Episode 108: Hakim Draper, CEO of Artist Intelligence Labs, discussing web3 music, gaming + culture

[Music] good morning good afternoon or good evening wherever you're joining us from all over the world welcome to web 3 Warriors episode 108 featuring Hakeem Draper CEO of artist intelligence Labs a managing partner with link Media Partners a chief strategy officer for data to leads and an adviser to thulu verse a new web 3 game coming out uh welcome hakee how you doing today thanks for joining us I am well how are you I'm doing pretty good for you know Saturday afternoon you're joining us from uh sunny California I see some nice Hills there Southern Cali shout out I have yet to make my way down there I'm up here in the Prairies of Canada we don't have as many nice beautiful Hills like what you got over there how's the weather treating you very well I was trying to remember where I was the last time that we did this uh last time I was on I I must have been in Los Angeles I I think you were in LA but I can't recall my my wife and I my wife and I have been totally like living a sort of nomadic decentralized life for the last like three and a half years now so it's coming to an end it's been a very sort of fun experiment to really understand what it means to live without attack attachment to a bunch of like really anchoring material things it's been not not quite Off the Grid though right just kind of uh no yeah still yeah just still interacting still in society I think there's a balance I think we take I think as a society we tend to look at these Concepts and go to the very very extreme and I think in practicality it's application and the real world looks more like something like what we've done for the last three and a half years or so ni um and so I think it's a it's been an interesting experiment it's a you know it'll be nice to have a home base again when we settle back in and have sort of a regular place that's ours I do miss like having a home of my own to go you know right I could imagine but you know I'm sure it's exciting in its own ways as well um and then you joined us with Micah that last time as well and we had a great chat on LinkedIn so that was pretty cool so you've been on the show a couple times and very much appreciate having your your knowledge and your depth of Knowledge from the music industry but also in web 3 and blockchain and you really been around the around the block for a minute so that's awesome uh so yeah welcome everyone to the web three warriors podcast um I'm David choma your host to go by Chrome in the metaverse and today we're really going to be looking at one of the favorite topics that we have which is really just blockchain Innovation empowering creators and how you know web 3 and crypto and the blockchain are really making it uh easier for creators to to create their own kind of um foundations for their career and also open new streams of Revenue new streams of community building um through the blockchain and through this kind of Global Network that is uh opened up through web 3 and through cryptocurrencies um so today specifically we're going to be looking at kind of music on one hand where um hakee has worked with the artist intelligence labs to create a platform called song secure where they're actually using the blockchain to basically replace the antic equated copyright system and allow for musicians to actually uh mint their you know intellectual property on the blockchain and have that stand as the copyright right and so very interesting Innovative disruption of a bureaucratic system that is going to be much more I think easy and uh more usable for your average artist out there right and then on the other hand he's working with a project called thulu verse uh in the gaming space which is kind of a mobile game that is embracing you know web 3 components so really interested in kind of picking your brain about that um and in both cases it's really about giving more power to the community giving more power to the artist and the Creator and that's really what we're here for on web 3 Warriors so thank you everyone for joining and with that maybe I'm going to jump into an interview with hem and really just trying to get an update on what you've been up to cuz as we mentioned you've been on the show a couple times before you're traveling nomadic life and uh busy in the music space and the gaming space and the data space which is another really interesting corner of uh blockchain and really just the digital world world that we're growing in um so what have you been up to a thanks for joining us what's new oh man um yeah I mean I think like you said first and foremost is song secure um and really um you know that's just very simply I want to take a step back so if you look at today's music ecosystem the challenges and use some air quotes here the challenges that all these companies report to have is is sort of incomplete data entain and not being able to match music with creators and rights holders uh that's a problem that we could have solved 10 years ago with this technology and I I pushed for it for a long time first from within Warner Music when I worked there and then after I left we did some really interesting projects so I could better understand um both blockchain is a technology tokenization of a fan ecosystem without cannibalizing the existing revenue and that's the project we did with old dirty bastard estate and wuang and that was amazing yeah I recall you telling us about that on the first time we had an interview yeah yeah we rolled it up with the um with the uh the 50th birth what would have been the 50th birthday of Old Dirty Bastard and W Tang performed bust run came out Queen Latifa stop by and it was a bunch of people just everybody came out and all the people that were there some 2500 people were all token holders that had participated in this sort of test that we did to better understand like is there a path to tokenization without cannibalizing existing revenue and what are sort of the ramifications what are the upsides and downsides with that and that's a whole another ball of wax but in that process what we really realized is that blockchain as an underlying technology is brilliant it's it's a it's so beautifully eloquent and the thing that it provides seems to be the thing that most corporations are terrified of which is transparency and accountability and it's the thing that we love about it and so we five years ago we developed songsecure song secure.com which is just a copyright registry on a blockchain this is not minting your music for nfts or any of that stuff we're just simply trying to tackle the copyright framework which up until now the copyright information that you register let's say at the US copyright office sits in an analog Vault that's not connected these are everything as siloed so that copyright data is siloed away from the pr so your BMI ask G cack oon wherever you are your performing rights organization it's siloed from your distributor and so now you give dsps twice removed from validation all the excuses in the world not to be able to find you to pay you your money let alone we're not even going to get into the rates that they're offering to pay you in the first place which are so problematic but we've created a landscape of excuses and and we just wanted to tackle something that would start chipping away at that and the other thing that we did was you know I I'm a regular speaker with the US copyright office I usually do something with them on world IP day and you know we talk about independent creators and empowerment and so I have some relationships there and we've had some really interesting conversations and then through there there's wpo the world IP organization which is more of a global international organization or a global organization that really is looking at the broader picture of it's 192 I believe now 192 member countries and you can check me on that number it may actually be higher now but um so there's about 192 member countries of YP YPO the world IP organization and when we looked at copyright what we realized is that blockchain solves this for all of them because it puts it all in onchain it makes it all completely auditable verifiable by anyone who wants to plug in an API or build a crawler that wants to verify and validate this data it doesn't matter where you're from or what your language is it doesn't matter which which country of origin you registered it from because it's all on this it's all on chain and I think what happens now is you start to see a world where as music creators where we're forced to do business in an international landscape with localized tools like the copyright office and the pr I Look to organizations like seesac that have really positioned themselves to be a global Pro rather than a regional P territorial Pro uh I think those will be ingenious partners for us going forward I think they can take a registry like song secure that's already being deployed what we're here we've been live for five years anyone can use it um we're being deployed in Japan Denmark Norway Sweden um Germany when you say being deployed is there like a a regulatory kind of um handshake or any kind of connection there like yeah yeah well each territory is different and so in some territories we're working with the nonprofit artist rights organizations um and in some cases we're working like in Africa we're working with governmental agencies and we have seven countries there we're getting ready to deploy later well yeah probably later this year they'll be deployed so those are with government officials in the UAE there's a commission that has been established to oversee and help to implement a a framework um so we're dealing with the entire commission and members of imagine someone like a UAE would love this kind of innovation because they can just point to it and look like this is how we do our music copyright because they always like to brag about all their all their onchain TY stuff they got going and and