M. Shadows

We haven't finished it yet. Um, we kind of took some time off for family, COVID weird touring circumstances, some changes within our team, and uh we are still currently with one record left on Warner Brothers Records. We'll be uh finishing that record up. I think we have may locked out. Um, our producer can get back to work on it, and then we're gonna go mix with Andy Wallace in August and then we're gonna figure out if it's first quarter or the fourth quarter or what we're

gonna do. So, uh, the status is that, and then we're gonna be booking tours put the tickets on sale when the record comes out, and the whole nine yards. But besides that, we've been working on this Web three thing, so we've been doing a lot behind the scenes building protocols out. Okay, before we get to the Web three thing, you were famously on Warner Brothers and then you jump to Capital, But now you're saying the new albums on Warner Brothers. Canna explain that to us? Yeah, So you know,

there's a lot that goes into that. We pulled the oal seven year clause that we were trying to get out of our deal, but the reality is we wanted our master's back. We wanted to make some sort of deal and be able to own our our recordings and uh or possibly resign and get a check, um, all the things that you do. And then we started thinking about the seven year clause and we actually wanted to see if we could help artists out in a way.

And I think there's a lot of misunderstanding between artists and lawyers and the label and that you actually still you win two court cases to get that law changed, and it just became a money suck. The people that we had a problem with that Warner Brothers that simply

weren't engaged in the band. Um had left and Max lu Sadden, some new people came in and they flew out, and we basically, you know, broke bread and said, you know this record we did with Capitol Records, come back to Warner Brothers, finish up your deal and we'll deal with it from there. So obviously a lot of rabbit holes in there. Um we had signed with Tom Wally

back in the day. We had Craig Garrants and Tom Wally, Andy Olafont, a great team, and then we had no regime changes until recently and our two thousand fourteen record Held of the King came out. We just noticed that no one at the label cared about our band. It was basically they'd come to the the the you know the recordings, they'd come and check out the record, and it was just everyone's on their phone. There was just

no support. We wanted nothing to do with it, so we, uh, we tried to get a better deal or at least get our masters back and get out of there. We went over to Capitol Records put a record. I think we're the only band that actually put out an album while we are still in some sort of litigation over the seven year clause, which caused a huge uproar between the labels and ourselves. So that's kind of where we were at. Okay, what does Capital say now that you're

gonna make another record for Warner Brothers. Well, we went to Capital and they knew the situation we were in. Obviously they're not they're not dummies. They're not going to sign us and say, hey, we're getting in some long term deal. Here, we were under the idea that we would get our record back. They were basically putting the one record out for us and then we'd be free and um, so I think they kind of probably expected

something like that to happen. Um, when the regime change happened with Warner Brothers, and obviously the amounts of money we were spending arguing with them back and forth, um, it was obviously the smart thing to do was just kind of put it to bed. So I think Capital they're fine. I mean, they got their one record and we went out and worked it. We toured for a long time on it, and uh, now we're back to

finishing up our contract. Okay, what can a major label do for a band like Avenge of Enfold, who's not going to be on Top forty radio. What does the label do that you need? Man, it's a good question. You know, I know what the label used to do, and I think there's and by the way, these are good a lot of the people that are Warner, but there's still are good people that we obviously have very deep relationships, like relationships like with Rob Goldclan and the

radio department, this and that. But you and I both know Evenge sevenfold isn't going to be on k rock anytime soon, especially with the formatting the way it is. And um, these these active rock stations just have moved away from what we do and they don't have much of an audience anymore, so they don't really appeal to

us anyways. We're just writing records that we want to write and the Middle America rock thing isn't really are jam at this point, right And and so you've got the radio apartment, You've got publicists, which we can kind of do ourselves. Um, all these sort of new ventures that were branching out into they really don't have a clue about them. They're trying to get involved. It's a good question, Um, you want them to put money, and you want them to do what they can with this.

You know, the Spotify playlists. You wanted to do these things, but at the end of the day, I don't know how big the reaches on the rock Spotify playlist. It's never in the top, you know, it's not on the the tips of the consciousness of the public right now, the rock and roll stuff. And you don't see big rock songs or metal songs getting their fair shake in those in those playlists. And it might be from the content, it might just be it's a place in time where

it doesn't work. But what does the record label do? It's a good question. I'm sure they would have a much different answer than I would. Um, But there's a big reason why I think going independent and doing a lot of these things and bringing them in house is very appealing to bands like us, especially at the size we are, when we know we can afford it and we can do it. So um. You know, they make they make videos, they go try to push it to radio. Um,

they try to do advertisement campaigns around your tour. They try to get you to do uh, you know, cell tap or sell CDs with your with your tickets which we don't want to do. You know, just all these things, it's all this this kind of rub. It's a friction at this point. And I think, you know, as we go into the other stuff later, I think this is why a lot of these things are gonna get ironed

out pretty quickly here. And when you see the new artist coming up that aren't signing two major deals or major labels, and you're gonna start seeing a lot more independence than one on one fan interaction. I think that's where this gets really interesting. Okay, you talked about active rock, so they will play Avenge sevenfold. Well let's talk about

what active rock is. Right. So you've got Octane and you've got you know, Octane, which is the serious x M version of of active rock, which is all over the country. And you've got stations that were big players in the alternative active rock system, right. You had like St. Louis, you had like Denver, you had New York City, you had k Rock, and they all became much more alternative. Right.

They the ones that kind of moved on. They're they're playing a much more alternative leaning thing where it could be the Arctic Monkeys or whatever. Their playlists at the time. I mean they even broughten things like Billie Eilish and uh what were this some of the other bands, but daft punk was getting played on these stations at some point. So a band like Avenge Sevenfold or a Corn or

a Metallica there wasn't really a place. So you're kind of playing in these markets that are a lot more red state, Middle America, UM, smaller market active rock things. But at the end of the day, UM, these things are great and you have to check those boxes, but they aren't those major plays where you're gonna walk into Staples Center and sell it out because k rocks blasting your stuff. It's just a much different feel. And I'm being very careful of my words because I'm not trying

to be disparaging to any of these markets. But it's not what it was when Evenge seven Fold was playing on TRL and they were on K Rock in New York and and in l A and St. Louis, and you go into Cincinnati and the shows were blown out and they were it was just this feeling of of, um, you know, this feeling of there was major drivers in these markets that were able to get our music out to people and Once those drivers went away, it became much more underground, and it became a much more stealth,

guerrilla style, you know, marketing campaign for bands like US. Okay, would you call Avenge seven Fold metal? Is that? Okay? I mean just for discussions sake, Okay, it's not offensive to you. It's not offensive now, okay, So what is the status of metal music in America? You know, metal always has fans, never dies. Rock may die, but metal is never gonna die, even though metal is rock. But as you say, it's not on top forty, it's not even on active rock. So how healthy is the scene?

I think the purely metal scene is always going to be there, Like you said, it's always got a pulse. I don't think the innovations there, and I don't think the ability for fans to have an open mind when something is innovative, something is different. I think the great

songwriting has kind of been lost a little bit. I think some of these um eccentric, you know, pieces of the music that you know, when Metallica came out, they were there was nothing like that, right, And it seems like a lot of bands in my generation are just kind of treading the same um treading the same water of what Metallica has already done. And I think when you see great artists, um, a lot of them aren't

in the metal scene. There's a lot of great art out there, and I would argue there's some amazing pop, some amazing hip hop, some amazing R and B, and some artists that are doing truly eccentric stuff and you don't see it as much in metal. And there would be a bunch of metal heads that send me fifty you know things on Twitter after they hear this, and you'll listen to it and you'll just kind of roll your eyes. It's the same stuff and they're doing the

same sort of vibe. And I think that hurts metal in a way because I think a lot of times it's just this regurgitated sound that people will praise and then it goes away because no one if you're not in the scene, you don't care. And if it's something way outside the box, it just gets the thumbs down right away, and the gatekeepers kind of keep it, you know, behind closed doors and say, well, we're gonna forget about that. That's not metal, And I think that kind of hurts

the scene. I think nowadays though there's UM bands like System of a Down like obviously they're not making music, they are truly a great band to me where they're making a different sound. There's bands like the Deaf Tones, there's Ghost who's doing their own thing. There are these shining bright moments UM, but overall as a scene, you don't see the experimentation that I would love to see as recording. This last week, Goes had an amazing number

number one around the world in many markets. Why do you think it was so successful? Well, I think they did a lot of vinyl and they did a lot of things that I'm not going to call it manipulation, but these are all the conversations that we have when we're a rock band. Sell as much physical as you can, UM get as many of these versions of this out there,

and then the streaming numbers always lack, right. I want to be a band that can just stand on our own and not do all the the the tricks and just get out there and I want people to actually want to listen to this, and I want it to be something where the where the audience, it's the grounds well where they are gonna go and put on their streaming devices and and move these people into this new era where yeah, I understand vinyl. I love Vinyl. It's a collectible. Like as we get an n f T S,

we're gonna talk about collectibles. But in terms of streaming, it's just a no brainer. And our audience still it's very hard to get them over there and to buy into this thing. You know. On our last record, we did a surprise release. It was supposed to be very stream heavy, and we got a lot of the arrows we took on our back was that people wanted a c D in the middle of oh Maha and and Best Buy, and we're like, sorry to break it to you, that's going away. Your car is not gonna have a

CD player. You guys are gonna have to move into this era with us. And it was a lot of it was a lot of pushback, and it was a lot of like Avenge has their nose at A has at A. They think they think they're better than us with these this streaming and it's this and that I'm always gonna buy CDs, and it's like, come on, guys, we have to move along with the real world if we want to be irrelevant or you know, a relevant sort of genre that has our you know, put that

can put our hat in the ring. So these things aren't necessarily Avenge seven Folds problem. We're gonna do what we're gonna do, but they are things that we are keeping our eye on and watching. Um. You know, sometimes if you move too quickly, you have an audience that's simply it does not compute. And um so, so I don't know. I think the Ghost thing, I mean I'm looking at it. I see the same number as you do.

And it's a lot of vinyl, it's a lot of collectibles, and it's a lot of you know, what you do when you're a rock band to make sure your numbers pumped so that industry people can say, hey, you've got a big number. What happens week two, three and four? Is it really a ground swell of um of this musical, you know, ground swell where people are of all genres are listening to Ghost. I hope so do I think so? Probably not? But you know, not to be negative. Okay, well,

we can't predict the future. But going back to streaming, why do you think the metal audience doesn't stream? I'll just give my own theory first. It's interesting because country artists and fans are all into streaming now, and I think that the rock art is just streaming so much their audience bought it. But I'm interested in your take. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, at this point, I would take any take, because I don't know, you know, like I I understand that I live in a bubble

in southern California. I understand that we might be a little more privy or we're around people that are more getting into the techie side of things. Right Like when we were a band coming up, we were burning c d s on our CD player. We're going to chain reaction, handing them out. Um. As soon as Napster came out and lime Wire and all those things, we quickly jumped on that and we were listening to all this music.

It's not to say that that same kid my age in the middle of the country maybe didn't have the same friends or the same sort of um ecosystem where they were being privy to that, right, And so as soon as I was able to get rid of CDs and get a streaming service, I jumped on it. And it was much It made sense to me. I'd go on an airplane I'd go to the gym. I didn't want to have a discman. I didn't like the skipping.

