blasé: Storytelling, Producing, Programming and how they relate to God | #29

Blasé is a musical artist and he is back for the second time on the podcast. Blasé has recently been working with a team to create their own music festival called “Lemon Zest Fest.” Tom and Blasé also discuss many different topics such as NFTs for music files, empathy, storytelling, religion, and fitness technology.

SPONSORS:
Drive Fitness: https://www.drivefitness.app/ to download the app
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Momma Bomma: https://linktr.ee/MommaBomma

EPISODE LINKS:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/officialblase/
Friends With No Benefits by blasé: music.official333am.com/fwnb
Lemon Zest Festival 2022: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lemon-zest-festival-tickets-20411711879
Stream blaséVitae here: https://ffm.to/vitae

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast Website: https://thedriveprogram.com
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-drive-program/id1504030059
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Jvfsmf48ft9KX3j1qqx3D?si=3073783906bf42b0
RSS: http://feeds.buzzsprout.com/951100.rss
YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6HiQoCw7lfOmGF_waGbUjA
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Transcript

Tom 0:00

Hello everyone, my name is Tom Driver, and welcome to another episode of the Drive Program. We have an extra special episode today, and it is also extra long, so sit tight. My guest is Blase. He's been on the show before, and one of the reasons it is extra special is that he actually was on a vacation in Florida. So if you've noticed recently, I've had to do almost all of my episodes online. Most of my network is still back in Virginia, and I'm really dedicated to doing one episode a week. So in order to kind of meet those requirements, I'm just been hopping on a lot of Zoom calls, catching up with people, and it's been going surprisingly well. But I can't hide the fact that I really, really do love the in-person interviews. It's just great to see one of my friends sit down, connect with them, and you know, the flow of conversation is just always really fun and exciting when I'm in person with somebody. So because I haven't done many in-person episodes, and I actually this was recorded a couple months ago. So I hadn't done an episode in a long time. I came in super hot and heavy, just very, very excited to sit down and talk with someone, and Blase and I talked for hours and hours and hours. This is actually a cut-down version from maybe a five or six hour long hangout. Yeah, man, we just had a great time. We talked about storytelling, we talked a lot about religion, we talked about NFTs and how those can be used in the music industry. We talked about a festival that he has been working on and I think is going to air sometime this summer. And a lot of other really interesting, cool topics. We actually talked about my app too um a bunch at the very end. So I had a great time talking and hanging out with him. I was so happy to see him here in Florida. I usually really listen a lot and and try to let my guests talk a lot. And as I mentioned, it was his second time on the show, and I hadn't done a podcast in a while, so I actually just talked my mouth off the whole time. I was talking so much. I feel a little bit bad as I listen back to it. But um yeah, since it is his second time, if you guys are wanting more blase, uh you can go listen to our first episode actually either before or after this, especially if you have not heard it. Because we do elaborate on a lot of the ideas from that first episode. You can watch them in either order, but there's definitely obviously a lot of connecting threads between those two episodes and Blase. It's kind of more of his introduction in that first episode. I am a huge fan of Blase's music. I think he's an amazing artist. So please go check out his music. I will provide the links to all of his music in the description along with his social media accounts. So go follow him and go listen to his music, guys. I don't have any other real updates except for just share the podcast with your friends and let me know if you have any friends that would make good guests on the show because I'm starting to do an episode every week, so I'm pretty much open to interviewing a lot of different people on a lot of different topics. Also, since this is an extra long episode, be sure to check out the outline in the show notes. So I'm gonna put timestamps with different sections of just different topics that we talk about throughout the episode. That way, if you don't have time to listen to the entire thing, you can just go check out maybe one of the sections you're interested in. Personally, I do feel like the middle part of this podcast is the most interesting. I hope you guys enjoy the episode, and here's a quick word from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Mama Bama and the Mod Canna. They sell C B D products online and are offering a 15% discount to listeners of the podcast. CBD can help relieve anxiety, reduce pain and inflammation, improve sleep, and have many other positive health benefits. Personally, I take C B D gummies every day to manage my stress levels and to help me fall asleep. Go to the modcana.com to shop for C B D infused products like gummies, lotions, tinctures, and smokables. Please use code DRIVE DRIVE at checkout to support the podcast and receive a 15% discount. I'm going to provide some educational resources about C B D in the show notes, but if you are unsure if you should be consuming CBD, please consult with your doctor. Thanks everyone. This is episode 29 of the Drive program with guest Blase.

blasé 4:53

I have.

Tom 4:54

Okay, with Jerry Seinfeld.

blasé 4:56

I yeah, so I know exactly what you're talking about. I purposely turned it on to have in the background, but I cannot say I've actively paid attention to what's happening in the show.

Tom 5:05

Do you know do you know why I'm bringing it up?

blasé 5:06

No.

Tom 5:07

Okay, so for listeners at home, Blase, I just picked him up, right? And we've been in the car for like an hour and a half, and we've just had all sorts of cool conversations in the car. And I feel like it's gonna be actually a good legway into the podcast, but it's been reminding me of that show because every episode, Jerry Seinfield gets a new car and he goes and picks up a comedian from their house, and then they drive to the coffee shop and they do little cutscenes of them in the car, and then some like cutscenes of them in the coffee shop. It's kind of like a podcast that that happens like halfway, half in the car, half in a coffee shop, and then they edit it down to like 30 minutes. The day we're having, I just feel like Jerry Seinfield. I picked you up. We're having cool conversations leading into the podcast. I don't know, it just feels exactly like that show to me. I wish we had a camera in the car and we could have recorded that part.

blasé 5:50

Like a GoPro or whatever. Because in the front, yeah.

Tom 5:52

We would end up with like six hours of content because like I'm gonna have to drive you home too. If there was a camera and mics in the car, that would be so cool.

blasé 5:58

You know, like a decompress section of the podcast at the end. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, no, I definitely, now that you mention it, that is that seems like pretty much what the last like what two or three hours were. So that's what's up.

Tom 6:10

Yeah, there's so many different ways I've thought of you could record a podcast. In the car is one. Me and my friend were also talking, what if you recorded a podcast while like a movie was playing, but you didn't play the sound of the movie, and you and the person talk about why you like each scene in the movie and stuff like that. Like you talk over the movie, but you don't talk with the sound on. But you pick a movie like Titanic that everyone's seen, or Wolf on Wall Street, or you know, The Lion King. You let the movie influence the conversation, but not quite take over the conversation. Obviously, you can have side conversations, but you can put it on YouTube with the movie playing on top of the podcast. Just like certain ideas like that, I don't know if I'll ever mess around with, but like there's so many, there's so many options you could do as far as just like recording a conversation, you know?

blasé 6:51

That seems a lot like the the format that YouTubers take. Yeah, I don't know if you've seen like the Spider-Man No Way Home. That's how they analyze all those, all the footage. They go frame by frame. It's not even playing the sound in the background, but they're paying attention to like the visual stuff, and then it brings up a bunch of side conversation. I like that format a lot, actually. It's pretty cool.

Tom 7:10

The new way of making content is just like reaction videos. Everyone's reacting to everyone's videos online. As long as you put your face next to someone else's content and like talk about how you feel about it, all of a sudden it's your content now. There's so many reaction accounts that have gone up. We were talking about this right before we pressed play, but I was showing you some Mac Miller songs. I was telling you, I almost made a Mac Miller podcast, right? And I spent a whole weekend basically sitting down and reacting to every single one of his songs. I was going through the lyrics on Genius, and then I would go and I would look at the samples because sometimes samples give you like a deeper meaning to the music. And so I sat there and I like kind of reviewed it and kind of reacted to it. And I have over a hundred hours of content of me going through like half of his discography and explaining like what every song means and why I like it and stuff like that. And then at the end of the weekend, I was like, bro, this is way too much content to edit. And I was like, I need to just focus on my podcast, you know, because I was rebranding and I was just messing around with ideas, you know. I knew I was probably just gonna change the name a little bit and keep it basically the same, but I was like, I don't want to feel tied to the fitness stuff. Let me just give this other idea a try. I created a YouTube channel called Mac Miller Fan Podcast, and I like tried it out for the weekend, and I was like, nah, it's not the right vibe. But I actually went down that path for a minute and like almost almost did it kind of weird, right?

blasé 8:24

Yeah, I mean it I think it's cool that you tried it. I'm definitely guilty of one of those people that like watching the reaction videos. And a part of it is probably you get some sort of affirmation for whatever your own belief is, I guess.

Tom 8:36

It's so interesting. I don't know why they're so popular, but I that that's why I did it because when Faces came out, the album I was telling you that it used to be released in 2014. I wanted to feel like I had listened to it for the first time. And so I spent that weekend watching tens of 20 of reaction videos to this to this album. I would watch them like 40 minutes, an hour, like almost the whole album, like watching these people react to it. It makes you feel like it's the first time. I don't know why, but it's so it's so special to see someone experience your favorite content.

blasé 9:06

I think you're right. I think that that is kind of the feeling. I wasn't sure until you just said it out loud why maybe I liked it. I think that might be it. You know, like that feeling when you like show someone a new song and I was just about saying the reaction, it's like the same thing, but there's like thousands of videos.

Tom 9:21

You must know the feeling of when you show someone a new song, like the first time you showed your best friend red dress, and you're like, hey, I just finished this. When you're creating something, you get so close to the details. When I'm editing a podcast or when you're putting together a song, you get so worked up in like this one lyric or this one like hi-hat or this one just sound, or it's like one percent of the whole song, and like you get worked up in it, and then you can't really see you lose track of the big picture. You're like, I don't know if this song is even good anymore because I I didn't like this tiny part, but uh, I don't know. And then you show someone else they're vibe into it, and you're like, it is it like reaffirms, you're like, Oh shit, it is good, it is good, it is good. I just fucking I got too worked up about this this one part, you know. It's kind of hard to see it clearly, you know.

blasé 10:01

For sure. I mean, there that exactly what you described happens all the time. And like sometimes I needed for people to confirm what I already thought was good is good, and sometimes I feel like something's bad, but I need to put it in front of other people to see if they notice it as something bad or just different, you know what I mean? I feel like that goes into a lot of things. I've had this conversation with a lot of people where they kind of when they're working on whatever the craft is, it doesn't necessarily have to be music, but they're they've been looking at it for days, months, weeks, whatever, and they know every flaw in it because they're the ones producing it at the end of the day. The perfect example is the song I'm working on right now. There's like 16 versions of it. Like what you were saying, oh, like maybe the hiat needs to be louder here, maybe the vocal needs to be louder here, whatever. Somehow we managed to pump out 16 versions, and I'll show it to people like my brother, who's not musically savvy to the point where he cares about those nuances, but I just wanted to show them to him and see which one he liked better. And at the end of it, he just thought I was playing the same recording on repeat. He didn't realize I was shuffling between different versions.

Tom 11:04

So for like he didn't even know. He didn't know.

blasé 11:06

He was like, Why do you keep playing it over and over? I was like, I was trying to like see which one you liked better, but depending on the need, I feel like you can get that first reaction response from someone and turn it into something destructive. As a fan of music, seeing other people appreciate what you already appreciate is a big deal. But in my specific context, I use it as a way to vet whether I'm in my head too much about something or not. And you know, so I definitely see the value going both ways.

Tom 11:32

Fun fact. I'm sorry if I just randomly rip out fun Mac Miller facts, but like I said, I spent I spent too much time that one weekend redoing all this research, and I don't talk to many musicians, so I might as well put these facts out while I while I'm talking to you, which is in Swimming, the opener song Come Back to Earth, Mac rewrote that song 17 times, and then he said he used the original version.

blasé 11:54

It happened.

