In my old life, I used to live a very specific kind of morning, and it happened almost every morning. The first thing I would do was wake up and try to figure out where I was. It wasn’t because I was hungover, although sometimes that did happen. The reason it’s hard to figure out where you are is because so much would happen in a 24-hour period that my brain would go to sleep, try to dream and process all the information, and then I’d wake up without having finished the job.
In one 24-hour period, so much can happen that your brain will simply not be able to arrange everything into an order that makes sense. At 10 a.m., we’re having a meeting with a shoe company. It goes well. At 1 p.m., we are at a wheel and tire store trying to decide what kind of rims should go on a truck. At 4 p.m., we walk into a recording studio, and I watch one of the most famous singers in the world record on a track that my artist was producing. At 8 p.m., you’re sitting down eating chicken wings in downtown L.A., and bullets are going to whiz by your head. One will graze your neck. In case you’re wondering, yes, you bleed a lot from your neck. Once the bleeding has subsided, you put a bandage over it, and then you go back to the recording studio until 2 a.m. because T.I. wanted to meet you.
That type of mental fatigue was a cycle that happened every single day.
I used to manage Travis Scott. I’m not bringing this up to name drop. I’m bringing it up because it takes a truly impressive skill set to succeed in that particular industry, and I think being a rap manager is the single most relevant credential a person can have for the environment we are currently living in. I understand this is a strange claim. Rap management is not, on its face, a skill that transfers to many other jobs. There is no LinkedIn endorsement for “knew which door to knock on in Compton at 3 a.m. to get back forty thousand dollars in cash that had been stolen from the studio.” Although maybe there should be.
I want to note something I have been seeing on repeat in the AI conversation, and I’m not doing this to pick a fight with my peers who are engineers. I love engineers. Engineering built the thing we are all currently arguing about. But the people I see making the loudest proclamations about the direction of AI, what it’s going to do, who’s going to win, what technologies are going to succeed, what the timelines are supposed to be, how the architecture should work, which company truly has the secret sauce, are irrationally confident.
Confident people don’t make proclamations. They do things. They act on those instincts. The proclamation is the tell… that tells you they don’t know. If I truly knew which direction something was going to take, why the fuck would I tell you about it? That’s valuable information. I certainly wouldn’t give that information away for free on LinkedIn.
This brings me to the real point.
I spent over a decade in the music business, and it is an industry where the floor can be removed from beneath your feet at any moment for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your work. In rap management, the people who survived and thrived were never the ones with the best five-year plan. If you had a five-year plan, you got eaten alive. The people like me who were successful were the ones who could get new information at 4 a.m. and rebuild their entire week around it before they sat down for breakfast. I have never optimized a goddamn thing in my life. As I used to say, “I don’t optimize. I metabolize.” Whatever gets thrown at you, that’s your intake for the day.
There’s a skill you learn in the music business that I don’t hear many people talk about, which is the skill of making a phone call you can’t make twice. In most normal corporate jobs, very few decisions are actually irreversible. If something is misunderstood, you can email somebody to clarify. You can walk it back in the next meeting. You can change your mind. You can blame it on the PowerPoint. You can “circle back.”
In music management, and really any other field where the stakes are capable of ending your career in a single day, you regularly have to make decisions where the phone call itself is the event. You will not be able to change that phone call 24 hours from now. The outcome of that phone call is everything that matters. People who have lived inside that kind of decision-making environment for any length of time develop a very specific posture toward uncertainty, which is that they stop being afraid of it. This is not something I want to pin on personal bravery. It is not about bravery. No one is brave on an important phone call. What you learn is that being afraid of outcomes simply isn’t useful, and your brain doesn’t have the bandwidth to carry it. Fear is an expensive mental asset.
What we are entering right now in the age of AI is a timeline where every meaningful decision you make about artificial intelligence is exactly that kind of phone call. These are extremely consequential decisions that people are going to make about high-stakes technology, and most of the people making them have never made a phone call like that in their lives.
