How To Survive Success, 8 Figure Exits & Being The Dumbest Guy In The Room

0:00 The Brown Note and the Toast

Ernest Chapman0:16 Can you still hear that? Can you hear, I mean, you come in here and you're just, like, casually drinking something, you're on your

Mark Montgomery0:25 phone, I don't know, I just had an energy session out in the hall. So, yeah, yeah, the Zapper guy, the Zapper got me. You're too kind of super tuned.

Ernest Chapman0:34 Tuned, yeah. What do you tune to? Though, I don't know, 432 or 440 because there's a difference. Six, seven. It's 67 Hertz is the brown 57 hurt that it's that is the brown note. It is, yeah, you got your diaper on. There you go. I'm ready. You're gonna need a diaper. All right, I propose a toast. A toast.

Mark Montgomery0:56 Oh, my God, don't give me just a just a touch. Yeah, just touch.

Ernest Chapman0:59 Just just to tell Oh, my God, skull, hold on a toast to betting on yourself.

Mark Montgomery1:04 Toast to betting on yourself.

Ernest Chapman1:09 It's the cough syrup. Yeah, exactly,

1:12 cough syrup. Holy hemp is the New Black. It's good. It's it's hemp. Hemp juice. Betting on yourself is something that I learned from you early on. In fact, I came in as a teenager and saw something you were building that kind of blew my mind. My memory from that was walking into this little building on Music Row. And my mom, at the time, was working with performing songwriter, I think,

1:20 Music Row, 2005, The Demo

Mark Montgomery1:36 actually, I think she was in because David Macias at 30 tigers, who was our tenant at the time, okay, was distributing her hymns record. Oh, man, okay, Latin Yeah, and you were in tow.

Ernest Chapman1:48 Did you know that you can get excommunicated now for performing a latin mass? If you're a Catholic priest and you want to do a latin mass, it doesn't shock me, they'll actually excommunicate. If they do an un without an authorized, unauthorized latin mass, you can get excommunicated. Got to get permission. Got to get permission. So, but you've always asked for forgiveness, not permission, trying. And so I want to so my impression of that moment was walking in, and I just met you, and you were like, this interesting tech entrepreneur, music, data, sort of. And I sat down, and I looked at a computer that you had. We opened this up, you gave the demo, and immediately I saw all this data on all the fan bases of all these famous musicians that you were working with. And I was like, Wait a second, this is everything is in the data. I think I was like, and this was 2005 probably Okay, so 2005 I was in my early 20s, so I was, I was I was 24 maybe 25 and I was, were you? Weren't you younger? Well, you probably thought I was 16 or 17, probably because, you know, I look very youthful. Yes, you do, but not with this anymore, so you can kind of, but I saw something you were doing that really lit me up, which now is, like the core of everything that I'm doing, which is, which is aligning data and and creativity to have a business outcome that everybody wins. It was crazy. But tell me briefly, like when I walked in there and sat down, what? What did you see? Because you saw something in me that I didn't see.

Mark Montgomery3:32 Well, I mean, so you, you came in with someone who I consider to be hyper creative. So by proxy, by genetic line, you would probably fall in the same bucket. And you know, you have a way about you. So that's I think I was, I sort of immediately assume, made some assumptions, and you were clearly curious. And I mean, we all do, right? You meet somebody who the hell is there's there's a there's that old there's that book by Malcolm Gladwell, blink right, where you have immediate reactions, and then you spend a whole bunch of time convincing yourself that that first impression was wrong or not, and what I mean, I think what I what struck me the most about that whole thing was I, at the time, was attempting to educate seemingly Well, clearly very well paid senior executives At every major record company on the planet about why the internet and why Napster and why all of this transformation was not the end of the world as they knew it, and that this was the answer, and they didn't get it, and you did a. And a bunch of other people did too, but it you know, you you very quickly identified. You just eliminated a bunch of middlemen. You just eliminated a bunch of infrastructure. You just brought the consumer, the quote, unquote, fan and the creator, that much closer together with very few people in the middle, and what could be wrong with that in theory? And, yeah, well,

Ernest Chapman5:26 how did that start? Because, I mean, there's, there's a, there's a lead up to that moment that I think is, is critical.

Mark Montgomery5:32 Well, I mean, I think that's it started with it started with playing with it started. It started with the curiosity around computing power, back in the day, that was early was really centered around some combination, you know, the idea that one of my favorite descriptions of the the entrepreneur, the founder, is juvenile delinquent, Yvonne Chouinard, who founded Patagonia, talks about entrepreneurs as juvenile delinquents. We look for a better way when we see, you know, we have this sort of innately. And for me, that combined with a hacker mentality that I picked up and started early with using early Apple computers, the apple, to see the apple, plus that kind of whole era being part of a software pirating ring, frankly, called the tar up, which is pirate, spelled backwards and and we're just playing with computers and then fast forwarded to kind of the early 90s, and playing with sound designer, which was the precursor to Pro Tools. And then in 1993 94 starting to build publicly facing websites. When people were like, Why do we need an email address? What's? What is? What Is any of this? And then, Soon thereafter, recognizing Through, through, see, seeing these bands that were, that were breaking through, but they weren't breaking through in the traditional mechanism, and finding one who was willing to try something crazy, the floating men who I live next door to, the bass player and and there's, there's a whole story around that, but this idea of, let's stop doing what we're doing and do something radically different. So let's take your 75,000 person mailing list and send them a final letter in the mail and say we're never going to send you a letter again. If you would like to continue to talk to us, go to the internet and go to this website. And that became the marketing funnel for a direct to consumer play that we launched back in the day, when you would, you'd go to a bank and, frankly, anywhere in Tennessee and say, I'd like to sell music on the internet. And they'd be like, you want to sell what on the where. And you know, so going to California to get a merchant number, finding a renegade group of guys. At the time, it was Scott Sears and Tim Moses and those guys at telelink who had an early version of a connected they were the pipes, but they were also enabling certain functionality, and to get them to agree to install commerce so that we could then sell music directly to those consumers, and launching that portal on April 20 at midnight, and watching the orders come in, I was like, I don't know what this is, but this is big, yeah. And, you know, that's the era when Amazon had just launched, and there was very little going on on the internet. It was still very and it was a year was that it would have been the kind of mid 90s, the exact date I'd have to go back and

5:40 The Juvenile Delinquent and the Software Pirate

Ernest Chapman9:00 look, but it's it was, nobody was paying attention back.

7:20 Selling Music on the Internet

Mark Montgomery9:03 Nobody was paying attention to the internet. And, you know, when you're a nerd and then you're a juvenile delinquent. On top, it's a great recipe for greatness and or mischief.

Ernest Chapman9:13 I mean that, that combination of personality of like juvenile delinquent, which I'm sure you've got plenty of fun stories, you know, recovering, much to my wife's chagrin, yes, recovering Catholic. No explanation needed there. But then that, you know, combined with being a musician and the bet on yourself, philosophy of like, I'm not going to wait for a record label to give me permission to do something they don't understand well.

Mark Montgomery9:42 And if you then fast forward, right? So, so that everything is, to me, it's all stacked on top. So if you as you as you then begin to do that, and then you start to see the I actually have a relationship. We have a relationship with these consumers. And then also, to be. So to recognize that they're not here for us, they're here for the art. So put the art on top. There's a byline at the bottom, but that's all that. That's all it is. It's all it ever was. Is they're here for the for, for the art. They're not here for aren't you wonderful that you're enabling this commerce. No one gives a sh@#. What they were interested in is, I want to consume this. I want this relationship, and then this desire to understand more and better so that you could serve better. And let's be honest, it's commerce, so serve better means make more money, right? Yeah, more wallet share.

Ernest Chapman10:38 A lot of artists seem to be allergic to understanding how to make money. So that's an interesting overlap. You know, I think about the the echo Music Days, and I think about my mom, who I'm going to be interviewing, so I'll get her impression on this, but she's always been such an artist and such a musician, yep, like 3,000% songwriter performer that she really needs other people to take care of a lot of the business stuff.

Mark Montgomery11:06 The fifth Beatle is what I like to call that, right, right?