I mean, we all know why streaming is superior. Um. Years after that, we did that surprise release and we had the pushback, so it kind of shocked us. And I just don't know. I think every time you bring up streaming to people and you get all these old bands and they're bitter about it, and it's like it's very weird, right, It's like they're still in two talking about how music doesn't make any money and there no one's buying our CDs and no one's doing this. It's like,

maybe you're not relevant, Like let's be relevant. Let's put our let's put our you know hat in the ring with you know, when they're listening to Biber or they're listening to the Weekend, they can jump over to Metallic and events seven folding. We're playing in the same park here. Um that that has always made sense to me. But you still get these people that are you know, streaming, streaming is killed industry, and now we gotta do this and we gotta do that, and it's like, no, streaming

kind of saved the industry. It's saved the the user. I call them the web two user. Right, it's like the the the fan. The fan gets to listen to you at any point. So how are you going to get their attention? How are you going to be the best thing that's gonna be going through their ear holes that day? And that's what we should be striving for, not having an argument if we should put on CD or vinyl or streaming um the the battle's already been won. So you know, to me, I don't have a real

good answer to it. I just think sometimes we get stuck in our ways and and Metal has really dug their heels in on on this. We're not gonna move along with the rest of the world. We kind of like it this way. Your merch table, since you talked about the label, do you sell c ds? Do you sell vinyl? Uh? No? No, So you've completely moved on. Yeah, we moved on a long time ago. Yeah. Okay, So are there enough Avenge Sevenfold fans to carry you without any of the perks that you had before the t

r l's, the radio, et cetera. Because it's hard to reach people, it's hard to make new fans. What's your viewpoint on that, well, to me, you let the hardcore fans evangelize you by giving them access and ownership to what you're building. And we're gonna get into that a little bit um and all we have seen and if you look at our trajectory, you know, we had shows in June that were coming up, but we cancel them

to finish this record. The money has gotten bigger, the slots have gotten bigger, and we can always go tour in these places. Right, We're gonna headline help us this year, will probably headline download for the third time. You know, in a couple of years when this records out. The

Danny Wimmer festivals, we're gonna be headlining those, right. The shows are bigger the But but what has to happen is you have to get those one thousand fans, those five thousand fans, and you make them owners, and you make them evangelize this band, and you service them to a point to where everybody else that's seeing what's happening

wants to be involved. And we don't have the drivers we used to have, but we do have a great catalog and we're gonna continue to put out new music and we're gonna innovate on how we put that music out and what it means to own a part of Events sevenfold, and what it means to own a part of our I P. And these are things that we're experimenting with and that we're extremely excited about. And we're also cutting out middlemen. Right. We own our own merchandise,

we have our own warehouse, we're building our own studio. UM, we're doing everything to where we own everything from now on. And you know, our last two records will come back to us in six years. UM. A big reason why we were make in the play to buy our masters. UM. We do believe because of rock music we have this. It's like kind of this bedrock of fans that are lifers.

The reason you go to an Iron Maiden show without all the drivers is, you know, it's very much because you see the grandpa there, the dad there, and you see the kid with the Iron Maiden shirt on. We're seeing that with our fans. We're seeing the people that grew up with us, that got the tattoos, and now they're in their forties and they're late thirties, and we're

seeing the call of duty audience. Because we were very deeply embedded in the video game seen a couple of years ago, and the nineteen year old, and then we're seeing them all having kids. We see it on Instagram, we see it on Twitter, and they've got the Avenge seven Fold onesies. These are people that we need to empower to build the band and to build the legacy because we don't have t r L. Right, Okay, so let's assume you have these five thousand or whatever number

we want to use. Does that inhibit you artistically because traditionally fans just want to repeat of what you've already done. Oh hell no, our fans know at this point like

you have throwing our fans. I mean, if anyone that listens to this, that knows the drama of every record that Avenge of Fold puts out, it's like the world's been put on fire right from Waking the Fall And we had done records on a on an independent label, and when we went to our first major label, we put out a record called City of Evil, which had no screaming and it was almost like European power metal

with an American vibe on steroids. And that record, everybody that listened to Waking the fallen was like, this is trash, this is horrible. That ended up going on TRL and having that kickstart, and it created a whole new audience.

When we put out the next record, it was another completely different entitil on its own, and what we realized then was that we are going to continue to put out pieces of art that represent It's almost like a time capsule of what we represent, what we want to do at that time, and every record has to find

its own audience. But what happens after a while is those people start galvanizing around the fact that they don't know what to expect, and so now you're starting to see people that go, I don't care what they put out. It could be a hip hop record. I trust even seven Fold to put out something cool because I like all these different styles. Now we have people fall off on every record, and we gain people on every record, right, and so we're not worried about that. In fact, we

wouldn't even make music. You know, one thing that always bugs me about the music industry is make the right record. Make the right record to me, You make the record that you want to make, and you're an artist. If you're not an artist, then don't do this. They go, go get a job, like I really want to make art that I'm sitting there proud of, and I go, this represents me right now, this is what I'm into

in two thousand twenty two. And I think as soon as you get away from that and you start playing the game and you're trying to figure out what fan X, Y and Z wants and you're trying to write for them, and that has never worked in the history of music. I'm sorry, you know, I've I listened to a lot of music, and when bands repeat themselves, it's instantly this like my ears go up and like, oh they're trying to do that, and that's always a bum out to me. And uh, well, we will never do that. We want

to challenge our audience. We don't believe our audience knows what they want. It's that's that famous Steve Job quote. Right, of course, I don't think they know what they want. You have to give it to them and they have to figure out while they're sitting there with their headphones on. I want them to look the first time their friends gone to hear that, and they go, what the f right? And then I want them to go, Okay, I get this, this is rad, this is different, and so that's our

our mentality at all times. If we don't get a reaction, we're actually kind of sad. Okay, the next number of hardcore Avenge sevenfold fians, what do you think their attraction to the band is? Why are they bonded so tight? You talked about you know you're surprising them, but why are they so dedicated to Avenge seven four. I think we came up in a time in a scene where it kind of was the you know, the anti new metal. I think we were the first band that brought these

guitar solos back onto the radio. I think a bunch of people identify like most bands with their with they're with growing up, you know, the nostalgia factor, and think we were breaking a lot of rules back then. And I think we were breaking rules musically. And I think when you dig deep into it, people started saying, Okay, they're they're flashy, they talk a lot of crap and interviews they're kind of over the top. The press loves

to go with it. But at the end of the day, you could break our songs apart, and we know what we're doing. Like I think you can look at the

music theory and you can look at that. We're a serious band underneath the layers of the entertainment on top of it, you know, and a lot of that's gone away because you know, when you're twenty years old and you get thrown into a van and you're there's no one to tell you what to do, and you know, Kevin Lyman throws you on the warp tour and you're and you're playing for you know, fifty bucks a day,

and you and you're just selling your own merchants. It becomes a wild time, especially straight out of high school. You I mean literally, you're given the keys to the kingdom, you know, your your little van. It's kind of like, you know, uh, it's like who let these guys out of the cage? You know? Um. And as we've as we've grown up, I think we've grown up with a lot of people that have gone through those things like any generation would. And I think we've continued to put

out compelling music. And I think we've done that by challenging the audience. I don't think you do that by repeating yourself. Okay, let's move into the n f T and the new paradigm you're establishing with revenge seven fold. But let's really start at the ground level. Were you always a techie? Were you into computers when A O. L Went nuclear and ninety five or six? Were you into that? No? I was fourteen at the time, so no,

I wasn't. But um, one thing I have been, and I always give this example, UM, I was very into video games when um, you know, on the PC and on the Nintendo, from the very early beginning of that, the earliest that I could possibly be involved. And I remember my parents and my grandparents being very much um thinking it was a time stuck and that it would ultimately just be a bunch of losers that play these things and there'd be no career, there no sort of

benefit from this sort of thing. The one thing I learned from it, and looking back on the culture now is that the culture drives innovation and it drives what is acceptable in society. Right, So what I mean by that is now we have multimillion dollar Twitch streamers, we have Fortnite champions, and we have kids growing up that want to be YouTubers, TikTokers, and streamers over basically anything else, my kids included. And so what I learned from that

is you follow the culture. You follow the kids because they are trying to fit into my world. They're going to create their own world, which will be society when they're my age. And the same way that my friends at forty years old still play video games every night and they're still talking. They have families, but they're still logging into you know, World of Warcraft, or they're playing pub g or Call of Duty. And this audience has grown up with video games and then and they never

lost it. This new blockchain thing and the age of the Internet will be adopted by this new generation as you see artists like Diplow or Blow or Steve Ioki or the Marshmallows of the world as they start dipping their toe into blockchain. And the reason my kids know what n f T s are and they know what you know, um digital goods are is because they're hearing about these people talk about it on there, you know,

their their social media. Now, what Events seven Bold is doing is something much more ethical, and I think, whoa, whoa, whoa. I want to get a lot of information before we get exactly what events. Yeah, I wasn't gonna say what we're gonna do. I'm just gonna say we're a different thing than all that, but we'll stop there. Okay, So at what point did you become invested intrigued by all

the technological changes? So I bought bitcoin in two thousand sixteen. No, no, no, before that, I would say video games is all it was. I was never a techie guy. Like. Okay, so the turn of the century when everybody gets a high speed connection, Sure, are you downloading on Napster? Are you talking? Oh yea yeah, yeah yeah. I didn't consider myself techy. It's funny because

I considered myself just a normal kid. Right. So I had figured out, you know, a l chat rooms and you go in there and you ruffle feathers and you act like a jerk online and everyone's running around and we think it's funny. And then it turns into you know, websites, going to these websites that didn't do much, but it was kind of like, Okay, there's a place to go.

This kind of boring but cool. Um. And then you know, obviously when we were we went from like these little eight doubt tapes to like um taping like Testament record or the Dream Theater record and giving them to each other. Then CDs right, and so then you had burning of c d s, which was like this blew our minds that you could change the track right. It was like

I can go to track four. That's crazy. And then you'd go to best Buy and you'd buy you know, the hundred and fifty stack, and then we just start we'd start, you know, like trading music that way. And then Napster came around, and then we started saying, well, now we got everything for free, and then you'd get viruses on your Lime wire or whatever, and then you you get a whole new computer because you're totally screwed. And I remember that was the time of party poker, right,

like start gambling online under age. So I guess that was kind of techy, but at the same time I knew my way around it. But I wasn't like a techy guy. I just kind of it was simple enough. Web one and Web two had made it simple enough for people like me and everybody at my school and all my friends to use these sort of protocols and these these devices and and make it really cool for us to gamble, listen to music, and trade. I guess, okay, Web two point oh, which at this point in time

is really seen as social media. To what degree have you and Avenge Sevenfold taken advantage of that? You know, we probably haven't. And we have a Facebook page, you know, we have of MySpace page. Um, we have an Instagram page, and we have a Twitter and what goes on in there isn't a lot and we don't really keep up

on it. Because we have this, we had this feeling of like this is super cheesy, Like we don't want to put ourselves out there in a lot of ways, like with the if you just put tour dates, like let's put it this way, if your machine gun, Kelly and you're all over in your and he's a good friend, right, so I'm not This isn't dissing him his life. He's got it all over social media. Everything he does, right, he's writing songs, he's doing this, he's doing that. That

doesn't work for Evenge seven fold. We look at ourselves more of like when we were growing up, we loved Mr Bungle and Faith No More and Tool and these bands that were very mysterious to us, and to put everything on social media didn't really work for us. And I remember Warner would always have a problem with it.

They're like, you know, Gerard Way is doing this thing and you should do it too, And every morning like have them sit in the sessions and write the songs with you and like take comments, and we're just like, that's not for us, right. It just felt uncomfortable. But Warner Brothers somehow got twenty million people to sign up to Avenge seven Folds Facebook. At one point. I think that thing is dwindled to sixteen million because we don't

do anything with it um. But when they started charging us tens of thousands of dollars to reach our own fans is when we started being very suspicious of these things. Right now, it's like we've brought you all these people, they're filling out your ecosystem. These are our fans, and now they go no, no no, no, no no, you don't actually get to talk to them unless you pay pay the piper um. So then we started getting really really suspicious of it, so to not go on anything else.

That's our relationship with Web two. It's very much this skeptical not really doing much on it, and we don't like putting our lives and what we ate for breakfast on there, so we don't do well on it. Okay, that's your choice, people might say on the opposite side, then in today's tsunami of information, unless you're in touch with your audience on a regular basis, they move on to something else. What would be your response to that?

