KOBE BRYANT'S LAST GREAT INTERVIEW On How To FIND PURPOSE In LIFE | Kobe Bryant & Jay Shetty

to say okay it's okay to fail because you're gonna be loved no matter what i had to look at it from a long term because i wasn't gonna give up on the game right so i had to say okay this year i'm gonna get better at that next year this and so forth and so on and then patiently i was able to catch them the first question i want to ask you because so much of your content right now that you're creating here at granity is aimed at helping young people aimed at helping children and

as a father of four girls i wanted to ask you what's the biggest thing you've learned about yourself by being a father uh you know it's amazing like when you become a parent things become much more you know life becomes you know yeah it lines things up for you a little differently right like before you have kids me and my wife we can travel anytime you know there's work and you know you become very uh you have a very clear focus when you have children it becomes about them it's not about you guys anymore right

and so that shift it's a big one you know it's one of kind of a selfishness together and then to being absolutely selfless and doing anything you can for your kids and so what i'm trying to do is create content to teach them first and foremost that's why i started this whole thing it's just reading stories to them that i felt like didn't exist you know our kids are athletes and they love reading about princesses and all these fairy tales and you know they get a little sick and tired about the man saving the princess

every time and you know the same old stuff magical wines and all that my kids are athletes man they want to learn about soccer balls and basketballs and volleyballs and you know magic that comes from that yeah and i love that you're encouraging young people to think more imaginatively about sports yeah and i think that's where you go a step deeper you know for me observing you and learning about you and hearing you speak in other interviews and everything what i'm fascinated by is that you've dealt with things in life pretty head-on right you've always

gone at it what took you a while what was something in your life that you were shy about originally or that took you a while to go head-on with but then finally you got there and you figured it out uh writing dear basketball that was a hard jump you know because i had written before i mean i started writing probably about 17 years ago so practicing every day a lot of things that i wrote were were ads and so you write an ad nobody looks up at who wrote the ad right you can kind of

there's a certain uh anonymity that comes along with that right but right there basketball was different you know it's putting it out there for the world to see it's trying to create a short film and i didn't know if i could do it man and uh you know it was my daughter who kind of put things in perspective for me gianna she's now 13 and she was like well you always tell us to go for it so yeah she put me on the spot she was like you're gonna talk about it you're gonna be about

it basically and you know and that that gave me the final push i love that when you started writing 17 years ago did you envision that one day you would move into this storytelling no was it just something you enjoyed no man it was something i enjoyed and i enjoyed writing ads it was something funny about trying to distill a message down into 30 seconds or a minute depending on the budget you know what i mean trying to say something important um trying to speak to the you know brand attributes but also speak to something

that's greater and that has a stronger message stronger philosophical message and how do you connect those dots so putting that puzzle together was something that was really intriguing yeah but like you know i never thought i'd be writing novels or movies and that sort of stuff never man i love that man i love it how everything evolves naturally and actually hearing you say that it reminds me so my vision when i was sharing earlier became very clearly making wisdom go viral and i was like how do i take these teachings that are like so sacred

they're hidden away in these books and how do i make them really relevant and accessible and practical to the whole world because i know that anyone can access them they're universal right these these teachers can apply to anyone but sometimes they're just hidden away sure and a young person doesn't know how to find them so that inspires me hearing them that's beautiful too because especially in today's um in today's world there's so much clutter you know it becomes harder for kids to try to weave through a lot of the crap that's out there to find

uh stuff that's actually beneficial to them yeah it was i think you reminded me i think eo wilson said we're drowning in information starving for wisdom for sure especially that's why i think your work is cutting through because i think what you've managed to do with your new work is that you're finding ways to connect with what people care about but you're taking it a step deeper yeah right you're not you're not just settling for like let's talk about sports it's not just about sports for life right it's about the metaphor that sports has for

life i mean you know sports is the greatest greatest metaphor we have in terms of dealing with life because you know even if you listen to music music will give you guidance right that you can then meditate on and think about how you would apply it in sports you have to apply it in the here and now i mean you're faced with challenges moment to moment you're faced with pressures and anxiety and communication or the lack thereof and also their stuff like it's in the moment so you have to live it and when you practice

