Today, I’m talking with Adam Bry, who is CEO of Skydio, the leading US maker of autonomous drones. Before we recorded this episode, I actually got to remotely operate one of Skydio’s drones in the Bay Area from Adam’s laptop in our podcast studio in New York and fly an indoor drone around our office. You can check out the full video of that on our YouTube channel.

Beyond flying drones around the country, Adam and I talked about why Skydio is so focused on the enterprise market — I asked him a lot about working with police and military, but you’ll hear him say a lot of Skydio’s customers are utility companies that use drones to remotely inspect important infrastructure in ways that weren’t possible before. 

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That’s a big market, but it’s also one that was being served by cheap consumer drones in the past — products that basically no longer exist on the US market since most of them came from China, and the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones late last year. All those inexpensive DJI drones disappeared overnight, leaving expensive Skydio products as the main alternative.

Adam and I talked about all that and the reality of manufacturing complex products like drones in the United States. We also talked about Skydio’s work with the military and how Skydio’s use of AI lines up with defense work — I really wanted to know where Adam’s lines were, at a time when military use of AI is more controversial than ever. 

There’s a lot in this one — maybe more than anything, it was refreshing to hear Adam talk about using AI to bring even more people to work at Skydio as the company expands. And again, I got to fly the drones, which ruled. 

Okay: Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Adam Bry, you are the co-founder and CEO of Skydio. Welcome to Decoder.

I’m very excited to be here with you.

I am super excited to talk with you. We just demoed flying an X10 drone remotely. I have a lot of follow-up questions about that. That was super interesting.

I would say the drone business itself is in a moment of extreme change. There are policies keeping some of your competitors out of the country. There’s what you’re doing with autonomy and working with governments and militaries around the world. Then, there’s just the state of drone technology in general, which seems like it’s on the cusp of being yet another thing. So, there’s quite a lot to talk about.

Let’s just start with the basics. Unless you’re a drone nerd, you might not have heard of Skydio. Explain what Skydio is and how the company came to be.

We are the largest US drone manufacturer. We make drones that are essentially flying sensor platforms. We started in 2014, and at this point, we serve what we think of as the critical industries our civilization depends on. We work with public safety. We work with militaries. We also work with energy utilities, construction companies, departments of transportation, and security organizations. 

The common thread between all of our customers is that they have hardcore, oftentimes high-risk physical operations, where putting sensors in the right place at the right time to get better information can fundamentally change outcomes. That’s what we deliver. We deliver end-to-end solutions where the drone is a key piece, but the software, autonomy, integrations, and, increasingly, the end-to-end workflows for the different industries built around the drone’s capabilities are really what our customers are buying.

We’re at a super exciting moment where after years of talking about a lot of this stuff, it’s really starting to work at scale with incredible impact.

If I think about just our drone coverage over the years, it started with those first DJI drones almost 10 or 15 years ago now. The first Phantom drones were pretty rickety. They had these giant batteries. And it was really just about flight, and being able to control flight in an easy-to-use way. Then we very quickly got to, “Oh boy, we could put fancy cameras in the sky,” and that was really fun. And those cameras got really fancy. Now you’re saying it’s a whole sensor suite, or is it just augmented cameras?

I actually think what you described there closely parallels the chapters of the drone industry that I think about. In the very early days, these electric flying machines were really toys. I think of the first chapter, and the first 10 years was about the electrification of radio-controlled airplanes, which were recreational. It was fun to go out and fly. This is the world that I come from. I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes. 

What I think happened is that people started bringing the toys to work and realizing that if you put the right camera on there and you had a skilled pilot flying it, you could do a lot of useful stuff. That created cool videos that showed up in cinematography, commercial real estate, things like this. 

The next chapter is about autonomy, where the drone lives in a docking station, is connected to the internet, can be flown remotely and autonomously, and is a piece of infrastructure itself. I think the impact that we’ll see from that is going to be orders of magnitude larger than everything we’ve seen thus far. And we’ve seen a lot of good stuff thus far. I mean, a lot of great work has happened in the world of drones as tools. It’s just very small scale compared to what’s coming, and we’re really at that transition moment now.

Describe the idea that flight is the fundamental building block, that you don’t need to think about it as much because you’re talking about the capabilities built on the second and third order of the thing able to fly itself. Do you spend time investing in how the drones fly themselves or is that solved?

We spend a ton of time investing in that. There’s kind of this trope in the drone industry where, “Oh, it’s not about the drone. It’s about the data.” Which is sort of true. You could say the same thing about almost anything. It’s not about the phone, it’s about the apps, the software, or whatever. 

But you have to earn the right to deliver these solutions. The way you earn that right is by being a world-class designer and manufacturer of these systems and making them super capable and super reliable. I think one of the things that’s oftentimes missed with drones is the idea that they are cutting-edge aerospace devices. They vibrate, they have aerodynamics, they have thermal concerns. We have really advanced compute running on board, a bunch of sensors. It’s akin to building a self-driving car that flies.

If you want to be a good drone company, you need to be a world-class aerospace engineering organization across 10 or 15 different disciplines. It’s only once you have that and are great at it that you can then start to focus on enterprise software integrations that connect your solution into, for example, 911 dispatch software that a public safety organization might be using or the incident management system for an energy utility.

Those things really matter, but if the core technology foundation isn’t great, they’re less important.

We’re going to come back to the phrase “world-class.” I have a lot of questions about what it means to be world-class in our current regulatory and tariff environment, but give me some examples. 

We have a consumer audience where probably everybody listening or watching has used one variant of a consumer drone. Just like every other product, they get slightly better every year until the fifth yearly model, which is a step change better than the model people might be familiar with. What are some of the big advancements in flight capability that people might not have perceived over time?

Originally, drones flew with raw stick to control service input. So, I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes where you held a joystick transmitter. When you moved that joystick, a direct command was sent to either an electric motor or a servo motor that would move a control surface, which moved directly in response to what you did. There was no compute between your stick input and what happened on the device.

The next step after that — which is what made the quadcopter possible — is to take very low level, primitive microprocessors next to inertial measurement units (the thing in your phone that tells it what orientation it’s in) and write what’s called a pretty basic “attitude control loop.” That’s the fundamental thing running at the bottom of every quadcopter control stack. It basically tells it which orientation to hold in physical space. So, when you move the stick, it maps to the orientation of the quadcopter. Without that, a person couldn’t fly a quadcopter. There’s no way you could move the stick to give a raw motor command. Just the mapping would be too much for our brains. So, that was the beginning of those things becoming a bit more accessible.

The next step was the GPS position hold, of not just holding an altitude but using GPS to figure out your rough position and being able to hold a position in sky. That was a big step forward because that meant you could go hands off, and the drone would just sit there and hover. That was a necessary step to get beyond needing expert, pilot-level skills so they can be usable by anybody. That’s what most drones historically have done, and most drones today still operate mostly based on GPS.

I would say the next big chapter — and Skydio really helped pioneer this — is using computer vision, or putting cameras on the drone. Not just the camera that captures the video the user might care about but cameras that see everything. They can go into a computer that’s running onboard AI and use visual information to make intelligent decisions, like holdingposition even if you don’t have a good GPS signal, avoiding obstacles, or tracking moving subjects. 

We started in 2014 and that was around the time… it seemed like a crazy idea, honestly. It’s hard to remember now but 12 years ago, using computer vision for anything outside of the lab seemed somewhat farfetched. We launched our first product in 2018, the Skydio R1, which I think was the first drone built around computer vision. Our competitors started doing similar things, and we’re now at a point where that stuff has reached maturity. I think there are still incredible capabilities yet to come, but it’s mature enough that you can count on it, rely on it, and build products around it. The fundamental thesis there was to build expert pilot skills into the drone, and I think the only way you can do that is by using computer vision.

I’m just so curious about the notion of this thing can fly itself and now we can build applications on top of that core capability. But it sounds like “this thing can fly itself” is not a finished project. That’s something you’re still spending a lot of time on.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s ever finished. There are just so many upsides here in what you can do, how good the automation can get, and what people can do with them. We work with public safety agencies today that are using these things to respond to 911 calls. Sometimes they need to follow a suspect — like somebody’s fleeing a crime scene in a car — and they’ll do incredible things while flying semi-manually.

Our autonomy system is still under the hood, but they’re flying semi-manually to track moving vehicles through urban canyons. Our AI system is very, very good. It’s not as good as the greatest human pilots I’ve seen fly in those scenarios yet, but it will be. And when it is, it’ll be that much more powerful and capable for more people to reap the benefits.

Yeah, I want to come back to that too. 

I’m giving you a lot to come back to.

There are a lot of threads to pull on here!

I want to ask about Skydio itself. You’ve taken in a lot of investment recently. The company’s getting bigger. I think you’re up to Series F. You have a multi-billion dollar valuation. You’re about to make 2,000 more jobs here in the United States manufacturing drones. How many people work at Skydio today, and how’s the company structured?

We’re about 1,000 people, which I think for the scope and complexity that we manage is actually pretty tiny. We do a lot with a very, very small team because we have to span so many different disciplines: across engineering, software development, direct sales and customer support, and manufacturing. In many ways, I think the company’s kind of traditionally structured. We have a head of sales, a chief financial officer, a head of marketing, and a head of people operations. We could talk more about it, but I think people ops is one of the most important functions at the company. 

What might be a bit unique is how technical we are at the senior levels. So, I have six or seven direct technical reports spanning hardware, software, hardware operations, and chief engineers for a number of the vehicle programs we’re working on. A lot of that is because I’m very technical. I have an engineering background. I still consider myself an engineer. I get pretty deep into the details sometimes on products and technologies that we’re working on.

It reflects our belief that these are cutting-edge aerospace devices, and if you want to be a great company in this space, you need to be world-class at engineering and delivering them. We spend a lot of time at the senior level deep in the technical weeds. My weekly staff meeting starts with a comprehensive review of every little technical thing that’s gone wrong with our products over the last week. We’ll go as deep as we need to in that meeting to figure out what’s going on and what we need to do about it. 

We do the same thing with new programs, and we do that for a couple of reasons. I think it’s the most important thing. It’s not the only thing that matters, but it is the most important thing. I think it’s useful even for the people who are leading non-technical functions to get steeped and exposed to what’s happening technically and then vice versa. Having our engineering leaders well versed in the business, what’s happening financially, and what’s happening with our customers is super important because they’re making some of the most consequential decisions on the technical side, which are ultimately going to manifest in the market with our customers and in our financial results.

I get the feeling that you think a lot about the accountants taking over Boeing. That’s what that sounds like.

We’re like the antithesis of that. [Laughs]

Yeah. [Laughs]

I’m certainly familiar with that story. It sounds awful. It’s ultimately just us doing what we think is in the best interest of our customers, which is being really focused on having excellent products and technology, not just today but a year, two, five, or 10 years from now.

I think you are the first CEO in five years of doing this show to say that people ops is really interesting and that we should talk about it more. What do you mean by that?

I have a very talent-centric view of business. We talked about the organizational structure. I think that matters, but I think it’s less important than just the people at the company. One of the analogies I use to think about this… I love sports analogies for business. People obsess over batting order in baseball. I don’t know if you’re a baseball fan, but there’s this whole theory about batting order. It’s evolved over time where you want the leadoff hitter to get on base a lot, and then you get into the meat of the order with the power hitters that are supposed to knock them in.

We’re now at a point where you can use analytics to study this stuff. I think the estimates are that the difference between the most optimal batting order and the worst batting order is like 20 or 30 runs per year for a Major League Baseball team. They score something like 500 to 800 runs per year. Adding one star player to the lineup is like 100 runs per year, and I think business is the same way. 

It’s not as directly trackable as baseball, but an exceptional person anywhere in the organization can completely change the trajectory of a product or a business. Most things really come back to talent, more than people realize. This is even for big, late stage companies and certainly for early stage companies. So, we spend a lot of time focused on that, on trying to get the best people in the world for each of the different disciplines, and putting people in a position to have tremendous impact. 

If you look at amazing new products that we’ve worked on over the last year…  we talk about the F10s, this fixed wing drone that gets caught with a robotic arm. It’s a crazy sci-fi thing. I think we did a good job creating an organizational structure for that team to be successful, but it’s really just that the people on the team are phenomenal. And it’s the same thing with R10, which I think is now the best enterprise indoor drone that’s ever been created. We did that in 15 months. Amazing people did that, and that’s ultimately what it comes down to. And our head of people ops [Anna Wiesenthal-Birch] is awesome. She and I work together quite closely on recruiting and talent management inside the business to get more of that.

I like this anti-Moneyball approach to running a tech company. We’re going to send this clip to the Sabermetrics people. It’s going to go viral.

Look, I’m not anti-Moneyball. I actually don’t think this is that anti-Moneyball. I would argue that a lot of what it was doing was sort of talent assessment, like deeply studying what attributes lead individual players to be successful or not. I’m not saying the batting order doesn’t matter. It does. You might as well pull all the knobs to optimize them, but the most important piece is having world-class people.