they have you know they have a big push going and then um also there's the um the Saudi music 2030 initiative okay um which is also Saudi 2030 initiative which is all entertainment ecosystem and framework and they're really looking to be a player on the international market in a in a really significant way and so when you start thinking about this and you think about from Japan to Saudi Arabia all deploying basically their own portal that's the same chain for copyright data for music creators and all of a sudden what we've started to do is remove the excuses of all of the middleman agency the mlc which has control over the blackbox money but is somehow having a hard time finding the people that it belongs to because in conveniently if they don't they get to split that money up amongst the major Publishers who they represent wow so they're not totally incentivized to get out there and Bang the Drum and make a lot of noise even though even though theoretically they're in control of a billion maybe multi-billion dollar Black Box their mandate is specifically to match those funds with the rightful owners and those creators and there's no limitation as to how much they can pay themselves or or allocate for marketing and Outreach so they really have no excuse for not banging the drum I bet you got their salary stuff right long before any of the Outreach stuff started getting going and it's barely starting to pick up steam now and it's still very selective and with very few Partners I think that they do they could serve a purpose and a function in here but I think their appointment and the oversight of that function right now is highly problematic and I think we need tools that provide transparency that that's accessible to anyone who wants to get the data and analyze it and digest it in whatever way that they need to to understand what's going on whether it's with Revenue whether it's with who's using my IP all of this data is accessible and it's trackable and we have we've had the technology for decades so there's no excuse why we don't innovate all this no doubt um and when you talk about that black box of money like that's just would be coming from like YouTube Spotify like everywhere and anywhere music being streamed they're they're sending Fs in here but then they're not necessarily being allocated out to the artist and you're saying a song secure is removing the excuses because it's very clear it'll all be kind of like in a very clear onchain database you know such and such music belongs to this Creator um so how are you disrupting that and and what is your hope for kind of adoption into the future so point of clarification on the blackbox so just so everybody understands the music modernization passed 08 I believe or 06 or something and one of the things that happen is there's a new mechanical royalty that's derived from OnDemand music streamers so that's anywhere where you can go look up a specific song and play it whether it's a SoundCloud or a spotifi or apple music like Pandora you can't do that you look up a song on Pandora puts together playl playlist that may or may not contain the song So Pandora has found a really diabolical way to skirt this um which which is another problem in itself but that money and that mechanism went into place long before there was an infrastructure or framework on what to do with that money how do you then if you're going to create a new mechanical royalty that all of these companies are going to pay into a trust or a holding company or escrow or quote unquote the black box then there was no literally for almost a decade there was no framework as to what to do with this so there is a tremendous amount of money in that black box that's wild uh is that your dog or your neighbor's dog no it's a neighbor neighbor's dog no problem um yeah so there's a tremendous amount of money in this black box that um you know that that everyone is working to figure out how do we how do we solve for this problem and this goes back then to what we talked about with copyright is because the copyright's not connected to the pro the pro is not connected to the distributor nobody's validating data as as this IP is getting aggregated through the dsps the Digital streaming providers and so by the time the digital digital streaming providers get it and generate this Revenue that they have to allocate somewhere it's not their problem and so now we've let it become this giant issue and so again for us I don't know what the solution is I know that I'm not GNA spend another couple of decades looking back like we have the previous couple of decades in the music industry I think we have to look forward and I think one of the things about looking forward is going okay basically let's start at the very core of the problem what the hell are we doing with copyright data what is its value if it cannot be confirmed value validated or accessed by people who need to confirm whether it's this license goes with this song and the person I got the license from is is authorized to do that or whether it's this song generated 25 cents and I need to pay it to its rightful owners again we have so much technology and you mentioned one of the projects that we work on is this data to leads and avocad data one of the reasons that we're even involved in that is because as we start going down this Rabbit Hole of unwinding the Detachment of all of this data what we find is that all of the data is there and everybody knows that your data is being bought and sold every day and lead generation is happening and scrapers are out there and all these things are happening so I I'm hardpressed to understand why a let's just take a technology guy for example like Daniel e who who could afford to pay himself last year more than Taylor Swift has made in her entire career wow over a bill over a billion dollars in compensation in a single year okay and this is what's his exact role in the industry Daniel Daniel e is the founder and CEO of Spotify he's the guy who says oh it doesn't cost you guys anything to make music so you shouldn't really get compensated anything but but I'm going to make more than the top earning Creator in ecosystem in a single calendar year and D so that guy that guy has no excuse he has technology he has all of the source material he has all of the relationships with the Publishers rights holders labels etc etc he has no excuse why he couldn't have been the one who saw for this I realized that it's not as tremendously lucrative as extracting revenue from you know R creators IP and coming up with creative new ways to bundle music with audio books and podcasts to pay you less for what is actually leading people to subscribe to the service forget about all that the guy got no excuse they have the money they have the technology they have the resources they have the source material they have the relationships same with the Warner Music is pivoting to you know with Robert their new CEO who is clearly pivoting to become a tech company and and they could have done this well if I'm being honest in 2014 and 15 when I was screaming up and down the hallways hey guys we need to talk about blockchain and no one even wanted to listen so January 2016 rolled around and new just rolled around and I woke up and I said I'm not going to do this for another day and I resigned that very day and that's when I went deep into blockchain and web 3 and I'm such an Enthusiast and such a Believer but I think we have to be practical and reasonable and we have to start solving some of this the the greater core issues even though it's not a it's not a patch that just heals the wound it's a slow fix where the more people start to adopt it and use it the more Partners we have the more Legacy music companies the more independent creators the more new deaths that are building the next stream model or the next direct to Fan sales model or and these methods of of validation yeah it's interesting because I think we hit on two things there so on one hand I'm just wondering does it matter what chain it's on like I was looking through kind of your Tech and it says it's on the Eon blockchain and it sounds like you're kind of building out from there so I was just curious like no neo oh Neo sorry yeah NE right now yeah yeah yeah um no we're on Neo right now and we're actually we've we've been for the last few months testing uh what we call mirrors basically mirror deployments and working on settling between all of the different chain data um you know and obviously using chain link and a few other technologies that are out there uh polka Dot's got some pretty cool tools but chain link right now has been sort of our Our Savior for threading all of this stuff together um for us we are chain agnostic I I want creative to be able to I mean personally I think creators music creators should follow you know there's some good examples out there at the Kane Mayfield all the time he's a great example of someone who kind of learned about each of the different chain ecosystems and then decided like okay I think there's some people for me here who would appreciate what I do here and there's some people who might appreciate what I do here so I'm kind of build here and then I'm GNA build here and then I'm gonna build here and then he kind of stays active in those communities so he doesn't this is a big thing that I see with a lot of just greater sort of nft projects overall creators who are going to do whether it's a gaming project or whatever and we can talk about that next but guys who really come into this thing very shortsighted and and whether you wear it on your sleeve or whether it's just by your actions everyone can see that you're just here to extract revenue and resources to try and jump start your crazy idea and there's a difference between being here to build for the long term and trying to come over here to get your bag to go run off and make your crazy dreams come true no doubt no doubt yeah there's a lot of extraction happening and shout out to Kane Mayfield I