those things you become better at it but i just feel like in this day and age our children have become less imaginative about how to problem solve and parents and coaches have become more directive in trying to mandate or give orders or teach kids how to think and teach kids how to behave versus and tell them how they behave versus teaching them how to behave and so that's why i'm creating these stories and creating this content yeah i love that i think it's so true when you treat people as kids then they always be kids

right even when they grow up and for you it was really powerful because you've talked about this before where your father said to you like whether you scored zero or 60 yeah like i love you yeah tell me what that statement meant to you at that time and and how did it actually motivate you to continue scoring 60 rather than go oh i'm all right it's zero well it did more than that right so like the basketball stuff speaks for itself in terms of what that comment made you know did for me in terms of

giving me stability and giving me confidence to say okay it's okay to fail because you're going to be loved no matter what and that that doesn't just mean basketball that means anything in life that means writing that means being an entrepreneur that means um having the confidence to go for it and um i've seen too many parents do the exact opposite and it terrifies children and children become paralyzed by their own fear because they don't have that security blanket of love and comfort yeah absolutely how have you been able to in your life see past

the cloud of emotion to actually execute on things because i think what we were speaking about earlier this challenge that young people have today everyone has today of just so much information so much cloud of emotion so many feelings so much childhood baggage that you're bringing like how have you always cut through that and execute them you know i what i try to do is just try to be still and understand that things come and go emotions come and go the important thing is to accept them all to embrace them all and then you can

choose to do with them which you want versus being controlled by emotion you know a lot of times i've seen players even myself you know when i was younger being consumed by a particular fear um and to the point where you're saying okay nah it's not good to feel fear i shouldn't be nervous in a situation like not and it does nothing but grow versus stepping back and saying yeah i am nervous about the situation yeah i am fearful about the situation well what am i afraid of and then you kind of unpack it and

then it gives you the ability to look at it for really what it is which is nothing more than your imagination running its course you know yeah absolutely yeah i love that because what you're saying is that when you're dealing with something it's almost like how can i get to the root of it yeah because sometimes what we're dealing with like you're saying it's an imagination an illusion it's not really it's not it's not really a thing you know like you think about game-winning shots and or game-winning free throws and people go to the free-throw

line and you're nervous about it well what are you really nervous about if you unpack that okay you're nervous that you're gonna miss the shot all right so you missed the shot then what happens people are gonna be embarrassed you're going to be embarrassed because thousands of people millions people see you missed a shot all right and then what people are going to talk bad about you okay right and so you're looking at you go are those things even important you know what i mean if that that is my fear like what is you worried

about letting your teammates down okay have you let them down before well i'm sure and practice and things of that nature right they're still there yeah you know and so when you're able to unpack it you kind of look at it for what it is which is really nothing yeah i love that breaking it down i think that's so important i think everyone who's listening and watching right now next time you're facing a fear next time you're going against something do that like literally unpack it don't just settle for your first answer because the first

answer is really the right one don't hide from it you know you got to be able to look at it and you know and and and deal with it head-on yeah i love that man and and you talk about that because you talk about you know when you talk about missing uh five throws and you talk about uh getting over yourself yeah right like getting over yourself how did you get that mentality of just being like i need to get over this like i need to get over myself you know trial and error you know

you grow up and you make game winning shots and it's awesome you come back the next day and miss a game when it's shot and it's misery and then the next day comes and you're back playing again and you understand that life has this cyclical nature where it's you know what you do on monday it's fantastic but then tuesday's a bad day but guess what there's wednesday so we just supposed to live our lives like this the whole time you know versus just staying like this and understanding that it's really just a journey of evolution

every day it's just constant improvement constant curiosity constantly getting better the results don't really matter uh it's the figuring out that matters yeah and we all get obsessed about the results yeah like we get obsessed about like the output yeah not the input of not figuring it out and not like changing things what you said trial and error like the experimenting yeah we forget to do that it's unfortunate man like i've seen a lot of players um especially now you know in youth basketball dealing with that um you have players that are like bigger and

faster and stronger and you know their coaches are just coaching them for results you know we're just going to use your size that because you're bigger than every other 12 year old out there to dominate today and but they're not growing right so they're just based on that result but they're not focused on growing this young child yeah into becoming a better athlete and through that teaching them how to become a more well-rounded person and we're missing that yeah see what you've said there just i want to ask you this and i'm not saying because