This is one of the weirdest talent markets in tech that I’ve certainly ever covered. You have outrageous salaries for people who work in AI, outrageous promises about AGI, and maybe you want to be on teams that are going to build AGI. You have big platform companies saying that all 6,000 people are going to report to Jack Dorsey with the power of agentic software tools. I’m not sure what any of that means. Is that affecting you? Is it hard to get the talent you want? Is it hard to pay them?

It certainly is a very competitive talent market, which is great. I’m an engineer. I think it’s great that engineers are sought after and that the market compensation for them is going up. I think we have a pretty unique value proposition for everybody, but especially for engineers, in that we’re building products that are very real and having real impact today. Robotics is hot again, and there are a lot of companies talking about robotics. There are a lot of grand promises being made. 

I think a lot of the companies starting off today are probably five to 10 years away. They don’t think this, but I think they will realize that if they succeed at all, they’re five to 10 years away from having anything like a viable business. We’ve been through that journey. We have an awesome core business and it’s growing really quickly, but I still think we’re at the beginning of what’s possible in our space. There’s a huge amount left to be built, but we build it knowing that it’s really going to matter if we can deliver. It’s going to save people’s lives. It’s going to make the energy infrastructure in our country operate more safely and efficiently. And because of that, we’ve been able to attract really, really excellent folks to Skydio.

Are you competing in the bleeding edge AI research area, or are you hiring different kinds of engineers?

We’re not trying to build foundation models that are $100 or $200 million training runs. We are probably some of the earliest users of AI in real products. We use deep neural networks in our perception system going back to 2017 or 2018, before anybody was doing that on a shipped robotic product. We are certainly hiring folks and have folks on the team who are experts in AI, neural networks, and all the other algorithms it takes to build these autonomous systems. So, I think there’s now this smaller set of folks who are experts in these very large cloud-based models. We’re not training those ourselves.

Let me ask you the other Decoder question, and then I want to start to pull on some of these threads that I’ve been pointing at along the way. You’ve had to make a lot of decisions in your run as CEO, most importantly, the decision to switch from consumer to enterprise. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework, and how has it evolved?

I think a lot of what makes super effective companies effective is that a lot of decisions almost become reflexive. It’s like when you’re learning a new skill as a person. You have to think about it a lot. If you’re learning to ice skate or something, you spend a lot of time thinking about foot placement, stride, and whatnot, Then, it just becomes very natural over time.

For me as a leader and for us as a company, I think what’s enabling us to move so quickly now is that we’re just reflexive on a lot of things. We’ve been through a bunch of product development cycles, we’ve seen new industries start to adopt our products and technology and the patterns that they go through. So myself, my leadership team, and everybody in the organization just know how to deal with a lot of different kinds of stuff, such that it doesn’t even feel like we’re making decisions oftentimes. Things just happen. The right thing just happens. It’s super powerful and fun to be a part of that.

That’s not everything. The new stuff, the frontiers, is where you have to do slow thinking (or reasoning in LLM parlance). For me, writing is a very powerful tool to do that. So, anytime we’re facing a lot of uncertainty or ambiguity, I tend to just start writing to help myself think about it. That helps clarify my thinking. I also think the output from that tends to be a really powerful artifact for fostering debate and discussion, so you ultimately have the thing that says, “All right, here’s the plan. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

The other thing that I think is super obvious —  a lot of things in business are super obvious and super simple, it’s just hard to do them —  is that the whole point of a company is to do useful things for other humans. It’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of that, especially as companies get bigger. So, we really force ourselves to focus on that. What is what we’re doing now going to mean? How’s it going to be valuable to somebody, and what are ways that make it more useful and more valuable to somebody? Ultimately, everything in a company should be oriented in that direction.

Then, the final thing that I’d say is that one of our values is, “Love the problem, get to the essence.” It’s worth spending a lot of time going deep, deep, deep on understanding problems, whatever they are. I think the best solutions are born out of a deep, deep understanding of problems, such that the simple, elegant solution oftentimes emerges from that. So, for myself and the team, I always try to focus people on really understanding the problem before swinging at too many different kinds of solutions.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of the tech industry, what kind of products we’ve all been dealing with, and, I don’t know, the rise of B2B SaaS companies, which are a dime a dozen. Do you feel like it’s different because you make hardware, that your attitude towards your customer and what you have to deliver is because there’s a complicated piece of hardware they have to charge, put on the roof, and deploy versus a customer signing up for a subscription software product they forget about, and that’s your whole business?

I’m so deep in it at this point that it’s probably hard for me to perceive. I don’t know what it’s like to lead a pure SaaS company. I certainly know that hardware is extremely unforgiving. You’re dealing with hard physical constraints, and the surface area and complexity of things that can go wrong is immense, and I think that that forces a deep level of rigor. But one of our goals is to be able to tolerate a very heterogeneous posture with respect to risk and complexity and uncertainty. So, reliability is the single most important feature in our flagship, mainline products. We maniacally focus on it. We have to vet everything that we ship extremely rigorously and carefully. 

But not everything is like that. There are pieces of the cloud user interface where we need to be much more iterative and ship things faster. It’s okay if there’s a bug, an issue, or something isn’t polished. When we start a new hardware program like with our indoor drone the R10, it has a very different risk profile. It’s not flying over people. In many ways, it’s designed to crash because it’s flying in indoor spaces. Reliability is still super important, but it’s a different profile from the X10.

So, a part of the challenge, and what I think we’re pretty good at, is being able to focus on the specifics of what we’re trying to accomplish, what a particular product is meant to do — whether it’s hardware or software — and dealing with it on its own merits rather than just applying blanket rules across everything.

Maybe there’s no answer yet, but one of the reasons I’m asking is that we see a lot of pure software companies totally rebuilding themselves around the idea that  AI will just vibe-code everything, or a bunch of engineers will control 50 agents so they’re going to ship more software faster than ever. Maybe that’s great, but also, is it going to be good? I wonder if your relationship to the customer… with this piece of hardware, your drones are very expensive. They have to be good.

I mean, we are extremely heavy AI users. I’m super excited about the hardware engineers I’ve seen throughout the company. They’re brilliant engineers, but they don’t have a deep background in software. They probably  wrote a little bit of software when they were an undergrad, but now they’re vibe coding incredible software applications to help them optimize different aspects of the hardware design to study vibration, aerodynamics, or something. So, the hardware we’re building is for sure better because of AI.

We’re super heavy users on the software side. We have all kinds of internal automations. We have the ability for designers, product managers, or anybody else to prompt a change to the code base that will then automatically get put into the queue to be tested and reviewed by AI and ultimately approved by a person. So, we’re super heavy AI users.

Nobody knows exactly how this is going to play out. I do think that having hardware in this AI world is super valuable because the hardware and software integration gets more and more powerful. I think hardware, is going to be among the last things to be vide codable, to be able to prompt, “I want a drone that does X, Y, Z thing.” Maybe we’ll get there someday, but making the hardware is really hard, and once you have it, being able to more easily add software on top of it to adapt it to more applications and more industries is a very valuable place to be.

I’m personally fascinated by some of the old hardware in my life that has gotten new life because of AI. I have old cameras, and AI denoise has breathed new life into them. I’ve added software to an old piece of technology, and now it has a whole new life in a different way. You can kind of see that across the entire hardware portfolio. 

You said build hardware, and we can’t just vibe-code hardware. The United States government has banned Chinese drones. They’re hard to get in this country. There’s a bunch of great market stuff. We’re constantly covering gray market DJI drones coming from Canada and other places. You’ve got to build the drones here. How is that working right now? Are you invested in that supply chain? Do you have all the pieces you need to build them here? How does that work?

We have always manufactured our drones in the US. We started doing this in 2016 and 2017 when people thought it was truly insane. We had investors in the early days who would come and do diligence on us, see a manufacturing line, and basically pull the ripcord, “What the hell are you guys doing? I’m out of here.” Conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley in 2014 was, one, probably don’t do hardware, and two, if you are going to do hardware, definitely outsource it to China.

That’s just not the path that we went down. Honestly, we didn’t go down it originally for geopolitical reasons. We went down the path of US manufacturing for practical reasons because their aerospace devices, engineering, and manufacturing are tightly coupled, and I think doing both side by side  enables you to build better products faster.

Now, it has become a critical strategic imperative for national security, and a critical strategic advantage for us and the decade of experience under our belts building these things in the US because manufacturing is hard. Hardware is hard. Manufacturing is definitely hard. Running a factory and integrating the supply chain for your product in your own factory is an extremely complex, messy endeavor, and we’re very good at it now.

I saw you key in on “world-class.” I don’t think we are a world-class manufacturing outfit yet. That’s a blunt assessment. I think China’s still better at manufacturing drones than we are, but I think we’re pretty good. I don’t think there’s any law of physics that says that you can’t be a world-class drone manufacturing outfit in the US, and we’re going to do it. We’ll invest in whatever hardware and software systems and people we need  so we have the world’s greatest drone factory right here in the US.

Let me ask you about that. The idea that you can be a world-class drone manufacturer in the United States is, in one way, the right ambition for a company that makes drones, but it’s also fairly narrow. Apple just turned 50. We did a bunch of coverage on Apple turning 50. A big part of that story is that it stood up the supply chain in China, and now there’s a huge array of vendors, sophisticated manufacturing partners, and component suppliers.

You talked about the history of drones. Why are there cheap IMUs and microprocessors all over China? Well, it’s because Apple built the smartphone supply chain, and we can build a bunch of stuff out of lithium-ion batteries and cheaply-available IMUs. We don’t have that here. 

I guess I’m just asking. You can be a world-class drone manufacturer, but the ecosystem that allows you to do that doesn’t exist here. Do you need that ecosystem, or have you found a way to do it all on your own?

I 100 percent agree with you. Drones are, in many ways, the combination of consumer electronics with hobbyist quadcopters, and historically, all consumer electronics have been made in China. 

So, I’ll say a couple of things here. One, I don’t think there’s any law of physics that says we can’t have a world-class consumer electronics, wide-scale hardware manufacturing ecosystem here in the US. Maybe there’s some alternate universe where slightly different policy decisions or a few decisions here or there have the East Bay and San Francisco Bay Area looking something like Shenzhen, China. I think it’s a bummer that we don’t have that kind of hardware richness in the US. These counterfactuals are always hard, but I don’t think there’s a rule of physics that says that that couldn’t be the case.

So, we’re focused on drones, and we’re focused on doing awesome stuff with drones. I do see broader momentum towards building more and more stuff in the US. I think some of this is driven by policy. I think some of it is driven by capitalist opportunity, and all of that is good. Yeah, we’re still using a supply of components that come from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and so on. Over time, I think more of those will probably be made in the US, but I have the most visibility into and the most confidence in the drone piece. We can definitely do that at world-class levels in the US.

Are there any Chinese parts in Skydio drones right now?

Very, very, very, very few. So we had the great distinction of being sanctioned by the Chinese government about a year and a half ago. We knew that we had China risk. We had done a lot of work to get our supply chain out of China, and the big remaining dependency that we had was batteries, which was public. We fortunately had a decent supply of batteries on hand, but we had to, stand up a new supply chain for batteries independent of China in very short order. At this point, all the first-level dependencies are gone. Anybody who’s saying that they don’t have any Chinese content in what they’re building is deluding themselves because it’s very hard to trace back to the second and third levels. But all our critical components, all the first-level dependency stuff, is outside of China.

Explain what you mean by “first-level dependency.”

The suppliers that we work with directly to buy the camera module, the sensor in it, the processor, the circuit board, the metals and plastics, and, as far as we can push, the suppliers that they’re working with. But it’s hard to say with 100 percent certainty on things like some passive component on a circuit board or the material that’s used in a particular thing.

The reason that Chinese government sanctioned Skydio was because the United States government was trying to kick DJI out of the country. The FCC banned foreign drones last December. It had basically been fulminating about doing it since 2020. Do you understand why the FCC banned DJI drones?

So the stated reason for China sanctioning Skydio was that we sold drones to Taiwan.

Sure.

I’m glad you had intuited the possible real reason. I think the real reason, as you stated, is that we compete with DJI and the US government has taken actions against DJI, so I think it was retaliatory. 

I don’t know exactly what the right answer is, but I think it’s pretty clear and non-controversial at this point that depending on Chinese technology and critical industries has a lot of risks associated with it. And this spans across a bunch of different categories. We’ve seen this in chips, in raw materials like steel and magnets, and with cars. Drones are one slice of this broader geopolitical competition, which is really technology competition.

With respect to drones, I don’t think it’s a uniform landscape. The drones used by our military are probably the most sensitive. Buying that from China clearly seems like a terrible idea. I would argue that it doesn’t seem like a good idea to have drones that live in docks deployed across US cities and across critical infrastructure calling home to Chinese servers.