Tom 11:55

And so that was like really close to like the amount of iterations you had on that one song. Um, I wonder if that's a sweet spot number, like 15 to 20, where you're like, okay, I can't make 30 more versions of this, you know.

blasé 12:05

Well, sometimes this is happening currently, is where I'm at with the track I was referring to before. I'm very happy with where it is, but I'm like, I'm not in a rush. I'd rather get it done right. So I keep asking, because I I'm working with um Mike, who I've mentioned before, who I do a lot of like the at least the engineering mixing stuff with. If we're not actually on the song together, I kind of you know call on him to help me out with the sound design of things. Make a version where we try this, make a version where we try this, and so on and so forth. And then at the end of the day, we have we we started with something I was already comfortable releasing, but then I have these extras just to experiment a little further. So sometimes it's just for the sake of feeling out a vibe if you felt it. I've definitely had situations where I tried something, it didn't work, and I'm like, I'm glad I kept a copy of the original and you can roll with that. So I don't know about Mac Miller's case specifically, but I hear stories like that all the time. I think when you're doing it as your full-time job, you have nothing better to do than to like ask what if for like every little thing, you know. So if you have the opportunity to experiment with that, you might as well.

Tom 13:08

So this is kind of um a marketing thing I did, but it ties in. I made about 90 to 100 iterations of the new podcast art cover. So uh the podcast used to be like red, and then I put a bunch of iPhones on it for season two. I don't know if I'm even gonna do seasons, but this is gonna be the third year that I've had the podcast, and I've switched over to like the blue cover art, and I've changed the name and stuff like that. And it's pretty simple, but I did so many versions of that, and it got to the point where I was like, bro, I don't know. But you go down these weird paths, it's almost like you're in a hallway, you turn left or right, you're like blue or red, and then you go blue, you turn right. Okay, font, white or black, you go white, and you then you turn another hallway. Then you go back to red though, and do I want white or black font? And then you go black, and then now there's all these hallways that you're going down, and then eventually you have to be like fuck. Then you gotta close each door on the way back in to like figuring out what the best version of it is. It's almost like a family tree or network of different iterations, and and none of them are necessarily better or worse, and like you can't even tell, and then you just have to pick a couple of them and go to someone else because you're crazy, you've been working on it for a hundred hours, and you're like, which one of these is better? And they're like, Oh, obviously blue, and you're like, Okay, like you're like, I didn't know, I just tried too many things and I got confused.

blasé 14:17

Yeah, I definitely know ex exactly what you're talking about, and part of it for me is a fear of losing past work. I'm obsessed with version control, I back up things aggressively. So if anything tampers with that process, I get very antsy because what if I did like the old one? Now I don't have that to go back to. Someone told me once if you didn't have a problem with it originally, roll with it and keep going. That's something I'm actively working on. You know, when you're like a young creator and you're just trying to put yourself in front of as many people as you can with like quality work or whatever, sometimes you can't afford the constant back and forth between versions like that. As a creative, you're prone to keeping all those versions. Have you ever done this thing where you're like, I'm gonna screenshot this and look back at it later kind of thing? So it's like it's sort of like that. You do it to be safe. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but in terms of aiding your indecisiveness, I think it's a terrible habit to have. It's kind of a balance.

Tom 15:08

No, but I feel like there's some happy medium though, and it it depends on the art, right? But I feel like there is a way to actually build in public and redesign in front of everybody while you're doing it. I think this kind of started with coding, right? We we talked about uh coding in our last episode. Back in the day, you would release like a picture, it'd be like this artwork, and then it's like it's done, right? And and if you think about the apps we're currently using, like mobile apps, as being like these pictures, let's just pick like Instagram, right? Over a decade, that picture it changed in our hand, right? It's like its own piece of art, all of a sudden the buttons change, and like they had a discover page, and then all of a sudden you can do stories, and then all of a sudden you can do reels and IGTV, it's ever evolving right in front of us. And I feel like that version control, you know, GitHub, the way that that coders actually develop allows a system for almost all art to work this way. Kanye West actually did this with his album, Life of Pablo. He released it and then he updated it and updated it. By the end, he was making very small changes, but almost for an entire year after it was out, he was continuing to update it, including adding like another song. For my podcast, I can actually go back and update the files and things like that. There's some podcasts I told you I split into two parts, and then a year later I went and made them one part, or there's some podcasts where I have re-edited it and put it back in, or taken it down. Certain ones had certain album arts, then I put a different one in. I could also go back and change the theme music for the podcast that we did two years ago with the new music if I felt like it. I could redo the intro. Kayla, uh, she got married since one of the episodes, so I went and updated her name. Podcasts are very updatable, you know what I'm saying? Music's a little bit different because people get really fixated on a song they like, and if you change it, then it upsets them. But on the album level, I feel like you can add more songs later or or subtract them, you know, like a deluxe version would be a version of an updated artwork, you know.

blasé 16:55

So what I was gonna ask, and you know, specifically on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever, whenever I've released music, I get stats associated with each song. Not that the numbers is like the defining characteristic of you know what I care about, but I like looking at the numbers. If I had to like replace one track with an updated version, there's a risk of me losing the stats, unless you like, you know, work with Spotify to sync up the stuff. With your podcast, do you have that issue where you had stats, you replaced the up or you like make updates to an episode. Does it keep the stats that you had before?

Tom 17:28

Yeah.

blasé 17:28

So is it directly from Spotify or whatever distributor service are they keeping track of it?

Tom 17:33

Buzz Sprout is keeping track of it, yeah. As long as Buzz Sprout shoots out to all the podcast platforms and say, like, hey, this is this is episode two released on this date, put a placeholder right there, right? Then Spotify is like, okay, and it keeps track of that episode. I can go in and I can change the title, the description, I can change the file, the audio file itself, you know what I'm saying? So I can change anything about the conversation. But the thing is, sometimes it happens with the order. It basically just keeps track of the date you posted it, right? So I remember one time I was looking at the order at my podcast, and I had released a solo episode where I reviewed Leonardo da Vinci that I actually I took it off so no one could listen to it anymore. Talk of talk about editing things, and I had one with Frank, right? And the one with Frank, we just talked about like goofy stuff, um, and we just kind of had a fun time. I mean, cool stuff, but goofy stuff, and I wanted to pull it back in the track list, and so I I actually switched these two everything. Say Frank's episode had 30 views, the solo one had 10 views. I switched the titles and I switched the audio files and I switched the description and everything so that one looked like it was posted before the other one. And what that did on the back end, it messed up my stats because now I don't really know how many times people have listened to all each of those two.

blasé 18:43

That's my that's the thing I get scared of. When you release music, they generate like unique IDs for every track. I actually had a friend recently, he found out there was like some sample not cleared in one of the things he put out, and he took it down, and I reached out to him because I was like, hey, like I don't know if you noticed this, but the song I usually go to to listen to for this artist just was like missing all of a sudden, and it was like one of his biggest songs. Kind of out of concern, I was reaching out, and he was like, Yeah, I had to like take it down, and I'm in the process of uploading a new version, and I was like, Oh, that's kind of scary. Like I said, it was one of his best performing songs, and you know, is everything gonna be okay with it, or do you have to start a st start from scratch? But then I remembered there are some scenarios where if you just re-upload the new one with that same unique ID as the original, then it just syncs it up by itself. I have clean and explicit versions of certain tracks, and I upload them as two independent tracks, and Spotify or like whatever service you're using kind of know to put them together. And I think that's just like a combination of the right metadata, whether that's like the artist's names, the titles, or whatever it is. I think that's kind of how they figure it out. The podcast thing, they should have a system to allow you to make those updates, but I feel like it it does get a little questionable at times. Which I mean, clearly, if if you've had run into that problem before, then you know, you know where I'm coming from to some extent with that. But I guess it it it depends. If if the stats matter to you, that's like a big deal. But if if you're just doing it to get the content out there, you know, it's a it's a give or take thing.

Tom 20:10

Yeah, in this scenario, I think it depends if you nip it in the butt early on. If you release it and then a week later you're like, crap, I want to change something, then it doesn't matter. But if it's a song that's been out for a while, I feel like you shouldn't mess with the stats at that point because that version got that many stats, not this version. But yo, this actually segues perfectly into the NFT about music conversation that I wanted to have. And we talked about a bunch of cool shit in the car. This is one that we started talking about it, and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we need to stop. We need to we need to hold on to this one for sure. And obviously, all these web 3 technologies uh using the blockchain are like brand new, and so no one fully understands what's about to happen. And I'm just now finding out how it all works. But please correct me if I'm wrong because I feel like you kind of know how it works, I kind of know how it works. We're gonna have a conversation about it. I'm not the expert on blockchain. I have some interviews lined up in the future where I'm gonna learn about it. So this is a little bit cutting some corners for me, but I do want to have a big conversation about how it could be applied to things, including music, right? Sure. Since you're you're a tech guy, you're a music guy. So I'm gonna explain how I think blockchains with music could work, and then correct me if you think it's something else, or just like we'll bounce some ideas back. But if I say anything that you're like, that's technically not possible, let me know, right?

blasé 21:22

Say uh right back at you.

Tom 21:24

So obviously, with the new NFTs, it's like a digital image, right? The most popular NFTs are a bunch of different iterations of the same thing. My friend's in like a snake NFT club, basically, where there's a hundred different versions of this same snake, and they all have different colors and hats and things like that, you know? So they're kind of a collection together. And if you own one, I feel like I I think it might work like this where you own the only version of that one, right? And using the blockchain, it can um validate that this is your like you're the only one that owns this digital file, right? And so for the first time ever since Web 2, you can just own a domain name. Now you can. Using tokens, you can own any digital asset online as long as it's it's on the blockchain, it has a digital token, no one else can technically own it, right? So people are making all sorts of money just off these literally JPEGs because it's like an investment. The same people that were getting into crypto and they were they were trying to find these shitty crypto coins because maybe those coins will blow up, they've attached that logic to like JPEGs, right? And people have made millions of dollars. If you bought one of those first 100 snakes, you're rich now. For finance guys, they're really into this just from the investment perspective. So from moving forward, this technology can be applied to anything. There's this guy named Gary V on TikTok who really thinks music is gonna be the next big thing. So I'm hoping maybe since you're technical, maybe we can come up with some ideas today and you can actually implement this, right? But here's what I'm thinking like you know how you said you had 16 versions of that song and they're all a little bit different. Yeah. So imagine you have the files on your computer called version one, version two, all the way to 16, and you you picked your favorite one, you put that one on Spotify, right? Then you had an auction and you sold the other 17 files, like the dot MP3 player with blockchain technology on it, right? And these 17 fans of yours back when you're a small artist, they buy those files, right? And it's they're all different variations. Then on Spotify, the main one blows up. Everyone likes that song. They all bought it for 10 bucks, but now all those files are worth millions of dollars. Like imagine if we'll do Olivia Rodrigo because she just blew up. Imagine with if Olivia Rodrigo made 10 different versions of driver's license and she didn't know which one to actually pick, and you were the owner of version five, and then she blew up, bro. You would have so much money. And because not a lot of people are making their music files into NFTs, you're gonna get all these finance bros just buying them because they're hoping that they're gonna get big. So you're gonna be able to make a bunch of money all of a sudden. Like, no longer do you have to even go through Spotify to make money.

blasé 23:58

Yeah, so I mean, kind of to go off of that, it is definitely something I've looked into. And actually, a few friends of mine who are also musicians have looked into it, at least from a music perspective, it's sort of like an incentive to keep fans engaged. The biggest fans are the ones who somehow were able to like make your, you know, your art a part of their life story. If they can get a chunk of that somehow, you know, it becomes priceless. It's like collecting baseball cards. There's like like a pristine, original version of whatever player baseball card can be worth a lot of money down the line, you know, the rarer it gets. And I feel like it's sort of that same notion. My understanding is blockchaining is just immutable transaction history. You know, like when you apply for like loans and stuff, you don't need to bring a bill to prove that this is your address and you pay this bill at this address, and you don't you don't need to show like government ID. You don't have to prove yourself. It's already there and it's already set in stone. That's basically how I'm interpreting it. The NFT is the perfect way to like monetize, you know, whatever you know, creative work you want to using that technology. A lot of people have said like, even do it with artwork, even do it with like any digital asset that comes to mind. The one thing I don't understand about NFTs is how they increase in value over time. Because, like what you were saying, what if you have 16 versions and one of them blows up? Technically, at that one version, that one master that is bringing in the revenue. I don't know what that means for like those other versions. Like, how did they get money from it aside from it being rare and maybe down the line? You know, like some people like steal hair from an artist at a show or something and they sell the hair online. I feel like that's the only way people can bring value, like in that specific example you gave me. I don't know if you have any other insight on that. I personally don't.

