in and day out, being able to explain things that are complex to people who, you know, would like to understand them better, all. All of these things, and these were all true. And I felt that. And I was like, okay, I think I can do a good job there. I think I can prob. Had more value there. And that was. That was what it was. The end of the day for me. Like, maybe I could have gone to be a CEO of an LVMH Maison, but I really thought there are other people who are better at that job than me, and I don't know people who are better at this job than me. Like, this job is kind of made for me. So that was. That was my motivation. But I also. And we've talked about this since I also said to Pascal, I was like, also, it's just going to be more fun. Like, we're going to have. Have fun. Like, it's gonna. It. It'll be funnier if we do this together than if we did it with someone else. You know, and I think that that's important. I know important's not the right word. Yeah. You know, but I. I think, you know, it's a motivator.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

Is a. Is a better way to put it.

[Host]

You talk all the time about how our lives are increasingly digital. There's an old quote which is, I was one of the first people on the Internet, and I intend to be one of the first people off it. How's that going?

[Ian Rogers]

Not so well at the moment. I mean. AI. AI, like, really jacked me in. I. I wasn't anticipating it, to be honest. Like, I thought maybe I was, like, reaching. Reaching the end of the arc, because, I mean, I just found the. I think the Internet is so boring. Like, I don't. I don't. You look at my screen time, my phone, you're not going to find Instagram or YouTube or. I don't even have TikTok. I don't have Telegram. I don't have. I don't know, fill in the blank. Like, my phone is for work. The only thing you're going to find there that's for pleasure is Apple music, to be honest. So I just, you know, the Internet, I'm. I'm done. Like, I would rather go for a run, read a book, play drums, play vinyl. You know what I mean? Like, I'm already there, but, you know, I really do feel like I've been delivered this incredible gift of like. Like opening terminal, making it full screen, and just like, barking commands at, like, you know, hitting control T, control T, control T, control T, T mucks. And, you know, like, for a, you

[Host]

know, more like playing drums than serving the Internet in some sense.

[Ian Rogers]

Definitely. And it's also. It's also, again, like talking, coming back to. To the beginning, you know, Are. Are you. Are. Are you an observer? You know, are you a spectator or are you a participant? Yeah, you know, I mean, you know, There's a great feeling of like, you know, my, my, my girlfriend's like this, this, I've got this PDF of these recipes and it's, it's a nightmare. I can't, I can't find anything. I'm like, I'm going to fix that for you. You know, and, you know, and, and, and, and two hours later also I was like, what recipe app is good good? She's like, New York Times one is really good. I'm like, two hours later, I cooked in New York Times. Like my recipe app kicks their ass. That's, that's fun.

[Host]

That's cool.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, that's, that's fun.

[Host]

You said you would give a TED Talk on skateboarding and failure. What's the, Give us the brief synopsis.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, so the, the, the TED talk is becoming good at failure. But I realized I used to have the only vert rank ramp in Los Angeles. And watching pro skateboarders skate my ramp, what I realized is the number one thing they are better at than you is falling. The way that it works if you're a pros, if you're skating vert as a pro skateboarder is you drop in and you do a trick or you attempt a trick, you can land like 85 of the time, you get the other wall 75 and like you just keep going until you're, you're, you reach that trick that you've never landed and you go for it and they get, you know, 10ft above an 11 foot high ramp and they're upside down and they're making a split second decision to put the wheels down just under coping and ride to the other side and hit the other side or kick the board out. Yeah. Knee slide to the bottom, climb back up the ladder and try it again. So falling is, is so if you can, if you, and there's a thing in life, so if you can,

[Host]

you

[Ian Rogers]

know, metaphorically be, you know, 10ft above an 11 foot ramp upside down and unafraid of, of failure.

[Host]

Yep.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, because you know you're going to fail some percentage of the time and actually you're so good at failure that you're not, you're not concerned.

[Host]

You know how to fall well.

[Ian Rogers]

You know how to fall well.

[Host]

You're not going to.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, you're not going to, you know, you're going to knee slide to the bottom, stand up, pick up your board, walk back up that ladder and drop in again. Now you are invincible.

[Host]

Not as risky as you think then.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I think it's like, we talk about, like, not being afraid to fail, et cetera. I think it's beyond that. I think it's becoming skilled at failure. Failure. Because once you're skilled at failure, you are untouchable.