The most controversial piece of this is probably with consumer drones. There’s frustration in that market now since people who’ve been using these inexpensive, very capable Chinese consumer drones are now having trouble getting access to them. But I think the national security stakes are quite real even there. If you look at the drones the Ukrainians and Russians are using, there’s a lot of direct consumer heritage there, and the supply chain that goes into a consumer drone is very closely aligned with the supply chain that goes into a military or enterprise drone. So, it’s hard to completely disentangle those things. Ultimately, that’s what the policy actions — which, by the way, have spanned both administrations and I think are fairly bipartisan — are aimed at.

There’s a supply chain and then there’s software command and control. It doesn’t seem likely that the Chinese government is going to take my DJI Mavic Air, launch it in the sky on my behalf, and then do something nefarious with it. So, is the actual consumer drone a danger or is it the fact that it connects to the internet at some point?

Again, I think it’s non-uniform. It’s different in different stories. I think having like a network-connected autonomous docking station drone at a nuclear power plant calling home to China — 

Yeah, that seems bad. I’m just saying in the consumer market — 

So, there I think it’s like a direct cybersecurity exposure risk. On the consumer side, it’s more about supply chain leverage. I don’t think anybody’s done anything wrong by going out and buying a Chinese consumer drone. But economically, that is essentially supporting a Chinese defense contractor, and it’s helping it build up its technology and economic might, and that really matters in aggregate. Again, you can debate what the right answer to that is, but you can’t deny that it is not in our national interest to support Chinese drone companies.

We have a big consumer audience. They have a lot of feelings about the differnt ways to support defense contractors. Skydio is a defense contractor now. Even your website directly speaks to military applications. You stopped making consumer drones in 2023. I think your first enterprise drone was 2020. 

I’ve always been curious, was it because the cost of building the product in the United States was so high that you couldn’t compete at a consumer level, and it was easier — or in some ways, more lucrative — to go after enterprise and government contracts?

This was probably one of the most consequential, difficult decisions that we made as a company. It was hard largely because I personally thought the consumer product was awesome, and I loved the things that our customers were out there doing with them. It was really driven by the fact that we were still a very small company, and there’s always this trade off between focus and serving different customers in different ways. I didn’t feel like we could be great at both. I didn’t think that we could be great at continuing to build the best consumer products for the kinds of things that we were doing while figuring out how to serve enterprise and government customers. 

It was a combination of factors. Honestly, the biggest one was the impact opportunity that we saw with enterprise and government customers. When we started in 2014, these markets didn’t exist. The enterprise stuff was always part of our long-term vision, but nobody was really doing anything with these things in 2014. So in the beginning, the idea was that we’d build these consumer products. The consumer market’s probably going to develop first and fastest, and then the technology platform we have will enable us to do other things.

I think at the time we were thinking we could do it all. In practice, it felt to me like we had to choose when we got there. But it’s really life-saving, efficiency-driving work for our civilization and the customers that we serve. Yes, it seemed like there was a good business opportunity there, but at the time, the markets were basically at zero. So, it wasn’t obvious. I and a lot of us at the company were drawn to the impact potential and a belief that there was a great business to be built.

The X10 that I flew earlier on your laptop, how much does that cost?

It depends on the configuration and whether it’s in a dock or not. As a standalone system without any of the associated cloud software and the advanced sensor package, it’s probably something like $15,000. But it’s substantially more with a dock and everything associated with that.

I have a line here that says it’s $25,000 per year per drone if you do have the cloud software and then the operating cost.

There are certainly some configurations that are like that. There are a lot of different options out there depending on what you want to do with it and what hardware and software you’re getting.

We’ve talked to a lot of drone professionals, firefighters, and volunteer fire departments, and their fear is that there are no cheap consumer drones to do the jobs that they were doing. I’ll just read you the quote here. “First responders are using consumer drones for the most part. A lot of fire departments in search and rescue, they’re volunteers with small budgets. They can’t spend $50,000 on the Skydio program. They’re going to get gifted a handful of cheap DJI drones, and that’s good enough to save people’s lives.”

If I was being as rude and direct as possible, I would say the United States government —  doesn’t matter which president — has handed you a gift. They’ve taken away your cheap, disruptive competition that was a good enough substitute for consumer products and now, you have the opportunity to sell $50,000 Skydio programs to first responders who have no other options. Can you get cheaper? Can you deal with that?

I think there are two pieces of this. One is, yes, we definitely can. The R10, our indoor drone, costs $6,000 for the hardware, and that includes the controller and the drone. There’s incredible capability there that I don’t think you can get at any other price point. People build other flavors of indoor drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars that are outpaced by the R10. The more we scale up, the lower the costs we can reach with our products. But I believe the highest impact in most scenarios — and I think that the data is bearing this out now — is coming from more advanced, dock-based, remotely operated autonomous drones. You can see this in the data. We have hand-flown fleets, we have dock-based fleets. The dock-based drones fly five to 10 times as fast, much in the same way that a cloud server is fully loaded even though a desktop computer might sit at home unused. Once  the thing is available to be driven through software, there’s much more you can do with it.

We’ve competed head-to-head against DJI in the dock-based world for the last year and have won head-to-head on that capability. There are a lot of agencies out there that were skeptical of Skydio and liked flying their Chinese drones. They were doing these 911 responses with drones and were open-minded enough to trial our system, and they will tell you that it’s better. The autonomy and the integration just enables them to do more, better, faster. Ultimately, I think reaching that massive scale is going to be our highest impact path. 

For example, the F10 product, which is our fixed wing drone, will have something like a 50-mile coverage radius from its docking station. When you think about sparsely populated areas where there might be just a volunteer fire department, being able to click a button on a map and have an F10 show up 10 minutes later, 30 miles out from its docking station is a lifesaving capability. Not to say that great stuff hasn’t been done with consumer drones in the hand of volunteer firefighters, but when I think about the best possible solution here, I think it’s a badass, dock-based F10 that’s zipping around at 100 miles an hour and can cover thousands of square miles.

I agree. I think I’m just focused on the cost, right? They were buying $800 consumer drones, not—

So on the cost, I think the cost permission for that F10 will be way lower if you do a fully balanced analysis of what it takes for the person to go out there and fly it and how much training is involved versus clicking a button on a map and having a dock-based F10 show up. Not everybody’s going to like that answer, but I think it’s fundamentally true in most scenarios.

I’m excited for you to go to something like the city council meeting in my hometown of Racine, Wisconsin, and pitch cost permission because the upfront cost is very high. This is what I’m getting at. There was a low-end competitor and it’s just been eliminated. We’ve gone looking around for other US consumer drone companies, and there don’t appear to be any. Maybe a better comparison here is the car industry. Ford CEO Jim Farley, who’s been on the show, loves to talk about how much better the BYD cars are. He’s always like, “Man, these are here.”

It’s kind of his shtick.

Yeah, it’s good. He’s gotten very good at it. It’s great practice. And the United States government is straightforwardly protecting our auto industry from that competition. The car influencers are like, “Man, these cars are better than our cars.” Do you worry that you’re being insulated from that competition?

I think that the only long-term stable solution is building the best drones here in the US. Honestly, I don’t really care  whether Chinese drones are allowed in the market from a product development standpoint. We serve the US military. We know for certain that our adversaries are going to be using Chinese drones in a conflict. If we want our troops to have the best capabilities, the stuff coming out of China is the relevant competition. That’s the standard that we hold ourselves to from a hardware standpoint, whether or not they’re in the market or not. 

I can say with pretty high confidence that in this new world, the world of drones as infrastructure where AI and autonomy are central, integrating these things together into end-to-end solutions is the winning recipe that’s most valuable for customers. I think… not think, I know we have the best solutions in that space, and you can talk to customers who have used both and will tell you that. In that world, we have the upper hand. In the hand flown world where the drones are more manual and there’s more pressure on price, China has the upper hand. Fortunately for us as a company and a country, I think we’re headed more towards the autonomous remote world. I still think that whether or not they’re allowed in the market, that’s the competitive bar that we want to hold ourselves to.

Obviously, the United States is just one market. The European market is huge, and who knows what will happen with NATO. There’s a lot of pressure on the kind of contracts you want to fulfill. As you go into different markets around the world and compete with DJI, are they winning on price like you’re saying? Are you winning on features? What’s the balance?

It’s going to be a slightly different story in different markets for different customers who care about different things. Most of our business is still here in the US, but we operate in Canada now. We operate in Japan. We have and will continue to successfully compete head-to-head on the strength of the integrated automated solutions we can deliver. And as we get bigger, we’re getting better and better at manufacturing more hardware at lower cost, which will enable us to serve more and more markets.

Are you going to keep all the manufacturing here in the United States?

That’s the plan, yeah. We’re doubling down. We announced we’re spending $3.5 billion over the next five years in the US on our own manufacturing with domestic suppliers on our internal operations. We’re getting a new giant factory. We’re all in. I think that we’re already one of the leading examples of real US manufacturing working at substantial scale, but there are many more gears we can find.

Real US manufacturing working at substantial scale. You have 1,000 employees. How much of your manufacturing is automated? As you invest in manufacturing, how many people are you going to hire versus how much automation are you going to bring to bear?

Automation is definitely a key part of the story. R10, the product that we just launched, is the most automated product we’ve made from a manufacturing standpoint. We actually overinvested in automation there because we wanted to develop and trial a lot of new techniques. So, automation will be a key piece of it, but there’s always going to be a lot of jobs involved in running a factory, operating the company, and delivering and installing this stuff for customers.

I’m just thinking about the famous Tim Cook saying something like “I couldn’t fill this ballroom with manufacturing, engineering management, and in China I could fill like multiple football fields.” Do we have the talent base for you to do what you’re saying you want to do?

Well, I think that these things take time. I don’t think you’re going to create the talent base and the ecosystem that exists in China overnight, but it’s not zero. Look, Tesla gets a lot of the credit here. It has built and operated factories at large scale. In the area, we have a large number of Tesla alumni that work at Skydio. There are actually a lot more than people realize. A lot of higher end enterprise servers and things of that nature are built in the Bay Area. So, the talent base is larger than I think most people realize, and there’s a lot of momentum behind it now. 

It’s easy to look at the world today and say like, “Yes, China has a richer ecosystem. It has more happening there.” But I don’t think that it has to be that way. As a company, we’ve actually got a great foundation. These things ultimately are demand driven. If there’s a need to build more and more drones, that creates the conditions for more people to get into it and get great at it. We’re seeing that happen right in front of our eyes.

I want to end by talking about AI and autonomy here. The need for a government and defense contractor to build more and more drones, which we’re seeing happen in front of our eyes, is going to cause a lot of our audience to have a lot of very specific feelings about what these drones are for, who’s making the decisions, and whether they have any say in the matter. The demo I saw with you was very cool. There’s an emergency somewhere, the drone takes off from the dock, it flies to it, and helps the first responders do whatever they’re going to do. The flip side of that is there are a lot of surveillance ideas baked into that.

As you add more and more autonomy to the drones, boy, there are a lot of ideas baked into that about who’s making which decisions, especially if the drones have any lethal capabilities. What’s your perspective there? How do you draw the lines?

There are two things you kind of alluded to, and we could talk about either of them. There’s the military use of the products, where we are in a technology race against China. I very strongly believe we want our troops to have world leading capability. I think the world is better off. I certainly think the US is better off. If that’s the case, our military is ultimately accountable to democratically elected folks who are calling the shots. They’re controversial. Obviously, not everybody agrees, but there is a democratic process in place.

The other side of it is with public safety and law enforcement where the products have incredible impact. I actually think if you care about transparency and accountability in policing, it’s hard to imagine a better tool than a drone. It’s like a flying body camera. It provides objective, documentary video evidence of everything that’s happened, and it’s extremely narrow and precise. It’s not blanketing a city in cameras that are passively collecting. It’s responding where you know there’s an emergency and providing very narrow intelligence just in that scenario to drive better outcomes.

So, I think there are definitely legitimate concerns and questions about this stuff. But one of the things that I’ve learned and have actually been very positively surprised by is the level of direct accountability that exists within state and local law enforcement today. All the contracts we have with police customers have to be approved by the city council, and that incentivizes the police agency and us as a company to do everything we can to make it an obvious win for the community. We have a feature we call the Transparency Dashboard that makes it easy for agencies to publish the flying they’re doing so they can create a public record of all the flights that they’ve done, where the drone went, what it was responding to, what its trajectory was along the way, and what the camera looked at. We don’t publish the video, but you can see the camera footprint on the ground. So, any citizen can go and look at it and see what their agency is doing. 

This is an example where technology is just a straight win. In the trade-off between better policing with better outcomes and protecting civil liberties and transparency, I think drones are an example of technology fundamentally moving that curve up for the better so that you can get better outcomes while still protecting privacy and transparency. 