believe he's actually joining the the Pepe Fest over at be Studio this weekend or somehow his art is his art is incorporated there with uh DJ skrilla as well shout out to skrilla you know some leaders in the Pepe culture over there in the Bitcoin space so they're all connecting with people got his big Pepe Fest happening and it was funny when he first announced it I think he was very much looking more at like the ethereum space and then there were a lot of like the the rare Pepe guys and stuff be like oh you going to do Pepe Fest and not have us and then he was like oh I have to open it up and like he opened it up to everyone and it looks like it's going to be a pretty cool event so shout out to the Pepe fest going on over there um but yeah Kane Mayfield definitely is here for the culture for you know adding to the overall ecosystem right um and I think that's an important point just before we move on from song secure though you did also mention having kind of the API option and the ability to really kind of plug into it and having these Partnerships around the globe so is this kind of how you see the song secure kind of network effect growing from here and like you just mentioned being blockchain agnostic which is huge so you'll be able to kind of have this expand across different uh blockchains you know theoretically over time right so like how important is kind of that API integration piece and how are you managing that so so right now we've been working with a closed group of Partners um we have two different levels sort of a a a Dev level and an Enterprise level of API um and so we're working with a major rights manager and PR you know performing rights organization on how we Implement that and streamline registration so the same registration data that you would put on your copyright instead of having to go to then your PR and then the mlc and then Sound Exchange and register all separate times that same registration would be aggregated and you would just validate it at each stop and go yes that aggregated correctly or edit I need to make this adjustment but that way there's a a active string all the way through and it makes it easier so on the one hand on the Enterprise level that's how we're working on the dev level um we have game projects and like I said we're working with some people who are working with some new the developing some new streaming ecosystems that they want to try um some of them I think look kind of promising um but we'll see what happens when they launch and how they're adopted um and what we you know again with those guys what we want to be able to do is give them a clear path and give the uh music creators a clear path and so you know we have 14 15,000 users who will be able to opt in on this new Avenue of monetization with this partner with this new streaming service and if they decide to opt in and their music is connected right into the ecosystem and that it's points right back to their copyright their hash and their they can connect their payout stuff and since you know before we move on gaming I'll share with you you know in addition to song secure we launched that about five years ago it's been growing pretty steady a few couple of years after that we launched artist toolbox. a artist toolbox AI is tools and utilities for uh music creators we stay away from the novelty application of things that are really going to create You music but things like stem splitter the M converter uh lyric extractor to make it easy for you to then aggregate lyrics throughout the dsps and things like that um it's got a bunch of great tools like that and then most recently um we've just come out of beta and quietly soft launched our distribution ecosystem which is called drr secure so dros secure.com is a fully connected distribution ecosystem to all of the traditional web 2 stuff but also with a fully connected back end so rather than having to go look at your data in Spotify for artist or apple music for artist you're going to be able to see all of this data in one dashboard uh additionally um you can connect in obviously all of your Social Media stuff and we have a product called toun bio which is our link tree answer it's basically built for musicians you know we're we're music creators so everything we build is for music creators and um there's some cool features coming in tun bio like you know automatically pull your latest track from YouTube Spotify Apple music title so you don't always have to remember oh did I update my link and you know and you can still put custom links and things like that so all of this will be connected into a seamless dashboard um as well as any of your web 3 Endeavors and that's where it gets really interesting because what we're really trying to pull together as an ecosystem where all of the things you're doing you can start to actually see what is your return versus the sort of energy and effort that you're putting out because you know while you might go try and Chase a million streams you could theoretically put that energy and effort into trying to sell 100 nfts over a three-month period and you know what you're going to do way better on the nfts or maybe you have some other ecosystem where it's just a fan direct maybe you're just doing digital downloads and you have a collectible claim inft and then you can do a burn and redeem for limited vinyl there's so many amazing creative things that artists can do nowadays we're just trying to give them a a place that connects it all that they have the freedom to really see side by side with unbiased filters that just go here's where you're actually seeing a return on your investment here's where you're getting um genuine support and value for your creative efforts versus this really passive support that happens in streaming that doesn't necessarily convert to they're going to come see you live or they're going to click your link or they're going to join you on a on a live stream or in the metaverse we have to move away from that aggregating and chasing streams mentality and we have to take one of the beautiful things that's happened in web 3 is this the concept of community and while people throw the word around a lot I think you have to build a fan community around not just your music but a com a shared Love Of Music overall doubt no doubt and I think uh Kane Mayfield to your point has done that fairly well I give a shout out to Unice as well as another artist we've had on the show who's been doing really well um I think she just had a recent drop or maybe it hasn't even dropped yet with Gala music which is another interesting platform there's a lot of these Music and Sound sound. XYZ being another one you know music platforms that are trying to kind of bring a kind of web two Vibe into web 3 and uh you know I think we could have an interesting conversation about that but before we move on from music I am curious you know what do you think it's going to take for kind of the music industry to do more of what you just mentioned with the adoption whether it's token gating whether it's you know having um you know a special edition vinyl that you can only get if you own the nft concerts in the metaverse where uh you know nfts are the tickets kind of thing I heard some rumors you know Eminem just dropped his recent album right and he had been dabbling in the nft face a bit and we see Snoop Dogg talking about death row being an onchain kind of record label if you want to call it that so there are some kind of major players that are talking about it and at least are you know touching the blockchain in some way but you know Eminem just dropped this new album I haven't heard about any web 3 component so far um and I just wonder you know what's it going to take for someone like an Eminem or anyone really to just be kind of more um receptive to incorporating nfts and giving their fans who want to have a open a crypto wallet and many probably already have one right who want to take advantage of a web 3 angle you know what's it going to take for them to just throw that out there is it really like honly yeah what's what's stopping them from hon honestly I don't think it's for them right I don't I don't think it's a Eminem I don't think it's a big name okay I think it's it's it's 300 cane Mayfields in their own lane that are all building Brick by Brick I think it's a it's a a a you know L Russell right it's it's someone like that that has momentum traction Independence they've already built their foundation on this direct fan hand toand sort of transaction and engagement and I'm I'm accessible to you they've are they're there already I think it's it's it's guys like that and it's guys like Kane and I think it's going to take a couple hundred of them and those use cases are going to Aggregate and and then what happens unfortunately is that the Steve IIs and the bigger names come over and they do something flashy on the front end and flat on the back end and then all the greater fans get very discouraged and then they don't go support the local guy or the Kane Mayfield or the Russell or the O Reed or whoever the next guy who does something like this is who's really really a dope artist and I think those big names actually wind up doing more harm than good because they're not bought in and I get it I'm not you know here to debate whether they should even be bought in or whatever I get it you're already settled you got you you've already built your defensible space you got bank roll you've got houses you don't have the hunger that you used to have and there therefore you're not as concerned about the issues of control and aggregation and you know sort of rampid um depreciation and devaluation of our contributions and what we do I think you're far too removed from it at that level no doubt all right all right so the slow and stad approaches probably better and we want more artists in here for the culture you know um so yeah um and I think building and listen to that point right like like you said like Unice and Kane and like so these are