The Wolf Of All Streets - Music, Art, and NFTs with DJ Justin Blau aka 3LAU

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

Justin Blau, aka 3LAU, is a world-renowned DJ, best known for his chart topping hits and unique DJ style. Starting small at college fraternity parties, 3LAU quickly rose to fame, performing at sold out shows around the world. What few know is that Justin is a talented trader and early crypto adopter. Justin and his team are beginning to explore the ways that artists can distribute their work in a decentralized and scarce manner using NFTs. 3LAU is transforming traditional art, looking to give super fans a one-of-a-kind experience, while also raising money for charities along the way. Scott Melker and Justin Blau further discuss their similar backgrounds in music, performing and crypto, mixing finance and blockchain into the world of art, learning about Bitcoin from the Winkelvoss twins, NFTs, Kanye West tweets, what blue checkmarks, Yeezys, and Jordans all have in common, who is Blockparty, predatory record labels, mining for gold on asteroids, a shaky dollar, having strong opinions loosely held, the impact of COVID on performers, building schools in Guatemala and more. --- CHOICE IRA by KINGDOM TRUST Don’t be part of the 7.1M Bitcoiners who have bitcoin and a retirement account but don’t have bitcoin in their retirement account. With Choice IRA by Kingdom Trust you can hold bitcoin in your retirement account. The first 1,000 users to open a Choice IRA will receive $62.50 in free BTC - visit RetireWithChoice.com/WOLF to join the waitlist and secure free BTC. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- ELECTRONEUM Electroneum, has gained widespread adoption providing a mobile-first payment solution to the world's unbanked, attracting more than 4M users worldwide in less than three years. They have since launched a new freelance marketplace, AnyTask.com, which is providing thousands of freelancers the opportunity to sell their services to buyers globally, without the need of a bank account. Learn more at Electroneum.com. --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

I'd like to thank my sponsors, Voyager and Electroneum, for making this episode possible. Stay tuned for more info on them later. What is up, everybody? This is Scott Melker, the host of the Wolf of Wall Street podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities in the world of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics. This show is powered by Blockworks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. You can check them out at blockworksgroup.io. If you like the podcast, you follow me on Twitter. You need to check out my website and join my newsletter where I share my trades, charts, analysis,

market thoughts, lessons on improving your trading and investing. You can check that out at thewolfofallstreets.io. Now, today's guest is a fellow DJ who, like me, had the opportunity to enter the world of finance, but turned down comfort and stability for a shot at a career in the world of music. Started DJing college parties and worked his way up to become one of the best known DJs and producers in the world. What many people may not know is that Justin's also passionate about both trading and crypto, two things I'm excited to talk to him about more on this episode. So Justin Blau, man, it's awesome to have you on. Thank you so much for being here. And thanks for letting me join. I'm really stoked to be here. Yeah, man. So tell me a little bit about your path. It is so similar to mine. You reached a

higher level at the end of the path. But, you know, I was an Ivy League graduate who was DJing frat parties and, you know, and kind of just decided that that's what I wanted to pursue with no real hope of a future. And, you know, I ended up making a living out of it. No, that's awesome. Yeah, very similar paths. Ironically, I was starting to, I had made folk music when I was younger, like guitar, Bon Iver style, kind of chill, mellow stuff. And when I got to college, I studied finance in college, thus the combination

of my passion in music and of course, in the distributed ledger tech space. But when I got to college, I met one of my best friends who is still my best friend today, Johan, who's Swedish. And he convinced me to come to Sweden the summer after my freshman year, which just made me fall in love with dance music. I was sold and wanted to be a DJ. And at the time, as you know very well, since you have a history in music, there weren't that many American DJs that were making house music or pop music. There were a lot of DJs, but not many that were making their own stuff. Mostly people that were playing clubs, producers. And so as a college kid,

I started making mixes, posting them to the internet, to all the blogs back when, uh, back when, you know, Spotify didn't control distribution, uh, monolith. But, um, that was when I, I, you know, got very lucky a couple of things went viral on YouTube. I started playing the college circuit, improved my skills as a producer, came out with some original songs. And then in 2014, my song, How You Love Me, went number one dance in America. And that paved the path to where I am today, which is pretty crazy. But along the way, along the musical journey, I've always had kind of this fascination with the insane level of middleman transactions that happen within the music business,

the lack of fairness between, you know, all the different participants in the music economy. And, you know, ironically enough, Kanye West is tweeting about that and everyone's been talking about it, just how terrible record labels are and how the structure of most artists' deals are pretty terrible for the artists. And that was my jumpstart into being fascinated with the decentralized economy in general. what types of assets could give artists more freedom, what types of distribution channels might make royalty payments faster, smart contracts that can distribute, you know, royalties fairly within seconds instead of within six months, you know, there's all this, all these different technological applications of distributed ledger tech to music. And that's when I decided, well, not to get, I don't want to go

too deep into the story, but I actually got into cryptocurrency in the first place through the Winklevoss twins. I met them on spring break in Mexico. This was right around the time after they discovered Bitcoin and Ibiza. And they're still very close friends of mine. And we chat about all this stuff on occasion. But they were building Gemini while I was staying with them in LA, I think, in 2014. And that's when I bought my first Bitcoin. At the time, it was like 5BTC that I still own to this day on its own address. And that was the jumpstart into my journey in distributed ledger tech world. Follow that, 3 years later, ICO craze 2017. I saw a lot of music projects pop up that I knew couldn't actually execute what their white papers were saying. And I decided to start my own project

that was called OMF, our music Festival. And the concept behind that was to basically allow fans to stake capital and choose artists of their own to play their own, like an independent music festival without a talent buyer. And then of course, should the festival succeed, fans could share in profits. Little did I know after hiring great securities attorneys in three different jurisdictions, including Switzerland, Cayman, and the United States, I learned very quickly that that vision wasn't really possible and that we would run into a lot of regulatory issues. So I couldn't achieve the vision that we set out to achieve, but we did still throw a festival at the end of 2018 with Zedd, myself, and Big Sean. We developed a mobile wallet with Stellar. I worked with the Interstellar team,

and we built a mobile wallet for Stellar Lumens. Simple stablecoin rewards at the festival. You could scan QR codes to earn rewards. You could spend them on merchandise. Very basic principle, entry-level project. But it worked. It was a great success. We had 8,000 people there. We did more Stellar transactions, I think, in a short period of time than ever. And people were really excited about it. And that was at the end of 2018. And at that point, I decided that I wanted to shut down the project, even though it was a great success because I felt that the regulatory environment wasn't ready for the vision that I had originally set out to create.

