Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is Matt Sanders eight k A and shadows
Speaker 1: of the band of Then Sevenfold. Matt, great to have
Speaker 1: you on the podcast. Hey man, I'm a long time
Speaker 1: listener and a longtime reader. I'm happy to be here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now you tracked me down about n f T S
Speaker 1: and Avenge Sevenfold is very into n f T S
Speaker 1: and I want to go into that. But before we do,
Speaker 1: what's the status of the band today? Status is interesting.
Speaker 1: We recorded an album, you know, a few years ago.
Speaker 1: We haven't finished it yet. Um, we kind of took
Speaker 1: some time off for family, COVID weird touring circumstances, some
Speaker 1: changes within our team, and uh we are still currently
Speaker 1: with one record left on Warner Brothers Records. We'll be
Speaker 1: uh finishing that record up. I think we have may
Speaker 1: locked out. Um, our producer can get back to work
Speaker 1: on it, and then we're gonna go mix with Andy
Speaker 1: Wallace in August and then we're gonna figure out if
Speaker 1: it's first quarter or the fourth quarter or what we're
Speaker 1: gonna do. So, uh, the status is that, and then
Speaker 1: we're gonna be booking tours put the tickets on sale
Speaker 1: when the record comes out, and the whole nine yards.
Speaker 1: But besides that, we've been working on this Web three thing,
Speaker 1: so we've been doing a lot behind the scenes building
Speaker 1: protocols out. Okay, before we get to the Web three thing,
Speaker 1: you were famously on Warner Brothers and then you jump
Speaker 1: to Capital, But now you're saying the new albums on
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers. Canna explain that to us? Yeah, So you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot that goes into that. We pulled the
Speaker 1: oal seven year clause that we were trying to get
Speaker 1: out of our deal, but the reality is we wanted
Speaker 1: our master's back. We wanted to make some sort of
Speaker 1: deal and be able to own our our recordings and
Speaker 1: uh or possibly resign and get a check, um, all
Speaker 1: the things that you do. And then we started thinking
Speaker 1: about the seven year clause and we actually wanted to
Speaker 1: see if we could help artists out in a way.
Speaker 1: And I think there's a lot of misunderstanding between artists
Speaker 1: and lawyers and the label and that you actually still
Speaker 1: you win two court cases to get that law changed,
Speaker 1: and it just became a money suck. The people that
Speaker 1: we had a problem with that Warner Brothers that simply
Speaker 1: weren't engaged in the band. Um had left and Max
Speaker 1: lu Sadden, some new people came in and they flew out,
Speaker 1: and we basically, you know, broke bread and said, you
Speaker 1: know this record we did with Capitol Records, come back
Speaker 1: to Warner Brothers, finish up your deal and we'll deal
Speaker 1: with it from there. So obviously a lot of rabbit
Speaker 1: holes in there. Um we had signed with Tom Wally
Speaker 1: back in the day. We had Craig Garrants and Tom Wally,
Speaker 1: Andy Olafont, a great team, and then we had no
Speaker 1: regime changes until recently and our two thousand fourteen record
Speaker 1: Held of the King came out. We just noticed that
Speaker 1: no one at the label cared about our band. It
Speaker 1: was basically they'd come to the the the you know
Speaker 1: the recordings, they'd come and check out the record, and
Speaker 1: it was just everyone's on their phone. There was just
Speaker 1: no support. We wanted nothing to do with it, so we, uh,
Speaker 1: we tried to get a better deal or at least
Speaker 1: get our masters back and get out of there. We
Speaker 1: went over to Capitol Records put a record. I think
Speaker 1: we're the only band that actually put out an album
Speaker 1: while we are still in some sort of litigation over
Speaker 1: the seven year clause, which caused a huge uproar between
Speaker 1: the labels and ourselves. So that's kind of where we
Speaker 1: were at. Okay, what does Capital say now that you're
Speaker 1: gonna make another record for Warner Brothers. Well, we went
Speaker 1: to Capital and they knew the situation we were in.
Speaker 1: Obviously they're not they're not dummies. They're not going to
Speaker 1: sign us and say, hey, we're getting in some long
Speaker 1: term deal. Here, we were under the idea that we
Speaker 1: would get our record back. They were basically putting the
Speaker 1: one record out for us and then we'd be free
Speaker 1: and um, so I think they kind of probably expected
Speaker 1: something like that to happen. Um, when the regime change
Speaker 1: happened with Warner Brothers, and obviously the amounts of money
Speaker 1: we were spending arguing with them back and forth, um,
Speaker 1: it was obviously the smart thing to do was just
Speaker 1: kind of put it to bed. So I think Capital
Speaker 1: they're fine. I mean, they got their one record and
Speaker 1: we went out and worked it. We toured for a
Speaker 1: long time on it, and uh, now we're back to
Speaker 1: finishing up our contract. Okay, what can a major label
Speaker 1: do for a band like Avenge of Enfold, who's not
Speaker 1: going to be on Top forty radio. What does the
Speaker 1: label do that you need? Man, it's a good question.
Speaker 1: You know, I know what the label used to do,
Speaker 1: and I think there's and by the way, these are
Speaker 1: good a lot of the people that are Warner, but
Speaker 1: there's still are good people that we obviously have very
Speaker 1: deep relationships, like relationships like with Rob Goldclan and the
Speaker 1: radio department, this and that. But you and I both
Speaker 1: know Evenge sevenfold isn't going to be on k rock
Speaker 1: anytime soon, especially with the formatting the way it is.
Speaker 1: And um, these these active rock stations just have moved
Speaker 1: away from what we do and they don't have much
Speaker 1: of an audience anymore, so they don't really appeal to
Speaker 1: us anyways. We're just writing records that we want to
Speaker 1: write and the Middle America rock thing isn't really are
Speaker 1: jam at this point, right And and so you've got
Speaker 1: the radio apartment, You've got publicists, which we can kind
Speaker 1: of do ourselves. Um, all these sort of new ventures
Speaker 1: that were branching out into they really don't have a
Speaker 1: clue about them. They're trying to get involved. It's a
Speaker 1: good question, Um, you want them to put money, and
Speaker 1: you want them to do what they can with this.
Speaker 1: You know, the Spotify playlists. You wanted to do these things,
Speaker 1: but at the end of the day, I don't know
Speaker 1: how big the reaches on the rock Spotify playlist. It's
Speaker 1: never in the top, you know, it's not on the
Speaker 1: the tips of the consciousness of the public right now,
Speaker 1: the rock and roll stuff. And you don't see big
Speaker 1: rock songs or metal songs getting their fair shake in
Speaker 1: those in those playlists. And it might be from the content,
Speaker 1: it might just be it's a place in time where
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. But what does the record label do?
Speaker 1: It's a good question. I'm sure they would have a
Speaker 1: much different answer than I would. Um, But there's a
Speaker 1: big reason why I think going independent and doing a
Speaker 1: lot of these things and bringing them in house is
Speaker 1: very appealing to bands like us, especially at the size
Speaker 1: we are, when we know we can afford it and
Speaker 1: we can do it. So um. You know, they make
Speaker 1: they make videos, they go try to push it to radio. Um,
Speaker 1: they try to do advertisement campaigns around your tour. They
Speaker 1: try to get you to do uh, you know, cell
Speaker 1: tap or sell CDs with your with your tickets which
Speaker 1: we don't want to do. You know, just all these things,
Speaker 1: it's all this this kind of rub. It's a friction
Speaker 1: at this point. And I think, you know, as we
Speaker 1: go into the other stuff later, I think this is
Speaker 1: why a lot of these things are gonna get ironed
Speaker 1: out pretty quickly here. And when you see the new
Speaker 1: artist coming up that aren't signing two major deals or
Speaker 1: major labels, and you're gonna start seeing a lot more
Speaker 1: independence than one on one fan interaction. I think that's
Speaker 1: where this gets really interesting. Okay, you talked about active rock,
Speaker 1: so they will play Avenge sevenfold. Well let's talk about
Speaker 1: what active rock is. Right. So you've got Octane and
Speaker 1: you've got you know, Octane, which is the serious x
Speaker 1: M version of of active rock, which is all over
Speaker 1: the country. And you've got stations that were big players
Speaker 1: in the alternative active rock system, right. You had like St. Louis,
Speaker 1: you had like Denver, you had New York City, you
Speaker 1: had k Rock, and they all became much more alternative. Right.
Speaker 1: They the ones that kind of moved on. They're they're
Speaker 1: playing a much more alternative leaning thing where it could
Speaker 1: be the Arctic Monkeys or whatever. Their playlists at the time.
Speaker 1: I mean they even broughten things like Billie Eilish and
Speaker 1: uh what were this some of the other bands, but
Speaker 1: daft punk was getting played on these stations at some point.
Speaker 1: So a band like Avenge Sevenfold or a Corn or
Speaker 1: a Metallica there wasn't really a place. So you're kind
Speaker 1: of playing in these markets that are a lot more
Speaker 1: red state, Middle America, UM, smaller market active rock things.
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, UM, these things
Speaker 1: are great and you have to check those boxes, but
Speaker 1: they aren't those major plays where you're gonna walk into
Speaker 1: Staples Center and sell it out because k rocks blasting
Speaker 1: your stuff. It's just a much different feel. And I'm
Speaker 1: being very careful of my words because I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to be disparaging to any of these markets. But it's
Speaker 1: not what it was when Evenge seven Fold was playing
Speaker 1: on TRL and they were on K Rock in New
Speaker 1: York and and in l A and St. Louis, and
Speaker 1: you go into Cincinnati and the shows were blown out
Speaker 1: and they were it was just this feeling of of, um,
Speaker 1: you know, this feeling of there was major drivers in
Speaker 1: these markets that were able to get our music out
Speaker 1: to people and Once those drivers went away, it became
Speaker 1: much more underground, and it became a much more stealth,
Speaker 1: guerrilla style, you know, marketing campaign for bands like US. Okay,
Speaker 1: would you call Avenge seven Fold metal? Is that? Okay?
Speaker 1: I mean just for discussions sake, Okay, it's not offensive
Speaker 1: to you. It's not offensive now, okay, So what is
Speaker 1: the status of metal music in America? You know, metal
Speaker 1: always has fans, never dies. Rock may die, but metal
Speaker 1: is never gonna die, even though metal is rock. But
Speaker 1: as you say, it's not on top forty, it's not
Speaker 1: even on active rock. So how healthy is the scene?
Speaker 1: I think the purely metal scene is always going to
Speaker 1: be there, Like you said, it's always got a pulse.
Speaker 1: I don't think the innovations there, and I don't think
Speaker 1: the ability for fans to have an open mind when
Speaker 1: something is innovative, something is different. I think the great
Speaker 1: songwriting has kind of been lost a little bit. I
Speaker 1: think some of these um eccentric, you know, pieces of
Speaker 1: the music that you know, when Metallica came out, they
Speaker 1: were there was nothing like that, right, And it seems
Speaker 1: like a lot of bands in my generation are just
Speaker 1: kind of treading the same um treading the same water
Speaker 1: of what Metallica has already done. And I think when
Speaker 1: you see great artists, um, a lot of them aren't
Speaker 1: in the metal scene. There's a lot of great art
Speaker 1: out there, and I would argue there's some amazing pop,
Speaker 1: some amazing hip hop, some amazing R and B, and
Speaker 1: some artists that are doing truly eccentric stuff and you
Speaker 1: don't see it as much in metal. And there would
Speaker 1: be a bunch of metal heads that send me fifty
Speaker 1: you know things on Twitter after they hear this, and
Speaker 1: you'll listen to it and you'll just kind of roll
Speaker 1: your eyes. It's the same stuff and they're doing the
Speaker 1: same sort of vibe. And I think that hurts metal
Speaker 1: in a way because I think a lot of times
Speaker 1: it's just this regurgitated sound that people will praise and
Speaker 1: then it goes away because no one if you're not
Speaker 1: in the scene, you don't care. And if it's something
Speaker 1: way outside the box, it just gets the thumbs down
Speaker 1: right away, and the gatekeepers kind of keep it, you know,
Speaker 1: behind closed doors and say, well, we're gonna forget about that.
Speaker 1: That's not metal, And I think that kind of hurts
Speaker 1: the scene. I think nowadays though there's UM bands like
Speaker 1: System of a Down like obviously they're not making music,
Speaker 1: they are truly a great band to me where they're
Speaker 1: making a different sound. There's bands like the Deaf Tones,
Speaker 1: there's Ghost who's doing their own thing. There are these
Speaker 1: shining bright moments UM, but overall as a scene, you
Speaker 1: don't see the experimentation that I would love to see
Speaker 1: as recording. This last week, Goes had an amazing number
Speaker 1: number one around the world in many markets. Why do
Speaker 1: you think it was so successful? Well, I think they
Speaker 1: did a lot of vinyl and they did a lot
Speaker 1: of things that I'm not going to call it manipulation,
Speaker 1: but these are all the conversations that we have when
Speaker 1: we're a rock band. Sell as much physical as you can,
Speaker 1: UM get as many of these versions of this out there,
Speaker 1: and then the streaming numbers always lack, right. I want
Speaker 1: to be a band that can just stand on our
Speaker 1: own and not do all the the the tricks and
Speaker 1: just get out there and I want people to actually
Speaker 1: want to listen to this, and I want it to
Speaker 1: be something where the where the audience, it's the grounds
Speaker 1: well where they are gonna go and put on their
Speaker 1: streaming devices and and move these people into this new
Speaker 1: era where yeah, I understand vinyl. I love Vinyl. It's
Speaker 1: a collectible. Like as we get an n f T S,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about collectibles. But in terms of streaming,
Speaker 1: it's just a no brainer. And our audience still it's
Speaker 1: very hard to get them over there and to buy
Speaker 1: into this thing. You know. On our last record, we
Speaker 1: did a surprise release. It was supposed to be very
Speaker 1: stream heavy, and we got a lot of the arrows
Speaker 1: we took on our back was that people wanted a
Speaker 1: c D in the middle of oh Maha and and
Speaker 1: Best Buy, and we're like, sorry to break it to you,
Speaker 1: that's going away. Your car is not gonna have a
Speaker 1: CD player. You guys are gonna have to move into
Speaker 1: this era with us. And it was a lot of
Speaker 1: it was a lot of pushback, and it was a
Speaker 1: lot of like Avenge has their nose at A has
Speaker 1: at A. They think they think they're better than us
Speaker 1: with these this streaming and it's this and that I'm
Speaker 1: always gonna buy CDs, and it's like, come on, guys,
Speaker 1: we have to move along with the real world if
Speaker 1: we want to be irrelevant or you know, a relevant
Speaker 1: sort of genre that has our you know, put that
Speaker 1: can put our hat in the ring. So these things
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily Avenge seven Folds problem. We're gonna do what
Speaker 1: we're gonna do, but they are things that we are
Speaker 1: keeping our eye on and watching. Um. You know, sometimes
Speaker 1: if you move too quickly, you have an audience that's
Speaker 1: simply it does not compute. And um so, so I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think the Ghost thing, I mean I'm
Speaker 1: looking at it. I see the same number as you do.
Speaker 1: And it's a lot of vinyl, it's a lot of collectibles,
Speaker 1: and it's a lot of you know, what you do
Speaker 1: when you're a rock band to make sure your numbers
Speaker 1: pumped so that industry people can say, hey, you've got
Speaker 1: a big number. What happens week two, three and four?
Speaker 1: Is it really a ground swell of um of this musical,
Speaker 1: you know, ground swell where people are of all genres
Speaker 1: are listening to Ghost. I hope so do I think so?
Speaker 1: Probably not? But you know, not to be negative. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: we can't predict the future. But going back to streaming,
Speaker 1: why do you think the metal audience doesn't stream? I'll
Speaker 1: just give my own theory first. It's interesting because country
Speaker 1: artists and fans are all into streaming now, and I
Speaker 1: think that the rock art is just streaming so much
Speaker 1: their audience bought it. But I'm interested in your take.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's interesting. I mean, at this point, I
Speaker 1: would take any take, because I don't know, you know,
Speaker 1: like I I understand that I live in a bubble
Speaker 1: in southern California. I understand that we might be a
Speaker 1: little more privy or we're around people that are more
Speaker 1: getting into the techie side of things. Right Like when
Speaker 1: we were a band coming up, we were burning c
Speaker 1: d s on our CD player. We're going to chain reaction,
Speaker 1: handing them out. Um. As soon as Napster came out
Speaker 1: and lime Wire and all those things, we quickly jumped
Speaker 1: on that and we were listening to all this music.
Speaker 1: It's not to say that that same kid my age
Speaker 1: in the middle of the country maybe didn't have the
Speaker 1: same friends or the same sort of um ecosystem where
Speaker 1: they were being privy to that, right, And so as
Speaker 1: soon as I was able to get rid of CDs
Speaker 1: and get a streaming service, I jumped on it. And
Speaker 1: it was much It made sense to me. I'd go
Speaker 1: on an airplane I'd go to the gym. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to have a discman. I didn't like the skipping.
Speaker 1: I mean, we all know why streaming is superior. Um.
Speaker 1: Years after that, we did that surprise release and we
Speaker 1: had the pushback, so it kind of shocked us. And
Speaker 1: I just don't know. I think every time you bring
Speaker 1: up streaming to people and you get all these old
Speaker 1: bands and they're bitter about it, and it's like it's
Speaker 1: very weird, right, It's like they're still in two talking
Speaker 1: about how music doesn't make any money and there no
Speaker 1: one's buying our CDs and no one's doing this. It's like,
Speaker 1: maybe you're not relevant, Like let's be relevant. Let's put
Speaker 1: our let's put our you know hat in the ring
Speaker 1: with you know, when they're listening to Biber or they're
Speaker 1: listening to the Weekend, they can jump over to Metallic
Speaker 1: and events seven folding. We're playing in the same park here.