people who spent time in the space and just like they spent time developing their musical skills and then they spent time considering how the two blend together where they meet and how they bring them together to build and again I think that when the headline is Steve ioki drops nft and does a million dollars I think every other artist that rushes over here thinks oh boom funded I'm go extract a bunch of money these dummies don't know what's going on and I can give them a couple of songs and who cares they don't even know and and and then it doesn't work and then they go to all their musician buddies and go that web three stuff [ __ ] it's all [ __ ] it's nonsense it's all fake it's all fake when the only thing that's fake was your your intentions if you came over here with genuine intentions you would have had an authentic experience that you would have at least taken something away from and in reality if you came over here with authentic intentions you're probably still here because everybody I've seen since 2016 who's come into this space with authentic intentions even if their initial idea didn't work is still here still building and still holding their head up and standing on the principle of what the space is and it takes some patience you know and um obviously there's a certain element of sales being able to sell yourself being able to promote yourself that is um required to a certain extent but to your point the longer you stay in the space the longer it's clear that you're genuine and authentic with what you're trying to put out and the artwork speaks for itself you know you will get fans eventually and yeah be here for the culture I think that's what it's all about U amazing man I can talk web 3 music with you all day so just wrapping this up right so under the artist intelligence Labs you got the drro secure you got the artist toolbox. a and you got song secure among other things and you're kind of wrapping this all up and really have a global offering to creators and music music musicians I should say um to really take their kind of um creativity to this Indie labels Publishers Indie labels some of our clients that we've onboarded initially for our distribution include some Legacy labels and rights holders that have recently exercised their reversion Clauses and got all their rights back nice and now they're going to re-release all of their music through our distribution ecosystem because they get to keep more of their money and we don't have hidden fees like drro kit there you go so you know all right artist intelligence labs for the win so what's the best way to reach out to you for any artist listeners out there who want to uh touch base and and try to tap in oh man uh you could pretty much hit me on any of the platforms I I don't spend a lot of time on X it's just I'm so busy and you you just takes time and you really have to be careful about getting on stages on X because you don't know who you're going to be on a stage next to or associated with in other people's minds and I think that there's a lot of you know stuff going on over there as like you can see from Natalie's recent tweets you know these things are happening right on a on a daily and weekly basis and I think um again I think it's important to be intentional so look I'm available in the social media spaces if uh you want to go old school I do a room every morning Monday through Friday uh from 8 Eastern 800 am Eastern to about noon I'm usually in there for about an hour or so every day it's called music networking no egos it's on the Clubhouse app and it's um hosted by a guy named rosin beats who's a really solid dude who's just trying to help out artists and network and has got some really good professionals that come in that room and we have a really good time every morning and you know anyone is welcome you could reach out to me on any of the platforms you know go to artist intelligence labs.com and uh check out any of the products and the suite of stuff we do awesome awesome artist intelligence labs.com you can also check out dros secure.com I know they got the join up option on the site there um but yeah yeah shout out to rosin you know I do try to jump in there still on the good old Clubhouse you know there are still some good rooms over there but yeah every morning it's going so music uh networking no Eagles I'll actually drop the link for that in the description of this episode as well so anyone who wants to tap for old school fans for old school fans um we used to do a real on clubhouse called music business R pill sessions I missed that room me me and my partner David Ln we're getting ready to bring the mus business rep sessions back on an app called flock and I will have more details on that coming very soon oh flock all right haven't heard about that one yet but yeah those red pill sessions were amazing definitely a big part of uh my kind of adoption of the web 3 music in general and really just the idea I love those roomes yeah trying to empower the creators you know it was it was always fun awesome and so many great guest and you know 45 king would hang out in there so many people 45 King great great stories and yeah it was just great to hear the history from the people who who made it you know from them direct yeah it's oh shout out to clubhouse honestly those type of um experiences and even meeting you and um being able to learn so much about the music industry I got to I got to give it up the clubhouse it's pretty awesome and uh to your point x is definitely a crazy mess these days or Twitter so um yeah no need to go over there all right let's switch it up let's talk gaming a little bit here I am very curious about the thulu verse and uh everything they're building it's a bit of a game um yeah tell us about let's go back a little further um so a few years ago as you know I was part of a group um that helped launch a a company called random games with a guy named Tony Harmon who was the um former president of Nintendo North America for 16 years um and with that project they launched the unio verse um so the unse is still going strong I'm not affiliated with this but I I talk about people and their intentions are shown by their actions and the fact that while some of these guys contemporaries have fled this space and abandoned their projects they have actually been making progress they recently just held a contest where the winner got $15,000 they've deployed a new world there's new tools they just dropped a new uh hero um for their world so unio verse um I listen web3 building with intention WTH and Tony who are leading that project are phenomenally great guys and they really have the right intention on what they're trying to create in creating something that's going to be valuable for everybody who participates in it on some level whether it's your entertainment value whether you take some of this p and you spin up your own lore and you create your own series or comic books or who knows what's going to happen from this but I love the intention in what they're doing um and then um a mutual friend and a guy that I've known for a lot longer than I've known those two guys a guy named Jason Kaylor who runs a company um called Cosmic Foundry sorry they recently changed their name so they're called Cosmic Foundry and they've launched the cthul Lou ver now they are Web Two web 3 gaming they're really um bullish on nfts and nft gaming um and they've done some pretty great stuff their first two games are live one of them you can get on the App Store um and then one of them uh you can play online on any device um and they're building accessible puzzle games you know battle games things things like that um I I think again I think where they're headed um and the core of the team I think you can just look at the work that they've put in and the product they've developed and know that their intentions are genuine yeah 100% I can see it's a very cool kind of uh mobile game style um how do you feel about the way that web 3 is kind of integrated right like we've talked to um company that's working on wallets as a service and the idea that integrating the wallet is such like a key point of friction right and making that as kind of seamless as possible um how are these kind of gaming companies that you're talking to um handling that I know I'm a big fan of the UN overse as well for sure and they did a pretty good job of connecting it kind of through your phone and they have a it's kind of web two but then it links up with your wallet and has the web 3 component in there how much like how important is that kind of so look as a strategist this is where I live right is like I look at this pain point and it's a total pain point it is very difficult when you get into the onboarding part it it seems like it should be easy because we're all here and we've been dealing with this for years but when you start helping somebody create a wallet it gets very intimidating for the average person especially when they're not technologically savvy so to speak you know there may be app Savvy where you know if it's you know fill in the form and click next they can do that but like you know it feels very technical um and so we have to as developers uh in this space we have to come up with ways and I talk about this in music too where we meet our fans our users or the people we want to adopt these projects uh where they are as best we can and so uni over is the perfect example of a really elegant solution uh where you know you got to create a wallet and and you're going to go through it you're you're going to at some point but you're going to less technical you're going to connect your wallet to the unio verse and then you're going to verify it and tether that to your mobile device and then going forward you're never going to expose your wallet again because everything is validated and Tethered to your mobile device which requires a prominent carrier with a named account it can't be a burner phone or you know all this stuff so now you get into a little