Steve Schnur

president of music? Uh? Well, I I say that every I'm responsible ultimately for every single note that goes in every single game, every single trailer, every artist that shows up at every single event. Anybody who's you knowsociated with music, whether it's Snoop showing up at the launch of a battlefield event or whether it's them you know, a hundred songs that go in a FIFA. UM, I'm responsible ultimately

for for all of it. I UM. I think over the years, UM, we used to sort of look at, you know, how do we how do we represent culture? And I think what we've tried to do now is actually, um become culture. You know, to the point where these playlists and these um pieces of music we put in all of these franchises are so meaningful to people now. Um, going back the last ten twenty years, so long winded way to say, I guess I'm in charge of all of that. And why do you live in Nashville. I'm

glad we have some time here. Listen. I lived in Nashville in the nineties, all of my friends. In nine five when I worked for Clive uh when I told him I was thinking about coming down here and running a record label for Tim Dubon Mike Dungan, which was a blessing. But who knew at the time. Um, they said I was crazy. Um they don't let Jews in Nashville. Oh my god, you're gonna be you know, ha ha ha Uh. It was the most amazing time of my

life working for those guys back then. Uh. So when I moved to l A, initially to work at Capital, but then for years to work um eddie A. You know, I always figured how do I get back? Um, it just seems like a more normal place to me. It's also closer for me to get home to New York. I like that. I like that I'm centrally located. The answer to your question is that, UM, I tried knowing that games. Uh. We were always told way back when that we were bigger than the film industry and the

music industry combined. But when I started, we still sounded like the toy industry. And even though there's nostalgia in the Mario Brothers and pac Man, UM, I needed to find a solution so we could record live with real orchestras. If I'm gonna hire Hans Zimmer and I'm gonna hire a hilder off of an Oscar Win, you know I have provided them with some great orchestrash. We had a fallout, you know, we had a fallout, not just e A, the entire non signatory industry had a fallout with the

A f M UM. We were able to record for years in UM in Los Angeles and a non signatory single performance Agreement UM. And when the new guys came in to run it, I warned them kindly that they were gonna lose not just the entire game industry, but they were gonna learn lose the independent film industry. They were gonna lose you know what what you know inevitably came the TV business, you know, Netflix, Amazon, none of these modern media companies, We're going to become union signatories.

And they were gonna lose all of this business to Eastern Europe. That's where everybody was gonna go to prag Bratoslava, you know, etcetera. Um, And so it happened. And I was the one knowing this town pretty well from living here in the nineties that said, let's go see if we can cut a trailer in Nashville. I know the steel players, I know the drummers, I know the guitar players. Not sure if I know the cellist, but let's try it.

But guess what, um, mind blowing, mind blowing horn sections as you can only imagine, think of all the great horn horne arranged, horn arrangements. They came out of here for years and years and years, and I ended up recording a score to a game called Dragon Age Inquisition here. I had a very loud mouth among the composer community in Los Angeles, from Hans to John Debney, you name, and it it goes on and on and on and next thing you know, people were coming year to record and

their minds were blown. So I think Nashville has become easily the top one of the top two greatest places to record orchestra for film television in games, London being the other. Uh. And I think the stages sadly in Los Angeles have emptied the musicians, so many of them are out of work, a lot of them are moving here, and so rather than commute back and forth, I figured it would make sense for me to plant my butt here in Nashville and to help further and build the

community um of you know, great orchestral recording for media. Um. Now, I've spoken to the guy who's the chairman of the tourism board and told him, the next time you're you have that tour bus driving down Music Row and you tell the blue haired ladies that this is the studio where Johnny Cash and Elvis recorded. Two blocks down is the studio where Call of Duty and Fortnite was recorded. Every kid's going to freak out and want to go with our moms and those tours. Now, so we've built

one hell of a community down here, um. And that's why I live here now. And you know, it's a commute to l A, but it's no big deal. And Frankly, half the time, my flight is shorter than half the people that work for me and have to drive from Eagle Rock to Marina del Rey. Okay, just going sideways for a second. Your father was recently ill. If you're from the East Coast, how's your father being treated in Irvine? Well, my dad saw the light of California twenty years ago

and moved to uh Orange County. Um, proclaiming he had wished we had he had moved us out there, uh when when we were kids. But I'm a Jersey slash New York City divorce bratt and you know this, Bob, you can't take that out of us. We are who we are. We just bring New York with us to California. UM. So, my dad's been living out there for twenty years. I do think it's the greatest thing he could have done

for himself. Um. Who wants to be, you know, in their nineties, little one, even in their seventies and shoveling snow. I think you've written about this quite a lot. You know, he was a Vermont drive to Vermont, go skiing, come back to Jersey, go to work, and finally twenty years ago, he's like I'm done. He didn't do the Florida route. He did the California route. Okay, I gotta go here because I tell this story all the time. Do you still have your condo in Mammoth? No? I mean this

is fin finance mistake one oh one. When the recession hit, Okay, the thing went severely underwater, and I did a panic and I sold it and I called the financial guy at Mary Lynch and I said, I'm about to, you know, do one of those the bank wants you? Am? I actually gonna sell it for way under the mortgage? And what does that do to my credit? And they said, just get out, get out, get out. It'll take you fifteen twenty years to get back to where you bought it. So I sold it now. I got divorced, so I

would have lost it anyway, So what the hell? Okay, but the story that I tell is you were renting it out and what ultimately happened with the Golden Platinum Records. Why don't you tell us? You remember this? It's fantastic. So I had this idea, you know that if I rented it out, you know, how am I going to compete in that Mammoth marketplace. First of all, you're hiring a property manager at a fifty fifty split, which is absolutely the stupidest thing imaginable, but that's the way it's done.

So I remember taking all of these golden platinum records, putting them up on the wall. We had a view from the living room of Mammoth Rocks. So I said, okay, well let's call it, you know, Mammoth whatever it was, Mammoth Rock dot com or whatever. I thought I was so smart to get at the time, but I really was a little you know, being an East Coaster, I was cynical about it from day one. So I figured, how do I get these platinum records on the wall

without somebody just lifting them off? So I had them mounted to the wall like they used to do with the hard rock in Las Vegas. You know, they're mounted from behind. It would take a superman to rip it off the wall. Only to come up there one time and found out there were holes in the wall. Somebody had rented my place, shown up with a crowbar and just basically ripped them out. And so when I went to the property manager, remember fifty fifty split, you think

they do more? Um, I told them, and they said, well, we've had three people in there, so we don't know who to go to. So sorry. So yeah, that was my uh hard earned lesson in not really renting things out on a weekly basis and having high expectations when it comes to maintaining. UM, you know it was. It was a high quality place. But it is what it is. I lost a blink quantity to um Platinum Record and a couple others, but you know what it is, what

it is. I kind of don't listen to blink anyway anymore. Anyway, how many did you lose all in total? It had to be five or six that they were. There were five or six holes in the wall, good gigantic you know, six inch circumference holes in the wall. This person literally went out of their way to getting it. I don't know why I looked on eBay. Uh they never showed up. So okay, let's go back something you said earlier. Explain

the A f M union situation. Well, listen, I'm a union person, ironically, and I believe there's a purpose, particularly for the pension paying into the pension when you use union musicians. Um, but I do believe, uh, and I'm not running for office here to run the union. But I do believe that the union works through the musicians and not the other way around. And if you go back to the history of the particularly the a f M to the forties, I think the guy who ran

back then was a guy named Fiarello. I could be his name, and Um, you know, we could look back and think of him as a tough s ob who got shipped done. But the truth is he was abusive and he was um. He got in the way of progress. He was so upset as far as I know, and I've learned with musicians being replied, musicians being replaced on radio by recorded music, that he went out of his way to shut it down. He did not accept technology and or technology has brought us as a music industry

for the last hundred years. We have to ride the technology wave, not try to shut it down. Otherwise, I e. Napster, We're just wasting years where we could be a part of it. UM. And I think, you know, I think the current union UM is in the same situation. Um. You can come to Nashville and do union recordings. The only difference is that Nashville is a right to work state. So the union members can't be sued for making their own decision on whether they want to work on a

project or not. By the way, when I put out the call two musicians, the greatest musicians in town, no one's ever said no. But they have a choice. So, UM, I hope you know union members musicians understand that. UM, many of us, most of us who work for you know, companies that aren't signatories to the union. And that's most companies. Now. Remember, the people that are really still signatories are the ones that signed it back in the Charlie Chaplain era, Warner Brothers, Disney,

Paramount and this goes back lord knows how long. But a lot of Netflix, the majority of their projects are non union projects. So why not try to get the business here in the US rather than lose the business to Eastern Europe? Why not try to figure out ways to work with companies? UM, And I think Nashville has become an incredible solution. I mean, you know, Spike Lee does you know records uh music for his movies here with you know, and and and the list goes on

and on. I mean Lost in Space on Netflix was all all that score was recorded here, And like I said, so many games, Um, not my games, even some of them call a Duty and Fortnite and others. So it's

become a high quality solution. And there's not a day, Bob that I don't go out to lunch or dinner here when somebody who plays cello or a tuba or whatever the case may be comes up to me because it's Nashville, still a small town and says thank you, thank you for letting us work six days a week, you know, And UM, I'm not doing it for that. I make no money from that. I don't know in

the studios, I have no personal financial incentive. I just know that we, you know, in the modern media business needs solutions to have high quality recordings with the best musicians of the world and not be driven out and forced to go to places like Prague and and uh you know other places in Eastern Europe where there's problems. You have to edit the hell out of those. Um recordings. Um, the musicianship is good, but it's not mind blowing at times.