Speaker 1: Um that that has always made sense to me. But
Speaker 1: you still get these people that are you know, streaming,
Speaker 1: streaming is killed industry, and now we gotta do this
Speaker 1: and we gotta do that, and it's like, no, streaming
Speaker 1: kind of saved the industry. It's saved the the user.
Speaker 1: I call them the web two user. Right, it's like
Speaker 1: the the the fan. The fan gets to listen to
Speaker 1: you at any point. So how are you going to
Speaker 1: get their attention? How are you going to be the
Speaker 1: best thing that's gonna be going through their ear holes
Speaker 1: that day? And that's what we should be striving for,
Speaker 1: not having an argument if we should put on CD
Speaker 1: or vinyl or streaming um the the battle's already been won.
Speaker 1: So you know, to me, I don't have a real
Speaker 1: good answer to it. I just think sometimes we get
Speaker 1: stuck in our ways and and Metal has really dug
Speaker 1: their heels in on on this. We're not gonna move
Speaker 1: along with the rest of the world. We kind of
Speaker 1: like it this way. Your merch table, since you talked
Speaker 1: about the label, do you sell c ds? Do you
Speaker 1: sell vinyl? Uh? No? No, So you've completely moved on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we moved on a long time ago. Yeah. Okay, So
Speaker 1: are there enough Avenge Sevenfold fans to carry you without
Speaker 1: any of the perks that you had before the t
Speaker 1: r l's, the radio, et cetera. Because it's hard to
Speaker 1: reach people, it's hard to make new fans. What's your
Speaker 1: viewpoint on that, well, to me, you let the hardcore
Speaker 1: fans evangelize you by giving them access and ownership to
Speaker 1: what you're building. And we're gonna get into that a
Speaker 1: little bit um and all we have seen and if
Speaker 1: you look at our trajectory, you know, we had shows
Speaker 1: in June that were coming up, but we cancel them
Speaker 1: to finish this record. The money has gotten bigger, the
Speaker 1: slots have gotten bigger, and we can always go tour
Speaker 1: in these places. Right, We're gonna headline help us this year,
Speaker 1: will probably headline download for the third time. You know,
Speaker 1: in a couple of years when this records out. The
Speaker 1: Danny Wimmer festivals, we're gonna be headlining those, right. The
Speaker 1: shows are bigger the But but what has to happen
Speaker 1: is you have to get those one thousand fans, those
Speaker 1: five thousand fans, and you make them owners, and you
Speaker 1: make them evangelize this band, and you service them to
Speaker 1: a point to where everybody else that's seeing what's happening
Speaker 1: wants to be involved. And we don't have the drivers
Speaker 1: we used to have, but we do have a great
Speaker 1: catalog and we're gonna continue to put out new music
Speaker 1: and we're gonna innovate on how we put that music
Speaker 1: out and what it means to own a part of
Speaker 1: Events sevenfold, and what it means to own a part
Speaker 1: of our I P. And these are things that we're
Speaker 1: experimenting with and that we're extremely excited about. And we're
Speaker 1: also cutting out middlemen. Right. We own our own merchandise,
Speaker 1: we have our own warehouse, we're building our own studio. UM,
Speaker 1: we're doing everything to where we own everything from now on.
Speaker 1: And you know, our last two records will come back
Speaker 1: to us in six years. UM. A big reason why
Speaker 1: we were make in the play to buy our masters. UM.
Speaker 1: We do believe because of rock music we have this.
Speaker 1: It's like kind of this bedrock of fans that are lifers.
Speaker 1: The reason you go to an Iron Maiden show without
Speaker 1: all the drivers is, you know, it's very much because
Speaker 1: you see the grandpa there, the dad there, and you
Speaker 1: see the kid with the Iron Maiden shirt on. We're
Speaker 1: seeing that with our fans. We're seeing the people that
Speaker 1: grew up with us, that got the tattoos, and now
Speaker 1: they're in their forties and they're late thirties, and we're
Speaker 1: seeing the call of duty audience. Because we were very
Speaker 1: deeply embedded in the video game seen a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago, and the nineteen year old, and then we're
Speaker 1: seeing them all having kids. We see it on Instagram,
Speaker 1: we see it on Twitter, and they've got the Avenge
Speaker 1: seven Fold onesies. These are people that we need to
Speaker 1: empower to build the band and to build the legacy
Speaker 1: because we don't have t r L. Right, Okay, so
Speaker 1: let's assume you have these five thousand or whatever number
Speaker 1: we want to use. Does that inhibit you artistically because
Speaker 1: traditionally fans just want to repeat of what you've already done.
Speaker 1: Oh hell no, our fans know at this point like
Speaker 1: you have throwing our fans. I mean, if anyone that
Speaker 1: listens to this, that knows the drama of every record
Speaker 1: that Avenge of Fold puts out, it's like the world's
Speaker 1: been put on fire right from Waking the Fall And
Speaker 1: we had done records on a on an independent label,
Speaker 1: and when we went to our first major label, we
Speaker 1: put out a record called City of Evil, which had
Speaker 1: no screaming and it was almost like European power metal
Speaker 1: with an American vibe on steroids. And that record, everybody
Speaker 1: that listened to Waking the fallen was like, this is trash,
Speaker 1: this is horrible. That ended up going on TRL and
Speaker 1: having that kickstart, and it created a whole new audience.
Speaker 1: When we put out the next record, it was another
Speaker 1: completely different entitil on its own, and what we realized
Speaker 1: then was that we are going to continue to put
Speaker 1: out pieces of art that represent It's almost like a
Speaker 1: time capsule of what we represent, what we want to
Speaker 1: do at that time, and every record has to find
Speaker 1: its own audience. But what happens after a while is
Speaker 1: those people start galvanizing around the fact that they don't
Speaker 1: know what to expect, and so now you're starting to
Speaker 1: see people that go, I don't care what they put out.
Speaker 1: It could be a hip hop record. I trust even
Speaker 1: seven Fold to put out something cool because I like
Speaker 1: all these different styles. Now we have people fall off
Speaker 1: on every record, and we gain people on every record, right,
Speaker 1: and so we're not worried about that. In fact, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't even make music. You know, one thing that always
Speaker 1: bugs me about the music industry is make the right record.
Speaker 1: Make the right record to me, You make the record
Speaker 1: that you want to make, and you're an artist. If
Speaker 1: you're not an artist, then don't do this. They go,
Speaker 1: go get a job, like I really want to make
Speaker 1: art that I'm sitting there proud of, and I go,
Speaker 1: this represents me right now, this is what I'm into
Speaker 1: in two thousand twenty two. And I think as soon
Speaker 1: as you get away from that and you start playing
Speaker 1: the game and you're trying to figure out what fan X,
Speaker 1: Y and Z wants and you're trying to write for them,
Speaker 1: and that has never worked in the history of music.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, you know, I've I listened to a lot
Speaker 1: of music, and when bands repeat themselves, it's instantly this
Speaker 1: like my ears go up and like, oh they're trying
Speaker 1: to do that, and that's always a bum out to me.
Speaker 1: And uh, well, we will never do that. We want
Speaker 1: to challenge our audience. We don't believe our audience knows
Speaker 1: what they want. It's that's that famous Steve Job quote. Right,
Speaker 1: of course, I don't think they know what they want.
Speaker 1: You have to give it to them and they have
Speaker 1: to figure out while they're sitting there with their headphones on.
Speaker 1: I want them to look the first time their friends
Speaker 1: gone to hear that, and they go, what the f right?
Speaker 1: And then I want them to go, Okay, I get this,
Speaker 1: this is rad, this is different, and so that's our
Speaker 1: our mentality at all times. If we don't get a reaction,
Speaker 1: we're actually kind of sad. Okay, the next number of
Speaker 1: hardcore Avenge sevenfold fians, what do you think their attraction
Speaker 1: to the band is? Why are they bonded so tight?
Speaker 1: You talked about you know you're surprising them, but why
Speaker 1: are they so dedicated to Avenge seven four. I think
Speaker 1: we came up in a time in a scene where
Speaker 1: it kind of was the you know, the anti new metal.
Speaker 1: I think we were the first band that brought these
Speaker 1: guitar solos back onto the radio. I think a bunch
Speaker 1: of people identify like most bands with their with they're
Speaker 1: with growing up, you know, the nostalgia factor, and think
Speaker 1: we were breaking a lot of rules back then. And
Speaker 1: I think we were breaking rules musically. And I think
Speaker 1: when you dig deep into it, people started saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: they're they're flashy, they talk a lot of crap and
Speaker 1: interviews they're kind of over the top. The press loves
Speaker 1: to go with it. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: you could break our songs apart, and we know what
Speaker 1: we're doing. Like I think you can look at the
Speaker 1: music theory and you can look at that. We're a
Speaker 1: serious band underneath the layers of the entertainment on top
Speaker 1: of it, you know, and a lot of that's gone
Speaker 1: away because you know, when you're twenty years old and
Speaker 1: you get thrown into a van and you're there's no
Speaker 1: one to tell you what to do, and you know,
Speaker 1: Kevin Lyman throws you on the warp tour and you're
Speaker 1: and you're playing for you know, fifty bucks a day,
Speaker 1: and you and you're just selling your own merchants. It
Speaker 1: becomes a wild time, especially straight out of high school.
Speaker 1: You I mean literally, you're given the keys to the kingdom,
Speaker 1: you know, your your little van. It's kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, it's like who let these guys out
Speaker 1: of the cage? You know? Um. And as we've as
Speaker 1: we've grown up, I think we've grown up with a
Speaker 1: lot of people that have gone through those things like
Speaker 1: any generation would. And I think we've continued to put
Speaker 1: out compelling music. And I think we've done that by
Speaker 1: challenging the audience. I don't think you do that by
Speaker 1: repeating yourself. Okay, let's move into the n f T
Speaker 1: and the new paradigm you're establishing with revenge seven fold.
Speaker 1: But let's really start at the ground level. Were you
Speaker 1: always a techie? Were you into computers when A O.
Speaker 1: L Went nuclear and ninety five or six? Were you
Speaker 1: into that? No? I was fourteen at the time, so no,
Speaker 1: I wasn't. But um, one thing I have been, and
Speaker 1: I always give this example, UM, I was very into
Speaker 1: video games when um, you know, on the PC and
Speaker 1: on the Nintendo, from the very early beginning of that,
Speaker 1: the earliest that I could possibly be involved. And I
Speaker 1: remember my parents and my grandparents being very much um
Speaker 1: thinking it was a time stuck and that it would
Speaker 1: ultimately just be a bunch of losers that play these
Speaker 1: things and there'd be no career, there no sort of
Speaker 1: benefit from this sort of thing. The one thing I
Speaker 1: learned from it, and looking back on the culture now
Speaker 1: is that the culture drives innovation and it drives what
Speaker 1: is acceptable in society. Right, So what I mean by
Speaker 1: that is now we have multimillion dollar Twitch streamers, we
Speaker 1: have Fortnite champions, and we have kids growing up that
Speaker 1: want to be YouTubers, TikTokers, and streamers over basically anything else,
Speaker 1: my kids included. And so what I learned from that
Speaker 1: is you follow the culture. You follow the kids because
Speaker 1: they are trying to fit into my world. They're going
Speaker 1: to create their own world, which will be society when
Speaker 1: they're my age. And the same way that my friends
Speaker 1: at forty years old still play video games every night
Speaker 1: and they're still talking. They have families, but they're still
Speaker 1: logging into you know, World of Warcraft, or they're playing
Speaker 1: pub g or Call of Duty. And this audience has
Speaker 1: grown up with video games and then and they never
Speaker 1: lost it. This new blockchain thing and the age of
Speaker 1: the Internet will be adopted by this new generation as
Speaker 1: you see artists like Diplow or Blow or Steve Ioki
Speaker 1: or the Marshmallows of the world as they start dipping
Speaker 1: their toe into blockchain. And the reason my kids know
Speaker 1: what n f T s are and they know what
Speaker 1: you know, um digital goods are is because they're hearing
Speaker 1: about these people talk about it on there, you know,
Speaker 1: their their social media. Now, what Events seven Bold is
Speaker 1: doing is something much more ethical, and I think, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 1: I want to get a lot of information before we
Speaker 1: get exactly what events. Yeah, I wasn't gonna say what
Speaker 1: we're gonna do. I'm just gonna say we're a different
Speaker 1: thing than all that, but we'll stop there. Okay, So
Speaker 1: at what point did you become invested intrigued by all
Speaker 1: the technological changes? So I bought bitcoin in two thousand sixteen. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: before that, I would say video games is all it was.
Speaker 1: I was never a techie guy. Like. Okay, so the
Speaker 1: turn of the century when everybody gets a high speed connection, Sure,
Speaker 1: are you downloading on Napster? Are you talking? Oh yea yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. I didn't consider myself techy. It's funny because
Speaker 1: I considered myself just a normal kid. Right. So I
Speaker 1: had figured out, you know, a l chat rooms and
Speaker 1: you go in there and you ruffle feathers and you
Speaker 1: act like a jerk online and everyone's running around and
Speaker 1: we think it's funny. And then it turns into you know, websites,
Speaker 1: going to these websites that didn't do much, but it
Speaker 1: was kind of like, Okay, there's a place to go.
Speaker 1: This kind of boring but cool. Um. And then you know,
Speaker 1: obviously when we were we went from like these little
Speaker 1: eight doubt tapes to like um taping like Testament record
Speaker 1: or the Dream Theater record and giving them to each other.
Speaker 1: Then CDs right, and so then you had burning of
Speaker 1: c d s, which was like this blew our minds
Speaker 1: that you could change the track right. It was like
Speaker 1: I can go to track four. That's crazy. And then
Speaker 1: you'd go to best Buy and you'd buy you know,
Speaker 1: the hundred and fifty stack, and then we just start
Speaker 1: we'd start, you know, like trading music that way. And
Speaker 1: then Napster came around, and then we started saying, well,
Speaker 1: now we got everything for free, and then you'd get
Speaker 1: viruses on your Lime wire or whatever, and then you
Speaker 1: you get a whole new computer because you're totally screwed.
Speaker 1: And I remember that was the time of party poker, right,
Speaker 1: like start gambling online under age. So I guess that
Speaker 1: was kind of techy, but at the same time I
Speaker 1: knew my way around it. But I wasn't like a
Speaker 1: techy guy. I just kind of it was simple enough.
Speaker 1: Web one and Web two had made it simple enough
Speaker 1: for people like me and everybody at my school and
Speaker 1: all my friends to use these sort of protocols and
Speaker 1: these these devices and and make it really cool for
Speaker 1: us to gamble, listen to music, and trade. I guess, okay,
Speaker 1: Web two point oh, which at this point in time
Speaker 1: is really seen as social media. To what degree have
Speaker 1: you and Avenge Sevenfold taken advantage of that? You know,
Speaker 1: we probably haven't. And we have a Facebook page, you know,
Speaker 1: we have of MySpace page. Um, we have an Instagram page,
Speaker 1: and we have a Twitter and what goes on in
Speaker 1: there isn't a lot and we don't really keep up
Speaker 1: on it. Because we have this, we had this feeling
Speaker 1: of like this is super cheesy, Like we don't want
Speaker 1: to put ourselves out there in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: like with the if you just put tour dates, like
Speaker 1: let's put it this way, if your machine gun, Kelly
Speaker 1: and you're all over in your and he's a good friend, right,
Speaker 1: so I'm not This isn't dissing him his life. He's
Speaker 1: got it all over social media. Everything he does, right,
Speaker 1: he's writing songs, he's doing this, he's doing that. That
Speaker 1: doesn't work for Evenge seven fold. We look at ourselves
Speaker 1: more of like when we were growing up, we loved
Speaker 1: Mr Bungle and Faith No More and Tool and these
Speaker 1: bands that were very mysterious to us, and to put
Speaker 1: everything on social media didn't really work for us. And
Speaker 1: I remember Warner would always have a problem with it.
Speaker 1: They're like, you know, Gerard Way is doing this thing
Speaker 1: and you should do it too, And every morning like
Speaker 1: have them sit in the sessions and write the songs
Speaker 1: with you and like take comments, and we're just like,
Speaker 1: that's not for us, right. It just felt uncomfortable. But
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers somehow got twenty million people to sign up
Speaker 1: to Avenge seven Folds Facebook. At one point. I think
Speaker 1: that thing is dwindled to sixteen million because we don't
Speaker 1: do anything with it um. But when they started charging
Speaker 1: us tens of thousands of dollars to reach our own
Speaker 1: fans is when we started being very suspicious of these things.
Speaker 1: Right now, it's like we've brought you all these people,
Speaker 1: they're filling out your ecosystem. These are our fans, and
Speaker 1: now they go no, no no, no, no no, you don't
Speaker 1: actually get to talk to them unless you pay pay
Speaker 1: the piper um. So then we started getting really really
Speaker 1: suspicious of it, so to not go on anything else.
Speaker 1: That's our relationship with Web two. It's very much this
Speaker 1: skeptical not really doing much on it, and we don't
Speaker 1: like putting our lives and what we ate for breakfast
Speaker 1: on there, so we don't do well on it. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's your choice, people might say on the opposite side,
Speaker 1: then in today's tsunami of information, unless you're in touch
Speaker 1: with your audience on a regular basis, they move on
Speaker 1: to something else. What would be your response to that?