bit of resistance from the hardcore web 3 guys because then make no mistake about it you're two-thirds of the way to kyc yeah right but all the ways right we don't get to have it all the ways so so we have to figure out how we meet people where they are and then once we show them something that they can sink their teeth into or give them a reason to be here what we find is now there is now there's a Marketplace to rent your un overse Heroes there is they did the Collectibles and then the merge and you get new me you a new collectible they did all of these cool things that you could be a part of to complete the set and get proin and now they've announced where that's going with the coin and the where they're going to do and so now you start to see how this entire ecosystem get very excited but you also see you bring along a fan base a base of community that are at different levels some of those people in that Community are Avid web 3 you know guys they're well-versed they're moving in the community to help organize smaller groups to help onboard new members to bring them into the contest and things they're now partnering with other communities where they're able to start Bridging the Gap and then giving people from outside of this web 3 world a real incentive to come in and participate hey if you're a gamer and it's a $155,000 contest that's going to be that starts Friday and it's going to be done Sunday yo you're either gonna figure out how to get in or you're not you know if you're a gamer you want to be in it I gotta play a game for a few hours on a weekend and maybe I can win 15 grand he let's see what this game's all about oh it's a pretty good game develop by guys who have developed iconic games over the years turns out this thing's a real contender you know and so now you get introduced to the world and the the games and the community and then you see there's all these other creative ways that you can participate and then cthulu and cthulu vers and what they're doing will again in their own way that's organic to their ecosystem do the same thing where they have games that are web two and they have games that are web 3 and they will eventually have games that theoretically you may play to a certain level and then it shifts from a web two game to a web 3 game and you sort of have to gamify onboarding to transition them to that next so there's a lot of ways to do this and I think we just need to get creative and I think we need to work with the fans of these projects and that's the other thing I will say that both projects have done very well is they listen to the user feedback they participate in in community town halls and Community meetings where they talk to all these people they get their their voice back they help promote and help users sell user generated material that they're then putting out to their own Marketplace to sell and they don't even take a fee off of it they're just like hey we love what you did with that we're gonna boost this post that's awesome that's awesome that's true Community there for sure right and so I think it is about intention and so I think gaming is not you know I I hear some narrative that web 3 gaming is dead and I would um I would argue that the the last iteration of the quote unquote presumed Kings of web 3 gaming are dead long live the Kings um the people who are actually building and developing are the ones that were going to bring this thing home anyway and I think you have you know guys like the crew at Uni overse and guys like the crew at Cosmic Foundry who are experienced professionals who have been doing this they build really compelling high level games that have lasted the stood the test of time and they see what's happening in web 3 and they're True Believers like you and I are yeah and so on the one kind of I think pain point for the developers in web 3 and we just had Justin Gary on our last episode actually shout out to him he's uh in the kind of Creator or how do you call it trading card games like magic the Gathering uh he created his own called Ascension and then they just created a digital version called or a different game kind of Soul Forge which has been out for about 10 years but now they have soul Forge Fusion which they're again bringing the digital collectibles on chain they're working with salana but one of the pain points that I kind of brought up and again he's another one who's been in there for decades now so he's got a fan base that actually loves his games it's not just about you know trying to sell everyone on blockchain um but I asked him this question and I'm curious so your thoughts on it is like how do you protect against the speculators right so like even in unse for example since you kind of told me about their project kind of right from launch I've been in there I've been watching and I've seen kind of the way that some of the floor prices have spiked up and gone down and a lot of the narrative around oh well you're diluting this and that or you're creating too many Heroes and you know that that conversation in the Discord and so I think it often comes down to the speculators on one hand and those that really want to see the monetary value of the project go up and then The Gamers on the other hand who yes they are interested in the value side of it and they love the idea of actually owning these digital Assets in their own Sovereign wallet but they also want the game to be fun and they're just here to actually find a cool fun new game right and so I feel like you always want your majority of the fans or the players to be that ladder group right the people who actually love the game and find it fun you don't want to have you know 50 60 70% of those playing the game more in the Speculator group because I think that's more risky that it just kind of um whittles away when they don't reach you know whatever goal they're hoping to you know get to through their speculation so just curious on your thoughts on like speculation versus Gamers and how you know you kind of navigate that CU I feel like every web 3 game project has to kind of have a way to balance that yeah there's no you know listen I I think anyone who tells you that they solve for that is bold fa lying so I think I think so look I think it's it's it's virtually impossible to actually solve for that I think that what the guys that random games in un Universe did to mitigate that as best they could was about as good as it gets that I've seen um I wish I could take credit for that strategy to mitigate but man they did a brilliant job of and again it's sort of attaching taking from wallet to sort of tethering it to this verified cell phone account and it helps eliminate the Bots and the the the you know people who get you know 20 burner phones and you know do all that so it it I think that's the best you could do man is is mitigate as best you can and um and make it f the other yeah and then the other thing is you have to the in the end you can mitigate that side as best you can but I think on the other side then you have to redouble your your commitment hey I think you have to redouble your commitment to um create value for your community whether it's a quality game or whether it's entertaining events or I don't know what you do but you you got to redouble that commitment to really creating value 100% it's what happens you're hanging out outside on a beautiful California day you know you might get some dogs nearby I'm curious on your thoughts on the metaverse right kind of expanding from gaming and actual game projects specifically into the concept of this far-reaching digital world where we're buying space and you know you and I both have plots in the voxel metaverse for example and there's decentral land there's sandbox those are kind of the three big ones that I've been more familiar with but there are of course others but how do you feel about kind of the growth of the metaverse in general is there one project that you're kind of interested in or you see doing things the right way um just how you feel about kind of that Evolution and how it plays into kind of maybe the broader web 3 gaming Evolution honestly I look at the the metaverse like I look at blockchain I am a verse agnostic I think that if if when I work with artists or when we're working on projects if I can come up with a compelling application then certainly I would do it uh when people host events I certainly go through and try and check them out and attend to support as much as I can uh you know I think I'd love to see a lot more happen in that realm but I think at the same time we're it's still a space that's nent and finding its footing um as far as what are the actual experiences because everything's really if you if you sort of take a step back and look at it it's really been geared towards developers and sort of the techsavvy initiated and I think that for me I live in the music world where for instance last night you know uh we had a show there was 1,400 1800 people there something like that um how how do I take a 00 people from around the world in a virtual space and give them the experience that we had in that venue last night and I think that's the challenge that's where we're getting to I think that's where we're we're going to get closer to I think people are building cooler experiences I think that everyone needs to from a music standpoint I think we need to look at creative ways to both de develop as a collective and Implement different strategies into our own ecosystem where they're appropriate yeah and I think that you know it's one of the things that I see with with artists is they'll have an idea and they'll kind of build out a space and then they'll just kind of try and force it and I just urge everyone to take a step back and assume remove your tech savvy side and assume assume you're just a fan or a consumer and then think about what's that experience for them what's going to make it compelling or entertaining or worth it yeah and I feel like I think that's where we got to get creative