And I found that I had to keep pivoting the vision into something that I didn't even want it to be to kind of fit within the framework of U.S. securities law. So I decided the best thing to do instead of burning capital for many years until it was ready was to just start fresh and think about other things that I wanted to be involved in within the blockchain space. And so I've always been an active investor in the space. I was trading altcoin arbit investor in the space. I was trading

altcoin arbitrage in 17 when different exchanges had wild price discrepancies. Of course, that didn't last very long, but it was fun while it did. And because I have that background in finance, I've always been not an active trader. I'm not trading on a daily basis, but a more monthly, weekly trader when it comes to this stuff. I don't really hold a lot of alts. I'm pretty BTC maximalist personally, but I also kind of respect everyone's opinion. I don't think there's a correct answer. I don't think anyone can really know where this space is going because it's evolved in so many ways over such short periods of time. So yeah, so a lot of people are usually surprised that I'm a DJ and I also might know a couple things about this stuff.

But I've been really excited about all the new developments in the DeFi space. I'm pretty active in the farming world, but not of seeing how people value my work beyond just the music itself. We've been creating these audiovisual experiences and packaging them up in these video files that are one of ones or three of threes. And we did our first launch with Blockparty two weeks ago now, and we sold out in like three hours. I was like, wow, there's demand for this. There's something here. And the world of NFTs is really, you know,

it's something that a lot of people have talked about over the past three years. I'm sure you've heard tons from lots of different directions that this is the future. This is the future. Now I think we're starting to see the demand and starting to see the onboarding of new users and new collectors. And I think the applications of NFTs are going to grow way beyond art in the next couple of years. So it's just exciting to be a part of the beginning of a new movement. And I'm really glad that I got involved.

I think most people hadn't heard of NFTs probably until a week or two ago in the community at large. I think you're right. The people who are in the know have been into it. I mean, I've been talking to Blockparty for probably a year, even when they were a ticketing platform, about the possibilities with NFTs. For those who are listening and don't know, it's a non-fungible token, which basically just means that it has guaranteed scarcity. It's on the blockchain, but it's like you said, it can be a one-on-one, three-of-three, five-of-five. And what's important about it, obviously, is that you can't forge it. The provenance is clear. You can prove exactly what it is, that it's not fake and that it's real. And it's a collector's

item. And I think we're in a world where scarcity is probably the most important thing for value moving forward. So can you talk about your first drop, what you did, and the creative vision of how you can use NFTs with music? Because I know there are limiting factors. You can't just put out a song as an NFT, right? There's length and compression and things to deal with there. Right. So I'm lucky that I've remained an independent artist for most of my career. So I do own most of my own masters and that, you know, that's a lot of variables that are, you know, required when thinking about creating these pieces, these, these particular art pieces. So all the audio in my pieces is, is original music that either has not been released or may never even be released. They're just ideas that I've had that are already kind of finished ideas,

but they might not be full length songs. So we decided to start figuring out a way for fans to hear those even before they're out in the world. Like there's no reason why a fan shouldn't be able to hear the stuff that's a work in process or maybe something that might never be a completed product. And I think that, you know, teaming up with my art director, slime Sunday, who's the visual artist behind our project, um, has been incredible because we've worked together for five years and I basically reached out to him and I said, Hey, do you want to, do you want to try

making these small, very detailed digital audio clips as art? And he was like, I don't really know anything about this stuff, but let me give it a shot. We started making these things. We started, um, displaying them and testing them on these screens behind me, my, my frames. And what we realized is, you know, while anyone can go look at one of these videos online, there is only one owner of an addition. Um, the same way anyone can go look at the Mona Lisa, but there's only one real Mona Lisa. There's really no difference.

The blockchain is just the manifestation of ownership and helps facilitate that validity of ownership within this digital art world that's emerging. And what's super fascinating to me is that these principles aren't new. They're actually pretty pervasive in culture and social media culture. It's just that people don't think of them as NFTs because they're not necessarily decentralized, digitally scarce assets. To give you an example, the Instagram verification checkmark is one of the earliest forms of

digital scarcity that has incredible value. Now, it's centralized scarcity in the sense that Instagram gets to decide, you know, who gets one and who doesn't. But back when I, you know, when, when the verification became a thing, I had a buddy that worked at Instagram that gave me the ability to verify other people's accounts. Now, then of course, you know, that type of user account doesn't exist. They actually had to rescind it because people were accepting payments for a patient. Of course, I never did that because I would ruin my reputation and my best friend would hate me forever. But I did know of it happening.

And I did receive offers of upwards of $14,000 to $18,000 to get an account verified because I had the ability to just press the button. Why? It's a blue checkmark. Because there's a lot of other things that are associated with owning that piece of digital scarcity on your Instagram account. Maybe it means that it's more likely brands work with you. Maybe it means that people perceive you in a certain way. There's some digitally scarce emotional value to having a blue checkmark on your Instagram or on Twitter or whatever it might be. And so I like to give that as an example. When people are like, why do I want something that everyone can see?

Who cares? It's yours. Yeah, it's a stupid argument because every single girl I went to college with in the late 90s had a copy of, you know, Starry Night hanging on their wall in their dorm room. But that doesn't take away from the one that's hanging in the MoMA, right? Right, exactly. And they look the same. And there is something to be said. And this is the kind of final thought about digital

digitally scarce art and digitally scarce assets in general um there's something to be said about the emotion you get out of being the owner of something and whether it's digital or not you could buy a real pair of easies or you could buy a fake pair of easies there's something that feels different about owning the real ones. Even though they're both fucking sneakers, they both work the same way. They're both made in the same factory. But because you have the real one, it feels different. I don't want fake Yeezys. I don't want them. I'd rather I want the real ones. Why? I can't really explain that with words.

But the scarcity of it is what makes me want it. So there's no reason why that can't exist in the digital space. And of course, it's already existing with the entire principle of Bitcoin, right? The of the entire blockchain world is based on this principle of digital scarcity. There's no reason why it can't be manifested in the form of art or in the form of music. I think music will take a bit longer and we can chat about that later. Music by itself, I mean, but there's, because there are certain implications that, you know, with music that don't quite follow the same rules as art. But I do think, you know, the space is going to grow pretty substantially.