Speaker 1: My response to that would be like when System of
Speaker 1: a Down puts out a record, or Faith No More
Speaker 1: puts out a record, we all go get it. Like
Speaker 1: I know that if Avenge of Them will puts out
Speaker 1: of record, when we put out a record, people can
Speaker 1: be as distant as they want. When you're in the
Speaker 1: rock community. As soon as that calling card comes, as
Speaker 1: soon as you see that thing on Apple Services or
Speaker 1: Spotify or we put out some sort of information, I
Speaker 1: believe they will all come back. I don't believe you
Speaker 1: have to be all over social media doing a lot.
Speaker 1: I think for some people do. But I think a
Speaker 1: lot of other genres are a lot more flimsy than
Speaker 1: the rock genre than the metal genre. And and it's
Speaker 1: so funny because these are like two different points, Like
Speaker 1: the metal genre has an innovation problem, but they don't
Speaker 1: have a community problem. Like there's people that love heavy
Speaker 1: metal and they're gonna find out when these bands are
Speaker 1: doing these things now branching outside of that, maybe we
Speaker 1: keep more of the TRL audience. If we're all over
Speaker 1: social media. Do we want that audience? Is it healthy
Speaker 1: for us? I mean maybe if all your metrics are
Speaker 1: as selling records, But we're trying to go headline health
Speaker 1: fest and headline download festival and trying to go do
Speaker 1: all Danny's festivals and go do these things with a
Speaker 1: more authentic audience. And I say some of these words,
Speaker 1: and I know this will come back, you know, like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, think authentic as these other artists, But I
Speaker 1: think of these other genres as what have you what
Speaker 1: have you done for me lately? I don't think metals
Speaker 1: that that much of that sort of genre. So I
Speaker 1: think that works to our advantage. Again, but I don't
Speaker 1: want to do something that makes me uncomfortable. I don't
Speaker 1: do this because I have this need to be a
Speaker 1: rock star. I do this because I love music and
Speaker 1: I want to put it out there. And at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, if I think, you know, I
Speaker 1: can sell more records because I show you what I
Speaker 1: had for breakfast, or show you show me in the studio,
Speaker 1: then I want out I don't want anything to do
Speaker 1: with it. So at some point you have to do
Speaker 1: it on your own terms and and say, are you
Speaker 1: really an artist that wants to put these things out
Speaker 1: for a real reason or are you an artist that
Speaker 1: simply wants to get you know, a bunch of records
Speaker 1: sold and maybe sell a lot of tickets. I just
Speaker 1: I think there's a fine line there that you have
Speaker 1: to walk. Okay, so you started talking about bitcoin. Continue there.
Speaker 1: So in two thousands sixteen, I learned about this internet money,
Speaker 1: which I knew people that were playing video games. Um,
Speaker 1: we were doing a thing called game battles, which was
Speaker 1: competitive gaming online. So again it goes back to gaming.
Speaker 1: And at the time, you know, so if I do
Speaker 1: the math, you know, in my early thirties, at that point, um,
Speaker 1: and it made sense to me. I didn't read the
Speaker 1: white paper. I didn't know Satoshi was doing, but the
Speaker 1: idea of internet money and the idea that people were
Speaker 1: trading this and betting and gambling online, it may sense
Speaker 1: that this thing was something. Um. Then I heard about ethereum,
Speaker 1: and I heard about smart contracts, and I started reading
Speaker 1: the white papers and okay, wait, wait, everybody may not
Speaker 1: know everything you talk about I think you know Bitcoin,
Speaker 1: I think they know. Etherium explained smart contracts. So smart
Speaker 1: contracts were basically, and to keep this as high level
Speaker 1: as possible, they are basically taking the Bitcoin problem of
Speaker 1: permissionless currency, which you know, it gets authenticated by nodes
Speaker 1: across the world, which is why you don't have to
Speaker 1: have a human involved. These computers are authenticating that Matt
Speaker 1: paid Bob and there's no human involved, and as soon
Speaker 1: as both sides agree, then it goes through. Now what
Speaker 1: Ethereum did is they added on top of that and said, well,
Speaker 1: you can put anything into a smart contract. It's lines
Speaker 1: of code, it's called metadata, and these contracts are going
Speaker 1: to live on the blockchain and as soon as both
Speaker 1: contracts have fulfilled their promise, then and a transaction will
Speaker 1: take place. It could be a transaction in real life,
Speaker 1: it could be a financial transact, chin it could be
Speaker 1: a piece of art, it could be a piece of music,
Speaker 1: it could be whatever it wants. But these things will
Speaker 1: live on the blockchain, authenticated by nodes around the world.
Speaker 1: To the average person, you can own bitcoin. What's the
Speaker 1: difference between owning and what exactly is a smart contract?
Speaker 1: So two different things some owning. Bitcoin is a currency
Speaker 1: that is authenticated by computers around the world. That there's
Speaker 1: only twenty one million of them. Now they all haven't
Speaker 1: been mined, and these are all gonna be weird. These
Speaker 1: this whole conversation might be rabbit holes, and I'll try
Speaker 1: to keep out of it. No no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no no, don't don't stay out of the rabbit
Speaker 1: holes because they're relevant. I just don't want to go
Speaker 1: too far ahead, So let's just leave it at. Bitcoin
Speaker 1: is a digital currency that lives in a decentralized fashion
Speaker 1: because of the way that it's set up, and it
Speaker 1: solves the problem of banks, uh, third party credit cards,
Speaker 1: anybody that can get in the way of and shut
Speaker 1: down these lines of communication, these lines of finance. So
Speaker 1: that's what bitcoin solved. Um for better or for worse, right,
Speaker 1: we can get into that um ethereum win a step further,
Speaker 1: and the metadata that's involved in these smart contracts, it
Speaker 1: can provide anything, not just a currency. Now there is
Speaker 1: a currency with ethereum, it's called and And as you
Speaker 1: move things across ethereum the blockchain, you have to use
Speaker 1: athereum as gas, which is kind of powers let think
Speaker 1: of it as your vehicle, and you have to use
Speaker 1: these transactions to move pieces of metadata across the blockchain.
Speaker 1: So again, it's all decentralized. In the beginning, of course
Speaker 1: it isn't. It's an idea. And then as things go
Speaker 1: deeper and deeper, the owners of Ethereum start owning the
Speaker 1: protocol based on how many coins you have based on
Speaker 1: these nodes across the world, which probably doesn't isn't relevant
Speaker 1: to this conversation, but it is decentralized in that way,
Speaker 1: so nobody can so to give a perfect example, the Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Do now, if you're gonna send money on Athereum or Bitcoin,
Speaker 1: there's no government, no visa card, no Spotify, no US
Speaker 1: government that can stop those transactions from going through. They
Speaker 1: are decentralized. So you would say bitcoin is a pure currency.
Speaker 1: But Ethereum allowed these smart contracts which allowed the growth
Speaker 1: of n f T s and other things. Would you
Speaker 1: agree with that? So any of these contracts are gonna
Speaker 1: be labeled as n f T s, right, So they're
Speaker 1: just pieces of data. So when we say n f
Speaker 1: T on this podcast, a bunch of people are gonna go, oh,
Speaker 1: a board eight cost five screw that, right, But an
Speaker 1: n f T could also be the d to your house,
Speaker 1: your bus ticket, it could be a fractionalized version or
Speaker 1: a fractionalized loan that you've taken out. It could be
Speaker 1: a fractionalized home in real life that you've bought, that
Speaker 1: you are in a dow with people and you have
Speaker 1: part ownership of. Those are all n f t s.
Speaker 1: They're non fungible tokens, but they really are just meta
Speaker 1: data on the blockchain. So n f t s get
Speaker 1: this bad name because people instantly attribute it to, Oh,
Speaker 1: this artist is putting a piece of artwork or a
Speaker 1: piece a song on the Internet and they want me
Speaker 1: to own it. I'm not an art collector. I don't
Speaker 1: care about that. I'm gonna download it for free. That
Speaker 1: n f t s are stupid, right, Um, But it
Speaker 1: gets much deeper than that of what you can do
Speaker 1: with these things. Um. So n f T s, let's
Speaker 1: let's just for the listeners. We're just gonna say it's
Speaker 1: metadata on a blockchain, not necessarily ethereum, but there are
Speaker 1: many blockchains. Let's go back to your personal experience. So
Speaker 1: in sixteen you buy how much bitcoin a lot um? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I bought um about twenty dollars at the time or
Speaker 1: at the bitcoin and at the time it costs two
Speaker 1: fifty dollars per bitcoin. Okay, needless to say, it's been
Speaker 1: very volatile. How have you emotionally handled that rod? It
Speaker 1: is hardened my soul. I've never sold any of it.
Speaker 1: So if you look at these peaks and valleys, you know,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where I said, listen, I
Speaker 1: put twenty grand and I bought twenty grand of ethereum too,
Speaker 1: and that was thirteen dollars at the time. But the
Speaker 1: point is that in two thousand and eighteen we had
Speaker 1: many crashes, right we I think bitcoin got to twenty
Speaker 1: thousand coin and it went down to a thousand. You've
Speaker 1: got everybody in your circle. You go from genius too,
Speaker 1: dummy because I'm not selling it it right and so
Speaker 1: and then I just bought more because here's the here's
Speaker 1: the deal. The fundamentals never changed. All it was was
Speaker 1: growing pains of people not understanding, and it became a
Speaker 1: speculative tool. It becomes a circus. Right, You've got doch coin,
Speaker 1: You've got all these things going on, and people are
Speaker 1: just buying on top of each other and they're trying
Speaker 1: to be the last they not be the last man standing.
Speaker 1: And but if you actually look at the tech and
Speaker 1: what has been done there, there's no reason to sell.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was more reason to buy more because
Speaker 1: I haven't seen a time in human history where we've
Speaker 1: had a better technology than what we currently use and
Speaker 1: then we just threw it away. It doesn't exist. Electric
Speaker 1: cars took a while, but it's a better technology than
Speaker 1: what we're using. And the computer and many times, I
Speaker 1: mean I was young, but I see that the clippings.
Speaker 1: Now Internet was a fad, it's over. No, it's not.
Speaker 1: It's connecting everybody in a way that never happened before.
Speaker 1: Do we have our own problems with it? Yes, it
Speaker 1: came with a whole new stack of problems. But people
Speaker 1: aren't giving up the Internet, Bitcoin, ethereum, these all coins,
Speaker 1: some of them are gonna have very good use cases
Speaker 1: and they're going to be very important in our future.
Speaker 1: And as new um, as new companies and brands come online,
Speaker 1: and as new brands disrupt the old brands and come
Speaker 1: you know web three first, you're gonna start seeing all
Speaker 1: these plugs are much easier to plug in if you
Speaker 1: are already involved in this sort of smart contract digital world.
Speaker 1: There we go rabbit holes. Okay, so there are these
Speaker 1: varying coins you mentioned, you know, internet currency, and I
Speaker 1: was convinced when Marc Andreessen wrote something in the New
Speaker 1: York Times talking about, you know, leaving the banks out,
Speaker 1: that you can sell something in Africa because it's right
Speaker 1: there on the blockchain, whereas before intermediary said, well there's
Speaker 1: so much fraud, we don't want to get involved. Do
Speaker 1: you believe these coins, ethereum, bitcoin, they will exist or
Speaker 1: just something will exist? I know something will exist. I
Speaker 1: think I'm I'm very very positive that bitcoin will exist.
Speaker 1: Some of the smartest people, I mean, you've got the Jacks,
Speaker 1: you've got the the Elon's, they are very bitcoin maxie.
Speaker 1: And there's a reason for that. And that's a different conversation.
Speaker 1: There's there's reasons to stay proof of work, there's reasons
Speaker 1: of you know, and these are I find these crossroads here.
Speaker 1: Ethereum is moving to a more eco friendly way to
Speaker 1: mind the ethereum coin, which is proof of steak. This
Speaker 1: is big for the environment, it's big for a lot
Speaker 1: of different things, but it also there's a little bit
Speaker 1: less security with it, because it's the people that run
Speaker 1: the nodes have to own a certain amount of ethereum
Speaker 1: and and and when that happens, you start having lopsided nodes,
Speaker 1: or you start having people involved in some sort of
Speaker 1: way even though they're they're not actually doing the the
Speaker 1: approving themselves. It just gets a little bit hairrier, right.
Speaker 1: And there's definitely papers that people could read on this
Speaker 1: and why Bitcoin won't be doing that. They're staying proof
Speaker 1: of work there there there mo is to figure out
Speaker 1: better ways to use the energy that we have, go
Speaker 1: wind or solo or whatever they're gonna do. But they're
Speaker 1: staying purely permission less. Nobody can get involved in bitcoin.
Speaker 1: And so you have people like Jack and Elon who
Speaker 1: are bitcoin maxis, and they're trying to say, don't get
Speaker 1: involved in Web three. Web three is going to be
Speaker 1: owned by the FECs, right the all the vcs are
Speaker 1: gonna come in. They're gonna do the same thing they
Speaker 1: did to Web two, and it's gonna be all about bitcoin.
Speaker 1: These are different conversations that they have. They both have
Speaker 1: a lot of merit. But I do believe Bitcoin will
Speaker 1: be around. I believe that the theory will be around.
Speaker 1: It's so far ahead. Um. But my answer for will
Speaker 1: there be a digital currency is yes. But I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna put my you know, my name down for a
Speaker 1: because we all know how quick things change. For those
Speaker 1: who don't really know, explain Web three to them. So
Speaker 1: Web three is a permission less at call, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a supercomputer, it really is. It's computers that are
Speaker 1: authenticating notes. So where before on on Web two we
Speaker 1: had things like a piece of art. Let's take a
Speaker 1: board it for example. If if you had a board
Speaker 1: it which most people will know what a board it
Speaker 1: is at this point, is on the cover of everybody
Speaker 1: will just make it a little simpler, okay if they
Speaker 1: If you just had an item, you can have an
Speaker 1: item on the Internet before blockchain and you could right
Speaker 1: click save, you could pass it around the Internet could
Speaker 1: do whatever you want with it. And Web three you
Speaker 1: can do the same thing, except that there is one
Speaker 1: authenticated owner which lives on metadata in the blockchain. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, if you were to sell Welcome to the
Speaker 1: Jungle today, which probably wouldn't work, but there might be
Speaker 1: a buyer out there that says I want to own
Speaker 1: Welcome to the jungle. Now, through a piece of metadata,
Speaker 1: you could essentially put the i P rights, the publishing,
Speaker 1: the masters, the artwork, everything in it, and that would
Speaker 1: go for a crazy large price. Right. So the guy
Speaker 1: that gets it now could go and actionalize it off
Speaker 1: to other people. He could make merchandise, he could pull
Speaker 1: it off streaming services. You do whatever he wants. He
Speaker 1: owns all the rights, it's all in the metadata. Um.
Speaker 1: These things are basically think of them as digital contracts
Speaker 1: that you can do whatever you want with them. And
Speaker 1: the the creator of these contracts. So say event Someville
Speaker 1: does it, we kind of write the rules however we
Speaker 1: want to do it, and then it's done on the
Speaker 1: back end, on the on the blockchain. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of a hard thing to understand, I guess in that context.
Speaker 1: But you have all these collections right now of things
Speaker 1: like the board apes, which are a piece of art,
Speaker 1: and these this meta data allows you into a club. Right,
Speaker 1: So this board ape you have on your computer is
Speaker 1: a contract that you own the ape. You can do
Speaker 1: whatever you want with it. You have the i P
Speaker 1: rights to it. You can be invited to parties, they
Speaker 1: can air drop you their own digital coin, they can
Speaker 1: drop you serrums to make mutant apes. This whole world
Speaker 1: opens up up things that you cannot get if you've
Speaker 1: simply clicked right click and save, um and so again
Speaker 1: in so many different use cases. But that's one that's
Speaker 1: very simple that's happening right now that a lot of
Speaker 1: people are scoffing at. But the reality is, go right
Speaker 1: click slave one of those things and see if you
Speaker 1: get the air drops. See if you get to go
Speaker 1: to the party, See if you get to you know,
Speaker 1: have access to this group of people that have been authenticated,
Speaker 1: these these minds that have bought these things early. Um,
Speaker 1: these dows. They just created a dow where the owners
Speaker 1: of the board apes have governance and they have a
Speaker 1: vote over what happens in the future of the board apes.
Speaker 1: What kind of so anyways, yeah, rabbit hole. Okay, wait
Speaker 1: wait wait you spell dow. D O explain to my
Speaker 1: audience what a DO is. So a DOW is a
Speaker 1: decentralized autonomous organization. So autonomous doesn't really work because there
Speaker 1: has to be human at the beginning of these things, right,
Speaker 1: they start centralized and as time goes on, based on
Speaker 1: the amount of tickets or tokens that you give out.
Speaker 1: These tokens could represent governance or votes in how the
Speaker 1: company has run. So I'll give a small example. We
Speaker 1: all know what dot com is. So in the web
Speaker 1: three era, there's a thing called E n S. Right,
Speaker 1: So having your name, um, you would have to go
Speaker 1: through a company called E n S. So you pay
Speaker 1: a little money and they give you this this E
Speaker 1: and S that goes to the ind of your name.