[Host]

Yeah. You get to keep going. Yeah, yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

Now you're just learning, because in all. In all cases, there's only two outcomes. You win or you learn. You know, if you believe in failure, you're already at a disadvantage because now you're going to have that fog of, like, I don't know if I can do it. Whereas, like, what that pro skateboarder knows is, well, I didn't get it that

[Host]

time, plus one new life.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna get it. I will get it.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, and by the way, it is really beautiful. Like, what does it mean to be a pro skateboarder? It simply means that you've got enough 85 tricks in your bag that you can impress somebody.

[Host]

Right.

[Ian Rogers]

You know, you're just like, I can drop in, I can do this, then I can do that, then I can do this, then I can do that, then I can do this. And then by the time you're done, people are like, holy. You know, but you're just leaving out the. The 25% ones when it's time for your run of the competition. You know what I mean? Like, but you're always working on those

[Host]

based on a reference. You made it to, I believe, a Willie Nelson record. What is the top five Desert island album list?

[Ian Rogers]

I can tell you top three easily because I think about those a lot. Number one is Sly the Family Stone Fresh. You can watch the slide documentary, but to be honest, like, I didn't resonate with me. No. No disrespect to Questlove, but to me there's a. There's a different story of. Of Sly. There's a lot of the story is there. But there. There's a. You know, he was a radio announcer in San Francisco and. And he put together this just incredible kind of like, multi culty group that was everything that, that, you know, that you'll read about him is. But then he was getting closer to the source. If you listen to Fresh and Small Talk, which were, you know, his kind of mid-70s albums, where the reviews were like, sly has lost the plot from my perspective. He was getting, like, closer to the source, like, whatever that is. And Fresh to me just has this, like, this looseness where he's always kind of like, it's on the edge, but it's always right in The Pocket. And it's been my favorite record since I was 16 years old and still is. Wow. Number two is Funhouse by the Stooges. And if you think about that record, I think it was 1970. It makes no sense. Like, they. What they were doing was so primal and it just. It's literally. It's lightning in a box model. Like, I. You know, I can't. I can't. It's just impossible to believe that it exists. And I would rather listen to Fun House than do pretty much anything people like, why don't you watch movies? I'm like, why would I watch a movie? And I could just listen to Funhouse again. Like, you're telling me that movie's gonna be better than one more listen to Funhouse? I really doubt it, actually. So. And then the third is Willie Nelson's Spirit, 1996. Not the best known Willie Nelson record, but Willie has this incredible gift of singing really sad things positively. You know, it's not on the record, but like, the. The best example is if you'd only come over, I'm sure that you'd see we're not lonesome, My cricket and me. But Spirit has songs like, Too sick to pray, I've been too sick to pray, Lord, that's why we ain't talked in a while. Your memory won't die in my grave. Like. But, like, please go listen to these songs. Like, they are brilliant. Like, just the way they're his. And. And Willie is Willie. His guitar. It's really. The album is mostly him. Guitar, piano, very sparse. His playing is incredible. The songwriting is incredible. His phrasing is just unbelievable. Like, I mean, try to sing along with a Willie Nelson song, you're not going to get it right.

[Host]

Right.

[Ian Rogers]

Because his phrasing is so him. You know, I think another one that I would. That I would add to the list. I've been thinking about a lot. I've been coming back to a lot is Marque Moon by the band Television. You know, this. This record was. I think most of the songs were written around 74. It wasn't recorded until 76. They were. Or maybe it was end of 75. Came out in 76. Somewhere in that. In that they were a real CBGB's band. They were in there with like the Ramones, the Dictators and Blondie and Talking Heads. You cannot believe that, like 24 year olds made this album. And. And also it comes back to what we were saying earlier, where genres are great, when anything's possible. Like, what was Television like? They don't fit into. Like, if you think about the CBGB's band, like our bands, it's not like they sound like the Ramones. Like, there's no sonic similarity between the Ramones and Television. Right. They're both part of the same scene to come back to earlier, but. And Marquimun is just one of those records. Like, I can put it on over and over and over and every time I'm just like, how does this exist? How does this exist? Yeah. So then I, and then, and then, I don't know, there's so many other places I, I, I, I could go. But I, I think, yeah, there's a. First of all, Twisted Teens. Did I mention Twisted Teens? But I mean, I don't know. I would say I'm excited to check that out. And I, I think like, Paul's Boutique changed my life. So that, that deserves, that, that deserves mention for sure. I'm trying to think, like, what other like hip hop records like, really, really changed my life. That's where you start to get random. Masta, Ace, Slaughterhouse, it was like super important album to me. I think it's genius. It's also, I think, comes from that time when things didn't go in the box yet. Like, Slaughterhouse is an incredible rapper from New York, basically making fun of gangster rap, but with just incredible flow, really interesting beats. Like, you know, this, he had this offbeat on beat thing and like, you can tell, like that record doesn't fit anywhere, you know, in, into the, into any canon.