My response to that would be like when System of a Down puts out a record, or Faith No More puts out a record, we all go get it. Like I know that if Avenge of Them will puts out of record, when we put out a record, people can be as distant as they want. When you're in the rock community. As soon as that calling card comes, as soon as you see that thing on Apple Services or Spotify or we put out some sort of information, I

believe they will all come back. I don't believe you have to be all over social media doing a lot. I think for some people do. But I think a lot of other genres are a lot more flimsy than the rock genre than the metal genre. And and it's so funny because these are like two different points, Like the metal genre has an innovation problem, but they don't

have a community problem. Like there's people that love heavy metal and they're gonna find out when these bands are doing these things now branching outside of that, maybe we keep more of the TRL audience. If we're all over social media. Do we want that audience? Is it healthy for us? I mean maybe if all your metrics are as selling records, But we're trying to go headline health fest and headline download festival and trying to go do all Danny's festivals and go do these things with a

more authentic audience. And I say some of these words, and I know this will come back, you know, like, oh, you know, think authentic as these other artists, But I think of these other genres as what have you what have you done for me lately? I don't think metals that that much of that sort of genre. So I think that works to our advantage. Again, but I don't want to do something that makes me uncomfortable. I don't do this because I have this need to be a

rock star. I do this because I love music and I want to put it out there. And at the end of the day, if I think, you know, I can sell more records because I show you what I had for breakfast, or show you show me in the studio, then I want out I don't want anything to do with it. So at some point you have to do it on your own terms and and say, are you really an artist that wants to put these things out for a real reason or are you an artist that simply wants to get you know, a bunch of records

sold and maybe sell a lot of tickets. I just I think there's a fine line there that you have to walk. Okay, so you started talking about bitcoin. Continue there. So in two thousands sixteen, I learned about this internet money, which I knew people that were playing video games. Um, we were doing a thing called game battles, which was competitive gaming online. So again it goes back to gaming. And at the time, you know, so if I do the math, you know, in my early thirties, at that point, um,

and it made sense to me. I didn't read the white paper. I didn't know Satoshi was doing, but the idea of internet money and the idea that people were trading this and betting and gambling online, it may sense that this thing was something. Um. Then I heard about ethereum, and I heard about smart contracts, and I started reading the white papers and okay, wait, wait, everybody may not know everything you talk about I think you know Bitcoin,

I think they know. Etherium explained smart contracts. So smart contracts were basically, and to keep this as high level as possible, they are basically taking the Bitcoin problem of permissionless currency, which you know, it gets authenticated by nodes across the world, which is why you don't have to have a human involved. These computers are authenticating that Matt paid Bob and there's no human involved, and as soon

as both sides agree, then it goes through. Now what Ethereum did is they added on top of that and said, well, you can put anything into a smart contract. It's lines of code, it's called metadata, and these contracts are going to live on the blockchain and as soon as both contracts have fulfilled their promise, then and a transaction will take place. It could be a transaction in real life, it could be a financial transact, chin it could be a piece of art, it could be a piece of music,

it could be whatever it wants. But these things will live on the blockchain, authenticated by nodes around the world. To the average person, you can own bitcoin. What's the difference between owning and what exactly is a smart contract? So two different things some owning. Bitcoin is a currency that is authenticated by computers around the world. That there's only twenty one million of them. Now they all haven't

been mined, and these are all gonna be weird. These this whole conversation might be rabbit holes, and I'll try to keep out of it. No no, no, no, no, no no no, don't don't stay out of the rabbit holes because they're relevant. I just don't want to go

too far ahead, So let's just leave it at. Bitcoin is a digital currency that lives in a decentralized fashion because of the way that it's set up, and it solves the problem of banks, uh, third party credit cards, anybody that can get in the way of and shut down these lines of communication, these lines of finance. So that's what bitcoin solved. Um for better or for worse, right, we can get into that um ethereum win a step further, and the metadata that's involved in these smart contracts, it

can provide anything, not just a currency. Now there is a currency with ethereum, it's called and And as you move things across ethereum the blockchain, you have to use athereum as gas, which is kind of powers let think of it as your vehicle, and you have to use these transactions to move pieces of metadata across the blockchain. So again, it's all decentralized. In the beginning, of course

it isn't. It's an idea. And then as things go deeper and deeper, the owners of Ethereum start owning the protocol based on how many coins you have based on these nodes across the world, which probably doesn't isn't relevant to this conversation, but it is decentralized in that way, so nobody can so to give a perfect example, the Ukraine. Do now, if you're gonna send money on Athereum or Bitcoin, there's no government, no visa card, no Spotify, no US

government that can stop those transactions from going through. They are decentralized. So you would say bitcoin is a pure currency. But Ethereum allowed these smart contracts which allowed the growth of n f T s and other things. Would you agree with that? So any of these contracts are gonna be labeled as n f T s, right, So they're

just pieces of data. So when we say n f T on this podcast, a bunch of people are gonna go, oh, a board eight cost five screw that, right, But an n f T could also be the d to your house, your bus ticket, it could be a fractionalized version or a fractionalized loan that you've taken out. It could be a fractionalized home in real life that you've bought, that you are in a dow with people and you have

part ownership of. Those are all n f t s. They're non fungible tokens, but they really are just meta data on the blockchain. So n f t s get this bad name because people instantly attribute it to, Oh, this artist is putting a piece of artwork or a piece a song on the Internet and they want me to own it. I'm not an art collector. I don't care about that. I'm gonna download it for free. That n f t s are stupid, right, Um, But it gets much deeper than that of what you can do

with these things. Um. So n f T s, let's let's just for the listeners. We're just gonna say it's metadata on a blockchain, not necessarily ethereum, but there are many blockchains. Let's go back to your personal experience. So in sixteen you buy how much bitcoin a lot um? Yeah, I bought um about twenty dollars at the time or at the bitcoin and at the time it costs two fifty dollars per bitcoin. Okay, needless to say, it's been very volatile. How have you emotionally handled that rod? It

is hardened my soul. I've never sold any of it. So if you look at these peaks and valleys, you know, it's one of those things where I said, listen, I put twenty grand and I bought twenty grand of ethereum too, and that was thirteen dollars at the time. But the point is that in two thousand and eighteen we had many crashes, right we I think bitcoin got to twenty thousand coin and it went down to a thousand. You've

got everybody in your circle. You go from genius too, dummy because I'm not selling it it right and so and then I just bought more because here's the here's the deal. The fundamentals never changed. All it was was growing pains of people not understanding, and it became a speculative tool. It becomes a circus. Right, You've got doch coin, You've got all these things going on, and people are just buying on top of each other and they're trying to be the last they not be the last man standing.

And but if you actually look at the tech and what has been done there, there's no reason to sell. In fact, it was more reason to buy more because I haven't seen a time in human history where we've had a better technology than what we currently use and then we just threw it away. It doesn't exist. Electric cars took a while, but it's a better technology than what we're using. And the computer and many times, I mean I was young, but I see that the clippings.

Now Internet was a fad, it's over. No, it's not. It's connecting everybody in a way that never happened before. Do we have our own problems with it? Yes, it came with a whole new stack of problems. But people aren't giving up the Internet, Bitcoin, ethereum, these all coins, some of them are gonna have very good use cases and they're going to be very important in our future.

And as new um, as new companies and brands come online, and as new brands disrupt the old brands and come you know web three first, you're gonna start seeing all these plugs are much easier to plug in if you are already involved in this sort of smart contract digital world.

There we go rabbit holes. Okay, so there are these varying coins you mentioned, you know, internet currency, and I was convinced when Marc Andreessen wrote something in the New York Times talking about, you know, leaving the banks out, that you can sell something in Africa because it's right there on the blockchain, whereas before intermediary said, well there's so much fraud, we don't want to get involved. Do you believe these coins, ethereum, bitcoin, they will exist or

just something will exist? I know something will exist. I think I'm I'm very very positive that bitcoin will exist. Some of the smartest people, I mean, you've got the Jacks, you've got the the Elon's, they are very bitcoin maxie. And there's a reason for that. And that's a different conversation. There's there's reasons to stay proof of work, there's reasons of you know, and these are I find these crossroads here. Ethereum is moving to a more eco friendly way to

mind the ethereum coin, which is proof of steak. This is big for the environment, it's big for a lot of different things, but it also there's a little bit less security with it, because it's the people that run the nodes have to own a certain amount of ethereum and and and when that happens, you start having lopsided nodes, or you start having people involved in some sort of way even though they're they're not actually doing the the

approving themselves. It just gets a little bit hairrier, right. And there's definitely papers that people could read on this and why Bitcoin won't be doing that. They're staying proof of work there there there mo is to figure out better ways to use the energy that we have, go wind or solo or whatever they're gonna do. But they're staying purely permission less. Nobody can get involved in bitcoin.

And so you have people like Jack and Elon who are bitcoin maxis, and they're trying to say, don't get involved in Web three. Web three is going to be owned by the FECs, right the all the vcs are gonna come in. They're gonna do the same thing they did to Web two, and it's gonna be all about bitcoin. These are different conversations that they have. They both have a lot of merit. But I do believe Bitcoin will be around. I believe that the theory will be around.

It's so far ahead. Um. But my answer for will there be a digital currency is yes. But I'm not gonna put my you know, my name down for a because we all know how quick things change. For those who don't really know, explain Web three to them. So Web three is a permission less at call, it's a it's a supercomputer, it really is. It's computers that are authenticating notes. So where before on on Web two we had things like a piece of art. Let's take a

board it for example. If if you had a board it which most people will know what a board it is at this point, is on the cover of everybody will just make it a little simpler, okay if they If you just had an item, you can have an item on the Internet before blockchain and you could right click save, you could pass it around the Internet could do whatever you want with it. And Web three you can do the same thing, except that there is one

authenticated owner which lives on metadata in the blockchain. So, for instance, if you were to sell Welcome to the Jungle today, which probably wouldn't work, but there might be a buyer out there that says I want to own Welcome to the jungle. Now, through a piece of metadata, you could essentially put the i P rights, the publishing, the masters, the artwork, everything in it, and that would go for a crazy large price. Right. So the guy that gets it now could go and actionalize it off

to other people. He could make merchandise, he could pull it off streaming services. You do whatever he wants. He owns all the rights, it's all in the metadata. Um. These things are basically think of them as digital contracts that you can do whatever you want with them. And the the creator of these contracts. So say event Someville does it, we kind of write the rules however we want to do it, and then it's done on the

back end, on the on the blockchain. So it's kind of a hard thing to understand, I guess in that context. But you have all these collections right now of things like the board apes, which are a piece of art, and these this meta data allows you into a club. Right, So this board ape you have on your computer is a contract that you own the ape. You can do whatever you want with it. You have the i P rights to it. You can be invited to parties, they can air drop you their own digital coin, they can

drop you serrums to make mutant apes. This whole world opens up up things that you cannot get if you've simply clicked right click and save, um and so again in so many different use cases. But that's one that's very simple that's happening right now that a lot of people are scoffing at. But the reality is, go right click slave one of those things and see if you

get the air drops. See if you get to go to the party, See if you get to you know, have access to this group of people that have been authenticated, these these minds that have bought these things early. Um, these dows. They just created a dow where the owners of the board apes have governance and they have a vote over what happens in the future of the board apes. What kind of so anyways, yeah, rabbit hole. Okay, wait wait wait you spell dow. D O explain to my audience what a DO is. So a DOW is a

decentralized autonomous organization. So autonomous doesn't really work because there has to be human at the beginning of these things, right, they start centralized and as time goes on, based on the amount of tickets or tokens that you give out. These tokens could represent governance or votes in how the company has run. So I'll give a small example. We

all know what dot com is. So in the web three era, there's a thing called E n S. Right, So having your name, um, you would have to go through a company called E n S. So you pay a little money and they give you this this E and S that goes to the ind of your name. So I am shadows dot eath. I have a bunch of a like appetite for destruction dot eath. I've got all these things right that if the bands ever came and you gotta give it to them. But basically it's