i you know like you know yourself best and you know how you've got there so i'm asking it from a place of humility of learning when i look at you i'm like you know your superpower isn't just your work ethic your superpower isn't just like figuring things out your superpowers like you think strategically like that's a very strategic thought of saying this person could be this in the future if they were developed as a whole individual right rather than just like let's use them for the short term right and where did you develop that from

that ability to see beyond to think deeper to to reflect deeper where did that come from well i had to do that because you know i grew up growing up in italy when i first moved over there it was you know i didn't speak italian i didn't have any friends you know i had the game of basketball and through sport and playing soccer i was able to make friends and build connections but it was a lot of time spent alone and and when i came back to the states i wasn't the most athletic kid you

know i was really scrawny like really really skinny and had like major knee issues because i was growing so i was the dorky kid with hot socks and big old knee pads it's fashionable now it's fashionable now it wasn't then and so um i had to look long term because in the here and now i couldn't compete with these kids i mean there was kids that were like 12 years old with beards like i can't i can't what am i supposed to do with that like they're doing windmills and dunking backwards and i'm happy to

like tap the backboard you know so i had to look at it from a long term because i wasn't going to give up on the game right so i had to say okay this year i'm going to get better at that next year this and then so forth and so on and then patiently i was able to catch him yeah that's i love hearing that because i think so many of us kind of you believe like when when you see people like yourself it's like it's so easy as an excuse to ourselves oh you're destined

for it right you were made for me it's kind of like that kind of you know like oh yeah you know but but when you talk about saying oh actually when i started i didn't have the physicality that meant that i was gonna make it like you had to figure it out and i love it figure it out man it's just piece by piece and it's the consistency of the work which i feel like a lot of parents are missing today because we're not teaching that to our kids we tend to say like kids don't

want to do the work but in reality it's when we're failing them because we're not leading them the right way and teaching them yeah you know how to fish you know what i mean and so like the consistency of work monday get better tuesday get better wednesday get better right and you do that over a period of time you know not like one month or two months i mean it's three four five six seven eight nine ten years and then you you know you can get to where you want to go yeah i think it

was bill gates who's talking about that he talks about how like we we overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten years no doubt right like it's like that yeah like i think everyone thinks about like what can i do right now like how can i make it happen but like with you i think people always ask you also like you know how do you deal with losing or failure what i'm intrigued by is how someone like you deals with winning because you've won again and again and

like i was saying earlier you you know you want obviously we know you won in basketball big as an athlete but you you're winning now even in the work you're doing here as a storyteller as a producer right it's amazing to see so many incredible awards coming through how have you dealt with winning like when you win what goes through your mind to help you to continue well it's a little different like in basketball it was different because i expected to win you know like i expected us to win championships i expected us to win

five quite honestly i expected us to win eight um and so when you have that vision in sports it's a direct competition like i know how hard they're working i know how hard we're working i know what their strategy is i know what r is it you know so it's a little different so we went in the nba it was like yeah we expected to do that but now we we're going to come back and we're going to do it again you know and so it's that constant like all right you're churning you win one

championship i'm back in the gym the next day working getting ready for the next one now uh it's different because it's not about the awards you know you just wind up trying to create something that's that's going to inspire someone that hopefully you know through that inspiration they can inspire somebody else and what i've come to learn as my career went on is that's more significant than any championship is how do you connect with somebody that can then connect with another and then with whether the awards come or not you know that's for you know

um you know the academy of the word uh um body to decide but you know like for us it's just to try to create things yeah well i guess now that's what shifted that now the intention isn't even expecting to win it's expecting to change lives right right like your content is really about making a difference and an impact on young people sure i'm sure which i which i think is like the biggest way of winning i think so i mean you know we're looking at 62 percent of young children are dropping out of sports