And as these collectors, you know, continue to collect these digital assets, who knows what their value might be in the future? Wu-Tang did it. Right? I mean, Wu-Tang sold an album to one person, the wrong person, unfortunately. But that was leading the bottle. It wasn't necessarily an NFT by any stretch. But it's been proven that scarcity in music can be monetized in that way. Obviously, as you said, music is somewhat different because an artist generally wants as many people to hear their music as possible and not a single person to be the only one that can hear it. But I think it's an interesting time to even discuss this because most people probably don't know. But if you're a music producer or DJ, you have probably

1000 unfinished, somewhat finished, completely finished, and never could get it licensed. I mean, songs. I have hard drives and hard drives full of stuff I made before I even had a computer. Tracks from MPs. Crazy. And the lack of pressure to finish those and to have a medium to do that if you have a great visual artist to put it together, I think that the possibilities are just somewhat mind-blowing and also i think it removes some of the yeah remove some of the pressure also to make like a certain kind of song like when you're a producer and you're known for something you can only put out a song that's going to make people dance or a song that's going to do this and now you can like take that eight bar loop and

create art out of it nailed it Couldn't have said it better myself. That's literally what we've been doing and what's been, it's actually been re-inspiring, you know, at a time when I may be starting in March when quarantine started here. I definitely lost a little bit of inspiration just given the nature of the world. And now I have a means of, like you said, you know, showing my audience ideas that might not be finished or might be partially finished or might never come out or may eventually come out and giving them the

ability to appreciate that music in the form of audio visual art. And it's exciting. It's reinvigorating. It gets me, you know, awake in the morning. And when we're done talking here, I'm going to call my art director and we're going to work on one of our pieces that's dropping on Nifty Gateway on October 5. And we spent 4 hours in the studio. He was in his visual studio. I'm in my music studio, going through how we're going to edit the intros and outros of these pieces, because we originally wanted them to loop perfectly, but it's kind of hard to do that. So now we're actually creating audio visual intro and outro. So it feels smooth when it repeats without actually looping perfectly. So these are all

like problems that we're going to encounter as the space grows. But what's so exciting about it is that the demand is there, whether we like it or not, whether someone else wants to believe that this is all bullshit, or whether they believe in the concept of digitally scarce art, we did $23,000 of sales in three hours on Block Party two weeks ago. I didn't expect that, but it's there. And talk about the secondary market, right? So that people are only buying... Most people... There's people, obviously, who are the collectors, I think, and then who obviously are super fans and they're the ones who want to own it. But most of the NFTs being bought are being flipped by traders. It seems to me that they're buying it. It's an speculative aspect of it.

And I think when you start adding physical features to these NFTs, like we've spoken about, if we do a big drop, that particular NFT is your all-access pass to every Blau show in existence for life, which we can actually execute on our end. What is that worth to someone? What is backstage access in any Blau show ever worth to someone? What might that trade on the secondary market for? These are intangible things that we can issue as physical features to these NFTs, not just artistic features, but physical features. So the landscape is like so early here. It's so early, but even more exciting because the market will determine what people want. And I'm here to

hopefully provide it. Yeah. I mean, I'm experimenting with my first drop with Block Party in a couple of weeks too, which is exciting because I've been basically retired for five years after doing this for 20 years. You know what I mean? But it got me so excited when I learned about the space and what was possible. And actually, when they showed me yours, what we could do. And the challenge I came up against was the ability to do a whole song. And so what we're doing with mine is we're splitting basically almost 4-minute song into 8 30-second pieces with the artwork animated a different way. And then if you buy the entire thing, or if someone collects all 8 of them, then they'll

get a comped video and the full wave from us. I love that format. We've talked about that format as well. I think that's such a cool format. Because it makes it a collection. And I just think the possibilities are endless, man. I'm so excited to see a way to finally marry my two passions and to get back into it. And like I said, I don't have to sit here and make a whole lot of new music. I can just sort of retool something I've done and then work more hard on the vision of what the visual should be with an artist. And that's kind of what you're talking about. So how do you see it progressing with music? You kind of touched on that. But what do you think the future is for NFTs with music with these challenges? So there's kind of a two-part answer to that question.

I think there's the idea that, you know, how do we create NFTs with existing masters that are signed to bigger record labels? Well, we're probably a little bit far away from that, right? So like if I wanted, if I was an artist, you know, the audio that I'm using for my NFTs right now is mostly new stuff that isn't out yet that I own 100% of the rights to. Right. Let's say I wanted to tokenize and create visual art for a song that's already out there. The licensing of that is extremely complex. There's no precedent for it. So I think we're pretty far away from that.

That being said, that's not to stop someone from releasing a future song as an NFT. First, then signing the record deal, then the song comes out on Spotify. But at that point, they could carve out in the legal agreement some clause to make the NFT possible and not violate any master recording right ownership issues that might pop up. So these are all uncharted waters. I think that it's going to be fun to experiment. Right now, I'm playing it super safe by only using content that I know I own 100% of. But in the future, let's say I issued an NFT with a full song and a full visual clip. And that song isn't out on Spotify, but it eventually comes out on Spotify. Maybe I release it independently. Maybe the owner of that NFT gets to share in the profits of the master recording right side of the song. That would be insane.

Yeah. These are all the potentialss. Now that's a security. Talk about an investment. Yeah. That's a security, but it's not if it's retroactive. So yeah, you know, there's all these different, there are all these different security implications to, you know, putting a song into a piece of art that complicated, whereas just the visual itself is not that complicated, depending on the license.