Speaker 1: So I am shadows dot eath. I have a bunch
Speaker 1: of a like appetite for destruction dot eath. I've got
Speaker 1: all these things right that if the bands ever came
Speaker 1: and you gotta give it to them. But basically it's
Speaker 1: like the dot com boom. What they did was they said, well,
Speaker 1: based on and they never announced this until they announced it,
Speaker 1: which was cool. I had this thing for a year, right,
Speaker 1: So what they did was they basically took everybody that
Speaker 1: had these E N S names and they said, based
Speaker 1: on how long you've held these and based on the
Speaker 1: amount of time that you spent and the name that
Speaker 1: you have, we are going to give We're gonna turn
Speaker 1: the whole company into a doubt. So now your token
Speaker 1: is your voting and your governance for the whole company.
Speaker 1: We are completely backing off. So it's kind of what
Speaker 1: what Metalic did with ethereum. You create a currency and
Speaker 1: then you back out slowly as people start gaining governance
Speaker 1: and gaining these tokens and these coins, as the ecosystem
Speaker 1: starts fulfilling itself off. So in E n S, I
Speaker 1: had a I could decide if I wanted to cash
Speaker 1: out my money which was over a couple hundred thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: or I could be a voter and a part of
Speaker 1: this ecosystem and evangelizing E n S. So that's what
Speaker 1: a dow does. A dow could be anything from buying
Speaker 1: a physical house in the real world to buying a
Speaker 1: piece of digital like I think there was a dow
Speaker 1: trying to buy the Constitution, the US Constitution. There's dows
Speaker 1: that raise money in our charities for certain organizations that
Speaker 1: can't get money easily, so they can bypass altered parties
Speaker 1: by using a dow and the money goes straight to
Speaker 1: these people. There's a bunch of different use cases for dows,
Speaker 1: and there's probably gonna be a use case for record
Speaker 1: labels and all sorts of things moving forward. As people
Speaker 1: start seeing hey, I work at this company. I want
Speaker 1: to have ownership in it. I want to be a
Speaker 1: part of the voice UM. Chris Dixon gives the example
Speaker 1: of how would Uber look if the owners of Uber
Speaker 1: were the drivers, right, If you had a car, you
Speaker 1: had governance over a vote, and you had these kind
Speaker 1: of unions that were helping people decide what they were
Speaker 1: going to use their governance on. You could trade your
Speaker 1: governance for certain things. Of course, big ideas, and they
Speaker 1: might be kind of far out, but I actually don't
Speaker 1: think they're that far out. They're already being implemented. But
Speaker 1: that's what now is. It's a decentralized autonomous organization. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's go back to Web three. The theory on web
Speaker 1: three is to decentralize power and ownership so you don't
Speaker 1: have an authority like you have at Facebook or any
Speaker 1: of these other huge companies that we have online. Why
Speaker 1: are people like Jack Dorsey, etcetera. Explain why they don't
Speaker 1: like this because many people see it as a piano
Speaker 1: sea giving the power back to the people. Explain why
Speaker 1: some of these people don't see it that way. Jack
Speaker 1: Dorsey to paint him as a nonbeliever in in crypto
Speaker 1: or Bitcoin would be wrong. He is a huge believer
Speaker 1: in Bitcoin and Lightning Network. Again rabbit holes. Bitcoin is
Speaker 1: going to have its own not only payment system, but
Speaker 1: it will be able to provide n f T s
Speaker 1: off of basically layered two protocols that will be built
Speaker 1: off it. He likes that because it truly is decentralized.
Speaker 1: Some of these bigger guys that have been in it
Speaker 1: for a long time. If you look at Jack's thing,
Speaker 1: it's got Bitcoin logos. He always talks about. He gets
Speaker 1: into it with the Web three guys right because he
Speaker 1: doesn't like the idea that the billions of dollars that
Speaker 1: are being funneled into Web three right now will own
Speaker 1: Web three. If you look at you go Labs and
Speaker 1: you look at um the board Apes for example, they
Speaker 1: are a company that started with a five eight eleven
Speaker 1: months ago. It was worth nothing. They decentralized the point
Speaker 1: where all the owners own the I P. They started
Speaker 1: a mother brand called YOUG Labs over it, and then
Speaker 1: what happened. Um Horrowitz came in, uh Citadel came in,
Speaker 1: black Rock came in, and they put fourgner and fifty
Speaker 1: million dollars into YOUG Labs So Jack's question is who
Speaker 1: owns the dow at this point, who owns the board apes? Right?
Speaker 1: Is it you? Or is it all the same players
Speaker 1: that were investing in Facebook, and they were investing in
Speaker 1: you know, Twitter and investing in all these things. So
Speaker 1: it's almost a battle of who can be the most decentralized, right,
Speaker 1: who can be the most money or who can be
Speaker 1: the most currency for the people, who can bring the
Speaker 1: most value to this promised land of Web three. So
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say Jack's a guy that's like, oh no,
Speaker 1: it's all trash, like stick to Facebook, right, It's very
Speaker 1: much the opposite of that. Um. So there are these
Speaker 1: little in fights within Web three quote unquote and the
Speaker 1: Bitcoin maxis, which I think they both have really good arguments.
Speaker 1: And once we get into what we're doing, I would
Speaker 1: like to explain why we think we're doing it more
Speaker 1: ethically than a lot of the Web three players. Now
Speaker 1: I'm a collector of a lot of these tokens, and
Speaker 1: I don't and you Go Labs has done nothing yet
Speaker 1: to to show that they are a d are a
Speaker 1: centralized platform that's going to do bad, But it is
Speaker 1: what it is, right when you have four and or
Speaker 1: fifty million dollars invested in you. That's coming from a
Speaker 1: couple of sources. So let's let's call spade a spade. Right,
Speaker 1: these are big players coming in with a lot of money,
Speaker 1: and they can they can determine what what's gonna happen here. Okay,
Speaker 1: you were an early adopter, you bought bitcoin in sixteen.
Speaker 1: You're following the scene. At what point do you say,
Speaker 1: here's an opportunity for revenge seven fold? Um? I don't know.
Speaker 1: If you're familiar with Gary v you know who Gary
Speaker 1: v is started selling wine online and became a marketing guru,
Speaker 1: Gary Vaynerchuk. So Gary what he did and what the
Speaker 1: board apes did. So I'll start back in one. I
Speaker 1: bought my first, well the beginning of I bought my
Speaker 1: first UM crypto punk, which, if anyone that knows that
Speaker 1: is it's basically the first collection that ever gained notoriety
Speaker 1: on the on the blockchain. UM. It was the first
Speaker 1: digital collectible that you could own. In my mind, I
Speaker 1: was like, well, I believe in the space, that's a
Speaker 1: no brainer. I should buy as many crypto punks as
Speaker 1: I can, Right. So I went in there and I
Speaker 1: had already had, you know, and this is like one
Speaker 1: of the complaints to a lot of people already had
Speaker 1: a lot of ethereum. Right. I bought it in two
Speaker 1: thousand sixteen when it was thirteen dollars a coin. Now
Speaker 1: it's sitting at four thousand a coin at this moment,
Speaker 1: right or when when when I was talking about this
Speaker 1: and so was a lot easier to go in there
Speaker 1: and drop, you know, sixty seventy grand on a on
Speaker 1: a jpeg um. But something in tregued me about it,
Speaker 1: and I thought, if this is the first piece of art,
Speaker 1: I'm seeing this as the next rem brand, this is
Speaker 1: the next Picasso, right, this is the digital age, um,
Speaker 1: digital asset ownership, first time you can own something on
Speaker 1: the internet. I need some of these. So I started
Speaker 1: buying him, and I remember the way I felt about him.
Speaker 1: I was I was so happy with it. I was
Speaker 1: scared at first, and I was like, what a waste
Speaker 1: of money? And then I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at this thing all the time. And one
Speaker 1: of the AHA moments for me as I was with UM,
Speaker 1: I went to a Laker game with a with a
Speaker 1: buddy who owns part of the Phoenix Suns and we went,
Speaker 1: you know, to watch that game, and I was he's
Speaker 1: an investment guy, big investment guy. I don't want to
Speaker 1: name names in any of this because it doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: but he was there and he was asking me about
Speaker 1: Crypto because I've been telling me about it for years
Speaker 1: and they never dipped their toe and it was too
Speaker 1: scary to them. And I said, well, I gotta stop
Speaker 1: you for a second. That as a guy beingd Avenge
Speaker 1: sevenfold know a guy like this. A lot of vcs
Speaker 1: are big metal heads. They really are. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of these guys are are very much into rock
Speaker 1: and roll. A lot of them came from that generation.
Speaker 1: You know, uh, I golf, I play metal and a
Speaker 1: lot of these guys they grew up on Motley Crue
Speaker 1: and guns and Roses and they and they stuck with
Speaker 1: it and they know Event sevenfold and they know Metallica
Speaker 1: and they and so a lot of times you meet
Speaker 1: these guys and their owners of these big vcs or companies.
Speaker 1: You know, how do you feel because you talked about
Speaker 1: you don't want to participate on social media. For those
Speaker 1: of us who've had the opportunity to hang with the billionaires,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of perks, the private jets, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But it's clear that they're in control. So do you
Speaker 1: have any ethical issue interacting with these people? I would
Speaker 1: argue that if you're in a band, they listen to
Speaker 1: that you're in control. They respect that. I could argue
Speaker 1: this long, day long, and it really gets down to
Speaker 1: the specifics, but maybe later. Let's go back. So you're
Speaker 1: at the Laker game with this guy's part owner of
Speaker 1: the Sun's. So I guess it comes down to can
Speaker 1: I afford to go to the Laker game myself or
Speaker 1: do I need them to pay for me. I can
Speaker 1: afford to go to the lake again myself. So I
Speaker 1: think we're on we're on equal ground here. But we're talking.
Speaker 1: He's always asked me about bitcoin and and and ethereum
Speaker 1: and all these things, and he's always been his whole
Speaker 1: team has always been like, how do we get involved.
Speaker 1: I've explained it to them and they never pulled the trigger.
Speaker 1: So I said, well, you're gonna be really blown away
Speaker 1: by the dumb thing I bought recently. It's this picture,
Speaker 1: and he said, get out of here. I said, no,
Speaker 1: it's just it's this picture and and and the first
Speaker 1: one I got out like a little clown nose and
Speaker 1: had like a little boppy hair, and I said, this
Speaker 1: is a crypto punk and what did you pay for that?
Speaker 1: Like stars? And he's like, no, get out of here,
Speaker 1: and like I was like no, I think this is
Speaker 1: the future. And they're laughing, and then his kids come
Speaker 1: up and they go, you have a crypto punk. I go, yeah,
Speaker 1: I a crypto punk there, Like can we see it? Yeah? Sure?
Speaker 1: Now this is something they can pull up on their
Speaker 1: own phone, but they want to see the phone that it.
Speaker 1: It's acted and by the way, it's not really on
Speaker 1: that phone, right, it's a picture. It's calling a you know,
Speaker 1: a link basically, but can we see it? These kids
Speaker 1: who are gonna inherit this come me someday are passing
Speaker 1: around this crypto punk like it's the coolest thing they've
Speaker 1: ever seen. They're holding one in their hands, a real
Speaker 1: crypto punk, and it clicked with me. The future will
Speaker 1: be dictated by the generation that is coming up. Um.
Speaker 1: And so what had happened? Shortly after that? The board
Speaker 1: apes came out and a bunch of US d gens
Speaker 1: were minting these board apes, and the crypto punks didn't like, okay,
Speaker 1: not everybody's gonna know. Go a little bit deeper into
Speaker 1: what the board apes are. Okay, So the board apes
Speaker 1: were a collection of ten thousand apes that have generative quality. Right,
Speaker 1: so there's probably hats that are made uh thirty seven
Speaker 1: skin colors, eighteen eyes that could be put on there
Speaker 1: like frowning to that, and so a generator when you
Speaker 1: buy these things, generates you a one of one random
Speaker 1: ape that can never be recreated. But the thing that
Speaker 1: the apes were doing is they said, hey, we're going
Speaker 1: to give up the i P to these apes. Go
Speaker 1: print your own T shirts, start yoga studios, start a
Speaker 1: coffee brand, go sell your own ape as a merch brand.
Speaker 1: And zoomies, which happened this week, and it was Nick
Speaker 1: Yards and Snoop Dogg and all of them. They're the
Speaker 1: ones that did this. They said, we don't care what
Speaker 1: you do. The bigger you make this brand, the more
Speaker 1: it's gonna make people want to be a part of
Speaker 1: this community. And in fact, not only do we not
Speaker 1: own the apes and you own the I P, We're
Speaker 1: gonna create a dow eventually, and we're gonna create a
Speaker 1: coin that's gonna put to get these ecosystems, all big
Speaker 1: things on a road map. So we all minted them
Speaker 1: whatever whatever, it's five d bucks, right, we bought a
Speaker 1: few of them. A month went by, nothing happened. Then
Speaker 1: things started changing, Right, You've got celebrities buying them. You
Speaker 1: had LaMelo Ball was one of the first ones, Josh Hart.
Speaker 1: People started buying these things, and it became like putting
Speaker 1: them on their uh, you know Instagram, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of funneling back into web, to their Twitter profiles. Their
Speaker 1: Instagram was kind of the calling card if I know
Speaker 1: what's up right, I know, I know what's going on here.
Speaker 1: Steph Curry bought in, Tom Brady bought in Odell Breckham Jr.
Speaker 1: So all of a sudden it was like the cool
Speaker 1: kids club to be involved again. While you probably see
Speaker 1: Feigner and fifty million dollars get funneled into this thing recently, right, so,
Speaker 1: but they just became this this use of web three
Speaker 1: where it was like, let me give you another example.
Speaker 1: We were in n f T, New York and the
Speaker 1: Apes were having a party, right, and the party was
Speaker 1: free booze, free food. You get in for free. You
Speaker 1: gotta have an ape um you gotta show your ape
Speaker 1: at the door. You gotta R s v P. They
Speaker 1: authenticate that you have the ape. You get in there,
Speaker 1: it's Beck, Chris, Rock, the Strokes, the Baby, free concert
Speaker 1: all night. Everything is free, paid for. You've got all
Speaker 1: these like minded people in the same room, people to
Speaker 1: understand the vibe they're they're in the know. And so
Speaker 1: that's like a small perk, right. So in real life perk,
Speaker 1: you've got the merch whatever, which everyone wants. There was
Speaker 1: t shirts going for fourteen thousand dollars when they first
Speaker 1: sold out because people wanted to have the board ape
Speaker 1: merch um. It became like a cultural phenomenon of like
Speaker 1: the old way you could own something, but you never
Speaker 1: own the brand. But we're giving you the rights to
Speaker 1: own the brand. You do whatever you want. And it
Speaker 1: gave people this leeway and this freedom to go build,
Speaker 1: to build what they wanted. There's musician the Chain Smokers.
Speaker 1: There's there's a bunch of artists that I know right
Speaker 1: now that are coming out with projects that are actually groups,
Speaker 1: like the Gorillas, and they're using their apes. Right There's
Speaker 1: a group signed a universal already that is all apes,
Speaker 1: and and I know all these people because I know
Speaker 1: what they're trying to do. They're trying to create this
Speaker 1: this ecosystem and this thing around this cool kids club. Now,
Speaker 1: since then, there's been a million and one you know,
Speaker 1: copycats and people trying to do the same thing. But
Speaker 1: what happened? Back to your question, I said, it's one question.
Speaker 1: It's the party with Beck and Chris Rock. How many
Speaker 1: people were there? It was R S v P. So
Speaker 1: hold out instantly people, you know, and you've got the
Speaker 1: who's who there? Right, it's like Gyo Cri. It's it's
Speaker 1: the Marshmallows, it's the the snoop dogs. I mean everyone's there. Right,
Speaker 1: It's the place to be. You've got your ape, there's athletes,
Speaker 1: anyone from New York was there. It was the place
Speaker 1: to be. And these are like cultural movements that you
Speaker 1: kind of have to follow and not so when people
Speaker 1: talk about the PfP aspect of it, like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: a stupid thing I put on my Twitter. I always
Speaker 1: don't discount that because that's a calling card. It's like
Speaker 1: wearing your Slayer T shirt down the road. And you
Speaker 1: know what kind of that that guy is kind of
Speaker 1: all about. Right, you see the board ape on a profile.
Speaker 1: You know what they're about, and you know they have
Speaker 1: something like minded, which I think is important, but it's
Speaker 1: not the whole game here. So when the board Apes
Speaker 1: did that, and Gary had done what he did with Vcan,
Speaker 1: which if you have this token, you have access to
Speaker 1: one on one time with him, you can win dinners
Speaker 1: with him, He's gonna air drop you stuff randomly, you
Speaker 1: get free access into his ve con. So all these things.
Speaker 1: I started seeing the tokens as this utility tool, and
Speaker 1: as I started thinking about it, I was like, man, Gary,
Speaker 1: Gary is a little bit of a different story. But
Speaker 1: the board Apes pulled this out of their ass, right,
Speaker 1: they pulled it out of thin air. No one knew
Speaker 1: what the board Apes were in. It all came from
Speaker 1: the crypto punks and just kind of moving into this
Speaker 1: new era of digital ownership, and people bought in. They
Speaker 1: understood it. And I said, well, what do you what
Speaker 1: happens if you take up an audience of twenty years
Speaker 1: and you distribute these tokens to them, and you say,
Speaker 1: we're gonna find our biggest evangelizers, We're gonna find the
Speaker 1: people that want to build this community. We're gonna decentralize
Speaker 1: a little bit of our operation here and give you
Speaker 1: voting rights to certain things the merch we drop you
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit of set list things that we're
Speaker 1: kind of playing with right now. Right, you don't want
Speaker 1: it to impede too much on the overall fan base. Um.