Most of the time. UM, I'll tell you a funny story. My friend John Julihan, I don't know if you know him. Um, he was here doing the film that they did about a year or two ago on Tammy Faye Baker. Um, and uh, he asked me to help put together a horn section because guess what it was, um, a non union film, you know. Um and uh I got to I put together a horn section for him. And he came down and Dave Cobb, who I think you know, um,

was recording it producing it. And John looked at me and said, oh my god, I can't believe these horns. I'm they're playing this, these these parts just like that's just like the original records. And then one of the trumpet players said, and that's because we were the guys that actually played on that record. So listen, you've got a swinging brass section here that's incredible. You have string sections that are as good as London, which is a tall,

tall order. And uh. The only thing we're short of here in town is a magnificent stage the size of Abbey Road one. We can put about seventy five on the floor at Ocean Way, you know. So for me where I do Star Wars and I need a hundred plus people on the stage, I go to London for those things. But we've come up with a solution for three industries. And you know I said from day one, I always wanted to pay into the pension, you know, for the union. I believe in it as long as

they handled the pension correctly. Um. But um, my home, my thing is that I just don't want them hurting the musicians. I don't want them suing the musicians. And this is a place where musicians work. They work six seven days a week doing what they do. They don't have to work at Jerry's Deli or any place like that to make it. You know, they have a lot of work here now in film and TV and games. Okay, let's just assume, for the sake of discussion, you were a signatory and you did cut in l A. What

would be the difference to you. Yeah, that's a great question. Um, well, I'll tell you what it's not. It's not a matter of cost, because people think this is a cost solution, which it's not. You know, listen, there's a set rate here, set right there. Um. If I were a signatory and I cut there, Um, I would have some of the greatest stages in the planet, the barber strikes and stage you know this, and that I would have some of

the greatest musicians in the planet. Um and the different says now sadly, thanks to the Union, I would have a lot of dates at these stages to choose from because they're empty a lot of days of the month. Abbey Road is sold out two years already now in advance. You can't even get in there until uh Nashville's about six months eight months. Um, So why is that happening? Why are there empty stages there when it's not a matter of cost, you know? Um? So, we did amazing

scores in Los Angeles. Michael Jaquino did our Medal of Honor scores back way back when we did lots of SIMS scores back then with Mark mothers Bow and Steve Jablonsky. I'm really proud of those scores. The quality is incredible. But unfortunately we're driven out. When I say we, I mean an industry was driven out. So you gotta you gotta come. If it's not the cost, what is the burden of the union production? I see what you're saying. You're asking me. Why are you asking me why modern

media companies are in signatories to the union. Yeah, let's go there, I think, yeah, um, and I usually don't go there, but I know you, so I'm gonna go here. Um, listen, there's back end, and you know there's back end for musicians, and most companies Amazon, Netflix, Activision, the list goes on. You know. UM, they're different, they're set up differently than the old traditional major movie studios. UM, there's no back end.

But there's also not back end, by the way, for the executive producer or the director or the other people that have worked on a UM project like a game for three years. And so it's pretty hard to justify not giving an executive producer who's worked on a game for three years and then giving back end to a violinist who worked on a game for three hours. That's kind of an equation that doesn't work out very well.

So that's it. It comes down to back end. And that's why most companies now, like I said, Netflix and others are not signators. So how did you get your gig dy a And what was the status of the music department? Then there wasn't a music department. There wasn't a music department in any game company. I was working at Capitol Records. UM. I had left at Nashville to move to capital be one of the guys that ran and r um roy Lot left. As you'll recall, Andy

Slater came in. Um. It was a miserable environment, to be honest with you. Um and Uh. Fortunately, at the same time as I was a capital UM, I was also music supervising films, particularly Sandra Bullock films. I had done the music supervision for a smaller film called Gunshot, but then a much bigger film called Miss Congeniality. I also was able to write cues on that, which I always joke when I get might BM, I check every single year. Uh we can go to Nobu once, but

that's about what it can afford. Um and uh there's your back end story by the way. Um. But um and then I so I had I didn't realize that I had this experience, for lack of better term, in music and music supervision. I sort of took it for granted. I got a call from Terry McBride because I had worked with Sarah McLaughlin in the nineties when she I think we struggled to put fifty people at Cafe Shane I think it was called in New York. It was

Marty Diamond. Uh. Terry McBride and I. We're trying to figure out what is it gonna take to have her play Radio City Music Hall in a year? How do we get from fifty to whatever that number is. So

I had a history there. Terry was, um, you know lives up to the you know, don't ever burn bridges because my bridge was so solid between network and myself and we all loved each other so much and then gone through thick and thin together that he happened to be friends with the then president of e A. It's a Vancouver thing and um, Terry called me and said, you're going to get a call from a guy named Rusty Roof. I'm like, come on, who makes that name up as the radio guy? And he goes, yeah, he

actually used to be a radio guy. Um, but he's the head of hr at e A. Uh. And I was telling them that they should start a music department like a film studio. I was so in love with music supervision, especially for Fordace Film which was Forda Films, which was Sandy Bullock's company, that my dreams had changed. I wanted to be the head of a studio, paramount universal, head of music in a studio. Um, so my initial commented Terry was games. Anybody your mind? Like I pretended

to play a few of those. You know when I was trying to sign a band back in the nineties, What do I, he said, take the meeting. I don't even think twice. Just take the meeting. So I flew up to Vancouver and um met with Don and Rusty roof Um, who were spectacular guys. But here was the difference. And I think I told you the story years ago. I was working in the record business in two thousand

and one. Napster was right there. It was in the headlight, and it felt you felt fear and of the unknown in the record business, even though people stay oh and sync it was selling Millie who cares? We saw fear right there in front of us. UM and I walked into those buildings A d A and it was like I was back in MTV in the eighties. There were kids everywhere. It was loud, people were playing games, there

was creativity. And I remember calling my now ex wife at the time and saying, if they offered me this job, I'm taking it. And she said, whoa wa wa, wait a send, what are you talking about? I said, I haven't felt this energy in so many years. Okay, the record business had it for a moment, but it's not there right now. And she said, are you gonna take a job based on energy and a building? And I said,

actually think so. Something's going on here. So I met with Don President and he said what I said to him? What's your vision? And he said, the greatest thing you could ever hear to an entrepreneurial guy like myself. He says, I don't know. He said, we toyed with Robbie Williams in a FIFA game, we toyed with bar naked ladies in an NHL game. We got some press. We think

there's something there. What do you think? And I said, well, I think you guys are spending too much time trying to sound like sports, and I think eventually sports need to start sounding like us. I think we need to be what I'll call the new MTV. At the time, people labels are spending millions upon gazillions to to pay for promotion, to get to to get records on the radio. Remember this is before Spotify, before this UM. But the audience is gaming. People that are twelve and seven and

in seventeen, they're in games. We have the real estate, so let's bring music to where they are. Let's change the sound of sports. Let's change the sound of games. So if we have a game called Madden two thousand and four, let's make it sound like two thousand and five. Why are we still playing a C D C and Queen? Where are the champions? And why God's name would you ever license Gary Glitter? Haven't you've heard that story yet? So they so they said okay, And um, I said, also,

you still send sound like the toy business. So I'd like to go out there and hire. At the time, the first guy hired was a guy named Michael Jaquino. Um, this is pre Pixar, pre Lost on ABC. Let's hire some of the next greatest generation of composers because we have such an advantage in this medium we have. If you if you're if you're writing a score to a film, you know there's Tom Cruise and oh yeah, he's doing that, and he's running and he's doing Okay, let's find the

emotion and present what Tom is feeling. But in a game, you've got millions of people on their couches and you need to create the emotion that each and every one of them is feeling. And I bet you once I present that to the next great generation of composers, when I untether them to picture, when they become a part of the story itself, they're going to freak out. And UM. So that's how it started. So it was really an entrepreneurial beginning because I started just me and UH. Within

a year, I had two people working for me. UM. I believe we're still all together, by the way, even though we're many more people now. UM, and I'm I'm humble, but I'm also smart enough to know that if you surround yourself with people that are better than you and have impeccable taste in music and wonderful ideas, that you know, the tide rises all boats. As the cliche you know says, So UM, we just started instead of putting a C. D C and queen into football games and soccer games.

You know, I went all around the world for my first year, and I went to every I went top down, every CEO, every president of every label, and every publishing company, every artist I can get in a room with. UM. I met with Steve Berman and Jimmy back then. They got it from the first second I presented it to them. Jason Flam got it from the first second I presented it to them. Craig Calman got it from the first second. Julie, you know then at def Jam got it from the

first second. A few didn't. Um and we started putting bands in these games, and next thing, you know, bands like a Sabian and Kings a Leon. None of these bands had sinks, nobody knew who they were, and all of a sudden they started kind of gaining attention. To listen. Fast forward even ten years whatever the number is. Later,

um uh thirty seconds to Mars. I I put Jared Leto's band in UM Madden I think it was at the time, and um Kevin Weatherly called me and he said, did you guys put a band called thirty seconds to ours in UM Madden or something? And I said we did. I said why? He said, because it's testing like familiar and we haven't played it yet. So I knew we were on to something and I wasn't looking to be the hero I wanted. I knew that we could be ground zero to launch bands, that that's very MTV esque.

We could be ground zero and we could affect. But I knew. The winning point of doing all of that was when somebody here's a band. Now, when people here Kasabian or they hear whatever the list is. We can go through hundreds of bands. They remember FIFA nostalgically from two thousand seven or two thousand three. That's where the winning, That's where the win was. You know, to be forever associated with that moment. You and I have those moments when it comes to MTV. You know, you think of

a cure, you think a flock of seagulls. Oh, those are MTV moments. I thought we could, we could create FIFA moments or maddened moments, and that has proven to be true. So um, the people that got it a hundred percent were the artists. Every artist from day one. I remember sitting going, remember this is two thousand and two, Snoop Bust, Jermaine Duprie, all these people that you think about what it was twenty years ago. We gotta get in. What do we need to do to get in? Madden?

You know, they had a front row seat to their fans every night. They knew that their fans played games. They knew that they and their bands played games. So that was very important real estate to all artists back then still is by the way, So that's kind of where it all started. It was an idea, it was an entrepreneurial idea, it was a vision. Um and um.

You know, I don't believe in repeating. I'm I'm absolutely against anything that's cut and pace who Every year we just have to rip it up and reinvent, do better, do bigger, do more, um and UM. I think now I look, you know, in the last year, and I'm very proud when I see Travis Scott doing a show in Fortnite, you know, pre the Houston thing. But you know, I'm very proud of when I see these huge moments, you know, or Spotify having Spotify Island on the roadblocks.

These are all amazing things. Um. But it's all because of the years, you know, uh, the evolution of it all, you know, having Kings of Leon and started Madden too, sorry FIFA two thousand and two or three, whatever the year was. Um. Then came guitar hero, then came rock band and if you look at it that way, you can see where how the evolution you know, occurred of it all. And now everybody's paying attention. But we kind of knew it all along. Okay, you say you were

going to Vancouver. I think, uh, Electronic Guards started in northern California. Where is the company now? Yeah, well it's a good story. Um. So they had the president of Studios, Don Mattrick, who I mentioned before, lived and was based out of Vancouver because the e A had bought his company. I think it was called Dynamic Software something like five or ten years before I met him. So the head of studios was based at A Vancouver, but e A

has always been based in northern California. So I I sold my house in l A, moved to Vancouver, moved in December. I do not recommend moving to Vancouver in December because for three or four months, uh, you don't see the sun. It's freezing. And don't get me wrong, I love Vancouver and I'm friends with lots of people that live there, but they all say, oh, but you should see this place in July. I don't want to be in a place eleven months a year for one

month's sick. Um. But um, you know it was Larry Probes who was the CEO of e A then who um he was my Grammy date that year in two thousand and two. Uh, And he said, who the hell hired our head of music? It can put them in Vancouver. And I didn't want to throw our then president under the bus, so I started a him and haunt. He said, I get it, I get it done. Hired you Uh uh, We're in northern Cali. You should where should you be based?