like the dot com boom. What they did was they said, well, based on and they never announced this until they announced it, which was cool. I had this thing for a year, right, So what they did was they basically took everybody that had these E N S names and they said, based on how long you've held these and based on the amount of time that you spent and the name that you have, we are going to give We're gonna turn

the whole company into a doubt. So now your token is your voting and your governance for the whole company. We are completely backing off. So it's kind of what what Metalic did with ethereum. You create a currency and then you back out slowly as people start gaining governance and gaining these tokens and these coins, as the ecosystem

starts fulfilling itself off. So in E n S, I had a I could decide if I wanted to cash out my money which was over a couple hundred thousand dollars, or I could be a voter and a part of this ecosystem and evangelizing E n S. So that's what a dow does. A dow could be anything from buying a physical house in the real world to buying a piece of digital like I think there was a dow

trying to buy the Constitution, the US Constitution. There's dows that raise money in our charities for certain organizations that can't get money easily, so they can bypass altered parties by using a dow and the money goes straight to these people. There's a bunch of different use cases for dows, and there's probably gonna be a use case for record labels and all sorts of things moving forward. As people start seeing hey, I work at this company. I want to have ownership in it. I want to be a

part of the voice UM. Chris Dixon gives the example of how would Uber look if the owners of Uber were the drivers, right, If you had a car, you had governance over a vote, and you had these kind of unions that were helping people decide what they were going to use their governance on. You could trade your governance for certain things. Of course, big ideas, and they might be kind of far out, but I actually don't think they're that far out. They're already being implemented. But

that's what now is. It's a decentralized autonomous organization. Okay, let's go back to Web three. The theory on web three is to decentralize power and ownership so you don't have an authority like you have at Facebook or any of these other huge companies that we have online. Why are people like Jack Dorsey, etcetera. Explain why they don't like this because many people see it as a piano sea giving the power back to the people. Explain why

some of these people don't see it that way. Jack Dorsey to paint him as a nonbeliever in in crypto or Bitcoin would be wrong. He is a huge believer in Bitcoin and Lightning Network. Again rabbit holes. Bitcoin is going to have its own not only payment system, but it will be able to provide n f T s off of basically layered two protocols that will be built off it. He likes that because it truly is decentralized. Some of these bigger guys that have been in it

for a long time. If you look at Jack's thing, it's got Bitcoin logos. He always talks about. He gets into it with the Web three guys right because he doesn't like the idea that the billions of dollars that are being funneled into Web three right now will own Web three. If you look at you go Labs and you look at um the board Apes for example, they are a company that started with a five eight eleven

months ago. It was worth nothing. They decentralized the point where all the owners own the I P. They started a mother brand called YOUG Labs over it, and then what happened. Um Horrowitz came in, uh Citadel came in, black Rock came in, and they put fourgner and fifty million dollars into YOUG Labs So Jack's question is who owns the dow at this point, who owns the board apes? Right? Is it you? Or is it all the same players that were investing in Facebook, and they were investing in

you know, Twitter and investing in all these things. So it's almost a battle of who can be the most decentralized, right, who can be the most money or who can be the most currency for the people, who can bring the most value to this promised land of Web three. So I wouldn't say Jack's a guy that's like, oh no, it's all trash, like stick to Facebook, right, It's very

much the opposite of that. Um. So there are these little in fights within Web three quote unquote and the Bitcoin maxis, which I think they both have really good arguments. And once we get into what we're doing, I would like to explain why we think we're doing it more

ethically than a lot of the Web three players. Now I'm a collector of a lot of these tokens, and I don't and you Go Labs has done nothing yet to to show that they are a d are a centralized platform that's going to do bad, But it is what it is, right when you have four and or fifty million dollars invested in you. That's coming from a couple of sources. So let's let's call spade a spade. Right, these are big players coming in with a lot of money,

and they can they can determine what what's gonna happen here. Okay, you were an early adopter, you bought bitcoin in sixteen. You're following the scene. At what point do you say, here's an opportunity for revenge seven fold? Um? I don't know. If you're familiar with Gary v you know who Gary v is started selling wine online and became a marketing guru, Gary Vaynerchuk. So Gary what he did and what the

board apes did. So I'll start back in one. I bought my first, well the beginning of I bought my first UM crypto punk, which, if anyone that knows that is it's basically the first collection that ever gained notoriety on the on the blockchain. UM. It was the first digital collectible that you could own. In my mind, I was like, well, I believe in the space, that's a no brainer. I should buy as many crypto punks as

I can, Right. So I went in there and I had already had, you know, and this is like one of the complaints to a lot of people already had a lot of ethereum. Right. I bought it in two thousand sixteen when it was thirteen dollars a coin. Now it's sitting at four thousand a coin at this moment, right or when when when I was talking about this and so was a lot easier to go in there and drop, you know, sixty seventy grand on a on

a jpeg um. But something in tregued me about it, and I thought, if this is the first piece of art, I'm seeing this as the next rem brand, this is the next Picasso, right, this is the digital age, um, digital asset ownership, first time you can own something on the internet. I need some of these. So I started buying him, and I remember the way I felt about him. I was I was so happy with it. I was scared at first, and I was like, what a waste of money? And then I was like, oh my god,

I'm looking at this thing all the time. And one of the AHA moments for me as I was with UM, I went to a Laker game with a with a buddy who owns part of the Phoenix Suns and we went, you know, to watch that game, and I was he's an investment guy, big investment guy. I don't want to name names in any of this because it doesn't matter, but he was there and he was asking me about Crypto because I've been telling me about it for years and they never dipped their toe and it was too

scary to them. And I said, well, I gotta stop you for a second. That as a guy beingd Avenge sevenfold know a guy like this. A lot of vcs are big metal heads. They really are. You know, a lot of these guys are are very much into rock and roll. A lot of them came from that generation.

You know, uh, I golf, I play metal and a lot of these guys they grew up on Motley Crue and guns and Roses and they and they stuck with it and they know Event sevenfold and they know Metallica and they and so a lot of times you meet these guys and their owners of these big vcs or companies. You know, how do you feel because you talked about

you don't want to participate on social media. For those of us who've had the opportunity to hang with the billionaires, there are a lot of perks, the private jets, etcetera. But it's clear that they're in control. So do you have any ethical issue interacting with these people? I would argue that if you're in a band, they listen to that you're in control. They respect that. I could argue this long, day long, and it really gets down to

the specifics, but maybe later. Let's go back. So you're at the Laker game with this guy's part owner of the Sun's. So I guess it comes down to can I afford to go to the Laker game myself or do I need them to pay for me. I can afford to go to the lake again myself. So I think we're on we're on equal ground here. But we're talking. He's always asked me about bitcoin and and and ethereum and all these things, and he's always been his whole team has always been like, how do we get involved.

I've explained it to them and they never pulled the trigger. So I said, well, you're gonna be really blown away by the dumb thing I bought recently. It's this picture, and he said, get out of here. I said, no, it's just it's this picture and and and the first one I got out like a little clown nose and had like a little boppy hair, and I said, this is a crypto punk and what did you pay for that? Like stars? And he's like, no, get out of here, and like I was like no, I think this is

the future. And they're laughing, and then his kids come up and they go, you have a crypto punk. I go, yeah, I a crypto punk there, Like can we see it? Yeah? Sure? Now this is something they can pull up on their own phone, but they want to see the phone that it. It's acted and by the way, it's not really on that phone, right, it's a picture. It's calling a you know,

a link basically, but can we see it? These kids who are gonna inherit this come me someday are passing around this crypto punk like it's the coolest thing they've ever seen. They're holding one in their hands, a real crypto punk, and it clicked with me. The future will be dictated by the generation that is coming up. Um. And so what had happened? Shortly after that? The board apes came out and a bunch of US d gens were minting these board apes, and the crypto punks didn't like, okay,

not everybody's gonna know. Go a little bit deeper into what the board apes are. Okay, So the board apes were a collection of ten thousand apes that have generative quality. Right, so there's probably hats that are made uh thirty seven skin colors, eighteen eyes that could be put on there like frowning to that, and so a generator when you buy these things, generates you a one of one random ape that can never be recreated. But the thing that the apes were doing is they said, hey, we're going

to give up the i P to these apes. Go print your own T shirts, start yoga studios, start a coffee brand, go sell your own ape as a merch brand. And zoomies, which happened this week, and it was Nick Yards and Snoop Dogg and all of them. They're the ones that did this. They said, we don't care what you do. The bigger you make this brand, the more it's gonna make people want to be a part of

this community. And in fact, not only do we not own the apes and you own the I P, We're gonna create a dow eventually, and we're gonna create a coin that's gonna put to get these ecosystems, all big things on a road map. So we all minted them whatever whatever, it's five d bucks, right, we bought a few of them. A month went by, nothing happened. Then things started changing, Right, You've got celebrities buying them. You had LaMelo Ball was one of the first ones, Josh Hart.

People started buying these things, and it became like putting them on their uh, you know Instagram, you know, kind of funneling back into web, to their Twitter profiles. Their Instagram was kind of the calling card if I know what's up right, I know, I know what's going on here. Steph Curry bought in, Tom Brady bought in Odell Breckham Jr. So all of a sudden it was like the cool

kids club to be involved again. While you probably see Feigner and fifty million dollars get funneled into this thing recently, right, so, but they just became this this use of web three where it was like, let me give you another example. We were in n f T, New York and the Apes were having a party, right, and the party was free booze, free food. You get in for free. You gotta have an ape um you gotta show your ape at the door. You gotta R s v P. They

authenticate that you have the ape. You get in there, it's Beck, Chris, Rock, the Strokes, the Baby, free concert all night. Everything is free, paid for. You've got all these like minded people in the same room, people to understand the vibe they're they're in the know. And so that's like a small perk, right. So in real life perk,

you've got the merch whatever, which everyone wants. There was t shirts going for fourteen thousand dollars when they first sold out because people wanted to have the board ape merch um. It became like a cultural phenomenon of like the old way you could own something, but you never own the brand. But we're giving you the rights to own the brand. You do whatever you want. And it gave people this leeway and this freedom to go build, to build what they wanted. There's musician the Chain Smokers.

There's there's a bunch of artists that I know right now that are coming out with projects that are actually groups, like the Gorillas, and they're using their apes. Right There's a group signed a universal already that is all apes, and and I know all these people because I know what they're trying to do. They're trying to create this this ecosystem and this thing around this cool kids club. Now, since then, there's been a million and one you know,

copycats and people trying to do the same thing. But what happened? Back to your question, I said, it's one question. It's the party with Beck and Chris Rock. How many people were there? It was R S v P. So hold out instantly people, you know, and you've got the who's who there? Right, it's like Gyo Cri. It's it's the Marshmallows, it's the the snoop dogs. I mean everyone's there. Right, It's the place to be. You've got your ape, there's athletes, anyone from New York was there. It was the place

to be. And these are like cultural movements that you kind of have to follow and not so when people talk about the PfP aspect of it, like, oh, it's a stupid thing I put on my Twitter. I always don't discount that because that's a calling card. It's like wearing your Slayer T shirt down the road. And you know what kind of that that guy is kind of all about. Right, you see the board ape on a profile.

You know what they're about, and you know they have something like minded, which I think is important, but it's not the whole game here. So when the board Apes did that, and Gary had done what he did with Vcan, which if you have this token, you have access to one on one time with him, you can win dinners with him, He's gonna air drop you stuff randomly, you get free access into his ve con. So all these things.