That’s why I think AI is something you metabolize, not optimize. The people who are going to succeed and thrive in this environment are people who already know that the thing they were sure about on Monday might not matter on Wednesday, and on Friday could be actively dangerous. This is not a mindset a book on the Agile methodology is going to teach you. This is a mindset you learn when you’re sitting in rooms full of people who all have a Glock in their waistband and are not happy to see you. When you exist in those rooms, there are no rules, and the consequences for getting it wrong… mean going for a fishing trip from which you don’t return.
I want to make something incredibly clear, because I know some of you are going to object to my phrasing. When I say you want a rap manager and not an engineer, I don’t mean that in the literal sense. I am not telling you to hire people who tend to carry a Tec-9 in their BMW. (Although I do understand I sound like I’m describing myself because I do drive a blacked out 7-Series like Suge Knight.) What I’m saying is that “engineer” and “rap manager” are not really job titles in my argument. They are postures for how we approach work. An engineer says, “Give me the spec and I will build the thing.” A rap manager says “There is no spec, there will never be a spec, the spec is a fiction, and the only reason we pretend it exists is so we could get to the end of this meeting.”
The actual job is to keep the artist alive, and the money moving, and the next thing happening, all at the same time, while the building is on fire and people are shooting at us.
You can find people with the rap manager posture inside engineering organizations. They are the people you send a Slack message to when things are on fire. They are also generally the same people who don’t get promoted, because the rap manager posture does not perform well in performance reviews. A “Rap Manager Posture” is not HR friendly. A rap manager does not placate his co-workers and their whimsical ideas. A Rap Manager wakes up every single morning and says, “I’m going to make money.” Then they go to sleep, and they wake up, and they say, “I’m going to make more money today than I did yesterday.”
The hardest part about this moment we’re living in right now is that there is too much money in the room, and nobody knows where that money is going. Not the founders. Not the researchers. Not the private equity writing the checks. Not me. Not you. Not some dude with a podcast. Not anyone, period. The amount of confidence currently being proclaimed about AI is inversely proportional to the amount of actual knowledge about anything in this industry. Someone should plot that on a graph on LinkedIn, but do it with a shitty image generator so I know it’s real.
What strikes me about the current moment is how much it reminds me of the music industry in 2009. Streaming was either going to save music or kill it. The major labels were either going to consolidate everything, or everything was going to collapse into dust. Music piracy was either an existential threat or the best marketing channel ever invented. Every single one of these predictions was made with enormous confidence by people who were paid to be confident. Very few of those people turned out to be correct.
What actually happened in 2009 was not what anyone was predicting. The people who thrived in that industry were people like me, and I was not living on thought leadership. You had to be willing to keep functioning while everyone else was trying to write a plan. I was a young man while all of this was going on, and I had a lot more energy to thrive in the wreckage. I could exist on limited resources because I didn’t have a wife or children, and sleeping on couches in recording studios was not going to change my life. Also, sleeping on a couch does not cause nearly the neck and shoulder pain that it causes me today.
I know what it’s like to metabolize an entire day on a Subway $5 footlong, two Diet Cokes, and a netbook. (For those of you who don’t remember, a netbook was this teeny tiny laptop that was absolutely frustrating to use in every single way, but I did like the portability.) I know what it’s like to generate leverage when you have no leverage, simply because you’re willing to bluff and you know the person sitting across from you has no idea whether you’re crazy or crazy crazy.
Anyway, I keep circling around this point, and I’ve been doing it for several paragraphs now, which is probably why my literary agent is frustrated with me. Right now, we are in an environment with absolutely no rules. There will be no government regulation coming to save us. There are no standards or best practices. Everyone is trying to hype up some new product or thing. The thing they’re telling you is going to change the world, and the thing everyone else is doing is not going to change the world. In a world of bullshit, doubt, proclamations, and hyperbole, you do not want an engineering mind.
Engineers are wonderful. Engineers are necessary. But engineers want specifications.
There are no specifications when someone is trying to step on your neck.
You want a rap manager.