And I had that one moment where I could have said anywhere by the way, I could have said Aspen. I know that would have made you happy. Um. And I said, I don't know whether I want to say this out loud, but you probably should have never moved me out of l A. You know. So he says, moved back to l A. And I said, oh, I wish you would have told me that before I sold

my house. You know, I'm all in um. Anyway, that was a crazy year, but I ended up spending only three four months in Vancouver and then moving to l A until I moved here to Nashville. And I still somewhat commute. Up until the pandemic, I was doing every single week back and forth Nashville l A UM and the pandemic gave me the opportunity to slow that down a little. Bit, but uh so we still have massive studios, really beautiful, impressive studios in Vancouver, where UFC has created,

where FIFA is created. I mean, it's it's unbelievable, but we are in northern California based company. Well, it used to be the only direct flight from Nashville was an American and then Southwest went in. So which one do you fly? Well? I fly Southwest because they have the nonstops. American only has one poorly timed NonStop unless you want to go on a red eye, which I do not. So um. I literally just got off the Southwest flight from l a X this morning seven am. Um, so

I do that. And uh. Up until the pandemic, the advantage of flying Southwest was that a list companion pass, which was brilliant. But the pandemic obviously none of us traveled so much. So that's gone now. So ironically that you it's ironic. You asked me that because as we flew in today and I was squished, you know, like a like a you know, like a sandwich, like a

Deli sandwich in between people on Southwest. I said, you know what, once I don't get my status again at the end of this year, even if I have to change planes in Dallas, I'm going on American from now. It was really good for a while. I don't know why you think everybody would have multiple flights here nonstops all day long, because I don't know the last time you were in Nashville. But this is Las Vegas, for

God's sake. It's out of control, you know, even though most of us that live here don't ever go down there. But why wouldn't you have five nonstops today? I don't get it. Okay, So what was the status of the gaming business then when you took the gig in twenty two two? Has opposed it today? And where does e A fit in the hierarchy of gaming companies? Yeah, that's

a great question. I think back in two thousand and two, gaming was massive, but gaming was thought of pretty much as a chldren's activity by those of us in mainstream media. I don't think we knew then the impact that gaming had or could have, or would have had or has had. I think we were making great games, sticky games. There were people that were obsessed with it, but they looked particularly comparative to what you see now. They looked like you know animated, they weren't as real life as they

are now. They were limited in what they could contain. It was a single player world, not a multiplayer world. That's a key difference what I just said. You went to the store, you bought a disk, you stuck it in your Xbox or your PlayStation two or whatever it was at the time, and you had a single a single player experience, and the and the community of that experience was when you had your buddies come over and sit next to you on the couch and you had

two controllers that looks like a teen fifty. Now now you have a multiplayer environment completely online. You're playing with people all over the world you'll never physically meet. Um. Everything about it, from from the cloud to the technological advances is completely on fire. You're living in what you think is a real world. Everything looks if you play FIFA Madness. It's really close. People actually getting mixed up

now between what's real and what's not real. Um, And I think the difference not that you ask me this, but I'm going to volunteer without you asking me this. Having come from the record business to the game business. Although as I like to say it, took me in two thousand and two, leaving the record business to finally get into the music business. I know you'd like that, but it's it's true, um is that the game business I noticed, because I was on both sides, did not

try to hang on to the past. They did not try to keep brick and mortar retail in business. They didn't go out of their way to keep the shiny disk boxed in a nice little jewel case and that's the way to sell it. There was no attachment. Actually, I was in many rooms where they would say, how do we put this this stuff out of business? How do we go direct? How do we create a one on one to our players? Why is there a middleman? Why are we sacrificing the dollars we're paying to the middleman.

So that's the financial point of view, but as importantly, how to create a one on one relationship? I don't recall up until two thousand and one, two thousand to ever a record company where they said, how do we create a one on one relationship with our music fans. It was astonishing to me to hear the difference technology. They weren't waiting for it, they were creating it. The expectation of the player, but also the expectation of the corporation.

We're in the technology business. We can't look the same in two thousand three like we do in two thousand two. We need to evolve every year or else they're gonna players are gonna hate us. We can't keep putting out the same features and expect them to show up every year. So look at look at how it looks in two thousand and three. You see an animated, interactive fun game on a on a limited platform, and now you're playing Fortnite. By the way, the model changed to free to play.

Now you're going to place like Fortnite, free to enter. The micro transaction replaced all that. Or if you're playing Call of Duty, or in the case of e A FIFA or Battlefield, you're downloading directly from the cloud and gone of the days when you have to wait six hours for it to show up. Shows up in six minutes, sometimes one minute, and as it's downloading, you're already playing. By the way, you're already in with thirty people from

all over the world. So imagine if you not just if you not just create technology, you don't have to fight technology. If you're a part of the evolution in the creation of technology, and that's the thinking. Imagine what the game business is gonna look like in five years or ten years. Think about everything that's evolved now. I know you're I've read lots of things you've done between VR and a R and AI and on and on

and on. But I think you know, I've been watching the difference now for twenty years between the two businesses now the music business now meaning the label business and and the publishing business. I think that they've realized that technology is a great thing. Um my question my challenges are they meaning my and your friends at labels, the guys that and the women that run labels. Are they becoming too complacent right now on the Spotify Apple model,

because at some point that has to end. You're going to have to evolve to the next level. Are you a part of building that. I think there are labels like Warners and Juana, who's the head of digital there. I think they invest properly. I think they're attaching themselves and growing forward with new technologies. But but the point is complacency is very, very dangerous, as we saw in the record business, and as i've learned in the game business. We cannot be where we are today in six months,

so twenty years. To answer your question, it's a whole different medium now. And I don't just believe it. I know it. The facts are out there. It is the most important medium for anybody under the age of X. And you can fill an X by the way. X could mean twenty, it could be forty, depends who you ask. Is interactive media? Is interactive entertainment? I think so apart of the next generations thinking that they expect it in

all media. Are people who are five and ten in fifteen and twenty now, really in twenty years going to go on to go to a movie theater where they see a film with a beginning, a middle, and an end when all they've known their whole life is choice, going left, going right, having an impact on the story. You know, it's something we need to really think about.

And again I'm volunteering this. You didn't ask me, but I've had many, many conversations with the CEOs of many labels I where they really start needing to pay attention to you GC user generated content. I get it. There's clearly problems and you know, Lucy and others. You know, they should fight, you know, formats like TikTok because they

need to be compensated fairly. But the one thing they do need to understand, and it's proven music fans want to get their hands on the music they want to create. I think that really comes from gaming. They want to create. So how do we untether music in the future and become fairly and fairly compensated, not do what we did before twenty years ago with Napster where we held tight. We're gonna show them we're not going to let that new technology disturb our model. How do we acknowledge that

you g c is what is expected? You know, I was shocked at first, frankly because I came from the record business. When all of a sudden, I saw so many players creating their own FIFA moments or their battlefield moments and attaching our music to it and uploading it to YouTube at the time, and I used to think, where's the takedowns they're stealing? And I was told by our lawyers, no, actually, we actually want you want don't you put all of our music up online? Why don't

you put all of our music on TikTok? We want our players to create. That's what keeps them engaged. And my shift in my thinking was immediate. I oh my god, I've been trained in another business where I thought it was theft. It's actually engagement. So how do we monetize it? How do we make it fair? Is Spotify I can to continue to have walls continuously for the future, or is there another model? I mean, I don't know where

we gonna charge. If you charge me twelve bucks a month for one service, but you know fifteen to untether x amount of songs that I can go create, And there was some model. I'm making that up. I'm going to spend that money, particularly if I'm fifteen or eighteen. I want to create with this music. So these are things you know that I'm challenging people, not for the sake of what I do. I created a catalog of thousands and thousands, thousands of cues. When I got there.

We didn't even own some of the music when I walked in there. From all the years, now we own some of the greatest, most well known themes period. There's not a kid you're ever gonna find me that doesn't know the theme to the sims or the theme to Battlefield seven notes? You know, to me, I grew up with those seven notes of Star Wars, don't dunt unt huh?

That was everything to me as a kid. But to another kid who's fifteen or twenty now they listen to do dundunt dun't don't, which is the theme to Battlefield, and they go, holy, that's a holy ship moment. So how do we monetize that but untether it? How do we let kids get their hands on it and go create with it? And I think this is the greatest opportunity moment we have in twenty years, the untethering of music.

We can't repeat history. We can't do it. We can't hold off when the art, particularly now that we if we and we do have one on one relationship with the music play the music consumer or the player gamer, then we need to listen to them. And it's clear people want to create, So why are we limiting them? So I applaud Universal by the way for taking it on, but we need to come up with a solution. And I know them very well. I know that's the way they think as well. But we need to get there

as a community um in music and gaming. Hope that makes sense. Let's just go sideways for a second. What is the future for Microsoft and Sony. They have certain game franchises, but they historically have had the consoles. Is it really ultimately just to own the games? What's going to happen there? I listen, I believe that. You remember when um Bill Gates years ago said the Xbox is going to be the center of your living room. Um, that kind of is true now, I mean gaming. You

can get Netflix, you know it's the center. Um, they're gonna be um cloud based boxes, right, I mean, uh, there's no more disk than needs to be put into it. You're gonna be able to download, You're gonna be able to what I hope to see. I hope this comes true. I think they're all working on it is. Imagine a world a community. Let's use sports as an example. Or on your PlayStation or your Xbox, you can find your

other Titans fans. I'm in Nashville. I can play, you know, a game of Madden with them an hour before the Titans are playing you know, the Broncos. And then without even touching it, my whole community of thirty people that I just played with sits there without even blinking an eye, and we watched the game. We watched the actual game together, and then we can tell we can go over here to our music section and we can talk about the music. Well. In other words, it's our virtual community. It is the

center of my living room. It is the center of my community. People find each other with commonalities, and that is where they find each other. Um, I do believe that that's where it's going to. Well, it's already going there. You know. Look at the fanaticism rightly so of a Fortnight. That's a community. Look at the fanaticism of Call of Duty. That's a community. Look at the fanaticism of FIFA, that's

a community. So those communities have other interest maybe they're associated with or aligned with gaming music one of them. But as if you hear a new artist for the first time, you know, in FIFA and you're in your FIFA community, Hey, let's all meet tonight at o'clock on Xbox and we're gonna do a one on one with that artist. Let's all get some virtual merch together so we can play in our Billie Eilish jerseys tonight versus our Titans jerseys. Whatever. The point is that that is

where the community begins and ends. It's what you and I used to do when we were kids, but we had to go down the block and hope some other kids showed up. But now you can do it, you know, right from where you are. So I believe there's a huge future in in in these boxes. Uh, in your living room. Uh. They were very limited before. UM. I think now listen, the question you didn't ask, but I assume you were thinking was what happens when Microsoft acquires

Activision eventually? But since you jump, let's go, do we does that limit them? Are they still going to Is Activision now Call of Duty going to only be available on Microsoft and not Sony anymore? Tbd? They say that's not the way they're thinking. I hope that's true. I think it'd be foolish personally. But Halo did quite well on Xbox only. UM, so let's see what happens there. UM. But I think it really is about community. It's about interactivity.