Ernest Chapman11:09 If you're John Prine, you really need an albaneta, that's right. So I think it's interesting there too, because, like, one of the reasons I understood it when I sat down and looked at what you were building, well, I didn't have the background to understand the business stuff, but I grew up at the dinner table. Conversation was always which record label or publisher or manager screwed us. I mean, you remember Larry cherry? Oh, yeah, when Larry cherry, like, just woke up in Mexico one day with all of our money, yeah, and everyone else's money, yep. I mean, that's like, the classic. You know, what's the Hunter S Thompson quote you

Mark Montgomery11:43 always read the long, shallow trench of liars and thieves with the downside? Yeah, that's

Ernest Chapman11:48 the music industry. Yep. And so now we're doing projects in a lot of other industries, a lot of other areas. I've spent a lot, I spent many years taking the abstracts that I saw you doing at Echo, learning from being in the room while you're doing this kind of stuff, with other people doing my own thing, and realizing, like, the abstracts are the same across every vertical, every industry. You know, kind of want to talk for a minute about the, you know, the first Tennessee bank project. Oh God, right. Well, they didn't have Claude code when, when we were talking about the infrastructure of banking, right? But I just heard recently that Claude code has now figured out how to reverse engineer COBOL so that all those old code bases that have three guys in their 70s and know how to update them can now be exfiltrated and put into vibe coding so they can vibe code their way through all the crazy stuff that they were struggling with all those years ago. Yeah, well, how did you take this foundation and turn it into all this other stuff? I mean, you've, you've done a lot of crazy stuff over the years, and we're going to tell some of those stories. But, like, I'm kind of interested in the core. You had to become somebody in order to do the things you've done and continue to do well.

Mark Montgomery13:10 I mean, I think, I think, I think there's always a new normal, and I think that that's, that's the journey, right? I think for a long time, you know, there are, there's the, there are all kinds of overlays. There's the social overlay, there's the American overlay, there's, you know, there's all kinds of stuff in the mix. And we're brought up in these frameworks where we, where we assign value to things, and you know, you're a product. I believe when I'm when I I'm interested in knowing someone's story. I want to know where they came from and what their parents did, because I think you're very informed by the environment you come up in, and then you have other factors, right? You have addiction, you have trauma, you have you also have inspiration. You also have it's not all bad, what you what you learn in those formative years and and in a lot of ways, that juvenile delinquent component is a is a blessing and a curse, because the juvenile delinquent is ready, fire, aim, and that has a lot of value if you didn't have, if I didn't have that component, if I didn't have that sort of, you can't do that. Well, Oh, you, f@#% you. You watch me go do it, right? Yeah, then I probably wouldn't have done some of the things I've done. It's also cost me dearly at times and and will continue to probably cost me dearly, because sometimes I even though I think I have some. God forbid to use the word wisdom. At 58 years old, I still have the Oh yeah, but I also have some temperance in how often I apply that, and I've had to have some I um, you know, having failure is the best teacher. It's also not the most pleasant teacher. You know you practice martial arts, you know what it's like to make the wrong move and then get whacked upside the head and so I think for me, I kind of break, break my life into two, two big buckets. You know, it's there are. For me, there, there was the season, quote, unquote, before and the season after. Waking up, realizing that what I thought it was isn't what it was. And so that human doing list that, that list of these are the things I've accomplished. This is the money I've made. This is the and recognizing that that's all leading in a way that you don't think about you think people talk about legacy, and they talk about this and they talk about that, and the reality is, is that it's life is a stream, and it's moving fast, and it's here, and then it's gone and it's never coming back. And, you know, to quote, and I'll give all the credit where it's due my wife Miranda introduced me to Marcus Aurelius, and I'm on my fourth reading of what I consider to be his journal to himself. And the My favorite quote of everything in there, and there are lots of them, is you're a rotting bag of meat, if you can. I mean, if you even want to think about that. And at first I was like, that, what the f@#% is he talking about? And now it's like, I am a rotting bag of meat, right? And I have, I'm in this stream, and I've got and it's going to be gone. And legacy, maybe, if you have enough money to put enough sh@# on enough buildings you might last 100 years. You know, some guys were smart and put their put their money in public libraries, and so their names are going to be around for quite some time. But will people really remember them? And what does that really matter? So, so for me, the shift to and by the way, the shift is not the shift is not easy, because you've you've got so much in you of how you've been that trying to shed that skin, trying to shed that thinking, it's difficult sometimes to not look backwards and go, Yeah, but, but to me, it's, it's impact. Now it's not really, it's about, it's about recognizing that I can make a difference. And, you know, there's this great story of the starfish. Have you heard this? I think you and I have talked about this starfish on the spider. No, the starfish is a story about there's variations of it, but essentially it goes like this. There's an old man. He walks out onto the beach after a big storm, and this is a ritual he does every day, and he goes on the beach, and there are 1000s of starfish that are washed up on the beach that were pushed up by by the current. He looks down the beach, and he sees this small figure coming his way. And the figure bends over. And then, as they're making their way, as he this, this little girl, it turns out, is making his her way towards him. She sees that. He sees that she's picking up starfish and throwing him back in the water. And she comes up to him, and she looks up at him, and he looks down at her, and he says, Why are you doing that? You can't possibly fix all this. And she looks up at him, and she looks down, and she picks up a starfish and throws it in the water. And she said, made a difference for that one. And so for me, that's the work, and that's that's the interpersonal journey of whether that's teaching or mentoring a founder, or whether that's, you know, coming across somebody and being curious, as opposed to how I think I was, historically, I talked about that idea of Blink, you know, making having that first impression. I still trust that instinct, but I also am more interested in investigating it than I used to be. Because, you know, I mean, we all to some degree. Have. We are all narcissists to some degree. Some of us have a healthy dose of it. Some of us do not. And I won't name any names, and I won't put, I would put myself in in a pile of of someone who's aware and trying to evolve and and at the same time, I recognize that, you know, my it's weird, what I am great at is what I try to spend my time doing, and what I recognize is that has continued to evolve, and yet somewhere in the core there are some core tenants that I operate under. And it's, it's never going to be done. And by the way, when it's done, who the hell knows? Like, who knows what that means?

15:40 Before and After Waking Up

Ernest Chapman21:03 Really well, the thing that strikes me about everything you're saying is, you know that that moment where everything changed, that moment which I'd like to hear, that story of what, what pushed you into, what you're describing for me, you know, I think about what is success, and I think about spending many years playing in my mom's band, and do you know what her most successful song is?

18:00 The Starfish on the Beach

Mark Montgomery21:34 I mean, I would, there's a bunch. I would say this kiss probably is success. Well, what is success? Well, so in my opinion, her most successful song is epitaph for love.

Ernest Chapman21:45 Okay, so I would say it's sand and water. And the reason I would say that is I looked out at a front row full of crying people at every single show when we sang sand and water, which was a song that she wrote about my dad passing away, and about raising me as a single mom, and that whole lyric has been an incredible source of healing for a ton of people. I don't know. I don't know how to count how many people, and it really didn't make any money, yeah.

Mark Montgomery22:20 Well, that's, you know. So now we're back to this whole thing about, you know, art and commerce and what is, where is the value? And I think I always thought the value was money, right? Because that's what I learned from my that's what I learned growing up.

Ernest Chapman22:35 Well, you learned that from your dad, right? From my dad, yeah, you know. And I love your dad.

22:40 When You Sold Echo, What Did He Tell You

Mark Montgomery22:40 I do too, but I also, you know, we all have issues with our with our with our parents, and, you know, I got to learn. I learned a lot of things from him that I apply and that I treasure, and I learned a lot of things from him that I very clearly went the other direction, on and went and tried really hard not to do those things.

Ernest Chapman23:06 Well, when, when you sold echo, what did he tell you?

Mark Montgomery23:09 Oh, well, so you think about the idea of, you know, you fantasize about, there's a big board table, and everybody's, you know, and there's a golden pen, and they write the chin. You sign the Dean has lots of zeros. You've done that, though, yeah, and, but it didn't look like that. It was. It was a cramped little Office of the General Counsel of the company. After we had been, this is the whole side, side story. But after we had, had to go track down, like, a single document that nearly blew the deal up, which is why I'm so anal about document, like everything that

Ernest Chapman23:52 explains a few things, oh yeah, and

Mark Montgomery23:55 and the so this is, it's 11 o'clock Pacific Time, and we're trying to get this thing frickin inked and done. And it's not easy to that's not an easy process period. And in our case, it was far more precipitous, because we had made, we had made a series of decisions that that deal needed to get done. And we when we finally were done, when we were through the paper, and my dad is in many ways, my biggest fan, but there was a period of time where my dad was also very jealous of me and was tried to put me in my place a lot, because, frankly, I was some of it I needed, but I wasn't having it, because that's you want to talk about, that whole thing about personality. We can go there in a minute. But as as I find the document, and Chris was the lawyer's name, he left. He went out. The Room to use the bathroom or something. My dad goes, you little son of a b@#$h, you beat me because I had just made more money than he had ever made. Wow. And it was that was a mixed that was he was both, I think, proud, and also probably disappointed. And, you know, that relationship over a long period of time has got been on and off. He was the one who told me, get the f@#% out of my house. When I came home with a pierced ear, you know, called me a faggot and told me to get out.