yeah definitely requires some creativity right and I think about like um for example the Travis Scott concert that he did in the fortnite metaverse not the same not onchain obviously but the audience the impact the views that they got on the YouTube video after like it's just Monumental right but maybe the creativity there was to go where the kids are go where the people are right you know whereas DCL voxels they're all pretty quiet right like you're lucky if you can get 50 to 100 people to show up uh at a single event there right so I'm curious you know what's it going to take um since the very first episode of this show I've been talking about Gamers adopting the blockchain and specifically the onchain metaverse as a kind of just hangout right like a digital community have all this opportunity it seems like a natural fit but Gamers 90% of them have zero interest in blockchain unfortunately at least as of right now so there hasn't been that adoption and so yeah maybe it is somehow going to where they already are and making it more fun making the value so clear that everyone's going to want that thing in their you know wallet I don't know I just I'm curi that's been part of the problem is the fortnite use case is very misleading right um a it doesn't sell tickets B it's a captive audience it's a it's a a fan reward right it comes out of a marketing budget it's not like they're having to get anything out of it other than how many people can we get on the server at one time to watch this thing and then how many aggregate views to your point afterwards can we create to generate new users and bring people in and blah blah it's it's a loss leader right and so it's a bit of a disingenuous example and I think it misleads a lot of musicians who think they should just be able to do a show in any old metaverse and get a bunch of people there right and I think the other I think the idea is quite the opposite I think that we can look at that model and I think that's the the the idea we need to take as musicians I think you need to find people who are building bigger worlds metaverses whatever that you can partner with very early on and build their Festival that you do every year or build a quarterly musical event or something with them that help support and on board I think we have to get in early and I think that's how we're going to meet people where they are you know right now the fans you're going to find over there are also going to be technology early adopters yeah and so when we see other metaverses or new metaverse projects pop up I frankly think they present an opportunity for artists to find their footing in the space and for people who are trying to build new metaverses to bring value ad like the bigger players do like these guys but for a more independent freethinking Forward Thinking community and frankly I think if you went on the fringes where it's a bunch of Builders and early adopters I don't think they want Travis Scott I think they want Kan Mayfield right I feel feel so what about so you know what about those platforms that already exist though right like so on one hand I think DCL is doing a lot of things right I think they have a lot of kind of big Brands um you know the Gucci and the Porsche and other kind of big brands in there that have done you know events that have done all right you know I don't think they've had huge amounts of people show up but they've had a decent audience and they're able toote their brand so de centraland I think in some ways has been doing this right um but looking at voxels where it's just so quiet and dead and I don't know what the situation is in the back end there but to your point it's also in that kind of n stage where someone like a cane Mayfield or anyone who's already got a fan base in web 3 could start throwing events in a voxal spot and maybe make it more valuable for people to come even if the values just entertainment and Community right having fun hanging out so I wonder like here's yeah I see it working more like this um Kane is in the Pepe community and building over there on bitcoin right jigar and rad audio and some of these guys have been building in bitmaps right and again I think it's meeting fans where they are so you you have a world that's built their native in that sort of land and you have an artist who's built this brand up na native in that land I think the two of them and the people who are fans of sort of both communities are are the group that put their head together and figure out how to make this thing compelling and I think little pockets of that a few little pockets of that are really the path forward I think we you know again you have a lot of people who want to talk about like Mass adoption and all these other things that's not really a concern right now a concern right now is just how how do we make this adoptable and Digest to anyone who may become a fan of my musical works tomorrow right right that's my only real concern and I think that when the path to the artist organically takes you from you know SoundCloud and where YouTube wherever else you may discover a guy like Kane and then you you you do Google Search and maybe you find handprints or you find the the stuff he's doing on the Pepe stuff and you go oh he does nft teas and you kind of come down that rabbit hole and and then from there you become a fan now you've sort of committed and you're a fan and you're in the world and maybe you bought one or two things or you you c a download or whatever it was and then they introduce you to the next step of like hey if you want to come further into this fandom you're already here in the world you've already onboarded with all of the technology that you may ever need as far as accessing this I don't need you to download a new wallet or create a new key or do anything like that right come over here and check out this thing I'm going have over here no doubt no doubt to yeah I I think it has to be way more um organic like that and I'll just say it real quick and I I I second that shout out to jigar because again as a developer right he he just did what Kane did as a music artist the grass is green is where you water it so find a place where you're comfortable and start watering it and tending to your lawn and that's what he did and originally it was on voxels and bit Maps came up and he made I mean he was just killing it in boxels and then bit Maps comes up and like he's so far a ahead and what he's building and what he's doing and the technology and now and he gets to take everything that he learned from this previous ecosystem and then blow that out to a whole another the level um so yeah I think it's the same thing I think you I think it's important for creators to stop looking for the flashy thing and work with people who are here building for the long term I think those are all people who are building here for the long term yeah jagar had a yeah I'd recommend everyone to go check out our latest episode with jagar I believe it was episode 98 or so but um definitely check that out because he did give a good background on bit map and what he's been building and um you know been very successful in being able to sell those plots but also actually helping the team conceptualize what a voxal based metaverse built on bitcoin could actually look like so he's actually right on the ground level of that entire metaverse project and I hope it does pan out uh as well as there so that foreseeing and that that right and that organic sort of community that he has combined with the organic community of support that aain has all those people are the people who can figure out how to make events in that space compelling those are all the people who could really put their heads together put their and put their feedback and input in which is how they've been building to this point you know Kane talks a lot of the stuff through he has ideas he talks through people he doesn't do every idea he has but you know the ones that he flushes out in his mind that seem executable he certainly executes them and I think that you just have to take that approach if you're gonna try and move over here in this in the web 3 space I think be patient don't look at again don't look at you know Steve Kai or any of these big names or whoever they are don't don't look at those those aren't those are anomalies of extraction and the reality is it's a slow burn it's a slow build just like anywhere else if you're trying to build a music career or trying to build up you know any kind of career frankly you got to start somewhere and just get really really good at at that thing and then start building anomalies of extraction I like that you gotta coin that one there AEM okay so when it comes to the metaverse I'm hearing like you don't think it's necessarily an either or between finding the fans in the metaverse which at this point I think is next to Impossible or even necessarily bringing your fans into a chosen metaverse because that is also a very large lift right it's really more about something genuine and just finding that right time and place and and kind of just being consistent with it I guess is what you're saying yeah yeah look I think I think that and I think when when when people come up with compelling ideas with new technology the the users will come the fans will come and so that's on all of us that that may be the creator of the space or it may be the artist who's trying to throw a virtual concert in the metaverse right you still have to step outside of the box a little bit and think about how from a fan perspective Ive can you make that compelling and there's a lot of tools you know listen man I think a lot of the stuff was right there poabs and you know like these proof of attendance then all of these different things they were it's all right there it's just it's going to take the right artists and the right team to start building in that direction and I'll say this you know like uh I we're working with an artist who a couple years ago we weren't working with him