It's about interactive entertainment. Interactive just doesn't mean a button on your controller. Interactive means our community is try link together, looking watching sports together, listening to music together, talking about music together, playing games together. I think it's a really exciting future. So let's go back to the players in the field and market share, etcetera. Who are the big players here? The big players are Activision e A, UM,

you know, take two. I used to work for straus Zelnick at BMG and now you know he's across the hall, so to speak. UM, certainly Epic, you know, UM and others. I think the addition to your question is who are the big players? But what what are their franchises? Are they relying on one or two games or do do they have a very well spread out portfolio? I think that's where you know, one of the many reasons why I've been any A for twenty years is that we're

not reliant on one franchise for every battlefield. We have FIFA for every Madden, we have SIMS for every UFC. We have f one now we just did it. We have Star Wars, we have Marvel. I mean, it's it's a lot of tent pulse, so to speak, as opposed to certain companies which are massive, but they rely on one or two franchises. UM. So those are the players. Of course, ten Cent you know, as a player, they own a piece of everything. UM and Uh. I have

friends that have left e A to go work for them. Um. I don't know how happy they are though that they've left. I think once you leave, you I know there's a lot of they call them the boomerangs. There's people at the A that have left and come back three or four times. So it must it must be a good place to work. I haven't left, but you know people keep coming back and saying thank God? Okay? Is it analogous to the movie business, which is at this point

almost solely franchise in terms of dollars? What war? Can you get a new game started? In a new game? Does it have to be aligned with F one or something? Can you start from the ground up? Yeah, it's a great question, and it has changed dramatically. Long cone of the day when you could put a bunch out and see what sticks. Um. It takes years to develop original I P. We do it, UM. I would say once every year or two we take a bold step and

go for it, but there's years behind it. Sometimes we bring back our old original I P and reinvent it. Dead Space is a good example. It was a huge hit in the late in the in the two thou two nine Uh, and we're putting it back out this year. We do enough research to know there's significant demand for it. The same thing with Skate. Skate was original I p UM back in the early two usins. However, we're changing the model. It will be a free to play model.

It's in beta now with five hundred or a thousand people. In two years it will be up to ten million, fifteen million people. UM. But there's a lot of testing. There's a lot of UM player feedback. UH. We listened heavily to every player that comes into early beta's. UM. But to answer your question, UM, putting out new I p is significantly risky. UM. It's always preferred, you know,

to have your own original I p UM. But long gone of the days when I first started, I remember sitting with many executive producers talking about ideas for games, and we go for it. UM happens a little more and often now. UM. Also, the release schedule has thinned out over the last five to ten years. There used to be you know, Lord knows dozens and dozens of releases. Now there's fifteen. UM. So you have to be very

confident in what you're putting out. UM. If you if you put something out that you are either unsure about or that is testing terribly um or testing poorly. I should say, UM, then you better be prepared to engage players after it comes out and continually give them content to re engage them. You you don't run, you don't kill things so quickly. Even if you have a poor first showing, you double down and you engage them. The investment is significant. UM. The reason why, in the case

of F one, we did an acquisition. We acquired a company and the UK called code Masters that makes some of the greatest racing games on the planet. UM. So yeah, in there there's a high level of confident. They had a hugely successful F one game. UM. And last year our first one to put out under e A Sports, with all the talent, by the way that was associated with building in that game still intact. We didn't suddenly buy the franchise and replace Um. We had a hugely

successful showing. So there needs to be a high level of confidence going in. That doesn't mean there isn't room for original thinking. UM. But it takes years. I mean I'm working on games right now that won't come out until we're that far ahead. Okay, when do you get involved in a project. Yeah, no, that's a great question. Um. The second something is green light. I get involved because, um, I don't live in a post world and I don't

live in a quote unquote in production world. Once something begins to be thought out, it is green light for the first step. And we're building towards what we call a vertical slice, and that means we're building one level out just to present internally, to make sure that every feels everybody feels confident about going the next step. I'm

heavily involved in building that vertical slice. I'm doing it right now, hiring a composer or thinking about the tone of the game and if it if it involves licensed music, um, and and that that by thinking those things out early enough that actually helps to evolve the characters. You know. I have a thing that I do when it's a more filmic based game, and I've done this in films as well, even though we might we may never have licensed music in the game and it's completely filmic. And

I'm hiring Lauren Ball for Hans Emmer to do the score. Hypothetically, I look at the characters and I like to build playlists if they were real What would they be listening to? Who are they? Are they into new music or the into classic music or the anto you know which genre of music? What would their patterns of listening be. Because by associating music to them, each individual helps grow the personality.

And actually by building those playlists, that helps the writers also begin to go I never thought about it that character would do this, that characters like this, that character has the possible ability to do this. So music helps us define who those characters are. Um, I've sat there with major composers for two years coming up with tones and ideas and themes. Some themes never make it to the final product, but what they do is they'd help

develop the story. So the answer to your question is very very very early, you know, um, long one in the days, you know even by the way, to further answer your question, FIFA twenty three launches, you know, one day, and I'm working on a FIFA the next day, so there's never a pause. Those are annual products, so you only have a year to figure it out. But the more filming, you know, filming games like Battlefield or Mass Effect or Dragon Age years three years, sometimes four, Okay,

so you're in there you're making playlists, etcetera. When do you establish a budget and when do you spend dollar one? Yeah, um, usually when we get past the with the exception of hiring a composer early, where I'm exposed to an initial payment to that composer. UM. I usually don't start spending money until our vertical slices passed the the internal test and we're on our way. We're on a production schedule.

At that point, I develop a budget. I take a look at what we need, possibly what we don't need. I take a look at the what the score might sound like, so I can begin to project, um ahead, what the costs of recording that orchestra will be. UM, what level of composer, unless I've hired that composer already, a level that composer I'm going to be able to afford to bring on. UM. So I would say, the day we get the vertical slice pass full thumbs up, greenlit,

move forward, I'm in. So I'm managing that budget usually for about two years. Our next Star Wars project, which comes out in March, I've been working on for well. I measure it now by the pandemic, through the entire pandemic so what was that one? Um, sorry, it's almost three years. So that's the length because I remember starting it there. Um, so I built that budget out three years ago. UM, and uh, we're just finishing it now. We have one more thing to complete and then we're done.

So that's a full full three years of writing, recording, managing a budget, um, and delivering against what the expectations are. Now, of course there's the issue of whether you're going to have a score, whether you're gonna have licensed music, whether you can combine those. How do you come up with the raw number for a budget? Does it depend on the overall budget of the game, or do they say, we trust you, Steve, just tell us what it should cost. How do you come up with a number? I think

it's a combination of the two. I mean, certainly on a smaller mobile game comparatively to hypothetically Star Wars, you imagine, the budgets are quite different and so the expectations are much different as well. By the way, so, um, I'm able to suggest uh and usually get signed off on a budget big enough to be able to deliver on a title like that. Um. But there is Yes, I've been there twenty years So I think I am confidently um and humbly at the place where you know, I'll

present a budget and people trust me. Um. I'm not stupid uh, and I'm certainly um trustworthy enough internally to where I'm not going to spend million dollars on something where the expectations should be fifty grand. Um. So I think I'm to the point now or after all these years, where I can suggest a budget to the ep UH and have finance sign off on it uh quickly because they understand what I'm delivering will deliver. So to speak, Um, that takes time. It takes um delivering winning scores, It

takes years of seeing audience player feedback. You know, nobody blinks an I fortunately with me right now, you know when I put in a budget for FIFA, because everybody sees the cultural impact and the and the return on investment of that license music budget. Um. But I'm also not stupid to where I'm gonna go and say I

want to triple my budget. I pretty much delivered on the same numbers every year, you know, and if something changes, um, then I adjust, okay, Uh, just because I remember the question I was going to ask in terms of mobile games. How big a part of that is e A. And of course, if you're on the iPhone platform, apples taking you have the Google Play. What's going on in that world is opposed to the stuff that's downloaded for play on the Internet or whatever. I mean mobile games. We've

invested heavily in mobile games. I mean we acquired Glue, um, which remember the days when this little help was I'm anticipating a question in this conversation about Kanye So remember when his ex wife had her big uh mobile game. Glue did that. And Glue also did the Taylor Swift game that I don't know if that ever came to life, but and so there they were a massive mobile platform and we acquired those guys. In the last two years. Um, we're finally pouring out all of our franchises like FIFA

and others onto mobile platforms. So we're investing heavily in mobile. Uh. The economics, like you said, you know, think about it. You're wherever you're buying those is a piece being taken out. Of course, you know you're gonna buy a mobile game on Apple, you know the economics of it, um, But you know console games are where the significant expenses in

creating and developing significant. Okay, So if you have one of your big games, whether it be uh end well or every three or four years, if it's solely score, or if it's solely licensed music, what's the number for the budget ballpark? UM? I can tell you this. I can tell you what I can and cannot answer, but UM it is to answer an earlier questionnaires. It is somewhat like the movie industry in that regard. Somewhere between one of the overall score UM closer to one usually

is what I can get for a music budget. It's small comparatively to the overall numbers in developing a game. UM. You know, I. I know you didn't ask me this, but I'm gonna say it anyway. UM I I believe that we should always pay, you know, for other people's IP We pay to license music into FIFA. We pay the license music in the Madden There have been thoughts for years about what television used to do. Well, we have a we're a promotional vehicle, so you should give

it to us for free. And I fought that every single ounce of the way for several reasons. Number one, UM, the minute we start not paying for music and either accept payment for the placement or take it for free. The credibility of our curation goes down the toilet, and that can never happen. We have to make decisions based on great music that will travel around the world. I also believe you pay for other people's intellectual property, and

if we're licensing something, we're gonna pay for it. So um, you know, I manage, you know, to get a hundred plus songs in FIFA close to that in Madden, and I set a budget incording accordingly where the money goes the right way, it goes to the people who are licensing from We make better decisions. Everybody wants to be in that real estate. But you know we don't make those We don't make those decisions based on cost or money spent. We make those decisions based on the best

music possible. And you know, fees and budgets set on that. Everybody has an expectation as to what we're gonna pay. Let's go to the easier side the score. So you may hire someone prior to the layer cake being complete, but you're gonna hire somebody shut either after over the period of years, which is longer than it takes to make a movie. How involved is the composer? Tell me the relationship from the moment you hire them to end of production. Yeah, this is a part of the business

in particular that I genuinely and deeply love. I didn't know how much I loved it, frankly, Bob, until I got into it to the point where I have such a deep connection to the composer community. Um, listen, I allow the composer to be involved, he or she as deeply as they would like to be. I would prefer more than less. I would prefer to them to have input into the story, into the characters. I want that because I want the music to inextricably tie in with

the characters and the action. Um. So, these are very long periods of time, So I don't have Hans Zimmer or Hilda or others exclusively for these three years they're doing they're doing movies, they're doing television shows. But when we get closer to release, after years of building these tones and ideas, then they come in the time exclusively and they helped me finish out the project. That's kind