Ernest Chapman25:36 There's the juvenile delinquent right there. And yeah,

Mark Montgomery25:38 and hair down to my recovering cap, yeah and so. And then on the flip side, you know, later in our relationship, when I I wanted to have a better relationship with him, and I was encouraged to tell him that I loved him. Every time I talked to him, yeah, when I would hang up the phone, I would say, I love you, dad, and he would say nothing. He didn't he. He was never given those tools by his father, right? And it took about a year, and one day I said it, and he said it, oh, yeah. And I hung up the phone, I was like, you know? So I just kept and I and I'm learning that that's that's never over, right? I mean, it's I have a 14 year old daughter who would rather quote her step on the interstate than have a real conversation with pretty much any old older man, including her father. Every day, when I drop her off at school, I tell her to have a good day, and I tell her that I love her, and one day, she'll tell me again, and that's okay, because that's where she is, and this is it's not about me. She's got her she is an autonomous human being. She has her own life already. The work that I've tried to put in there is largely done now, and my job is to be around when she needs me.

Ernest Chapman27:05 So when you were a kid, what was the family dynamic like? What did you learn from your family? Your ancestors spend time with your grandparents?

Mark Montgomery27:16 Like, yeah, my, so, my, so, my, my, my, my mother's father was a raging alcoholic, six kids, cat, you know, a staunch Catholic family, but the in the traditional sense of my dad's family, my my grandfather was A he. He was in the army. He was actually so one of my interests and passions is photography. He was a photographer for the army. He was dropped behind enemy lines in the Second World War to document the war, wow. And so, so he went from that to being he helped build the Mackinac Bridge. He sold photography door to door.

Ernest Chapman28:07 Did was he on D Day? Was he? Yeah,

Mark Montgomery28:09 he was, he was involved in the in the invasion. And, you know, he was a hard he was an a$$hole. He was

Ernest Chapman28:18 straight up a$$hole. So, so your dad got that from his dad?

Mark Montgomery28:22 Well, my dad got this. My dad is a, you know, when you say this word, people have, there's a, there's a, it's a loaded word, the notion of a Salesman. Yeah, right. And I'm a salesman. I just don't sell sh@#. I don't believe in and, and I'm very particular, excuse me, I'm very particular about what I sell. Yeah, and so you know that that is an that is an EQ skill, not an IQ skill, yeah, it's an ability to read the room. I learned a lot of that growing up in a family. So back to so I have kind of both sides of the of the family. And by the way, I think both sides of most people's families are f@#%ed.

Ernest Chapman29:02 Yeah, I mean, you're describing things, and I'm like, Okay, well, I can identify things in my family that would completely match everything you just said.

Mark Montgomery29:09 And some people just mask it, or don't want to talk about it with that. And these

Ernest Chapman29:12 are literally the skills that allowed our ancestors to survive some of the most ridiculous situations you could ever imagine, and cross an ocean and not die, yeah, and get here to give us

Mark Montgomery29:25 this, we had an ancestor on the Mayflower Wow. So you're part of the Mayflower society. You couldn't know there was one, but maybe I should be. You probably need a society to join. Okay, so, so, so, yeah, so I mean, and then if you think about kind of my I was a mistake. My parents were 19. My dad for the first six months. My parents were married. I think they lived in my my his parents basement. Wow. My dad was my I say he was a pool hustler. He would correct me on that. He wasn't a hustler in the sense that he would, he would sort of come in and pretend that he didn't know how to play pool. He would come in and say, I'm going to beat everyone in this room who wants to go first.

Ernest Chapman30:13 Sound familiar? Yeah, that sounds like something. You'd say, yeah. And so,

Mark Montgomery30:17 you know, and that's and we could get into a whole other so. And then he, I think, realized, and then be, and then he started working in in the real estate game. And over a period, long period of time, he he did all kinds of projects, commercial, residential development, etc, etc.

Ernest Chapman30:35 And so you got to watch all that growing up, yeah. And he worked

Mark Montgomery30:38 seven days a week, and and my mom drank seven days a week. Wow. But also painted, and was super crafty, and like, did all these, like we have we have these. We have this Santa Claus we bring out every year that was handmade by her, that's super ornate that she used to put in these boutiques. She, she was a painter. She she was a in a lot of ways, you know, we I grew up on 30 acres of land, and she was over my time there was grooming all of the land like there were trails. And there she would move flowers from one area to another, so they'd be on the trail. And she was very esthetically oriented. You get some of that. So I get some of that from her, yeah. And then, I guess maker, yeah. And my dad. And then watching my dad build, he took the old, I remember this very, very interesting moment. He had bought this old Meat Packing Company called the Rhymer Meat Packing Company, and he was going to turn it into offices. And this place was a sh@#hole, right? I mean, it was like, I remember walking through it going, Really, you're going to, this is going to be and, you know, that transformation into, and then the awards that followed, for rehabbing the, you know, like that, all of that stuff was seeping into me, right? Without me, kind of, he didn't even realize, clearly recognizing it, including the bad sh@#, including, you know, we talked about before we started, you know, going to Hoffman, yeah, you know, including the lines of addiction that come from both sides of my family, that manifested themselves in me, in alcohol that were mostly casual for a long time. Maybe not so casual when I think about some of the we did in college and, you know, but, and then recognizing that and bringing that to a halt at some point, using Hoffman as the mechanism,

Ernest Chapman32:48 yeah, Hoffman process has been amazing. Quadrinity process. They've got the body, the mind, the heart and the soul, four parts of the person, right? And putting them into alignment. Well, as you're describing all this, I'm thinking about how you've inherited all these lines of transmission of trash and treasure, and they're intermingled. They're mixed together.

Mark Montgomery33:13 Well, we talk about this, right? The notion that your your superpower is also your kryptonite, right?

Ernest Chapman33:18 But you've gone through a process. Some of it I've seen. Some of it was before we met. But you know, you've gone through a process of separating the two, right, trying to take out the trash.

33:20 The Process Has Gone Through Me

Mark Montgomery33:30 Is, I would say the process has gone through me. Tell me about that. I would not have wished what has happened to me on my worst enemy, and it did it to me. It was not the other way around. Had it been the other way around, I probably wouldn't have done it the way it happened. But I didn't. I didn't, you know, I can look back now and go, I did the best I could with the information I had at the time. And we all have these births and deaths. We all have these new normals. You know, when I was selling my company, my first marriage was failing, and when I sold my company, I had no earthly idea that I was going to feel the kind of remorse that I felt. I had no idea that I was going that I had no idea that they were lying that not that they were lying to me. I have no I had no idea that it really wasn't about me or my company. It was about what was good for what they were doing, so what they promised that they were going to do when we sold the company to them in 2007 and then seven months later said, Hey, remember what we were talking about there, and not just to us, but to like seven other founders. Yeah, we're not doing that. We're going to go do this instead. And oh, by the way, what that means for you is we're going to systematically dismantle your business that you spent 10 years building, pouring your life into, because it doesn't fit to what we've decided we're going to go do. Do I took that super personally.

34:00 The Dismantling

Ernest Chapman35:02 That sounds like dismantling 10 years of your life. It was

Mark Montgomery35:05 dismantling 10 years of my life, and also dismantling 10 years and then I was dismantling 10 years of my personal life, quote, unquote, with my first wife. And that was all happening at the same time.

Ernest Chapman35:18 How do you get through that level of pressure, stress, chaos.

Mark Montgomery35:24 I mean, you just, you just do it. You don't have any choice. There's only one way, and it's forward.

Ernest Chapman35:30 So that feels like fall back position to the things you learned from your your grandpa and your dad, right? Like that core. You know, we have a phrase sometimes I'm like, oh, Mark's got his a$$ kicking boots on today. Yeah, because

Mark Montgomery35:44 you go on the offensive, there's only, there's only, the only way to win in a game like that is to go on the offensive. I mean, when you, when you look at the end of the day and I mean, this is business, is war, you can, you can put any, you can put all kinds of, you know, whatever, right? But at the end of the day, you're stepping on the field, and you're either going to step on the field to play or you're going to step on the field to win. And if you step on the field to play, you're going to get mowed, because if the other guys stepped on the field to win, they're going to do whatever it f@#%ing takes to win. And so, and even under the awe, I mean, I was the dismantling of our company was was facing down a multinational corporation with a sh@#load of money, with guys at the top of it, who who are notoriously ruthless and me, my little band of sailors, right? I remember one of the, one of the things I was most proud of during that period of time was, and there's a, there's a guy named Steve day, who, you may or may not remember who, who was also a very early adopter. Steve was one of our, one of my what part of my leadership team at Echo And as they were dismantling the company, they were, they were, they were not going to leave people well. And I learned this later in life. I learned that leaving people well is, is karmically the the right thing to do, and it's also harder and takes longer, and you have to be more sensitive to it, as opposed to just ripping sh@# out. And Steve, they put together. This is back in the day when Lance Armstrong was doing these little bands. And they put they had these armbands that said, wwmd, what would Marco do? And basically what they were instructed to do was throw these artists. We had hundreds of artists on this, on our platform, and the big ones, of course, we're going to get treated differently because they were part of all the larger Live Nation deal. And the, I can't frontline entertainment at the time, was Irving's company, and those were all being mashed together, and Warner was in there somehow. And, like, the whole thing was, I mean, it's, it's the it's, it's Illuminati stuff, right? Going on over here, no comment. But this little, this little band of renegades was basically quietly offloading these important clients and leaving them well, handing them all their sh@#, handing them all their resources, where it was like over here they were trying to just rip them out. And that culturally, that notion of we're here to take care of these artists was kind of at our core foundation. It was never about us, it was, it was about them, and weirdly, it was about us, right? On some