Yeah.

I think the trajectory the space is on proves that. I was concerned five years ago that public pushback was going to be one of the big barriers to adoption, even though we knew the impact was strong, and we just haven’t seen that. We’ve seen communities oftentimes asking for their local police department to use it. The stories speak for themselves. There are videos of finding missing people or deescalating a dangerous situation where it’s obvious that you would have had a different outcome without a drone. I think when people see that, they tend to get it. 

I’d say the good news for people who have questions or concerns here, is that there are democratic processes in place. If Skydio is being considered in your city, you can go to the city council meeting, you can see what the debate looks like, and you can speak up, and I think that’s healthy. Every community ultimately gets to decide for themselves.

I understand why you want to pull apart military and policing applications, and I won’t linger on it too long. I think for a lot of people in US, their police forces look ever more militarized or the president has deployed the military into their city. The idea that there will be pervasive surveillance backed up by something that feels militaristic is definitely more real today than it was 10 years ago. People don’t like the idea that there will be pervasive surveillance or preemptive policing enabled by cameras, sensors, or what have you, and they don’t feel agency, right?

So, saying you can go to the city council and get rid of Skydio when there’s muddy interests pushing Skydio forward… I think there was a controversy with Skydio in Las Vegas, right? How do you feel about that? Do you feel like people actually have enough agency, or is this just a way for you to say, “Look, your city’s going to buy it, we’re just the vendor?”

Look, part of living in a democracy is that not everybody’s going to agree, but I’ll give you a non-Skydio example. So, there’s a company may be familiar with, Flock Safety, that makes automatic license plate reader cameras as its core business, which is a completely different kind of technology. It’s basically passive collection on all the time. The value of it is creating a database of every car and where it’s been. The business model incentivizes the sharing of that data as broadly as possible.

Then on top of that, the company doesn’t have a great history of what it says publicly lining up with what’s actually happening with that data, and there’s a huge amount of pushback against it. I think some of it may be misguided. I think the company’s mishandled some of it. Some of it has to do with concerns about the core technology. But because of that pushback, the contracts are debated at city council, and in a lot of places, it’s being ripped out or replaced with something else. 

Again, I don’t know what the right answer is. It’s probably different for different communities, but it’s an example of the process in action where communities get to decide. There are inevitably going to be concerns. My personal view is that even the harshest critics are valuable because it’s part of our accountability mechanism. We get to see what people are concerned about and what don’t they like. Even if it ends up getting deployed in a community, it’s valuable to see what the concerns are and to be asked tough questions because it changes how we think about product development in some cases and what can we do to address it.

What changes have you made specifically as you’ve thought about Flock?

Well, this is not in response to Flock. The Transparency Dashboard was largely driven internally. It seemed like a good thing to do, but a lot of the specific features have been iterated on and improved based on raised concerns. I’ll anonymize it a bit, but there was a case where a woman was afraid that a police agency flying one of our drones might have been looking at her on her private property. They weren’t. So, we enhanced the Transparency Dashboard to show the camera footprint on the ground so she could go and see for sure that they weren’t.

How do you validate that? If you’re a citizen, you’re like, “Man, I see that drone flying. They’re big. They’re noisy.” I’ve seen a lot of TikTok clips of people noticing the boxes getting installed on roofs, and the conspiracy theories flourish, right? You can say there’s a dashboard and you can look at the dashboard provided by the company, but you have to validate. You need some external, perceived, independent validator of that. How does that work? Is there a feedback loop there?

This is the thing with social media. What is the ground truth? How do we decide what misinformation is? Who gets to decide? There’s no perfect answer to these questions. The thing that I would say is there are generally very good accountability and feedback loops almost uniquely with state and local law enforcement. Socounty sheriffs are directly elected. Police chiefs are usually appointed by an elected mayor. When something goes wrong or if there’s a concern about technology they’re using, they’re on the nightly news explaining it. And they usually don’t want to be there. It’s part of their job, but — 

Some of them really want to be there.

Some of them may want to be there more than others, but look, I think that the feedback loops there are actually pretty active and healthy. Again, not everybody’s going to like the outcome. There’s going to be some percentage of the population that doesn’t like the idea of having police at all or aving police with advanced technology. 

But I always think it’s helpful to think, “Well, what do you want to have happen?” Let’s say that somebody’s trying to break into your house or a loved one goes missing. What do you want to have happen? Do you want a drone to show up in 30 seconds so that the officers know exactly what they’re heading into? If you have a loved one lost in the woods, do you want to be able to quickly surveil that area with a bunch of autonomous drones to increase the chances of them being found? I think that the concerns around privacy and transparency are totally valid, but you also have to weigh that against the alternatives. Drones, in particular, uniquely optimize this, where you’ll get maximum benefit in terms of better outcomes with minimum trade-off in terms of mass blanket, always-on surveillance.

Let me make a comparison for you. Jamie Siminoff runs Ring. He’s been on the show several times. His thesis is that if you put up enough Ring cameras in certain neighborhoods, you can “zero out crime“. He and I have debated this at length, where Ring can actually zero out crime. Does that feel doable to you or is that the wrong trade-off? Like, actually, if you put enough Skydio boxes on enough roofs, you can zero out crime.

Look, I think the Ring cameras are great. I have one myself. I’m not an expert in all things Ring. Let me take a different spin on it—

It’s an example of what you’re talking about. There’s a trade-off here. You put up enough fixed cameras—

Let me give you a more concrete [example] that I think gets at what you’re talking about in our space. There’s something like 300 million 911 calls per year in the US, one per citizen per year on average. Do I think the world is better off if there is an autonomous drone that shows up in 15 or 20 seconds to every one of those by default? Yeah, I do. I think that we’ll save a lot of people’s lives. Cities will just operate more efficiently. I think we can do that with maximum protection of privacy and civil liberties because it’s targeted, narrow, and it creates a digital record. Because of that, it’s less subject to abuse. 

Does that end crime? Probably not, but I think it takes a really big bite out of it,and a lot of people are going to be safer and happier because of it. It’s a huge motivator for what we’re doing at Skydio. I do want to emphasize that it’s fair and right that public safety and the military get a lot of attention, but this is not all that we do. A lot of our drones are just off inspecting the energy grid, making sure that the power stays on or gets back on faster, or keeping roads open for departments of transportation, which is boring and out of sight for most people. I think that stuff will ultimately end up being the biggest segment in the business. But yeah, this is an example of technology just fundamentally moving things forward for the better.

Sadly, I have to keep asking about military applications. I do want to talk about power line inspection, and we’ll do a full hour on that one of these days. The other complicated moral question that you’ve alluded to is how the military uses this technology. There is brewing controversy with Anthropic drawing some red lines about how Claude might be used in military applications, whether or not it’s even capable of doing things the military might want it to do. Mass surveillance has certainly come up in the Claude discussion. Do you have red lines, where you’ve told the military that you won’t allow your technology to be used for certain things?

This is an area where I’ve gotten some things wrong. We said some things previously that led folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones. Now, we’re generally focused on building flying sensor platforms. We’re what the military calls, “dual-use technology”. It turns out that the requirements from a sensor, flight time, and reliability standpoint for inspecting the energy grid are actually pretty similar to what makes something useful to a soldier on the battlefield for what they call ISR intelligence (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). 

I have a pretty strong opinion that the people who are putting their lives on the line and who are ultimately accountable to democratically elected leaders are in the best position to make these life-and-death decisions about what tools to use and how to use them. It’s very easy to sit back in a Silicon Valley office and think that we’re very smart, that we know the technology, and the idea of using it for X, Y, or Z thing seems evil or bad, so we’re going to write a policy or ban people from doing it. I think that’s ultimately misguided. It’s actually dangerously misguided. It’s not giving democratic processes enough credit. It’s not giving the service women in our military enough credit. The military has a whole policy wing of brilliant people that sit around thinking about this stuff. They’re not going to get it exactly right, but they care a lot about it.

At the end of the day, you’re typically talking about a young person in a trench somewhere whose life is on the line. It’s not our place to tell them what they can and can’t do. We’re focused on making our products great at certain things, and we’re less focused on other things. Out voice matters in the conversation, but it should ultimately be up to the folks whose job it is, who are putting their lives on the line to decide how to use it.

Do you think this is different because you make hardware?

From like Anthropic, for example?

Yeah.

No. The practical implication or the instantiation details might be different, but we faced this question when the Army started running experiments where it would put grenade droppers on our drones. There were people who felt like we should shut that down. There were questions internally. I think that’s a pretty visceral example of the military’s experimenting with turning this thing into a lethal device, but I just don’t think it’s our place to decide. And I think a lot—

There’s decide, but then there’s building the capability, right?

Maybe in the case of Anthropic, no one knows what the models can do and you can just ask it for anything. You’re like, “Make me a bomb,” and maybe it’ll do it. Maybe Anthropic has some real feelings about whether or not that’s a good idea, and it restricts it. For you, the military hands you a purchase order and says, “Put a grenade dropper on it.” You can or cannot do that. You can literally say, “We will not allow our sensor platform to target people, identify them, and then fire the gun.”

I think one of the problems here is you end up with really strong adverse selection. If you make a policy that says, “You’re not allowed to do X, Y, Z thing with our products,” the chances are pretty high that the US military is going to follow it, right? They have lawyers, they look at this stuff, and they will probably follow the terms of service. Ultimately, that may mean they don’t buy the product. Our adversaries or terrorists are not going to follow the terms of service, right? They don’t care. They don’t care what our policy says. They’re happy to buy the thing or hack it, and they don’t care what Anthropic’s policy says. So, if you try to draw these lines to establish purity where, “We think X, Y, Z thing is bad, you shouldn’t do it with our product. We’re going to try to create legal terms or things in the product that prevent you from doing it.” 

Ultimately, I think you just end up on the wrong side because the “good guys” will will generally follow what the policy says, although maybe not uniformly. Bad actors are not going to care. They don’t care at all what the policy says. It’s not to say that you can’t have an opinion, you can’t talk about it, or you can’t debate it. But when you start trying to draw these bright lines and say, “This is good, this is bad,” you more often than not will just end up on the wrong side of moral questions.

Can I bring this back all the way to the beginning? You started by talking about talent, recruiting talent, getting the best people, and how that is better than the right structure, which is some real Decoder bit. I have to be honest with you, that’s the whole thesis of this show. 

As you’re out in the world recruiting, people have a lot of feelings about working for defense contractors, about working for the military, about helping to kill people. Right now, Google is beset by internal controversy about working with the government. They’re going to do it anyway, because Google has enough people that maybe some attrition is fine. You only have 1,000 people, and you have to recruit some more. How does your talent base feel about this, and how has it affected your recruiting?

Look, I think debate about this is healthy. Questions about it are healthy. Different companies have different postures. There’ are some companies where you have to get on board or get the hell out. It’s generally healthy to have a diversity of perspectives on this stuff. I think this is actually one area where we have quite a bit of diversity, and diversity is awesome and really helpful. 

One of the dynamics that I’ve seen — and you can see this most clearly in public safety —  is when we started working with military and police in the summer of 2020, which was not a super popular time for law enforcement in the US. There were a lot of negative headlines about it. There were a lot of people internally who had some concerns. As our products have grown in that space and people have seen the impact that they’ve had, almost everybody, including folks internally who were initially very concerned, have come to the belief that it’s really incredibly impactful, positive work to be a part of.

So, I’m happy to have this conversation with anyone. I’ll have it with a candidate who I’m talking to. I’m having it with you right now for the world to see. People get to make up their own minds on it, but if you really care about developing cutting-edge tech that will have a positive impact on the world —  defined as helping people do their jobs better, helping our critical industries run safer and more efficiently, and saving lives — I think Skydio is hard to beat.

You’re part of a cohort of companies. I think Andreessen Horowitz led your last round. It’s led almost all of your rounds, I think.

No, it led our seed in Series A and then they doubled down in the Series D. So, it’s been a great partner and great investor, but we’ve got a lot of great investors.

I’m asking about Andreessen particularly because there’s its American Dynamism Project. It does a lot of government lobbying. There are reports today that it’s going to do even more lobbying in this cycle. Palantir exists. Anduril exists. There is a new cohort of defense companies that are thinking very differently about what it means to defend America as some of these contractors. Do you perceive yourself to be part of that group? Do you have a different culture? How does that work?

We’re our own thing. I would say each of those companies has their own thing. A lot of the folks from Anduril came from Palantir, but they have a different identity and a different culture than Palantir does. I don’t really think of us as being part of any particular group or cohort. I think about us trying to be the best in the world at what we do from a technical standpoint and trying to deliver outcomes that really matter for our customers. 