of where it's just that's more like a movie. Um, Frankly, I've never seen a composer now that I think about it to this day that hasn't just dove in the deep end. They want all in the biggest composers in the world. I watched, you know, shows on Netflix and HBO and others, and I'm blown away by some of the music that's happening in television right now, which is one of the most exciting places too for entertainment. My you know, there's I don't even know if we announced

it yet. We will in a minute, So while say here here, I'll say it here anyway, pardon me, um. I was watching the show on Apple called Servant. It was a Shamalan thing. The music was so damn good. It was horror music, but like I never heard before. Horror music is supposed to sound like Bernard Herman meets you know, um, Halloween, but this was psychological. The music sick. It's scared the b Jesus out of me, the music

in that. And so for Dead Space, which comes out next year early next year, I wanted this guy, Trevor Grecus, didn't meet him, never knew, blew my mind. So this relationship now is two years old. He has contributed so much in challenging us. What does horror feel like? What does fear feel like? How could you psychologically get into the head of somebody on a couch who you'll never meet, to where they are emotionally messed up from what's happening

on screen musically speaking. So I think you want somebody like that who has huge ideas, who's the next generation thinker, who understands the medium. Because Trevor is a game fanatic. He understood massive fact he he played the old Dead Spaces, he knew it. I don't need composers because they're gamers, because they understand the technology. But I want composers who understand the opportunities that come with the medium, and that to me is where it changes the whole game, no

pun intended. Lauren Bolf does the same. He does Mission Impossible and all these great movies that are that are in the theaters. But when I work with him, he digs in because it's like it's like a sandbox. Now I get to explore. Now I get to have fun. Now I'm not tethered to that thing the director shot that's on screen. Now I can come up with all these crazy ideas. I can invent instruments. We can play the instruments in ways they're not even supposed to be played.

We can go and you know, just whatever wacky ideas that enhanced that emotional participation. And um, I just think it's it's really become. Frankly, one if not my favorite parts of the gig is digging in with these intensely creative minds and coming up with ways. Well, I'm gonna give you another example. Hilder, who won the Oscar for Joker, who I learned warners wanted to fire her every single day, not Todd Phillips but everybody else because she was doing

something very against the grain. Um. When I first met her, I was smart enough to go to Berlin. It was my last trip before the pandemic. Uh. I knew she was going to win the Oscar, but she hadn't, and I wanted to hire her to do battlefield the next battlefield. Battlefield takes place obviously in the future, but the not too distance future. Climate change has completely destroyed the world as we know it. Sounds like it could be true.

Hurricanes are ten times stronger, snow snowstorms or growing up in July, nations are underwater, there's two nations left, Russia and the US, and they go to war. They're not fighting for land, they're fighting for control of climate. So I sat with Hilder and at first she said, m hm, war game. I don't know how I feel about that. Remember I knew her for an hour, and I said, you know, the difference between call of duty and battlefield is battlefield isn't about war. Let's see how many people

we can shoot. Choo choo, choo shoot. It actually makes you think as to why we're in war. It actually is a war game with a conscious And imagine if we could write a score we didn't know there was a pandemic that was about to happen. Imagine if we could write a score that was indistinguishable between the music and the sound design, to where the bullets sounded like percussion. Sorry, the helicopter sounded like cushion, the bullets coming out of helicopters,

and the string sounded like the wind. But to the point where the fear of the inevitable, unless we get a grasp as to what the hell is going on with climate change in this world, it makes you shake in your shoes, shake in your chair. Can we write a score where you can listen to it on Spotify, and I really recommend it from the beginning to the end. Get some wine, smoke a joint, I don't care, Get into a place, lean back in a chair. Can it live in its own? Can it be a warning? Can

it let us know? Can it let us feel what we're doing to this planet, the inevitable where we're headed? And her eyes lit up. I said, so, think about it as a piece of music that works in the game, but think of it also as a piece of art, a piece of music that can live in its own and shake our souls to what we've done to this planet and what's an inevitably going to happen unless we

get on the right track. Can we do that? And within an hour here's a woman that just won the Golden Globe, was about to win an oscar, and she was signing on to do music for a game she never played, a game she never wrote for a game. We decided not to record any live instruments. We decided to invent instruments. We decided to go to a shipyard in France and record the scraping of the hull against the metal and the cement. We wanted it to not

necessarily be musical. We wanted it to be emotional. So I've sat in the studio at my house many times and listen to the score album. It is not like listening to you know, Fiddler on the Roof or or anything like that. It makes you go. It's if there's a little nine inch nails in there in the sense of electronic what the f is this? There's a lot of pulsation in there that makes your heart go to a place you can't imagine. And there's a hell of

a lot. At the end of forty something minutes, you're sitting there in your chair saying, what the funk was that? And hopefully, and now I believe she's about to be hopefully nominated for two Oscars I hear this year. But I've seen it performed eleven minute piece at Disney Hall, and I just saw another maybe fifteen minute piece of the score performed at the Opera House in Sweden. And

it lives on its own. It can sit on its own and be a masterpiece and art piece because art is supposed to and I think you'll agree shake you to your core. If you see something or feel something, it's supposed to shake you. It's supposed to make you think, wake up, even if you don't like it, even if you disagree with it, even if you hate it. I

don't need war in this case. Every time you in a battle for it to be Timpani who said war has to a victory has to sound like fog horn d I mean if I ever was in a war and I just want a battle and I killed people, I'd throw up. Probably I would not have a victory. Lap so we wanted today could take a different approach out of it that hopefully to answer your question, is the level of high involvement that some of the best composers in the world all get involved with when it

comes to this medium. It's pretty phenomenal to see it now there are a lot of old rockers involved in composition. Is that window still open? And what is the barrier to entry for newbies to the sphere. When you say old rockers want, you mean old rockers wanting to get their music into you. No, no, no, no, I'm talking about his composers like Mark Mark m M. Yeah. I get a lot of calls, Bob from a lot of guys in bands that I worked with in the old days or bands that I certainly know of in the

old days that they want to be composers. Um. Very few can make that transition. There are great exceptions. Trevor Rabin, Mark Mother's Bow, you know, certainly the guys in nine inch Nails. You know, Trent and Atticus UM, Jeff Russo, UM. Certain guys can do it. Most camp and I've done it with many, probably a few too many times because I was a fan and thought, oh, this is just gonna be awesome. I've always wanted to work with this

guy or this woman. UM. But there's it's it's a big gap between being a rock star and being a composed The first one is collaboration. If you're making a record, you're going into studio, you're shutting everybody out. You deliver the record, maybe to your A and R guy, Maybe he gives you an hour or three of feedback. Maybe you adjust, maybe you don't. But it was done in isolation. Hans Simmer doesn't do anything in isolation. He calls me. He's working with me right now every single day. What

do you think about this? Should I change it? Does it fit? Yeah? Hans? Why don't we try doing this? Instead of this, I need to get this emotion out of it. Okay, I'll be back. It's a collaborative thing. So sometimes a little ego gets in the way of the rock star trying to be a composer. Sometimes the idea that they're being given direction doesn't fall so well

on their ears. I was working God, I was so optimistic about working with this big, high profile hip hop guy, um, and after a couple weeks, I just we just couldn't go any further because every time I would give direction, he would come back with a different version of what he did. And I'm not saying my my word, my direction is the end and make it like me. That's not what I'm saying, But like Hans or Hilder, where we'll sit there and we'll come up with crazy ideas.

What if we could do this? What if they challenge me, I challenge them. It's a pretty deep relation. Listen, a lot of these composers have become my best friends. I spend more time with them than anybody you know, to three years on a project, every day, hours every day, so that transition is really really tough. Um. Like I said, there are exceptions, you know, Jeff Russo has become an incredible composer. Played guitar in a rock band. Who knew

he knew probably I worked with him before. Um incredible collaborative spirit. But then there's the next generation of great composers who did play in rock bands, Chris Bowers, Hilda who I just talked about. It's collaboration from the second you enter the room together. There's no here's my idea, that doesn't exist. It's let's create the vision where when? And and very humbly speaking, Hans Zimmer, biggest composer in the world. What do you think? Did I get it wrong?

I might have gotten it wrong? What do you think? And they want feedback. There isn't an ego asking here, you know. It's I'm not saying ego doesn't exist, because that would be naive. But it's a very different thing than making a record. UM. And I really enjoy UM. You know. I'm heavily involved in the SCL the Society Composers and Lyricists, and this community of collaborators is quite impressive, and it's something I was never really exposed to when

I was in the record business for so long. You'd go in there and you'd make a record with the band end, but you had to make sure you were good to their ego. You know, that's great. How many hopefully I wasn't in too many, But you know how many times did you go in the board room once a week and they played a record and you thought the record was average? But everybody's bobbing their head up and down because everybody's looking at each other, and because

the CEO is in the room, Oh my god. But you're going, oh my god, this thing's gonna stiff the second and it's radio. You know, everybody's bullshitting each other. Composers and myself and others. We don't bullshit each other. We just we understand the end result is the most important thing. How we get there, it doesn't matter. There's no feelings to be hurt. You know, there's no my

way or the highway, you know. So just going back to the Hilder thing, you know, it's it's it's going to disturb you to listen to the score for Battlefield, and that's the intention. But that wasn't something that she came up with and said, Okay, I got it, I'll write it, I'll send it to you in three months. That was Monday through Saturday. She was in Berlin. I

was in Nashville during a pandemic. We had our Swedish producers every day on the phone hours listening to not just Q by Q, listening to bar by bar of collaborative effort to create something that all of us. I remember I handed the first portion to score in and I had some people go, what is this? This is horrible? We can't deal with this. Why because it's upsetting us. Good We're on the right track. Okay, let's flip the story over. Uh, let's talk about a totally licensed UH score.

What I mean is different individual rock, pop, hip hop tracks. How do you decide to do that? And what are the steps in that? So? I have some rules I've had for twenty years with my team, and my team has been together for that long. Uh. Nobody is allowed to listen to the radio. Ever. Nobody is allowed to be influenced or looked at charts. Ever. Nobody is allowed

to define success in a one dimensional way. Having a number one or a top ten record is meaningless because success in the year two and music can be defined in many different ways. Is somebody who gets a hundred million streams on Spotify more important than somebody who has a million streams. They're both successful, depends who they are,

depends what the expectations were. So I believe if we pay attention to trends, if we understand who's on their way up, who's potentially not where to certain where are certain genres going in the World's hip hop? Certainly, you can look at the numbers of hip hop. It's the most popular genre in music around the world. But where is it in its life in its lifetime right now?