I started seeing the tokens as this utility tool, and as I started thinking about it, I was like, man, Gary, Gary is a little bit of a different story. But the board Apes pulled this out of their ass, right, they pulled it out of thin air. No one knew what the board Apes were in. It all came from the crypto punks and just kind of moving into this new era of digital ownership, and people bought in. They

understood it. And I said, well, what do you what happens if you take up an audience of twenty years and you distribute these tokens to them, and you say, we're gonna find our biggest evangelizers, We're gonna find the people that want to build this community. We're gonna decentralize a little bit of our operation here and give you voting rights to certain things the merch we drop you maybe a little bit of set list things that we're kind of playing with right now. Right, you don't want

it to impede too much on the overall fan base. Um. But then we started thinking about real life perks. Well, what if you go to a show and there's a PO app there And for people that don't know what a po app is, it's a proof of attendance. You scan the PO app when you get there and it reads that you have a token, and then we get to air drop you a ticket stub that moves from that night. Now, if you collect enough ticket stubs, we

give you a reward. We give you a free guitar, a zoom call with us, all things we can track on the meta data instantly without a team. So then we started building meta data protocols out for merchandise for us. Then we started building in the metaverse a little bit too fast. You have the idea, yes, how long after you have the idea do you take action? And what does that action look like? Okay, so our first idea

was not fully baked. I was still in the mindset that what if we put a little bit of unreleased music and a a picture kind of where most people go, right, like, I bet that's worth a lot. That's kind of cool. And my mindset now is that you don't turn musician or music fans into art collectors. They don't care. They just want the music right there. They don't care like that they own the track on Spotify, they don't really care. There's very few people that are going to care about

that ownership. So we made this n f T and what we did is we said, hey, anybody in the audience that has a metal mask, which is the for the people that don't know, that's the that's the connector between us and and web three. So it's like this app on your phone that can basically it's like a looking glass into what you own on your Ethereum wallet. UM it's where you keep your n f T s UM.

So anyone that downloads a Metal Masks send us your address and we're gonna pick a hundred one people and drop this piece of art with um a piece of music. So we had five thousand people sign up on Metal Masks and send us their addresses, which is a pretty good number. Right of this new thing, right, and we said, and by the way, most of the fans that got him were just like, at first, we rolled our eyes at this. We thought it was whatever, We're just download

this free app. When was this exactly? This is May of last year. Okay, so this is just after Grimes and all the insanity becomes public. Yeah, it was public, but again it took us a month to kind of

id and get it announced and do all it. So it was around the same time of a lot of stuff happening, and um, you know, we had five thousand addresses and one of the things that we noticed is that we started looking at addresses, which everything on the blockchain is seeable and you can kind of I can look in your wallet, you can look in my wallet, and we noticed that no one had any n f t s and all of the meta mauths had been set up recently, and so we wrote a piece of

code and we were able to kind of look into every address at once, and we noticed that only thirteen people had any prior n f t s. Right, So this was a whole new audience that had no clue what we were doing. It was not this savvy Steve Ioki audience or the chain smoker's audience, you know, which was cheering when they put a board ape on their Instagram. Our audience was just like, we don't know what this is.

And so we air dropped those seventeen people some because we didn't want to give it to an address that was going to get forgotten about or the because once it's gone, it's gone, right. You can't you can't there's no one to call. You can't call the talk and say hey, ethereum founder, can you go get some of these n f t s that we lost. It doesn't work like that. So then we started distributing them to

people that we saw very active on Reddit. We kind of matched up the names or or you know, when they had signed up and they kind of put their addresses and Reddit. So we're trying to give them to super fans, people that could kind of understand it. So we did those and they kind of sat there, and then we then we had the idea of like the board apes. I think the board apes came out just after that, just around that time, and the utility thing

kind of sparked that interest. So we started doing educational videos because we knew we had a lot of work to do because a lot of people just kind of ignored it, they didn't get it, and they moved on. So we we talked a bit. We ideated on the Death Bets Club. We started working with an artist. Well a little bit slower. You're making educational videos and you're

putting them okay, so let's actually go before that. We ideated on the idea, and we kind of floated and read it, and we said, what if we made a ten thousand collection like the board Apes or like the Crypto Punks, And we turned this into the Access passed Slash touch point to all things event sevenfold, And we'll

get into all those things later. But if you have this pass, we consider you an evangelist, and we consider the amount of stuff we're gonna give you that you'll feel like an owner and that you'll want to build and make this community as good as you want to make this community. And if you don't want to be in the community more, then unlike Patreon or go fund me, you can actually sell your membership to someone else that

wants to get in. So it is digital ownership one oh one, right, and it's it's one of these things that we had to under to teach the fans. So I think in basically, we set up a website. We went out to everybody. We said, hey, guys, we're gonna set up a white list anybody that wants to get in. This is the price. It's about dollars at the time with what ethereum was. And then we had a bunch of moaning and groaning and I'll just why do I

do this? And and and we need to go back a little bit further where evenge some of folds never done paid meet and greets. We don't do paid v I P. Stuff. We we've always felt it was cheesy, and we've always gone out after shows and shook hands and taking pictures, but we never do the whole pay me tucks and we're gonna shake your hand getting a

line thing. And so this was something completely new. We were offering things that if you're part of this club, we're gonna we're gonna either guarantee or pick certain things based on rarity. Again more rabbit holes based on what you get, but it's for three and or fifty bucks. You have these things for life. And the more value we bring to the club, and the more value you

bring to the club. These things could go up in value or they could go down right, but we we kept very far away from the speculative use this as a pump and dump thing because it was very important to us that people saw this as a fan club on steroids that they owned. And so when we opened up the white list, and for people that don't know what the white list is, obviously we are having people sign up there meta mass addresses and we were saying, cool, you can mint on day one. You can mint on

day one. We had three people sign up. That was it? Only three people? And we said, okay, we got to go back to the drawing board. Because projects that are doing well sellout and T minus five seconds. We have a whole new audience that doesn't understand this and they don't trust it. So we started making videos explaining what

Ethereum was, explaining the digital ownership, our package. We started explaining how you set up metal mask, how you go to coin base and get Ethereum, and a little caveat here It was important to us that they got Ethereum and didn't use moon pay or some other thing to use FIAT because if you want to put a token for sale, you have to pay a little bit of

gas and they'd be stuck. So if they didn't understand the ecosystem and what they were getting into, they would simply just have a token and they would eventually have to go find ethereum or figure out how to set up a coin based account or a binance account. So we walked them through all these things. The the white list grew after we put out these videos. From that

was my question, where could someone see these videos? Okay, so we put them on YouTube and we put them all over our new website, which was Avenge seven fled dot io, which is the new version of web three. So it's it doesn't really matter if you use a dot com, but these are Web three enabled where you can build a p I s, you can build the plumbing of web three. So for instance, a very small example is the board apes had a bathroom a graffiti room, and you couldn't go in the graffiti room unless you

have a board ape. So what happens is metal mouse pops up, it says would you like to sign in? It reads that you have a board ape, and it allows you in. So this was a very small use case at the time. Now obviously your brain can go wild of what you can put behind closed ecosystems for collectors and and owners of these things. Right, it could be new music, that could be merch that they can only get. It could be digital assets, it could be

closed off concerts. And then you have to have the question of what do I want to have clothes off and what do I don't But those are all different philosophical questions. But the idea of a metal mouse popping up and having to read the blockchain that you this token in your wallet was revolutionary. It was all of

a sudden. You couldn't just make a bunch of email addresses, and you couldn't just send a code somewhere or or do all these things that we try to do, or a QR code or this or that they can all be sent somewhere else, or there's all these hoops to jump through. But now you just had to have a token. Just simply a token will allow you in. It didn't matter who you were, where you came from. The out of token you can get in. So we started seeing

this and we put these things on our web three website. Obviously, before you do how many people watch the videos? I don't know, that's a good question. I don't know. I know that our initial launch video did about two fifty you know, views initial launch of what we're trying to build. Okay, and how long were the videos? We made the first video about six minutes and then everything after that was

a minute or under. It was like, yeah, sure, right, there's people that go into the discord, and there's people that go on Google stuff themselves and they just figured it out, right, But then you have a lot of people that go in the discord like what do I do? I'm lost, I don't this is this is bold, right, So we made videos that were like, okay, here's us explaining it to you. We have twenty years of a rapport with you. We're not gonna screw you over. We

truly believe in this. We think this will be good. Now, it's coming from the horse's mouth, right, this is this is how you do this, And so we made these videos before you go there. You mentioned Discord explained for the new be what discord is. So Discord is this ephemera chat in a way that Reddit would be something if you look at red, it would be something where you make these big posts people can comment on it,

they get pinned. They do at least certain things, where Discord is more of a free flowing chat, so as things are happening, there's there's hype and excitement, and there's different rooms. So if you're in a band, you could say, let's go talk about guitars in here, or let's talk about our albums in here, or let's go do a

merch giveaway in here. And so the n f T world is really adapted to um these discords because it's got these large amounts of people that are constantly talking about the utility of their tokens, the art of their tokens, the parties that they're gonna be throwing, the the protocol, the dows. It's this. It's this sort of chat where people can ideate with each other in real time instead of you know, going to read it and waiting for posts to be responded to, not knowing how many people

are in there, you're really seeing this liveliness. So it got adopted from video games back in the day where people were playing cross platform and someone wanted to play Call of Duty with someone on PS five but they had a PC. You turn on Discord and then you would use it as a UM as a communication tool, but they have quickly learned that they are the the center of Web three n f t s and what is being being used at these communities. So they have held off on their I p O and they're going

back to this is all other stuff. But they're they're going back to building out their Web three stuff because there are ways to manipulate a Web two device or a Web two sort of ecosystem when Web three is involved. And and so those are again some of those problems that were new type of problems that we're running into. Right, you don't want to click on links in Discord and connect your wallet because all your stuff might be going to somebody else, like things like that that Discord needs

to fix. So Discord is a just think of it as a big party and everyone's in there chatting at the same time. And n f t s that are very popular constantly have stuff happening in them. Okay, go back to your narrative, you put off the videos, you educate your audience. And so the white list went from UH three nine thousand, nine for for one thousand, for for ten thousand tokens and we shut off the white list,

and we kind of thought that was a day. We kind of wrapped it up, like all right, here we go, time to start building. What we didn't know was that out of those nine thousand people, about sixty five of

them were not able to get either. So they got they got kind of stone walled either when they were trying to buy it with their visa car or coin based takes a couple of weeks to authenticate you, or you know, there's like no your your customer on finance now, and so all of a sudden, all these people that thought they were going to get in or it just got too difficult, right we talked about you talk about friction all the time. There was a little bit too

much friction. Like I have to get cryptocurrency. I don't really trust it. I hear bad things, and I gotta put it in this metal mask ballet and then I gotta go on this thing called open sea, and I gotta mint this thing and I'm getting this token but it's really just a jpeg. Uh fuck it, you know, like I'm I'm I'm over it, right, So we had

about seventy percent that didn't get there. You know, they signed up and they got to that point they didn't get crypto again, we wrote a piece of code to look in their wallets and see and uh so we had what would be called a a steady sellout. So it took a couple of weeks to sell the ten thousand tokens um and then after that we just started building and the tenth the way. Just to be clear, this is separate from the three hundred and fifty dollar one. Nope,

this is it. So you ultimately did sell ten thousands, yes, and so what we did we had, you know, made a few million dollars on that, and we rolled it into because a couple of years ago I had bought a bunch of Sandbox Land and Sandbox For anyone that doesn't know what that is is a metaverse. It is a decentralized platform which centralized for now, but it will be decentralized as people that own land, they will gain

more governance. As a whole roadmap to that, but a metaverse is kind of like Ready Player one right where you go in and you can jump from people's worlds to worlds and they all have different things going on. There's a bunch of different gaming techniques that we go into. But there's a bunch of reasons that people will want to be there. They can wear their digital merch, they can throw virtual parties, you can actually have concerts there.