Ernest Chapman38:53 but you're, you're an artist, you're a musician. You came at this from the perspective of, like, the Hair Club for Men, like, not only the president, also

Mark Montgomery39:00 a client. So well solving a problem, right? Like the that's the other, I think the other key thing, when you look at people who do this kind of work, they're, they're generally, if you get to the to the core of it, they're solving their own problem. There's a problem that they've identified that turns out there's a market for. And when I think, you know, I go back and think about that time, and if I had not been so myopic and so focused on the artist community, I would have recognized I was building Salesforce five years before Salesforce existed, right?

Ernest Chapman39:35 And it would be or Shopify, or Shopify, I think about what you're saying about you're going to sell the what on the wire. I need a merchant account to sell CDs on the internet in 1995 or whatever. And I'm thinking about when you described everything you had to go through to just build the infrastructure for that

Mark Montgomery39:52 standing on desks while what a lot of standing on people's

Ernest Chapman39:55 desks go on desks. Yeah, it feels like a description of a horse drawn. Carriage before the automobile was invented. And now, like, you know, I mean, we've got clients on Shopify right now that when we need a new product loaded in, it's like, I mean, there's a process involved, but it doesn't, it's not like that

Mark Montgomery40:13 everything we everything we ever wanted back then, is built today, right? So, like, there's this whole thing about, you know, the ongoing work of startup world. And, you know, when I think about, particularly my kind of domain, music, tech, there's nothing left to build. It's all built. Well, right?

Ernest Chapman40:33 Is there? Or maybe there's something we don't see yet. I mean,

Mark Montgomery40:37 well, I think, I think the answer goes back to, I think it's all built. I think could it, will it be improved? Will there be new version? Sure, of course, all that. But what's at the core of that is the connection from the ear to the heart, and that's not going to change now, you know, now we could go down the AI trail, but the I think that that at for me, at the core of all of that work was the transformation that music provided to me personally. You know, you know you're, you know you're in f@#%ed up territory. When Jim Morrison makes more sense than your parents, that's you're really in trouble. And that was kind of for me, my escape out of all the chaos of a workaholic father An alcoholic mother. And it wasn't all bad, right? I mean, I grew up in a, by comparison, in a very, I'm going to use a democratic word, a privileged environment, but that's all relative. And so this idea that music saved my life back then, and this idea that music saved my life back when you and CMAC and a bunch of people came around me in a moment where I needed something to hold and that, that that thing that is putting a bunch of creative people in a room with of with a the Western scale is not very, not Very big.

Ernest Chapman42:18 There's only 12 notes. And yet the

Mark Montgomery42:22 potential of multiple humans working in that same framework produces all this different kind of, these different frequencies, these different ways to communicate, these different ideas, this these vibrations that have some power and and, you know that when I, if I as we're even, as we're talking about it, that's kind of the line that runs through all of this for me, the

Ernest Chapman42:52 power of music, or the power of, well, connection the vibration, I

Mark Montgomery42:56 think it's, I think it's, I think it's All of that. It's and it's also the recognition, you know, I think, when you, when you, you think about the idea that that you hope you get to a certain place and you hope it's never going to change, the reality, back to the stream, is it's always changing. It's always going to change. And so that's, and weirdly, that's what music is. Music is always, it's always changing. It's alive. And it's a respite. It's a place of it's a place of safety for me and and then the work of supporting it. And, you know, we could get into imposter syndrome, and we could get into you, and I've had this conversation, you know, I'm 58 years old. I moved here in 1990 with 800 bucks to be a guitar player, having no idea that, that I didn't even know what that meant until I saw what a real guitar player looked like, you know, and then to come that much further, you know, that dream has, that not even dream, that pursuit of excellence on my instrument continues today, and only here recently have I finally come to recognize my contribution in a room and that it's real and that I'm not an imposter, that I do belong in that room with those people and and that's a weird juxtaposition, because I can sit in that room and I can also sit in the room with the CEO of an $85 billion company and manage that, because, again, EQ, which, by the way, I learned from being in chaos when, when my alcoholic mother and workaholic father were doing this?

Ernest Chapman44:47 And that CEO wants to be a guitar player? Yeah? And all the guitar players, well, I mean, say all of them, but a lot of them, you know, they're working in Starbucks, yeah? And. And they wish they had the stability of that CEO. So I think it's interesting to blend those two things.

Mark Montgomery45:04 Well, it's not dissimilar to your story. When I when you and I reconnected, yeah, you were teaching music lessons for 45 bucks an hour, yeah. And you had one kid, and one more was, was Sebastian on the way.

Ernest Chapman45:17 Oh, no, Sevy wasn't on the way yet. That was 2019 but yeah, when, when I woke up to the world of entrepreneurship was when we had our first kid, Trey, and he was a couple years in, and I started to realize I'm not going to be able to ever spend any time with my child after school when he's in preschool and kindergarten after school, because I'm teaching guitar lessons and bass and piano lessons in the after school hours, and I'm hanging out with everybody else's kids. It was cool because I got to practice being in that role of a mentor and kind of having leadership and teaching, figuring out the psychology of a kid, and I got to see lots of different parenting styles, and I did that for about 10 years, but you actually came along at a at a critical point when that was starting to fall apart and I didn't know what else I could do. And I think there's something that I'm only realizing now, as you're telling your story, that I'm realizing is, is one of your motivations, is that you've, I've seen you do this with other people. You find the the kind of like creative weirdos that have potential, and then help them activate their potential and set them loose. I mean, I went through the Entrepreneur Center, which you were one of the founding people. I think you wrote I went around. I was around early. I went through all that. I went through that training because you told me to go there and do it. And I did pre flight. And I learned all these fundamental things in 2014 2015 and then, you know, not too long after that, I experienced this crazy world of like coming to the ink building. And, you know, so this is interesting, because I want to get the storyline right from your perspective, because there's, there's some timing here where, basically, we haven't talked about flow, but flow was an amazing thing. It was an amazing idea. And that whole thing was winding down as I entered the picture, and I'm looking around, you handed me a hard drive that had a bunch of old files on and I looked through that thing. I think you handed it to like, five people, and one of them was me, and I looked through that, and I said, Wait a second. I could keep doing some of this stuff that turned into not black labs that turned into black labs, intelligence, all the data work that I'm doing right now. I'm thinking about mothership, which was

47:20 The Hard Drive That Became Black Labs

Mark Montgomery47:48 the, which was basically the next phase of what we were building at Echo, right? But the abstract version, not the music focus. But I

Ernest Chapman47:56 see this kind of, like the, you know, King Solomon's temple gets destroyed and rebuilt multiple times, right? You look at the history of that, and it's like this, this great symbol the temple, is you really and your life is mixed in with it. Anyone's life is involved in one of these things you just described, sort of the you know what happened with echo after it sold and then it was dismantled. But tell the story of what happened after that, because that created an ecosystem that we're still in now,

Mark Montgomery48:26 when you say, back up and ask me again, yeah, so, so the after echo,

Ernest Chapman48:31 after echo you went into, I'm gonna figure out how this stuff works mode.