Speaker 1: But then we started thinking about real life perks. Well,
Speaker 1: what if you go to a show and there's a
Speaker 1: PO app there And for people that don't know what
Speaker 1: a po app is, it's a proof of attendance. You
Speaker 1: scan the PO app when you get there and it
Speaker 1: reads that you have a token, and then we get
Speaker 1: to air drop you a ticket stub that moves from
Speaker 1: that night. Now, if you collect enough ticket stubs, we
Speaker 1: give you a reward. We give you a free guitar,
Speaker 1: a zoom call with us, all things we can track
Speaker 1: on the meta data instantly without a team. So then
Speaker 1: we started building meta data protocols out for merchandise for us.
Speaker 1: Then we started building in the metaverse a little bit
Speaker 1: too fast. You have the idea, yes, how long after
Speaker 1: you have the idea do you take action? And what
Speaker 1: does that action look like? Okay, so our first idea
Speaker 1: was not fully baked. I was still in the mindset
Speaker 1: that what if we put a little bit of unreleased
Speaker 1: music and a a picture kind of where most people go, right, like,
Speaker 1: I bet that's worth a lot. That's kind of cool.
Speaker 1: And my mindset now is that you don't turn musician
Speaker 1: or music fans into art collectors. They don't care. They
Speaker 1: just want the music right there. They don't care like
Speaker 1: that they own the track on Spotify, they don't really care.
Speaker 1: There's very few people that are going to care about
Speaker 1: that ownership. So we made this n f T and
Speaker 1: what we did is we said, hey, anybody in the
Speaker 1: audience that has a metal mask, which is the for
Speaker 1: the people that don't know, that's the that's the connector
Speaker 1: between us and and web three. So it's like this
Speaker 1: app on your phone that can basically it's like a
Speaker 1: looking glass into what you own on your Ethereum wallet.
Speaker 1: UM it's where you keep your n f T s UM.
Speaker 1: So anyone that downloads a Metal Masks send us your
Speaker 1: address and we're gonna pick a hundred one people and
Speaker 1: drop this piece of art with um a piece of music.
Speaker 1: So we had five thousand people sign up on Metal
Speaker 1: Masks and send us their addresses, which is a pretty
Speaker 1: good number. Right of this new thing, right, and we said,
Speaker 1: and by the way, most of the fans that got
Speaker 1: him were just like, at first, we rolled our eyes
Speaker 1: at this. We thought it was whatever, We're just download
Speaker 1: this free app. When was this exactly? This is May
Speaker 1: of last year. Okay, so this is just after Grimes
Speaker 1: and all the insanity becomes public. Yeah, it was public,
Speaker 1: but again it took us a month to kind of
Speaker 1: id and get it announced and do all it. So
Speaker 1: it was around the same time of a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff happening, and um, you know, we had five thousand
Speaker 1: addresses and one of the things that we noticed is
Speaker 1: that we started looking at addresses, which everything on the
Speaker 1: blockchain is seeable and you can kind of I can
Speaker 1: look in your wallet, you can look in my wallet,
Speaker 1: and we noticed that no one had any n f
Speaker 1: t s and all of the meta mauths had been
Speaker 1: set up recently, and so we wrote a piece of
Speaker 1: code and we were able to kind of look into
Speaker 1: every address at once, and we noticed that only thirteen
Speaker 1: people had any prior n f t s. Right, So
Speaker 1: this was a whole new audience that had no clue
Speaker 1: what we were doing. It was not this savvy Steve
Speaker 1: Ioki audience or the chain smoker's audience, you know, which
Speaker 1: was cheering when they put a board ape on their Instagram.
Speaker 1: Our audience was just like, we don't know what this is.
Speaker 1: And so we air dropped those seventeen people some because
Speaker 1: we didn't want to give it to an address that
Speaker 1: was going to get forgotten about or the because once
Speaker 1: it's gone, it's gone, right. You can't you can't there's
Speaker 1: no one to call. You can't call the talk and
Speaker 1: say hey, ethereum founder, can you go get some of
Speaker 1: these n f t s that we lost. It doesn't
Speaker 1: work like that. So then we started distributing them to
Speaker 1: people that we saw very active on Reddit. We kind
Speaker 1: of matched up the names or or you know, when
Speaker 1: they had signed up and they kind of put their
Speaker 1: addresses and Reddit. So we're trying to give them to
Speaker 1: super fans, people that could kind of understand it. So
Speaker 1: we did those and they kind of sat there, and
Speaker 1: then we then we had the idea of like the
Speaker 1: board apes. I think the board apes came out just
Speaker 1: after that, just around that time, and the utility thing
Speaker 1: kind of sparked that interest. So we started doing educational
Speaker 1: videos because we knew we had a lot of work
Speaker 1: to do because a lot of people just kind of
Speaker 1: ignored it, they didn't get it, and they moved on.
Speaker 1: So we we talked a bit. We ideated on the
Speaker 1: Death Bets Club. We started working with an artist. Well
Speaker 1: a little bit slower. You're making educational videos and you're
Speaker 1: putting them okay, so let's actually go before that. We
Speaker 1: ideated on the idea, and we kind of floated and
Speaker 1: read it, and we said, what if we made a
Speaker 1: ten thousand collection like the board Apes or like the
Speaker 1: Crypto Punks, And we turned this into the Access passed
Speaker 1: Slash touch point to all things event sevenfold, And we'll
Speaker 1: get into all those things later. But if you have
Speaker 1: this pass, we consider you an evangelist, and we consider
Speaker 1: the amount of stuff we're gonna give you that you'll
Speaker 1: feel like an owner and that you'll want to build
Speaker 1: and make this community as good as you want to
Speaker 1: make this community. And if you don't want to be
Speaker 1: in the community more, then unlike Patreon or go fund me,
Speaker 1: you can actually sell your membership to someone else that
Speaker 1: wants to get in. So it is digital ownership one
Speaker 1: oh one, right, and it's it's one of these things
Speaker 1: that we had to under to teach the fans. So
Speaker 1: I think in basically, we set up a website. We
Speaker 1: went out to everybody. We said, hey, guys, we're gonna
Speaker 1: set up a white list anybody that wants to get in.
Speaker 1: This is the price. It's about dollars at the time
Speaker 1: with what ethereum was. And then we had a bunch
Speaker 1: of moaning and groaning and I'll just why do I
Speaker 1: do this? And and and we need to go back
Speaker 1: a little bit further where evenge some of folds never
Speaker 1: done paid meet and greets. We don't do paid v
Speaker 1: I P. Stuff. We we've always felt it was cheesy,
Speaker 1: and we've always gone out after shows and shook hands
Speaker 1: and taking pictures, but we never do the whole pay
Speaker 1: me tucks and we're gonna shake your hand getting a
Speaker 1: line thing. And so this was something completely new. We
Speaker 1: were offering things that if you're part of this club,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna either guarantee or pick certain things
Speaker 1: based on rarity. Again more rabbit holes based on what
Speaker 1: you get, but it's for three and or fifty bucks.
Speaker 1: You have these things for life. And the more value
Speaker 1: we bring to the club, and the more value you
Speaker 1: bring to the club. These things could go up in
Speaker 1: value or they could go down right, but we we
Speaker 1: kept very far away from the speculative use this as
Speaker 1: a pump and dump thing because it was very important
Speaker 1: to us that people saw this as a fan club
Speaker 1: on steroids that they owned. And so when we opened
Speaker 1: up the white list, and for people that don't know
Speaker 1: what the white list is, obviously we are having people
Speaker 1: sign up there meta mass addresses and we were saying, cool,
Speaker 1: you can mint on day one. You can mint on
Speaker 1: day one. We had three people sign up. That was it?
Speaker 1: Only three people? And we said, okay, we got to
Speaker 1: go back to the drawing board. Because projects that are
Speaker 1: doing well sellout and T minus five seconds. We have
Speaker 1: a whole new audience that doesn't understand this and they
Speaker 1: don't trust it. So we started making videos explaining what
Speaker 1: Ethereum was, explaining the digital ownership, our package. We started
Speaker 1: explaining how you set up metal mask, how you go
Speaker 1: to coin base and get Ethereum, and a little caveat
Speaker 1: here It was important to us that they got Ethereum
Speaker 1: and didn't use moon pay or some other thing to
Speaker 1: use FIAT because if you want to put a token
Speaker 1: for sale, you have to pay a little bit of
Speaker 1: gas and they'd be stuck. So if they didn't understand
Speaker 1: the ecosystem and what they were getting into, they would
Speaker 1: simply just have a token and they would eventually have
Speaker 1: to go find ethereum or figure out how to set
Speaker 1: up a coin based account or a binance account. So
Speaker 1: we walked them through all these things. The the white
Speaker 1: list grew after we put out these videos. From that
Speaker 1: was my question, where could someone see these videos? Okay,
Speaker 1: so we put them on YouTube and we put them
Speaker 1: all over our new website, which was Avenge seven fled
Speaker 1: dot io, which is the new version of web three.
Speaker 1: So it's it doesn't really matter if you use a
Speaker 1: dot com, but these are Web three enabled where you
Speaker 1: can build a p I s, you can build the
Speaker 1: plumbing of web three. So for instance, a very small
Speaker 1: example is the board apes had a bathroom a graffiti room,
Speaker 1: and you couldn't go in the graffiti room unless you
Speaker 1: have a board ape. So what happens is metal mouse
Speaker 1: pops up, it says would you like to sign in?
Speaker 1: It reads that you have a board ape, and it
Speaker 1: allows you in. So this was a very small use
Speaker 1: case at the time. Now obviously your brain can go
Speaker 1: wild of what you can put behind closed ecosystems for
Speaker 1: collectors and and owners of these things. Right, it could
Speaker 1: be new music, that could be merch that they can
Speaker 1: only get. It could be digital assets, it could be
Speaker 1: closed off concerts. And then you have to have the
Speaker 1: question of what do I want to have clothes off
Speaker 1: and what do I don't But those are all different
Speaker 1: philosophical questions. But the idea of a metal mouse popping
Speaker 1: up and having to read the blockchain that you this
Speaker 1: token in your wallet was revolutionary. It was all of
Speaker 1: a sudden. You couldn't just make a bunch of email addresses,
Speaker 1: and you couldn't just send a code somewhere or or
Speaker 1: do all these things that we try to do, or
Speaker 1: a QR code or this or that they can all
Speaker 1: be sent somewhere else, or there's all these hoops to
Speaker 1: jump through. But now you just had to have a token.
Speaker 1: Just simply a token will allow you in. It didn't
Speaker 1: matter who you were, where you came from. The out
Speaker 1: of token you can get in. So we started seeing
Speaker 1: this and we put these things on our web three website. Obviously,
Speaker 1: before you do how many people watch the videos? I
Speaker 1: don't know, that's a good question. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: know that our initial launch video did about two fifty
Speaker 1: you know, views initial launch of what we're trying to build. Okay,
Speaker 1: and how long were the videos? We made the first
Speaker 1: video about six minutes and then everything after that was
Speaker 1: a minute or under. It was like, yeah, sure, right,
Speaker 1: there's people that go into the discord, and there's people
Speaker 1: that go on Google stuff themselves and they just figured
Speaker 1: it out, right, But then you have a lot of
Speaker 1: people that go in the discord like what do I do?
Speaker 1: I'm lost, I don't this is this is bold, right,
Speaker 1: So we made videos that were like, okay, here's us
Speaker 1: explaining it to you. We have twenty years of a
Speaker 1: rapport with you. We're not gonna screw you over. We
Speaker 1: truly believe in this. We think this will be good. Now,
Speaker 1: it's coming from the horse's mouth, right, this is this
Speaker 1: is how you do this, And so we made these
Speaker 1: videos before you go there. You mentioned Discord explained for
Speaker 1: the new be what discord is. So Discord is this
Speaker 1: ephemera chat in a way that Reddit would be something
Speaker 1: if you look at red, it would be something where
Speaker 1: you make these big posts people can comment on it,
Speaker 1: they get pinned. They do at least certain things, where
Speaker 1: Discord is more of a free flowing chat, so as
Speaker 1: things are happening, there's there's hype and excitement, and there's
Speaker 1: different rooms. So if you're in a band, you could say,
Speaker 1: let's go talk about guitars in here, or let's talk
Speaker 1: about our albums in here, or let's go do a
Speaker 1: merch giveaway in here. And so the n f T
Speaker 1: world is really adapted to um these discords because it's
Speaker 1: got these large amounts of people that are constantly talking
Speaker 1: about the utility of their tokens, the art of their tokens,
Speaker 1: the parties that they're gonna be throwing, the the protocol,
Speaker 1: the dows. It's this. It's this sort of chat where
Speaker 1: people can ideate with each other in real time instead
Speaker 1: of you know, going to read it and waiting for
Speaker 1: posts to be responded to, not knowing how many people
Speaker 1: are in there, you're really seeing this liveliness. So it
Speaker 1: got adopted from video games back in the day where
Speaker 1: people were playing cross platform and someone wanted to play
Speaker 1: Call of Duty with someone on PS five but they
Speaker 1: had a PC. You turn on Discord and then you
Speaker 1: would use it as a UM as a communication tool,
Speaker 1: but they have quickly learned that they are the the
Speaker 1: center of Web three n f t s and what
Speaker 1: is being being used at these communities. So they have
Speaker 1: held off on their I p O and they're going
Speaker 1: back to this is all other stuff. But they're they're
Speaker 1: going back to building out their Web three stuff because
Speaker 1: there are ways to manipulate a Web two device or
Speaker 1: a Web two sort of ecosystem when Web three is involved.
Speaker 1: And and so those are again some of those problems
Speaker 1: that were new type of problems that we're running into. Right,
Speaker 1: you don't want to click on links in Discord and
Speaker 1: connect your wallet because all your stuff might be going
Speaker 1: to somebody else, like things like that that Discord needs
Speaker 1: to fix. So Discord is a just think of it
Speaker 1: as a big party and everyone's in there chatting at
Speaker 1: the same time. And n f t s that are
Speaker 1: very popular constantly have stuff happening in them. Okay, go
Speaker 1: back to your narrative, you put off the videos, you
Speaker 1: educate your audience. And so the white list went from
Speaker 1: UH three nine thousand, nine for for one thousand, for
Speaker 1: for ten thousand tokens and we shut off the white list,
Speaker 1: and we kind of thought that was a day. We
Speaker 1: kind of wrapped it up, like all right, here we go,
Speaker 1: time to start building. What we didn't know was that
Speaker 1: out of those nine thousand people, about sixty five of
Speaker 1: them were not able to get either. So they got
Speaker 1: they got kind of stone walled either when they were
Speaker 1: trying to buy it with their visa car or coin
Speaker 1: based takes a couple of weeks to authenticate you, or
Speaker 1: you know, there's like no your your customer on finance now,
Speaker 1: and so all of a sudden, all these people that
Speaker 1: thought they were going to get in or it just
Speaker 1: got too difficult, right we talked about you talk about
Speaker 1: friction all the time. There was a little bit too
Speaker 1: much friction. Like I have to get cryptocurrency. I don't
Speaker 1: really trust it. I hear bad things, and I gotta
Speaker 1: put it in this metal mask ballet and then I
Speaker 1: gotta go on this thing called open sea, and I
Speaker 1: gotta mint this thing and I'm getting this token but
Speaker 1: it's really just a jpeg. Uh fuck it, you know,
Speaker 1: like I'm I'm I'm over it, right, So we had
Speaker 1: about seventy percent that didn't get there. You know, they
Speaker 1: signed up and they got to that point they didn't
Speaker 1: get crypto again, we wrote a piece of code to
Speaker 1: look in their wallets and see and uh so we
Speaker 1: had what would be called a a steady sellout. So
Speaker 1: it took a couple of weeks to sell the ten
Speaker 1: thousand tokens um and then after that we just started
Speaker 1: building and the tenth the way. Just to be clear,
Speaker 1: this is separate from the three hundred and fifty dollar one. Nope,
Speaker 1: this is it. So you ultimately did sell ten thousands, yes,
Speaker 1: and so what we did we had, you know, made
Speaker 1: a few million dollars on that, and we rolled it
Speaker 1: into because a couple of years ago I had bought
Speaker 1: a bunch of Sandbox Land and Sandbox For anyone that
Speaker 1: doesn't know what that is is a metaverse. It is
Speaker 1: a decentralized platform which centralized for now, but it will
Speaker 1: be decentralized as people that own land, they will gain
Speaker 1: more governance. As a whole roadmap to that, but a
Speaker 1: metaverse is kind of like Ready Player one right where
Speaker 1: you go in and you can jump from people's worlds
Speaker 1: to worlds and they all have different things going on.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of different gaming techniques that we go into.
Speaker 1: But there's a bunch of reasons that people will want
Speaker 1: to be there. They can wear their digital merch, they
Speaker 1: can throw virtual parties, you can actually have concerts there.
