What we talked about
Phi Pham is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Building Beats, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young people through DJing, digital music production, and creative workshops that integrate entrepreneurial, leadership, and life skills. Since its founding in 2009, Building Beats has reached thousands of youth across New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, helping them discover their creative voice while preparing them for success far outside the music studio.
Show notes
Phi Pham started Building Beats in 2009 with a napkin-sketch idea and a DJ’s understanding of community organizing, and built it into a nonprofit that has since reached over 10,000 young people across New York and Los Angeles. What makes the organization unusual is not just the music curriculum but the business model: schools pay for the workshops, which Phi argues creates a level of accountability that donation-funded programs rarely achieve.
What we covered
- Phi describes the DJ as a natural community organizer, someone who brings people together, makes things happen, and builds movements, and how that mental model became the foundation for Building Beats’ entire youth leadership approach.
- One student, Jada, started in Building Beats workshops as a high schooler in Far Rockaway, New York, moved to LA for music business school, and eventually became the face of Building Beats’ LA expansion, a full arc from student to teacher.
- Building Beats originally planned to be a grant-making foundation that funded other music studios. After helping launch a program in Brazil, Phi pivoted to actually running the workshops himself, which became the sustainable model they’ve operated for 12 years.
- The organization operates on a B2B model, schools are the paying clients, which Phi says forced the team to treat quality seriously in a way that donor-funded programs often don’t. Word of mouth from happy school partners drives most of their growth.
- Phi keeps workshops culturally relevant by building lesson plans around the artists students actually listen to, currently Billie Eilish and Bruno Mars instead of Biggie and Tupac, and even incorporating TikTok trends, anime, and K-pop into the curriculum.
- Looking ahead, Phi’s vision is an engagement-first learning model, “learn what you love until you love to learn”, and he is actively experimenting with AI music tools like Suno and ElevenLabs’ music features to understand how they will shape what Building Beats does next.
About Phi
Phi Pham is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Building Beats, a nonprofit he launched in 2009 that uses DJ culture and digital music production to teach entrepreneurship, leadership, and life skills to young people in New York, Los Angeles, and online.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/phihkpham
- Website: https://buildingbeats.org
Episode 50 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the Prevared podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Our guest today is Phi Pham. He’s an executive director and co-founder of Building Beats, a nonprofit that empowers youth through DJ and digital music programs while teaching entrepreneurial leadership and life skills. Since 2009, Building Beats has worked with over 3,000 young people
helping them find their creative voice and build skills that last far beyond the studio. Fii’s journey blends his experience as a DJ and music producer with a passion for community building, creating a unique approach to youth empowerment that turns beats into opportunities. Welcome to the show, Fii. How are you doing today?
Phi (00:50) Great, great. Your summary was awesome.
Federico Ramallo (00:53) Thank you. So what inspired you to start building beats back in 09?
Phi (00:59) Growing up, music was such a big passion of mine. I learned how to DJ when I was in high school. DJing became just my side thing and just hip hop music was my life. I think like all young people, I was so passionate about music and that helped me come up with the idea for building beats.
I knew that music was a good way to ⁓ engage and try to work with young people in some sort of way. I also realized I’ve learned so many small business, entrepreneurship, creative skills from being a DJ that I thought maybe I can kind of blend the two together. Let me start music programs to help young people learn how to be better people in the community, whether it’s business people, entrepreneurs, or just leaders in their local communities.
Federico Ramallo (01:44) very interesting. How has your background as a DJ and music producer shaped the vision of your organization?
Phi (01:52) I always think about the DJ as a community organizer. They throw events, they bring the community together. Whether it’s store owners, neighbors, students at a school, they try to bring people together to celebrate, throw a party, just kind of host things. And from that was kind of my learnings is…
DJs are kind of the people who kind of advocate and bring community together. And for me, that was kind of the beginning of understanding is like, ⁓ you know, when you’re a DJ, you learn how to make things happen, to build some sort of movements.
Federico Ramallo (02:31) Right, right. It reminds me to a, usually we joke in Argentina about the ball owner, right? Who owns the ball, you know, he’s friends of everybody, know, everybody invites him to play because he’s the only guy with balls, right? With a ball to play football, right? So when I was hearing you about talking about how DJ brings…
Phi (02:53) Exactly. Yeah. It’s a…
Federico Ramallo (03:01) community together. I was thinking about that, right? Because who, you know, who wouldn’t like to join the party with, you know, with a DJ playing, right?