[Host]

But it's cool that so many of these have persisted for a really long time.

[Ian Rogers]

For sure. Black Sabbath, Slayer, the Misfits, Sade. I mean, listen to Cherish by Shade. Tell me, like, how anyone had so much restraint. Like, what is amazing about that song is what's not in it. Like, I don't know, you know, no musician knows how to play so little. Like, people that made that song are. I think you got to start Gifted Geniuses.

[Host]

The radio station.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah.

[Host]

Turn on the Twitch stream or something.

[Ian Rogers]

I don't know if I'd get any listeners, man. It's so specific. Like it's on every night in my house.

[Host]

Come on. Internet of niche.

[Ian Rogers]

Thankfully, Hedwig loves it. So that's. I got, I've got an audience. I've got an audience of one and it's the only one that matters.

[Host]

That's great. Any advice for working or maybe any thoughts on working with your friends?

[Ian Rogers]

Oh, man, I feel like, yeah, I've, you know, I don't know that's an interesting one to reflect on because I feel like many times in my career year, we've been a. We've been a family, not a business. You know, we still like every day that we have for Topspin, which is company we had from 2008 to 2013, basically, we have a WhatsApp group, and it's active every day.

[Host]

Wow.

[Ian Rogers]

Like, so, you know, it's. That's a. That's a family. You know, Null Soft, which was Winamp. Like, that was much more of a family than a company. So those are, Those are. Those are beautiful moments. Moments. It's also like, you know, I've been working with Tony Fidel and, And Pascal Gaultier.

[Host]

We were friends first, as I understand.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, we were. We were friends first before we worked together. And I think, you know, we've been. We've been through some hard. Some hard times. You've watched there's a video on YouTube. It's the road to ledger stacks. And you see, like, the difficulty we had making that product. And we're all three in there, me and Pascal Antoni, and you see the difficult. So to the difficulty of making that product. And, and by the way, like, those are real tests of people, like, you know, who bails, who points fingers. But also, I think, you know, you know, what's beautiful about watching the Beastie Boys work is, like, they're super different people, those, those three guys. And you'll never hear, you know them. You would never hear them, you know, talk badly about the other one. It's only like, you know, it's a team, and they, like, face the world together, supporting each other. That's the advice. Like, you have to. To, you know, you really. You have to be a team. It's easy to talk. It's easy. I mean, magic or imperfection you want. If you look for it, you're going to find it. If you're looking for the imperfection, you're going to find them. If you're looking for the magic, you're going to find them.

[Host]

Run through so much of what we talked about.

[Ian Rogers]

Choose which one.

[Host]

You've done it in a few different. A few different times, a few different ways. Any advice on parenting?

[Ian Rogers]

I think that one parenting rule rule is you only say no if it matters, and when you say no, it means no. I think that's the, like, the biggest rule of parenting. I think there's another one that I've discovered, which is I think we want our kids to listen to us, but we should just acknowledge that they won't especially at a certain age, they have to stop listening to us. It's how they develop their own own id. Yeah, but there's this very predictable thing that happens. So your, your kid as a teenager is going to reject you on some level.

[Host]

Right?