Speaker 1: You can stream kind of what Fortnite did, but you
Speaker 1: would you could token gate it to where you say, hey,
Speaker 1: Deathbat club owners only get to watch this concert, or
Speaker 1: everyone gets to watch the concert. But if your Death
Speaker 1: Beats club owner, we're gonna give you a one of
Speaker 1: a one of a kind T shirt from the day. Okay,
Speaker 1: the name of the club just go a little deeper
Speaker 1: in there. So the Death Bats club Deathbed is a
Speaker 1: logo that we came up with in high school. It's
Speaker 1: a skull with wings um. Peter Luban at Bravado used
Speaker 1: to call it the Nike swish of heavy metal, say
Speaker 1: it's our, it's our. When we were young kids, we said, hey,
Speaker 1: look at the Misfits and look at some of these
Speaker 1: bands are Iron Maiden with Eddie, and we said, you
Speaker 1: don't need to know their name to know what that
Speaker 1: band is. You need to know that that's the Crimson
Speaker 1: Skull and that's the Misfits. You don't need to see
Speaker 1: Iron Maiden to know that Eddie is Iron Maiden and
Speaker 1: we said we want that, so, you know, being the
Speaker 1: little I guess we had some foresight there, but um,
Speaker 1: we had our friend Michael Montahue rest is slowly passed away,
Speaker 1: but um he drew the death bet for us, and
Speaker 1: that was the first drawing of it. We were just like,
Speaker 1: we want a realistic skull with wings, and we made
Speaker 1: this thing and at the time, uh, we just started
Speaker 1: branding it everywhere. So that's the death Bet. So this
Speaker 1: club is based off of our logo and we took
Speaker 1: the idea of the board apes and said, there's gonna
Speaker 1: it's gonna be generative death Bat. You're gonna get your
Speaker 1: own one of one that you can do whatever you
Speaker 1: want with. In fact, we gave up the I P
Speaker 1: to the Death Beats, So twenty years in building this brand,
Speaker 1: we turned around to the fans instead, if you get
Speaker 1: this token, you can go do whatever you want with it.
Speaker 1: So of course we're seeing a podcast out started with it,
Speaker 1: and that's the logo, and we see people doing merch
Speaker 1: shops and they're building merch for each other and they're
Speaker 1: making hats for each other. So our web three ethos
Speaker 1: at this point is that the more people evangelize this
Speaker 1: logo in the band. Then the bigger the club gets,
Speaker 1: and the bigger the band gets. Okay, I like board apes.
Speaker 1: Is everybody's logo slightly different, yes and so, and then
Speaker 1: you have things like some have gold skin and some
Speaker 1: have psychedelic skin, and some have and we also sweetened
Speaker 1: the pot a little bit. We have some that come
Speaker 1: with free meet and greets for life. We have some
Speaker 1: that come with free tickets for life. But that wasn't
Speaker 1: our main focus. That was something fun. We just threw
Speaker 1: in there because we thought it would be really cool
Speaker 1: for some fan to to get a guitar every year
Speaker 1: from Sinister Gates, or you know, get to go to
Speaker 1: all the meet and greets and when they've met us
Speaker 1: twenty times, I'll probably sell it to someone else. All
Speaker 1: these tokens were the same price. It was all luck
Speaker 1: of the draw, you know. So the kid in Argentina
Speaker 1: that you know got three and or fifty bucks. And
Speaker 1: the reason I bring of Argentina because I met a
Speaker 1: kid that took all of his money and minted board apes.
Speaker 1: He minted twenty five board apes with all of his money,
Speaker 1: five bucks of pop. He saved it with his brother
Speaker 1: and now the kids a multimillionaire, of course, but you
Speaker 1: hear these stories, right. We wanted to give our fans
Speaker 1: like that that couldn't afford a meet and greet package
Speaker 1: or a guitar that costs thirty at retail the chance
Speaker 1: to possibly get one of these and when you're done
Speaker 1: with it, you just send it onto to someone else
Speaker 1: you can sell it. So that was the idea that
Speaker 1: wasn't the The main idea was not the big perks though.
Speaker 1: The idea was that we get these people in the club,
Speaker 1: we start decentralizing it in a way, and we give
Speaker 1: them ownership of their bat, We give them ownership of
Speaker 1: this club. We start giving them perks. We're doing giveaways
Speaker 1: every month, We're doing all these things and uh and
Speaker 1: as the story goes on, I mean I have more examples.
Speaker 1: That was like version one point oh of what the
Speaker 1: Death Bats Club gets you and um. So to go
Speaker 1: back to the money though, because this is important, we
Speaker 1: took the two point seven million, right or whatever it
Speaker 1: was three million dollars that we made on this, and
Speaker 1: we've we bought n f T World, which is another metaverse.
Speaker 1: We bought. We bought um a thing called pixel Verse.
Speaker 1: We bought we started building our land in the sandbox,
Speaker 1: which costs, you know, around fifty to sixty dollars per
Speaker 1: per plot. We have thirty six plots. I bought the
Speaker 1: thirty six plots two years ago when it was thirty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars and now they're worth two point five three
Speaker 1: million dollars for this land that we have. And so
Speaker 1: but we took this this crowdfunding in a way and
Speaker 1: we're just funneling it all right back into the club. Now.
Speaker 1: Our ideas that people are gonna have so much fun
Speaker 1: with this club that we can sell them digital merch
Speaker 1: in there, we can do coke token gated concerts, we
Speaker 1: can have events in there, and as you air drop
Speaker 1: holders things, more people are gonna want to get in
Speaker 1: and we can do things with them as well. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be just Death Bats Club. So that
Speaker 1: kind of sums up the b one version of what
Speaker 1: where we see the Death Bats Club. Um, there's also
Speaker 1: other things where we air dropped every holder free tickets
Speaker 1: to any show they want. And the way we're doing
Speaker 1: that as we went to Live Nation and we went
Speaker 1: to Ryan Harlacker and our booking agent, Rob Light, and
Speaker 1: we said we need two d tickets for ship per
Speaker 1: show that we're just gonna put these kids on on
Speaker 1: the guest list. So when you go and redeem your
Speaker 1: token on the web three site and authenticates that you're
Speaker 1: the owner, it's gonna take your information and put it
Speaker 1: directly into our our our, our, our guest list. Right now,
Speaker 1: that's the shoestring budget. Now, if you get Michael Rapino
Speaker 1: and these guys who are already messing with polygon and
Speaker 1: messing with these ticket stubs, and you go, guys, let
Speaker 1: us plug in. This is not this is not some
Speaker 1: ecosystem that we is owned by anybody. We're gonna plug
Speaker 1: in and let these be authenticated tickets. There's already companies
Speaker 1: working on scanning, and all of a sudden, you've got
Speaker 1: this thing where it can be a much more seamless route.
Speaker 1: Now I believe that, of course tickets are going on
Speaker 1: the blockchain. There's you know, I read your thing about
Speaker 1: the ticketmaster and all this, and there's there's obviously, um
Speaker 1: there's obviously more problems, and there's problems that you solve,
Speaker 1: and there's things that the artists don't want the fans
Speaker 1: to know, and there's all these things that you know
Speaker 1: obviously that that you've have, you've touched on, but things
Speaker 1: like royalties being on chain is a no brainer. The auditing,
Speaker 1: the lawyers, the paperwork, all these things. There's companies right
Speaker 1: now that i'm that are very far down the line
Speaker 1: of convincing Spotify and Apple Music to move on to
Speaker 1: chain so that artists can get paid within twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: And at that point we can fractionalize those royalties out
Speaker 1: with a simple smart contract. We can actually pay our
Speaker 1: Death Beats club owners a percentage. Now you would say, well, Matt,
Speaker 1: you can't do that with the deals that you've got,
Speaker 1: the label deals. Hence why we're thinking about how do
Speaker 1: you do this all independently where we can keep the
Speaker 1: line share of Spotify, and we can keep the line
Speaker 1: share of our streaming services, and we can evangelize these
Speaker 1: people that the bigger the band gets, the more that
Speaker 1: you're gonna be paid by owning this token. Now, these
Speaker 1: are all things that you can do or not, but
Speaker 1: their possibilities, and they're all very interesting possibilities. And I
Speaker 1: feel like I just puked a bunch of rabbit holes
Speaker 1: on you. But these are all things that we're thinking
Speaker 1: about in terms of Web three and why it's important
Speaker 1: and where it's gonna go. We don't know the answer,
Speaker 1: but we we are preparing ourselves for these very cool
Speaker 1: creative endeavors that we can do with our fans. Let's start.
Speaker 1: Everybody you've got in the thousand got in basically got
Speaker 1: in for three Yes, the people who bought in, and
Speaker 1: when did this go live or went live in December?
Speaker 1: Anybody complaining? They're the happiest people. Nobody's complaining going that
Speaker 1: discord and they're just so happy that they have access.
Speaker 1: Well I'll end at that. No, no one's complained. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: oh oh, by the way, are you asking about deathbats
Speaker 1: holders are other people? No, I'm talking about the people
Speaker 1: who paid three d None of them are complaining. No. Okay,
Speaker 1: if you paid your three fifty dollars so far, you've
Speaker 1: got your own icon of the band that you own.
Speaker 1: You say you're gonna get free tickets? What else? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they have free tickets. They have access to our metaverse,
Speaker 1: which is obviously everything is moving online. You see Nike
Speaker 1: just bought. You see Adidas just bought right next to us.
Speaker 1: The hundreds are right next to us. The board apes
Speaker 1: are there the crypto punks are there. It's this whole
Speaker 1: group of people that are basically turning their shutting down
Speaker 1: their websites. They're shutting down the idea of Facebook and
Speaker 1: all these other things, and they're going straight to the
Speaker 1: audience and they're building experiences in there. UM, so right
Speaker 1: now you will get there's parties that are gonna be
Speaker 1: happening that I don't want to give the date yet
Speaker 1: at certain n f T events and you have to
Speaker 1: and you won't be able to get in unless you
Speaker 1: have a token. We will be doing a small tour
Speaker 1: before the Wreck Next record comes out, which will be
Speaker 1: for token holders only, and we'll be going to very
Speaker 1: small places and we have a sponsor that will be
Speaker 1: paying for that. UM. We have white lists and partnerships
Speaker 1: with big merch brands and video game headset companies that
Speaker 1: will be gifting our owners these sorts of things. Now
Speaker 1: to them, it's cool because they're they're getting involved in
Speaker 1: this thing at the ground floor and they're able to
Speaker 1: participate and get the cool factor by they're the guys
Speaker 1: that gave us the headsets are they're the guys that
Speaker 1: did this. Um. We are a little bit of an advantage.
Speaker 1: We own our own merch so we own our own warehouse,
Speaker 1: and we're able to plug all these things directly through metadata.
Speaker 1: We don't have to go to anybody and say, hey,
Speaker 1: can you try to you know, finagle all this. We
Speaker 1: understand that we're in a different position than a lot
Speaker 1: of bands, um. And so there's that, and then we
Speaker 1: will be air dropping everybody avatars for the Sandbox and
Speaker 1: for the n f T world. So you will be
Speaker 1: getting an avatar that there's only ten thousand of, but
Speaker 1: you can only get them if you have the death
Speaker 1: Beats token. So now you get to walk around, you
Speaker 1: get the flex in the metaverse with your friends and
Speaker 1: play these games. But you've got a Deathbat that you
Speaker 1: don't have to pay for. It's free. Um. We would
Speaker 1: We have a podcast that we started that Death Beats
Speaker 1: Club pays for, you know, with some of those royalties,
Speaker 1: and every month we break down songs like on a
Speaker 1: very high level of the music theory, all these things
Speaker 1: that went into the song, the stories behind them, and
Speaker 1: what we want to do eventually is get on a
Speaker 1: decentralized platform where we can fractionalize all those royalties to
Speaker 1: the holders. So that's what they get in what's coming
Speaker 1: up in the in the short term. Um, And then
Speaker 1: you've got to think when we start playing shows again,
Speaker 1: they do have those tickets. They will be having poeps,
Speaker 1: They will get ticket stubs for every show, and there
Speaker 1: will be a reward system based on how many shows
Speaker 1: you went to. And they also get monthly giveaways where
Speaker 1: we give away about three thousand dollars with the stuff
Speaker 1: just randomly to any bat. All you have to do
Speaker 1: is hold it. You don't have to be in there
Speaker 1: and participate. Um. We give you white list to every
Speaker 1: other projects, like if the board Apes came to us,
Speaker 1: they do it all the time, like board Apes don't,
Speaker 1: but they come to other brands and they say, hey,
Speaker 1: we're doing a thing with Adidas. Like your owners get
Speaker 1: on the white list, they can buy our n f T. First.
Speaker 1: I got in Adida's n f T because I was
Speaker 1: a board ape holder, right and so now I get
Speaker 1: access to the Adida's metaverse and I get free merch
Speaker 1: from them. So these are all things that are interconnected
Speaker 1: that our death Dot club owners are getting at this point.
Speaker 1: And also one of the biggest things that sold everyone
Speaker 1: is we have their own merch booth in their own
Speaker 1: line to get into shows. So they simply get to
Speaker 1: walk straight and go to dinner, not have to wait
Speaker 1: in line, just walk right in. We have our own
Speaker 1: guy waiting at the door that's gonna check your thing.
Speaker 1: You it's all gonna be on the you know, the list.
Speaker 1: Like I said, it's shoestring for now. Um. And then
Speaker 1: you're gonna walk right in and you're gonna have your
Speaker 1: own merch but that you can buy your own stuff.
Speaker 1: So these are the things that we have been ideating
Speaker 1: on and what we're doing right now. Hey, can you
Speaker 1: mention the brands that are involved, the headset brand and
Speaker 1: the sponsor. Um. We're still finishing that up, but to
Speaker 1: you know, just to be transparent with things that we
Speaker 1: have worked with before. We've worked with Stuff Gaming. We've
Speaker 1: worked with the Call of Duty franchise, We've worked with Astros,
Speaker 1: We've worked with we we have an announcement coming out
Speaker 1: with the biggest crypto um company in the world. UM.
Speaker 1: I can't announce them, but people can put the pieces together.
Speaker 1: That's coming soon. UM. We worked with the with the
Speaker 1: hundreds or Bobby and Ben. We want to do something
Speaker 1: with them. There's a lot of things that people have
Speaker 1: wanted to do sponsorships with us, and we've never done it.
Speaker 1: I've always felt it was extremely cheesy. But with the
Speaker 1: Death Beats Club, we think it's a perfect way to
Speaker 1: get their brands involved without us feeling like we're a
Speaker 1: sellout having a logo on the back of our stage
Speaker 1: or having someone sponsor our whole tour. Right, We've never
Speaker 1: felt that was cool, but we feel if we can
Speaker 1: give things to our Death Beats Club owners, we're willing
Speaker 1: to do that. Okay, so there are ten thousand, what
Speaker 1: about opening the club of more people. So there's very
Speaker 1: interesting ways that the board Apes have done it right.
Speaker 1: And so if you look at how far the board
Speaker 1: Apes have come, they now have ape coin, which is
Speaker 1: fourteen dollars a coin, and you can't get anything in
Speaker 1: the board Ape ecosystem, which is going to be launching
Speaker 1: in a month um called uh the other Side, and
Speaker 1: this is gonna be a metaverse that you and for
Speaker 1: people that don't play video games, you basically mine resources
Speaker 1: on the land that you get air dropped. If you
Speaker 1: have an ape, you get air dropped land. Now it's
Speaker 1: yours to sell to anyone you want. But they have
Speaker 1: a thing, and so basically they air dropped everybody ape coin. Now,
Speaker 1: they did a mutation earlier on where they gave every
Speaker 1: ape a serum and with the serum, you drink it
Speaker 1: with your ape and you get another n f T
Speaker 1: and an other n f T is called a mutant ape,
Speaker 1: and they had kennel dogs. They did two different versions
Speaker 1: of this, and then they opened it up to the public. Now,
Speaker 1: if you buy these mutant apes, when you've got one
Speaker 1: for free, if you're an ape holder, you could sell
Speaker 1: it on the secondary market, or you could be a
Speaker 1: new person buying in, but you get tiered access. Right,
Speaker 1: you didn't get as much coin as the AP holders,
Speaker 1: you didn't get as much land as the ape holders,
Speaker 1: but you were able to go to part certain parties,
Speaker 1: You're able to do certain things, so people can buy
Speaker 1: the merch, they can evangelize, but they're in at a
Speaker 1: lower level. Now, if you want to level up and
Speaker 1: buy the ape um, then you're gonna have to put
Speaker 1: some serious cash down, right, So the I think the
Speaker 1: mutant apes at this point are probably a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to get in at this point because the board
Speaker 1: apes have been killing it. And you know board Ape
Speaker 1: is probably three four and fifty dollars. But what you
Speaker 1: see is you're allowing more people in the ecosystem and
Speaker 1: to participate when they can. And if you get in
Speaker 1: early to get those mutant drops, they were like a
Speaker 1: thousand bucks. It's just those people at the foresight to
Speaker 1: get in right and then and then it becomes so
Speaker 1: um important to people to get in because it's the
Speaker 1: cool kids club that you know, you get in there
Speaker 1: and and it's and you and you can make some
Speaker 1: money on it. But again I hate talking about floors
Speaker 1: and what tokens are worth because A think it misses
Speaker 1: the point in music. You should be giving people such
Speaker 1: overwhelming value for their tokens that they don't want to
Speaker 1: sell them and that someday they want to they own them, right,
Speaker 1: So like, no one's gonna be mad at the board
Speaker 1: apes that you know, this guy got let in for
Speaker 1: a thousand bucks and now if he sells it and
Speaker 1: he needs to leave the club, he keeps the money.
Speaker 1: No one's mad about that that you truly own these things.
Speaker 1: Um So with music, I think people have missed the point.
