Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s longtime boss, made fun of J. Cole before he became the big star he is now.

Cole just started a new podcast series called “Inevitable.” It includes talks with his manager Ibrahim Hamad and director Scott Lazer.

This past episode, Ib and Cole talked about the big talks they started having in the late 2000s. Cole saw that even though most things weren’t going as planned, they were signs that he had finally gotten momentum.

After the meeting with G-Unit, Cole said, “we got meetings with two people: Chris Lighty and Paul Rosenberg, who is Eminem’s manager for life and runs Shady Records.” He thinks Sha [Money XL] had something to do with this. “It was like meeting Mark Pitts at 50’s house: ‘Now we’re talking,’” she said. A year ago, I was waiting outside on some Hail Mary crap for JAY-Z. Now, people are calling me and saying, “They want to come see us, they want us to pull up and play music.”

“I remember at the Paul Rosenberg meeting—I was there—it felt like he was doing someone a favor,” Ib said.

Cole answered, “Chris Lighty’s energy was more like, ‘Hey, I’m just going to play a game with you guys.’” I heard about you young n-ggas, boom boom boom. And Paul Rosenberg really thought he wasn’t interested and didn’t care. It felt like a gift in this case. There was no feeling in that meeting; he didn’t see or understand it. That’s fine, he didn’t play us at all.

“When we walked into the meeting, it was almost like, ‘I have a meeting I need to get through quickly.’” “Let’s do this.”” Ib talked about.

Cole said, “But again, I didn’t give a fuck because it was momentum.” “The fact that I was with Eminem’s fucking manager and still got ahold of him showed me that I was on his fucking radar.’ That was more proof that I should keep doing what I’m doing.”

Here is where you can listen to the whole shows.

J. Cole would later sign with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label and become the famous artist he is now; even Eminem likes him.

On Em’s “Doomsday Pt. 2,” which came out earlier this year on the Lyrical Lemonade compilation record All Is Yellow, the Detroit rapper shouts out Cole World and Cole Bennett, the founder of Lyrical Lemonade.

He raps, “And that’s why I’m back with Cole Bennett/ And I been at the level J. Cole been at.”It made Ib very happy, and he wrote on X, “That’s fire.”

Last year, J. Cole made a small dig at Eminem on the song “Fire Squad,” calling him a “white Elvis” who “stole the sound” of a Black genre. This nod is important because of that.

Cole joked at the end of the song that he was just playing and that “all good jokes contain true shit.”