Phi (03:13) Yeah. And I think the other thing was DJing really…
It was this interesting community that was brewing. Around 2009, when I was very actively involved in just DJing myself, I was meeting so many DJs online and the connecting of other DJs and stuff also helped me understand. It’s like community organizing was not just an in-person thing, but it was figuring out how you can use your digital skills to connect with other folks, similar interests online. And DJs I think did that from…
and connecting with each other online, trading music, all that stuff, going to people’s different cities to play music. But also, you know, if you’re throwing some events in your community, that was also the birth of social media and understanding how you use social media to bring your community together offline.
Federico Ramallo (04:04) Right, Yeah, O9 was before Facebook and all the social networks existed.
Phi (04:11) Exactly. So was kind of the beginning of that. And I kind of understood where it’s like as DJing has evolved with social media at that time, it’s like, yeah, they just could the theme of DJs bringing people together were still a big thing. But now there’s these new tools and these new tools are something that’s useful to help young people to learn.
Federico Ramallo (04:31) Right, right. I remember 2009, well 2000s was the age of Winamp, ⁓ the Winamp player.
Phi (04:40) Exactly.
Winamp, just MP3s in general were such a big evolution of DJing. You know, when I first started DJing, I got turntables, I got records, but I saw from 2004, 2005, it was the kind of introduction of these DJ technologies like Serato or Final Scratch where you can start playing MP3s. And I was like, that was just crazy to me that I can connect to my computer, to my turntable and have MP3s play out.
And that theme in a way kind of embed itself into the building beats DNA. Cause I just always saw like technology evolving, changed kind of the DJ culture in so many ways throughout now, like my 15, 20 years working on this project.
Federico Ramallo (05:29) Right, right. Yeah, I I remember those days where we used to burn CDs with music for our romantic interest. And that was cool at that time, because nobody knew how to do that, right?
Phi (05:42) for sure.
Yeah, it was crazy at that time and like you can just, it was an art, right? To put different songs together into a CD and just burn them. And I think it also, that was also kind of the growth of new music genres, people mashing up different genres, even just the idea of a mashup, right? Taking the beat of one song, the acapella of another song. It was just another example of just technology playing out in music and culture in some sort of unique way.
Federico Ramallo (05:56) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, because it was the… In the 2000s is when the techno music started, right? Because before that there was… The tools were not available, right?
Phi (06:26) Yeah, it wasn’t as available and yeah, that plus just the internet becoming much more mainstream as people were getting influences from all over and it was just leading to all sorts of kind of different sounds coming out. It was so unique, know, local sounds from Brazil to connecting with hip hop in some sort of way or local sounds of what kids were listening to in Baltimore. The world was really about. seeing all that in 2007, 2008 was really just, it kept me interested because
it connected me to the world in such a new way.
Federico Ramallo (07:00) Interesting, interesting. Can you share a story of a student whose life was transformed through building bits?
Phi (07:08) Yeah, we have so many stories, but I think one story that comes to mind. We have a student, she started in our workshops when she was a high schooler in Far Rockaway, New York. Her name is Jada and
She was always passionate about music, music business. She went through our program, really loved all the experiences we gave her, connecting her to the music industry, taking her to trips, connecting her to special guests in New York. She decided to go to college in LA and she wanted to go for music business. She went to, I think it was the New York Film Academy for their music business program. And she moved out to LA and…
Lo and behold, throughout the pandemic, we also started expanding our work into LA.
First person we reached out to was Jada. She’s like, Hey, you know our work in New York. Why don’t you help represent our work in LA in some sort of way? So she’s evolved from not just being a music producer and musician, but we trained her, taught her to be a teacher. She was a student herself in our workshops. She led a lot of our workshops in LA as we were growing out there and doing workshops there and seeing her grow to be from a young person in our programs to kind of being the face of our programs in a whole other city.
was really cool to see.
Federico Ramallo (08:26) wow, that’s amazing.
Yeah, I’m doing something similar by teaching. We teach trainees how to code and how to become better programmers and developers and how to go from trainee to junior to engineer leader. And it’s amazing when I see them, you know, show up on different high performing teams, right? And how much they grow. It’s, you know, I’m proud of all their achievements. Yeah.
Phi (08:53) Yeah, same, know, that joy of seeing someone just grow into this new space and now be a part of a brand new thing and building new things is, it’s what drives me for doing Building Beats all these years.