Mark Montgomery48:36 Well, I mean after then you built flow,

Ernest Chapman48:39 and that built a bunch of stuff. So after echo,

Mark Montgomery48:41 what happened was I had a full time job I couldn't talk about, which was basically getting the second tranche of payment from my overlords. So we, we, we spent 14 months basically arguing with them about who owed who what. And at the end of that period, they did pay our shareholders again. They didn't pay us what they owed us, but they did pay us again. And while that was happening, I was also part of there was a there was there were a bunch of people around this idea for the Center for Entrepreneurship, for any one person to claim that would be ridiculous. There were some people who were, were there at the very beginning the the idea of that was conceived in a meeting in 2006 with a bunch of quote, unquote, civic leaders. I don't know, you know, at the time, we were the third largest employer on Music Row. So I was that guy, and I was in that room, and that turned into a project in oh nine, which is around the time that I was finally settling with my overlords. I had gotten divorced, and so I. Had this full time job that I couldn't talk about, and what I decided is I had been lucky. We built echo out of cash. We never had any investors. We took one investor about 16 months before we sold the company, and he was a very unusual investor. That's a whole there's a whole story about that when I think about that. And so there were all there was this confluence of events, and I and I had determined that I needed to be I didn't understand venture investing as well as I needed to, because I had not experienced it. So I went to work for John Chadwick and Don McLemore as an EIR at Claritas capital, and I sat on the other side of the table with those guys. So you got to see, I got to be whole other world, yeah, and I got to see how they thought. And I remember distinctly, always empathizing with the person across the table, not with the people I was sitting with, and they seemed to want more from me, ie, the entrepreneurs would sidebar me, right? And so that work, combined with looking at the Center for Entrepreneurship, didn't know what it wanted to be. There was always this argument inside as it was forming. Who do we serve? Are we high growth? Are we everybody? Are, you know, and that argument, I think, continues, and it probably should. It's also interesting, because this whole world has evolved dramatically. I mean, we're now 25 years into quote, unquote, startup kind of being a thing. And so the in the work for the Center for Entrepreneurship, it was about establishing who are the, what are the best practices in this kind of work. And the Mac daddy's Y Combinator, right? If you want to look at value creation as an investor, there's nobody else that's better, if

Ernest Chapman52:01 it's for an investor.

Mark Montgomery52:02 And PS, by the way, even that system is is being disrupted now, right? So again, this idea, oh, we're on top. Who do we serve? Nothing's going to change, and the river rolls by and sh@#s different,

Ernest Chapman52:16 but, but the Who do we serve? Thing, I'm immediately thinking about the starfish again, because all these entrepreneurs are like little

Mark Montgomery52:21 starfish, and some of them are some, some of them that have washed up on the beach are whales, right? And some are starfish. So, yes, so, so for me, that was that work as I'm doing both of those things, as I'm sitting with and look, I don't mean this is going to, I don't wanna. I don't relate to money. I don't relate to it. I don't it's not what drives me. What drives me is the creativity. Money is just a is fuel for creativity. It's not what motivates me. If it did, I'd probably be much wealthier than I am, because I, like any other knucklehead, this is a classic creative move, like f@#%ing, of course, why wouldn't we try to, you know, and so that, but that, through line of working with the venture community, working on what should the ECB and experiencing the skullduggery of getting f@#%ed by a multinational corporation and recognizing, oh, this sh@#s all a game, yeah, like I was, I'm taking this really personally, and you part of me had to to get p@#$ed off enough to fight instead of to just cave. Because most people, in the face of what, what was happening in that era, would have just caved.

Ernest Chapman53:46 I mean, you could have easily just given up and gone and I was like,

Mark Montgomery53:49 somewhere quiet, not f@#%ing give up. You're not. You've you've made the wrong bet.

Ernest Chapman53:54 I mean, that's part of why I keep kind of trying to figure this, this out, like one phase to the next like, why didn't you just call it and say, All right, well, that was fun. I did make some money,

Mark Montgomery54:06 but because they f@#%ing owed me, period, they f@#%ed us and they didn't, they didn't do it to us or to me. They did it because that's what they needed to do. That was, that was, that was, that was their business. Their business was not about preserving this wonderful thing I created in this community and all these people and these customers. Their business was profit. Bottom line, we've changed our mind. We're going another direction. It doesn't matter what we promised you. It doesn't, oh, sh@#. Oh, wait a minute. Oh, this is all a game. And once I kind of recognize that it's like, oh, well, then let's play it to its logical end and and continue to play it to its logical end. And then there are things that are, I think are sacred, that are non negotiable, which back to music. This through line of showing up and doing the work and coming becoming aware that that this is not something, when I let go of the idea that that what I was doing was for anything but for my own sustenance, for my own mental, spiritual benefit, weirdly, the money, Money showed up at 5057, 58 years old, with this, these film and TV deals that we're doing on music that we created for no other reason than to create it. And then someone goes, that's really cool. Could, could we monetize that? Well, sure, you know, and that's we're now, we're now kind of in the future. But so I think the, you know, kind of back to that through line, and then leading to your question about flow, was all of that informed the idea of, okay, so I don't want to do a public private partnership, because there's too much politics. That's the EC. I don't want to be a venture guy, because I would rather walk on the to call my daughter. I would rather walk onto the interstate then go go to the country club and hang around with a bunch of people with pleated pants talking about nothing. I would rather be with the miscreants, with the musicians, with the weird thinkers. That's my these are, these are my people, right?

56:00 FLO and the Salons

Ernest Chapman56:40 When they're all turning into entrepreneurs and starting companies and coming up with crazy ideas, yeah,

Mark Montgomery56:45 and so, so the timing is really key there. Well, timing is that, timing and team is, I mean, when you get right down to any of this, those are the two

Ernest Chapman56:54 best I'm thinking about made a network. I mean, you've got a music producer, creative guy, and Kevin grush, who was what your EA at the time?

Mark Montgomery57:02 No, he actually. So Kevin, so we'll go to flow for so basically, flow came out of these three kind of buckets. And then one of the constants that we haven't talked about is everyone we all have. I'm a huge believer in having strong mentors that have that have expertise, experience heart, that really are doing it for your own best interest, not for theirs. And this woman who's been a constant in my entire really professional career, Liz Allen Fay, I went to her, and I said, Hey, I want to, I want to convene these salons, these thinking salons where I'm looking for a certain group of people, and I don't know who they are yet. And we started meeting at espaces, which was the original co worker here. I went there, yeah. And we started meeting. And I started it's, it's where smart sh@# with cool people, or cool sh@# with smart people started. That was Flo's business model, which I don't recommend for most

Ernest Chapman58:10 people. I mean, that sounds like a great idea to me.

Mark Montgomery58:13 Well, it, it, it turned out to be a decent idea. And so it was about inviting people in. And then, to quote my grandfather, watch their feet, not their mouth. Who kept showing up. So we started in April, meeting, meeting, meeting. It got to, I think, at one point, we had 20 plus people in the room just showing up. Everyone was showing up every week, talking about ideas, talking about, what will we build? What about the city. What about? And in November of 22,000 November of 2011 there were there. It ended up with with five people, myself included. And that was the core of flow. And the idea was smart sh@# with cool people or cool sh@# with smart people. Each of us had kind of brought our own chunk of relationships to the party. I had been going out to the West Coast a ton, spending time on Sand Hill Road, spending a lot of time with Google. I was part of they had a they had, it's like a thing, and I am Google. No, no. This is pre way, pre Google for

Ernest Chapman59:26 Entrepreneurs that when you have trailblazers, Trailblazers that when you hacked one of their URLs and

Mark Montgomery59:30 then, no, no, that's a separate that's a separate conversation. No. So trailblazers, they invited 150 people from all over the world to the Googleplex, and like John Doar, who's, like, one of the mack daddy venture guys like they, they would put us in rooms with the most brilliant it was. It was a lot of brilliant people all all together.

Ernest Chapman59:53 So you saw that happening and thought we should do that in Nashville, right? That's kind of,

Mark Montgomery59:56 I mean, yeah, good artist borrowed. Great artists stolen, right? And so, so I had the Google relationship. I'll get to the Kevin thing and and as as we we stand this thing up, we basically say, All right, so here's what we're going to tell people we're doing, but here's what we're actually going to do, which is different. What we're going to tell people we're doing is we're a high, high end consultancy. And so we start, we opened the door with Google as a client, under armor as a client, Nissan as a client. We had all these big blue chip deals in place as consultants, quote, unquote. But what we were really doing was every Friday we would get together and basically run a whiteboard of ideas of we want to start this kind of company. And that was the work that was Google. Used to call it Google X, yeah. So 20% of your time would be spent on things that were not possible. That's where Gmail came from. Wow, right? So all this sh@#s borrowed, yeah. And then one day, Kevin gross shows up, and he was at the time, and he he's a very bright human being, and he was having a moment of frustration because he couldn't figure out what direction he wanted to go. And I said, Well, come, come in. We'll bring some food in. And at the time, we were right below the main stage at the cannery ballroom. So like when they'd load the bands in, like sh@# would fall on our desks. That place was, I'm sure there was, sure I've been poisoned by been down there. And so we're in my we're in our little we have a we had a whiteboard room. And he, he comes in and he start, I said, Look, just start talking, and I'll just document it. And he threw up all over for about 90 minutes. And by the end, I was over here, and I was like, So is this what you're talking about? And he's like, yeah. I'm like, Well, then why don't you go do that? And he became the project lead on the Google relationship, and that's how that all started, was, was his sort of ability and acumen, his he, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to be able to get sh@# done. And he got sh@# done. He was not afraid to do whatever it took to get to punch the list. And then that led us to some combination of my I was watching the live at darrell's house thing happen, and I had built this kind of large soundstage that I was trying to figure out what to do with. And so we machinated ideas and made in inevitably turned into a hybrid of a bunch of his ideas and a bunch of our ideas. And then we wrote the first check for that business that went on to be it's funny, because that that deal in particular, it's probably our best deal, in the sense that for the dollars invested, we got 45 times our money back. That's pretty good, simultaneously, the overall flow platform, I would consider to be a failure. Because, why would you call it a failure? Well, I would call it a failure from a monetary perspective, because it did not return capital, right? But individual companies inside, well, some of them, but, but when people, when, when I think about somebody, asked me this, what was flow's biggest success? And my answer to that was, my answer to that today is different than it was what what flow did more than anything else, in my mind was the Google project, which was recruiting Google to Tennessee. And if you look at Google's investment in Tennessee to date, it's in the billions right now, whether you whether you like or think that's a good thing or not, Google, broadly, some people hate that company. Some people love it.