Tom 25:35

It's exactly the way it used to work when people would sell art back in the day. In fact, this is another segue we'll jump on later, but you know, they say the story behind the art is more important than the art itself. I always go back to him, but Kanye is a perfect example of someone who creates a story around his albums, like in the public eye, and that makes his albums more exciting, right? So back in the day, most of the artists would actually die broke, right? And then after their death, their art would get infamous, you know. So it really depends. It could go down in value, right? You could lose money on an NFT for sure. But let's say that you buy my first NFT and it's shitty. And then 10 years from now, though, I I practice my artwork and I'm all of a sudden an amazing artist, and I draw something that no one's ever drawn before, and someone's like, Whoa, I'll give you a million dollars for that. Then your first one that you bought a mine that sucks is now gonna go up in value because of the artist itself. You know what I'm saying?

blasé 26:29

So does like the market kind of dictate that value? That's kind of what I don't understand. Who decides what how like how do you decide that the value for an NFT goes up?

Tom 26:37

That's when the blockchain comes in handy. So let's say I um an artist over those 10 years, I made a hundred NFTs or JPEGs or whatever, right? And you bought number one, right? And when I made my second one that was better, it made the number one go up in value, and then you sold it to somebody, and then I made the third one and she sold it to someone for a little bit more. And every time I made another pitcher, whoever owned my current one sold it because they had a chance to make some money, right? Then the blockchain will show a history of it sold for one dollar, two dollars, three dollars, four dollars, five dollars, six dollars. And so, because of that, whenever the guy who comes along who wants to buy for seven dollars, he's like, is this really worth seven dollars? He can look at the blockchain and say, Well, six different people all bought it. Like, I can see that there was six other people who thought that this wasn't a worth their investment and their money. So I'm gonna have faith, you know. And if you have a piece of art that's been sold a hundred thousand times, then the next guy who comes along is like, oh shit, this has value. And that's kind of the whole idea behind crypto and web three is things have value if we assign them value. Money, we don't print, we don't back it in gold, right? There's there's no more printed money. That's the whole like idea behind Bitcoin, is that money is not tangible anymore, so it's just an idea. Therefore, you could say the same thing about the American dollar. Why does that have value? Well, because we all agreed as a society that it has value, you know. And that's the only fucking reason, you know? And so the same thing goes with these damn JPEGs. Everyone's like, why are these JPEGs worth so much? Because we decided they are. That's it. We literally decided that if if your JPEG is attached to the blockchain, it is more valuable than the one that just was copied on someone's computer. And if we all agree on that, then it's a thing now. And they're predicting music files are gonna be the next big wave. I'm telling you, a year from now, you're gonna have a bunch of finance bros trying to buy random artists like yours music files in hopes that you blow up later and that they made a big score off an investment. They're investing in you, you know what I'm saying? If you're attached to this blockchain and it it's certified that you made this song, then they're investing in you as a person. And you will, if you do well in life, then you'll bring the value of all your art up.

blasé 28:39

That's interesting that you mentioned that because I have like terabytes of unused versions of things. And this and I wonder, I wonder how valuable that could be. Another thing I'm wondering, not just for like the general population consumption, but like for other producers or musicians, I wonder how much value it'd be to have the individual tracks for a song, too. Yeah. Part of the art of it is taking a bunch of separate instruments and vocals or whatever and putting it into one. Myself included, I feel like a lot of producers specifically are just desperate to get the a cappella of some hip-hop track or like just the 808 or the drum sample for some other song or whatever. Not even to like use it, because you know there's some copyright issues with that, but just to like learn how that specific artist did something, those individual tracks are super, super valuable. I mentioned Mike before, the way he learns things is he screenshots when these artists are on live or like post a picture in a studio, he zooms in on the audio outboard gear and he mimics the settings on hardware, and that's how he learns things. So, like having something like an NFT to kind of be like an olive branch where like everyone can make some money out of it, I feel like that would be kind of cool.

Tom 29:48

I mean, first of all, yeah, isn't it cool that the problem you were saying with those 16 versions actually segues in it's the solution to your problem is making money off of them through NFTs, and then you feel like, oh, at least someone's appreciating each version of the song, right? That's good.

blasé 30:02

That's a cool idea.

Tom 30:03

It fixes that uneasiness you have about they're just sitting on my computer. Well, now at least one guy owns it and he thinks it's an investment, whether it is or not. Someone is appreciating version 12, you know what I'm saying? At least, but and I I didn't even think about the different versions until you brought that up. I was just thinking of one version, but then I realized, oh shit, all your different versions are very close to these groups that have been forming around different variations of images, right? But then the whole educational thing, I feel like that ties back into coding because the tech industry has just been exploding with innovation because everyone puts their code on GitHub, everyone learns from everyone. That's why you they say everyone should learn how to code because it's not like you're in a test, right? You always have the internet, you can always Google it. As long as you learn the basic principles, you know that all the code that was ever written is on the internet for free for everyone. The hardest thing you could just Google, as long as you know what it's called, you can find it, right? And so that allows for the coding community and like overall the tech industry knowledge base to just be it evolving so fastly. Well, that technology, even though it's it's different than code, it can be applied to everything, including music, including art and things like that. So, yeah, your your friend can actually buy, like if all these music files are online and people are purchasing them and stuff and selling them like their art, you could at least view it and like see how it's done. And if you wanted to purchase it and really download it on your computer and mess around with it, there's not just one of them. So you could actually put out a hundred copies of version one, a hundred copies of version two, a hundred copies of version three, and so there could be a thousand people running around with your different iterate because there's no limit to how it can scale. You could also do a million, and like this is where some of these cryptos they differ. One crypto will say we print a thousand coins every day, and then the next one says we put a cap, you can only have a hundred coins every day. Those kind of things change the market, it changes the volatility of coins. And that's why people make fun of the US dollar, because we're just printing more and more of this stuff, it's worthless. But as long as you put some cap on it, then it becomes valuable. You can actually scale this out and just release thousands of versions, and that's the kind of thing that the blockchain allows you to do. So now if Kanye put out every song on Donda version, and he had five versions of each, and he made 10,000 copies of each version, just put them on the market for people to buy, and people like you can actually download the full file and start learning. Like, how did this guy make make this song? Bro, so much value is gonna be transferred. And that's why you were like, Well, what is the value in it? That may that maybe that is, you know what I'm saying?

blasé 32:27

I was trying to think if I knew anyone relatively mainstream who did that. I think Tori Lane's made like a million in a fraction of a minute because he's going through some of his own random drama because of the Megan thee stallion thing.

Tom 32:38

That's the story behind the art, right?

blasé 32:40

Story behind the art. So, like, you know, whether or not you like his music, having a copy of it is being a part of that history, I guess. Yeah, I'm personally not into that kind of hype, I guess, but like making a million dollars from one album, even the best artists, it takes them like a few weeks, if not months, if not years, to see the return of investment for those type of projects. And he just did it with a click of a button. So I was like, that's crazy how he did that. But like the the the the difference is like there's like a finality to it, I guess. As long as you set yourself up and value it appropriately up front, you know, you can just could do that repeatedly. And and I I definitely see the value in it. And I was trying to think how could I apply it to myself, but this version thing that we talked about, bro.

Tom 33:24

You can see it, right?

blasé 33:25

A lot of things just fired in my head at once just now.

Tom 33:28

Bro, so think about this. First of all, yeah, Tori Lane's I think each of his each of his NFT versions of his songs are worth like $30,000 now. There might not just be one version out there, like I don't know what's the cap he put on him, but he could decide. And so it could be a hundred files out there that are worth $30,000. That's a lot of fucking money. And then the thing is, it's it could be Tori Lane's fans that maybe bought, you know, the first couple, but for the most part, especially with these JPEGs, it's not music lovers or art lovers that are going to it. It's these finance bros that know that it's an investment, you know what I'm saying? And so since not many people are doing NFT songs, if you just start making some, people will start buying yours for like 10-20 bucks. Not a lot, but I'm just saying people want to own NFTs because they don't know what's the next thing to blow up. You know what I'm saying? They just don't know. So finance bros with a lot of money just buying random shit. Like the they'll they'll buy the ugliest art or the lamest thing, as long as it's it's connected to the blockchain right now because they don't know, they just don't know, you know what I'm saying? And so you have just enough followers, I feel like on Spotify, where you're gonna be able to like sell them for like 10, 20 bucks. And if those for some reason go up in value, well then you then you're gonna start making more and more money. You could literally be bad at making music, and we both know you're good at making music. You just have to know how to put it all together because people are still figuring this shit out, you know.

blasé 34:44

I was just sort of thinking about it. I feel like the NFT approach is also more accessible. A big reason why I've understood artists are using NFTs is again, so fans can be a part of that. It can include the the artist in their story somehow, and vice versa. The way I've been doing it, and like a few of my friends have been doing it, is by selling merch to people. Especially over the last year or two, I've I've got a lot of fans that kind of pop up in like the parts of the world that I do like advertising in. And a lot of those are countries where it's more expensive for for me to ship it there than it is for the item itself. So I just don't open up selling merch in those areas, but I always feel bad because some of those people are the most loyal fans I have. They'll message me every day being like, Thank you for putting out the hangover, thank you for putting out red dress. Now I feel shitty because every time I put out do like a merch giveaway or something, I know I sort of have to exclude them because the cost of shipping stuff over there is very difficult. For me on my budget at least. Like other artists, you know, that's probably not an issue. But like the NFT thing is like another cool way to kind of reach more people that previously were kind of ready and willing to jump on the opportunities like that, but there's just no accessible way for me to give that opportunity out.

Tom 35:53

No, so yeah, the merchandise was kind of the the way artists could make extra money by their music, right?

Tom and blasé 35:59

And I think that's like the main way. The main way, yeah.

Tom 36:02

And and that's actually part of the problem is that merchandise also has to be good quality. It also has to feel good, it also has to be something you want to wear. I bought these sweatshirts with my logo on them for cheap or t-shirts. I don't like the way they f they rub against my chest because I went cheap on them and they suck, you know what I'm saying? So you have to actually do high-quality shit. That's why someone like Kanye is able to actually make money on those shoes because he spent the time partnering with someone like Adidas and put together really good shoes. They're also made by your favorite artist, but they're actually really good quality and they're done really well. And what they do is they'll, if you notice, he'll release 10,000 pairs of this one red shoe, and then three months later, he'll release 10,000 pairs of the same shoe, but it'll be blue. Instead of just releasing millions and millions of shoes, he'll put a certain cap on it, and that's and that's what we were saying. That's what assigns value is the limitation to it. So there's all these variations of a certain shoe, and you're like, oh, I have the red one, oh, I have the shiny red one, or whatever your thing is. Yeah, except for shoes depreciating value, just like every other real asset. But NFTs, they'll never be worn out, they'll never be lost, they'll never, you can't lose it really. It can't start falling apart, you know, if you wear it too much or listen to it too much. It's such a better investment than than anything in the real world, actually.

blasé 37:16

Yeah, I mean, you brought up the concept of limitation in general. I feel like that's actually a huge obstacle for people. I'm speaking strictly in the music industry. One, because it's such in and out with the trends sort of industry, I guess. It might feel good in that moment, but like a shoe, it could wear out over time. You could get bored of it and then just kind of toss it away. So, like having something that's a little more sustainable is always a good thing. Specifically, again, on that limitation theme, I've noticed even things like merch giveaways, if you have them regularly, people don't value them as much. But if you like strategically place them, kind of like what you were saying with the Kanye thing, he doesn't just have a million from the get-go ready to like ship or whatever, he does them in little chunks and makes the proper changes that he knows people will kind of like engage with properly and like really invest in. And you know, especially over the pandemic, I think we talked about it last time, but I use the pandemic time to kind of test the waters on a bunch of different ideas and what people would be more responsive to versus not, and that was like one of them. You have to play your cards right as far as supply and demand is concerned. Otherwise, tipping the scales in one direction or the other too much doesn't really benefit you or who you're trying to appeal to, which is in my case the listener. The NFT stuff we're talking about seems like a very good, happy medium for all of that stuff. And like you said, it's it's it's digital, so it doesn't degrade over time, unless you like lose your laptop that it's saved on or whatever. That's not really an issue in today's day and age, I feel like. But yeah, that's I mean, it's very cool stuff. I I definitely need to do my research now because this just got a lot of gears, gears turning for me.