62 and they cite the fact that it's not fun anymore well what does that tell them i mean that's telling us us as grownups are getting in the way get out the way let these kids be imaginative which you know like in our stories it's important that yeah there's a fantasy nature to it right but it's rooted in reality right when we have uh fire-breathing winged horses and things of that nature those are actual drills that are taking place right now we don't have fire drink you know fire breathing winged horses actually performing that but

we do have ball machines that are spitting balls at tennis players right and so all of our all of our stories are all anchored in an element of truth so that children feel like when they are doing these drills with these bald machines they can envision maybe it's a fire breathing winged horse yeah to keep them excited yeah yeah they can envision gus throwing fireballs at them yeah yeah and uh even the plays like when the you know in the wizard art series when the basket is opening up and shrinking these are things that we

experience as athletes like some days i feel like i can't make a shot man in the basket feels like the size of a keyhole yeah you know and other days it looks like a swimming pool yeah you know yeah that's magic and so we we root our magic in reality so that when kids experience these things particularly the failure side of it they can connect it to one of our stories and say okay i've seen this before i know how to deal with this yeah that's beautiful man i love that that analogy of like feeling

the basket bigger or smaller and then be able to vision that i can vision it right now like yeah it's all right like some days it looks huge and i love that that's such a great way of thinking about it and i guess so much of this is from your real life vision oh yeah yeah this is like some days i've experienced this yeah but i love that because it's also giving them the permission to say like be imaginative about this right yes and and that obviously gives so much i think when we imagine it

changes the reality of oh i'm just sitting out here taking shots yes right which can get boring and tiring comes mechanical mechanical that's the only way to get kind of cool like our job is to try to inspire the creativity inside of our children so that they can think through how to problem-solve situations so like you know when i coach my daughter's team it's not about giving them answers it's about asking them questions and getting them to process things right when the game is being played i'm not sitting there giving them answers or barking out

things on the sideline i sit down and i'm quiet my assistant coach sits there and she's quiet and the kids figure things out for themselves or they don't and then they come back and there's always questions and then you kind of ask them more questions and you help them figure it out but then you see their level of excitement the practice every day increase because it's something it's a process that they are owning right they're not coming to get orders barked at them every day they're coming for for for kind of their personal quest to

get better yeah and how did you how do you feel about you coaching i guess that style makes them feel comfortable but how have you been able to manage that with the pressure of you being there no it's no pressure because you know it's their process to own like i i have knowledge information that i've gained you know through playing so like the little details of things i can teach at a high level uh but ultimately it's it's it's them yeah you seem you seem very still and detached about it yeah yeah i mean it's

it's you know the kids love playing basketball so that's the anchor of it all they come and they play and they learn and they have fun and you know and they compete and you know they challenge themselves and one another and um you know they just get better every day yeah how have you seen that with obviously with legacy and the queen you you chose tennis yeah like what was the what was the choice of sports about i'm intrigued by the why tennis yeah so like the first novel we did was the wizard series it

was important that for that to be basketball because i wanted the first story to be one of empathy and compassion and in team sports if you don't have that you can't win right and so it was important to tell the tale of a basketball team uh dealing with their own personal fears and have those fears and insecurities lead to empathy and compassion for others right with the second story i wanted to look more internal individually and and look at how do you deal with the inner challenges the kind of the self negotiation that takes place

inside of our own heads and there was no sport better than that than tennis there's golf uh but tennis you have more movement which to me symbolizes life in general because life is there's a lot going on right there's the elements in tennis that you have to deal with as you deal with in golf maybe not to the same extent but they're still there and then there's the confrontation with the person across the net from you yes right as well as the strengths and weaknesses in your own movements and how you feel in your own

body and because of that it was important for this story to be a tennis story um i love that that that makes complete sense and give me an example of that self negotiation i love that word and yeah i get that can you expand on that a bit yeah like you know you're you're you're out running on the track working out and you start talking to yourself saying man my knee is really sore right now maybe i'm maybe i'm doing too much sounds like me maybe i need to back off you know man my lungs

are burning am i maybe i can just slow down here i'll do like an extra two sets tomorrow you know it'll be okay yeah right that sort of stuff yes like that stuff's dangerous yes and that's you just gotta say you know what i'm not negotiating with myself yeah the deal was already made the deal was made when i set out at the beginning of the summer and said this is the training plan i'm doing i sign that contract with myself i'm doing it you know throughout the that process you'll start talking to yourself like