You know, we were we were we were working with Anita, you know, years ago, you know, in Latin America because we believed we saw this trend of the globalization of Latin music. So we were placing Anita in the sims like before. We were fighting our own folks internally, you know, um rock, I told Sabelle on my team the second I started hearing a couple of years ago, rock is dead. I said, take the NHL franchise and bring rock back. It's gonna come back. There's no way you're gonna convince

me rock is dead forever. Go find the greatest rock bands on the planet, not the old ones, not the ones that sound like the old ones. What is rocks? And what is a kid? Who's a team? Who was raised on jay Z and Metallica because parents played it? What is the what is that sound like? What is the next evolution of rock? Sound like? Take the entire NHL soundtrack and devoted to bringing rock back, pay attention to the fact that it's not dead forever, and have

confidence that we can be a part of that. So I my job is to surround myself with people with impeccable taste. I have an opinion. Um, my opinion is strong, and we all fight and the best Remember those fights he used to have? I remember them so finally, when I used to have all my buddies over, usually to our living room or sometimes in my bedroom, and we'd all bring records and we'd play it, and we'd play Talking Heads of the Police, and we'd fight over which

one was best. That track sucks, No, you're wrong, this track is huge? What's wrong with you? Elvis Costello's I mean, I love those fights because they weren't fights, weren't batting each other up. We were being passionate. We loved it so much. I was allowed to love one band more than you and vice versa. I love those conversations we have at work. I actually encourage them once a while. I'll stick my neck out and go, you know, I like Coldplay, but I don't know if Coldplay is really

for him. You know, an eighteen year old play. You know who's listening, Who's going to see Coldplay right now? I'm not denying their talent. I'm not denying how huge they are, you know, but um, maybe there's some other choices we should make. Maybe we should invest in a lot of artists that people have yet to hear from. Because if I did a focus group today for FIFA twenty four, people would tell me to put in the bands from last year because they love them so much.

But last year they hadn't heard of them yet. So, as taste makers, and I say that with humility, as people with real estate, where we need to be highly responsible for what gets into that real estate, musically speaking, we better be damn good. I don't expect you to love every one of the hundred songs. That would be impossible.

But if you actually love a couple and they change your life, and you can look back and say, oh my god, the first time I heard this was an NHL two thousand and seven to change my life, and you're talking about that in two that's a huge, huge positive thing we've we've created. So we spend a year and we look at every possible angle. Where is music going, where is it not going? You know, how much do we invest in this genre? How much do we invest in I can't. I can't. I learned the hard way.

For a couple of years, I would spread the genres out in Madden Football because I would go to a Dallas Cowboys game and they would play country. And then I'd go to a New York Giants game and they would play hypothetically jay Z. And I'd go to the NFL and they'd say we are nine and ninety were everything for everybody. And then I realized it's impossible. If you think you're everything for everybody, then you're nothing to everybody. You have to make a choice, you have to put

your you know, whats on the line. You have to say, this is what we're gonna sound like, this is the tone, these are the limits to where we're gonna go. These are the artists we're going to invest in in this year, and hopefully it'll stick. And once you engage the audience year after year, they have higher and higher expectations. So yeah, I went from Blake Shelton five years ago in Madden Football to Kendrick lamar Uh to the baby before he did what he did, and now we're all hip hop

because and not just hip hop. Like, let's take a look at the charts. As I said, who are the next stars? Who's change? We hired you know, um hit Boy to do the score. There's a rock star turning into a composer. He did an incredible job this year. The players, and I don't mean our players, I mean the NFL players. They listen to our soundtrack. I don't care about the guys in the Budweiser stand, the people my age who go in there and they want to hear more Bong Jovi in a football game. I don't care.

I care about what the players in the field listened to. In the locker room. At the Titans games we used to have I've been in a game this year yet, but we used to have the Madden twenty when everybody was walking into the stadium, not into the suits, but into the regular seats with their kids. They would play all the music from Madden that year in the stands and the NFL did a focus group a test and they said it tested through the roof, and I said,

that's amazing. Used to tell me that only NFL fans want to hear. All they want to hear is classic rock, and they said, yeah, those are the people in the sweets. But we were talking like kids and they were freaking out, and I said, do you know how easy it is? Look how easy that is. You're making yourself relevant just by the association. All those kids play Madden. We can't deny it. They play Madden. The players obviously play Madden. That's the soundtrack that they hear for months. It's embedded

in their brains. They walk into a football stadium, maybe it's the first time they've ever gone to see a live sporting event, and the first thing they hear is that it's credible. So, um, long winded way, I hope I answered the question. Maybe I didn't. I apologize, but um, it's from now, um through the fall through January, all we're doing is talking about how we did, what we did, what we got right, what we got wrong. What is the next year to look like? Genre wise? We're gonna

have a lot of conversations about hip hop. Where is hip hop going? What's the next underground of hip hop? We're gonna talk a lot about Latin music, We're gonna talk a lot about rock and roll, and we're gonna make some decisions based on next year. That doesn't mean Madden's gonna necessarily sound. It's not gonna become I'm not telling you it's gonna be all rock and roll next year. But we really have to look at, Okay, fifteen and eighteen year olds, this is what they listened to this year.

We're going to actually hopefully be a part of shaping their musical taste for the next year. Now, what about next year's fifteen year old? What does that look like? In cases like FIFA, what does that look like? In Italy and the UK and Argentina and the US and Japan. We do not localize the music. We localize games for language, but we do not localize the music. So when an artist gets into FIFA, everybody in the world heard, you

know Lewis the child. I just love this because you know this is years ago, maybe eight years ago, six years ago. Um, I think I don't quote me on the number, but on Spotify, it was like seven thousand streams, and then we announced that year the soundtrack list and Louis the Child's name was on it and went to a million in twenty four hours just from a list. Nobody had heard the song yet, So we really need

to get it right. And I take that responsibility, and that responsibility it doesn't always reflect my personal taste, you know, I just I think I have pretty good taste. But I need to think about that player, that player around the world who's going to learn something new musically speaking for the first time. So we need to be impeccable in our people culturally, clem clairvoyant and understand trends. And I need to make sure I'm surrounded by people always

that understand that. And that goes back to the beginning of this. Why I don't let anybody listen to the radio. I don't want to hear from anybody. It's number one on Billboard, it's number one, and my book cares anymore. Welcome back to I'm not a nostalgic guy, Bob. I don't live in the past. I've you know, it's nice, you know, once a year to listen to a Springsteen record, and remember high school, but it's pretty meaningless to me

in my life. I really want to I really want to make sure that you know, I really get excited about what music can do to people going forward, and I think, um, we have the real estate to help with that. Okay, So let's just you've gone through the process with your team of what you want the sound to sound like. We know there's a very aggressive business. There are people who are pitching you, etcetera. Once you've locked in what the music should sound like, what are

the steps? Do you go to the usual suspects? Do you not contact anybody and ultimately is in the most favored nations? Or do you pay more for one track as opposed to another. I mean, the people that know that we're looking at them are obviously the artists and the labels and the publishers. I get great joy, um, humbly speaking, when uh, we put in a license request to a label, uh and they're looking it up and they say, we don't have this song yet in our system.

I love that the band got it to us so early that they didn't hand it into the label yet. I get tremendous joy out of that because we're so freaking early, um, and we all have to be really quiet, and even the artists, nobody's really broken that code of silence as far as I remember for years. You know, you'll know in July. If you're going to make it in a FEEFA that comes out in September, you'll know

in July. And we they're all on board with making sure that nothing gets said in social media and it stays quiet because they're a part of our launch. Uh M, A fan is not typical, you know, M fan. There there's certain licenses that are have valued more than others. You know, if I'm going to license uh um, a big artist who has a new material that we think is going to blow up, and the value of that is more than an artist that's putting out their first single.

You know, I think everybody pretty much agrees with that. I mean, um, I'm willing to pay if I support a band this year and it blows up and next year I want to put their single from their next album, I'm certainly prepared to pay more for it because they got bigger. Only once, by the way, in my twenty years did I get was I told by a person in a label licensing department on a band that had yet to put out even a record that I was offering too little because it was going to be a hit.

I said, well, sorry, then I'll pass because I'm not gonna pay you on futures. Um. But um, but let's do you watch it? How do you actually find it? Do you do it yourself? Do you have regular contacts? Are you inundated with you know, whether it be tracks, text, whatever people want to be in uh, inundated? Yes, Um, but that sometimes isn't what necessarily works. I think it is us being proactive, us getting out there. Um. Sabella my team at the beginning of every year goes to Europe.

She literally goes to everyone in her network, which is pretty massive. What bands are going in the studio? When can I get in the studio to hear the tracks they haven't recorded yet? Can I come to the studio and hear the demos? You know, I think we are out there. We're out there like crazy. Certainly you know, the pandemic stop that, let's get out there. It made it more challenging, so we had to rely on hopefully security of you know, it being sent to us. Um.

But for the most part, we're out there. We don't wait for it to come to us. If I waited half the time for it to come to us, it would be in shrink wrapping and radio on radio stations desks already. You know. Um, we need to be very proactive. I'm sure. Um, if we sat down with my team for the most art for the most part, they could tell you every artist that's writing and hoping and planning to put a record out in the next year or two.

There are exceptions, of course, I'm not saying we know of you know, three million, you know, But where the trendsetters? Who's the next generation of artists that we've been following? Where they at? That's our responsibilities. I have a lead music supervisor, Sabel Pettis. She's amazing. She's been with me for twenty years. She comes from a and R at Warners before that, and her job, her job is a strictly creative job. Where's every band at? Who do you

believe in? Where are the trends? Where they are they writing right now? Have you heard it? Have you gotten on a plane to the studio where they will play it for her? You know, I have many many, um, fond memories of bands sitting down with a guitar or something and saying, this is what the song is. We

just wrote this, what do you think. My favorite story, which dates me for a second, is when the guys at Green Day were in um Ocean Way in l A and UH asked us to come out to Ocean Way and they played us American Idiot and they said, we're about to go in and record it. Rob Cavallo was there and UH, this, when do we need to finish it by to get it in Madden, and I went, oh, man, we have arrived and so um do we miss some things? Yes?

But the beauty of the medium that I work in is that if something comes, if it's not finished by the time we lock, I can add it to downloadable content. In a month or two, I can always add it. I can refresh it. As a matter of fact, we just did you know the Ultimate FIFA Soundtrack. That's we had a narrow down to thirty or forty songs of the best songs to come from FIFA over the last twenty years. We took a lot, We worked with Spotify, we looked at playlists, we talked to gamers, and we

came up with that playlist. It's just a list of songs, but the fanaticism of getting in that on that list was mind blowing to me. But that didn't ship with the game. That ship this week when we give you a free downloadable World Cup portion of the game, and now you get thirty or forty new songs, including Casabian, including Blur song number two, which is now forever tied

to the game of soccer. Um uh, so on and so on each The list is long, but so we can always update, We can always take things out if we don't believe in something, but more importantly, we can always add, which we do. Okay, this is the music business in general. People are on neither one side or the other there the business or their creators. You talk about writing cues, Tell us about that in your own

musical creativity, writing cues um as in scores. Yes, okay, um, Well, you know I when I was I know you didn't ask me, but I'm gonna answer it this way. When I was for my mom put a guitar in my hand because I asked for it. Uh. And when I was seven, I guess she saw me doing some crazy things to some crazy songs. I would want to take the horn parts from Chicago c t A. At the time, as you recall and rewrite them. I thought Terry cath was the greatest guitar player in her But I wanted

to rewrite Robert Lamb's parts. I wanted to rewrite all of this stuff. I was seven. Probably sucked what I was rewriting, but I wanted to do it. So she used to put me on a bus to Port Authority at seven, by myself on the bus, sometimes by the way, on a side. And it was Mark Shaman, who was a couple of years older than me, who inevitably went on to be becoming a massive composer and Broadway writer.