Federico Ramallo (09:06) Right, right. Yeah, because it’s being part of their journey and celebrating their achievements with them.
Phi (09:16) for
Federico Ramallo (09:18) What challenges did you face in the early years of running a music-focused nonprofit?
Phi (09:24) Countless. I think I learn a new thing every day. Originally, my vision was it would just be a of a fundraising org. We’d be a foundation and we’d be a grant maker and giving out money and equipment to other music organizations. That was my original vision. I wanted to help seed or fund music studios around the world.
Federico Ramallo (09:25) Hahaha
Phi (09:47) Our first project we actually helped get DJ equipment and start a school in Brazil. So we helped start up our first program in Brazil, but through that I learned how do I make this sustainable? How do I turn this into something that I can kind of make as a reality in terms of impact and something that can fund itself to keep going and
I had to continue just being open to changing my mind on that vision to really that goal of sustainability is something that continually sticks with me. So we changed from being just a foundation or a fundraiser into an actual teacher or facilitator of workshops. And I came to learn that there was a space where
know, schools wanted workshops like this. And I was like, I don’t know if there’s been very many organizations actually doing this work I envisioned, let me just do it. So I started teaching myself and teaching these workshops to kind of learn, okay, this is what a classroom should look like. They’re gonna give us some iPads, they’re gonna give us some Chromebooks. And you know, I was like, I will figure out and make do in whatever way. And I think it was part of my kind of mentality is like, just be open-minded, see what you can do, learn from that first thing, that brand.
new thing and see if we can innovate on that. So going from just like a equipment giver to organizations to actual implementer and doing and leading the workshops changed our model and that model is now what we do for I would say the last 12 years is we teach this stuff but now I also see things continually evolving.
It’s much more accessible for people to learn how to do this with the internet, with YouTube, with all these tools and apps that are freely available. I’m continuing to think what does building beats change to? How do we evolve and kind of look in terms of how can we deliver impacts in the world in some sort of way? And I think it’s always in the back of my head is like, yes, we got this far, but we always have to keep an open mind because the world changes and we have to change alongside the world.
Federico Ramallo (11:51) Right, right. Yeah, the, think that…
Sustainability as a key, it’s important because that way you can help a lot more people, right?
Phi (12:02) Helping a lot more people, also figure out the funding or the resources that can be kind of used over and over again. you know, if obviously if it’s digital, it can be scalable and just given out to the world and in some sort of free way. And it’s just like.
Yeah, we’ve seen the evolution of a lot of these music making tools and equipment just get cheaper and cheaper over time. So it’s like, where do we kind of help play a role in that for that next stage? So yeah, and you know, my eye always on technology and the evolving aspect of technology influencing DJing and beat making has definitely played a role. it’s like, it’s an eye I keep thinking about as this AI future is like going to continue changing how our work looks in so many ways.
Federico Ramallo (12:48) Right, right, very interesting,
So what role do you see music plays in developing life skills beyond the classroom?
Phi (12:57) Music is, I think, one of those interesting things I referred to earlier, but it’s young people universally, for whatever reason, grow up so passionate about music. It’s something about music and the culture idolizing these pop stars, these rappers, these singers.
they build their lives around going to see these folks perform, going to these DJ parties, digging through these routed holes that a certain demographic of kids in kind of like any place, whether it’s New York, whether it’s Brazil, whether it’s Vietnam, whether it’s LA is kids grow up so passionate about this. And I think that was always my big thing is.
That was such a good way to get kids involved. And from there, that’s when you can kind of embed the life skills, the leadership skills, and the adulting skills into this work in some sort of way.
Cause if they want to get in the music world, it’s not as simple as just let me just sing and I’ll go viral and I will be a superstar. Right? You got to learn the habits. You got to go through the grit. You’ve got to have that persistence and you know, fight through that failure. And there’s so many skills that you can always learn from something that you’re passionate about. it is like figuring out what a young person’s passionate about. For us, it’s that lens of music. You know, some other people might be sports, could be dance, could be something else. For us, it’s, thinking about music.
and how do we embed life lessons into our work in whatever ways.
Federico Ramallo (14:26) Right, Yeah, can see that. Yeah, I can see how that happens. Yeah, it’s not magic, right? It’s a lot of great, a lot of work. And as you said, every kid loves music, right? Every young person loves music, right? Yeah. And I think that there is an emotional connection, right, with music.