we're not we just advis a little but anyway he's a really good artist kid named obl Reed he's really dope two years ago he basically was nowhere he had no following and no anything and if you go look at him now it's like this dude's on he's like the next big thing he's going to blow let go that's Brick by Brick that didn't cost a lot of money that wasn't because he has some deep budget that dude is the most humble hardworking kid that I've met in probably a decade in the music business as far as art artist who are going to earn it and if that guy came over here in web three and built like he just built for the last two years in the traditional world where he went from literally nothing to having 100,000 plus monthly listeners and millions of streams on his songs and every label wants to talk to him and he's got tons of shows and he's everything every artist dreams about doing is living it right now and it's hard work it's it's just consistent and building through the parts where you where you lose faith and what does it take to convince an O read to to adopt some web 3 angle I think he'll I think he'll adopt something when it's organic for him and what he's doing right now the stuff he's doing with like the Run Club is more outside stuff and IRL stuff um and I think it's very organic to his ecosystem but he does like he also like tutors kids and he's really smart and so you know there's some elements of that that maybe you know that that can be incorporated I don't know yeah some tech education you know yeah yeah yeah I think eventually there certainly is a component but right now he's very in the sort of IRL space since that's where all of his momentum is but I I don't think it's you know I think my point though is that any artist who can get dope at their craft you have to move beyond your arrogance and convincing yourself that you're dope and you have to like genuinely get so dope that fans listening to music like y you're dope so like if you can get to there then then it goes back to the grass is green is where you water it right where they're after two years where they're making decent money maybe six figures they probably could have been at se seven figures by now if they would have put that same energy over here for two years and building with intention of things that create value and engage with their fans yeah so it's just about right time and place essentially then right and yeah and and you know you gota you gota well it's you got to see it it's not right time and place it's you have to decide you have to make a decision this is worth your intention and then just like you're trying to build up your fan base or your brand there you can do the same thing here you can do them simultaneously as part of your overarching strategy I'm working with an artist that we're getting ready to start executing his strategy and he will certainly have a presence over here um and you know yeah so look I I think that artists just have to make the the intentional decision that you're going to be here for the long term and that these Endeavors that you do over here aren't for funding right it's fan engagement it's building your fan community and the more you interact and transact with your fan Community the more you're going to understand how you can return value to them and creative ways whether it's t-shirts or hoodies or whether it's getting with a guy like jigar to do a bunch of you know metaverse clothes for you to wear for your you know for your thing to wear or what whatever it is there's tons of ways that you can interact and engage with them once you're here and they're here but I think you have to be very intentional and I think that artists in today's landscape have to make a decision right now at the very beginning on if they actually believe that streaming in its current form is going to be the business model of the future for them or not shouldn't be a business model for anyone should be a primary business model body generally speaking I don't think it's sustainable mainly because you know we talked about how much this guy pays himself but also the fact that it's been around for what 15 16 years and they've had one profitable year maybe this year will be number two so two profitable years and you did that by bundling with audiobooks and screwing over the artists who you built your brick house with so do I think it's a sustainable business model never thought it was a sustainable business model in 15 years couldn't figure out how to make a profit even though they did $150 million in Revenue wild it's never been a sustainable business model and so yeah I don't believe that it's a sustainable business model and I believe that um and now vinyls are making a comeback a lot of like you know well vinyls vinyls are making a comeback Luchi and gra and and Elliot gra are taking over the the label ecosystem they're doing some very forward thinkings techn technologically wise uh I think you have Robert who's the new CEO over at Warner who comes from the tech World who's also hiring people from Google and Netflix and some of the tech and Dev people that have come from that world I think we're about to see a parabolic shift in the entire thing okay and do you think gonna I think sorry well let me finish that statement I think that we're all gonna be lost if we don't have a solid transparent trail of data as to who are IP who is the actual original Creator so I hate to sound like a shill but song secure I didn't just build this thing for no reason this thing is here because we understand that the landscape is Shifting things are going to get more fractured and more digital and if we don't start removing the excuses for dsps and aggregators to say we didn't know how to match this up with its rightful Creator no we're going to just get deeper into the woods no more that's my two cents I love it I love it song secure to the rescue um and so you think Warner is really going to be leading the pack in this kind of digital asset conversation right especially when it comes to music and entertain they already are yeah they already are they already are I haven't looked at it that closely so well well here consider this I I'll consider this so back when the nft stuff happened we had all this conversation about all of the labels having to go back and amend agreements and get all these artists to sign all these agreements about NFP so everybody Warner Universal Sony did okay but only one company also included new technologies both known and unknown to us to to this day so well Universal had to go back for the last year and get all their artists to sign another amendment about their ability to be able to claim their voices with AI right to clone their voices with AI right they had to get them to sign another agreement amend their other agreement War wasn't worried about that they've already positioned themselves to be a tech company they've already positioned themselves by the the person who's running the company and the senior leadership that he's bringing in under him it's very and then you know and then again you you have Elliot gra taking over the Atlantic Records ecosystem the son of the guy who owns the largest competitor to Warner just took over one of the largest divisions within Warner music wow war music has acknowledged that they're going to be a tech company going forward and they're going to let War a universal be the music company and it's going to be interesting to see where it goes but I think we're in for a parabolic shakeup um where while nobody believes that Spotify is gonna go away I remember the time and I'm sure you may too when everyone said are you kid my space ain't going nowhere look how big many people use it yeah okay Myspace there was a time everyone thought Apple music was going to be the go-to and then Spotify eclipsed it and it was just like yeah yeah what does it say that uh uh Warren Buffett just dumped 60% of his position in apple music and apple was his largest holding in his SP I mean there's going to be a parabolic shift in all of this stuff and for people who don't see it coming that's fine but yeah what I want to make sure is that we have the tools and access to the tools and the technology which already exists to deal with and solve for some of these complex issues that are coming our way amazing amazing I love it artist intelligence labs.com check it out uh okay a couple more questions here as we wind down anyone watching on the live stream see your chance if you have any questions before we wrap up um so I'm just curious looking at this now we've talked through both gaming and kind of the music space in web 3 how much is there kind of an overlap between the two and how do you see CU I think something like a song secure and some of these projects you're working on probably have uh application in both kind of gaming and music right um so how much do you see kind of the overlap happening and is it kind of a natural partnership do you think that there will be platforms that kind of embrace the web 3 music angle specifically for gaming like for use in games and things like so far it's been um non-existent um I want to work with a lot of these companies and a lot of these companies have some inherent challenges so like Universe for example I would love to create the channel and we started we already built this sort of framework that would do this that would allow the game developers that are in that world to select music from people who opted in and use it in their games um but there is this inherent issue in that all of the assets that are deployed in the game are owned by the community so what do you do with music in a world like that where you can't license in something to where everyone takes ownership of everything that comes into that world so they have an inherent challenged inste of we and they'll be listen and and they'll be not to say that the mechanisms Within those ecosystems won't exist right where you'll be able to take something like a Sonic secure framework and go to your user base