There are licensing implications to visuals, but not many when you're doing your own animations. So yeah. So I think the potential is really just beginning and there's infinite potential. I mean, people have been painting celebrities and iconic images and unique ways, pop art for, you know,

as long as art has existed. And it's never really been a huge copyright issue on the visual side. But music is such a different beast. I mean, I was stifled at every turn of my career by copyright issues and sampling because I think like you, around the same time, 2013, 14, I grew sort of doing mashups and remixes, you know, and, uh, it was kind of not a big deal at that point until SoundCloud sort of got attacked and all the takedowns. And that's sort of actually like, that's what ended my career effectively when I finally decided to pack it in. Cause I was like, my SoundCloud account's gone, but all my millions of listens are gone and time to time to move on. Well,

and it's kind of crazy because there was so much like consumer demand for that stuff. And we weren't asked, we weren't monetizing it. Like, why did people care? It's free promotion. I mean, it's so backwards,

completely backwards. And now some of that's changing because labels are starting to see that there could be monetizable value and releasing a mashup on Spotify. These are things that are happening, but it's still easier. Once you say the word crypto to a record label person, oh my God, it's not even a conversation they can dip their toe in, let alone dive into, which is what this whole space requires. So it's early, but I'm excited that people like yourself are taking this big leap of faith the way I did. And it worked. I had no idea what to expect. I mean, we spent a lot of time on our first drop art. I mean, some of the Block Party

team will tell you, I mean, we went through at least like 10 to 20 versions of every piece. It was a lot of work. It's not like we're just like throwing an image together, putting it up on the internet and selling it for 15 grand. Like that's not what's happening. People are. process of me and Mike, my visual director. We've already worked together for five years. And we really thought about what we wanted to convey with this art. And our first three pieces were the DeFi rabbit hole piece. It's called DeFi, but it's meant to be this vortex rabbit hole that is audio reactive to the original song that I made underneath it. So the DeFi rabbit hole shakes every time the kick hits and every time the snare hits. And we wanted to create, you know, meaning in that piece. We also had a piece called the grid, which is my, um,

signature triangle logo. Um, with this kind of, it's meant to look like a blockchain field, whatever that means. We just thought about how we could create a grid field that is reminiscent of a digital representation, a visual representation of what the blockchain might look like. And then we, of course, created this randomizer for public and private key that, of course, don't line up right because it would be impossible to do that. We wouldn't want to do that for a lot of reasons, but we basically created this random public-private key generator

that was constantly running at the bottom of the piece as the triangle spinning. So the grid was the piece that actually sold for the most and took us the most time. The song was also completely original. And that one was really, really fun to work on. Then the last piece we did was called Spacewalk. Just a block literally floating in space with some really cool light leak features. And, oh yeah, and then on one of my future pieces,

I actually reached out to one of my future pieces, we actually, I actually reached out to one of my friends who's, who's an incredible cybersecurity engineer, um, who wrote a Python script for me to pull in live block hash data. Um, and so while it won't be live block hash data on our piece, um, it's recorded, um, from a couple of weeks ago, there's literally hashes coming down the screen as this shape is moving. Um, it's recorded from a couple of weeks ago. There's literally hashes coming down the screen as this shape is moving. It's like super, super, super cool. So we've like put a lot of thought into this. Like I'm reaching out to friends to write scripts for this art, you know?

And I think that's why, you know, people are probably excited about it and why it is selling. Yeah, man. It's just such a, such a cool and incredible medium. And I really hope that we are at the beginning. But you're actually working with Block Party now to bring in other artists, right? I mean, this is something that you're actively pursuing, not only for yourself, but for the music community as a whole. Right now, a lot of musicians are having a very difficult time monetizing because there's no touring. And I wanted to be that first example. I took the reputational risk. Let's make this art.

If it didn't do well, oh well. If it did well, now we have a beta that I can show all my friends and say, hey guys, you can do this too. This is a way for you to monetize at a time that's tough for any musician. And a lot of my friends have already reached out after they saw the first drop. And as these drops get bigger and bigger, I mean, some of these well-known artist drops, they're doing over $100,000 in volume. And as we start to reach those numbers, which I think, based on the success of the first one, I think we might have underpriced everything. Yeah, I think so. I think that we could totally get to those numbers. And at that point,

artists may find a completely new way to monetize. And that's really powerful in this environment. So yes, to answer your question, I am going to help onboard a lot of artists to the NFT space, to Block Party, to convince them that this is a real... It doesn't feel real at first. And it takes everyone a minute to wrap their head around it. But once you do, it starts to feel totally natural and normal. I mean, talking about underpricing, I mean, I'm seeing things that people are buying for $80 being sold successfully within weeks for,

you know, over a thousand bucks. I mean, we're talking about people doing 10, 20 X's on pieces of digital art that they buy. And in so many ways and you know people might dislike me saying this but I think that the resale of art isn't is in so many ways less speculative than reselling an altcoin that doesn't do anything yet and here's why you there's emotional value in owning that piece of art there is no emotion I don't give a shit what anyone says there is no emotional value in owning that piece of art. There is no emotion. I don't give a shit what anyone says. There is no emotional value in owning an alt coin outside of your belief in the future of a protocol.

There's plenty of emotion. You're not getting any kind of, uh, I should say artistic experience from owning that alt coin. Um, it's just, you know, you verifying your own belief in the future of a protocol or

of a technology, which there is emotion in and of itself, but I don't think it even comes close to the level of depth that any art form can provide in that emotional arena. So if somebody buys something in the aftermarket for six grand that was sold for 80, either it means they're speculating or it means that they genuinely love it. I don't know of many people that trade like yourself that are like, Oh, I love Solana protocol. It just makes me feel so amazing. Like who's saying that? Like maybe, maybe someone's saying that, right? You know who's saying that?

The people who are down 50% on a position that was originally a trade and became an investment and then became a passionate community member. Nobody say that. Yes. And I don't want to tear on any bag holders of any altcoin. I think everyone has the right to believe anything they want to believe and everyone should think about how all this stuff is going to play into the future. But I do think that ARK in and of itself is maybe a layer of depth of emotion above speculating on alts and speculating on random DeFi pools, hoping the underlying asset doesn't go zero while you collect your thousand percent yield. I mean, you know, this is something that's really more interesting. And one of the things that we've been doing and what we're doing with our next drop

is literally, you know, these two screens behind me, we took a cinemagraph of me sitting, watching the art on the screens. I wish I could do it for you now. But dude, it was like the art can loop on there all day long. And when I walk past it, I feel something and people can do that with digital art. And it's theirs. They own it. It's just a really special new wave. And it'll be really interesting to see how it evolves. I'm excited that you're getting involved. Are you sick of paying ridiculous fees to trade crypto? It's time you try Voyager. It's hands down my favorite place to buy and trade crypto. And it's 100% commission free.