You can stream kind of what Fortnite did, but you would you could token gate it to where you say, hey, Deathbat club owners only get to watch this concert, or everyone gets to watch the concert. But if your Death Beats club owner, we're gonna give you a one of a one of a kind T shirt from the day. Okay, the name of the club just go a little deeper in there. So the Death Bats club Deathbed is a logo that we came up with in high school. It's

a skull with wings um. Peter Luban at Bravado used to call it the Nike swish of heavy metal, say it's our, it's our. When we were young kids, we said, hey, look at the Misfits and look at some of these bands are Iron Maiden with Eddie, and we said, you don't need to know their name to know what that band is. You need to know that that's the Crimson

Skull and that's the Misfits. You don't need to see Iron Maiden to know that Eddie is Iron Maiden and we said we want that, so, you know, being the little I guess we had some foresight there, but um, we had our friend Michael Montahue rest is slowly passed away, but um he drew the death bet for us, and that was the first drawing of it. We were just like, we want a realistic skull with wings, and we made this thing and at the time, uh, we just started

branding it everywhere. So that's the death Bet. So this club is based off of our logo and we took the idea of the board apes and said, there's gonna it's gonna be generative death Bat. You're gonna get your own one of one that you can do whatever you want with. In fact, we gave up the I P to the Death Beats, So twenty years in building this brand, we turned around to the fans instead, if you get this token, you can go do whatever you want with it.

So of course we're seeing a podcast out started with it, and that's the logo, and we see people doing merch shops and they're building merch for each other and they're making hats for each other. So our web three ethos at this point is that the more people evangelize this logo in the band. Then the bigger the club gets, and the bigger the band gets. Okay, I like board apes.

Is everybody's logo slightly different, yes and so, and then you have things like some have gold skin and some have psychedelic skin, and some have and we also sweetened the pot a little bit. We have some that come with free meet and greets for life. We have some that come with free tickets for life. But that wasn't

our main focus. That was something fun. We just threw in there because we thought it would be really cool for some fan to to get a guitar every year from Sinister Gates, or you know, get to go to all the meet and greets and when they've met us twenty times, I'll probably sell it to someone else. All these tokens were the same price. It was all luck of the draw, you know. So the kid in Argentina

that you know got three and or fifty bucks. And the reason I bring of Argentina because I met a kid that took all of his money and minted board apes. He minted twenty five board apes with all of his money, five bucks of pop. He saved it with his brother and now the kids a multimillionaire, of course, but you

hear these stories, right. We wanted to give our fans like that that couldn't afford a meet and greet package or a guitar that costs thirty at retail the chance to possibly get one of these and when you're done with it, you just send it onto to someone else you can sell it. So that was the idea that wasn't the The main idea was not the big perks though.

The idea was that we get these people in the club, we start decentralizing it in a way, and we give them ownership of their bat, We give them ownership of this club. We start giving them perks. We're doing giveaways every month, We're doing all these things and uh and as the story goes on, I mean I have more examples. That was like version one point oh of what the

Death Bats Club gets you and um. So to go back to the money though, because this is important, we took the two point seven million, right or whatever it was three million dollars that we made on this, and we've we bought n f T World, which is another metaverse. We bought. We bought um a thing called pixel Verse. We bought we started building our land in the sandbox, which costs, you know, around fifty to sixty dollars per

per plot. We have thirty six plots. I bought the thirty six plots two years ago when it was thirty thousand dollars and now they're worth two point five three million dollars for this land that we have. And so but we took this this crowdfunding in a way and we're just funneling it all right back into the club. Now.

Our ideas that people are gonna have so much fun with this club that we can sell them digital merch in there, we can do coke token gated concerts, we can have events in there, and as you air drop holders things, more people are gonna want to get in and we can do things with them as well. It doesn't have to be just Death Bats Club. So that kind of sums up the b one version of what where we see the Death Bats Club. Um, there's also other things where we air dropped every holder free tickets

to any show they want. And the way we're doing that as we went to Live Nation and we went to Ryan Harlacker and our booking agent, Rob Light, and we said we need two d tickets for ship per show that we're just gonna put these kids on on the guest list. So when you go and redeem your token on the web three site and authenticates that you're the owner, it's gonna take your information and put it directly into our our our, our, our guest list. Right now,

that's the shoestring budget. Now, if you get Michael Rapino and these guys who are already messing with polygon and messing with these ticket stubs, and you go, guys, let us plug in. This is not this is not some ecosystem that we is owned by anybody. We're gonna plug in and let these be authenticated tickets. There's already companies working on scanning, and all of a sudden, you've got this thing where it can be a much more seamless route. Now I believe that, of course tickets are going on

the blockchain. There's you know, I read your thing about the ticketmaster and all this, and there's there's obviously, um there's obviously more problems, and there's problems that you solve, and there's things that the artists don't want the fans to know, and there's all these things that you know obviously that that you've have, you've touched on, but things like royalties being on chain is a no brainer. The auditing,

the lawyers, the paperwork, all these things. There's companies right now that i'm that are very far down the line of convincing Spotify and Apple Music to move on to chain so that artists can get paid within twenty four hours. And at that point we can fractionalize those royalties out with a simple smart contract. We can actually pay our Death Beats club owners a percentage. Now you would say, well, Matt, you can't do that with the deals that you've got,

the label deals. Hence why we're thinking about how do you do this all independently where we can keep the line share of Spotify, and we can keep the line share of our streaming services, and we can evangelize these people that the bigger the band gets, the more that you're gonna be paid by owning this token. Now, these are all things that you can do or not, but their possibilities, and they're all very interesting possibilities. And I feel like I just puked a bunch of rabbit holes

on you. But these are all things that we're thinking about in terms of Web three and why it's important and where it's gonna go. We don't know the answer, but we we are preparing ourselves for these very cool creative endeavors that we can do with our fans. Let's start. Everybody you've got in the thousand got in basically got in for three Yes, the people who bought in, and when did this go live or went live in December?

Anybody complaining? They're the happiest people. Nobody's complaining going that discord and they're just so happy that they have access. Well I'll end at that. No, no one's complained. Okay, Well, oh oh, by the way, are you asking about deathbats holders are other people? No, I'm talking about the people who paid three d None of them are complaining. No. Okay, if you paid your three fifty dollars so far, you've got your own icon of the band that you own.

You say you're gonna get free tickets? What else? Yeah, so they have free tickets. They have access to our metaverse, which is obviously everything is moving online. You see Nike just bought. You see Adidas just bought right next to us. The hundreds are right next to us. The board apes are there the crypto punks are there. It's this whole group of people that are basically turning their shutting down

their websites. They're shutting down the idea of Facebook and all these other things, and they're going straight to the audience and they're building experiences in there. UM, so right now you will get there's parties that are gonna be happening that I don't want to give the date yet at certain n f T events and you have to and you won't be able to get in unless you

have a token. We will be doing a small tour before the Wreck Next record comes out, which will be for token holders only, and we'll be going to very small places and we have a sponsor that will be paying for that. UM. We have white lists and partnerships with big merch brands and video game headset companies that

will be gifting our owners these sorts of things. Now to them, it's cool because they're they're getting involved in this thing at the ground floor and they're able to participate and get the cool factor by they're the guys that gave us the headsets are they're the guys that did this. Um. We are a little bit of an advantage. We own our own merch so we own our own warehouse, and we're able to plug all these things directly through metadata. We don't have to go to anybody and say, hey,

can you try to you know, finagle all this. We understand that we're in a different position than a lot of bands, um. And so there's that, and then we will be air dropping everybody avatars for the Sandbox and for the n f T world. So you will be getting an avatar that there's only ten thousand of, but you can only get them if you have the death Beats token. So now you get to walk around, you get the flex in the metaverse with your friends and play these games. But you've got a Deathbat that you

don't have to pay for. It's free. Um. We would We have a podcast that we started that Death Beats Club pays for, you know, with some of those royalties, and every month we break down songs like on a very high level of the music theory, all these things that went into the song, the stories behind them, and what we want to do eventually is get on a decentralized platform where we can fractionalize all those royalties to the holders. So that's what they get in what's coming

up in the in the short term. Um, And then you've got to think when we start playing shows again, they do have those tickets. They will be having poeps, They will get ticket stubs for every show, and there will be a reward system based on how many shows you went to. And they also get monthly giveaways where we give away about three thousand dollars with the stuff just randomly to any bat. All you have to do is hold it. You don't have to be in there

and participate. Um. We give you white list to every other projects, like if the board Apes came to us, they do it all the time, like board Apes don't, but they come to other brands and they say, hey, we're doing a thing with Adidas. Like your owners get on the white list, they can buy our n f T. First. I got in Adida's n f T because I was a board ape holder, right and so now I get access to the Adida's metaverse and I get free merch

from them. So these are all things that are interconnected that our death Dot club owners are getting at this point. And also one of the biggest things that sold everyone is we have their own merch booth in their own line to get into shows. So they simply get to walk straight and go to dinner, not have to wait in line, just walk right in. We have our own guy waiting at the door that's gonna check your thing. You it's all gonna be on the you know, the list.

Like I said, it's shoestring for now. Um. And then you're gonna walk right in and you're gonna have your own merch but that you can buy your own stuff. So these are the things that we have been ideating on and what we're doing right now. Hey, can you mention the brands that are involved, the headset brand and the sponsor. Um. We're still finishing that up, but to you know, just to be transparent with things that we

have worked with before. We've worked with Stuff Gaming. We've worked with the Call of Duty franchise, We've worked with Astros, We've worked with we we have an announcement coming out with the biggest crypto um company in the world. UM. I can't announce them, but people can put the pieces together. That's coming soon. UM. We worked with the with the hundreds or Bobby and Ben. We want to do something

with them. There's a lot of things that people have wanted to do sponsorships with us, and we've never done it. I've always felt it was extremely cheesy. But with the Death Beats Club, we think it's a perfect way to get their brands involved without us feeling like we're a sellout having a logo on the back of our stage or having someone sponsor our whole tour. Right, We've never felt that was cool, but we feel if we can give things to our Death Beats Club owners, we're willing

to do that. Okay, so there are ten thousand, what about opening the club of more people. So there's very interesting ways that the board Apes have done it right.

And so if you look at how far the board Apes have come, they now have ape coin, which is fourteen dollars a coin, and you can't get anything in the board Ape ecosystem, which is going to be launching in a month um called uh the other Side, and this is gonna be a metaverse that you and for people that don't play video games, you basically mine resources on the land that you get air dropped. If you have an ape, you get air dropped land. Now it's yours to sell to anyone you want. But they have

a thing, and so basically they air dropped everybody ape coin. Now, they did a mutation earlier on where they gave every ape a serum and with the serum, you drink it with your ape and you get another n f T and an other n f T is called a mutant ape, and they had kennel dogs. They did two different versions

of this, and then they opened it up to the public. Now, if you buy these mutant apes, when you've got one for free, if you're an ape holder, you could sell it on the secondary market, or you could be a

new person buying in, but you get tiered access. Right, you didn't get as much coin as the AP holders, you didn't get as much land as the ape holders, but you were able to go to part certain parties, You're able to do certain things, so people can buy the merch, they can evangelize, but they're in at a

lower level. Now, if you want to level up and buy the ape um, then you're gonna have to put some serious cash down, right, So the I think the mutant apes at this point are probably a hundred thousand dollars to get in at this point because the board apes have been killing it. And you know board Ape is probably three four and fifty dollars. But what you see is you're allowing more people in the ecosystem and

to participate when they can. And if you get in early to get those mutant drops, they were like a thousand bucks. It's just those people at the foresight to get in right and then and then it becomes so um important to people to get in because it's the cool kids club that you know, you get in there and and it's and you and you can make some money on it. But again I hate talking about floors and what tokens are worth because A think it misses

the point in music. You should be giving people such overwhelming value for their tokens that they don't want to sell them and that someday they want to they own them, right, So like, no one's gonna be mad at the board apes that you know, this guy got let in for a thousand bucks and now if he sells it and he needs to leave the club, he keeps the money. No one's mad about that that you truly own these things. Um So with music, I think people have missed the point.