Tom 38:44

Yeah, man. We could definitely talk about NFTs for three hours. I feel like I need to get down with some experts who know NFTs, but maybe if you go and you look into this and maybe work on this and you come back and you actually own one, that would be a crazy next podcast to do, right?

blasé 38:57

I have I have a handful of people that I already know of are doing it. I'll reach out to them and I'll be ready. I'll be ready for the next one.

Tom 39:04

The cool thing is like I feel like it's gonna actually happen for you. It probably is not gonna be too hard for you to figure it out. I know you're technical, I know you have some friends who could help you with it. You already like making music, you already like trying to bring those two worlds together as much as possible. So I have faith you're gonna put it together. I'll end this topic by saying if you put out an NFT version of Red Dress, I'll buy it for like 10 or 20 bucks, which is crazy because I already have it for free, right? That's what's uh and especially if you put out an extended version that only I owned, I would buy it for like 50 bucks or something.

blasé 39:32

I can get you. I'm I need to talk to Mike. I've been telling him to like, like I said, I'm big into backing things up and all that fun stuff. I need to get the backups from him because he's the one backing them up right now, even giving you like the individual pieces that make up the whole. Currently, that sounds very appealing to me.

Tom 39:49

I don't even care about it, but guess what? If I think, and I do think this, that you're gonna at least get more popular than you are today, you know, in the future, somewhat more popular, I think you have a lot of potential. But like, I'm confident you're at least gonna have more followers 10 years from now, or more listeners, right? I would have five years from now. So I don't even know what I would do with that file, but I would just from a financial investment, I'm confident in who you are, but you told me about how it'd be useful to someone else. I could buy those files and and I know that that song's good, that it's like underrated. So then I could buy those files and you'd be like, You sure you want to buy this for 50 bucks? I'll say yes, because I know I can sell it for five grand a couple years from now.

blasé 40:28

I guess that's like the same concept of buying stocks too. Exactly. You have to like kind of notice the trends before they get really big and peak. Exactly. And then you know, act on it. So that makes sense.

Tom 40:38

They say crypto made everyone their own bank, and NFTs for music will make everyone their own label.

blasé 40:43

It's going that way. And you know, I talked about my own label in the last thing. It the idea is to be like a stepping stone into like aiding your own individual label entity, I guess. You know, the world is going in that direction, so it's kind of dumb to not also go along with it for the ride.

Tom 40:59

You know, so let's segue into your label then, because you last time we talked, we're trying to put together like a label in the old sense of the world, not with this new NFT idea, right? So tell me about how that's going and and what you guys have been working on.

blasé 41:12

So when we last spoke, I was trying to not in a traditional sense of record label, but I was trying to build in the form of like a subscription service where you know you pay some minimum fee and we'll basically create a structure for you to build off of. We're not like loading money out to people and saying, make us the money back with the money we loaned you or you owe us. It wasn't meant to be like that. It was more like we'll give you guidelines, we'll give you deadlines to help you release on a more regular schedule. Like in today's day and age, anyone can do anything. Like you said, if you just Google it or YouTube, it all that information is available to you. The problem is the lack of structure. So we were like, let's provide that form of structure for people. The problem is people don't like being told what to do. We gave it a shot and it worked for one person. We did like a trial run for a group, and they really liked it. We checked everything on the checklist, it worked according to plan. We had a successful release for that artist, but it was a trial, and then when we told them we wanted to start charging, it was like something small, like $10 a month or something. No more than like a Netflix subscription, you know. But they were like super not into it. And we had we even tried to throw in a bunch of options to make it more affordable for them. I guess that's sort of what they say about like college these days. You have so many options that you almost don't know what to do now because you have too many options, and then people get intimidated by that and just back out. So I think I mentioned this last time. The two basic services we provide for people are like helping them with the final mixing and mastering of their songs, and then the other side is the marketing side of their music. So, what's actually been happening the most since we last spoke is the marketing side of things. So now I actually do have a pretty decent rotation of anywhere between five and ten, five to ten artists that like continuously come back to me for promoting whenever they have a new project out. And that's kind of where the label itself is making most of their money. The next big thing for the label is a festival that we have coming. And when I say label, it's more like I'm running the logistics and financial stuff for it for this festival. For legal and tax purposes, I'm running it through the label. But that's kind of where the efforts are at right now, as far as the label is concerned.

Tom 43:20

Yo, what you just said gave me another NFT idea. I have to I have to share it. And then don't let me forget, we're gonna return to the festival. Okay. So the idea was you said that people didn't know, they didn't want to pay, right? They didn't know what option to pick, things like that. And and usually it's artists that aren't making money that need your help, right? So to bring it back to the NFT idea, I can't let it go, which is part of what makes NFTs in blockchain really cool is these smart contracts, right? So if you figured out how to NFT your music, then with your label, one of the services you could offer it could be we'll mix and master it and we'll market it and we'll attach it to the blockchain for you. I'm sure once you figure out how to do it, it won't. Be very hard, so you can just set up a smart contract and attach their song to a blockchain, right? So it'll go out to Spotify, and then one version will go to this NFT blockchain, and you can put a smart contract in there that says every time this file is sold, my label gets 10% of the revenue. So let's say you have a hundred clients, and 99 of them no one wants to buy their their songs on the blockchain, but randomly one of them does, and it becomes one of those gifts or PNG files that are worth millions of dollars, your label will get 10% of those royalties, right? And that's how you could make money, you know what I'm saying? Because no one's gonna want to pay you up front. But as long as you had one NFT song that blows up every once in a while, then that's how you get paid, right? And that's kind of how labels do it now, but they'll they'll take 40% or something crazy or even more, right? Because they gave you everything. But in a future label, right, like we were talking about, you can put a smart contract together that says you just get 1% of every time it's sold, you know what I'm saying? Or three, whatever the contract is, depending on how popular you are and how popular the artist is, right? You can put that into the NFT, and that's that's part of the power with it as well.

blasé 45:15

To to speak on what you literally just said, that was one of the options I was talking about, minus the NFT part. The NFT part I think kind of defines the value of whatever you're you're putting out there, which we wouldn't have if we were just doing it on Spotify. But one of the options was you don't have to pay us anything up front, we're just gonna take a percentage on the back end. You know, we were sort of talking about it with the podcast in the song. You have to upload it to a distributor, that costs money. And depending on which distributor you're using, it's either a subscription fee there, which is what scares some people, but then there's another one where you just pay an annual fee for every single release, which also scares people because if you're the type to release a lot of music, say you release 10 songs in one year, you're gonna have to pay a hundred dollars every single year consecutively to keep that release up. That just introduced another level of options that people have to worry about. So our offer was like, we will deal with all that mess for you, but we need X percentage based on whatever services you asked us for. You know, like if you asked for one, we'll take 10%, if you ask for two, we'll take 20%, whatever it is. The reason why this particular group didn't like that is because they wanted ownership of it. They didn't want to pay, they wanted to own everything, and that's totally understandable. And I'm in that position too, but it's one of those things to get to that place, you have to either be able to put in a lot of work or a lot of time. And if you can't do both, you're stuck with no options at that point. The NFT thing I think is more incentivizing because of the value it could bring down the line. Yeah. But I think like we've kind of glossed over here and there, it's it's very new in the grand scheme of things, and I think it's gonna take a while for like the general population to buy into it as much. I know there's a lot of people, especially in the tech environment and like you know, business surrounding um industries that are very hip to it, and that's why they're gonna come out on top, to be honest. In terms of incentivizing your everyday college student to do something like that, I feel like it's a little harder, especially when you're strapped for cash.

Tom 47:15

The reason I don't think that they want to share any of the ownership with you is because they get a small cut off of Spotify, right? They're already basically getting screwed over by these scre streaming services, so they might not want to give you a cut of any of the streaming revenue, but you you, right, who knows based on things I'm telling you and other people are telling you that NFTs are gonna get really big over the next couple years, you can say, fine, like you get all the streaming revenue and and we just get 10% on any NFT sale. And they're you know I'm saying they're gonna be like, okay, why would anyone buy my.mp3 file online, and you're like, Well, we just we just think that it might happen. So we get 10 or 20%, and they're gonna be like, okay, fine, no one's gonna buy my shit online, you know what I'm saying? And you're setting yourself up. You might not make money off of the first 10 artists, but I feel like you would be setting yourself up to like get into this new market of music, you know?

blasé 48:04

You're setting yourself up for it to be more likely. So I mean it makes sense to me. I I have to get on the wave to be honest.

Tom 48:10

Most of these artists won't even understand what you're talking about. They're like, okay, sure, put it on the okay.

blasé 48:14

Yeah, for sure. It really does matter what platform we're talking about. NFTs is that solely, I feel like, could change the game as far as whether people think it's worth their while or not. The reason why we were we were doing the percentage things at all to begin with is because I'm like, without us, you might end up with a crappier mix, right? So we're bringing the value of like a like a better mix. So it sounds more professional grade. These days, people, even that people don't care about as much as they used to. That's like where the murky waters are. I totally agree with you as far as like they might not care as much, they might not understand it, they might not even believe in it. But for you to kind of put that down on paper in like one of the smart contracts, as you were saying, one helps them in the long run in case it works out, and two helps you because you had the idea and took the initiative to set it up. So I I see the value, but in terms of convincing them, I feel like there's so many different layers to like why they're reluctant to do it. And I'm hoping what you're saying kind of like pulls them out of it and and at least lets them see the vision a little bit more clearly.

Tom 49:16

Whether the current people you're working with or not will understand it, if you learn how to do that to your songs, you'll attract new customers that are there for that reason, and then the just the mixing and stuff will be the bonus. Based on the way things are treading, I think that would suddenly turn into your core feature that you're offering. You know what I'm saying? I know that mixing and stuff is is important, like you're saying, but when if if you just have some financial guy who's just trying to make some money off of the NFT stuff, there's gonna be a lot of people I think that need that service. I feel like it's gonna be pretty easy to figure out. Remember you asking me, like, do you put it on Twitter or Instagram? I'm like, everywhere, why not? It's gonna be the type of thing like might as well put my song as an NFT. It's gonna be not that, it's not that hard, so it's gonna be pretty simple to go to someone like you who just say, Yeah, I'll put it on the blockchain, copy and paste some code from you know how coding works. It's so easy just to once you figure out one uh the solution to one problem, just to like replicate it a bunch of times. You know what I'm saying? So it's gonna be pretty simple, I feel like, for technically inclined people.

blasé 50:12

Sort of off that logic. I mean, what I was saying before, we offer the mixing thing, that's not our most popular service. People come to the marketing, and the reason is because they've seen what it's done for me, and they're like, I want some of that. So, to that, to that same effect, if I I think if I figured out how to do it myself, it worked for me, and I'll try and make it work for you too. So they're I think that's where the value is. You know, that's why any company hires you is because they're like, we've seen that you can do this over and over again. We want you to do it for us now, and that's kind of that's how any business works, I guess, to some extent. When you're like hiring people, that's how life works, bro.