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In the next few months, they're also adding more in-app purchases, including local food and supplies, paid TV, gaming, gift cards, and much more. If you'd like to learn more, head on over to electronium.com. That's E-L-E-C-T-R-O-N-E-U-M.com. It's interesting because I totally agree with you on the point about altcoins. So even if you're just a trader and it's not something that you're passionate about, in this case, you just need one person who loves it. The secondary market is, as you said, you only need one buyer. If you buy something that you think is amazing, you just have to be convinced that there's one person who thinks it's slightly more amazing than you and is willing to

pay for it. And if it's something that's selling out, you already know the demand is there. Obviously, if you're sold out in three hours, there was someone who was trying to buy it in the fourth hour that couldn't. I mean, we've seen it in the sneaker market for as long as I've been buying Jordans. It's such a great example. And I'm a huge sneaker collector. I love sneakers. And it's just a sneaker. But I want it.

I want that rare one. I love the look of the, like, I have two pairs of the new Yeezy slides coming like, and I want the real ones. I can't explain the emotion in me that wants those, but I do. And I'd rather have them than slides that I buy at Target. Yeah. I mean, yeah, For me, Jordans was always about the kids at school that had them

and I didn't. In my later life, for some reason, it's an emotional thing. Like you said, it's a symbolic, well, I didn't have them then, but I can buy them for myself now even if it's a simple pair of shoes. Jordans, dude, the Toro Bravo 4s, those

are such iconic sneakers and i never wear mine i have them in the closet i love them they're older but they're special to me they create them there's no reason that the digital world can't do that too yeah in fact perfect example yeah go ahead no i was just gonna say mean, I think that the evolution of this particular, you said something in the beginning of this, beginning of our conversation that I thought was really interesting because it's something that I'm looking at challenging in the future. This concept of when you're a musician,

you want everyone to hear your work. It's true. You do. But at least at this stage in my career, I found it fascinating. What if I created a music video with an unreleased song that only one person will have access to? And it's their choice to show it to other people if they want. But as an artist, I create the art and then leave it to the universe to decide. That person can buy it and they can do whatever they want with it. Why not? Why not give that a shot? I wonder what would happen. I'm just curious. Would that person then share it? What are the licensing implications of that? If they did decide that they wanted to upload it to Spotify,, of course they couldn't upload it as their own song. That would have to be like written,

written into some form of agreement. But if I was a big fan of an artist, like for me, Radiohead is one of my favorite bands of all time. If I had a song that they made that no one else ever heard, there's something really cool about that. Insane. Yeah.

You know, like there's something really interesting about that. I don't know. You know, like there's something really interesting about that. I don't know how that works yet, but I want to give it a shot. Let's see what happens. And the experimentation that's going to follow the next couple months in this world, in this NFT world that's brand new, is beyond exciting. I mean, even what you're doing, where you're splitting up the song,

creating a collection out of multiple pieces. That's so cool, man. I think it's awesome. You could do that with real art, but it's not quite the same. So this is pushing boundaries. And it'll be really fun to see how people get involved. It's also interesting.

I mean, DJs at your level, certainly everybody has visuals for their show. Oh my God. So like, I mean, those are just... So, I mean, it's done. Like the art is there, right? And those are visuals for shows are largely sort of pieces that people only experience in the moment or they're not on YouTube and they're not around and they may have that mind-blowing moment when they're looking at it and they never get to see it again. So imagine if every big touring DJ who now is suffering and sitting at home could like monetize their show visuals. Let me take that a step further because I've thought about that. I think that's 100% something that's going to happen. What about consignment? What about someone that

wants to go to a music festival and wants me as an artist, or not just a music festival, a show, may say, I want you to record my experience so that I can remember it later. And we hire a videographer and we create that individual an art piece of their experience at the show that they can rewatch in the future. Consigned digital art. That could happen. Why not? Why not? By the way, it's already happened. It's just not, it just doesn't exist on blockchain. Right? So like there are really wealthy individuals that spend a lot of money on

tables at EDC that hire videographers to record their exclusive experience so that they can remember it in the future. Why not? That's a form of art in and of itself. I mean, I think that I'm, I'm also like speaking here, like I don't expect everyone to agree with every idea. I don't even necessarily agree with all my own ideas yet. Right. I just think about them and I say, what if, what if, what if, and I never rule out the possibility because before all this, I had no idea that we were going to do 23 grand in sales in three hours that it happened. Now I'm like, huh, what else is here? Let's explore this. Let's let's push the boundaries.

And it's exciting to see that you're doing it too, man. It's just really exciting to even be thinking about music again for me, to be honest. So, I mean, talking about COVID and DJing and music just to pivot away from the art side. I mean, talking about COVID and DJing and music, just to pivot away from the art side, I mean, what are people, DJs right now thinking? You know, like I have a ton, obviously, of DJ friends and it's crazy. You see them basically doing Twitch streams for tips and things like that. But at the very, I think, highest level, I mean, is there an expectation that it goes back to how it was?

What's the timeline on that? Or do you think that people are already now starting to realize that they're going to need to pivot or actively trying to do something different? It's a hard question. I think that some people are doing the drive-in thing. I think that's great for them to monetize in this crazy time. I don't want to dilute my own live experience doing that. I feel like being really close next to someone crammed into the, into the club or crammed up at the festival is like such a big part of the experience. When I go, that's what I do.

That's how I enjoy festivals or shows so it's difficult for me to imagine you know being in an environment where you can't meet other people who share your passion and the music that you're watching live it's like such a big part of it so we're not doing that but I do think there are a lot of artists that are because they need to to survive and that's good I think that's good that they're doing that're doing that um but realistically i don't think things will go back to normal for another year um i know that sounds kind of crazy but even with testing at the door um things will start to go back before a year from now but will they will they return to where they

were before it's going to be maybe even longer than a year in terms of consumers attitudes towards actually going to shows like who wants to go now. I mean, there are people that don't give a shit, but not everyone doesn't give a shit. A lot of people do. I I've been pretty strict on my own quarantine schedule. I've only driven places. I haven't taken a flight. I get tested, you know, I'm not really out in public that much. I do get tested pretty frequently um especially because i see my grandparents pretty often so i i would never you have to yeah and because we really haven't seen a solution in sight the election's coming the focus has shifted to the election people are becoming a little bit more lackadaisical you know i realistically don't think the music world is going to go back to normal anytime soon i think

it's going to force artists to have to innovate and think about things like this. We'll see. I can't give a good answer because I don't think anybody knows. When this started, I figured it would be six months. Six months later. It's six months later and it doesn't feel any closer closer to, you know, realizing the, certainly the reality of what it was before. What other creative ways are you seeing artists, you know, try to make Scrap Together a living at this point, I guess? Outside of the drive-in shows, a lot of people are doing the Twitch thing. Yeah. A lot of brands are paying for streams.