Actually, everything in the defense business is growing right now. Defense is growing very quickly for us. It’s actually a shrinking percentage of our overall business because other things are growing that much faster. So, I’m super proud to work with the US military, and I think it’s generally good that more tech companies are doing so, but  I would say that our identity is less defined by being a defense contractor or being super defense focused compared to the other companies you’re talking about, 

I actually think some of the biggest value we can provide to our defense customers, especially in our space, is by being incredibly successful in civilian markets so that when they go head-to-head against adversaries using Chinese consumer drones, we’ve got the best thing to match that.

We’re out of time. Thank you for being so open. I have a million more questions for you, but I’m just going to ask here at the end, can you build us a cheap consumer drone again, please?

This is probably the hardest question to end on because I would love to do it. I think we could do it, but we’re still so early in these markets with massive potential, and there’s still so much left to build. I can’t justify taking our focus off of that. So, I really hope somebody else does. Maybe we can partner with them in some way, maybe we can provide some technology. I certainly think there’s a need there. I hope that we will get great, American consumer drones. I think it’s unlikely that it’ll be us that’s manufacturing them.

Sounds good. We’ll have you back to do a full hour on power line monitoring soon. Thank you so much.

All right. Thank you. This was great.

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Today I’m talking with Harvey Mason Jr., who is CEO of the Recording Academy — that’s the outfit that puts on the Grammy Awards. I last talked to Harvey in 2024, when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but still not exactly clear how that would happen. 

Well, it’s been 18 months since that conversation, and you’re going to hear Harvey say that AI is now “omnipresent” in music production. And Harvey knows what he’s talking about — he is himself a legendary producer who’s worked with everyone from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé. Harvey has said that every session he’s been in recently has had AI in it, and I really wanted to know what that meant — what kinds of tools are musicians using, in what way, and what kind of music is it making for us? Is it any good? 

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Because, as it stands, there’s an exponential increase in the rate of AI music creation. Streaming platform Deezer reports that more than 50,000 AI-generated songs are being uploaded every day. All that AI-generated music is getting harder to identify and filter out, while at the same time, tools like Suno have become mainstream parts of the creative process for musicians of all kinds. So I really wanted to know how Harvey experiences all of that and balances his role running the Grammy Awards, especially since the Recording Academy’s rules say that AI music isn’t eligible for the industry’s highest honors.

There’s a lot going on in this one. Harvey and I also talked about the Grammys moving to Disney after years on CBS and what it means to reach new younger audiences with award shows in the age of TikTok. If you’re a Decoder listener, you know that I’m always saying that whatever happens to the music industry happens to everything else five years later, and this conversation really underlined that for me.

Okay, Harvey Mason Jr., the CEO of the Recording Academy, on the future of AI and music. Here we go. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Harvey Mason Jr., you’re a songwriter, you’re a producer, and you’re the CEO of the Recording Academy. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you. Good to be here, man.

I’m excited to talk to you. It’s been about a year and a half since you were on the show. A lot has happened in a year and a half. I actually just want to start with a lightning round of the Decoder questions. I ask every CEO the same question, but I have so much on my list that I’m just going to do a check-in on whether these things have changed.

You’re the CEO of the Recording Academy, and that’s the organization that puts on the Grammys. You run MusiCares for Charity. It’s the social support system for most of the musicians in the United States. How is the Recording Academy structured? How many people work there, and has it changed at all in the past year and a half?

It’s definitely changed. We continue to grow and progress and try to do more, reach more people. As you said, we serve music and all the people that make it in a lot of different ways through our Grammy organization, which includes the Grammy Museum, MusiCares, as you mentioned, our advocacy efforts in DC, working with state lawmakers around the country, and then of course the Grammy show. And so we’re a little over 300 people, so it’s not a massive organization, but we punch above our weight, and we do a lot of work, and we’re very active.

The way that it’s changed is that I think we’re doing a good job of keeping up with the changes that are happening, and that is nonstop, especially with technology, new styles of delivering music, creating music, and consuming music. And then also trying to make sure that we’re staying in tune or relevant with what’s happening in music genres, things that are happening. New popularity comes up. People are consuming different styles of music, music from different parts of the world. All those are things that are ever-changing, and I love that our organization is moving quickly and staying ahead of a lot of those things.

Are you investing more on the policy side, on the production side, where you’re saying you’re changing? What part specifically is growing?

Well, one of the things that is really going to make a big change is our partnership with Disney at ABC. We were at CBS for 50-something years. And so, for the first time this year, we will be with Disney, on ABC. That gives us the ability to do so much more, as you said, investing in content and storytelling. We have more opportunities for using our Grammy brand and to tell music stories in different ways — documentaries, scripted, and other forms of music content, because Disney, as our partner, has an appetite for more of that than we had previously. So that will be a change. We’ve created Grammy Studios, which is exciting. That’ll be our arm to create a lot of that content, and we’re really approaching content for a strategy. So when we’re doing events, masterclasses, or we’re doing Grammy houses around the world, we’re going to be filming them and creating content around those.

The other question I ask every CEO who comes on is about decision-making. What’s your framework for making a decision? I’m just going to tell you, 18 months ago, when you were on the show, you said you like to think a lot and then make a decision really fast. Has your framework changed at all?

No. If I didn’t include the collaborative approach of decision-making, I was probably thinking too fast, and you might have caught me on the lightning round. A big part of my decision-making is gathering information from people that I trust and people that are around me. And people who are experts, because I don’t pretend to be the expert in every department of what we do. I do think I have a great group of people who give a lot of different insight and diverse perspectives, and really specialized thinking. And I come from sports. I played basketball, as you know. I’m a songwriter, as you know, and those are team efforts. You write songs together; you’re not sitting in a room all by yourself, at least the way that I work. You do that with other people. And the best idea wins, and the same for sports. You have a role on a team. If you’re great at that one role, you do that. You don’t try to do everything. So that has always been my style of leadership or decision-making.

Describe that structure. So your group of people around you, the Recording Academy, is about 300 people. Just how is that structured? How many people work for you, and then what roles do they play in a large organization?

Sure. So we have a president, we have a chief of strategy, and I have a chief of staff. We have different department heads. I have about 12 people reporting to me at this time, and we’ve gone back and forth on that number, and it changes from time to time. I’ve done a couple of reorganizations over the six years now that I’ve been in the role. And each of those department heads manages a department, but they all report up to me. We ultimately have meetings to make the decisions that we think are the most important. Right now, we’re undergoing a strategic plan build, which is, I think, incredible. And it’s been an amazing process for our organization. Each of the department heads is bringing ideas, and we’re coming up with objectives and goals, and real strategies to accomplish those goals. I really enjoyed the process. And then, of course, budgeting against that is another thing that’s going to be a fun challenge for us. So we’re right in the middle of that process.

The reason I ask all this is that I feel like if we rewound the clock 5, 10 years ago, I could understand the music industry. And my thesis on the show is that if you pay attention to what happens to the music industry, you will know what will happen to every other creative industry five years from now. The change is always fastest in music. 

Five years ago, okay, we’ve come through the shift to streaming. Artists understand they’re going to get paid pennies on the dollar from Spotify, even if they got a billion streams. We have to find other revenue lines. We’re going to do sync licenses, where everyone’s going to do a Keds ad. We’re going to be on tour all day and all night.

Keds, that’s a deep cut, but thank you.

You know it. Now it’s like that’s all upended. I want to ask you about the vibes of the industry right now, and it’s not just AI that’s upending the industry. I’ve been reading the music press this past week. Everyone’s talking about blue dot fever. This notion that there are blue dots and all the Ticketmaster seating charts that represent empty seats, and big artists are canceling tours. You got Meghan Trainor, the Pussycat Dolls, and Post Malone, who just canceled about six dates. Well, first of all, I’m just curious: do you think blue dot fever is real?

I do. I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but from what I’m reading, and I’m probably reading a lot of the same things you are. It seems like it’s a very, very serious issue, and it seems like we’ve been trying to deal with ticketing issues for some time now. There are some discrepancies in the information that we’re hearing. Hopefully, we can get to the bottom of some of it. Obviously, there are legal cases going on, but the vibes in the industry from what I’m seeing are that there’s a lot of trepidation. There’s a lot of concern.

There are fears around some of the ticketing issues, but also AI. And I’m sure that’s the topic that is at the tip of everyone’s tongue. But I also see a lot of opportunity. There’s more music being created and more music being listened to. There are a lot of live opportunities out there. I know you mentioned some that have been canceled, but there are others that are doing really, really well. I was just at Coachella a couple of weeks ago. And what a spectacle, what an amazing event and series of events. Now you see they sold out for next year without even announcing a lineup. So there are things that are working really, really well.

The reason I’m pushing and I’m starting with live [performances] is again, five, 10 years ago, I think the industry figured it out; there’s stuff we can monetize, and there’s stuff we can’t. And the idea that the music itself was hard to monetize, I think that was a paradigm shift in the industry. You’re going to cut a record, and that thing is not going to make you all the money, unless you’re at the very top of the game. It’s all the other stuff that’s going to make you money. That pressure has led to rising ticket prices. Post-COVID, everyone’s going to be on tour forever.

But also, the demand has led to some rising ticket prices. I think there’s a high demand to see a lot of artists, depending on who they are. And again, you’ve said some artists that didn’t have as much success selling, but there have been other events where money’s not even the object. People just want to go see great entertainers and great music. So I think it’s a combination of both.

Do you think ticket prices are just going to keep going up? I worry that ticket prices are just going to keep going up.

Well, considering what’s happened to other commodities or other things in our world that we live in, it doesn’t seem like there’s any end in sight. You look at gas, you look at food, you look at rent, the cost of living. I hope that ticket prices find some kind of level, because I would hate that to be an experience that only certain people get to take advantage of. I think music, watching music, and being entertained by songwriters, creators, and singers, that’s a part of who we are. And that’s stuff that we need just to feel human and to feel alive and to be able to find that common ground with other people. 

I would like to think we find a way to allow people to go to concerts. But again, if you look at where we’re headed as a society, it just seems like the cost of things is running away from us.

Right next to that, there’s a big lawsuit against Ticketmaster. The federal government settled, and Ticketmaster agreed to some changes with the federal government, as part of that settlement. I think the state attorneys general did not think it was strong enough. They pursued the case; they’ve won; something else is going to happen. Do you see the Ticketmaster case having an impact already, and do you see a bigger impact in the future?

I definitely think it’s going to have an impact. I think it is going to depend on how it plays out. There’s still a couple of rounds left in that, from what I can tell and what I’m hearing. Once that shakes out, then we’ll be able to see what the effect will be.

I feel like it was understood how to make money in live events, and that is shaky right now. The idea that tours are getting canceled or we’re oversupplying a market with rising costs, and people are going to pick gas and groceries over seeing their favorite artists — that’s unsettling, I think, in the industry.

But I also think that’s going to be such an appealing proposition for live events more in the future than even now. I would bet that, depending on ticket prices and accessibility, of course, things to be considered. People are going to want to go see live music. They’re going to want live experiences. You’re seeing more and more people on computers and phones, AI, and the way they’re working remotely. I personally believe being together, like we’re doing this podcast, is much better than doing it on Zoom. Listening to music is going to be much better for people than just doing it on headphones. They want to be somewhere where you can be among your peers, among people who love the same music and feel that, experience it. 

Again, I was at Coachella. I felt that there’s nothing like going to a live concert. So I truly believe, yes, there’s lots to sort out, whether that’s the legal issues, the ticket pricing, the bots and the blue dots, and all the different things, but people are going to want to see live music.

How long did it take you to plan your Coachella outfits? [Laughs]

[Laughs] Zero minutes.

I watched Coachella from social media, and I was like, “Oh, there’s a whole other thing happening here.” That’s the other dynamic. The music industry has become way more commercial. Coachella is the influencer Olympics; it has all of the brand activations. There’s something there where it’s, okay, the money has to come from somewhere. It’s going to come from credit card companies or travel agencies or whatever’s happening, brand activations.

Packaging. Yeah.

Tell me about that vibe right now, that we have to commercialize the industry in order to support these artists.

Well, I don’t know if it’s a great thing or a horrible thing. I can’t tell, but it’s definitely happening. And it is a way for artists to make additional revenue, but it all stems from the music. Music is driving so much of this, and the culture around it is so important. And that’s why I love the work that I do, because I get to be around those people. If you can figure out how to package up all the different things you just talked about, the ancillary revenue opportunities, you have to remember, back at the source, it’s the music, it’s the songwriting, it’s the performing, it’s the recording. And that’s why, to me, the academy is so important because we’re continuing to push to advocate and support those opportunities for our music people. 

So yeah, I love all the different things that people have figured out how to make money — they monetize music, performances, live, or merch, and even food. You see food coming together with music; you see sports coming together with music. Those are great things. Those things make me excited because of my passion for music and music people.