Tom 50:47

Yeah, so it's the name of the game.

blasé 50:48

So again, yeah, like why why go against the grain on something that you know it's like always the common sense things you just need to like be able to identify it in in the newer context, I guess. So yeah, that makes sense.

Tom 50:59

Okay, don't let me go back to that topic anymore. I feel I there's like so many other things I want to talk about. So we we gotta push forward. Um the festival, why okay? So you you kind of said it tied into like this is how you're gonna make money now, because you know all these artists, they don't necessarily want to pay that much for your services. It felt like, okay, but if we put together this festival every year, that'll allow everyone to sell merch and promote each other, collaboration and all that stuff, and just maybe be a center point for your label to congregate around and all the the artists that you work with, I guess.

blasé 51:27

Yeah, so I mean to speak as to why we started it in the first place had nothing to do with the fact that the mixing wasn't cutting it for us. Like we always knew it was gonna be like a slow burn type of service, anyways. The mark, like I said, the marketing is kind of where it is, anyways. But the reason we did the festival is one because I I don't know if I told you last time, but like we had for our album, which came out last summer, we had plans for a release party that got screwed because of all the COVID stuff. And just like as a joke, I was like, I was talking to Mike, I was like, what if we just planned a festival and just you know got it got it out of our system that way? And he was like, Yeah, I like that idea. So then on social media, I just kind of like posted about that. I was like, yo, I'm kind of salty because we didn't get to do our live show. How would you guys feel about us during a local festival? And a lot of people responded really well to it. And one of those people, she was like, Hey, I'm like a designer, I'd be interested in helping you plan this event. Two or three people like that messaged me directly about it, and one of them took it to the same level of seriousness that I usually take anything in life, even the music stuff. A lot of people will treat it like a hobby until they realize that you are taking it seriously, and that's like the first step into like you know, taking anything seriously. You have to prove to yourself that it's something you actually want to take to the next level, and so that's sort of what we did with the festival. It turned it turned from like a joke to something that like we realized, hey, we actually have a small group of people that are down to put time aside to work on it. And so it kind of snowballed into like three of us, meaning me, Mike, and my other friend Sana. Shout out Sana, if she sees this, but um it was just the three of us. We were like, all right, we'll put money down, we'll get a venue. Collectively, we know so many local artists, you know, just from the album we worked on, and then we know a good bit to like run an audition process, we know how to talk to like venues for rent and stuff, because we've done that sort of thing to like do like shows here and there. And now our team is like a team of five, and we actually have people coming to us now saying they want to work for us and be involved. And so it kind of just snowballed into this like entity that naturally is community engaging, which was like a big thing for us. It's like a cross-pollination engine of sorts where like my music stuff gets to be thrown in it, obviously, but my like interest in business gets thrown a bit, my interest in legal pursuits as far as like performance and creativity is concerned get thrown into the mix. I get to like talk to vendors and sponsors and form partnerships with all these different local and bigger organizations. So, like one of the things we did is partner with a charity, and that's been interesting. Just seeing how the mechanics of all that work are very interesting to me. So, like, I'm currently technically the logistics director for this festival, that allows me to kind of dip my fingers in all sorts of you know pools that kind of bring the whole thing together. So that's something I really enjoy. So I realized, hey, if we're going to put this much time into it, I feel like whoever's involved should get paid. And if we're doing this for the artist, by the artist, because we're all like musicians on to some level, or like at least artist in some format, I was like, we should make sure the artists are getting paid too. So that's why we started like looking at sponsors and we're setting up a GoFundMe and event to kind of like make sure it's being valued to the same level of seriousness that we are taking it. And that's how I was like, okay, this can be like an annual thing where we make money off of it, and over time it'll grow and people will be more engaged.

Tom 54:55

But isn't that such a beautiful thing when like all of your different hobbies kind of collide into one big project and you're like, oh my gosh, like I know all these random tidbits of things about music, about marketing, about you know, like you said, these legal like situations, a non-profit charity, right? I just randomly know all this stuff about like how to run a charity, and then ultimately it all comes together and like in this one big moment, you know. That sounds like sounds like it's fun because no matter what you do in business, I feel like you have to pick something that you just really fucking love, and it's just a lot of fun to do. And I kind of on a smaller scale, I was the social chair for my fraternity in college, you know, nothing crazy, but like I did plan all the events for about a full year, and like I just had so much fun doing that, dude. I had so much fun like picking the music, picking the drinks, picking the guest list, picking even the decorations and stuff. I just love setting up the whole like aesthetic of the place and just watching people come in and having a good time, you know. Let's say you were in charge of like the judicial part of the fraternity or something, then you gotta fucking tell people they gotta do this and they can't do that. But like being the social chair, I was just being like, hey, let's have a bunch of fucking fun, dude. And like everyone, everyone loved like the parties I put on, it made me feel good. It like it made me really enjoy what I do, and that's honestly a time period where I really figured out how to like be a perfectionist about something is like putting together these social events because when you're alone, it's hard to like push yourself to that level. But I just got so much feedback of everyone's having a fun time doing this. I'm gonna do this again next week. I'm gonna do it better, you know what I'm saying? Because it just it feels good to give other people a good time, you know. And so I feel like this is gonna be a very rewarding experience for you, you know?

blasé 56:31

Yeah, I mean, doing it by yourself is not as fun, but like, you know, being able to like dabble in all these things, you get to meet a lot of people. You know, I kind of preach this every time I talk to anyone about anything music related, but like the collaborating aspect is always like a big thing for me. And this is like such another level up for me because it's not just music anymore, it's the business side. When I say legal side, I have a friend who's like in law school right now. Literally, just yesterday I was texting her being like, Hey, I have a quick question about these like artist contracts. Do you mind like walking me through whatever you do know? You know, she's always more than happy to help. Small interactions like that, I feel like one I learn a lot, it fills in a lot of loose ends in my own understanding of certain things. So I get to like get informed on those things, and as well as like being able to talk to people of like quite literally all walks of life as far as career choice is concerned, because they you know, different people do like a hundred different things. Being able to tap into that on a multi-dimensional plane, as far as you know, music business, yeah, like everything we were saying before is concerned. For me, that's super exciting. I don't get bored easily. That's like the beauty of it. That's why I did the label stuff too. It was like, I don't get bored. Like, you know, like when you do one thing for so long, it's so easy to get drained by it and like exhausted, and you're like, do I really like this at this point? Like what you were saying, it's a bunch of different hobbies that kind of intersect in some form of another. That's what keeps it interesting for me. And so the label was my first iteration of that. And then the festival is kind of like how it's been manifesting ever since, you know? And it just keeps things lively and like it can turn into an annual thing, which is why, you know, I brought it up as like maybe a potential stable form of income for whoever's involved, you know, years and years to come.

Tom 58:12

I was telling you when I was on the way to like go pick you up, I was listening to our old episode and I was like, dude, this is gonna be so awesome. Blase knows all these things about software development and music and you know, storytelling and and startups, and and I know that I can just jump around and learn all these different things from him, and like wherever the conversation takes us, I'm gonna be able to extract some knowledge out and like share something with my my listeners and just like learn something new. I was getting pretty excited. And I feel like it's the same thing if you're planning a festival with a bunch of other other artists. If you're like an accountant, it's pretty one-dimensional. Like, you have to just be very focused and make sure that you run the numbers the right way every day and do that. But like, if you're any sort of artist, there's so much inspiration involved with art that you can't just put it in a bottle and be like, I'm the guy who makes really good beats. You know what I'm saying? Like, no, like you have to experiment, you have to like learn a couple other things to like make yourself a well-rounded individual. Like we were saying, the story behind the art is more important than the art itself. You have to make yourself an interesting person in all areas of life to make people actually want to hear your music or or look at your painting. You know what I'm saying? People buy Da Vinci's paintings not because they look cool, they do, but like he was such an interesting person. He was so interesting, and that does transfer over to the art, but it's not just the art that is exciting. And so, if you're putting this festival together with all these different artists, you're talking to them about where should we put this stage or what color should we make the banner, or like things like that. You're gonna get a lot of creative ideas flowing and a lot of different people coming from a lot of different backgrounds, other people that are multi-dimensional, all getting together and working on something, just brings it to like God level mode, you know.

blasé 59:48

Yeah, I mean, you you kind of explained my entire like mentality going into all this festival stuff. It's very like refreshing, I think is the best word for it. Like I was saying before, like you do the same thing, you get stuck in a rud almost. Even though it's like a continuation of this like long-term picture on a like a micro level, every single day is very exciting. Just like meeting up with the people and brainstorming, think tanking or whatever it is, I feel like that's kind of my favorite part. The festival at the end of the day is like, I think it's gonna be awesome, but like the little steps along the way is kind of what makes it you know, yeah, man. Exciting to me. Yeah.

Tom 1:00:22

When I when it comes to the podcast, the the thing I probably like the least is the editing portion, but like that part is still so much fun to me because I know the big picture. Once you have the big picture in mind, some of the details get so exciting. And then if I get tired of editing, I can just zoom out of that and go to marketing or go to something else, or like start texting you and hang out with you and and and and actually like sit here in the moment. I know the big picture of thing I'm working on, and and you can never really get bored when your big picture is so big, you know what I'm saying? So for you, you're probably like, oh, I want to make music, cool, I know how to make music, or like let's let's say you were just started off as a rapper. Oh, I want to write music, cool, I wrote some music, I wanna like rap, okay. Now I can rap and write. I want to produce, now I can rap and write and produce. Okay, I want to help other people produce. Now I can rap and write and run a label. Now I need to help them market, rap, write, produce, market, run the label. Okay, now I need to put on a show. Okay, now I'm an event planner. You know what I'm saying? You add to the list, and then when you back up, it's like, oh, I can jump into any of these things on any day. It can never really get boring because if I get bored of running the festival, I can just go home and make some music and know that eventually the music will make it to the festival. Therefore, it all fits as long as like there's this big umbrella over all your hobbies, then it's great. You know what I'm saying?

blasé 1:01:34

You're just you're describing my life to a T currently, and it's it's it's good. I mean, I'm glad um I'm glad you you're you're like on the same page with that because a lot of people see what I'm doing and they're like, you are driving yourself insane. And there are some straining aspects of you know wearing that many hats, but for me, like I'm literally like, what's the point if I can't do a little bit of everything? For everyone, I'm sure there's different reasons, but for me, like, in order for me to do anything, this applied in school too. I was a terrible student because I was like, I don't see I don't see me using this ever in life. Why should I care? In my mind, if it doesn't have any like long-term effect or like can't provide me personally any satisfaction, I can't do it, it won't work. So, like to an extent, it sounds super stupid to say out loud, but like I kind of need it to survive, like jumping around and being able to do all those things, and it just so happens that all those different things can kind of like funnel down into one end product. A part of it was planning for that to happen, but you know, I feel like I I did get lucky compared to some other people who I know who are trying to do something similar, but just never pans out for one reason or the other. But I'm glad it worked out the way it did. Yeah, as far as that's concerned.