1:03:00 Recruiting Google to Tennessee

Ernest Chapman1:03:47 But that brought a whole bunch of other companies will. I mean,

Mark Montgomery1:03:50 that was back in the day, back way back here, in 2026, or 2006 everybody was arguing about, well, how are we going to be we were, we we were, we were this little Podunk frickin country music town. How are we going to get market validation? And I kept saying in the room, the way you get market validation as a technology center is by getting a technology company to come here. And there's only three. At the time, there were only three, and one of them was Google. In fact, I would argue Google was the mac daddy. Yeah, and that idea, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about, you know, having a crazy idea, and everybody around you telling you your f@#% you know what the f@#% you talking about. And it's like, oh, yeah, watch me. Did we do that? Did we are we responsible for all of that? No, did we light the fire? Did we see the opportunity? Did we act on that opportunity? F@#%ing right? We did. And what did that lead to? Market validation? Google Fiber was a validator. That led to them putting in Google for Entrepreneurs here, which was an idea that really. Came about during that process. Then they, then they expand their investment, right? And that all, all of that led to Amazon, and now to Oracle, Oracle. And whether that's good or not, you know, our mutual friend Molly secures, thinks our city's lost its soul, and at the hands of all this expansion that everybody wanted,

Ernest Chapman1:05:27 I'll be having her on when she's available, because I've already reached out, and she's great. I've heard that, but I've also heard people, you know, old timers, go that started in 1973 Yeah, you know, or whatever, 1976 and there's always Nashville is really interesting, because there's layers of civilizational destruction and renewal. I mean, I remember being a teenager and watching them tear down the Andrew Jackson, the Jacksonian hotel to put in a Walgreens on West End Avenue. You know, I guess back then, there wasn't a Historical Commission with any teeth, but, you know, didn't have Miranda back then. Don't know if that would have happened now, it probably

Mark Montgomery1:06:08 would have, maybe, because at the end of the day, this is, and this is the we're back to the game, right? Unfortunately, the where, where we have assigned value as a species is money, yeah, and, and everything seems to be in pursuit of that.

1:06:20 God as Foundation, the Five Layers

Ernest Chapman1:06:24 So you're now, you you've switched into George Carlin mode. But I love Carlin. I can't argue with you well. So let's talk big picture for a second. I mean, I've got this five part framework we were talking about for where I sort of put God at the top, and then civilization right under that. And then I have purpose driven work. If you have work without a purpose, you have a day job. If you have a purpose but you can't get paid for it, you have a hobby. I always want everything to be both in the work layer and then the family layer, which you know, during the Hello Marco days, I remember we had a statement of principles when I first started working for you and your agency and family first, I believe, was the first principle, still is for me, and that layer has to be healthy or the whole thing falls apart. And then the individual layer at the bottom, the self optimization layer. And it strikes me that in this conversation, we've really talked about most of those layers. We haven't really talked about the God layer, although you did well, we fast to being a recovery Academy,

Mark Montgomery1:07:23 and we talked well. We talked about so. So what I would say a couple things on that one, you know, you're we talked you. We this framework you're describing. I would turn it on its head. I would say God is, is the foundation. And I don't mean God defined by organized religion. I mean God as good or good orderly direction, God as logos, God as consciousness. God is that thing that's in everyone, everyone where it's it's all everywhere. There's a book Bernie ledden introduced me to called the end of upside down thinking, which basically says that consciousness is the root of everything. And I have come to believe that in a way that I didn't before I would consider historically, would have considered myself agnostic, not atheist necessarily, but agnostic only because I had seen I look at, I look at all the prophets, and you know, Jesus is perfectly fine with me. I remember somebody saying to me, I can't remember who it was. Said something to the effect of man, you got balls as big as church bells, you go after Jesus in the open. And the answer to that is, I actually, I don't. I go after his followers. My problem isn't with Jesus. My problem is with his followers, not all of them, but a bunch of them, right? And, and, and every absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't care if you're I don't care who you are. If you're put in a position where you're where you're being revered in a way, inevitably, it seeps into you and you, and you can't help yourself but think you're above all of it. And I just think that's the human condition. So for me, whether you know, whether that is predator priests or whether that is I mean, what's that crazy church in Franklin with that woman who died in a plane crash? The Remnant, the remnant. I mean, holy sh@#. You want to talk about batsh@# crazy, right? And all of that in my mind is about putting an intermediary between me and what I know to be true, which is that there's a God and I'm not he, she, him or it. I don't know what. I don't know what it is, and I don't need to know, I don't need to define it to know it's true. I can feel it. I've seen evidence of it, and I built and I do believe, you know, when you read text, 4000 year old text, you know Marcus's text? In my mind is, is really a journal to himself. It's his personal diary. It's pretty it's his personal diary. And basically, to read that and go, This guy's having the same damn problems. I mean, obviously I was not the king of the known world, that I'm not the king of the known world, but it's all the same sh@#. Well, you're kind of the king of your own world. Well, you, we all are the King of our own individual worlds, right? Yeah, but the idea that that this is the none of this is new, and none of it will ever be new. It's all the same, and it's all going it's all the river. Do I worry about? I think humans have are moving to attaining a level of knowledge that could precipitously decline our numbers, right? Knowledge, clear, okay. I mean, but, but, like I used to be, I used to worry about the planet. I'm not worried about the planet. The planet will shake us off like the bad case of fleas that we are when she's ready, right? And everything will renew itself again, because all those cycles work has happened if we, if we choose to at our own hand, by by means of nuclear, by means of or by giving the robots control of nuclear. I mean, who the hell knows, or by the next black plague, or by pick your pick your version. And so I don't that will all be for whatever reason, if you believe in the notion of logos, if you believe in the notion that it's all happening the way it's supposed to which, by the way, helps you accept things personally, that that that you, I spent a long time not accepting a lot of things. You, you've heard many of these things, right and and I still do that to some degree, but I don't do it nearly as much as I did, and I live more in this notion that whatever's happening is happening because it's supposed to happen, and that my job is to show up every day and do the best that I can in the in the moment that I'm in and, and that's it. And, and can I affect change? Yes, to some degree, I've done that. But is that part of the some larger thing. I believe that that's true in a way that I don't think I did before.

1:12:20 In the Room With Death

Ernest Chapman1:12:25 What got you there? Something shifted

Mark Montgomery1:12:29 Well, I mean, I think what got me there was I, I consider it a great honor to have been in, to have been around, to have been in the room with death multiple times, and you know, the very intimately close to it, sitting in the room with it. And when you you know, I'll go back to my favorite quote, you're a rotting bag of meat. You and I are dying sitting here, right? And whether that's happens immediately because I step out the door and get hit by a bus, or whether that happens slowly and painfully via some disease, or, you know, whatever that is. That is the end. I'm going to take the dirt nap if I have, if I live to be the average age of my lineage, I'll live to be 85 I have about 9700 days left. So I never thought about that. I never, you don't, until you stare, until you sit next to it, and then, you know, my wife passing, and then my mother passing and being the only one in my family who knew what to do with she's she's gonna die. My dad couldn't be with her. He could not do it. My sister could not do it. I could and I was able to be with her, and I was able to I owed her amends, and I was able to make those, and I was able to tell her it was okay to go, and that we would be okay, right? And that sh@# you don't come back from, you just don't. You just don't. I mean, you know you, you've lost people close to you. And I think that that transformed me in many positive ways, and it also did a f@#%ing number on me for for a period of time that I wished I had could have shortened. I wish that it did not take me so long to recover from all of that. But I also recognize that that I was I used to think. Because, because of the role that I had back in the day, and because of the story that I told myself, and you put on this suit of armor when you're a CEO and you go out, you're you're in the war, I didn't really think that. I didn't really consider myself to be a very emotional or feeling person, because I had locked that up behind the suit of armor I needed to do what I was doing at the time, and that was stripped away, whether I liked it or not, and and the, you know, the destruction of my ego, recognizing here's a guy who purportedly can do anything he puts his mind to, and I can't save the things that are the most important to me, and you just, it just f@#%s with your head. Yeah, and you wake up and go, and then we're back to I'm a rotting bag of meat and the rivers running, and I can't do anything to stop it. And I get a I get a glimpse of it, and it's gone before, before I know it. And that's me too. And so I think that, and the stripping away of the ego and the recognition that, you know, a lot of what we do, a lot of how the game is played, is so frivolous and so uninteresting. You know, when I stepped away from it, I think the assumption would be, the assumption was, for me, that I would come back to it, and I've never really gone back, because it's not interesting to me, and I recognize its value, quote, unquote, in relation to building a company or to you, there are certain things you have to do, but I have chosen to step away and not do those things because it doesn't, it doesn't feed me, and I'm not quite sure what all feeds me now. I mean, I know some things. I know I like, I like playing music. I mean, I know I enjoy time with friends. I love I love being home. I don't like to travel. I used to travel all the time. I was going out half the year at my peak at run an echo.