I think selling your art on the blockchain is it does not compute. I think selling very little utility like a one time offer does not compute. I believe if you create these things at a touch point to your

whole ecosystem, that is the play. And I think everything from Ticketmaster to live Nation two, the spotifyes or if Jack does something with Title, I think these will be on the blockchain, and doesn't matter what blockchain there are, what they're on, you're gonna have a layer two capabilities to funnel money or your earnings into ethereum, and you'll be able to funnel that into token holders if you want to go to the financial route. If you don't, just offer them a ton of value and continue to

have this ecosystem that evangelizes itself. Okay, two hundred members of the club get it into each gig. How do you select those two hundred members. Well, we've done some analytics on it, right, Um, so obviously there's not a thousand holders in l A. L A is gonna be your biggest market. London is gonna be a big market. We have looked at it and we think at the most you might get a hundred if in the major major markets. I don't think it's gonna be even close

to a problem. But we have an rs VP system set up on the back end basically that's rolling out this week. You know, we didn't need to have it rolled out because we haven't done shows we're not doing until next year. But basically what they would do, and I've played with it, basically, all you do is you were deem your token and we did a fun little caveat we had a big n FT artist named pop Wonder make the ticket and the idea is you can keep the ticket, or if you use the ticket, it

burns and so you no longer have the ticket. So now you can and so now the pop Wonder piece goes up in value for the people that are keeping the ticket and the people that want to go to the ticket they're like, screw it, I got this free ticket. I'm gonna go, and it's actually a plus one and for anybody. And we've done the analytics, we're looking around.

There's not gonna be more than a hundred people at one particular show, and so we've kind of looked at all the math on this and said we can afford to probably give out two tickets to everybody, and it's still not gonna be full, and if it is, I'm gonna call Brian Harlocker and be like, hey, bro, give us a hundred more. You know, so I think as long as uh. But but at the end of the day, I think the big boys are coming in. Anyways, I

know they're coming in. I've talked to these people. I'm not gonna name names, but I know these people are coming in and they're gonna do it, probably correctly, and hopefully they do it in an ethical way that it's better for the fan, and that we can plug in our fan clubs and we can literally just work lockstep with them without anybody being anybody's boss. Just simply buy a little bit of data and a little bit of code.

Say we're a CIA artist, we are working, this is the tour we're doing, and we're plugging in our Death Beats club. Do you have a problem with that? And they're gonna say no, because they want our fans to

be empowered. They want these things to work, and they're gonna be on the blockchain to all these different companies and and I think it's going to be a very very beautiful um ecosystem for the fan and it's gonna be very cool and exciting and creative for the artist, because we have a lot more creativity than just putting out a Facebook post and just all these things being blocked off and then hey, you got a new record, go pay them a million dollars and talk to your fans.

Let's talk about kickstarter, never mind pledge music. There are examples where people took the money and didn't deliver. This is not identical, and one could argue that these people have already gotten the three fifty dollars worth. But this isn't our commitment that you're gonna do this on a regular basis for years. You know, maybe you have the commitment. Do you think other people will do it and funk

up and then tarnish the whole sphere. The whole sphere is already getting tarnished because is do you have a bunch of board A copycats and they do just that, right, they go and they The problem with n f T s at this point, which can be you know, which is a good thing for new artists if you think about this, um, all the money's up front and when you get you know, three million dollars in your pocket and you're just some kid that's an artist and just

like I don't know these people. I don't have anything. That's why I think when you look at a bench sevenfold and you look at Gary V and you look at Nike, and you look at Adidas, and you look at all these big people coming in, if you do it correctly, your your reputations on the line, right, and it has to be some sort of person that like g if slip knot did this. Some nuts not gonna rug their fans. That's the term you know that everyone uses.

They're not gonna be like, oh, thanks for the few million bucks, Um, we're not going to build up the metaverse whatever, and then hey, why don't you come, you know, hang out with us on the our next tour. It's gonna be a complete dumpster fire, terrible pr I believe that if we got into streaming and we get into all these other things, the fractionalization of assets, the ability for these poeps and the fans to have more control, I believe this is a lifelong paradigm shift and how

the whole industry is run. I believe it firmly. Obviously, you know, I don't know if it's your nephew or who you're talking to. Before. But I believe in this so firmly, and I've I've I've studied this stuff enough to where I don't see any other way of this going other than meta coming along and saying, hey, guys, it's easier over here. I want you just use our

metaverse and we're just gonna own everything, right like. But there's a lot of people in this space that are very they're very much adamant to make sure that doesn't happen. I don't know if that, I don't know the future. I know that EVENTE seven fold is going to build out our own ecosystem. We're gonna own it and our

fans are gonna own it. Um. But you're right, there could be there could be plenty of new artists that decided to crowd fund instead of buying the shirt, a chain reaction of that new band and they say, hey, we're gonna fractionalize the record that you guys basically fundraise for us. We're gonna own most of it, but you can own a piece of it. That's kind of like go on me where they could not be abandoned. That's

at risk you're willing to take. There's a bunch of bands that I saw Vision of Disorder, Poison the Well. You know, all these hardcore bands when I was growing up, I would have easily bought those tokens, and if they didn't ever make anything for me, I would be completely fine with that owning those tokens. Now, just being there early and being being first evenge something fold. All I

can do is speak for us. We will not do that to anybody because we have we have written out and started programming a game plan that works, and we know it works, and so we believe that we're just gonna and and this podcast could look like overpromising, we are going to under promise and over deliver on every one of these things. That's why I don't want to say too many things that we're doing, because this summer is going to be insane the stuff we open up

and do. Um. But but I do believe that this is the future for for established acts, people that have something on the line. If you own this for Iron Maiden, and you had that token and they were giving you some of these perks, and even if a company was running it right, maybe if you have sanctuary running it or someone that works on their team running it, and the band just checks in every once in a while, and they're doing certain things. It can be different for everybody.

It's not a one size fits all. We decided to go very personal with it because that was close to our hearts to do that. But I don't believe that that's the case with every band. I believe that this can look differently for everybody. What other bands are doing things like Revenge siven Full, whether doing it well or doing it poorly. Anybody that has done it so far has done it wrong. Everybody who's done it so far.

And these are a lot of friends that I'll be talking about and people in the industry that I know, and and I've been talking to them and trying to educate them on what this play is. But it's a big play, right like the things we're talking about are. It's an undertaking, and you have to have a team that understands it. And if you don't understand blockchain and you don't understand the possibilities, it's very easy to blow

it off and go. It's a collectible. Just people should be happy that they just own at bat right a n Ausi crypto bat and and and they are starting to release things out. But if you take the idea of a collectible like what grimes it or a piece of art, and you're selling it to somebody that understands

what that is, that's okay. But if you're selling to your fans who want to get closer to you, and there's all these possibilities within the in real life stuff, the I r L. Or you're talking about streaming, or you're talking about the metaverse and you're talking about digital concerts and digital assets, you're talking about video games, you're talking about owning all of your own skins that all of our kids love to spend thousands of dollars on.

Now you own them instead of renting them from Epic Games. Now you're owning stuff from us. If you look at that play, that's a big undertaking. But we are sure that that's the future. Now, there's a bunch of artists and bands that come to us and go like, yeah, that's fine, but we just want to sell like a ten thousand collection, and you know, we'll just we'll do a couple of things, but we're not gonna do much. Now. To me, that gives the whole thing a bad name.

If you have a certain band in your wallet and that you spent four or fifty bucks, five bucks and you're not seeing getting whole picture. I believe that that turns people off and they go, screw this, Why do I need that? You can do all those services without an n f T. Right. They can point to go fund me or Patreon, or they can point to a v I P package that kiss is gonna sell you for three thousand dollars or whatever it is. And these

are not slights on these bands. This has been the model. Um. But if you can bring all that in house and have a smaller team and dictated all by a little bit of code and a team where it's coming purely from your creative you know juices, to me, that's a much cooler, better productive thing. Okay, your accountant or a lawyer or the guy with the suit boys gets a bad reputation, they're gonna say, okay, you got this three million dollars, you spend a lot of it on virtual property.

Where are the future monetization points? They're everywhere and then wherever you want to do them. Right. They are digital t shirts, they are digital avatars. They are renting out your land which is worth millions. Now they are doing gated concerts they are, uh. And the funny thing that you know that veeps, you know has like basically every venue is already wired for virtual concerts or at least some sort of streaming. You could have every one of

your concerts streamed in there. And what kids are going to buy the T shirt that proves that they watched that concert. You don't even have to It's not even like nickel and dining. It's just purely putting things out there. The cool thing about the Sandbox, every asset that we make in the Sandbox, which I should send you. The world we're building, it's incredible. Um, it's a huge social hub, concert venue, casino, all these things. Every one of those assets can actually be sold as n f T s

and people can put them in their world. So say you have a bunch of death bets in there, we can release five thousand of them, or we could put a big Indian head that West Lange, who's an artist, created and we could sell three of them, and we can auction them. People can sell them to each other,

so you've got the whole digital world. Basically, anything you can do in this world, you can do there and monetize and then you've got the in real life events where in my mind, the bigger you make this thing, the more it will be to get in the club. And we make up five pc, um, you know, kind of back end on every token. Every time it's switches hands, so the board apes have no problem, right, every time

changes hands to get five PC. And that's been going on for eleven months, right, So they're just swimming in money, but nobody feels like they got taken advantage of because they kept right. So it's not just like it's like it's kind of pick and choose what you wants to buffet and you just keep providing people a way to spend money. But they never feel nickel and dined because again, this is their club and this is what they want. They want the floor to go higher, they want these

tokens to be valuable. They want to have access to the band and at the end of the day, sell it out if you don't want it. Okay, let's go back. You have ten thousand members. Are you basically saying the sky is the limit with members but every membership will be teered. No, I'm saying that if we decide at some point that the entry level get it's too high, then we will probably tear something out, and the and the owners of the death Bats will probably be happy

with that. There'll be more people brought into the ecosystem, very very much slower. Ten thousand people were in now, yes, let's call it seven thousand. Some have multiple bats, let's call it seven thousand. Let's assume it's wildly successful and you have ten thousand more people who want to get in the club than what happens. So that means the price of the ten thousand will go very high. Up right, it's just gonna be an economics of how much people

want to pay to get in. Now, if you said, hey, Matt, the floor is ten, it's thirty dollars to get into your fan club. That seems a little egregious, right, It's a little crazy. It's the cool kids rich club. But the board apes did for this problem is they air dropped everybody a companion, which was a mutant ape of

a syrum to drink. You could well, so they did a little more in that they allowed you to drink it or not, so you could sell the serum or you could drink it and get another n f T. Now that was the tiered n f T. They don't get the full benefits, but they get the cheaper access of being in the club. Right, So they might get the the board and the you know, the the I'm sorry, the bathroom where people are doing graffiti on it, and you might get to go to the parties, but you're

not getting as much ape coin. You're not getting as much land. These big events that they're doing. You don't get the full picture. But you're in the club. People with the mutants feel like they're in the club. So what you do is you say, okay, guys, we're gonna bring We're gonna give you all a free one, but then we're gonna sell twelve thousand more. So the mutants

have eighteen thousand, I think is the cap. So they gave every board ape a free one and they sold another eight thousand, So now you have a The board apes feel happy. They just got an asset that they would never had before that they could turn around and sell for thirty dollars day one. Um I had a friend that got a gold one and ended up selling it for a hundred fifty thousand day one, just because he got air dropped. It was luck of the draw um and it was actually a dog. It was our

first thing. And I know this gets a little crazy. They dropped a couple of things, but we could always say, Okay, we're gonna have a tiered membership where they're not gonna get the big stuff. If we do fractionalized royalties, they're gonna participate at a graded scale. Or if we do you know, the first two tickets to get into these shows, they don't get in unless there's space for them, or the meet and greets go to DEATHBT holders first and

you guys get the second tier. There's so many things you can do, and it just comes down to what is happening in that moment and the analytics of what the floor is and if people do want to get in, if there's that demand, then I think you can you can make the club big. Let's let's let's say we got seven thousand people yep, they all paid three hundred

and fifty dollars yep. Let's say they start trading them and we use that number of thirty thousand ye which is expensive, yes, not if you bought it at thirteen dollars on bitcoin, but generally speaking expensive. So therefore aren't we essentially saying there are only gonna be seven thousand people will all opportunities No, because and and this is so, this is the idea with the board Apes. What I what I love about the roadmap is it was very