But we were going, we've we we've since reconnected. And um, I used to go to Carnegie Hall and study with this guy who looked ancient to me. He actually was like and I was seven to me, he could have been three thousand, and he was so old that he was the composer to the one of the first silent films with score, called The Nook of the North Okay Classic. And um, he taught me, at seven, nine, ten years old, how to rewrite these cues and how to begin to

write for picture. What does this scene looks like? The scene looks like this. The actors are doing this, the script does this? Where does silence serve? Where does music serve? Even better? How do you create the emotion and the person in the chair in the theater? What are your options? What is the orchestration, the instrumentation. It was unbelievable to me that you could control the emotional experience with one

minute of music. And I also learned when I lied to my Jewish grandmother at seventeen, and she said, hey, that's a nice hobby you have, but in our family the choices. You can become a doctor, you can become a lawyer, or god forbid, a dentist. That was a quote, and I felt bad because my dad was a dentist. Um. I lied, and I went to school to study music. Um. But the one thing I learned was I'm good, but I'm much better if I hire other people to do it.

I can contribute, but I'm gonna hire Hans Zimmer to write it, but I have enough knowledge to be able to communicate with him on musicians terms. So to write a queue, and to write a queue in an interactive format, you're not talking about what's happening on the screen. You're talking about all of the possibilities. Are you going left? Are you going right? Are you running and falling under the log and the bad guy gets you, or you jumping over the log and you made it or the

other ten thousand or ten million possibilities? How are you writing that in one minute? What is the objective of the music? Is the is the objective to sit above and to have a you know, as I mentioned before, we won the war, so bring on the timpany that sits above it? Or is to be so subtle that you don't even know the music is there. It's there, but it's you're two in the scene. So the but you're feeling anger or anxiety or fear or joy, and

then you probably don't even realize what's doing. That is not what's happening on the screen. It's when that music gets in your in your soul. Because I don't believe that music is meant to be or written to be heard. I believe music is written and meant to be felt. So a composer, if guided well and as a collaborative person, can find that emotion and not even rely what's going

on in the screen. What happens if you get up to go to the bathroom and the screen, but you hear the music, you're still feeling, oh my god, I gotta get back, I gotta get back, I gotta get back to the couch. What's going on the screen is not what's doing that. What's going on in your ear, to your heart, your soul. So doing that in one minute or sometimes twenty second moments is incredibly challenging. Now, the beauty of gaming is that you're not writing one

continuous queue. You're writing pieces that technology can allow it to go left or right. So if you're running in a horror film running and you trip over the log, the trigger in the technology is triggering that music to do one thing. But if you make it over the log, it knows you did it. So now the music is doing something else. So it really is interactive with your experience. It's not tethered to that screen. Um, and it's pretty.

And those are just one example. You know, years ago, fifteen years ago, maybe we did the Lord of the Rings games and I thought, you know, we were going to hire a composer and I could use the music from the films, which uh, we did. Um, but I had a moment where I wanted to hire Jimmy Page. I thought, anybody who listens to Zeppelin like me, knows that Lord of the Rings was a part of this mindset. Okay,

I mean it was there. And if you ask any of guys in Laura in in Zeppelin, they'll tell you Lord of the Rings right, the books in particular, you know, because it's previous to the films. And so I reached out at the time to David Dorne. I know you probably know, Um, we understand by the way runs maps now for Apples. Yes, he's in Maps. Yeah, I need to call him and tell him I'm lost. I think I just need to have that moment with him. Um. But anyway, I reached out to him, and everybody believed.

Everybody agreed. I said, let me license a bunch of Zeppelin tunes and have Jimmy right, that's Lord of the Rings. That's how the next generation should should learn Lord of the Rings. So of course we went to the lawyers, whoever they may have been, and they said, well, with the tunes, with the Zeppelin tunes, we didn't even get to money. But like we realize it has to mix itself during game play, so we need to hear the possibilities, like what are the three or four ten mixes that

the engine is going to create? And I said, I can't play you that because it would be millions. I don't know what the computer you know that, sorry, the technology might change, you know, the base might go here and Jimmy Page's guitar Michael here, and Robert Plant's voice might soar and stay in a note. I don't know. It depends what the players doing. And at the time they couldn't. I didn't do the deal. They couldn't wrap their heads around it. I couldn't get approval on every

single mix because the number was infinity. I still think it's the most badass idea and I wish I could still do it, you know. Um. So that's to me about writing a queue. It's um. It's not writing something to be listened to like a record many times, it's something to be written to be felt. And if you don't understand that, and I guarantee you knowing you you do. But if you don't understand that, think about, for instance, what John Williams Scores and Star Wars did to all

of us back in the seventies. Think about how we felt. Think about when we were soaring into the world of Star Wars and that very Stravinsky classical type of score, which was not what we were listening to on w an E W where I was from, we were listening, we were listening to rock music. But that score made me feel a certain way. It made me feel my chest puffed out. I felt bigger than life. I didn't listen to it like I listened to a pop song and w ABC in New York that was a different experience.

I listened to it like with confidence. That's what we have to get. Okay, you depict a very full life. We're talking to you, just one composer every day and you have multiple games. You're talking about travel. What degree did this contribute to your divorce? Wow? What an amazing question, all of it, all of it. Listen, I married the wrong person, and I want my kids to hear me say that, because that would hurt them. But that didn't help.

But you know, I ended up marrying this job, and I love this job and I have no regrets about that. I devoted my life to this job because I believed in it. I didn't do that when I worked at

Capitol Records. The Andy Slater days of Capitol Records were not worth marrying, but being in the next being a part of the evolution of entertainment and knowing I could use that real estate to do what I always like to do since I was fourteen years old, play really cool ship for a lot of people and saying, what do you think I'll never forget playing Houses of the Holy from a next door neighbor. Holy crap, are you kidding?

Playing again? I still do that. My wife, I'm remarried, always says, my god, you act like a fourteen year old, and I go, yeah, And I've been able to make a living out of that. I don't think she means that when she says that, I think she means it differently, is my point. But you know it contributed to my divorce. I'm not going to avoid your question. It contributed to it. I traveled a lot. I still do um and I missed a lot, and I would try to come home

a lot. I would go to London to work and then come home in the weekend to see my son's baseball game, and then go back the next day to London. But you can't you can't do that forever, so it didn't contribute to my divorce significantly. Um and um, it's okay, and your present wife accepts that your job is number one. Well, my present wife. From the first day I met her, I found out that Zeppelin was her favorite band of

all time, so I was ten steps ahead. UM uh yeah, of course, you know, of course, and we listen, we're adults now, I what at tangent I'm about to go on. I don't understand why people get married now that I'm an adult in their twenties and early thirties. I do not believe in it. I believe the best time to get married, if you do get married, is as an adult. Get married in your forties, when you're grounded, when you know what your life is, when the expectations of each

other are set. You know. Um, my growth took me one way and my ex wife's growth took her another way. So I am very fortunate that I found the most amazing person on earth who loves what I do, appreciates what I do, by the way, and all my friends like Hans Zimmer and they love her. I don't hold her back from that. She's a part of it. She comes to the studio all the time, pops in. My God, I can't get her away from half the composer she loved. Her dad was a musician. He was a recording artist

for him c a way back in the day. You know. Um, So she understands. She comes from the world of music her parents. Um. And I think she sees the excitement that I have when I'm working on a score. She understands the isolation that I have to go through to get there. Um. She understands why you know, I suddenly just added to move to Nashville, And she said, Okay, she's a California board and raised person. Um. But said, let's go And um, so you have to have somebody

who's on board. But I don't think that can happen when you're in your twenties, because you don't know when your twenties and know in your twenties where you're gonna be in your forties and your fifties. You just don't know. And sorry, you have to have somebody who goes along for the ride. Okay, let's go back to Nashville. At the top, you talked about being a Jew in Nashville. We have the whole Kanye self immolation. We have Dave

Chappelle talking about Jews on Saturday Night Live. We're recording. This is only a couple of days ago, and you wrote a piece about this, So give me your take. I could go deeper, but you know exactly what I'm talking about, Ah, Dave Chappelle, the normalization of anti Semitism, Thank you so much. Sarcasm by the way, UM, let's since I'm not a religious person. Um, most Jewish people I know are not. But culturally we are bound food where we're from, the way we talk, the way we think.

You know, we're bound together through this culture. There's only but fourteen million of us on the planet. Um. But shocking news anti Semitism. There's nothing new. It's been around forever, thousands of years. UM. Every hundred years, history repeats itself. Look at the Spanish Inquisition, look at the programs we can keep going. When I did that one of those

twenty three and me things was unbelievable. It was a map from Tunisia and Morocco to Portugal, to Spain, to France to Italy, belong all the way across to Croatia, straight up through you know, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Poland straight up to Finland which used to be Russia. That's a map of people fleeing, you know. Yeah, my kids said, oh my god, are we French? Well we probably were for twenty years or a hundred years. I have no

freaking idea. So here we are again. Did we think that in ninety three through that that was the end of it? No way. So here we are with the current normalization of anti Semitism, the hatred that spews from the mouths of celebrities, politicians and just regular people. And I never thought, probably none of us ever thought in our lifetimes that we would be sitting here defending it like our relatives. Did you know we're more than a

generation or two since World War Two. I've got a huge, wonderful, loving family in Israel. Secular family lives in Tel Aviv. I'm a liberal Zionist. None of us are bb people. We don't believe in settlements, we're not right wingers, were not religious. We don't spit it people when they walk down the streets. By the way, that's the majority of tel Aviv. We believe in rights. We believe in gay rights, we believe in equal women rights. We believe in equal

rights for Arabs and everyone. Um, and here we are being hated again. We are not Israeli politics. I am not American politics. Tom York said it so well. I started an organization ten years ago with David Renzer called Creative Community for Peace that was about using music to build bridges, not through boycott, where you use music to bring people apart. I and the one thing that a Palestinian and an Israeli kid might have in common is Rihanna.