Phi (14:48) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (14:52) when we’re teenagers, up until teenage is like when we develop this emotional connection with specific songs or bands and whatnot, That kind of fades away when we grow up, right? So that’s why I say that the great music kind of was before the 2000s, right? I say kind of jokingly because that’s my perception, right?
Phi (15:01) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (15:15) of what I said before, That the music that I hear now, it doesn’t resonate with me as much, right? So I’d rather go back to the oldies, right? But nevertheless, I I know that there’s great music today, right? ⁓ And that resonates different in people, right? Yeah.
Phi (15:25) Yeah.
Yeah. But yeah, either way, it’s
yeah, you know, people connect to music in such strange ways, but it’s that that kind of emotional connection is it’s that lifeline that holds them through failure in whatever way. So it’s like, think using that as a way to just.
as tool to keep teaching them. It’s like if you want to stick it out and learn this music thing, you’re gonna go through all these struggles. Might be hard to make a song, might be hard to make a beat, might be hard when you put it out to the world and no one listens. But because they’re so emotionally connected, it gives them and helps them build persistence in some sort of way.
Federico Ramallo (16:08) Right, right. Yeah, one of things that I critique of the current pop music, right, it’s that they kind of gauge what the market wants and they design the music based on what the people expect, right? ⁓ So, whereas in the 80s or the 90s, that was much more difficult to do, right? So people would, you know, just…
Phi (16:24) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (16:34) play whatever they want and then, you know, some would become great, some would not, right? And there’s so much ⁓ experimental music, right? From weird to great to exquisite, right? And I think that became less frequent, you know, currently because people tend to do that thing of
Phi (16:44) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (17:00) I want the music to be popular rather than technically good, right? Does that make sense?
Phi (17:07) Yeah.
It’s yeah, the market also just continually changes, right? These days it’s how do you make something that the algorithm likes, right? Whether it’s putting it out on TikTok or whatever Spotify is people try to cater to the algorithm. And sometimes you don’t want your true essence and authenticity shine if you’re just building things for the algorithm. But at the same time, it is also just continuing to learn as these technologies change and how we interact and evolve with it. How do you keep
Federico Ramallo (17:16) Right.
Phi (17:38) true essence and authenticity to yourself while figuring out how do get this out there to the world and whatever.
Federico Ramallo (17:44) What do you think is, you you mentioned sustainability, but are there any other key factors to scaling impact on on bidding bits?
Phi (17:56) I’ve always had a contrarian mindset to this. I think it’s like when you say nonprofit or charity, people think we should just rely on donations and fundraising to get by.
But I have always built our team to act like a small business. So we figure out a model where schools pay us. And if schools pay us, we have to go out there and do sales. And if we do sales, we have to figure out and act like these schools and these students are our clients. Schools, it’s like a B2B model. But with students, it’s this unique B2B to C model that we work on. So it’s like, it’s this two pronged monster that I’ve always taught within the team is,
We have to treat our students and our schools like clients, like any other business. And by building that framework, I think really helped us to pay attention to our equality because this is not donation money that we’re getting. It’s like these are schools paying for our work. So it’s like.
It forced us to think about quality of our service and make sure it’s like, if we want to return, we got to make sure that their kids like the work, the school likes the work. We are reading them and understanding what they want. Right. And then from there, it really helped us grow in terms of scaling our impact. And that for me is sustainability with the business mindset, right? It was like the best kind of business model is a one with recurring clients. So we have just thinking about retention year after year as a way to really scale our work.
Federico Ramallo (19:23) Right, right. Yeah, I think I like the new concept of for profit with social impact. there’s even a category for that, right? That means, you know, they don’t see, I mean, there’s a category in the areas now for that, right? Which allows you to carry over the profits from one year to another, right? But I like the concept because then it
Phi (19:30) for sure.
Federico Ramallo (19:46) It is a for-profit business or organization, but it has a social component, right? So it’s not for profit just for the sake of the profits, right? There is a lot more into it, right? And I like that concept because, yeah, I agree with you that I think that the part of the sustainability and the profits allows you to have more freedom and less dependency on, you know,
Phi (19:55) for sure.
Federico Ramallo (20:13) donations or any external factor because then it only depends on you, right? You providing a good service for making sure everybody’s happy, right? Like the schools and the students are happy with the service that you’re providing and that depends entirely on you, right? You and your team, right?
Phi (20:34) It,
yeah, the hard thing with the traditional philanthropy model is you get some sort of donation, but then you serve another community. So it adds some kind of middle component in terms of receiving that funding. And sometimes that breaks down the kind of accountability.
