We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lamar Seay a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lamar, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

Students should be taught subjects like real estate, investing, taxes, natural health remedies, growing your own food, social media and public ettiquite, trusting your instinct, following your path, and other relevant subjects that we end up learning later in life through trial and error. It’s common knowledge amongst progressive people that the government puts us through meaningless school subjects to keep us dumbed down as a culture and keep people from rebelling against the system set up to keep the general public blind and in debt. I would also make things like learning about your mental health and remedies used to keep us healthy mandatory to learn. The general public has caught onto big Pharma’s plan to keep us sick in order to keep us dependent on their drugs and insurance companies.

I knew from an early age that I was learning many things that weren’t relevant to my life. I was taught that a child only needs an education up to the 6th grade to be functionally successful and that everything else was to point us in the “right direction” career-wise. I challenged the norms early on and learned that I would need to create my own path in order to be successful and avoid things like debt and toxic masculinity. I’ve had the same experiences from joining the Marine Corps as college kids did with going to college. (Responsibility, the workforce, bring self-sufficiency, etc. I realized that life was about trial and error and learning from not only our mistakes but also the mistakes of those who tried and came before. us.

In this industry that I am in currently, things have been changing gradually. This leaves room for creatives like myself to come in and set the precedent, without having to deal with the older generations’ stubbornness and toxic ways of thinking. I watched how the mixtape era impacted the music industry in the late 90s and early 2000’s and studied how the industry standards were disrupted. This is the same thing going on right now in the content streaming industry.

Lamar, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am Co-Founder and Co-Founder & Chief Operations Officer of the global streaming platform VYRE Network. We created this company after years in the magazine and media world, and after transitioning into the digital magazine space, we had to realize that magazines have become obsolete, and in order to stay in media, we would need to step our game up. In our magazine days, I have interviewed and/or covered major artists such as Jay-Z, 2Chainz, Kanye West, French Montana, Wiz Khalifa, and the list goes on.

Our platform distributes short films, feature films, documentaries, TV series, live-stream concerts, and live sports to a global audience. We have been downloaded in 186 countries to date and we contain 14 subsidiary channels that are all assets to our main platform. We focus on independent filmmakers and creators, who are often overlooked by the “mainstream” streaming platforms. We figured out early on that with all this access to technology and equipment there are creatives out there with quality projects, but no access to global distribution for people to enjoy them. We help the creative skip the lines of agents, lawyers, and red tape to bridge the gap between communities and information through the media space. of course, there is content all over the place, however, there aren’t many outlets that focus on the next generation of filmmakers and athletes as we are. Our platform is available worldwide in any place where you can download Hulu, Netflix, and other streaming apps, however, our app is completely free to download.

I am most proud that my partner and I built this company from the ground up with little to no investment money. This came from our relationships, creativity, and determination. We have content that is on over 60 different airlines worldwide currently. We have had distribution partnerships with sports leagues that were overlooked by the “mainstream,” and we have formed an advisory board and partnerships that include names like Donnell Rawlings, Mathew Knowles, Anuvu, Shoreline Ent, Mayweather Promotions, Publica, Freewheel, and a number of others. I am also very proud that we survived an investment industry that has only dedicated 1% of its investment money to black founders in 2022. We continue to push the envelope and create great partnerships in order to move our company forward.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

A big lesson that I had to unlearn throughout this journey and life is that sometimes years of experience holds us back from being progressive. We have ran into many folks who have been doing XYZ for 10, 20, 30 years and still have the same mentality in an industry that changes on a daily basis. So, in a lot of cases we had to learn to be grateful for people’s expertise and input, but still brave enough to take that knowledge and do it our own way. I had to learn to stop trusting people blindly just because they have years of experience, but instead, to utilize their experiences to create our own path and add our own spin on things. So many industries have been simplified by technology, yet at times it falls on deaf ears due to stubbornness and cognitive dissonance.

How’d you meet your business partner?

My co-founder Dave Hill and I met in 2011 when I moved out to Los Angeles. Back in 1997, Dave created a Hip-Hop magazine that would go on to become the #3 Hip-Hop magazine in the country. Once I was introduced to Dave through my brother, I started out writing articles and doing ad sales for our digital and print magazines. I was handling so many tasks at that time because we had a very small team, that I was appointed Chief Editor after 6 months with the company. Before I came on board, our media brands had interviewed or featured artists such as Kanye West, Jay-Z, The Game, Snoop Dogg, Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, and many other high-profile artists. From the magazine industry, we stepped into the cannabis industry and created a company that we considered the Forbes of cannabis. We discussed things like regulations, job market, state laws, social impact, and others, not related to just smoking cannabis, but the impact the industry has on our society. Years later, we revived our music media brands and turned our magazines into channels that are distributed through our own streaming platform, VYRE Network.

Contact Info:

• Website: vyre.tv (app download & view) vyrenetwork.com (corporate website)
• Instagram: Personal: @Seayword / Business @Vyrenetwork
• Linkedin: Linkedin.com/in/LamarSeay