Again, the reason I’m starting here is that I want to ground the conversation with AI. I feel all that pressure in the music industry. I can see all those gears turning. Then, right next to that, AI is upending the process of songwriting, the process of producing music. And I do think it is happening faster in the music industry than in other creative pursuits. You can just see it happening every single day in music.

Music people are pretty quick to jump on new technologies, and we adapt relatively quickly, I think. And you’re going to see it have an impact across all creativity and different art forms, I’m quite certain. But as you said, music people are early. It’s had an impact already, and I’m sure we’re going to dive into it.

So the last time you were on the show, I’ll just read you some of the quotes. “I don’t think you can tell me that AI can create Songs in the Key of Life, Nevermind, or Illmatic.” And then you said, “It’s all going to be a mess until we get it sorted out because yes, it’s difficult.” It’s been 18 months. Has your thinking evolved dramatically on how AI can deliver quality, and how musicians should use it?

It has, honestly, and it’s crazy. I never thought it would change, but actually, that’s not true. I knew it was going to change, because it’s all been changing so fast. But the quality of what it’s able to create has improved dramatically. I remember 18 months ago, you could tell when something was AI-generated. And now it’s to the point where people are playing me things and telling me that AI made it, and I’m surprised. I’m impressed by the quality of it. And all that scares me because I do represent roughly 30,000 music people and then millions of music people around the world that have grown up their whole lives trying to figure out how to express themselves by using a guitar or a keyboard and writing their heartfelt lyrics. Now you can prompt some of that stuff. And it’s darn good, which I don’t know if I love or don’t love, but it’s evolved over the last 18 months.

You’re still a working producer and a songwriter. I know you’re still in sessions. You gave a quote in January. You said, “I’ve seen AI in every studio, in every session. I’m not remembering a song I’ve been around or a room I’ve been in that was not using some form of AI.”

I have been mulling that quote since January, when you said it on stage. I’ve been dying to have you in this chair to ask you about that quote. How is it being used? How is it changing the process of songwriting from your vantage point as a producer and a songwriter? And then obviously, as somebody who represents the interests of all the songwriters?

So the quote, let me address that first of all, because I work in pop music generally, pop and R&B. And in those genres of music, I think it’s pretty omnipresent. There are other genres that are not that way. So I don’t want to mischaracterize it because what I do and what I see may not be everyone else’s experience. But when I’m in a room, AI is generally always there. It’s being used to create chord progressions. It’s being used to fill out drum loops. Some people are just creating entire tracks using AI. Others are using AI to come up with lyrics. Maybe they’ve written a few lines in the first verse. They want the second verse to have the same rhyme scheme and rhythm, and they’ll just enter the first one and say, “Make a new one for the second one.” Some people are being… They’re putting in a title, and it’s giving out ideas. And some of them are just using it as a rhyming dictionary. 

But AI is across so many different aspects of songwriting right now. Definitely, people are using it to create background vocals, to make stacks, to create demos of singers that they may be writing a song for. It’s pretty wild, the power of AI. And how I feel about it is that I have mixed emotions. I am definitely disturbed by the fact that I worked my whole entire life, and all the people that I work with have been grinding for years in studios and in bedrooms on laptops and with instruments, to try and figure out how to make great art. And now there’s a possibility of people doing that who have not put in the work or don’t have that same passion, and they can just type in a prompt and create a song.

I talked a lot about my niece. She does a lot of AI creating, and she sends songs to my wife and says, “Look at the song I wrote.” She’s in sixth grade. And so it’s definitely a challenge for me, but I also have to understand that both in my role as a producer and my role as a CEO, there’s got to be a balance because AI is here, people are going to use it. There’s competition out there. Songwriters, artists, producers, they’re all competing for a certain number of ears.

And a lot of them, they don’t care how they get to those ears; they just want to get to them. So I am struggling with making sure we’re preserving human creativity while also allowing technology to evolve the craft and the art form of creating and writing songs. So it’s not an easy struggle for me because I am a creator, but I’m also overseeing or trying to help serve music people in the music community in my role as CEO.

We did a story a while ago. Our great friend, Charlie Harding, wrote about AI in the country music industry. And the country music industry is an industry. It’s more structured than other kinds of music.

Very different.

There are songwriters, there are session musicians, there are track players. It’s a machine. And he was like, “AI is showing up in structured ways here.” The idea that people are going to make a demo track for an artist… that’s going away because the songwriters can just say, “Make me a song that sounds like whatever country artist,” and I’ll pitch it to them directly with their voice. And none of the artists would cop to it, but we heard it from all these songwriters. “Yeah, we’re just using the artist’s voices.”

There’s a real dynamic there that is spreading to other parts of the music industry. Pop music, as you mentioned, is starting to use it, but it’s not as structured. It’s not as controlled. How do you see that diffusion happening across genres?

Well, I’m a little surprised, to be honest, that it is permeating the country scene. I would think that would be one of the last to accept AI or any input from it.

Oh, I have a very different view of country music. I think there’s an image, and then I think there’s an industry.

A reality. Well, I’ve definitely witnessed some people in that space using AI, and it just has to be… You have to figure out how you’re going to use it. Is it going to be a tool or is it going to be a replacement? And that is going to change per industry. I’ve seen people who are doing film scores now using it in a way that I never imagined. They’re playing individual instrument lines into the generative platform, and then that will, in turn, create a full arrangement. So maybe you’re playing a line on a piano, and then it turns it into strings, violins, violas, cellos, and basses, and it splits it out on a score. And then they’ll just hire the orchestras to play it. But they will not have to do any of the arranging, the composing, or even making the charts. It’s doing all that for you. So you’re going to see it used in different ways in different forms of music making, which you’re already seeing, as you said, in country versus pop versus composing.

I’m going to read you some stats that I think are just fascinating. The Hollywood Reporter did a big AI and music poll last fall, but it tracks with the polling that we’ve seen more recently. Most people, 52 percent, do not want to listen to music made with the help of AI. Sixty-six percent of people said they’ve never listened to music knowing it was made by AI. I don’t know if you can do that anymore, but that’s what they said. And then there’s a lot of data that just says people dislike AI generally.

But you have to look at who they’re asking and who are the people that are filling out those surveys, and who are the people that subscribe to their magazine or will look at their website. As you get into younger people, I would imagine those numbers might change.

So, younger people… This is polling that we have cited a lot on this show and across The Verge. Younger people, the more they use AI, the more they dislike it. So Gen Z has this ferocious dislike for AI. I bring this up not to litigate the poll numbers with you. I’m just curious about the sort of widespread use of AI, and the knowledge that most artists have that their fans don’t want them to say they’re using AI.

So Michelle Lewis told Rolling Stone the music industry has a quote, “Don’t ask, don’t tell policy about AI music.” Suno is one of the big generative AI platforms, maybe the dominant one; its CEO, Mikey Shulman, says, “Suno is the Ozempic of the music industry. Everybody’s on it. Nobody wants to talk about it.”

That’s the gap, right? Everyone’s using the tools, everyone sees the power of the tools, but we cannot tell our fans straight out that we’re using AI to make the music. Do you see that gap closing or do you see it widening?

I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s going to close or widen. For us at the academy, we are in a challenging position because we have to award excellence in music. And we are now every year deciding what is going to be the threshold of acceptability for AI. So that’s going to probably have an effect on how the gap widens or closes because we ask when you submit, “Did you use AI?” But acknowledging it’s like Ozempic, some people are going to tell you they’re on it, some people are not. It’s a little bit of taking people’s word for it until we can find the technology or deploy the technology, which I know is supposedly out there, that can determine when AI is being used, and how much it’s being used. We are a little bit at the mercy of people telling us and disclosing when they’re using it.

We’ll see what the perception is as people become more comfortable… In the history of humanity, I think we’ve had a pattern of becoming much more comfortable with new technology as we’ve used it and it’s been a part of our society, and it doesn’t usually take us very long. I remember people that I was with saying, “I’m never putting my credit card on the internet. That’s ridiculous.” Or, I’ve even met people in the music space who said they’d never use Pro Tools, AutoTune, Melodyne, or some of the other things that have developed and allowed us to be more creative and more efficient with our creativity. So we’ll see what happens. In 18 months, we should talk again, and we’ll see how people are feeling.

Did you see the recent sort of social media discourse about whether the “D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune)” held up as an idea from Jay-Z? It’s like, now it’s everywhere. It didn’t actually die. It took over everything.

It took over everything. Yeah. I haven’t seen that, but it’s a funny subject to think about.

I’ve got big artists saying basically, adapt or die. Diplo, “I can get the best voice from AI. I don’t need anybody to sing the song anymore.” Literally, he said adapt or become an Uber driver.

Timberland is doing straight AI artists. He’s got an entire record labeled for his AI artist. 50 Cent just loves posting memes of soul covers of 50 Cent songs. Grimes exists. Taryn Southern is out there. What’s your take on how it’s the bigger artists who are going to adopt AI faster because they have the name recognition, they can put out AI music, and people will listen to it because it is 50 Cent, Grimes, or whoever? And the younger artists are struggling for attention because they’re swamped on social channels full of slop.

Some big artists will adopt, others are going to reject. And I think it’s very similar to the other tiers of music creators. Some young new artists are going to see it as an advantage, and they’re going to want to use AI because they can create faster, and they can create more things. And some are going to rebuff the whole idea of using technology like that to create. I don’t think you’re going to find any one-size-fits-all. That’s what’s going to be cool, or I think somewhat acceptable about it. I am always going to advocate for humans, and I think that’s still going to be an important part of the art form, which is how we express ourselves as a society, as humans, as we’re interacting with each other and talking about that human experience. That’s how we communicate. That’s how we feel about each other; that’s how we come together. I think that’s always going to be important. 

The other thing that’s going to be important is that humans are going to create the coolest, newest stuff. I don’t think, and in 18 months we can talk again, but I don’t think AI is going to go out ahead of us and beat us at coming up with a new sound, a new genre, something that’s fresh and exciting, that lands and resonates with listeners. They will, at some point, maybe figure out how to do that. But what they’re going to do now is they’re going to listen to all the cool stuff that we make. Then, they’re going to iterate on that, and they’re going to probably add a little twist here, mash some stuff together, and come out with a new song, a new voice, or a new singing.

But as humans and as creators who are living life and experiencing things, we are going to be the ones that push the art form forward. I truly believe that, and this month we’ll see. So you’ll have both. You’ll have people using AI and just creating a whole bunch of music, and you’ll have other people say, “I want to do it my way. I want to create through my experience and through my pain and through my interactions.” And that’ll be cool.

So you were talking earlier about how to win a Grammy, and you have to certify that you made it with humans. You only want to give the award to the human part of the music. That’s obviously getting fuzzier. You’re describing it getting fuzzier. If Diplo submits a track and he’s like, “All the backing vocals are AI.”

It’s okay.

That’s okay?

AI doesn’t make you ineligible. It doesn’t exclude you from the process. We just have to make sure that human creativity is at the forefront and there is human creativity. So if somebody submits songs with AI background vocals, they’re not going to get a Grammy for performance because AI is doing the performing. But you can still submit for songwriting or some of the other categories. And conversely, if AI has written the song but you have a human singing it and they sang the heck out of it, that person can be submitted for a performance award. 

We acknowledge — and this is why it’s a fine line — that we’re walking the tightrope right now. And we want to make sure we’re honoring human creativity; we want to honor excellence. We have to acknowledge that AI is being used, and at some point we’ll have to decide: do we want to completely ban AI from the process and say, if you used AI at all, you are excluded from the Grammy process? Or are we going to say AI is the next version of a tool for music making and people are using it in different ways? Some of them are really interesting and creative, but some of them seem egregious and too much. We’re going to have to find that sweet spot, and that’s what we’re doing every single year. 

We review this policy, we look at it and make sure that we’re doing the thing that our board of trustees, our members, and our creative community want, because we listen to our creative community. So that’s what I see. The future is navigating that, and I think it’s going to evolve over time.

Where’s the line right now? How much is too much?

Right now we call it more than a de minimis amount of human creativity involved in the process. So as long as you can show that a human was involved and it wasn’t just a tiny amount, then we will say it’s acceptable. But as soon as it gets beyond that point of none or not enough human interaction, then we have to pull back. And it’s not a perfect system. I mean, it is a very, very tough system to create because again, we don’t know exactly the percentage of human creativity or human interaction. We don’t have the ability to determine that today. I hope that we do in the future. We acknowledge that it is not the most perfect system, and music, by the way, is subjective as you know. So we’re evaluating and trying to award something that means something different to everybody.

We just want to try and get it right, and we want to try and celebrate music and music people in all the different forms of it. And at this point, we are acknowledging that AI is a tool that is being used. At some point, we should talk about the legislation because we need guardrails. We need people telling us and us enforcing the rules around how AI can be used.