Right? But if we think about the work that we do to a specific client and they pay us, that leads to that just typical accountability model is, Hey, I’ll pay you this. I want to make sure that that work that I paid you for is something that I, you know, that’s worth the money that we paid. So having just a small mindset like that for us and thinking about it like that, where it’s like the folks that are paying us, they’re paying us to do impact with their community. And
They’re holding us accountable. So a small thing like that and thinking like that really helped us just break through and understanding how we deliver quality. And I think like anywhere, it’s like quality scales, right? Word of mouth is a really great way for marketing. And that’s how we’ve grown our work is by having quality services, these school partners will reach out to their friends at other schools and other communities to bring us in to do similar programming.
Federico Ramallo (21:45) Right, right. And also the students, which you already mentioned that they also talk about how great experience they had,
Phi (21:55) Exactly. Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (21:57) What partnerships or collaboration has been the most impactful?
Phi (22:00) Impact is an interesting word, right? It’s like, is it students who change and like their lives are changed in whatever way? Or is it the number of students or the students in tough situations? I think we think about impact in all those aspects. We work with a few.
either homeless or transition housing programs. And I know those kids are in tough situations. We work in justice programs where kids are either on probation or at high risk of just getting into the justice system. So I think an impact of changing the kids’ lives, working in those spaces, give kids who are in really tough situations in their life, just at least some time to be creative and think about something else. And I think some of those maybe are high as impact in terms of potentially just being therapeutic
for a young person. But there’s the other sort of work where it’s like we can change a student’s life and we can change their trajectory. And some of those are kind of, I think.
One of our theses of building beats is kids are so engaged with music that they want to continue learning and going through this journey, being better people in the world. And that example I brought up of Jada is a really good example of what the other form of impact is. Jada, I don’t think she grew up thinking that she would be a teacher and educating, but she went through that journey with us. engaged with us for six, seven years and learned so much that we empowered her to become an educator. And she is just one of so many stories of our students.
either growing to be teaching assistants or even teachers in our programs. And I think that is some of our most impactful things is when we see our students just teaching other students. They chose this work because they saw how powerful it was for them growing up.
Federico Ramallo (23:46) Right, right. Yeah, and I think that the changing the life is the great metric, right? It could be a small nudge to, as you mentioned, seven years on development, right? Or on learning more, right? Because with that little change, then it grows and grows and grows, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓
Phi (24:05) for sure.
Yeah. And, you know,
I always think about that sustainability is like, how do we keep that going? How does that young person impact other people in their community? And it’s like these days we have some of our students who kind of other students idolize and look up to is like, ⁓ man, Alberto, Jada, you guys have gone so far in your career, in your lives. And it’s like, they end up being mentors. So it’s like seeing them impact other people. It’s, it’s great that we planted that seed and now they flowered and plant their own seed.
I think it’s just beautiful to see in terms of the ecosystem continuing to grow in that sense.
Federico Ramallo (24:42) Right. Another thing that I notice is that I’m a software engineer, right? So I’ve been building software for many years, 25, 30 years. And one thing that I noticed throughout my years is that the great software engineers are musicians in some sort, right?
Most of them, do it as a hobby, right? A few do it professionally, right? Although they keep both professions, right? But what happens is that then when we start organizing conferences, I’ve seen people getting together to jam, to practice, to make this impromptu band, right?
and people love it, right? And it creates this community within the community, which I think is amazing. Yeah.
Phi (25:41) Mm-hmm. Yeah. And
yeah, there’s so many patterns that connect from software engineering to audio engineering. So just it’s another example of just like learning music can really teach you how to see the world in different way in whatever lens you’re in, especially like something like software engineering.
Federico Ramallo (26:01) Yes, yes. How do you keep workshops engaging? You mentioned that the current and newer generations are more connected. We talked a little bit before the show about the short attention span that is happening with people now, right? I think that applies for everybody and I include myself, right?
Phi (26:16) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (26:23) How do you keep the workshops engaging?
Phi (26:25) I think two things. I think about the term cultural relevancy a lot in terms of is it relevant to our young people?
You know, we can’t be teaching them artists that we grew up listening to. We have to figure out who the artists they’re listening to, relevant to them, engaging to them. You know, me, I grew up listening to Biggie, you know, and like Tupac. And it’s like, yeah, I can teach my students that, but like they have no idea what this old people boomer hip hop is. Right? So it’s like these days, you know, I’m building lesson plans on Billie Eilish, Bruno Mars.