For God's sake, Let's try to get bands to go to Tel Aviv and then go somewhere in the Arab world. Let's try to have music be the bridge. Elton John gets that. Lots of artists gets that, gets that, Lady Gaga gets that, Donna gets that. The list goes on. Um. I was. I felt this rise in anti Semitism, not just by through the organization, the nonprofit that I started with David, But I see the stats. I see what's happened in the last two three years. I heard Jews

will not replace us, just like you heard it. They were taking down rightly so, taking down Confederate statues, and they were marching, yelling, about Jews. So you see this, I asked the question, you know, a couple of years ago, when did we as Jewish people stop being a minority? Because we are a minority. I'm actually in the middle of reading a book. When did Jewish people start becoming white? Because are we really white? You know? Sure? Okay, you we can we we we can get away with it.

But remember that map I told you Tunisia, Morocco, all that stuff. I bet you I had a lot of relatives that didn't have this skin color. And then if you trace it back two thousand years, I guarantee you I had relatives that didn't have a skin color. So why are we suddenly hated again? Or have we just always been hated and it's just coming out? I said, yes, I'm gonna get political here. You know. One of the things that Trump did was when I lived in New York.

Remember um, when we lived in New York, so many of us, and we come home at night after a day at work, and we turn into lights and all the cockroaches ran back in the cabinets. So Trump, by not by by supporting the Jews, will not replace us group in Charlottesville gave permission for the cabin for the cockroaches to stay out and not have to run back in the cabinet. My point is the cockroaches were always there. This is a racist country. Come on, look at the

history of this country. It's a racist country. So anyway to answer your question, Pittsburgh synagogues shootings, Kanye West, he don't. Don't people who have voices and celebrity have some level of responsibility, you know, for him to say death not death death, con don't Kanye is meaningless. It's what he

has create, helped to create. Kanye didn't invent anti Semitism, but he furthered it along because of those folks that dropped all those pamphlets in Los Angeles and stood on the bridges and the people that stood on the bridges with of Jacksonville with the signs that said Kanye is right. And then Dave Chappelle what he did on Saturday. I'm a fan of Dave Chappelle. I believe, you know, I could believe in complete free speech, but don't normalize hatred.

I'm very concerned, deeply, deeply, deeply concerned about the relationship between the Jewish community and the Black community. We grew up arm in arm. Literally, my best friends were Jewish and they were Black. There was this commonality between us. We felt we had been put through hell in our histories and we're survivors, and yet people are I don't like what I see in the last couple of years,

the riff between these communities that should be there. Yeah, I mean, sure we know Jews were there when Martin Luther King crossed the bridge. I get it, and but at the end of the day, the relationship is so deeply important for both communities, brotherhood and sisterhood, and it's damaged. And I'm very concerned about that. To be honest with you, I would expect that from rednecks living somewhere in this country or other whatever the equivalent is in Europe, people

who are ignorant and poorly informed. And I think that Jews run this or Jews run that. I haven't gotten a call, by the way, if there is a conspiracy conspiracy. Nobody called me about running a bank or running I mean, it's unbelievable. But I'm mostly and deeply concerned about the riff between the Jewish and the Black community. Additionally, and I saw this has come up lately, this is not

original thought. But one of the things is that Dave Chappelle said that really deeply offended me, was using the term jew versus Jewish. This is an original thought to me. I think Michael Rappaport or somebody said this recently. But if you're Jewish, you can refer to me as a jew um. But if you're not, we are a part of a Jewish community. It is condescending. I'm saying this for anybody who will listen to me hear me. It's condescending,

it's degrading. And I do not believe somebody says the Jews says that naively without meaning some level of anger anti Semitism attached to it. I think, you know, we deserve to take that phrase back. We really do, and I think we need to be loud now. The one thing that has changed in the last hundred years is that we have the ability to not just be out, but we have. We didn't have Israel, and again, remember

where I started here. I'm a liberal Zionist, but my family in ninety one didn't have an army, and for that, I'm really proud of Israel. I do not like a lot of things the government does. I don't like a lot of things the American government does. Trust me, I'm a bleeding liberal. But what's going on? A friend of mine, who is the director of Creative Community for Peace, said it really well to me recently. Suddenly, in the last couple of years, Jews are getting squeeted out, squeezed out

from the extreme right and the extreme left. When did Berkeley or U see I I just came from Irvine. Suddenly that's a hotbed of anti Semitism. So now we've got both sides, so we better do something about this. We gotter be loud. Guess what, everyone. We don't control Hollywood, guess whatever you and we don't control all the things that they say we control. We're smart. We're smart because

our parents believed in education. That's why we're smart. That's why doctors are Jewish, doctors can be Indian, doctors can be Asian doctors cannot be in some of those. But our parents pushed on us what their parents weren't able to do. Education, Work your ass off, sleep as little as you can. That's why some of us might be successful.

Not all of us are successful. You know, we're a part of the fabric of this world, and I can't imagine that we're gonna let anti Semitism rise to the heights again in this century as it did in the last and the one before that and the one before that. So Kanye West started a load of ship, you know, just malignant stupidity. I understand if he has mental illness, but that's not an excuse right now, because he has influence, significant influence, as do many other people right now. Marjorie

Taylor Green, are you kidding me? This is one of the reasons why anti Semitary people really believe that we had lasers. I'm still waiting for a jet pack, God damn it to get me across town a laser. It's amazing how gullible, ignorant, and hateful so many people are. So I want to be very vocal about it. I don't want to be one of these complacent American Jewish people, just like the German complacent Jewish people of two where they were more proud to be German than they were

to be Jewish. That didn't get them far. So I'm angry, angry in a good way, and I don't know, you know, I had a experience in Nashville where I've never had poor experiences with anything, you know, anti Semitic wise, I got thrown out of an uber car in June or July because I was talking to our head of Swedish studios on non Jew by the way, I can say jee because I'm Jewish. And I guess the uber driver heard me talking to him about how I was going

to visit my family in Israel. And the guy pulled over and says, get out of the car, you fucking jew, you dirty jew. What I mean? First, for me, I've read about this, it's actually happening. And I said, excuse me. I mean, I was shaking and I was shocked. I wanted to jump out of the car and go let's go, buddy. But he said to me, if you don't get in the car right now, I'm gonna get out and pummel your face into the ground. And I believed him, so

I got out of the car. I walked up the I walked down to my house, which is a few down. I walked up this gigantic hill I live in live On and I said to my wife, Um, it's time. And I know that sounds dramatic, and I told her the story and I said it's time not to leave. Not that you know six year ago thing where so many of us said if Trump wins weren't moving to Canada. No, this time it was we need to get a passport somewhere else just in case. I'm not saying I'm going

to move now. How am I going to get a British or a Canadian or another passport? But I can get an Israeli passport that law of return, So I can't believe I'm doing that. I'm doing that and I hope to never have to use it. Um my entire family and as real again, this secular liberal freethinking, why you were we why are we building settlements? How how

do we create a two state solution? Huge amount of beautiful family that I have are all there because one person survived the Holocaust and he created this incredible family. And my cousins and my relatives married people who I consider to be my sisters and brothers, even though we're

not quote blood relatives. And they come from one person who now at eighties something, when she was seven, saw her father shot in front of her in Paris, and they fled to the south of France and got hidden from house to house to house until they could get to what was going to become Israel. And I'm sitting here in front of people who are survivors because of horrible things, and I never thought we'd be here having to talk about this again. But that's naive. Um So.

I I just have no tolerance for anti Semitism, by the way, just like I have no tolerance for racism, misogyny, anybody who speaks out against the LGBTQ community. We were raised as Jewish people to stand up for everyone who is being oppressed or hurt or or or anything, anybody who's being bullied upon. That's how we were raised. And I would just hope in this century that these other

communities this time will stand up for us too. Okay, Now, Seinfeld, legendarily George was Jewish and they changed his religion because they didn't want the show to be Jewish. To what degree with the people in the music industry who are Jewish afraid to stand up and own it, and what could be done in terms of the communities we touch? Yeah, I mean, I I loved that George thing you just said. It's very similar, like I said, to what happened a hundred.

You know, eighty, I should say eighty years ago in Germany. You know, if we just assimilate, if we just bury ourselves, pretend we're not Jewish. Don't go to don't go to synagogue, or only go once a year, but don't tell anybody go to work after you go to synagogue. Russia's Shanna, you know. Don't wear it on your sleeve, don't wear a higher on your neck, don't put a massos on your door, because the ups guy will know you're Jewish. Let's try to just fall in line. Guess what, you're Jewish.

They know you're Jewish. They hate you anyway. My grandmother used to say that to me, they hate us because we're Jewish. She got fired for her job at eight T and T in whatever, the thirties of the forties because she took off for Young Kippoor and they said, wait, you're Jewish. Don't come back. And so, yeah, we can assimilate, we can hide, we can become a part of all the white nss in America we want. But they know

you're Jewish, So why not be proud of it? You know, I again, I say this again, that doesn't mean religious. I'm not saying go to synagogue on Friday night. I'm not an organized religion guy in any religion, by the way, But your culture is which culture is. Okay, you are who you are. So music business, hey, there's Jewish people in it, there's non Jewish people in it. I've worked for a lot of Jewish people in the music business. I've worked for a lot of non Jewish people in

the music business. They didn't bring their Jewishness to the music. They did bring their jewishness to the label. Okay, we all maybe the office was a little emptier on Russia Shaanna in New York. But guess what, that's not what Dave Chappelle made that just heinous, asinine comment about I've been to Hollywood and I'm gonna unfortunately paraphrase it. But there's a lot of Jews in the business. Well, guess what. New York has the biggest Jewish population in the world.

Jerusalem is the second Jewish biggest population in the world. Los Angeles is the third biggest Jewish population in the world, and Tel Aviv has the fourth. That's a population thing. This isn't a control thing. So you know, I just think Jewish people don't need to necessarily suddenly go all religious. But you can't hide from who you are. Be proud of it. I am. I'm proud for where I come from. I'm proud from the cultural things that I've learned because

of it. You know, I'm I'm dead against some of the politics that come out of Israel, particularly in this up and coming regime BB part whatever, but I'm certainly proud of the contributions that country has made. I'm really proud of it. I have I have pride in that, just like somebody who's from Ireland has pride and things that come from there. People that are British have pride. I have pride. I'm not gonna apologize for that, and

I'm not gonna hide. And if you hate me because I'm Jewish, ego, funk yourself and be you just don't know me. Been scapegoats forever and we're gonna be scapegoats in a hundred years and three hundred years and five hundre years. But for God's sake, can we at least all suddenly have a voice. And I feel we need to hide. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I feel. Well, I you know, I hope that a lot of people hear that, because normally

use your message good. So is the delivery certainly much better than good? Now I knew you know, you flew from so Cal over a couple of time zones to Nashville. So I think we've come to the end of the feeling we've known, even though we could talk for much more time. But you've really been fantastic, Steve. I want to thank you for taking the time unbelievable and thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm so glad to reconnect with you.

I had such amazing memories of you and I sitting across the dinner table together, and I remember wanting to talk non stop with you, and I'm just so grateful. I'm great. You know. That begs a couple more questions that I want to ask you about you, But as I say, that's it for today, Okay, fine, thank you until next time. This is Bob left set