We've done a couple of brand-partnered streams. But to be dead honest, man, when I'm DJing a set in my studio to nobody, and I have to fake the energy, it's not that I'm faking it. I'm still into the music, but I don't get that crowd energy. I don't get riled up the way I do when I play normally for 10 years that I've been touring. It's not the same. So I actually don't even really, I do it for the fans. And I think it's important that they get to enjoy music from the, from the comfort of their homes when they can't go out. Um, but I personally don't enjoy it as much. I'll do it because I want to obviously showcase some new music

that I'm listening to, new stuff that I'm making. But it's not the same feeling. I don't have the same feeling. I'd rather actually make music than DJ live from my house. Yeah, of course. I agree with that. Has it been at all a welcome break from the touring life or is it you're ready to get back out there and you miss it? Has it been at all a welcome break from the touring life?

Or is it you're ready to get back out there and you miss it? You know, it has been a welcome break. I've been touring since I was 19. I'm 29. Right before COVID, I had always lived in a building, in a condo for seven years because I was moving around. I didn't, you know, I didn't want to move into something that was more responsibility and you know i bought my first home in december covet hit now i get to enjoy my first home um and i have a backyard which

i never had a backyard in my life you know like i did when i was younger but it's been a while and it's nice to have like being the nature i live right right on the foot of a mountain in Vegas in the desert. It's really inspiring. It's inspired a lot of the creativity behind the NFTs that we've been making. And, you know, I was already kind of planning this year to roll back the touring a little bit and take a break. Now it just got forced upon me. I'm yield farming substantially for the past month.

It's awesome. I'm yield farming and making music and spending time with my girlfriend and, you know, which I normally don't get to do that much of in a touring environment. So it's, it's been actually kind of nice and I'm very thankful and grateful for the lifestyle that, that I've been able to enjoy at this time.

That's, that's hard on people. And I think that's kind of my inspiration for getting other artists on board to this NFT space, to give them the means of being able to support their lifestyles in a time that's otherwise pretty difficult. Yeah. I mean, I never toured at that level, but I've had years where it was like 100, 120 days on the road. And I can say that by a certain age, I'm 43. So, you know, when I was in my late 30s and approaching retirement, I hated it. Like, I love playing music, but everything else that I had to do to get there to play music, I just really... It's like you show up every single place.

They want you to party with them and you want to be their best friend. You just want to go to sleep. I tell people that I don't get paid to dj i get paid to put my body through hell so that i can dj that's true that's the only like if someone wants to like if there's a set down the street here in vegas and it's going to be a great time it doesn't take any extra effort but to go from la to tokyo la to new y LA to New York, to Tokyo, to Korea, to Philippines, to Indonesia, to Singapore, to Hawaii, back to Korea, San Francisco home. Um, I memorized that cause I've told people that story a lot. Like I did that in like two and a half weeks. Like that's

not, not rational. Like it's not sustainable. So yeah, for me, it's been nice. Um, I've had a lot of downtime i've been able to enjoy you know learning a lot about the new tech that's happening in the blockchain space because i'm doing a lot more reading and that's been exciting because i think that this is a this is a really exciting pivotal moment for everything in the space not just not just define not just nfts but everything and especially when there's all this fear about, you know, what is fiat really worth when the government can just snap their fingers? I mean, there's a lot of people that are really concerned.

I mean, I know personally, I'm very afraid of what the future looks like. And I think that's attracting a lot more people to the space. For the first time, you know, I think that we had, obviously, there's the maximalist population that was ahead of the curve, as there is with anything new, you know, the Bitcoin people who are like, dollar's gonna hyperinflate, it's over. But now we're like, I don't think the dollar's gonna hyper hyperinflate. But now like your average person is sitting around going, wait, what the hell is this? What do you mean they're just going to print more and send more and buy corporate bonds?

I think everybody realizes now that the market is somewhat of a Ponzi scheme. And economic theory is shifting in ways that, and again, I have no like, I tell everyone that I have strong opinions loosely held. I'm always willing to be proven wrong. Yeah. And right now, I actually don't have a strong opinion on what field of economics truly informs the current structure, whether it's Keynesian economics, MMT. I don't really know what rationalizes what the Fed and what the government are doing right now. But I don't even want to know.

I just don't trust it. I don't care. I'm not even going to try to make sense of it. It doesn't make sense. So I'm going to do something with capital, with resources that I do understand, which is that there's this thing called Bitcoin. There will only be a certain amount that will ever exist. There are very few threats to its existence, quantum computing being one of them, but who really knows how long it'll take for that to happen and what other features will be added by the time that's possible.

This is something that might be super fucking volatile, but I know it's limited. Gold isn't limited. The Winklevii, they're so funny. I love their example about gold. If Elon starts mining asteroids, gold ain't going to be worth anything yeah of course

not scarce anymore but there are rules algorithmic programmed rules that limit something that's digitally scarce that's powerful to me it always has been um so as a fiat alternative, I don't know. It's not certainly not as transactable, but as a store of value, you know, people who've worked really hard in their life who have dollars and, you know, it's losing purchasing power, sitting in a bank account that's earning zero yield. I mean, that's dangerous. And then you think about the global economy and you think about all the other countries that have people that have hyperinflation, unbanked populations in India, in Venezuela. You think about giving them access to banking for the first time in history. And you really start to think that this shit is powerful beyond what we know here in the US. We're very privileged to be

in this country, in my opinion, regardless of political belief. we live in a free country where you could basically do anything you want um that is not the case for 90 of the global population number 80 of the global population but still i i think that there's there's so much power in that that u.s centric people you know i i fall into that myself i fall into that mindset of feeling, you know, us centric in my views of economics, in my views of money, when the reality is there are all these people that don't even have access to a fricking bank account. They got phones though. They got phones.

