I'm Elise you and you're listening to Ted talks daily today on the show.

We have a talk scored to music appropriate since it's a talk from the producer, entrepreneur and art enthusiast Swizz Beatz and his Ted 20-20 talk. He shares ideas on how to make art better for the people who love it and for the artists. It's a celebration of creativity, art and music. As he puts it, music makes people feel hugged.

So let's take some time to enjoy that feeling.

Hi, I'm Sally Russian, while a host of a new podcast from Ted called Drop. Every week you'll travel to a different location around the world, get lost in a new vibe and tap into a surprising idea.

Next up, we get into dinosaurs and deep time, all behind a hardware store in a very normal New Jersey suburb that's been dropped from Ted Chicot, pin drop on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Having some type of support is very necessary when you're creative, you know, there has to be something that's fueling that creativity, that's fueling that fire that you have inside. My love for music and creativity starts way back, way back back in the South Bronx where I grew up, building seven hundred apartment. I will go outside and all I would hear is music. You go around to the back park, the deejays are playing. It's a basketball game going on.

But then you look at the handball court and that handball court to have an amazing graffiti mural. I don't know if it's from Keith, Haroen or Fab Five Freddy. I was instantly attracted to the creative music has been my therapy since day one. Anytime time I get stressed out, I go to the arts, I go to creativity, I go to music, music, make people feel hugged, people feel loved. And then I remember one of my uncles saying, you should get into producing.

I was producing. You know, it started as a family owned business because Roughriders was created by my family, gave DMX, they gave you Eve, they gave you drag and gave you the locks. I've gotten every accolade in music that one can get. It just came to the point where it's like, you know what? I'm no longer going to have fun with this unless I'm able to give back. You know, the Dean collection started for me to create a museum for my family, and I would name something that my kids would have to be responsible for the past two generations.

So wait a minute. The Dean collection is not just for the Dean collection. The Dean collection is for everyone. There's some galleries now and places you walk in. If you don't have fifty thousand, there's nothing to talk about. And I felt that a lot of people was using that as an excuse to exit art.

They feel that art is only for rich people. Whoa, we got to stop this.

We got to fix this. And that's what made me and my wife say, you know, we have to create an entry point to the younger generation that didn't understand the art world, didn't have that seat at the table. And then we started no commissions. It's a big event. You got thirty something thousand hours a night. The drinks are free, the food is free, the concert's free, the education is free. And I feel that education should be free.

We went to Shanghai. We went to London. We went to Berlin. We did it right in my my backyard in the South Bronx.

You can come into no commissions and get something for a couple of bucks or a couple of hundred thousand. There's a tear for every person that have love for art. And what we're doing is something totally different from a gallery. The artist keep one hundred percent of the sales. But what about after no commissions? How can you sustain how can you move forward without having to be trapped to sell your soul? I was a part of the sale with my brother Sean Diddy Combs, the twenty one million dollar purchase which may carry James Mashu, the highest selling African-American living artist, to today.

I'm like, man, you just broke the record. And the artist is like, Yeah, I don't know whether to be happy or to be sad. He first. So that work, it was under one hundred thousand. So imagine a work that you made for under one hundred thousand is now being sold for twenty one million and you have to sit home and watch this and you couldn't even participate five percent when you look at it. I'm a producer, I'm a songwriter.

Every time it's played on the radio I get paid. Every time it's played in a movie, I get paid every time it plays period I get paid. Visual artists, they only get paid once. How when paintings are sold and traded multiple times. And that's that artist's lifetime work that other people are making. Ten, fifteen, sometimes a hundred times more than the artists that created it. So I created something called The Dean's Choice, where if you a seller or a collector and you bringing your work into, let's say, Sotheby's, there's a paper that's there to say, hey, guys, you know, this artist is still living.

You've made three hundred percent on your investment by working with this artist. You can choose to give the artist whatever you want of the sale. I think that even if people did it, it has to change everything in the art. And this is happening in Europe already. It happens in the music industry. It's called publishing. And artists are able to survive. Musicians are able to survive years after years off of the residual income of their publishing. So how can we take something that brings creatives together and celebrate each other myself and temulum and working on this idea called versus for about three years now.

Then this trying time came and everybody started going to social media to express themselves. So what we did was I played my type songs, he played his type songs, and we went on Instagram live.

This is so good with a coach you let go. A lot of people like to say battle. We pulled back off of that. Worry about it because we're battling enough in the world today. We call it an educational celebration. I think we got a name for 10th one. Me and Timberland's started out with twenty thousand people as of yesterday. Seven hundred fifty thousand people in one room. So we have this thing called the versus effect and the versus.

The fact is what happened to the artist after they contributed versus we can go to the Babyface and Teddy rally.

They both went up millions of views, both of their songs reentered the charts. And then we look at the first lady's verses. And both Erykah Badu and Jill Scott have seven positions in the top 20 charts. This is the verses effect, you know, billions and billions and billions of impressions. This is something I've never seen before. And I felt that these artists are getting their flowers today, which is a great thing why they can smell them.

This is personal for me because many times I've been counted out, I've been hot and cold 100 times. You still have to understand the business as an artist to elevate to a level that you deserve to be, because most creative, we're very emotional. We're very let somebody else handle that. I want to stick to this.

But not only creativity is key, education is key, which is the reason why I went back to school to sharpen my pencil and my mid 30s. We have to know our business, but it's going to take us digging in a little deeper and pulling out the knowledge that we need to prepare ourselves for this world that's waiting to take advantage of the creatives. Then we can make better choices, then we can end that conversation of art is dying poor. If we're not protecting the arts, we're not protecting our future.

We're not protecting this world.

Creativity heals us, PR.