man i gotta i think i need to maybe if we nope no it's non-negotiable negotiable yeah yeah i love that and for you empathy and compassion were things that you'd been through like that was that was personally inspired work yeah when did it come to your awareness that empathy was something missing for you and that you wanted to develop it um i had a teammate that that spoke to me and said hey cole you know i just want to feel like as a teammate you need me i was like well duh i can't i can't

you know like that was my immediate reaction like dude yeah of course but i had to kind of think about really what he was saying and where that was coming from for him and his story and his journey and what that meant to him and that opened my eyes that there's a bigger game being played it's not just basketball but it's the emotions of each individual and the backstory that they're carrying with them the baggage that they're carrying with them and if i really want to be a champion and be a great teammate i have

to understand what those mean to help them become better and in turn help me yeah and do do you think this content is going to help all the content you're creating here at granity is that for you to help build better bonds between parents and kids like are you hoping that the podcast for example like kids are going to listen to on the way to school or on the way back or like how are you imagining people consuming the work yeah i mean i imagine it in in different ways you know but like ultimately people

always figure out a way to do it that's comfortable for them but like you know which is why um in everything that we do we try to create the highest quality of product right like you know people will sit down and tell me they'll say okay well audio books very small percentage of people listen to audio books we don't really have to invest too much in doing audio books and what excuse me no because that one person just listens to audio books that one family enjoys audiobooks they have to get the best experience that i

could possibly give them so that means using a london orchestra that means doing full symphonies that means having felicia rashad read the stories like it means everything the books themselves i got this all the time there's no money in making books man nobody makes money in books and i'm sorry you want to make a book with using what material you want you know you know i'm like uh yeah because children matter so like i don't know how they're going i i imagine how they're going to be consuming content um but ultimately it's my responsibility and

our responsibility studio to make every single thing that we put out the highest quality possible yeah yeah no i can imagine i can imagine parents listening to it on the way to school yeah i can imagine listening on the way back or on the way to practice sure sure things like that like i think it's cool i think it's well the puny's for sure like the puny's i was like you know when i first made the puny's we're going to release it in the summer i think we released it in august um and uh i

think i think it was august around the same time but my mind i was saying okay parents are going to listen to this every saturday morning because i know i'm in the car driving my kids to soccer games and like you know volleyball games and stuff so parents can listen to this with their kids in the cars they're driving the sporting events like that was kind of what i had in my mind and then when it came out it's like you know teachers were using it more so than anybody in classrooms and doing like classroom

reports on the punys and and all sorts of stuff so yeah never know it's it seems that you study life a lot right like when you're talking about all of this imagination which stems from your own work like for example like when you're dealing with empathy and compassion it's reflected in the content when you're going through these visualizations of what could this look like it goes on the content you study life a lot what currently are you studying and what kind of gets your imagination really growing right now like what keeps that moving for you

uh you know certain there's a certain element of truth and everything you know and um you know the creativity generally comes from personal experiences first and then you kind of look on a broad kind of on a broader scope of okay how do you take something extremely personal and then channel it in a way for masses to understand and get their arms around sort of thing but it always starts in the element of truth and then you start unpacking that by sitting in thought and figuring out like character and you know who is this person

and you know who's his family and then that's when i start getting in trouble you know because it's like the questions don't end yeah you know so i have like books and books and books and books and books and books and books and books and books of backstory because it's not good enough just to say the characters this way yeah why are they that way yes for the parents well where do their parents come from you know where's the dad come from why are they raising a kid this way and then you know what does

it have to do with the economy that's around them and then and just one thing leads to the next and then you're just writing all kinds of stuff it's crazy yeah that's awesome because i think so many of us get you know in our lives we get stuck with imagination because you kind of get into that autopilot mode yeah doing the same thing every day same routine same drive to work yeah and it's like i feel that what you're sharing is that's easy for anyone to do it's not like oh because you could be brian

you don't feel that everyone gets into that true you're able to find these creative outlets yeah well you know like creativity is in everything you know like even in consistent like what i found is is creativity a lot of time comes from structure i agree i'm just saying you said that when you have those parameters and the structure then within that you can be creative but like if you don't have the structure you're just aimlessly doing stuff yes you know where are you going you know so like having a clear structure of understanding okay this