Tom 1:02:48

There's like this one of these personality quizzes you can take called like the strength finder, and one of my top ones was connectedness. Like I really like when things are connected. Another one of mine was like futuristic and maximal, making things like as good as it possibly can. But I feel like you must also have the connectedness attribute because I just love it when I can bridge things together and I feel like you're the same way. Like, you don't want to add a new skill to your list as if it doesn't connect with all these other things you're kind of piecing together. But also you're so good at seeing the connections between things that there's almost nothing that you at this point you can't add in and figure out a way. For me, the whole music thing has been very hard to like work into my idea because I'm like, oh, I like to listen to music in the gym. Like, maybe I'll put together some playlists uh for workouts or something, like find some way to pull it in, right? And when I told you I was making that Mac Miller podcast, this is the umbrella, this doesn't fit in the umbrella, and it made me upset. But then I told you I took the beats off of three of Mac Miller's songs and put them to drive fitness promo videos. Through that podcast realization, I realized what makes these beats so good, it's that you know, it feels very personal, right? And like someone's just talking to you. And I was like, well, that would be really good background music to the podcast. And then it was like, aha, I somehow fit Mac into the podcast in which fits into the app, which fits into the gym, which fits into the okay, cool, it's back under the umbrella. And I was like, cool. But there was like this like moment of crisis where I was like, oh my god, I'm making this other podcast that has nothing to do with my other goals, and like I'm just wasting now. I'm just wasting time and like you get stressed out. And sometimes you gotta like cut something out of your life because it doesn't fit, but if you can just with every like new hobby, if you can just take a piece of it to fit, then it then it okay, then it added to like the bigger plan that you have going, you know.

blasé 1:04:28

Yeah, I mean, not only that, but like when you're picking up a new hobby, if you don't have something motivating you to do it in the first place, it's so easy to like lose touch with it. Not only is it good for like that big umbrella, big picture thing that you were already focused on, but if you for some reason do need to like go out and find something new to do, associating it with what you already know is a good way for you to like keep going with it. That's the best way to like acquire a new skill, in my opinion. A lot of people like to watch countless YouTube videos and take like those random generic courses online, and I'm like, while that's great and fun to do, I would rather apply it to what I'm doing. And the best example I can give is when I first started working as a front-end developer, they like gave me all these technologies that they were like, you have to use it. This is what the project's using, that it is what it is. I wasn't very good at it, and I was like, I need to find a way to learn it so I can you know contribute to that project. I was like, I'm not gonna take some generic class, I'm gonna build my label website using this framework. So that's what I did. I built it, I understood the ins and outs of it by the end because it was for my own personal gain, right? And interestingly enough, it ended up being the favorite language for me to code in. It made work a lot easier for me because I already knew some of this from my own personal experience. I tied it into something I already knew, and it helped me in more than one place at the end of the day. So I I try not that I'm like very closed minded with trying new things, but I try to vet it to a point where I'm like, can I can I use it in more than one place? Am I going to enjoy it long term? Am I setting myself up to be Consistent with it. If you're not even gonna be consistent with it, like unless like it's like skydiving or something, like you know, some people might not want to skydive more than once. I don't know, but like you know, if it's something that's supposed to be like a part of a routine, why try it unless you know for a fact you can you want to do it, and like that's just kind of my way of understanding for myself what what am I good at, what do I like, and what kind of energy do I want to bring back into my own life. That got very philosophical all of a sudden, but I do think it's kind of like important to consider that both ways. One to try new things, and then one to make sure that new thing fits with you as a person, you know. So it kind of comes full circle in that respect.

Tom 1:06:38

No, dude. So, first of all, that comment kind of reminded me of when we used to work together at Ventera because they were like, learn all this new stuff, and I sat there for a whole summer and I built my fitness stuff, and you sat there and built some music stuff, right? And you know, neither of us used those versions anymore, but we both went on to like build on those ideas. As long as this stuff I'm doing for work can fit into this other stuff I'm passionate about, then I'm okay with spending 40 hours a week doing this other thing that's not necessarily my dream, you know? So, you know, that that just brought me back to that summer, right? Um, and then bro, I like that you got philosophical. In fact, one of the things I wanted to talk about, uh, and just something I want to aim for in the podcast in general, is I just want to have these like deep philosophical conversations, and you can't force them, right? I need to have a uh episode like center around like a topic for the most part, and especially if it's my first time with a guest, and so that's why this is a cool episode because the first episode is like, hey, this is this guest, I'm introducing you, and then the second time I meet with the guest, it's like, okay, my audience knows who you are, let's get into things, and that's second and on, I feel like is when I can really crack into some philosophical conversations. But I want to touch on storytelling soon, but you have all these different interests, right? You got you know, music production, you got computer science, you got event planning, you got marketing, and you know, out of all of them, last time we met, you were like, I'm more of a storyteller, right? And so, like, I kind of want to somehow boil down, and instead of talking about any of those things, talking about the center point of how do you create I'm trying to be so abstract, how do you create something that resonates with people? What are some things, and like don't tell me in any specific discipline, because I want to create podcasts that anyone can walk away from. So there's some people listening right now, they don't know what NFTs are, they don't know even what music production is really like, but what's something that you can say about creating content or a thing, intangible or tangible, that makes it resonate with people, you know what I'm saying? And and you, I think storytelling is something that you do weave right through some of your projects, but other things like that that everyone knows what a story is, you know what I'm saying? What are some other universal, or you can go you can dive deeper into stories if you want, but what are some universal truths that you have found in the intersection of all of these ideas that we're talking about?

blasé 1:09:07

Okay, so this is gonna make sense. The name of our festival is called Lemon Zest Fest, and the reason we chose that name is based off is we want it to go off of the phrase when life gives you lemons. And if you think about everything we've sort of talked about instead in in terms of like learning how to do things yourself, you know, start with one interest, Google this, YouTube that, learn it, incorporate it in, and like, you know, grow from there. I feel like that like when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade phrase kind of sounds silly and childish and generic, but if you really think about it, all it is is perseverance. Based on what resources you have at the time, make do with it and you know, see where it takes you. And literally everything we've talked about regarding what I've done and also regarding what you've done, it's literally like this is what I have to work with. I'm gonna make it work. And a part of it, I was thinking about it when you were talking about the personality test. I don't know, I've taken one. I don't know exactly what the character idea or whatever was, but the key thing was like stubbornness in the good way. I don't have all the money in the world to like buy the most expensive gear. I don't have like all the money in the world to pay someone to professionally engineer my shit. That's why we were like, we are going to take what we have at our disposal, which you know again ties back to like the technology thing where like you can just YouTube everything and figure it out. You just have to put the time in and do it. We took what we had and we applied, like we learned what we could and applied it to something we were passionate about. And that's kind of how like literally the entire evolution of who I am as an artist and a developer and a creator, whatever, like that's kind of how all that came to fruition. As far as the festival is concerned, the storytelling behind it is we wanted to create something, one, for the community to engage with, and two, to support artists like myself who don't didn't previously have that like platform to perform in front of people and engage with like the entirety of the DMV on a community scale, right? So we were like, let's build something that, like you said, resonates with people. And the way we were gonna do it is like approach it from a mental health perspective coming out of a pandemic. We did all of this planning, we are still currently doing all of the planning in a pandemic. So there's all sorts of restrictions as far as that's concerned, but we are still persevering through all of that to get to this final goal, which is having like a Saturday with a few hours where everyone from the community can come together once it's like, you know, relatively safe out to like join and convene in that space. So the entire theme of it is perseverance through whatever obstacle you're facing at that time, whether it's a lack of knowledge, whether there's like like a literal pandemic going on in the world, whatever the case may be, doesn't have to be music, doesn't have to be, you know, building an app necessarily, it can just be anything. It's just like persevere by working with what you have and just seeing it all the way through to make sure you don't have any regret in your own life, as far as that thing is concerned. I don't know if that answered your question, but I feel like I touched on every single thing possible.

Tom 1:12:04

No, it exactly does. I feel like we're both gonna leave this room and lighten enlighten people. It's the hair, it's the hair.

Tom and blasé 1:12:10

The hair.

Tom 1:12:11

So basically, what I'm gathering, no matter what it is, everyone has a unique human experience, right? I'm Tom, you're blase, but at the same time, we're all interconnected, right? And so figuring out what your unique experience is, whether it is positive or negative, whether it's good or bad, whether it's um sad or funny, whatever, figuring out what makes you you and your situation your situation and your life your life, figuring out what makes it unique and and being willing to share that is what gives it value. Because if your life is shitty, let's say you are the saddest person in the world, okay, if you can figure out why your specific flavor of sadness is so sad, or or whatever, even if it's a negative thing, what makes it unique, what makes it interesting or valuable, as long as you can put that together in some medium and share it, then other people are gonna resonate with that and you're gonna turn that sadness into a positive because other sad people are gonna resonate with that. If you have a lot of money, well, that's a good thing. Share your money, pretty easy, okay. Boom, just find the right thing to share it in. I mean, that can be a problem too, but find what you're passionate about and what you're naturally inclined to, share your money in that direction if you're an investor or invest in your own ideas. Okay, that's pretty simple. Let's say you're broke, figure out how to share this negative situation you're in in a way, or or help everyone view it in a way. You can go from being broke, okay. Well, then maybe I can't afford a studio. So then maybe I I'm making music with sticks or something, and that's so unique, no one else is doing that because you know I'm saying, and no one else with money would do that. You know, that's kind of a random example, and I don't even want to give too many examples, but like no matter what you're going through, there's something special about it and unique about it. And as long as you can figure out how to assign value to that, then it'll be brought into a positive thing. Like some of the most depressed people are some of the funniest people. Is it good or bad that they were depressed? Like, well, if they if they can figure out like how to wield it in a in a in a way that they enjoy, then then it's a good, then it's good. You know what I'm saying? It's a good thing.

blasé 1:14:31

Yeah, I mean, everything you you've said kind of just the the lingering thought for me is like self-discovery, one of yourself, and then once you can do it for yourself, you can kind of see it in other people and be able to like resonate with them as well. And I think that just like generally the world would be a better place if people could do that, but like, you know, very specifically to what you said, that's kind of how I approach songwriting. Like, I always describe blase as like my alter ego, and I don't mean it to say that it's not based on who I am actually in real life. You've listened to some of my stuff, it can get very sad and very dark at times, the material that I'm talking about. But the reasoning for me personally, for my own self self-discovery, is like if I don't put that somewhere, I'm going to like be like that in real life. I would have been super sad and depressing when we were talking just now, you know. But instead, I'm like, why don't I put it in a format that one, it's away from me because I know for myself, if if I bottle it up, I turn into like an ugly person and I don't want to do that. It's not fun, I don't enjoy that. But I like how I can express it in a medium in such a way that other people can listen to it, not to make them feel sad, but them to remember that other people are going through it as well, and they don't have to feel alone about it, if that makes any sense. And like you've probably heard that answer before, but like not a lot of people think about it in both directions. You know what I mean? It's somewhat tangent, I feel like, to what we were talking about, but in the sense that you kind of need to know where your strengths are and how you can contribute to like society, I guess. Once you know how to do that for yourself, you can bring in more people and help them as well, if that makes any sense. I feel like that's something we should all be doing long term. One, understanding ourselves on that level to the point where you're like, you know what's good for you, you know what's bad for you, and whatever it is, you can channel that outwards into the world and ideally help someone do whatever they're you know, get through whatever they're getting through. And I feel like, you know, everything I've done so far has been aimed in that direction, and the hope is, you know, people realize that to the point where it can help them in their own lives. So which again, which is why I'm talking about the festival being very community engaging. It's helping local businesses, it's helping local artists, all those things are things I'm passionate about, and the other people on my team are passionate about. So, you know, that's just like a very easy common ground. The concept seems very simple, but the execution gets caught up in politics and like financial issues or whatever. But again, that perseverance that you have based on what you have, yeah, in that current moment, if you can like carry that with you, it goes a long way. So that's been the theme of pretty much everything so far.