and say hey if you want to submit your music for use in this world and sort of or submit songs to be owned by the community and using this worlds or whatever you can and they can even track the use and in some ecosystems maybe record reward you with um proin or coins or whatever the the e the the the economy runs on in that gaming ecosystem so I think those internal Frameworks are there but I think we're all still navigating some of the complexities of how how do you tap that for the average music Creator who's not really coming to web 3 to give up all their rights to build up a catalog I don't want to lose that piece cuz it doesn't sound like that needs to be the case like is it for unio versus for example I know the whole case is the idea of like for the community by the community open license um definitely along all the creatives right but when you look at the actual game itself and the actual build that goes into it I don't think every single element of the game is completely open license and and available for taking right and I'll share something with you I'll share something with you all the music in the game yeah they bought and it's owned by the community wow they buy it they buy it from the composers and it's owned by the community and it needs to be that way and so that creates diff I I don't know if that's how they're going to do it going forward I know that's how we did it for the first year okay yeah that just sounds overly um honorous cuz like for one it extremely limits the amount of or the kind of music that you can get right because only certain types of um I think music uh creators will be okay with that right yeah in reality here's the thing in reality I think that their bigger challenge just to make the game Super compelling right and they're we're we're so close to literally being able to have an apple music or a Spotify plugin to your Twitch feed I mean they the technology exists to deal with the license and the clearance and all of that stuff it's just about whether these companies can actually play nice together to get this stuff resolved but either they'll play nice together and let this technology do what it does and get it resol so creators and game players and everybody can so in that in that world then everybody's musical experience in their game is curated by themselves or maybe it comes from their existing playlist that they already have aggregated um I I I think that from a Game Dev side what these guys from both um Cosmic Foundry and from random games the thing that I've appreciated is that it's as you can see it's easy to get bogged down and minutia of these details of how mechanisms work and lose sight of your goal right and their goal is to build Next Level really high quality games and assets for other developers to build games with and so they're focused and they're delivering on that I think because they're an ecosystem specially unse because it's an ecosystem where it also lends itself to other developers building their own game with these assets right I think that you also wind up having other developers who figure out other creative ways maybe they've got a buddy and they just want them to do the whole soundtrack for their game or maybe again maybe you work out a way where you play your music from an outside Source yeah that's it's like when you take the asset that you've purchased or that is open source and used it in a new project it doesn't mean every element of your new project also has to be open source right so it just seems there should be a solution there where you can actually have uh you know certain types of music that is compensated for and bought and not open source and not you know CCO or whatever right and frankly on my on a on a traditional you know let's say on a web three game on my audio dashboard I should be able to have multiple audio sources one being the internal narrative or voice from the game and I should be able to have one that's music whether I want to have that from whatever my music player is it's not like anybody else hears it yeah it's I'm hearing it in my ear I should be able to set those I should be able to set those so if I want my music real low and I want the guy in my ear to be volume up or if I want the guy to be down low and I want to hear the music more because I don't really care about what the guy's saying because I know what I'm doing in this game then I should have the freedom to do that and I think that when we push beyond the minutia of sort of where we are today in the ecosystem system and we look at the freedom that these things are going to bring for game developers I think we're going to see a lot of tools Niche tools and solutions that will come out in one game and then wind up being adopted across multiple games no doubt no doubt well that's what we're here for and I think unio verse is definitely uh a trend Setter in that space and there are some other web 3 games also pushing forward but the way that unse like you said is really trying to do something so open source and so Community Based is definitely pretty fascinating and I know they just had a a recent release of their latest hero so shout out to the UN overse continuing and the hoverd man with the [Music] hovercraft H the hoverd contest which was awesome I watched some of that it's and again like you know look I I was a I was one of the original founding team and an adviser for the first year and I really like those guys but more importantly um I like the project and and how they've been intentionally building and from the first time that we had talked about this long before they launched man they are true to their word really pushing amazing one of the real ones not out to rug Poole really doing it for the right reasons clear intention um very transparent very accountable and their Discord is always popping there's always people asking questions and giving feedback and things like that so it's definitely cool so yeah shout out to you uh so what's around the corner for a keen what are you looking forward to what are you kind of most excited about heading into 2025 it sounds like you've got a lot a lot on your plate yeah you know we're we're now so um you know with link media we we were Consulting and Advising a lot of projects the last few years and and um we took on big projects in in the hospitality world that were pretty compelling um and so now that we're done with that we're we're you know we're we've um you know we're launching we've recently launched distribution inside the artist intelligence Labs ecosystem um we're bringing our speaking series back um where we go out we speak to colleges and students and whoever wants to book us to have us come speak um David lwin and myself um and then and then um and then uh yeah I mean really that's about it right now we're incubating a few new projects we'll see where they go um and we're you know managing and Advising musical Talent still in some Legacy Estates and some new talent and uh we got a few projects that will be dropping some new music on later this year and early next year that should be really fun awesome awesome any uh IRL events that you're looking to do maybe at Art basil or nft NYC CU David lot one's pretty connected in NYC right you got that history and the Comm it would be awesome to be a to attend I'm sure you guys could do a CO satellite event with nftc or something any any plans around that um not really around NC um we're really trying to build it up the stuff we're gonna do is much more micro conference festival type stuff just very focused half day one day bring in a lot of our friends who are artists that people would recognize some of them will tell stories uh we have DJs that'll be doing DJ sets we you know it's we want to sort of you know I like all the focus and all the let's talk about nfts and dream and all that stuff but I also think that right now we need to be facilitating more networking where people can have deeper dialogue about how we actually execute some of these things you know I've spent since 2016 in the blockchain space and you know certainly I've seen my fair share of projects come and go um and I've been pretty lucky in having a pretty good run of success um in the projects that we were associated with and some of the things that we were doing so I would like to see some of more projects like that get launched I'd like to figure out how we get um in contact with more developers more people who are building in the music tech space specifically in this world and how we collaborate more on Solutions and support one another um there's a lot of you know there's a lot of fractioning in all these segments and a lot of competition and I think that's fine to some extent but at the same time I think that we're uh we're a collective that frankly could afford to support one another um and it's it's not like um you know Microsoft supporting Google here you know right exactly exactly you know we're we're all trying to free ourselves from all of that stuff and I I I've said it for a long time but let's be real intentional that we're not bringing old habits into this new space exactly exactly we like to say you know web 3 is about um abundance over scarcity and collaboration over competition you know these are two Paradigm shifts that I think web 3 is making more possible and really empowering us to do things differently and and really uh shake things up for the industries and all the disruption you just mentioned in the music industry is so exciting um and even in the gaming industry to a lesser extent as well um yeah I think there's a lot going on and I appreciate all of the insights hem it's been a really amazing chat do you have any other final words before we wrap up here no man that's it I appreciate you having me thanks everybody for watching and uh yeah man artist intelligence labs Media Partners I'm pretty easy to reach there we go check it out Keem beats online thank you so much again until next time we'll catch you all in the metaverse peace out peace everybody [Music]