So you probably, um, I think a lot of people who have that sort of us centric view never really leave the U S to some degree. You probably, I think a lot of people who have that sort of US-centric view never really leave the US to some degree. You know, most people aren't fortunate enough to travel the world, but you've been obviously everywhere. So does that inform your perspective at all, seeing it live and in person on the streets of these other countries? Yes. Being in, walking around in Jakarta, Indonesia, where you've got a designer mall with every major fashion designer, Dior, Chanel, under the sun, that is completely empty with a few clients and literally 10 feet away, you're in the slums. I mean, that's crazy. That was an eye eyeopening experience being in Guatemala as well. I've done a lot, some charity work in Guatemala, um,

three hours outside of major cities where there's no paved roads or clean water. These are things that like people take for granted in this country and people complain about politics and people complain about this, that they don't realize that like having electricity and running water is like unbelievable. It's unbelievable like the simple things in life that we forget um and and i think that you know i don't want to go too macro here but i do think that fintech not just blockchain tech but fintech as a whole is what

will balance these services and these features that we so greatly appreciate here in the u.s fintech will bring it to emerging markets because people are willing to invest in emerging markets. And when there are people that are willing to invest value is created, you know, infrastructure is created. And right now, if you want to move money from one country to another, it's really fucking hard. Yeah. Even for us, even for us even for americans so imagine if you're trying

to get money from nigeria to kenya or you know but like you don't even like i never even really thought about this stuff but then when i did my first eth transaction and it took like 45 seconds i was like you know paying high gas i like, but even for the high gas, it's better than a fucking $30 wire. International. I was going to say, a wire is so expensive, it's ridiculous. And your money might not arrive for seven days. Oh my God, it's so antiquated.

It frustrates me. It's like, I can't believe that it's lasted this long. But these legacy systems do, you know, maintain their, their, their market share. But it will change. And it's just exciting that people like yourself and people like me people like your followers are thinking about this stuff because whether we like it or not, it's coming. And in the next 50 years, things are gonna be a lot different. You touched on doing charity work in Guatemala. I know that charity is a big part of your life. Can you talk about that a bit more? Yeah. So we've built about seven schools in

Guatemala with funds that we've raised from my record label, which donates a large portion of profits to charity. It's kind of at my discretion, but we've raised about $380,000 in the past four or five years for different charities. And mostly pencils of promise, which is a charity that particularly builds schools in cooperation with local governments in places for, you know, some elementary education. I visited three or four of the schools in my life. I've been down to Guatemala three times. It's an eye-opening experience and really makes you feel... I've always felt like it's cliche when people talk about that, right? Because other people

tell those stories about going to these places and seeing how other mass amounts of the global population live. But those cliches are pretty accurate cliches. It really does change your perspective. I ended up taking my parents one of the trips and they were mind-blown by the experience. Being on a dirt road for three hours is pretty hard

on your body. Winding roads to get to a city that has barely any electricity. These are things that we really do take for granted here in this country. And that's why Twitter frustrates me because people complain about such bullshit, like whatever it might be, like,

how are we supposed to be employed? How are we supposed to like find a job, like figure it out, you know, that we have the ability to figure it out here in this country. You can figure something out. It might be hard, but these other people, they got nothing. They have nothing.

So, you know, not to say that people, you know, it's obviously difficult for some people in this environment to find employment, but in the world where you have the information of the internet at your fingertips, you could build any skill set that you want. And someone else will value that skill set. And, you know, in my case, I felt outside of music, I've wanted to build my understanding of the distributed ledger tech space, because I feel it's going to shape the future of our economy and of global economies. And having that knowledge is probably going to be valuable in the next decade. So that's why I do what I do and why I'm trying a lot of stuff. Some of it's not going to work.

Some of it is. Yeah. I mean, I've failed more times at things than I care to remember for sure. And it's funny. I think I sent a tweet quite literally today that said, you know, success is not just about talent, it's largely about access and opportunity. And that's what you're saying. And these probably some of the most talented people in the world live in these places, but have literally zero access or opportunity to capitalize on that talent. Exactly. And that's why politically speaking, my only political

belief is that the government should spend every single dollar equalizing the playing field for access and opportunity. That's the only way to fix anything. Quite literally the opposite of what governments do. But that's literally, I mean, money should go into improving education. Money should go into giving people access to affordable banking, to unpredatorial interest rates, to all these problems that exist that create this wealth divide. It's not so much about taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. It's literally giving people equal opportunity and disrupting these existing legacy systems

that favor the wrong types of people and the wrong incentives. But I think ultimately, it is an exciting time. Because the world is in crisis, we see a lot of innovation in times of crisis. People are more open-minded in times of crisis. They're looking for solutions. And in that environment, and in this environment, we're going to see a lot of really cool things happen. There's going to be some pain. We're also going to see a lot of cool things happen. Excuse me. You're talking about charity. There's probably endless ways to utilize NFTs and art to raise money for charity, embedding QR codes or an ability to donate or a certain percent of

the proceeds. I mean, I think there's probably, I haven't even thought about it, but I bet that there's incredible ways to do that. 100%. And I've always felt whenever, you know, a lot of my philanthropic commitment has been primarily to education because I've always felt that my education has played such an important role in my life. If I didn't have the friends and teachers and people along the way that were

amazing mentors, I would not be where I am today. I can very confidently say, I gained so much from my education here in this country, both public, you know, and private college, all of it, even though I didn't graduate. Um, I still have a relationship with my economics professor from college. We talk once a month and he's the one who convinced my parents to let me drop out. Really? Yeah, because he was like, Justin's never going to have another opportunity

like this in his life. And he can keep his scholarship for seven years and just let him try it. So that was it. But so that's why I give back mostly in the education field because I feel like that's the easy, it's the clearest path to equalizing opportunity for me in, in, in the field of giving. Um, I also obviously really, you know, like to help with medical projects that have hit close to home. Um, but those are kind of my two philanthropic priorities, mostly education and anything medical related that has affected people in my life or family members and whatnot. Yeah. So interesting. We talked at the very beginning and then we kind of just came back to it talking about wiring money, but having a middleman is a huge problem in, in so many parts of our lives, certainly financial,

but most people probably don't realize how many people at DJ or musician is paying. Oh yeah. Well, not me, but, um, but a lot of, a lot of other musicians need, need to have, um, better guidance when they start their careers because, and we can dive, this is a whole other conversation. I wish we had the time to go into this, this deep conversation because I have a lot of thoughts about this,

but when an artist starts their career, they, they, they demand that liquidity that security net so that they can pursue their art in most cases. And so they're more willing to sign an unfavorable deal to gain access to that liquidity early on from a record label. That's taking advantage of their equity stake in the artist's work. So that artist is so in demand for liquidity to have that, to pursue that dream.