morning i'm gonna like when i was writing a wizard series and outlining legacy i come in in the morning 7 a.m and i'm there i'm writing backstory from seven to 12 then go pick up my kids and then i come right back and i'm writing again so like within that structure you know my mind when i go to sleep is already like planning of what the next day is going to be because i know you know what it is i have to do it's that consistency and structure yeah i can agree with you more i'm

writing my first book right now oh wow and a lot of people have been asking me like jay and and i'm like that i have a very scheduled focus on writing and they'll be like how do you find inspiration at that time what if you're not inspired at that time and i'm like no the structure helps spontaneity yeah right it's that consistency that breeds creativity well that's the thing too is like you know people think like it's you're just kind of just kind of you know mulling along and all of a sudden aha you know

like the show that we have on espn now called detail yeah uh basketball you know sports breakdown show um that came to me when i was walking around with my wife shopping yeah and i look at a piece of fabric and i'm like wow this is really the detail and this thing is oh my detail this name of the show and then everything came from there but i had been thinking about a show like that for like a year yeah you know and i couldn't i couldn't shake it loose i'm like what i got i

gotta find a sports show that i'm gonna do but it needs to can't just be basketball focus has to be broader and i want to hear from the best minds in the world hear from peyton manning i want to hear from what is it what is it for like a year and then all of a sudden boom you know and so people think it just comes out of nowhere yeah you gotta like obsess over for a while and then it kind of pops loose absolutely you had to plant the seed well before yeah to see

the fruit yeah and you gotta water it all the time man like you gotta sit down and watch and watch other shows that are out there and like you know and then ultimately you just find you know like when the answer comes to you it's like my god i could have thought it on the first day i remember john williams told me that he said he said he'll sit for like two months to try to figure out what the melody is yeah and he'll just be playing he'll he'll be at his piano all day he'll

say the only day he'll take off at sunday because his wife forces him to take sundays off and he'll just be sitting there riding right right and then it just comes yeah and he's like i seriously could have thought of that on the first day like why it's just so simple yeah absolutely and that's what people don't realize is well like when you go out then you're shopping with your wife and you see the detail and you're like okay that's the show and then you go back into consistency to create it yeah it's like you

know it wasn't just like oh now i thought of i'm just gonna throw that idea like now i'm going back to the drawing board have the name now do it around i try to what i try to do is shoot the idea down and figure out everything that's wrong with the idea ooh okay right this show won't work because like detail for example like this show won't work because it's not for fans it's for the one percent athlete yeah all right well will would it be successful people connect to it like you know you start

unpacking every little thing how would we shoot it can i even get peyton manning to do it could i get you know and uh you start shooting them down same thing with the novels like characters and plots and stories does this make any sense no here's why i felt like that really helps me yeah i like that approach a lot actually because i think sometimes especially right now in the world we go to the wishful thinking side like you have the positive vision and you're like oh this is how it's going to turn out right

and then you ignore the bad stuff yeah or you ignore the kind of like the potholes or the loopholes because you're just like oh no i don't want to focus on the negativity yeah but actually what you're saying is if you're aware of it of those known unknowns then you can actually break them down yourself well yeah it's just like the same thing for any great movie you have to have the antagonist yes you know a strong villainous character will really drive the narrative along if you don't have that you have nothing from which your

hero has to bounce off of you know that that villain could be you know maleficent it could be something inside of you it could be whatever but you have to have that clear antagonist that's driving a narrative forward and so in this sense it's the same thing you pick apart the negative and from that you can then move yes move forward absolutely what i'm loving here right now is that all i'm hearing is like kobe the storyteller like i'm loving it like what i feel is like what i'm hearing about is your obsession and obsessiveness

yeah with stories and it's not just like you know i i'm saying this it's like you've really studied stories like you've really broken them down and understood it where tell me about where that obsession comes from in general how you find obsessiveness and how you've applied that to story yeah obsessiveness just comes from something that you love like you really love it you'll go through fire for it you know you'll go through the ups and downs with it and you'll just keep at it because you love it so much you know um and story for