Federico Ramallo (26:56) Yeah
Phi (27:02) figuring out what our young people want, what our young people want to listen to and trying to tie that in to our lesson plans. And it’s not even just the content and the artists, but these days it’s the medium. The medium continually changes. 10 years ago, yeah, we were thinking about how do we teach young people with, maybe it was Instagram back then. These days it’s how do we find really interesting TikTok videos or TikTok memes or content that we can engage our young people on.
So thinking about the medium and how that’s changed over time is helpful to engage our young people too, and go to where they’re at. And that’s from the medium in terms of the platforms they’re on, that’s from the memes they’re talking about, that’s from kind of their day to day. Sometimes it’s like there are events these days that like overtake everything. And it’s like, how do we put that and tie it into the classroom in some sort of way? If it’s World Cup time, you know, some of our kids love soccer.
How do we tie in soccer into our class? NBA finals. I talk about basketball all the time with our young people. Some of them just like really care about just basketball. like, hey, you know, who’s gonna win so and so and so. And it’s like, okay, maybe we make a beat using basketball noises or something like that. Another kind of growing thing is, you know, a lot of our kids like anime now. K-pop and anime is such a big thing. So thinking about all this different content and how do we incorporate into our work?
I think cultural relevancy is such a big part to engage young people.
Federico Ramallo (28:30) Right, Yeah, I mean, you’re thinking about different artists that I know very little of. Well, I know Billie Eilish, but I thought the comment was spot on, Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I feel I’m getting behind on the current music trends, right?
Phi (28:49) That’s the hard
thing is young people, always are at the kind of forefront of the new stuff. So it’s like, we learned from them. And it’s like, as a team, we have some like Slack channels, like, yo, what are the new things kids are listening to? That way we can kind of learn and understand and dig through kind of what they’re doing so that we can figure out how we build content around it.
Federico Ramallo (29:10) Right, right, because it has to be appealing for them, right? And that makes it, you once you have find something that they’re interested, then you can connect it with real hard lessons, right? And…
Phi (29:14) Exactly.
Yeah,
listening to the customer in so many ways, right? In this case, it’s like our students is our customer.
Federico Ramallo (29:26) Right.
Right, right, yeah. And the schools can be the middleman, but your final user is the students, right? If the student’s happy, then everything else can be figured out, right?
Phi (29:39) Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (29:40) Interesting. And what advice would you give to someone who wants to start a creative skills nonprofit today?
Phi (29:47) You know, 2025 is such a time for change. Technologies have changed in so many ways. When I was really active starting this up in 2012, 2013, it was a cloud revolution. It was figuring out can mobile and cloud-based things help our work in whatever ways.
Looking at it today, know, the big things is the crypto stuff and the AI stuff specifically, right? AI is changing creativity in so many ways. Jump in, play with all the new tools. VO3 is interesting. Suno is interesting for music. Of course, all these things you can do with ChatGBT, Claude, building MCPs, figuring out all that stuff. How do we connect to all those things? I think experimenting with what this new world looks like is…
my biggest tip in terms of how do you want to create impact? One, sure, it’s in the work that we do, but it’s also the entire world of exploring and figuring out some of these things. There’s just so many things to be discovered. have, what I envision is like, there are just now so many new Legos that have just fallen into this play pit. And now you can build so many new things with it. Explore some of that.
That’s where the novel things come out. like, when you find novel things, it’s going to interest whether it’s young people, adults, whatever. And I think it’s like being at the forefront of understanding how these different tools connect and experiment. Be open to, you know, there may be not one answer. So for me, it’s, that’s what I’m diving into, you know, 10 years ago, I would have not been thinking that I’m be making AI videos. I wouldn’t be thinking about like,
how do I build a workflow to create all these kind of little AI processes or whatever. But these days with all that available, it’s forcing me to like rethink as a beginner. And I think as a beginner is like figure out the tools available and figure out how you can connect those and build some sort of picture from it.
Federico Ramallo (31:44) Right, right. It’s the second time I heard Zuno and I, and the first time I said I was going to try it, but I got distracted and kind of forgot about it. Now that I mentioned it, I have to go back to check it out.