Ernest Chapman1:17:14 I would prefer not into doing that again. No, but you've, you've had amazing mentors, yeah, been very lucky. I've gotten to meet some of them, but then you've become a mentor. So I want to understand the connection here to a minor in reality, which started as barefoot Wednesday, yeah, so during all of this time, you were in parallel building an education continuum that can save people.

1:17:20 A Minor in Reality, the Mentorship

Mark Montgomery1:17:44 I don't know if it's an I don't know if it's an education. I mean, I know what do

Ernest Chapman1:17:47 you want to call it, but it can, it can save people from a lot of the mistakes that you had to learn the hard way. You can't save them from their own mistakes.

Mark Montgomery1:17:55 Yeah, I mean, I Well, so, I mean, I see the starfish on the beach again. That's, well, that's what it is I see. And it's the same thing. It's whether it's Kevin gross or Dre aggression, or when I was working with David Mason, or whether it's you, or whether it's Charlie Jordan, or who, what I, what I, what I recognize is, well, I'll, I'll kind of abstract it there, really, it's, there's two, there's two things, but they're related to each other. When I realized a couple years ago that the the idea of being a founder, that that whatever that is, is fairly unique, and founders cannot be directed by anybody but other founders. And frankly, they can't really be directed, right, because they're

Ernest Chapman1:18:50 juvenile, because they're juvenile

Mark Montgomery1:18:52 delinquent, right? Of course, yeah, and so. But if you've been where they want to go. There are moments where they will listen, right, not always, and so call that mentorship, call that education, call that call whatever you want to call it there that there's, there's frameworks for those kinds of interactions that are more uh, not non standard. I don't know what the right word is. Well, I just

Ernest Chapman1:19:25 remember a minor reality, and we, you know, well, being pulled into that. And we're teaching a class at MTSU on marketing and the music industry. Well, that and breaking all of their

Mark Montgomery1:19:34 rules, we really weren't teaching. That wasn't what we were ever teaching. I mean, that was, that was, yeah, so, so to me, that was and back to juvenile delinquency. When, when Bev Kiel said to me, Look, I'm going to give you something the other universities that want you to teach for them will never give you total autonomy. And she meant it, and she lived up to that promise for 10 years, and I know she took an enormous amount of sh@# for me. Because, to your point, every everything we were told we could not do, we did.

Ernest Chapman1:20:05 And when you look at the trajectories of some of those students, oh yeah, it's crazy.

Mark Montgomery1:20:11 It's and, you know, I used to spend a lot of time worried about the kids that I wasn't reaching, but it works. Well, it does work. And it's education. Yes, it's education. Yes, it's education, it's experience. It's a combination. It's a bunch of things. It's also, you know, it's also tough love, like I've got a new class. So when we folded the tent on the first version of that, really two reasons, one, because when Beverly got promoted to run the entire platform at MTSU around recorded music and entertainment. She had bigger problems than our little band of misfits, right? And so

Ernest Chapman1:20:53 it's like it was so hard to get fired, though I remember we tried. Well, we would have gotten fired by the guy who took her place. Inevitably, he would have fired us. I guess the pandemic kind of helped. Well, the pan helped.

Mark Montgomery1:21:03 Well, the pandemic, that was the other big thing. So coming out of that, and having spent 10 years and feeling really, you know, generally, really good about that work, and to your point, I can think of, I mean, we, we and I stole this from Jeff Cornwall, who I love dearly, the lifetime guarantee. You know, I keep up with a lot of those kids because we say at the beginning, you're stuck with us. You're stuck with me. You got, I got a drug. You into it, right? And so the the work, I think, speaks for itself in the form of of these people who have gone on now, again, I'm not. I used to be the one I would, I would, and still do. Sometimes want to take credit for things that I was only fractionally involved in. And it's the nature of we're back to narcissism and that whole thing, or being a sales guy, right? Or being a sales guy, but, but truly to see and to have it continue, a young lady who went through that continuum with us a number of years ago, Alyssa, came to me here recently. She's got a big change going on in her world, and as she was describing it to me, I said, Well, here's what you need to do. Need to go sit down with a guy who's going to be in charge now and tell him what you want. I can't do that. I'm like, Yes, you can. Yeah again, yes you can, right? And so it's mindset training. It's, it's tough love. It's, it's having a conversation with a young man in my current class who who clearly wants to be something and is doesn't recognize that, that that's great, and I'm in full support of that. But in order to be that, you still need these other things, and you can't be just the artist, right? If you're just the artist, your business manager ends up in Mexico with all your f@#%ing money, right? And, yeah, so that that that being able to say to him, the f@#% are you doing? Right? Like, yes, stop and have, oh, and by the way, yeah, here is the playbook, right? And whether that you know like and they're all different. And that's the other thing I love about teaching, is I learn as much as as they do. In fact, I think often I get the better end of the deal, because it keeps me thinking about, Oh, sh@#, I didn't think about that. What's on their mind, right? And and at the same time, I get to things that seem obvious to me are they can't just like, mind blown. Like, what do you mean? I can just do that. And it's like, so that idea of, you know, the original inspiration for the class was, I want to teach a class that I wished I had had, I wish somebody had told me back here, right? This whole thing is a f@#%ing game, right? Like the whole thing, and so play and play hard. Learn how to and learn how to play and learn how it works. Don't take what's, what's been, what's, what's what you're being told is, is, often you're being told something to keep you in your place. And I'm saying, There you there is no place. Your place is where you decide it is, and that's what you need to go do.

Ernest Chapman1:24:33 You're teaching them to bet on themselves. Yeah, I am, yeah. And that seems to be a big through line that you mentioned music, you mentioned, mindset, empathy, the empathy piece really strikes me talking to you and kind of just we haven't really had the time for some reason to sit and have this conversation in many years, because we're f@#%ing busy, because we're really busy doing a lot of amazing work. Yeah. Uh, but as I sort of zoom out and look at the the big picture here, it's actually really striking the amount of emotional quotient or emotional connection that's required to actually juggle all these different competing energies, all these unstoppable force meeting and immovable objects situations. There's these people that are just doing the best they can, trying to navigate a complex, confusing, ever changing world. And you're you seem to just have this strange attractor where you pull in the one unicorn, herder, yeah, the unicorn, or where you're pulling in the ones that are the creative, brilliant weirdos that that could really do something dangerous, actually, that they don't know it yet. How do you find that? How do you

Mark Montgomery1:25:49 it's, I mean, we're Meg, I think we attract. I think, I think it's the law of attraction.

Ernest Chapman1:25:55 Did someone do that to you or

Mark Montgomery1:25:59 Well, I mean, f@#% Jim Morrison, man, I've always been attracted to the weirdos, right, the highly creative that that anything that flew in the face of normal seemed interesting to me. Always, right? I'm always attracted to those things that are a little obtuse. And and I also recognize being a parent now that consistency is also important, right, in a way that I did not recognize that historically and, and, you know, being becoming a parent, you you be. It is for a selfish prick. It was the self selfless act, and it was, it was unintended. I didn't I just try to, I, I try to do things when I when I embark on something, I try to do it to the best of my ability. And and I am, I am not afraid to have an opinion and to stick to that opinion. I'm also not afraid to look at, look at a situation, and recognize that I'm wrong in a way that I think historically I was, I was more self centered. I learned that from the women in my life. And, you know, so for me, I think we're it all in a way, it all comes back to the starfish. My my work here, whether that's on an individual basis, whether that's within the framework of a classroom, or whether that's in the framework of a community, is to show up as best I can with the information I have and try to try to have an impact. And I used to do that for the accolades. I used to do that for the power. I used to do that, but we're back to narcissism. I used to do that for for the wrong reasons. And I do it over here, and I can still do it for the wrong reasons, because that can, that can show back up, but I try to do it for the reasons of, how do I how do I take the information that I've got that served me reasonably well and impart it to somebody who doesn't have that information? And I don't, I don't necessarily think about that. I do that more freely without, without what's in it for me. And I only learned that being a parent, I only learned that seeing that my job now, you know my job was, my job is, my job will be. And, you know, I, I think that I, I feel that in a way, maybe it's the hemp oil. I feel that in a way that I don't think I felt before, because I don't think I allowed myself to feel for a long time. And when I first started to feel I didn't like it and and mostly what I felt was sadness and grief. And as that has been removed through work, I've also been able to feel contentment and joy and in a way that I that I didn't before, because I was too busy being a human doing. It was, it was just about getting it done, and it's still about getting it done, but it's about getting it done within the framework of of impact as opposed to accolade

Ernest Chapman1:29:39 or human doing versus human being? Yep. Well, it strikes me that there's a quite a paradox that you come from of having simultaneously enough trauma that you don't want to feel your own feelings while you have the emotional empathy to read the room and to meet.