me started a long time ago i had a great english teacher at lower marion high school uh named jay mastriano and she explained to me the art of story telling my sophomore year and that's where i started falling in love with it and understanding story structure you know how to develop compelling characters and how this thing how stories um are the driving force whether they're inspirational informational that really change society yeah absolutely yeah we're defined by the stories we tell ourselves whether personally or or outside absolutely absolutely and and it seems like you just mentioned

that it just shows the role of teachers and now when you find that teachers are using the work you're creating to teach that must be amazing comes full circle yeah you know and uh you know it's a it's a it's a pretty cool feeling man like i like growing up when i was in high school man i didn't read much at all yeah you know because basketball was my thing now if you give me a basketball book or like a sports book or like a sports psych book or i'm devouring that you know what i

mean because it was a clear focus for me which kind of gets me into this market a little bit too because like for our active children that love being outdoors and playing all the time they're not reading no but they're missing out on so much by not reading but they will read if there's something that they feel like speaks to them so true you know and so now i think we get more readers in the world because of it hopefully so true no i think so i agree with you like for me and and this

is why everyone's different and i think there's such a need for what you're doing because when i was growing up i never enjoyed fiction and so i thought i didn't like reading because all the books that the school suggested were fiction books right and then when i was 14 my dad handed me an autobiography and a biography and i devoured it and then i started reading because i want to hear about real people right who break and who develop and who learn and grow and like have been through failure and like i want to hear

about rags to riches and i want to hear about like i want to hear about real people who went through real pain that's right but i grew up believing that i didn't like reading right and i think that's you're so right i think there's a lot of kids out there who think they don't like reading or they think reading is boring it's a problem because like what i found in the industry which is why we self um publish because a lot of publishers want to publish the same type of story you know the same type

of uh plots uh same looking characters not a lot of diverse characters out there at all and uh so we said you know what we're gonna have to do this on our own this way we don't have anybody in our way telling us what the market wants to hear i don't care about that we write stories that come from the heart and our characters are going to look like my daughters because my daughters don't have characters out there that look like them it's a great book so yeah they're going to look like my kids and

uh and we're gonna go from there yeah i think i think what you've just raised there about diversity and representation is huge it's huge man huge because i don't see it man and like you know it so books is just the first thing publishing is the first thing now if we look at animation is even worse it's even worse you know in terms of developing characters um diverse characters but even beyond that the animators themselves there's no diversity in that industry right none and i'm talking not just racial diversity but gender diversity as well and

so there's there are a lot of things that we need to take on that we are taking on and uh hope to make the world and the industry a better place because of it yeah no i i fully agree with that i'm a british indian right born and raised in london in it never seen any character anywhere right because they think you know the mass market they're not going to it's not going to appeal to the mass market so we're not going to do that yeah exactly wait what what yeah and and everything's spreading so

fast now and everything's global now yeah right nearly all content is is global now and most global markets are growing everywhere so the need for people especially young people being able to see themselves in characters and and even and it's it's not and i think it's a deeper point that you're making is you want to be able to see your story in someone right right even just beyond like color and background it's like your story your experience of life when we made your basketball we got a lot of pushback from people like i i took

it to some very prominent studios at first and they all said yeah no um because you said basketball is too sport specific nobody's gonna connect with this sort of thing because you know there's a lot of people out there who don't watch basketball and i'm like well that's not the point yeah that's not yet it's not the point and so it was really a case study even with our novels everybody was like sports novels nobody's going to read that it's too too much of a niche market in each market i'm like sports is bigger than

that man and so we made their basketball to really prove a point that you don't have to watch basketball at all to connect to the journey of a dream yes you know and uh once we saw that connection was kind of kind of validated our point of view i think that's a massive point of view and for anyone who's listening or watching right now who thinks because kobe bryant wants to do something it just happens it just shows you have to do it yourself sometimes because not everyone's gonna believe in you certainly not right certainly

not and what you'll see is you know once you start doing it and now people want to come and jump in but i'm like you know you kind of forced us to go about this ourselves so i think we're just going to build it from the ground up ourselves but yeah thank you exactly they saved you yeah right thank you appreciate it because if you guys signed on you know we just get kind of going with the flow totally yeah you can be grateful to this yeah yeah yeah absolutely no i agree it was the