[Ian Rogers]

Some, some are worse. Some go through this in a much more severe way than others. Right. But they have to. It's how they create themselves as individuals. Then they have this period. College is not for learning things. College is when you're too old to live at home and you're too young to be in the real world world. So you go to this utopia where nobody really checks in on you very often and you around and you know, you get what you can out of it. Right. Then ultimately you get popped out of that system. However you spend it, by the way, spend it in college because don't waste it.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Ian Rogers]

Like even if it's community college, doesn't matter. There's a college for everybody. Spend that time in college because ultimately you're going to get popped out of the other side of it. You're going to realize that you're in the real world, which sucks by the way, and you freak out like inevitably like a 22 year old kid comes out of college is like, what is this? Like wow, being a grownup really sucks. Right. And, and so what suck. But, and what do you do? You turn back to your parents morals. So I think it's important that your kids know who you are and what your ideals are. And you don't expect them to give a shit when they're 16, but they

[Host]

have something to return to.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah. And that's why I think being a lenient parent is a disservice to your kids. Because if you, if you're just like, oh whatever, you're not going to listen to me anyway, then they don't know. Yeah, they don't know where you stand. You have to show them where you stand. Wherever it is you stand, you show them where you stand. And then I promise you, when they are are in their mid-20s and they're in the real world and they're alone and they're scared they're going to come back to whatever your ideals and morals were and lean on them. So give them to them. Give them scaffolding.

[Host]

Any advice on relationships or thoughts on love?

[Ian Rogers]

I mean, I'm probably the wrong person to ask, but maybe I've learned something in all of my mistakes.

[Host]

Takes.

[Ian Rogers]

I just think that like it has to be deliberate, you know, it's again magic and Imperfection. When your partner. You choose which one you're going to see. If you. If you're looking for something, you're going to find it. If you're looking for them to be disloyal, you'll find that disloyalty. If you're looking for loyalty, you'll find the loyalty. So, you know, choose. Choose what it is you're looking for. And also, I think that, you know, we're. We're all on a journey and, you know, sometimes you team up with someone and you go on that journey together. There is no guarantee that you will stay on that journey together or that you're going to the same place even. So, I think again, coming back to Willie Nelson's spirit, when he says. He says, I'm not trying to forget you anymore. I've got back into remembering all the love we had before. He's basically talking about. About, you know, it was. It was someone. It was someone that I loved. And, you know, now, you know, things have changed, but I'm. Now I'm going to remember, like, the great times that we had instead of, you know, regretting the fact that I don't. I don't have you anymore. And I think that if you. If you take that. That sort of position with a relationship, then you can kind of always be in a place where, you know, even if it ended today, I don't regret this. And this was time well spent and, you know, nothing is forever. Who is it? I. If it's Esther Perel who says all relationships end in death or divorce, right? So all relationships end. You know, it's a question of how. And then, you know, you want to. To have made them the best out of. Out of that time. But then I think if you want it to stay a partnership, then that's got to be a deliberate thing. I mean, I. I think for, you know, for me and Hedvig, there's a part of it that it is because it is, but there's a big part of it that is because we want it to be. So, you know, if you're not sold, it can't work. But, you know, if you're sold, then you can find a way to. To. To make it work. My last thing, actually, there's one comes from Jimmy Iovine's dad. If the cat is bigger than the. Keep the cat. If the. Gets bigger than the cat, you got to get rid of the cat. I think I love that in a relationship because there's never perfection. There's always the question, is like, is there more than cat? That's where you got to make the decision. At the end of the day, if the cat's bigger than the. Keep the cat.

[Host]

A final quote. This must be the end of the world. All the people turning into pigs and ponies. I can't let it happen to me, by the way.

[Ian Rogers]

I feel that way watching everybody go World cup crazy, crazy. I'm like, everyone's turning into pigs and ponies. Can't let it happen to me. It's a Frank. It's for a quote from a Frank Zappa album. I don't think it's actually a Frank Zappa quote, but I think it's like

[Host]

one of the characters shows up a couple different times. I was trying to find the real source.

[Ian Rogers]

I think it's on Playground Psychotics, which is like great Zappa, period. It's when he had Mark Volman and Howard Kalin. I hope I'm getting their names right from the turtle with him. It's an amazing Zappa era. Live at the Fillmore, 1971. Playground Psychotics. Playground Psychotics is the one to go listen to.

[Host]

That's the way to. In. I haven't really listened to him at all.