Tom 1:17:07

Yeah, I feel like the formula we're laying out, right? Because I feel like we have this idea we're wrestling with and we're trying to like chisel it away. So maybe call it a formula for like enlightenment or personal just happiness. Not I hate the word happiness actually, but to be at one with yourself. I I feel like the formula right would be persevering for self-discovery, like you're saying. So a path down self-discovery, and then I think an important piece of the formula is sharing that self-discovery and therefore helping others with their own journey of self-discovery. You know what I'm saying? Because we were saying you can't just go down your own rabbit hole too much, read all day and spend your time alone, you're gonna go crazy, you know what I'm saying, and work on things and never tell anybody about them, and you also can't just overshare all the time and never grow, both internally and externally, or with people and and by yourself. For instance, I'll give three examples, right? I used to be the social chair in college, that was way too much like connecting to other people and not enough of my own personal self-discovery. Then I spent two or three years really deep diving into my into my app, and it was never ready, never ready, never ready. Apps are never ready, actually. And so it was too, it was too isolating, and I and I and I was growing myself as a developer, I was growing myself as an entrepreneur, I was growing myself as a marketer, I was learning all these things, but I wasn't sharing enough, you know what I'm saying, of that experience. I was sharing the app, but I wasn't always sharing the experience, and and that's an important key. And then since I've discovered the podcast, it's been the perfect balance for me of I am learning about myself because I have to do some research for on guests, or I have to read a book, so I have things to talk about, or I have to edit and I have to reflect on myself. So there's this big self-discovery portion, but then I share my experiences with whoever my guest is, and therefore whoever my listeners are, and I help them tell me about their experiences, then they tell me what they're passionate about, what they've been doing, what their journey and experience on this world is, and then therefore they're rediscovering more about themselves. This formula that I've been tapping into, that it's like life's never been better for me. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, and I want to share that with other people. That's why we're recording this conversation, you know. But it's not even for them. I feel happy sharing it, knowing that one person can listen to this and and go aha and and figure something out about themselves makes this conversation so much m bigger than for just you and me. I don't know if this is true or not, but a philosophy that has been beneficial to my life is just imagining, and I've seen this all over the internet. Imagining like the universe is experiencing itself as you for a moment, you know what I'm saying? So like call the universe, call it God, is just experiencing itself as Tom right now. But also experiencing itself as you, okay? That makes me, you, you, me. So like on the way, I was like, wow, I can't wait to learn more about Blase because I mean learning about myself, because really I am the whole global consciousness just experiencing me. So everything you've ever done in your life, I've done, and so is all the listeners at home. Therefore, I'm if if I go into it with a mentality of I'm learning more about myself, then like your wins are my wins, your pain is my pain. It's like the limitations that we put ourselves, like the universe puts itself in by existing as us is what makes it special. But the more you learn about the universe, the more exciting it gets as well, you know?

blasé 1:20:24

I feel like what you're describing is like a very abstract version of like empathy for like you know, just like shared consciousness.

Tom 1:20:32

Empathy, yeah.

blasé 1:20:35

I mean, no, I mean, but seriously, like I think it is something that's heavily underrated today, specifically, especially. So, like the fact that you're saying it, I think is valuable because a lot of people don't give a shit. They're very much everyone lives in a very like individualistic lifestyle, I guess. And I think it's hard for people to come out of that. You know, a lot of people, like I I come from an immigrant family, you know, coming into like a relatively diverse area makes it very easy for me to see that in other people because you want to you want them to see it in you almost, you know? And you know, you're from the you're from the DMV, so like I don't know about your area specifically, but generally the DMV is more diverse than like other parts of the world. You're exposed to a lot of things that you know some rural parts of the country might not be, and that makes it easier for you to, like we were saying, empathize with people, which at the end of the day is just like the sharing of values, points of views, whatever, you know, whatever it is. And I feel like things get better when you when you have that in your life. I don't think there's ever been a situation where knowing more about anything in general, but like in this case, like about a specific person or whatever it is, I don't think that has ever hurt, you know. It never hurts to learn more things. It can hurt if maybe they found a way to like remove information from your brain, but like that's not a thing that people deal with, you know. So yeah, I mean that general theme of empathy, I personally relate with that as well. I think a lot of the world's problems could be solved if we just had a little bit more of it. And I feel like that's pretty much exactly what you're describing, you know.

Tom 1:22:05

Yeah, to some extent. When you said empathy, it made me laugh, right? Because why am I trying to overexplain what empathy is in a confusing abstract way, right? But I think it boils down to the fact that like ideas are not words, and like empathy represents an idea, but it's bigger than what it the idea is bigger than the word, so like we simplify things as humans as words into our brain. And so you're so desensitized to the word empathy that you're like, I know what empathy is. It's you know, looking at someone and and you know, feeling what they're trying to feel. It's like, but what does that mean? It's like for some reason, like breaking it down and like going through all these different scenarios and and different outcomes and and situations where you can empathize with someone and giving examples and stuff. It helps you, it helps me, it helps all my listeners, it helps everyone actually feel that idea in a more full way than just the word itself. I don't know, if we had telepathic powers, then we wouldn't even need to describe it for three hours. It would be more of this big wave of understanding of like, oh, empathy, that idea. But it wouldn't come across like that. It would be like, oh, you would just experience like overwhelming. It'd be like a flash of like I experienced everything that everyone has ever experienced from the beginning of time until the future, from you know, the first microorganism to the last artificial intelligent robot that controls the universe in a f in a second. You know what I'm saying? That's true empathy. But I can't even right now, all these words I'm throwing at you, they don't do you're like trying to describe something that's intangible.

blasé 1:23:29

It makes sense. Exactly. Yeah. I I definitely understand where you're where you're getting at with it. It's an interesting thing, though. I mean, that's if you think about it, everything in life is like that to some extent. You're just trying to like describe it to the best of your ability. I don't remember where I saw it, but they were saying like the only person who has heard every word you are saying is you. And I thought that like really stuck with me in a very weird way. You no one's ever going to fully, in human context, empathize with you better than you yourself. You can try, you can try explaining everything. And even what your concept of like strong amounts of empathy towards someone else, you don't know for sure that that's even correct. You know, that's just like your best approximation. So, like, everything is relative, which is why, like, even though people can't fully do it, you have to do it to the best of your ability within the context that you're given, you know. Even then though, I feel like people don't do it. I feel like some people had some negative experience where they're like, feeling too much for other people makes my life worse. And it's it's it goes back to that thing where it's like if you didn't know how to do it for yourself from the get-go, how are you gonna do it for other people? There's like so many different things. I think about these things a lot, actually. It's just I've never been forced to like talk about it out loud, I guess.

Tom 1:24:39

Dude, I know, dude. I was getting this kind of feeling, I didn't know how to put it into words, but as I was listening to our last episode on the way to pick you up, right? I was like, oh my gosh, this guy is so multidimensional, right? Because we talked about music and coding and like storytelling or something. I was like, wow, he thinks about all these different things. I think about all these different things. And it just made me realize, like you were saying, like, I can empathize with you, right? I haven't heard everything you've said for your whole life. So I'm like, oh my gosh, in that last interview, I only scratched the surface with Blase. I only learned less than 1% of who he is as a person. And I left that last interview thinking, like, wow, I really know that guy. You know what I'm saying? And I do know you, but it to the extent that I could in in that time frame. But even after today, we're we're gonna talk a car ride here of three-hour podcasts, a car ride back, about five hours. I'm still not even gonna scratch 2% of you, maybe not even one. You know what I'm saying? Because you're so complex, because every human's complex, but we don't we think of ourselves as this complex. Doesn't matter who you are, everyone in their head has as many dimensions as you know. If you call someone else one dimensional, you didn't you didn't understand the assignment. You know what I'm saying? There is no one who's more or less dense than you are, or you know what I'm saying? Everyone has all these different things that they're passionate about, or that they're not people, there's certain people that hate everything. That's they're still putting conscious energy into hating it. They're still the best at hating a hundred things. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't matter, everyone's the same, everyone is God, everyone is the universe. And I was realizing that on the way here, and I was like, oh my gosh, I get to learn more about Blase. Like I get to scratch that surface further, and I know that he has all these things in his head, because I have all these things in my head. I know, I'm like, I know that he thinks about everything I think about, but like you said, I've never heard you say all these things. So now I'm like sitting down and I'm like, say all the things that I think, and and you're like, well, which one, motherfucker? There's a there's an infinite amount of them, you know what I'm saying? Like I can't possibly which one do you want? Because I can't possibly boil myself down to a three-hour interview, or even say 20 years from now, we've done 10 of these. I can't boil myself down into 30 hours. That's so little of who I am. I've lived for and I've and thoughts don't even work in the same dimension as time. So I've had infinite thoughts all the time. And that's just my conscious mind. There's also my subconscious mind. You know what I'm saying? It's like, oh shit.

blasé 1:26:44

There's layers to the layers, I guess. Yeah. I mean, no, it's it's funny that you say that, but I I definitely um I definitely I'm I'm totally on the same page, which is mind-blowing in and of itself, because like sometimes you feel like you're the only one and it doesn't like cause me like anxiety, anxiety, but I think about it too much, and then I get way too in my head about certain things, and that kind of freaks me out sometimes. But like, you know, just talking about it, I'm glad you said, like, oh, I also think about these things, because sometimes it's kind of like, does anyone even think about it? And I think that's kind of like the question you need to ask when you're like talking to other people, just in general, not about any specific topic. But like you were saying, you know, you've only met them for like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of their life. You don't know the whole story. I feel like a lot of people need to humble themselves when they interact with people to that level where they're like, I've literally met this person on every launch break for only the last three years of their life. You know, like how does that constitute knowing that person and what they've been through? You don't know. Even if you're in a bad mood that day, I feel like it's harder, but like you should still be like, Am I the only person who's ever been in a bad mood today? Why do I get to be so special and treat someone like shit as a result of it? It's hard to do. I'm I'm definitely guilty of it. The feeling that revolves around the world word empathy. I feel like I have to try and actively do it more. I feel like I have a good core. On that on that sort of thing, but there's definitely like gaps of it missing, you know.

Tom 1:28:05

So I think further along than you think, hopefully some I can help you connect some dots, you know what I'm saying? Because I'm on many different journeys. I'm on a mental journey, a physical journey, a spiritual journey. And you know, for instance, my physical journey has I haven't always it's not one direction where I'm always like getting stronger, you know. I'm saying there's been moments where I get weaker and it's it's rough, you know. Mentally, it's been more straightforward because you learn more and more and more and more. I mean, you forget some things, I've gone through declines, but mental, the mental journey has been I not everyone's mentally inclined, but for me, it's it's like always easier to add things to my database of knowledge. But only recently have I really begun on a spiritual journey, right? I wasn't super religious. Um, and as a kid, I don't know, you can just believe what people tell you and you don't really know. But the further I get into my spiritual journey, right? I I read the Bible sometimes, I read a lot of books, like I meditate, I try all the different spiritual stuff, at least try it, you know. And so I don't know exactly what I don't want to categorize my spiritual journey, but I'm definitely on one right now, or I've begun one probably about a year or two ago. The further I get into like understanding the spiritual side of this thing we call life, the more I understand that everyone on everyone is going through the same thing I am, or has at some point, or it's all the same, you know what I'm saying? And it's so obnoxious with like money is a rough one. So when a really rich person says like we're all the same, it's like shut up, you're rich, you know? And it's it you can throw out some examples that it's it's not fun to think like that, you know, if you're like really poor or you have some disability or something like that, and you're like, we're not all the same, buddy, you know what I'm saying? But your experience is unique to you, so the range of emotions that you feel about everything you experience is the same. I don't even know how to put it into words, but in some weird effed up way, we all are going through the same thing, you know what I'm saying? And it's so weird.

blasé 1:29:52

I have a perfect analogy for that entire situation. Like where I grew up, I feel like I've been exposed to a lot of diverse cultures, religions, whatever, whatever it is, specifically religion. You know, have you heard this thing where it's like I didn't even know this was a thing, but there's like certain topics that are like rude to talk about at the dinner table, and it's like money, politics, religion, race, or you know, like there's like a I don't remember how many there are. Literally, if you just talked about those things, we wouldn't have half the problems that we have in the world right now. It's literally like the tiptoe topics, and I'm like, why? Like, those are the ones that we're sex is a big one too.