Mark Montgomery1:30:00 At least, which, by the way, you learn from coming up in an alcoholic home, because you go, because your radar is up, because it's you got to figure out what, who is everybody in the room today? Who is, oh, his mom today? Yeah, who's mom today? Whose dad today? Is it dangerous today? Is it safe today? Wow. And I didn't grow up in an abusive that wasn't, it wasn't the abuse was mental and it wasn't in I don't really believe my mother intentionally abused me. Sh@# happened, right? Sh@#? I mean, she was doing the best she could with the information she had at the time. That's forgiveness in a way that I didn't have forgiveness. People don't do things to me. They do things and I happen to be in the way. And, you know, that's that's different. That's much different thinking. And I still think some people, sometimes people do things to me, and that's I'm human. Sometimes I think my wife f@#%ing hates me and and sometimes she probably does, because sometimes I do stupid sh@# because I'm human, but it's a river and it'll be gone

1:31:00 Just Do It, AI, and the Last Toast

Ernest Chapman1:31:15 as soon as it's seen. So got one more question, and then then we should wrap

Mark Montgomery1:31:19 that means people are by now have tuned out. They're completely asleep.

Ernest Chapman1:31:22 Yeah, oh no, it's great, great nap time. It goes into the subconscious. So someone's watching this, and they've Googled you, they've seen all the stuff you've done, and they want to be like you or do something like you, right? To sort of a combined question, because I want to talk a little bit about AI and where the puck may be headed. But I also want to talk about that person that is setting out at the beginning of their journey, who may never meet you, who may not be in the same city, who might see this and go, I want to do all this stuff. And you know what? Maybe they even have some of the same kind of cocktail of trauma, trash and treasure, all mixed together. There's a recipe for the kind of person who's crazy enough to try to do some of the stuff that you've done, and you've also described this multiple seasons of your life where you finally found a way to feel your feelings, have faith in something bigger than you, and be doing things you know, not just with your a$$ kicking boots on, but also for impact and to help the world in a whole other way and help individual people. What would you tell that person? Would you warn them about anything? Would you tell them, and also knowing that they might not be able to get a job that they thought they were going to train for, they might have to go start something because those jobs are disappearing. With AI,

Mark Montgomery1:32:55 there's a lot of questions.

Ernest Chapman1:32:57 There's too many questions. Well, so what's your reaction to my cocktail of questions

Mark Montgomery1:33:01 on the topic of AI, I think it's, I think three things, one, sometimes I think it's y, 2k, I think we are all drunk on the notion of technology. And I think there is, I hope that there is a real, I don't think your life is in a screen. And I think a lot of people, I mean, I think statistically, we are living our lives in screens, which I think is super unfortunate, the small screen, when you think about the Untethered Soul, this notion that you live in this small world, versus the seat of consciousness, which is every which is everything. So i were i, and i also think they're jamming it down our throats, and we, in a lot of ways, we are the victims of our own belief that technology is going to solve all our problems. I don't really believe that that's true. And at the same time, I recognize that you'd be a fool to not be involved in it, because in a way, there Do we have a choice? Sure. Is it a choice that most people are going to get to make? No the people who get to make it are the really rich people who, by the way, when you look at all those people who PURPORT The value of the tools that they sell us, their kids don't use them, right? So the very rich are going to get a choice, and the very poor are going to get a choice. Actually, they don't have a choice. They just don't, you know, the middle which, by the way, is going to get crushed is, is you're sort of stuck,

Ernest Chapman1:34:52 but that's the landscape, right? That's what I see. And I'm seeing Mike. You know, I have a 12 year old and six year old. You have a 14 year old one day there. Going to be kind of like the next generation of little marks and little Ernest going, I want to do something. Mean, yeah,

Mark Montgomery1:35:08 and my answer to that is just go out and do it, right? I mean, in other words, like, I'll give you, I'll give you a really practical example. And this goes back to something you said earlier. What I see is potential in everybody. And so I'm, on one of the one of the tenants of this class, or one of the pods, or of a minor, in reality, is this idea of Mission Possible, which is, go find somebody who has something that you want that seems out of reach, and find a way to get to them and see if you can, if they'll impart some wisdom on you. So one of those, one of one of these kids that I that completed that exercise actually got his guy to agree to show up and and do a meeting with me. He didn't show up to the meeting. He was busy. It's fine, it happens. So I'm sitting with Mike on the phone, and we're I learned something about him that I didn't recognize, and as he's and so we hang up the phone, and I have this other I have this problem that's come up that I need a solution for, and it turns out he's the solution. And I'm like, so I ping him, and I'm like, hey, what about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's comes back, and he goes, Yeah, I could do that. And I said, you know, this is a business. What do you mean? Well, yeah, it's a business. Do you know what? How people charge for this, right? Did you know that probably you have two full days here while you're living here this semester, that you're free? You could probably start your side hustle now, and by the time you want to move back to Nashville? Yeah, I want to move back to Nashville, you could have your business established by the time you come back. And all you have to do it right. And here's what it takes to do that. So my advice to anyone who's dreaming about it is just f@#%ing do it like, what is the itch you're wanting to scratch? And go scratch it. Because the ability to do those things. This is, this is the benefit of technology, right? A lot of what you couldn't you would need an army of people to do before you don't need an army of people. You don't need a bunch of stakeholders. You can do a lot of it in a technology enabled way that allows you to take an idea and turn it into reality much quicker. And that is part of AI, right? That. And if the wife is sitting here, yeah, if my wife was sitting here, she'd be and this is not wrong either, right? Ai kisses your a$$, up and down. It makes you feel good. It's addictive. It's like any other. It's like this motherf@#%ing thing, right? You want to, you want to, you want to know why our kids are f@#%ed up. You're looking at it and and why we are, why we are more siloed, why we are more we we are being programmed in a way that if we you're not aware you're being programmed, and you're you participate in it, you're going to end up one way or the other. Why are we polarized and and if we spent more time like this, you know, like this week, I'm taking a couple days off. At the end of the week, I intend to spend those days outside, planting flowers and raking and my I think my daughter and I are going to go see a Monet exhibit, and like, if she wants to go, and if she doesn't, that's okay too. So the and because I recognize that in the stream there's going to be that moment, and then it's going to be gone, and that somewhere down here, or when I walk out the door and get hit by a bus, I'm going to be gone. And so what's my job? My job is to be here with you. My job is to be present as best I can when my f@#%ing monkey mind gets going. That's the other thing we didn't even touch on transformational for me, has been a meditation practice that, yeah, that is a constant, that that is a reminder that is that slowing the stream down enough to go, Okay, it's all it's all good. It's it all of it's good, even the stuff that doesn't seem good. I can look backwards now and see the benefit of sitting next to death in a way that I couldn't when I was sitting next to it,

Ernest Chapman1:39:30 but you can see it now. Yeah. And you know, if you believe that consciousness and God is the foundation of everything, then there's a huge benefit to just silencing all the noise and listening internally,

Mark Montgomery1:39:44 and doing it in a way that isn't, you know, we are all are, I say stuff to myself that I would never say to anybody else, that internal monolog is horsesh@#. It's, it's lying to. You, and yet it is perpetually, they're telling you all these things and

Ernest Chapman1:40:09 tricking you into making decisions based on what it said. Yeah, that's right, all right. Well, final toast.

Mark Montgomery1:40:15 Oh, Jesus, yeah, I gotta, I gotta go work. Just a little, just a little, my God, I can't believe you're doing that.

Ernest Chapman1:40:22 I'm gonna switch the line up, though, instead of bet on yourself, connect or die, connect or die, because that's really what this is all about. Thank you for connecting, for coming and being in person here with these candles and fancy cough syrup. Love you mark, Love you too. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai