When it comes to the music industry, particularly as it pertains to hip-hop, few have made the impact and hold the credibility of Lyor Cohen. It's with good reason then that CNBC and Farnoosh Torabi decided to follow Cohen and Young Thug, the current artist receiving the bulk of his attention, for a recent episode of Follow the Leader.

Throughout the program, which has been split up into clips included below, Cohen is caught extolling his industry virtue, saying of Thug, "If the music is popular, he sells tickets, he sells merchandise, he sells endorsements and it’s a compound effect." Torabi then notes that Cohen is a father figure to a lot of artists, Thug included.

In what may be the best example of that notion, Cohen gets tough with Thugger, telling him he'll have to play by at least some of the industry rules. "I understand that you’re shy and you don’t like doing it, but the fact of the matter is your fans actually want to hear it from you," he says in a conference room meeting, presumably about an interview or radio spot. "You’re going to keep them guessing, but we’re going to take advantage of the fact that they have huge listenership and we’re going to communicate to them that Slime Season 3 is about to come and then HiTunes is about to come."

Thug then tells Lyor that he wants 10 number one singles in the coming year, to which Cohen responds, "10? If you don’t freestyle and you actually work on the singles and record great choruses and develop your songs. Yes. You just record so many songs and leave them like little orphans out there."

Catch Follow the Leader on CNBC on Wednesday's at 10 p.m. EST, with several clips from Cohen's episode included below. As Cohen says in one of them, "There’s few really special talented artists out there that we as an industry are trying to find."