They're not thinking about how much they're giving away. Oh, 10%. Sure. In a tech startup, 10% of a company you're paying for that. Damn. Right. If you want 10% equity in a new project, like you met the full round, you know, that's pretty low and it's pretty low. So, you know, like, I think it's kind of crazy that most artists end up giving up a lot of their, the value that they generate.

There was a great Rolling Stone article that came out in 18 that said the U S music recorded industry generates about 40 billion a year. And only 12% of that 40 billion ends up in artists pockets. Right. Seems pretty crazy to me. And only 12% of that $40 billion ends up in artists' pockets. Right? Seems pretty crazy to me. But even with touring, obviously, the 360 deal became sort of a thing. And labels realized they couldn't sell music and could just grab your money from shows and merchandise and everything. But beyond even that, you're talking about the label deal.

You're paying your manager. You're paying your booking agent. You're paying a PR agent. If you're touring, you're paying your booking agent, you're paying a PR agent. If you're touring, you're paying the bus driver, you're paying for the gas, you're renting the bus. Yeah. There's just nothing left. And a lot of people pay on the gross.

They don't even pay on the net. So there's a lot of education that needs to happen in that arena. I also think that a lot of the music structure is going to be pretty heavily disrupted in the next 10 years as artists begin to realize that like they don't need a lot of these people on on percentage but instead on fee yeah newer artists like russ who have made millions of dollars off of just posting music to tune core like people are realizing that they don't need to go the conventional route anymore but it wasn't like that for a long time. So the next 10 years in music are going to be really interesting. Um, I'm really excited about something that I'm working on that again,

is too long of a conversation for now. But, um, one of the things that I'm most excited about, whether it's an NFT or not, it's probably not NFT related. Um, in the short term, it could be in the long term. But I'm really excited about the prospect of issuing equity and rev share in master recording rights to fans, giving fans an opportunity to invest in music assets. It's never been done. Fans don't have access to invest in music assets. They would love to because music is really emotional to them. It creates a positive feedback loop for fans to basically share the music that they've invested in and it also pays a cash flow

and all this this narrative of that's pretty common there's this common narrative within the music space that says uh spotify doesn't pay artists it's not true they actually do they pay artists a lot yeah the label The artist signed a bad deal. So if you maintain your rights, my revenue growth 50x between 2015 and 2019. So you tell me, it's creating value. People are like, Spotify sucks. But no, they're actually... All these streaming services are great. I'm making more money from music than ever before in my life. Thank you. Why? Because I own my masters. So instead of giving those masters to a label, that's going to give you a very small amount of cash and take 70 for up to 80% of the equity in music. Why not let the fans invest and believe in you at a more fair, multiple valuation of

whatever your future music looks like we've seen athletes tokenizing their careers right i mean yeah it's it's inevitably going to happen um in music but it's like it's just very difficult from from a legal standpoint there's a lot of sure it's insurance for the artists or the athlete to make sure that they get some of their money up front and it's a way for someone to speculate on something they believe in, which is, I mean, everybody should have the right to do that. It's an alternative to getting liquidity from a predator. So I think it's going to happen.

We're going to do it. I'm definitely going to issue equity in my next album to fans. And I'm really excited about it. In fact, I would go so far to say that some of my friends who are in the tech space and other investors, the quote-unquote round is already fully committed for. And I barely even started this thing.

I've just floated it to friends. And my friends are like, they know what my revenue looks like for my music from my last album, which is basically 3x the cost of creating the album. And they know that. They what I, you know, what streaming numbers we do monthly. And they said, when you do this, I'm committing this much money. Some of my startup friends, they're like, I'm in whenever you launch this. And we've already,

and my target amount's already committed for, and I barely started this project. So I know there's demand for it. I know that, you know, and investors would be so excited to have access to music cash flows. The problem is just that the narrative is wrong. That people say artists don't make money. We do.

It's just keep your rights. You used to need a label because like you couldn't get your CD on the shelf at Tower Records, right? I mean, you needed distribution and you needed marketing you needed you needed them to buy ads and billboard and rolling stone there was no internet i mean there now you now it's just the marketing promotion because you don't need the distribution you can if you have a friend who can like get you on a spotify playlist you're good that's what a label does for you right and says your song is good to all these i mean there's no label even do now i would go so far to say that labels there are certain labels that are

smaller that there's that do add a lot of creative and distributive value to a release so i did a release um with a big label not not big a I should say, reputable niche and respectable label called Anjuna Beats. And I'm more than happy to split my master recording rights with them because they did such an incredible job on the creative, on the promotion. They're a partner. So it makes sense. A major label record deal that has you locked in for four albums and gives you a hundred grand when you're a tiny artist and you don't know what you're doing, that's predatorial and wrong. So I shouldn't go so far to say that record labels will be irrelevant because they won't. I think labels that are more creative collectives will always be relevant and special. But the big dogs

that are just prey on young artists' careers, eventually the young artists will stop doing it. Yeah, especially they couldn't in the past, but now there's a better way it's not like in the 1980s you could uh go around the country to you know radio yourself and distribute your music so really is a different world now you can make a tiktok video and get on the top 50 it's insane it's awesome i mean it's awesome it's so much so much better this way it's a matter of i think people just now have to treat their career like a business and approach it in that manner as opposed to just the creative side. And if they can grapple that and find creative ways to market, you can do it on zero budget. Exactly.

Exactly. It's an interesting time. Cool, man. Well, I am... Yeah, we got to go. But this was awesome. I appreciate you letting me rant about stuff. Yeah, that's what we do here. Well, thank you so much for your time. And I'm looking forward to the next drop and to see what you have coming in the future. And we'll have to do this again a few months down the road and see where the space has landed. Definitely excited for your drop too, man.

It's going to be epic. Thank you, bro. Have a good one.