I know you’ve been advocating for specific litigation. I do want to come to that. I just want to stay on this aspect of it for one second. You’re saying that to win a Grammy Award, you need to show us that there’s more than a de minimis amount of human involvement. I can’t just prompt Suno to make a hit record: “Make a song like Harvey would make for Janet Jackson.” Which actually sounds like a great Suno prompt. I’m going to do that when I get out of here. 

Okay, that’s not enough. How do you prove it? Do you have to submit paperwork? Do you have to submit screenshots? What’s the proof?

We have screening committees that review and evaluate people’s claims, and at some point it does come down to people’s opinions and people doing the analysis and asking questions, asking for proof, asking for documentation. We’re not always going to get that, but we’re going to try. And as I said, it’s not a perfect science. We don’t have a black-and-white determining box that you can check that exactly proves that you’ve done what you’ve said you’ve done, but I know that our community is an honorable community. 

People who make music are… Creators are different people. I don’t think anybody wants to cheat and win a Grammy on grounds that they can’t prove. And I would hate to think that somebody would want to do that. Maybe it happens, and hopefully we’ll catch them before it does, but it’s just not the perfect system. It’s going to be challenging to determine exactly who did what. And until we can get the technology that breaks it down for us, we’re going to have to rely on our community to be forthcoming.

I feel like we’re having this deep conversation about the artistic process, creativity, and vibes, and I’m just hitting you with a stat after stat. Deezer says 50,000 AI-generated songs are being uploaded to their platform every day. You’re describing a process where a bunch of people get together, and they look at all the submissions for the Grammys and whatever evidence, and they do some process. Are you going to get overwhelmed with the amount of AI material that’s coming your way?

We’ll see. So far, we haven’t. We had about 24,000 submissions last year. Now it’s up a little bit from the year before, and we’ll see what happens this year. And if that starts to happen, then we’ll have to make changes. The cool thing about our organization, at least over the last five or six years, is we’ve really been quick to change. 

We’re watching what’s happening, we’re listening, we’re hearing from our music people, and we’re saying, how can we make sure we’re doing this the right way? So if we start to get overwhelmed, AI becomes an issue for us, we can’t determine what’s happening, we’re getting inundated, or the whole thing is getting diluted by AI, then we’re going to make some changes. But right now, I think we’re in a pretty good spot.

There are other parts of the industry that are attempting to do the same things. Spotify, for example, wants to change its royalty structures to account for AI music. They have a label now, like a human-certified label. Does that align with your thinking? Is there a more holistic approach across the industry that will help with this?

That would be great. I know a lot of us are talking amongst ourselves about how we can align and how we can build some of those processes and lanes for separation. I also think that’s going to evolve over time. And as we started talking, it is a deep conversation, philosophical thought. At some point, is it as important to determine what is synthetic or AI-generated and what is 50 percent generated? What is zero percent generated? And at some point, do consumers start to wear down and tire a little bit of that and just say, “I just want to hear great music. I’m not sure that I care about the tools so much right now.” Then it leaves it to us on the back end to make sure we’re protecting human creativity.

I’m not sure if it will be 18 months from now. Maybe we’ll be more concerned about it, but maybe we’ll be less, and it’ll be like drum machines. You’ll say, “Some AI was used in this recording, but do I care?” I care as the CEO of the Grammys, and I care about representing human music people. And again, we’re going to have to, in the background, continue to fight and push and advocate for human creativity, but consumers aren’t worried right now if a vocal has autotune on it. They’re not thinking about if the strings are real strings in the ballad that they just listened to and that they loved.

So I’m not sure I have the answer, but we’re going to see how it changes over time and how consumers’ appetite for different forms of creativity and different tools being used in that process play out.

There was a time when people really cared about autotune, right? Cher’s producers lied about using autotune on “Believe.” That used to be a thing that they would literally lie about because they didn’t want anyone to know how they’d done it or copped to it. And you’re saying that’s going to fade away with AI the same way it’s faded away with-

I’m not certain it’s going to. I’m going to say that’s an option that it could. People become normalized to it, and they just want to hear great music. They’re not concerned about the tools as much. But in saying that, I have to, again, reiterate that my belief is that humans and human creativity are always going to be important, are always going to be the most desirable, and always be the thing that pushes the art form forward.

I like your optimism. My pushback here is that drum machines, for the most part, were not made by defense contractors. Maybe Yamaha had some sort of defense contractor, but for the most part, the instrument companies, the sampler companies… Pioneer was not making military targeting systems. 

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, all the big model companies are defense contractors. They’re caught up in the top of the government controversies every single day. They’re asking everyone for billions, if not trillions, of dollars. We’re going to put the data centers in space. At least from my perspective, it seems like the interests of artists and creatives, authors, they know it’s bad, but they’re like, “Hold on, we have war. We’re going to do war with the AI models. We’re going to argue about cybersecurity because maybe we’re going to crash the whole world.”

Have they been responsive to you? The last time you were on the show, I asked if you met with Sam Altman, and you’re like, “I’m hoping to.” Have you met with him since?

I haven’t met with him directly, but I have met with his team and people from Open and from Claude. We’re doing a lot of talking, and definitely the other platforms, Suno and Udio and others. So the dialogues are ongoing. From my perspective, or at least maybe I’m overly optimistic. I know I probably am. You already told me I am today.

I appreciate it.

But I think everybody wants to do this the right way, and maybe they’re tricking me. From what I can tell, they realize the importance of music and creativity, and nobody wants to upend that completely. At least the music people that I talk to that are running those companies, they’re fans, and they love music, and they love creativity, and they want to add to that ecosystem. So we’ll see where it goes. 

I am optimistic, but I think my optimism comes more from the fact that I know our community and I know music people. I know how we think. I also know how competitive and talented our music people are, and I’m just always sure that we’ll persevere and we’ll use the tools. We’ll figure out cool new ways to do great new things with them, and we’ll iterate on what we’ve done before, and we’ll come up with a new way of making music and expressing ourselves. So that’s really where my optimism comes, less so from thinking that all the platforms are going to get in line and do exactly what we want because we know that’s not going to happen or less so that we’re going to have the perfect legislation that’s going to be drafted and passed and approved this year because I know that’s probably not going to happen, but I believe in our people.

As you talk to all these companies, which of them seem the most artist-friendly? Which of them seem the most distant? How’s the dynamic?

When I’m in the room, they’re all artist-friendly. They’re all very nice, and they all love creators. [Laughs]

I’m just thinking about OpenAI doing Sora and just like launching it in the world and being like, “We stole everything.” Or I just keep picking on OpenAI, doing Studio Ghibli or saying, “This voice from our voice synthesizer sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson,” until there’s a lawsuit. Some of them seem much more poised to be aggressive, and some of them seem a little calmer.

Some of them are more… They’re just not as concerned about it, and they’re not focused on it, a little more frivolous with how they’re treating the artist community. Maybe I’m misinterpreting it. It doesn’t seem like they’re doing it to be spiteful, to be harmful. They’re all trying to figure this all out at the same time.

I have heard some people say they just want to move fast and break things. You’ve heard that probably more than I have, and they’re going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. And those are things that are scary from a creative community perspective. The people that have written songs and hold copyrights and intellectual property, we never want to hear that. We’ll ask for forgiveness later. We’re going to use what you’ve created and what you own and what you legally have possession of, and we’re going to use that for our own benefit. That’s a dangerous precedent and one that I don’t think any of us on the creative side would support, but you are seeing some of that, so that needs to be worked out.

There’s an interesting split here. There’s legislation that you’ve brought up. The No Fakes Act, which protects voice, image, and likeness. There’s the Train Act, which would give creators access to the records of what was trained on so you could demand royalties. There’s a CLEAR Act, which is just a transparency act. Just tell us what’s in the models. I would love all those to exist. As you said, I don’t know if this year is the year for Congress to act with alacrity on AI.

I just got back from DC, and it doesn’t seem like this is the year. They’re having so much infighting, but there is a lot of alignment around these, which surprised me. It’s bipartisan, bicameral support especially for the No Fakes. Everybody knows that’s the right thing to do, and how can we get it done? Let’s get the language right. Let’s not try and make it perfect. Let’s get something on the books right now, and then we can refine it. That’s at least my thought.

You would think Donald Trump, of all people, would understand that the use of his voice is a powerful thing that he should… But it doesn’t seem like it matters. My most nihilistic version of this is that copyright law exists as a framework for big corporations to make deals, and for everyone else, it’s just a free-for-all. We’re just going to take stuff and remix it, and Mark Cuban and Taylor Swift are doing crypto ads, and that’s just the end of the … There’s no holding back. And maybe there will be some laws on whatever timeline there are laws. In the meantime, you’re going to get the platforms deciding that, because copyright law is the structure by which they make deals, they have to do something.

YouTube has likeness detection now. That is just a private legal framework. They just made up some rules about likeness, and you can sign up for it, and just the way that Content ID works on YouTube, they’re like, “We saw your face. You’re selling shoes. Do you want us to take it down?” And they’ll take it down. That’s a lot of platforms inventing a bunch of frameworks.

Do you think that’s going to be effective? Do you think there’s something to learn there as you push Congress or other governments to do stuff, or does that feel like just another kind of chaos for artists to deal with?

It feels like a first step, and it feels like something that is headed in the right direction because those are things that are attempting to protect the artists and the ownership that they have. I appreciate people trying to do that, but it does make it difficult for the artists. Having some federal framework, some federal legislation, or even an industry-wide framework that we could all abide by would be even better, but everybody’s just trying to figure this stuff out. People are trying to run their businesses. Artists are trying to run their businesses. Streamers are trying to run their businesses. It’s a dynamic that is very difficult, and I don’t know that we faced a time like this before.

Everybody likes to say, “We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen this before.” And to some degree that’s true. We’ve seen sampling, we’ve seen streaming, we’ve seen, as I said, drum machines and disruptive technologies in the creative process, but this one, for some reason, feels different. Maybe I’m showing my age when I say that because everybody says that about the issues that are in their generation, but the change to the human creative process and the ownership of that is in question or at least being discussed right now. I don’t think it’s been as acute as it is now or has the potential to be now in the history of where we are in creativity and music.

I don’t sit in your shoes. I don’t have to play the roles you have to play. I can just be direct. I look at the state of the world economy, and I think those guys shouldn’t be as rich as they are, and all of the artists should be much richer than they are.

I totally agree. Let’s go!

Are you allowed to be that frustrated and express that as clearly as, I think, your fans, as your constituencies, and the music community want you to say it?

Yeah, I’d like to think so. I agree with… Artists and creators and people who make music are special. They just are. And what they do for society and what we do for the world, what we do for individuals, for communities, for countries… I’m a music person, so I just see it through that lens, but I think that the people who do that should be taken care of, should be compensated, and they should have the ability to control what they make. They should have the ability to decide how it’s being used, how they’re compensated, and how they’re credited. I just strongly believe that.

In my career, I’ve worked with so many special people, and I’ve sadly worked on the last record of a lot of very talented people. I worked on Whitney Houston’s last record, Michael Jackson’s last record, Luther Van. And I remember distinctly when they passed and thinking to myself, “We’ve lost something so important and so meaningful.” People have their challenges, they have struggles, issues. Everybody has something they can get upset at an artist about. But at the end of the day, when an artist makes a record and you feel that record, you’re driving your car, you’re dancing at a wedding, or you’re at a concert, there’s nothing in the world like that Those people and the people that allow that to happen, we have to watch out for them, regardless of some of their shortcomings or some of their faults because of what they put into the world. And I just think that’s powerful.

Are you allowed to bring this fire to your meeting with the AI companies? That’s really what I’m asking here. For my audience, I sense frustration. This is going to go out on YouTube, and I invite you to take a scroll through the inevitable YouTube comments we’re going to get, which basically come down to why isn’t Harvey arresting Sam Altman, right? That’s the vibe I get on this show all the time. These guys, they’ve stolen everything, and the people who should be getting the value, the people who make us feel joy, are getting nothing. That’s how people felt about Spotify. That’s increasingly how people feel about YouTube. Are you allowed to bring the fire to your meetings and in your advocacy, or are you playing a more subtle game?

I try to bring fire with me no matter where I go, but also, it is a relationship, and it’s a long-term play. This is not going to happen instantly. And how you’re interacting with people is going to affect the outcome. I do believe, as I said, they’re trying to run a business just like I’m trying to run a business or protect the business, and finding a solution is not going to be me just bulldozing them. It’s going to be how do we come together to find something that works for both of us?

I have to say, much like streaming, when streaming came out, people were up in arms about it. “Streaming is horrible. We’re not getting paid,” but on the other side of that, you see how many more people are listening to music. You see how many more people are finding new artists that they never knew before, how many people are being encouraged to go to concerts because they discovered the song that they love on a streaming platform. So there are trade-offs.

If somebody goes in and just blows up streaming right off the bat, we lose a lot of other opportunities that are unintended, or you might not have thought of. So approaching the AI people is the same thing. Yes, we have some issues, but yes, you’re also bringing something that could potentially benefit all of us, music creators, society at large. And so how do you manage that is, I guess, the challenge?

