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This week I'm joined by KnowleDJ — and this is a slightly different one for the show. He's the first Canadian I've had on since about episode two, and he's built a career that doesn't really look like anyone else's. He grew up in Kelowna, a small city in British Columbia, started out as a hip hop promoter to pay his tuition, and got talked into DJing by a club owner who wanted him to do college nights. He was a "hip hopper for life" who couldn't stand the idea of playing anything else — until the money, and then the music, changed his mind. From there it's cruise ships playing to wildly diverse crowds, an economics degree feeding into how he thinks about the whole game, and eventually opening for the Backstreet Boys, Ice Cube and Ariana Grande, and running the after-parties for No Doubt's Sphere residency.
What I really wanted to get into was the thinking underneath all of that. We talk about cultural deference and why you have to prove you've done the digging before a crowd trusts you. We get into ADHD, diet and the idea of conscientiousness as a cheat code. He walks me through the worst gig of his life — a Vegas set he says was sabotaged, which blacklisted him for years — and the fate-tipping opportunities that came after. There's a genuinely moving stretch about Fat Man Scoop, who mentored him and passed away the very night Knowledge told him he'd played "Be Faithful." And we finish on the economics of it all: why he built himself a "category of one," what blue ocean strategy and ikigai have to do with DJing, and why, with his book The DJ Diaries on the way, he still believes music is the answer.
In this episode we get into:
Growing up in Kelowna and going from hip hop promoter to open-format DJ
Reading diverse crowds on the cruise ships, and learning that people hear music differently
Showing cultural deference — proving you've dug deep before a crowd trusts you
Rebuilding the No Doubt set from scratch, and the real story behind "Don't Speak"
ADHD, diet, and conscientiousness as a cheat code (the OCEAN model)
The brain science of doing hard things, and telling yourself a realistic story
Learning the mic, the art of the warm-up, and getting over stage fright
The worst gig of his life and being blacklisted in Vegas
Opening for Ariana Grande, Backstreet Boys and Ice Cube — and reading GA crowds
Fat Man Scoop's quiet, huge influence on hip hop — and a tragic full-circle moment
The economics of DJing: supply and demand, a "category of one," blue ocean strategy and ikigai
The DJ Diaries, what's next, and the idea of the "otrovert"
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