Phi (31:54) Yeah
Zuno, know, last week, 11 Labs released their music thing. So there’s just like so many things out there. And I think it’s now that we’re even we’re in an even more mature internet phase is anyone can build and anyone can build all these interesting things. know, vibe coding has been so interesting to me because there’s just so many new tools coming out there to explore with. For us, you know, we have on our website, it’s called the Toolbox, the Building Beats Toolbox. We try to curate so many different
around music and creative making in some sort of way, but it’s endless and I think these days it’s so much more accessible that just new things come about. There’s so many new ideas you can come about to engage young people with it.
Federico Ramallo (32:42) Right, right, interesting. You have building bits toolbox. I will check it out as well. Yeah. Today before, you know, before we had the meeting ⁓ a few hours ago, I show my kids in in scape and I show like, you know, a few things. And then at one point he was like, you know, that get out, you know, I’ve got it. And he, you know, he started getting.
Phi (32:48) sure.
Federico Ramallo (33:09) looking for videos and he’s been for hours and hours and hours just reviewing that stuff. Inkscape is a vector editor so you can draw, it’s an open source image editor for generating vector images. ⁓
Phi (33:18) What is that? InScape?
Oh, I already looked that up.
Federico Ramallo (33:36) I usually say complex, but it’s more than complex. It’s unintuitive. It’s not intuitive to use, right? So you have to learn a few things how to use it. Once you figure it you can do a lot of stuff. And he loved it. And I was happy to see that he got into that creative mode of engaged on learning that, right? So I think that…
that finding those what takes to the young people that gets them into that mode, I think that’s amazing, right? Because it’s a beautiful thing when you see it happen, right?
Phi (34:07) Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (34:15) Yeah. So if building bit had unlimited funding tomorrow, what would be the first initiative that you would launch?
Phi (34:23) I dream of thinking about the education system from the ground up. always talk about building Beats University would look like not current universities. It would be engagement and interest based things. Let the young people use their engagement to get them connected in some sort of way.
in this kind of hybrid model, we see it in our own work is kids are coming to us because they want to learn music. But we have such a large community where kids, you know, some of them love skateboarding. They’re starting a skateboard club. How do we help them get funding to start their own interest based activities? And then from there, we tie in some of those other skills, life skills, leadership skills and whatever way. But use interests for us. Yes, we start with music. But I think the kind of if we had unlimited funds,
the ideas are endless in terms of figuring out what the kids want to do. If they want to start a class on building successful TikTok channels, right? We’ll help make that happen. If they want to play with Inkscape and learn about vectors, how do we put that together and bring adults to help them and kind of guide them on that process? So my vision always is, is engagement first. Whether it’s that kind of idea of cultural relevancy, but it’s let young people kind of figure out what their interests are.
and let them kind of explore with that in mind. I think there’s always that saying similar for reading is, know, read what you love until you love to read. And I think it’s like, for me, it’s like, learn what you love until you love to learn. And I think it just opens the doors for young people to just explore and explore the future and, you know, whatever drives them in whatever way.
Federico Ramallo (35:53) the
Right, very interesting. How do you see building bits evolving in the following years? You mentioned some AI tools, right?
Phi (36:14) There’s, yeah, the kind of, the vision I just painted right now is one example. The thing I’ve seen us do that’s still very magical is our community. We have worked with so many students now. I know our number say 3000. I think it’s somewhere around 10,000 now after 12 years of working with students all throughout New York and LA. And then just like the students who come to our work online.
So that community of students is, yes, we’re giving them the contents to learn in whatever ways, but I think what’s more powerful is their connection to each other and they’re kind of just.
Learning as peers together and I think that is going to be the driving point for us because that brings in the in-person connections They come together. They have radio shows. They take our classes in person. They meet each other They’re kind of young creatives networking and building their own little economy and industry in whatever ways Some of them get booked for DJ gigs They come support each other in all that sense and I think it’s like for us it’s it’s driving with community and it’s our community of
passionate young people. Creating.
Arts or anything else is always such a scary and vulnerable thing for young people. So I think the magic we’ve been able to do is build a space where like young people, they feel safe in terms of learning and feeling like they’re not experts. And I think that space, that safe space to learn how to be creative has been kind of our special sauce the last few years. And I’m kind of trying to dig in on continuing to build that out. Like how do we continue growing that community so that more young people and maybe even adults who want to learn a new thing
feel scared, feel vulnerable, can connect in some sort of way and going through that journey together, not only are you learning, but you’re really making lifelong friends and peers who kind of inspire you in their own ways.