same with this podcast funny enough when we launched a lot of people were a lot of people were considering whether it was you know gonna like you know you do social videos like is it gonna work on a podcast and there were a lot of people that were not sure and then like we launched some of the biggest podcasts in the world in in the health category which is which is my world and i was just like everyone's just like oh interesting but i'm like thank you yeah like thank you so much for saying no

and you didn't think it was going to work because now i figured out myself yes and what you said it actually builds confidence and validation yeah oprah told me this when i first decided to uh build the studio and i was asking how harpo came to be and she said well when she was doing her her deal for the oprah winfrey show she was reupping her deal and uh actually the first contract she made she uh she said well don't pay me up front just i want to own a percentage of the show and so

they gave it to her now at the time there weren't any black women hosting a daytime talk show no right so it was really new and uh and she said you know kobe if they believed that the show was going to be successful they wouldn't have given me giving me that they wouldn't they win them in their mind they're thinking oh we gotta steal we don't have to pay her we can take this money and move it over here this is great you know it's going to be a flop or we succeed i don't know

at least we get diversity on tv it's fine and all of a sudden it's oh oh oh oh oh trouble we shouldn't have given it away opened up pandora's box right so now you come back for the next deal and it's like you gotta have to give me some more ownership yeah like dang it here and then ultimately she you know came to only 100 of her show yeah which is amazing wow that's a great story yeah that's fascinating i think because sometimes when you think that you're like oh they like me that's what they're

giving it no yeah no don't like me please here's an idea it's terrible yeah i just need you to buy in just a little bit yeah i love that that is awesome how are you encouraging you've shared so many stories of like your teacher who taught you about storytelling and writing early on you just shared oprah's example like you've had so many incredible mentors in your life we all know about that how are you encouraging young people to find the right mentors and how can they find the right mentors even through your work i guess

your work is somewhat mentorship yeah we try to be you know and i think the important thing is research you know in the hall here in the office i have a hall that i call muse hall we have all the portraits of some of our muses here from jk rowling to you know steve jobs and so forth and so on i think it's important to research them and it's like putting you know fuel in the fire every day you know there's constant inspiration when you read about them what they were able to accomplish how they

went about accomplishing it it's just constantly you know feeding that flame and learning and the best way to do that is to learn from the people who have done it yes yeah that just made me so happy i have a gallery wall in my home if we were recording this at my place in hollywood like i have a gallery award steve jobs is right there yeah yeah right and and and einstein's there martin luther king's there and there's a few other people and it's for me it's the same thing it's like sometimes i'm sitting there

and i'll be like what would that person do like how would they have dealt with this challenge right and you're so right i think you can be mentored by people who aren't alive 100 because their stories still live which brings us to the importance of storytelling yeah their stories still live these muses are here it's important to learn from them and uh and if anything it helps you remember that they are human just like us yeah these great things that get accomplished can be accomplished yeah by others and beyond you know building walt disney company

is not something that you know people look at and scoff at and go oh it can't be done well why not why not yeah and the more action you take the more you think is possible yeah because you realize there are people just like us they make mistakes just like us and they kept going and uh we can do the same absolutely man well i could talk to you for hours but you're a busy man and you've got loads of things to do so we end every interview with what we call the final five quickfire

rapid fire round which means you have to answer in one word or one sentence maximum got it so this is easy for you so the first question is what brings you the most joy right now family beautiful second what do you want your girls to think when they hear your name daddy nice number three your favorite animated film pinocchio oh nice i was not expecting that it's the greatest yeah they made me they were in a zone when they made that film absolutely question number four the book that's had the biggest impact on you the

alchemist oh nice okay great question number five your one message to all storytellers would be create from truth it's beautiful man kobe thank you so much this has been an honor man thank you such a beautiful conversation thank you for sharing so many gems so many wisdom pieces and anyone who's out there right now i've got the copy of the book right here legacy and the queen you can go grab it and you can also listen to the podcast the punys as well right now so you can go and download that we'll put the links

to both of them in the comments section and in this podcast so you can go directly there kobe thank you so much for allowing us into your space man this is really special thank you i remember this thank you man thank you if you want even more videos just like this one click on the boxes over here and if you want to continue seeing these kinds of stories you can subscribe by clicking the link right here