What Kobe Bryant Spoke To Apple's Lead Designer Jony Ive And Oprah About

NBA All Star Kobe Bryant was spotted at Apple's Cupertino headquarters in May and reportedly met with Jony Ive, the company's lead designer. It was immediately assumed by all that Bryant was playing some role in the development of, what the media has dubbed, the "iWatch."

Bryant revealed some information about the visit in a recent interview with Bloomberg — it was he who initiated the meeting after a cold-call to Ive.

And he's not the only person Bryant has called.

In preparation for the company the basketball player plans to start after his retirement, called Kobe Inc., Bryant has been cold-calling all sorts of people.

Business Insider transcribed a portion of the interview in which Bryant explains his "process."

Bloomberg: "What is this Kobe process. You'll pick up the phone and call people who are leaders in industry and you'll just pick their brain?"

Kobe: "Exactly. [laughing] I'll just cold call people, absolutely. I'll just cold call people and pick their brain about stuff. Some of the questions that I'll ask will seem really, really simple and stupid, quite honestly, for them. But if I don't know, I don't know. You have to ask. I'll just do that. I'll just ask questions and I want to know more about how they build their businesses and how they run their companies and how they see the world."

Bloomberg: "Who are some of the people who you pick up the phone and call?"

Kobe: "You can start in the Nike Family, I cold call Mark Parker all the time. Jony Ive. Dan Wieden. Oprah Winfrey. Recently Arianna Huffington. The list just goes on and on and on and on. Hilary Swank."

In their meeting, Ive asked Bryant how he prepared and built his game.

"My response is much like the way he builds products. You think sequentially," Bryant said in his interview with Bloomberg. "Ya, you look at the end result of what you want to create but in order to create that there's so many little things that go into this entity, this device. It's no different that a basketball game."

In addition to Kobe Inc., Bryant also recently invested in a sports drink called BodyArmor. He said the primary focus right now is building the internal structure of the company before expanding it further.

Bryant, 35, is entering the second of a two-year contract extension worth $48.5 million. He hasn't said whether he will continue to play beyond this coming NBA season.