deeply thought out. They went to these people and said you can take some money off, basically saying you could take money off the table. Right now, we're gonna drop you this new thing, and you're gonna have kind of second class citizens, but they're going to be involved, right, But you're right for the whole all the perks. You have to have an ape. If you want everything, you have to have an ape. If you have a mutin ape, you get most of the stuff. And people are very

happy at that. But they were late to the party. They didn't believe in it. They scoffed at it. They got in, or they didn't have the money or whatever, they didn't know about it. But now they feel like they're in the board Ap club. You can still buy the Death Bats, merge will still be able to go to the shows and do possibly when meet in Greece,

to be in the giveaways. But when things happen financially, like a drop of a token, which we do want to do a token eventually which brings all these worlds together, or if it happens to be fractionalizing the podcast, like, we don't think that the second class editions should make the same as the the evangelizer deatbat holder that got in day one and has been holding this thing and building the community. So we would tear it out and

we would get with our accountants and look at it. Okay, So if you have the Board Apes club, that's all there is. Whether we consider a fat or bedrock whatever, you are joining this club at some price, but you have a club. But the essence is the music, the band, which is one step away. Yes, you know, it's one thing. If you say, hey, it's a club and it's just a club and we have seven thousand people whatever, blah

blah blah. But historically in the music business say we want to let as many people into the club as possible to grow our fan base, which is a different model from the Board Apes. It is a different model. And so what I would look at it as, I would look at at as utility that we never provided before and in a way that we can control and truly give some sort of perks too. Before we have a seven thousand people on our mailing list, like those emails, we don't know how many of those are real. We

don't know how many of those are multiple accounts. We don't know how much they care about EVENTE sevenfold or if they evangelize the band, if they live, breathe, sleep, and die for the band. But we have a pretty good idea about the Death Bats Club, and to me, it's a it's a fan club on steroids in a way that is creating utility that never existed before. So I don't think people can be bummed on that. I think they can look at it is going. That's how

they choose to build this thing. Now we know we have two railroads here, two lines, and we have to have one ft in. Don't give these people too much control because then they're gonna be making decisions that the vast majority of Events seven Fold fans are gonna have to deal with, right set list like certain like Event seven Fold merch. That's why we have clearly separated this

into the Death Bats Club. They have their own merch, they have their own website, they have their own sneak peaks at things now people could say, like, there's there's always gonna be the ability to reward the hardest working fans, and this is our way of figuring out who they are, the people who came along with us, So to us, we want to reward those people. And it goes all the way back to the beginning of this conversation. It's one thousand fans, it's four thousand fans, it's five thousand fans,

and it's super. It's super. Um what would it be You're you're super serving them in a way that makes them want to stand on a rooftop and just yell at the world how cool this thing is that they're involved in, and to me, that makes the band bigger. This is an experiment for sure. Um bands could do this with their whole audience. I just don't know where that goes. It's very it's a lot to keep in. Okay, let's just use the seven thousand and use social media paradigm.

For all we know, six thousand could be lurkers, six thousand lurkers that paid money to get in and are in the discord participating all day. Well, let's start there. How many of the seven thousand are participating in the discord. So we have thirty five thousand people in the discord, and the discord is is NonStop. And when we have those giveaways, that's NonStop. When we when we put something out about this club, it's just NonStop. Like people are excited.

Now you could say, well, Matt, it's new. Of course they're excited, right, But these are events seven full fans. These are This goes back to us checking their wallet and seeing that, you know, going from three people to this nine thousand to the people that actually and actually ended up buying. This goes into looking on Twitter and seeing thousands of bats in their Twitter profiles. To me, lurkers don't do that. These are people waving their flag.

These are people wearing their Iron Maiden shirt, and they're showing the world that they're a part of this thing and that they are evangelizing it. There's no way there's six thousand lurkers. Just to go back to the beginning, forget the three hundred tests to get the ten thousand, didn't you send like a hundred thousand emails? No, we opened up a discord and we only communicated with them in there. And the reason we did uh is because we didn't want the look you lose or the flippers

or this or that. And we also made it very clear. We said, if you were, if you were an n f T trader and you are buying into this project to flip it like to to try to make some sort of speculative play on it, we said, this is not the play for you, because we are doing this the long way, and if you're not a fan, you're not gonna want to end some froll merch. You're not gonna want to meet us, you're not gonna want to get music early. You're not gonna want to do all

the things that we're going to provide. And so our wording, in our in our in the way we frame this to everybody was so don't buy this thing. Don't buy it unless you want to come with us on this journey. That we really didn't get any of that n f T flip scandalous sort of action. It was a bunch of events, seven full fans. Okay, just to go back a little deeper, So everybody who said that they wanted in you went into their wallet and checked every each one of them out. On the very first n f T,

which is not the death Beats Club. We did just to see if they had any n f T experience, because we didn't want to give them to people that we're gonna lose them or didn't care. On the next one, when it didn't sell out like in five seconds, we were suspicious because we had over nine thousand people on the white list, right, you'd think that they would all be buying instantly, and I think we sold something like

four thousand with the white list. And so we wrote a piece of code and looked in their wallets and we noticed that didn't have any ether, which in which in our minds was it's a bunch of fans that simply don't know their way around cryptocurrency. Okay, but you're talking about somebody in their Twitter feed has a thousand bats. You might know that now, But before you left these people in, did you look and verify each one? Was hard? No, there's no way to do that. That's just you just

see an address. We can only tell by their actions. We could. We we know that if somebody's got a wallet with no n f T s in it, it's probably not a speculator n f T guy, right, It's just it's it's obviously a new fan that's signing up and they're trying to follow along, and they and they,

they're trying to get in. We have I would think that we have probably more wallets with one n f T in them than any other project that's ever been done, right, even because when they sell I I look at him a lot of times and I look and it's guy opened his account yesterday and he's got one n f T. He's in here for the Death Bats Club. They're not here to be speculators now, to your point, a lot of times in the discord that stuff steeps in, and a lot of our fans have now become very much

involved in other projects. Like they're buying Alien Friends and they're buying cool cats, and they're buying these other things, and they're into the world and they're and they're helping educate other people about these projects and they're enjoying it. Now how that turns out is yet to be seen,

but that's the world we're living. It. It's a highly you know, speculative financial play on some of them, but that's they're adults, right, And we we warn people all the time and they're you know, if you're gonna stick with Death Bats, we will not do you wrong. As soon as you go outside of this ecosystem, it's on you, right, And so people are adults. So but and I believe that you know the next band that comes in, whether it's Slip Not, from Metallica, from Mega Death. We've taken

a lot of arrows in the back. All of our owners are so happy with what we've done that I think these bands are gonna be just teed up. And I think once those bands come in, we're gonna be able to collaborate with them in ways that we never could before. And I think that's gonna get really interesting too. So how many people have sold their membership and what's the current value? So the current value right now because ether is down, I think you can still get in

for two bucks. Not many have sold if you look at the I mean a lot of sold to new people. But a lot of those are people that bought multiples, right, some people about two or three and they wanted to sell them. Um, a lot of our community and gifting them to people that can't afford them. Seen a lot of people come in, they can't afford them and they're gifted UM. But what I will say is. I think it's something like of a healthy n f T collection

is on sell at anytime, right. I think our collection is at six on sell, five to six percent, So you've got five to six percent of the supply that is willing to be sold. Everybody else they're holding. And so you know, that's not to say that someone couldn't throw somebody a big offer or this or That's all obviously doable in this space. Um, and I'm sure everyone has a price. But right now, fans are waiting to

see what we do. They're exciting for for the tour, they're excited for sneak peaks on the record, they're excited about the metaverse opening up, which we've been teasing and building, and they're just excited about the whole space right there following what we're doing. And they're just they feel like they're on the cutting edge of you know, they're on the surfboard, right in the wave and they and they just love it, and it's been really kind of exhilarating

for us to have that relationship with them. Okay, if you pull the lens all the way back, I've been listening to you talk about this at length. Someone who is not involved with Avenge Sevenfold and just looks at the discussion would say, well, there's a lot more excitement in the blockchain n f T Club than there is in the actual music. But I don't want to make it specifically about Avenge Sevenfold, Okay, but what might say that the excitement is more in the you know, meta

space as opposed to the music itself. Yeah, I would say, um, the same way that records have taken a back seat to touring. You know, we used to go on tour to sell our records, and now people make records to go on tour, and in a different way, right they the record is like another um tentacle, but it's not as important as it used to be. You put out MEW music because it gives you a reason to go on tour tours where you make the money. We all

know that. I think with this paradigm shift, you're looking at artists becoming like it's some umbrella and everything that falls underneath a certain artists umbrella is exciting, whether it's the metaverse, or it's in real life concerts or music or community community building. Right that those are my people imagine being connected to people that are like minded with the same type of music, but the conversations and the ideation just go off the charts and other things. They

start their own bands. It's like these little pools of people that already have something in common and now it's been solidified by me seeing your Twitter profile and you're in the Death Beats Club too. These are the kind of things we're trying to to build for these fans. I think I think you're completely right. I think the music as an artist is something that that's very personal to us. It's very much closed off. We're willing to

share it when it's ready. We go on tour because we love seeing certain cities and going on tour and and playing the records. But this excites us just as much because I feel there's so much creativity to be had.

And I I think you're right. The idea of Metallica and Avenged and you know, Dead Mouse and Steve Ioki and everyone coming in and these worlds that are all interconnected, that we can all jump from world to world like a lego block and interact with each other and interact with each other's fans, and these groups of people that uh, you know, maybe idolized, but also identify with certain types

of music. These are these are all new rabbit holes that are very exciting to go down, and you don't ever want to be like, oh, the music secondary, it's not, but the music drives all this. We come to other for the love of music. But it could be the Board Ape Club who doesn't have music, or Metallica or Kylie Minogue or you know, any sort of company. It could be Tillies, it could be Ben Hundreds who's trying to dress the metavers. It could be Gucci who's selling sunglasses.

It's bringing communities together. And one thing that I always tell everybody is that we want to be We want to throw our hat in the ring as a metal band and not being behind this ape ball. We want to be someone that carves and shapes out the future the way that artists want to see it shaped. And so that's kind of our play. And then you're right. The overall pictures way more exciting than an event seven fill token. In fact, we told people, if you're not

a fan, don't buy our token. You will not get anything out of it, right, Like, we are only gonna give We're gonna super serve our fans. And if you're not a fan. You're gonna be bummed that you spent your three or thirty dollars. Um, go buy the Metallica token or go by you know, the the used token or whatever band is gonna come next. And uh And to me, that's what I've been telling everybody. I think that's all about framing, right. We don't want to overpromised things.

I'm gonna go hundred and eighty degrees away from this. You are married to a woman who has an identical twin. Sister is married to another band member. My long term girlfriend is an identical twin. So what's it like being married to an identical twin? It is incredible because you see that bond is just deeper than anything I could ever have with another human. And I love it when they fight. I love it when they defend their husbands

and they fight for us. And but at the end of the day, they are They can't live away from each other, Like so me and Brian, our guitar player, lived down the street from each other because the twins have to be near each other. They they have a company together, they sell they they're high in sunglass company. Um, she's my best you know, I met these girls in sixth grade and so I grew up with both of them and they're my best friends the same way Brian's

my best friend because I met him in that age. Two. Um, it's incredible, and we have lifelong babysitters, and we have lifelong you know, like whatever they need, we got their back, and we go on vacations with them, we get the kids, and we're uncles and aunts and it's incredible. It's really special. Okay, Matt, we'll leave it at that. I want to thank you for taking this time, and I think you've done an incredible job of explaining it, and also what you're doing

is certainly different from everybody else and cutting it. So thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for having me man. I'm a big fan, so I look forward to uh all the letters and all of the newsletters that you send out. Okay, until next time. This is Bob left six