There are some bulldozers in the music industry. When streaming came out, Taylor Swift bulldozed her way into a rate structure that eventually most of the industry adopted. She put a big article in the Wall Street Journal about not being on Spotify at that time. Universal Music exists. That is maybe the biggest bulldozer of all.

Sir Lucian.

Sir Lucian Grainge, one of the biggest bulldozers of all. He’s suing and settling with Sunos and Udios literally in very tactical ways. The fight is whether the songs in Suno can be exported as MP3 files to be shared freely or whether you have to listen to them on a platform, which provides at least some gatekeeping. I don’t know if that’s effective. I don’t know if that’s an effective restriction. I can think of 50 ways to get around that as an old college music pirate.

At least 50.

But this is the level that the bulldozers are saying, “Okay, we are going to restrict your platform.” Do you think that kind of power in the music industry can lead the charge on pushing back?

Yes, it can. Will it be effective? We’ll see. At some point, I’m sure they all realize this much more than I do because they’re incredibly smart and powerful and thoughtful, but consumers want what consumers want. And friction between consumers and music, or consumers and how they access their music, those are things that you can push against as much as you would like to, and it’s probably not going to work because people want to listen to their music. So yes, I think strong leadership, lawsuits, and trying to be protective is important, and it is hopefully going to make advancements in the right direction. But at the end of the day, as I said, people want their music. They want to listen to it, and that’s probably going to change based on a lot of things: the lawsuits, the bulldozers, but also fans of music.

I want to ask one more question here, and then I want to talk about the Grammys and Disney for one second to wrap it up. You’ve been in the studios, you’ve seen artists use these tools in all kinds of ways. I’m assuming you’ve used the tools in all kinds of ways. What’s the most innovative sound?

I’ve never used the tools.

You have never used the tools?

No, just kidding.

[Laughs] I was going to say. That’s the breaking news.

[Laughs] No, no, no. I have. Sorry.

That would be surprising!

What’s the most innovative sound? What’s the most innovative technique that you’ve seen the tools enable? Because that’s the thing that, to me, would maybe make the sale. Not, I’m going to make soul covers of 50 Cent. There’s something about that that’s just kind of cheap. But we’re going to enable a new sound, a new method of songwriting that enables a new kind of story to be told. Where have you seen the bleeding edge?

What I’ve seen that’s interesting is people using the platform to create songs and generate stems, and stems are the multi-track split-outs. So you have all the drums on one track, bass on track.

So you say the platform, you mean like Suno?

Yeah, creating stems. And then having live musicians iterate off of the stems. So they’ll say, okay, here’s a really cool groove of a song that we love, but now let’s do a live drum, a live bass, and a live keyboard player. Not using the stems from the platform, but having those inspire live musicians to build on top of that. So I think that’s kind of cool because it’s almost like you’re having a writing partner in the room that has infinite ideas. And you can say, well, let me try it like this. Then you hear something that inspires something in you as a musician or as a producer.

To me, those are interesting uses. I like it less than people who just prompt and get a sound, and just stick that in their song and say, oh, I got something from the platform, I’m going to use it. I like it more when they get that, and they hear it, and it triggers something, and you go to the next level from what you’ve just heard. And I think that’s a cool use of it.

Let me put that in a sort of broader arc of music. We’ve talked about drum machines a lot. I’m a Depeche Mode fan.

Me too.

They became a drum machine band because the drums were too loud in their apartment. So the drum machine enabled Depeche Mode, and then synthesizers enabled all of the post-punk first wave. That’s my music. New Order exists because of a huge technological set of achievements that they then used to make a style of music. Turntables and mixers. We got first wave hip hop. Then we got samplers. We got another wave of hip hop. AutoTune, you got Akon, whatever that is. I can point-

T-Pain.

Yeah. One of the most underrated and correctly rated artists of all time, at the same time, T-Pain. All right. I can point to, here’s a technological innovation that led to a sound, that led to a genre, that led to a movement. What do you think that looks like with AI? Is it going to be the same kind of thing, or is it slop? Because the danger is slop.

The danger is definitely slop. I don’t think it’s going to be one thing because AI is all across the board, and it’s being used in so many different ways. The drum machine was a very specific example, whereas with AI you can’t define its individual use. Everybody uses it differently. Every genre uses it. Now I’m finding out from you that even country’s using it. So I don’t think it’s the same thing where you’re going to say, “Oh, that’s that AI sound.” I don’t see that happening.

I think that, to me, I look at all this data, all these feelings people have, and the whole industry can’t point to the thing that they’re delivering. We’re going to ask for all the GPUs, all the power, water rights, and you can’t buy a stick of RAM for a PC anymore. And you can’t point to the one thing that you made that’s worth it. You can point to everything. We’re going to change everything. And that everything is almost too diffuse.

I’m sort of wondering when, sure, Timbaland’s going to do an AI artist, but I already know what that artist is going to sound like, and I already know how the audience is going to react to that. There’s not a sound. There’s not a K-pop of AI that’s going to reorient the listener or the audience. Do you see anybody trying that, trying to push on it?

I don’t know. I don’t even know what that would look like. I don’t know what the result of that is. I think that you’re going to see new and different uses of the technology, and people are going to continue to push the boundaries. When you talk about Timbaland or Diplo or how they’re using it. I mean, we’re in the 1.0 version of this, and people are just getting used to seeing it in their toolbox. And once people have access to it for a little while, much like you saw the evolution of sampling… It used to just be that you could take the song and just sing over the whole thing. Now, it’s take a piece and chop it, then flip it and reverse it, and then speed it up and pitch it down. So you’re going to see new uses of this tool, and that’s when you’ll start to understand what its real power is.

Let’s end by talking about the Grammys a little bit. That’s obviously the thing that the Recording Academy does; it’s the thing that funds everything else. We started by talking about your decision-making process. You made a big decision. You’re going to leave CBS, you’re bringing it to Disney, it’s going to stream across platforms. You talked about the content explosion that we’re in for. Just walk me through that decision. Why make the change?

We’d been at CBS for over 50 years. They’ve been great partners. They were going through some ownership changes, as you know. They were trying to figure out what their focus was going to be. And we also knew, as a Grammy organization, that we had expansive ideas and thoughts about where we could go as a brand. We wanted to be more international, more global. We wanted to reach more music people. You’re seeing, in music, genres or borders and languages are breaking down. There’s music from all different parts of the world: K-pop, Afrobeats, music from the Middle East, India, other areas, Latin, of course. We knew we needed to continue to grow our organization and our reach, and we felt Disney and ABC would be a great partner for that.

It also really aligns with what they’re doing, as they’re expanding into new areas and new territories. And they’re a company that, I mean, I don’t know about you, I’ve admired that company and the leadership over the last dozen years or more. How they’ve changed and how they’ve evolved, how they’ve kept up with technology, how they’ve always, at the heart of that, been true to the artists, been true to storytellers. They’ve been really passionate about making great things. So there was a lot of alignment for me personally, and then also for our organization with Disney that just made logical sense.

Was this a bidding war? Were they the biggest check, or were they the biggest check and the best vibes?

There were multiple people involved in wanting to be in the media rights business with us, which I’m very appreciative and thankful for. And I think that is a testament to the work that our organization has done, our board, our members, our staff, and leadership over the last six years to get the organization to where we are. We were making sure we were relevant, making sure we were respected, making sure we were honoring music as accurately as we could.

And so because of those things, our international opportunity, the availability of music in other parts of the world, and our agency that we have to celebrate it, we were a desired property. Again, I’m fortunate for that. It was not about the biggest check for us, though. It was about making sure that we could further our mission, perpetuate the right narrative out into the music community, that we are here to serve music people, uplift music. Because of what we talked about earlier, the importance of it, and what I think music means to the world and to society.

Disney was a great partner because of that alignment. Yes, there was a financial component because, as you touched on, everything we do — our advocacy, our education, our music preservation, our legislation, all of our work around MusiCares, all that stuff is paid for by our media rights deal. So we have to get the right deal. And we are a not-for-profit. A lot of people don’t know that. We’re not doing this for profit. We get the money that comes in the door, and we push it back out into our music community to help music people. If you think about the LA wildfires, we did $30 million of relief to music people who lost their houses or their instruments or needed medical care. So those are the things that drive our decision, my decision, when it comes to doing a new media rights deal.

One of the things I think about with award shows in particular is that they were very powerful in what you might call the monoculture era. Everyone has seen all the movies. Everyone has listened to the radio. Everyone has heard most of the songs. That is dwindling. Everyone’s in a little filter bubble on whatever algorithmic platform, listening to whatever TikTok hit the labels have paid to make big today. That’s making the award show a more diffuse product. 

I can watch the Grammys, and I haven’t heard of half the artists. How do you solve that problem? Because the value of the award show needs to stay high to fund all the other stuff.

Well, as we touched on earlier, I still believe in live programming and live events. And that is going to be a premium offering. People want to see things that are timely, that you can’t record and watch later because there’s that social element of it. Did you see what happened on this stage, or did you see who won this? So that’s, to me, an advantage that we have that’s similar to sports. When you watch a sporting event, you want to watch it in real time because you want to see who won and who played well or what the stories were. So I hope, and I truly believe, that that is an advantage for an award show if done right.

As far as the diffusion and the different genres, if we can make the show compelling and we can continue to tell human stories, which I think we’ve done over the last few years, and our production partner Fulwell and Ben Winston have been instrumental in this, you bring audiences to the show because they’re compelled to watch the stories and the human interest elements. And we’re looking to expand that with our partnership with Disney. I think that’s an important component of it because it’s not just about what song you love. It’s about the process. It’s about who the people are that are making those songs, and then to see it displayed in a way that nobody else can do. I think we do that at the Grammys.

So, we should expect more. I know you produced the Michael Jackson documentary. Should we expect more music biopics with Disney, more short-form artists, human-interest stories with Disney?

I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that we are partnered with, I think, the best storytellers around. And using that platform, their expertise, knowledge, research, and appetite for more music content is something that we are excited about. We want to tell more stories about music people because to me they’re timely and they’re compelling, and it’s what we need more of right now.

So our hope is that Grammy Studios will continue to evolve and grow, producing more content around things that we’re doing, shows in other parts of the world. Tell stories about music people in other parts of the world. And of course our show is going to be the highlight, and it’s music’s biggest night. That’s this year, February coming up, and it’s going to be exciting. Our first show on Disney ABC.

A lot of the young audience lives on what you would call social media platforms. They’re on TikTok or Instagram Reels. Are you going to try to address them there more, or are you going to let the industry handle that?

No, absolutely. We want to be where music fans are and where people who are excited to watch music want to consume it. That’s one of the exciting parts about our partnership with Disney+ and ABC. They are very open to making sure we’re using all the different avenues and outlets for sharing our content, sharing our story, and sharing music with people.

And we’ve seen a little bit of a decline around linear from our show. We’ve kind of gone up and down. We crept our way back up to a pretty good number. But what we’ve also seen and experienced is a massive explosion of consumption in other mediums on the digital side, on our website, on YouTube, on the platforms. So obviously, consumers are changing, and how people are watching is changing. Our hope is that we can keep up with that, especially now in our new partnership.

Is TikTok still the place where all new music gets broken?

A lot of it, definitely. I won’t say all, but it’s a massive influencer, and it’s a huge platform for music people. And I see a lot of people spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out that strategy. How do we use it? How do we leverage that platform to get attention and eyeballs? And you touched on it earlier. It’s an attention economy. There are so many things coming out. I hear 75,000, you said 50,000 AI songs per day, and then another 100,000 songs on Spotify that are coming out. So there’s so much competition for attention. TikTok is something that has proven to bring a lot of eyeballs and ears to the table.

All right. Last question. It’s the toughest one of all, and then we’ll let you get out of here. Why didn’t Sabrina Carpenter win any Grammys this year?

Because our voters didn’t vote for her this year. It’s a tough one. I love Sabrina. She had a great record, but the answer to your question is very simple. It’s always about the voters. And there’s quite often music that is incredible, that is amazing and so exciting that doesn’t win. We have eight nominees, and seven of them lose, sadly. It’s subjective, it’s challenging. But the good thing that I’m proud to say is it comes down to the voters and who they vote for. 

Our process has evolved over the time that I’ve been here. We’ve removed some steps. There were committees that used to be involved. There were other things that would help determine the nominees and the winners. Now it’s a straight vote. How they vote is how you see the results coming out on television. So as much as Sabrina deserves to win and many other artists deserve to win, the voters dictate who gets that trophy.

All right, Harvey. Well, I hope you keep that process as human as possible for as long as possible. It seems important.

Very important. Thank you, man.

Thank you so much for being on Decoder. This is always a pleasure.

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