[Ian Rogers]

There's no way into Zappa because, you know, it's funny, I had this conversation with Gail Zappa when she was still alive. Frank was. Was no longer alive, but Gail Zappa was. And she was looking after the estate. She was very reluctant to put Frank's music on to streaming. And I tried so hard. I tried so hard. And I think there was one moment when I got through to her, I said, listen, Frank's music is a genre. It's not a. He's not an artist. It is a genre of music. And it doesn't matter who you are. There is a Frank Zappa song you were going to love and there is one you are going to hate. Like, you know, like. And there's everything in between, right? True. For every human being on the face of the earth, I promise you. And no one is going to explore that catalog like I did. Gail. One double or triple CD set at a time for like 29 each. Like, I was spending my last dollars buying Ryko disc in college. Like, you know, Zappa CDs, Bowie CDs, like, you know, like, that's what we were doing. But yeah, the way in would be Hot Rats and actually underrated Bongo Fury, Frank Zappa, Captain beefheart. Super underrated, 1976, I believe. Because there's a song on there called 200 Years Old, which is about America, which just turned 250 years old. So.

[Host]

Yeah. Anyway, no pigs, no ponies. What do you think you're resisting? How do you keep holding on?

[Ian Rogers]

I have no idea. I'm not sure that I am. I, Like, I really. I. I really. Yeah, I mean, the. The older I get, like, yeah, the. The. I. I feel very lucky to have made it this far, to be honest. I wish I could. You know, I wish I could see how the puzzle pieces fit together. Exactly. But I'm not. I'm not quite there yet.

[Host]

I think you're holding on to some kind of. We talked about it this morning. There's a. There's a fighting inertia that I admire in all kinds of people. And I think the longer you fight it and the longer you hold on to the punk rockness or the curiosity or whatever, it. Life stays interesting.

[Ian Rogers]

Yeah, no, it's definitely interesting. I look at, like. I think there's a lot of inspiration, right? You look at, you know, I mean, I just saw Mike D play here in Paris, you know, Mike 60, and he's on stage with his kids playing an amazing show, like being Mike D from the Beastie Boys, you know. Know, I. A long story that I'll make short sitting having tea with Paul McCartney in his house once upon a time. And he said to me, I met Eminem last night. And I said, oh, how was that? He said. He said to me, you're Paul McCartney? I said, yes, I am. He said, do you feel like Paul McCartney? And as, like, what a weird thing to say. And Paul said, no, I know what he means, because normally I just feel like a bloke having a cup of tea. He said. But then I get on stage, I put on that Rickenbacher, and I feel like Paul McCartney from the Beatles. And, you know, so I think there's a. Those. Those are the stories. You know, Paul's in his 80s, right? And he's. And he's still curious and. And pushing and wants to be relevant and, you know, and he's still kind

[Host]

of amazed by it all, I think.

[Ian Rogers]

Totally.

[Host]

Which is the cool.

[Ian Rogers]

I was so happy for that opening because I was like, I wanted to ask you, like, do you ever look in the mirror and go like, I was in the Beatles. He was like, I do. That's crazy. But that's great too. That's inspiring. Like, see, you know, hanging with, you know, Glenn Friedman, who's, you know, 10 years older than me and still as idealistic as ever. Seeing that, like Henry Rollins and you know, Ian Mackay are putting out like, the Cramps, you know, discography, like, you know, just this reminder that we can, like, we can, as long as we're breathing, we can still, like, create and like, bring. I want to say participate. Yeah, participate. Put beauty in the world. And I, I say that, like, I'm like, is putting like the Cramps compilation in the world. Beauty. It is to me, you know, but. But yeah, I think, I think so. Those are the, those are the things that, that inspire me. Thanks, Ian.

[Host]

That's all I got. We're way over time. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Dialectic with Ian Rogers. You can learn more at Dialectic fm Ian Rogers, where I'll have a transcript and links to everything discussed in the show, as well as all of that amazing music Ian talks about. I'd also like to thank Notion once again for presenting Dialectic. Notion has been a supporter since I went full time on the show and they are a tool and company that, despite being started over a decade ago, has found itself in a unique position for the AI era. Because Notion is where you and your collaborators have all of your work already. It is an amazing hub for working with AI and agents. Notion is also thoughtful about helping you automate away the busy work while allowing you to focus more deeply and collaborate on the work that counts. There's been much discussion lately about the cost of tokens, about the quality of models, especially newer open weight models. And the beauty of Notion is that you don't have to choose. You can work with the most frontier models from anthropic and OpenAI and Google, and you can also work with faster or cheaper models for the work that doesn't need such high horsepower. And as everything continues to change, being able to have access to all of the newest models the day they come out right where all of your work is, reduces so much complexity and makes it easier to focus on the real work. Thanks again to Notion and thank you for listening to Dialectic. I will see you next time.