Federico Ramallo (38:01) Right, right. That’s amazing because the, you know, when you say that you know something, it’s such a, you start from a point of vulnerability, right? It’s a very fragile situation, right? Very easy to, you know, get pissed and kids shut down, right? ⁓ So, and…
Phi (38:25) for sure.
Federico Ramallo (38:28) And by building the community, you’re building a self-selected group of people, right? That they share the same passion, the same interests, right? And that show them that they’re not alone, right? Even though, you know, during the pandemic, everybody was, you know, shut down. So being able to do the activities online, You know, there was a lot of people that was…
the press because of the social isolation, you know, having that connection, whether it’s online or physical or, know, and one connects to the other one, right? So I think that’s amazing. Yeah.
Phi (38:56) Yeah.
Flip side is, know, yeah, a lot of these tools become more accessible. We’re still going to continue leaning into the digital side. All these kind of AI tools building out new experiences. It’s going to be alongside our work. So I think our work is that in-person connection with each other and that community, but also thinking about all these new tools available and how do we incorporate it into our community in various ways.
Federico Ramallo (39:31) Right, right. my fear with AI is that it could replace the personal connections, right? Social networks, the same thing, right? know, have this, GROK just have these companions, right? That, you know, I was playing with them. It’s fun, but it’s…
Phi (39:49) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (39:55) It’s dangerous when that replaces a potential partner, right? So no kids are ⁓ not ⁓ finding partners, not building families, right? Because it’s easier, quote unquote, on talk to a perfect digital companion that it’s always…
Phi (40:04) shit.
For sure. For sure.
Federico Ramallo (40:20) Perfect saying exactly what you expect to say, Yeah, ⁓ I’m sorry. I’m
Phi (40:23) Yep, I agree, right?
Sometimes our digital companions might be a little too good. How do we kind of make sure that we keep that human connection in whatever ways?
Federico Ramallo (40:30) You
Right, right. And having this community where it can be online, but can also be in person, can also help you connect with humans in a much more meaningful way. I think that’s much more important in today’s age.
Phi (40:53) Definitely.
Federico Ramallo (40:55) Yeah. And the, and you one of the reasons I started this podcast is because, you know, this allows, allows me to connect in a much more meaningful way that, you know, we’re overloaded with notifications and emails and whatnot. And, you know, even diving to multiple conferences, it’s, know, ⁓ it’s so transactional, right? It’s so, you know, what do you, what do you do? Okay. Bye. You know, and then you move forward to the next, to the next.
And it’s a very shallow conversation. You can never talk about what we’re talking about in a much more deep ⁓ level.
Phi (41:35) For sure, for sure, yeah. Yeah, the beauty of sometimes is usually to give you that one-on-one connection with folks so you can kind of just learn deeper.
Federico Ramallo (41:45) Yes, yes. So I know we’re running out of time, but I wanted to ask you just one last question. What is one song or track that represents the spirit of building beats for you?
Phi (41:55) what is one song? You know, we have so many songs that our students made. and there’s one that’s very memorable for me is, yeah, some of our kids have made an attempt to make like a building beats anthem. And, I can send it over after this, but it’s, yeah, it’s just beautiful hearing the kids just come up with their own hooks, their raps in whatever ways.
And yeah, it’s kind of a sign and shows the kind of production they made, but also the songwriting they made from our classes. And I think it’s a really good example.
Federico Ramallo (42:28) amazing, amazing, yeah. And if you’re open to it, we can put some samples at the end of the podcast so people can hear it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, great. Awesome. Before we wrap it up, any other comments or remarks?
Phi (42:33) Totally. Yeah, I’ll those links over.
No, I think it was really great to just talk to you about just the work that I do, but also how it connects to the future. And just like thinking about how the world connects is going to continuously be important. I think the tools that we are making a lot of this evolution of technology is beautiful, but it can be dangerous and dark in whatever ways. How do we make sure we keep that human component, that component of connecting with one another as kind of our main theme? think I’m kind of excited to partake in that.
with the work that we do.
Federico Ramallo (43:14) Yes, yes, and I’m excited about everything that I learned about building bits. It only wants me to go and dig more and learn more and share it with the young people that I’m working with.
Phi (43:27) Cool, yeah, always appreciate all the support. And just connecting other humans to each other is always the goal,
Federico Ramallo (43:30) Absolutely,
Yes, yes. Thank you, Phi, for joining us today.
Phi (43:37) Cool, thank you.