Speaker 1: I think selling your art on the blockchain is it
Speaker 1: does not compute. I think selling very little utility like
Speaker 1: a one time offer does not compute. I believe if
Speaker 1: you create these things at a touch point to your
Speaker 1: whole ecosystem, that is the play. And I think everything
Speaker 1: from Ticketmaster to live Nation two, the spotifyes or if
Speaker 1: Jack does something with Title, I think these will be
Speaker 1: on the blockchain, and doesn't matter what blockchain there are,
Speaker 1: what they're on, you're gonna have a layer two capabilities
Speaker 1: to funnel money or your earnings into ethereum, and you'll
Speaker 1: be able to funnel that into token holders if you
Speaker 1: want to go to the financial route. If you don't,
Speaker 1: just offer them a ton of value and continue to
Speaker 1: have this ecosystem that evangelizes itself. Okay, two hundred members
Speaker 1: of the club get it into each gig. How do
Speaker 1: you select those two hundred members. Well, we've done some
Speaker 1: analytics on it, right, Um, so obviously there's not a
Speaker 1: thousand holders in l A. L A is gonna be
Speaker 1: your biggest market. London is gonna be a big market.
Speaker 1: We have looked at it and we think at the
Speaker 1: most you might get a hundred if in the major
Speaker 1: major markets. I don't think it's gonna be even close
Speaker 1: to a problem. But we have an rs VP system
Speaker 1: set up on the back end basically that's rolling out
Speaker 1: this week. You know, we didn't need to have it
Speaker 1: rolled out because we haven't done shows we're not doing
Speaker 1: until next year. But basically what they would do, and
Speaker 1: I've played with it, basically, all you do is you
Speaker 1: were deem your token and we did a fun little
Speaker 1: caveat we had a big n FT artist named pop
Speaker 1: Wonder make the ticket and the idea is you can
Speaker 1: keep the ticket, or if you use the ticket, it
Speaker 1: burns and so you no longer have the ticket. So
Speaker 1: now you can and so now the pop Wonder piece
Speaker 1: goes up in value for the people that are keeping
Speaker 1: the ticket and the people that want to go to
Speaker 1: the ticket they're like, screw it, I got this free ticket.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go, and it's actually a plus one and
Speaker 1: for anybody. And we've done the analytics, we're looking around.
Speaker 1: There's not gonna be more than a hundred people at
Speaker 1: one particular show, and so we've kind of looked at
Speaker 1: all the math on this and said we can afford
Speaker 1: to probably give out two tickets to everybody, and it's
Speaker 1: still not gonna be full, and if it is, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna call Brian Harlocker and be like, hey, bro, give
Speaker 1: us a hundred more. You know, so I think as
Speaker 1: long as uh. But but at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: I think the big boys are coming in. Anyways, I
Speaker 1: know they're coming in. I've talked to these people. I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna name names, but I know these people are
Speaker 1: coming in and they're gonna do it, probably correctly, and
Speaker 1: hopefully they do it in an ethical way that it's
Speaker 1: better for the fan, and that we can plug in
Speaker 1: our fan clubs and we can literally just work lockstep
Speaker 1: with them without anybody being anybody's boss. Just simply buy
Speaker 1: a little bit of data and a little bit of code.
Speaker 1: Say we're a CIA artist, we are working, this is
Speaker 1: the tour we're doing, and we're plugging in our Death
Speaker 1: Beats club. Do you have a problem with that? And
Speaker 1: they're gonna say no, because they want our fans to
Speaker 1: be empowered. They want these things to work, and they're
Speaker 1: gonna be on the blockchain to all these different companies
Speaker 1: and and I think it's going to be a very
Speaker 1: very beautiful um ecosystem for the fan and it's gonna
Speaker 1: be very cool and exciting and creative for the artist,
Speaker 1: because we have a lot more creativity than just putting
Speaker 1: out a Facebook post and just all these things being
Speaker 1: blocked off and then hey, you got a new record,
Speaker 1: go pay them a million dollars and talk to your fans.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about kickstarter, never mind pledge music. There are
Speaker 1: examples where people took the money and didn't deliver. This
Speaker 1: is not identical, and one could argue that these people
Speaker 1: have already gotten the three fifty dollars worth. But this
Speaker 1: isn't our commitment that you're gonna do this on a
Speaker 1: regular basis for years. You know, maybe you have the commitment.
Speaker 1: Do you think other people will do it and funk
Speaker 1: up and then tarnish the whole sphere. The whole sphere
Speaker 1: is already getting tarnished because is do you have a
Speaker 1: bunch of board A copycats and they do just that, right,
Speaker 1: they go and they The problem with n f T
Speaker 1: s at this point, which can be you know, which
Speaker 1: is a good thing for new artists if you think
Speaker 1: about this, um, all the money's up front and when
Speaker 1: you get you know, three million dollars in your pocket
Speaker 1: and you're just some kid that's an artist and just
Speaker 1: like I don't know these people. I don't have anything.
Speaker 1: That's why I think when you look at a bench
Speaker 1: sevenfold and you look at Gary V and you look
Speaker 1: at Nike, and you look at Adidas, and you look
Speaker 1: at all these big people coming in, if you do
Speaker 1: it correctly, your your reputations on the line, right, and
Speaker 1: it has to be some sort of person that like
Speaker 1: g if slip knot did this. Some nuts not gonna
Speaker 1: rug their fans. That's the term you know that everyone uses.
Speaker 1: They're not gonna be like, oh, thanks for the few
Speaker 1: million bucks, Um, we're not going to build up the
Speaker 1: metaverse whatever, and then hey, why don't you come, you know,
Speaker 1: hang out with us on the our next tour. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be a complete dumpster fire, terrible pr I believe
Speaker 1: that if we got into streaming and we get into
Speaker 1: all these other things, the fractionalization of assets, the ability
Speaker 1: for these poeps and the fans to have more control,
Speaker 1: I believe this is a lifelong paradigm shift and how
Speaker 1: the whole industry is run. I believe it firmly. Obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know if it's your nephew or
Speaker 1: who you're talking to. Before. But I believe in this
Speaker 1: so firmly, and I've I've I've studied this stuff enough
Speaker 1: to where I don't see any other way of this
Speaker 1: going other than meta coming along and saying, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: it's easier over here. I want you just use our
Speaker 1: metaverse and we're just gonna own everything, right like. But
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people in this space that are
Speaker 1: very they're very much adamant to make sure that doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that, I don't know the future.
Speaker 1: I know that EVENTE seven fold is going to build
Speaker 1: out our own ecosystem. We're gonna own it and our
Speaker 1: fans are gonna own it. Um. But you're right, there
Speaker 1: could be there could be plenty of new artists that
Speaker 1: decided to crowd fund instead of buying the shirt, a
Speaker 1: chain reaction of that new band and they say, hey,
Speaker 1: we're gonna fractionalize the record that you guys basically fundraise
Speaker 1: for us. We're gonna own most of it, but you
Speaker 1: can own a piece of it. That's kind of like
Speaker 1: go on me where they could not be abandoned. That's
Speaker 1: at risk you're willing to take. There's a bunch of
Speaker 1: bands that I saw Vision of Disorder, Poison the Well.
Speaker 1: You know, all these hardcore bands when I was growing up,
Speaker 1: I would have easily bought those tokens, and if they
Speaker 1: didn't ever make anything for me, I would be completely
Speaker 1: fine with that owning those tokens. Now, just being there
Speaker 1: early and being being first evenge something fold. All I
Speaker 1: can do is speak for us. We will not do
Speaker 1: that to anybody because we have we have written out
Speaker 1: and started programming a game plan that works, and we
Speaker 1: know it works, and so we believe that we're just
Speaker 1: gonna and and this podcast could look like overpromising, we
Speaker 1: are going to under promise and over deliver on every
Speaker 1: one of these things. That's why I don't want to
Speaker 1: say too many things that we're doing, because this summer
Speaker 1: is going to be insane the stuff we open up
Speaker 1: and do. Um. But but I do believe that this
Speaker 1: is the future for for established acts, people that have
Speaker 1: something on the line. If you own this for Iron Maiden,
Speaker 1: and you had that token and they were giving you
Speaker 1: some of these perks, and even if a company was
Speaker 1: running it right, maybe if you have sanctuary running it
Speaker 1: or someone that works on their team running it, and
Speaker 1: the band just checks in every once in a while,
Speaker 1: and they're doing certain things. It can be different for everybody.
Speaker 1: It's not a one size fits all. We decided to
Speaker 1: go very personal with it because that was close to
Speaker 1: our hearts to do that. But I don't believe that
Speaker 1: that's the case with every band. I believe that this
Speaker 1: can look differently for everybody. What other bands are doing
Speaker 1: things like Revenge siven Full, whether doing it well or
Speaker 1: doing it poorly. Anybody that has done it so far
Speaker 1: has done it wrong. Everybody who's done it so far.
Speaker 1: And these are a lot of friends that I'll be
Speaker 1: talking about and people in the industry that I know,
Speaker 1: and and I've been talking to them and trying to
Speaker 1: educate them on what this play is. But it's a
Speaker 1: big play, right like the things we're talking about are.
Speaker 1: It's an undertaking, and you have to have a team
Speaker 1: that understands it. And if you don't understand blockchain and
Speaker 1: you don't understand the possibilities, it's very easy to blow
Speaker 1: it off and go. It's a collectible. Just people should
Speaker 1: be happy that they just own at bat right a
Speaker 1: n Ausi crypto bat and and and they are starting
Speaker 1: to release things out. But if you take the idea
Speaker 1: of a collectible like what grimes it or a piece
Speaker 1: of art, and you're selling it to somebody that understands
Speaker 1: what that is, that's okay. But if you're selling to
Speaker 1: your fans who want to get closer to you, and
Speaker 1: there's all these possibilities within the in real life stuff,
Speaker 1: the I r L. Or you're talking about streaming, or
Speaker 1: you're talking about the metaverse and you're talking about digital
Speaker 1: concerts and digital assets, you're talking about video games, you're
Speaker 1: talking about owning all of your own skins that all
Speaker 1: of our kids love to spend thousands of dollars on.
Speaker 1: Now you own them instead of renting them from Epic Games.
Speaker 1: Now you're owning stuff from us. If you look at
Speaker 1: that play, that's a big undertaking. But we are sure
Speaker 1: that that's the future. Now, there's a bunch of artists
Speaker 1: and bands that come to us and go like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's fine, but we just want to sell like a
Speaker 1: ten thousand collection, and you know, we'll just we'll do
Speaker 1: a couple of things, but we're not gonna do much. Now.
Speaker 1: To me, that gives the whole thing a bad name.
Speaker 1: If you have a certain band in your wallet and
Speaker 1: that you spent four or fifty bucks, five bucks and
Speaker 1: you're not seeing getting whole picture. I believe that that
Speaker 1: turns people off and they go, screw this, Why do
Speaker 1: I need that? You can do all those services without
Speaker 1: an n f T. Right. They can point to go
Speaker 1: fund me or Patreon, or they can point to a
Speaker 1: v I P package that kiss is gonna sell you
Speaker 1: for three thousand dollars or whatever it is. And these
Speaker 1: are not slights on these bands. This has been the model. Um.
Speaker 1: But if you can bring all that in house and
Speaker 1: have a smaller team and dictated all by a little
Speaker 1: bit of code and a team where it's coming purely
Speaker 1: from your creative you know juices, to me, that's a
Speaker 1: much cooler, better productive thing. Okay, your accountant or a
Speaker 1: lawyer or the guy with the suit boys gets a
Speaker 1: bad reputation, they're gonna say, okay, you got this three
Speaker 1: million dollars, you spend a lot of it on virtual property.
Speaker 1: Where are the future monetization points? They're everywhere and then
Speaker 1: wherever you want to do them. Right. They are digital
Speaker 1: t shirts, they are digital avatars. They are renting out
Speaker 1: your land which is worth millions. Now they are doing
Speaker 1: gated concerts they are, uh. And the funny thing that
Speaker 1: you know that veeps, you know has like basically every
Speaker 1: venue is already wired for virtual concerts or at least
Speaker 1: some sort of streaming. You could have every one of
Speaker 1: your concerts streamed in there. And what kids are going
Speaker 1: to buy the T shirt that proves that they watched
Speaker 1: that concert. You don't even have to It's not even
Speaker 1: like nickel and dining. It's just purely putting things out there.
Speaker 1: The cool thing about the Sandbox, every asset that we
Speaker 1: make in the Sandbox, which I should send you. The
Speaker 1: world we're building, it's incredible. Um, it's a huge social hub,
Speaker 1: concert venue, casino, all these things. Every one of those
Speaker 1: assets can actually be sold as n f T s
Speaker 1: and people can put them in their world. So say
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of death bets in there, we
Speaker 1: can release five thousand of them, or we could put
Speaker 1: a big Indian head that West Lange, who's an artist,
Speaker 1: created and we could sell three of them, and we
Speaker 1: can auction them. People can sell them to each other,
Speaker 1: so you've got the whole digital world. Basically, anything you
Speaker 1: can do in this world, you can do there and
Speaker 1: monetize and then you've got the in real life events
Speaker 1: where in my mind, the bigger you make this thing,
Speaker 1: the more it will be to get in the club.
Speaker 1: And we make up five pc, um, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of back end on every token. Every time it's switches hands,
Speaker 1: so the board apes have no problem, right, every time
Speaker 1: changes hands to get five PC. And that's been going
Speaker 1: on for eleven months, right, So they're just swimming in money,
Speaker 1: but nobody feels like they got taken advantage of because
Speaker 1: they kept right. So it's not just like it's like
Speaker 1: it's kind of pick and choose what you wants to
Speaker 1: buffet and you just keep providing people a way to
Speaker 1: spend money. But they never feel nickel and dined because again,
Speaker 1: this is their club and this is what they want.
Speaker 1: They want the floor to go higher, they want these
Speaker 1: tokens to be valuable. They want to have access to
Speaker 1: the band and at the end of the day, sell
Speaker 1: it out if you don't want it. Okay, let's go back.
Speaker 1: You have ten thousand members. Are you basically saying the
Speaker 1: sky is the limit with members but every membership will
Speaker 1: be teered. No, I'm saying that if we decide at
Speaker 1: some point that the entry level get it's too high,
Speaker 1: then we will probably tear something out, and the and
Speaker 1: the owners of the death Bats will probably be happy
Speaker 1: with that. There'll be more people brought into the ecosystem,
Speaker 1: very very much slower. Ten thousand people were in now, yes,
Speaker 1: let's call it seven thousand. Some have multiple bats, let's
Speaker 1: call it seven thousand. Let's assume it's wildly successful and
Speaker 1: you have ten thousand more people who want to get
Speaker 1: in the club than what happens. So that means the
Speaker 1: price of the ten thousand will go very high. Up right,
Speaker 1: it's just gonna be an economics of how much people
Speaker 1: want to pay to get in. Now, if you said, hey, Matt,
Speaker 1: the floor is ten, it's thirty dollars to get into
Speaker 1: your fan club. That seems a little egregious, right, It's
Speaker 1: a little crazy. It's the cool kids rich club. But
Speaker 1: the board apes did for this problem is they air
Speaker 1: dropped everybody a companion, which was a mutant ape of
Speaker 1: a syrum to drink. You could well, so they did
Speaker 1: a little more in that they allowed you to drink
Speaker 1: it or not, so you could sell the serum or
Speaker 1: you could drink it and get another n f T.
Speaker 1: Now that was the tiered n f T. They don't
Speaker 1: get the full benefits, but they get the cheaper access
Speaker 1: of being in the club. Right, So they might get
Speaker 1: the the board and the you know, the the I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: the bathroom where people are doing graffiti on it, and
Speaker 1: you might get to go to the parties, but you're
Speaker 1: not getting as much ape coin. You're not getting as
Speaker 1: much land. These big events that they're doing. You don't
Speaker 1: get the full picture. But you're in the club. People
Speaker 1: with the mutants feel like they're in the club. So
Speaker 1: what you do is you say, okay, guys, we're gonna
Speaker 1: bring We're gonna give you all a free one, but
Speaker 1: then we're gonna sell twelve thousand more. So the mutants
Speaker 1: have eighteen thousand, I think is the cap. So they
Speaker 1: gave every board ape a free one and they sold
Speaker 1: another eight thousand, So now you have a The board
Speaker 1: apes feel happy. They just got an asset that they
Speaker 1: would never had before that they could turn around and
Speaker 1: sell for thirty dollars day one. Um I had a
Speaker 1: friend that got a gold one and ended up selling
Speaker 1: it for a hundred fifty thousand day one, just because
Speaker 1: he got air dropped. It was luck of the draw
Speaker 1: um and it was actually a dog. It was our
Speaker 1: first thing. And I know this gets a little crazy.
Speaker 1: They dropped a couple of things, but we could always say, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have a tiered membership where they're not gonna
Speaker 1: get the big stuff. If we do fractionalized royalties, they're
Speaker 1: gonna participate at a graded scale. Or if we do
Speaker 1: you know, the first two tickets to get into these shows,
Speaker 1: they don't get in unless there's space for them, or
Speaker 1: the meet and greets go to DEATHBT holders first and
Speaker 1: you guys get the second tier. There's so many things
Speaker 1: you can do, and it just comes down to what
Speaker 1: is happening in that moment and the analytics of what
Speaker 1: the floor is and if people do want to get in,
Speaker 1: if there's that demand, then I think you can you
Speaker 1: can make the club big. Let's let's let's say we
Speaker 1: got seven thousand people yep, they all paid three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty dollars yep. Let's say they start trading them
Speaker 1: and we use that number of thirty thousand ye which
Speaker 1: is expensive, yes, not if you bought it at thirteen
Speaker 1: dollars on bitcoin, but generally speaking expensive. So therefore aren't
Speaker 1: we essentially saying there are only gonna be seven thousand
Speaker 1: people will all opportunities No, because and and this is so,
Speaker 1: this is the idea with the board Apes. What I
Speaker 1: what I love about the roadmap is it was very
Speaker 1: deeply thought out. They went to these people and said
Speaker 1: you can take some money off, basically saying you could
Speaker 1: take money off the table. Right now, we're gonna drop
Speaker 1: you this new thing, and you're gonna have kind of
Speaker 1: second class citizens, but they're going to be involved, right,
Speaker 1: But you're right for the whole all the perks. You
Speaker 1: have to have an ape. If you want everything, you
Speaker 1: have to have an ape. If you have a mutin ape,
Speaker 1: you get most of the stuff. And people are very
Speaker 1: happy at that. But they were late to the party.
Speaker 1: They didn't believe in it. They scoffed at it. They
Speaker 1: got in, or they didn't have the money or whatever,
Speaker 1: they didn't know about it. But now they feel like
Speaker 1: they're in the board Ap club. You can still buy
Speaker 1: the Death Bats, merge will still be able to go
Speaker 1: to the shows and do possibly when meet in Greece,
Speaker 1: to be in the giveaways. But when things happen financially,
Speaker 1: like a drop of a token, which we do want
Speaker 1: to do a token eventually which brings all these worlds together,
Speaker 1: or if it happens to be fractionalizing the podcast, like,
Speaker 1: we don't think that the second class editions should make
Speaker 1: the same as the the evangelizer deatbat holder that got
Speaker 1: in day one and has been holding this thing and
Speaker 1: building the community. So we would tear it out and
Speaker 1: we would get with our accountants and look at it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So if you have the Board Apes club, that's all
Speaker 1: there is. Whether we consider a fat or bedrock whatever,
Speaker 1: you are joining this club at some price, but you
Speaker 1: have a club. But the essence is the music, the band,
Speaker 1: which is one step away. Yes, you know, it's one thing.
Speaker 1: If you say, hey, it's a club and it's just
Speaker 1: a club and we have seven thousand people whatever, blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. But historically in the music business say we
Speaker 1: want to let as many people into the club as
Speaker 1: possible to grow our fan base, which is a different
Speaker 1: model from the Board Apes. It is a different model.
Speaker 1: And so what I would look at it as, I
Speaker 1: would look at at as utility that we never provided
Speaker 1: before and in a way that we can control and
Speaker 1: truly give some sort of perks too. Before we have
Speaker 1: a seven thousand people on our mailing list, like those emails,
Speaker 1: we don't know how many of those are real. We
Speaker 1: don't know how many of those are multiple accounts. We
Speaker 1: don't know how much they care about EVENTE sevenfold or
Speaker 1: if they evangelize the band, if they live, breathe, sleep,
Speaker 1: and die for the band. But we have a pretty
Speaker 1: good idea about the Death Bats Club, and to me,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a fan club on steroids in a
Speaker 1: way that is creating utility that never existed before. So
Speaker 1: I don't think people can be bummed on that. I
Speaker 1: think they can look at it is going. That's how
Speaker 1: they choose to build this thing. Now we know we
Speaker 1: have two railroads here, two lines, and we have to
Speaker 1: have one ft in. Don't give these people too much
Speaker 1: control because then they're gonna be making decisions that the
Speaker 1: vast majority of Events seven Fold fans are gonna have
Speaker 1: to deal with, right set list like certain like Event
Speaker 1: seven Fold merch. That's why we have clearly separated this
Speaker 1: into the Death Bats Club. They have their own merch,
Speaker 1: they have their own website, they have their own sneak
Speaker 1: peaks at things now people could say, like, there's there's
Speaker 1: always gonna be the ability to reward the hardest working fans,
Speaker 1: and this is our way of figuring out who they are,
Speaker 1: the people who came along with us, So to us,
Speaker 1: we want to reward those people. And it goes all
Speaker 1: the way back to the beginning of this conversation. It's
Speaker 1: one thousand fans, it's four thousand fans, it's five thousand fans,
Speaker 1: and it's super. It's super. Um what would it be
Speaker 1: You're you're super serving them in a way that makes
Speaker 1: them want to stand on a rooftop and just yell
Speaker 1: at the world how cool this thing is that they're
Speaker 1: involved in, and to me, that makes the band bigger.
Speaker 1: This is an experiment for sure. Um bands could do
Speaker 1: this with their whole audience. I just don't know where
Speaker 1: that goes. It's very it's a lot to keep in. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's just use the seven thousand and use social media paradigm.
Speaker 1: For all we know, six thousand could be lurkers, six
Speaker 1: thousand lurkers that paid money to get in and are
Speaker 1: in the discord participating all day. Well, let's start there.
Speaker 1: How many of the seven thousand are participating in the discord.
Speaker 1: So we have thirty five thousand people in the discord,
Speaker 1: and the discord is is NonStop. And when we have
Speaker 1: those giveaways, that's NonStop. When we when we put something
Speaker 1: out about this club, it's just NonStop. Like people are excited.
Speaker 1: Now you could say, well, Matt, it's new. Of course
Speaker 1: they're excited, right, But these are events seven full fans.
Speaker 1: These are This goes back to us checking their wallet
Speaker 1: and seeing that, you know, going from three people to
Speaker 1: this nine thousand to the people that actually and actually
Speaker 1: ended up buying. This goes into looking on Twitter and
Speaker 1: seeing thousands of bats in their Twitter profiles. To me,
Speaker 1: lurkers don't do that. These are people waving their flag.
Speaker 1: These are people wearing their Iron Maiden shirt, and they're
Speaker 1: showing the world that they're a part of this thing
Speaker 1: and that they are evangelizing it. There's no way there's
Speaker 1: six thousand lurkers. Just to go back to the beginning,
Speaker 1: forget the three hundred tests to get the ten thousand,
Speaker 1: didn't you send like a hundred thousand emails? No, we
Speaker 1: opened up a discord and we only communicated with them
Speaker 1: in there. And the reason we did uh is because
Speaker 1: we didn't want the look you lose or the flippers
Speaker 1: or this or that. And we also made it very clear.
Speaker 1: We said, if you were, if you were an n
Speaker 1: f T trader and you are buying into this project
Speaker 1: to flip it like to to try to make some
Speaker 1: sort of speculative play on it, we said, this is
Speaker 1: not the play for you, because we are doing this
Speaker 1: the long way, and if you're not a fan, you're
Speaker 1: not gonna want to end some froll merch. You're not
Speaker 1: gonna want to meet us, you're not gonna want to
Speaker 1: get music early. You're not gonna want to do all
Speaker 1: the things that we're going to provide. And so our wording,
Speaker 1: in our in our in the way we frame this
Speaker 1: to everybody was so don't buy this thing. Don't buy
Speaker 1: it unless you want to come with us on this journey.
Speaker 1: That we really didn't get any of that n f
Speaker 1: T flip scandalous sort of action. It was a bunch
Speaker 1: of events, seven full fans. Okay, just to go back
Speaker 1: a little deeper, So everybody who said that they wanted
Speaker 1: in you went into their wallet and checked every each
Speaker 1: one of them out. On the very first n f T,
Speaker 1: which is not the death Beats Club. We did just
Speaker 1: to see if they had any n f T experience,
Speaker 1: because we didn't want to give them to people that
Speaker 1: we're gonna lose them or didn't care. On the next one,
Speaker 1: when it didn't sell out like in five seconds, we
Speaker 1: were suspicious because we had over nine thousand people on
Speaker 1: the white list, right, you'd think that they would all
Speaker 1: be buying instantly, and I think we sold something like
Speaker 1: four thousand with the white list. And so we wrote
Speaker 1: a piece of code and looked in their wallets and
Speaker 1: we noticed that didn't have any ether, which in which
Speaker 1: in our minds was it's a bunch of fans that
Speaker 1: simply don't know their way around cryptocurrency. Okay, but you're
Speaker 1: talking about somebody in their Twitter feed has a thousand bats.
Speaker 1: You might know that now, But before you left these
Speaker 1: people in, did you look and verify each one? Was hard? No,
Speaker 1: there's no way to do that. That's just you just
Speaker 1: see an address. We can only tell by their actions.
Speaker 1: We could. We we know that if somebody's got a
Speaker 1: wallet with no n f T s in it, it's
Speaker 1: probably not a speculator n f T guy, right, It's
Speaker 1: just it's it's obviously a new fan that's signing up
Speaker 1: and they're trying to follow along, and they and they,
Speaker 1: they're trying to get in. We have I would think
Speaker 1: that we have probably more wallets with one n f
Speaker 1: T in them than any other project that's ever been done, right,
Speaker 1: even because when they sell I I look at him
Speaker 1: a lot of times and I look and it's guy
Speaker 1: opened his account yesterday and he's got one n f T.
Speaker 1: He's in here for the Death Bats Club. They're not
Speaker 1: here to be speculators now, to your point, a lot
Speaker 1: of times in the discord that stuff steeps in, and
Speaker 1: a lot of our fans have now become very much
Speaker 1: involved in other projects. Like they're buying Alien Friends and
Speaker 1: they're buying cool cats, and they're buying these other things,
Speaker 1: and they're into the world and they're and they're helping
Speaker 1: educate other people about these projects and they're enjoying it.
Speaker 1: Now how that turns out is yet to be seen,
Speaker 1: but that's the world we're living. It. It's a highly
Speaker 1: you know, speculative financial play on some of them, but
Speaker 1: that's they're adults, right, And we we warn people all
Speaker 1: the time and they're you know, if you're gonna stick
Speaker 1: with Death Bats, we will not do you wrong. As
Speaker 1: soon as you go outside of this ecosystem, it's on you, right,
Speaker 1: And so people are adults. So but and I believe
Speaker 1: that you know the next band that comes in, whether
Speaker 1: it's Slip Not, from Metallica, from Mega Death. We've taken
Speaker 1: a lot of arrows in the back. All of our
Speaker 1: owners are so happy with what we've done that I
Speaker 1: think these bands are gonna be just teed up. And
Speaker 1: I think once those bands come in, we're gonna be
Speaker 1: able to collaborate with them in ways that we never
Speaker 1: could before. And I think that's gonna get really interesting too.
Speaker 1: So how many people have sold their membership and what's
Speaker 1: the current value? So the current value right now because
Speaker 1: ether is down, I think you can still get in
Speaker 1: for two bucks. Not many have sold if you look
Speaker 1: at the I mean a lot of sold to new people.
Speaker 1: But a lot of those are people that bought multiples, right,
Speaker 1: some people about two or three and they wanted to
Speaker 1: sell them. Um, a lot of our community and gifting
Speaker 1: them to people that can't afford them. Seen a lot
Speaker 1: of people come in, they can't afford them and they're
Speaker 1: gifted UM. But what I will say is. I think
Speaker 1: it's something like of a healthy n f T collection
Speaker 1: is on sell at anytime, right. I think our collection
Speaker 1: is at six on sell, five to six percent, So
Speaker 1: you've got five to six percent of the supply that
Speaker 1: is willing to be sold. Everybody else they're holding. And
Speaker 1: so you know, that's not to say that someone couldn't
Speaker 1: throw somebody a big offer or this or That's all
Speaker 1: obviously doable in this space. Um, and I'm sure everyone
Speaker 1: has a price. But right now, fans are waiting to
Speaker 1: see what we do. They're exciting for for the tour,
Speaker 1: they're excited for sneak peaks on the record, they're excited
Speaker 1: about the metaverse opening up, which we've been teasing and building,
Speaker 1: and they're just excited about the whole space right there
Speaker 1: following what we're doing. And they're just they feel like
Speaker 1: they're on the cutting edge of you know, they're on
Speaker 1: the surfboard, right in the wave and they and they
Speaker 1: just love it, and it's been really kind of exhilarating
Speaker 1: for us to have that relationship with them. Okay, if
Speaker 1: you pull the lens all the way back, I've been
Speaker 1: listening to you talk about this at length. Someone who
Speaker 1: is not involved with Avenge Sevenfold and just looks at
Speaker 1: the discussion would say, well, there's a lot more excitement
Speaker 1: in the blockchain n f T Club than there is
Speaker 1: in the actual music. But I don't want to make
Speaker 1: it specifically about Avenge Sevenfold, Okay, but what might say
Speaker 1: that the excitement is more in the you know, meta
Speaker 1: space as opposed to the music itself. Yeah, I would say, um,
Speaker 1: the same way that records have taken a back seat
Speaker 1: to touring. You know, we used to go on tour
Speaker 1: to sell our records, and now people make records to
Speaker 1: go on tour, and in a different way, right they
Speaker 1: the record is like another um tentacle, but it's not
Speaker 1: as important as it used to be. You put out
Speaker 1: MEW music because it gives you a reason to go
Speaker 1: on tour tours where you make the money. We all
Speaker 1: know that. I think with this paradigm shift, you're looking
Speaker 1: at artists becoming like it's some umbrella and everything that
Speaker 1: falls underneath a certain artists umbrella is exciting, whether it's
Speaker 1: the metaverse, or it's in real life concerts or music
Speaker 1: or community community building. Right that those are my people
Speaker 1: imagine being connected to people that are like minded with
Speaker 1: the same type of music, but the conversations and the
Speaker 1: ideation just go off the charts and other things. They
Speaker 1: start their own bands. It's like these little pools of
Speaker 1: people that already have something in common and now it's
Speaker 1: been solidified by me seeing your Twitter profile and you're
Speaker 1: in the Death Beats Club too. These are the kind
Speaker 1: of things we're trying to to build for these fans.
Speaker 1: I think I think you're completely right. I think the
Speaker 1: music as an artist is something that that's very personal
Speaker 1: to us. It's very much closed off. We're willing to
Speaker 1: share it when it's ready. We go on tour because
Speaker 1: we love seeing certain cities and going on tour and
Speaker 1: and playing the records. But this excites us just as
Speaker 1: much because I feel there's so much creativity to be had.
Speaker 1: And I I think you're right. The idea of Metallica
Speaker 1: and Avenged and you know, Dead Mouse and Steve Ioki
Speaker 1: and everyone coming in and these worlds that are all interconnected,
Speaker 1: that we can all jump from world to world like
Speaker 1: a lego block and interact with each other and interact
Speaker 1: with each other's fans, and these groups of people that uh,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe idolized, but also identify with certain types
Speaker 1: of music. These are these are all new rabbit holes
Speaker 1: that are very exciting to go down, and you don't
Speaker 1: ever want to be like, oh, the music secondary, it's not,
Speaker 1: but the music drives all this. We come to other
Speaker 1: for the love of music. But it could be the
Speaker 1: Board Ape Club who doesn't have music, or Metallica or
Speaker 1: Kylie Minogue or you know, any sort of company. It
Speaker 1: could be Tillies, it could be Ben Hundreds who's trying
Speaker 1: to dress the metavers. It could be Gucci who's selling sunglasses.
Speaker 1: It's bringing communities together. And one thing that I always
Speaker 1: tell everybody is that we want to be We want
Speaker 1: to throw our hat in the ring as a metal
Speaker 1: band and not being behind this ape ball. We want
Speaker 1: to be someone that carves and shapes out the future
Speaker 1: the way that artists want to see it shaped. And
Speaker 1: so that's kind of our play. And then you're right.
Speaker 1: The overall pictures way more exciting than an event seven
Speaker 1: fill token. In fact, we told people, if you're not
Speaker 1: a fan, don't buy our token. You will not get
Speaker 1: anything out of it, right, Like, we are only gonna
Speaker 1: give We're gonna super serve our fans. And if you're
Speaker 1: not a fan. You're gonna be bummed that you spent
Speaker 1: your three or thirty dollars. Um, go buy the Metallica
Speaker 1: token or go by you know, the the used token
Speaker 1: or whatever band is gonna come next. And uh And
Speaker 1: to me, that's what I've been telling everybody. I think
Speaker 1: that's all about framing, right. We don't want to overpromised things.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go hundred and eighty degrees away from this.
Speaker 1: You are married to a woman who has an identical twin.
Speaker 1: Sister is married to another band member. My long term
Speaker 1: girlfriend is an identical twin. So what's it like being
Speaker 1: married to an identical twin? It is incredible because you
Speaker 1: see that bond is just deeper than anything I could
Speaker 1: ever have with another human. And I love it when
Speaker 1: they fight. I love it when they defend their husbands
Speaker 1: and they fight for us. And but at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, they are They can't live away from
Speaker 1: each other, Like so me and Brian, our guitar player,
Speaker 1: lived down the street from each other because the twins
Speaker 1: have to be near each other. They they have a
Speaker 1: company together, they sell they they're high in sunglass company. Um,
Speaker 1: she's my best you know, I met these girls in
Speaker 1: sixth grade and so I grew up with both of
Speaker 1: them and they're my best friends the same way Brian's
Speaker 1: my best friend because I met him in that age. Two. Um,
Speaker 1: it's incredible, and we have lifelong babysitters, and we have
Speaker 1: lifelong you know, like whatever they need, we got their back,
Speaker 1: and we go on vacations with them, we get the kids,
Speaker 1: and we're uncles and aunts and it's incredible. It's really special. Okay, Matt,
Speaker 1: we'll leave it at that. I want to thank you
Speaker 1: for taking this time, and I think you've done an
Speaker 1: incredible job of explaining it, and also what you're doing
Speaker 1: is certainly different from everybody else and cutting it. So
Speaker 1: thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for having me man.
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan, so I look forward to uh
Speaker 1: all the letters and all of the newsletters that you
Speaker 1: send out. Okay, until next time. This is Bob left
Speaker 1: six