Tom 1:30:29

Yeah, yeah.

blasé 1:30:29

And like so many problems in the world could be eradicated if there's like some kind of open dialogue about it. The best one I can think of is like religion. For different people, like you said, everyone's on a slightly different spiritual journey, so it can mean a lot of different things. For the people who generally believe in God, the idea is like, you know, he he loves you, and there's like an afterlife of some sort, right? There's so many different religions that have that same end destination or like end goal with the whole thing, but they have so many different avenues of getting there. Some people believe there's three persons and one god, some people don't, and then there's like everything in between, you know? And I'm not a sports guy, but I'm like, why do we have referees at a game? It's not so they they can disagree and take home a different decision. The idea is that they see the same thing from two different perspectives and come to a consensus at the end of the day. And I'm like, why don't all people just do that? Whether or not you believe in one thing or the other, what are the chances that what aren't the chances that it's all there's only one correct answer for all of us? I feel like, you know, assuming there is a God, we probably all come from the same God. I would like to think that at least. If that's the case, why are we disagreeing on it? Why don't we just combine our knowledge and come up with a straight answer for what's going on? That's the best we can do, anyways. You know, like no one actually knows a hundred percent what happens after you die, but we have all these beliefs based on, you know, what our ancestors have told us, what all those people have seen in their own lives, and a part of it is blind faith. That's like the whole point of the word faith, right? It's like kind of blindly believing in something. Why are we not doing it to an extent that we can all see things on a separate page? Like it's okay to like believe in different things. I don't know, that's a very touchy topic for some people, but we live in a world where it's like the things that divide us are also the things that make us unique. You know, the race thing in in like our country right now is like a big thing. Like people are very proud to be from whatever country they come from, but those are the things that get them in trouble in terms of discrimination, and we're all kind of like doing the exact same thing. I don't have the answer for that. And we're getting very hot and heavy in this topic, I guess.

Tom 1:32:37

But like we're gonna dig deeper into it, don't we?

blasé 1:32:39

You should have like these things that kind of like help you stand out from the crowd, depending on you know what it is, but it shouldn't be at at the point where it like puts people down. I feel like that happens in our world a lot. Like I myself experienced a lot of like random prejudice for race, religion, whatever it is. And I know a lot of people have had it much worse than me, but I'm like, it's not because you have a unique perspective on things, it's because other people are putting you down for not having the same perspective or like you know, social status or whatever it is as them tying back to the empathy thing. If you just try that, try living by that to some extent, I think it'll be a lot easier and less of a strain on everyone. I don't know. That's also something I don't say out loud very much, but that's kind of like I I feel like a lot of people think that and they're just kind of too scared to say it, maybe.

Tom 1:33:28

Yeah, and see you sharing this, this is this is growth. I would this is me growing. You know what I'm saying? This is like big, like it's important to say these things.

Tom and blasé 1:33:36

Yeah.

Tom 1:33:36

Oh man, I'm gonna obliterate this conversation in the best way. But so I consider myself a Christian, right? Yeah, but I will also acknowledge that religion, like we are deeply religious creatures for some reason. I'm trying to figure that out, you know. I've been reading a lot, but it essentially is all the same, you know what I'm saying? And uh, people don't want to admit that. And I want it it, these are two conflicting ideas, but I want to be a Christian and also acknowledge that it is all the same. You know what I'm saying? And there'll be a bunch of people who tell me, well, you can't be Christian if you're trying to say it's all the same. But listen, when I was a child, I thought everyone who believed in God went to heaven. I thought that's how it worked. But then I realized that there's, oh, there's actually a bunch of other religions, and my religion believes that those people don't go to heaven. You know what I'm saying? Oh, also there's a bunch of sectors of Christianity. There's the Catholics, there's the Protestants, there's the Presbyterians, there's the Baptists, there's the Mormons who consider themselves, you know, Christians, there's the Methodists, right? All of those little sectors believe that only their specific brand of Christianity goes to hell. And that disturbed me because I started doing the math like, you know, I'm a kid, but I'm you know I'm doing the math. I'm like, wait, so like only 10% of people go to heaven, or even less? Because I was like a Southern Baptist. What percentage of the world is Southern Baptist, bro? Probably 2%. There's no way you're telling me that 2% of people go to heaven. You know what I'm saying? I did the math in my head, I thought it was you believe in God, you don't believe in God. Probably 50% of us are gonna make it there, 50% of us go to heaven. I was okay with that. That made that was sound logic to me. I was cool with it. And then I started doing the math on like, wait, how many Southern Baptists are there? Oh, okay. I don't know. I don't know if I believe that only Southern Baptists go to heaven. Or some people will say, like, only Catholics or only this bigger umbrella of whatever, whatever your belief is, you know what I'm saying? So just from a like a young age, I was like, I don't buy that. I don't buy that. There's people are good, there's so many more good people on this planet than just your version of your religion, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, and then I've been learning more and more about like astrology lately and how Christianity like perfectly maps onto like astrology, and apparently there's been hundreds of religions before Christianity that are the exact same. One example is Egyptian, right? There was an Egyptian religion where there was some mythical being, right? And he was a virgin, and or his his mother was a virgin, and he was sacrificed on the same day Jesus was, you know what I'm saying, and then rose again on the same day Jesus did, and those all line up with certain astrological things that happen, like the summer solstice or something. Like there's this there's this moment where the sun uh comes down and it sits for like three days and then it rises again, right? Um, and it's just the way it looks, right? And this other myth in Egypt was saying that this other mythological person, he the the story is that he uh died for three days and then rose again. And then there's a hundred other religions that do that, apparently, right? And and I also am a fan of believing that Jesus is the Son of God and that he did, he just happened to correlate with the astrolog astrological shit because of course he like God, if God is God, he designed it that way. And and I feel like there is within this understanding a realm to be like, well, I still believe that Jesus is special and all those other religions are not, but even still, Christianity actually fit into this pattern of religions that we've been seeing since the beginning of time, you know what I'm saying? And and this is when we're gonna switch topics to one that you like, but so you break down, like, well, what is a religion? What are all these patterns? What are all these things that we're seeing over and over and over again? And what do they mean, right? And what does it mean to be religious? Well, the components of religion are traditions, right? You know what I'm saying? Like Christmas and Easter, these are way more important than we realize. They do, they it's everyone doing the same thing at the same time of year and going through the same, it keeps us all going through the same motions together. And it didn't matter if you called it Jesus or something else, the Egyptians and every civilization before us at those times of year were doing the same exact fucking things for some reason, you know what I'm saying, for whatever they believe. But then there's always a story, right? And like all of the older um pagan religions, they believed in the gods and the myths and these ideas, these gods in the sky, right? Or something. And Christianity and Judaism and the Muslim religion, religions that come around that time, right? It switched over to being like, no, Jesus was a real person, you know what I'm saying? Uh these stories of gods changed into like, no, this guy was real, you know what I'm saying? And that's why people think that religion is special. We can talk about that later, but it doesn't change the fact that before Jesus even stepped on this earth for hundreds of thousands of years, we were already going through the same traditions in the same stories. He just lined up with a story that we've been telling since the beginning of time and traditions that we've been doing since the beginning of time. You know what I'm saying? The Greeks were doing these same traditions, you know what I'm saying? Like the whole um the drinking the wine, you know what I'm saying, the communion. Traditions like that have been happening way, way before Jesus has been around. Once again, I'm not trying to say what's true, what's not true. Um, and it could just be because God designed it that way that Jesus aligned with previous traditions. But this is what has opened my eyes to the importance of storytelling, because all these religions have a very important component of storytelling, right? And you told me last time we had an interview, you consider yourself a storyteller, which is why I think you're further along on your spiritual journey than you realize. And I'm also curious to like open up a conversation about storytelling with all of that in mind and how important stories are. You know what I'm saying?

blasé 1:39:01

Yeah, I mean, so you know, right off the bat, I did not know, you know, I mean, I was raised Catholic, but I did not know any of the stuff about the Egyptian religions and previous things of like recurring patterns. I'm not surprised by it, but I had no prior context to that. But from a like a storytelling perspective, I do think there's value, kind of like a reinforced presence on certain themes of people's lives, you know, one based on tradition, and especially if it's something that's like been repeated throughout history, I can sort of see why that kind of stuck around. Because, you know, I I don't I don't know what the percentages are, but I do think it's like Christianity is like at a majority right now. I I'm not at all surprised if that was because the themes that they adopted into their traditions were from things that people were already familiar and comfortable with. And I feel like storytelling kind of comes from that to some extent. There are new elements along the way, but the core themes are what like last time we were talking, like when I was talking about my Vitae album, I was talking about like the different stages in like a hero's journey. Almost every story, like every good story has those like set themes, but they just introduce new nuances along the way. Like I said, I didn't have any of that context before, but I'm not surprised at all because not not to say it's all boiled down to like good storytelling or anything, but like under the lens of storytelling, I can see why a lot more people resonated to it. And like what you're saying, like the traditions, like the it lining up with the astrological signs or whatever, like all of that kind of recurring over and over again makes people makes it more believable too, if anything. There's some tangible thing backing, backing a claim up, I guess. I'm a little reluctant to talk on it more, mainly because I haven't thought about it myself and I don't want to like say something out loud that I don't actually mean without fully thinking of it. But like, you know, everything you're saying kind of makes sense to me. I in terms of like, I think you brought up the topic of like, I don't even know why we have, or maybe you've said you did know.

Tom 1:40:58

I've talked about a lot of things. A lot of things I'm trying to do. I opened up like 12 different threads and put them on the table.

blasé 1:41:03

Recollective, it had something to do with what you were saying. But basically, what I wanted to add to that is um I feel like it's human nature to need a religion, but I for myself, I'm conflicted as to like whether the religion of choice matters as much. Again, that'll cause so much hate depending on who you talk to. But going back to that like analogy of the referees on the court I was saying, I'm like, there's no way this tiny percentage are the only people going up. At least in Catholicism, one of the major themes is like you can't be punished for something you didn't know was wrong in general. Like, I don't know like what more nuance there is to that, but like I feel like it's common sense. I don't think the God that we all know and understand today, I don't think he, she, it, whatever, whatever you want to refer to God by, I don't think that entity is as petty as people think he is. Like, of like why he didn't tell anyone you have to like sign up for a religion to get into heaven. The oversimplification of religion is just like a rule book of how to be good to one another and to be good to yourself. Yeah. And as long as you do those things, it's basically like a glorified way of saying those two things. And if you do all those things and live like an honest and like decent life to what makes sense to your uh your living situation, that's all it takes to you know make it to an afterlife. That theme is very consistent across the board, no matter what religion you're talking about. Yeah, right. So in my mind, obviously you're brought up with what your parents were brought up with, and your parents are brought up with what their parents are brought up with. I'm like, how much of it is you're doing it for for tradition, and how much are you doing it because you actually like believe like the little details related to each thing? Like I said, I've been exposed to so many, and I acknowledge the differences, but I'm like, we have so much more similarity than differences. Why are like why is no one harping on that? Again, with the race, with the religion, whatever it is, people harp on the differences, but I feel like people gloss over the similarities. I'm like, that's the thing that's supposed to be tying us together. That's like literally all we have to tie us together, and that's the one thing people don't like to talk about, and I don't understand why.

Tom 1:43:10

But that's my hot take on so I think I have a way of phrasing it all. No, this has been great. Um, I think I have a way of phrasing it all that we because we keep saying, Oh, I don't want to say this, I want to dance around this, and I I agree with that feeling. I have the same feeling, like, oh shit, I don't want to say the wrong thing and piss off the wrong person right now, or make them not like my podcast because they think I'm either promoting religion or hating on it, right? It's it's I don't want to be too confrontational, but I think I have a way of phrasing it that'll make sense to every everybody, hopefully, which is each religion believes the differences is obviously the traditions and certain their similarities, but take the differences and focus on those for a minute, and and one of the big ones is the afterlife, right? The Christians believe that they're going to heaven, Muslims believe that their version of heaven, right? But what I'm interested in this podcast, and what I'm interested in, is not what happens after you die, but how that a religion affects your life while you're here. You know what I'm saying? And I think everyone from different religions will be able to admit that I'm right that while we're here, the structure of religion and the idea of religion, it does do the same thing for people. Because it's not religion is not just about when you die. In fact, I would argue it's not even about that at all. It's all about how to live your life the best way. And by the way, one of the best ways to live your life the best way is to spend your whole life believing you're going to heaven because that is gonna like one of the hardest things about being a human being is realizing that someday you are gonna die. No other being on this entire earth or this entire universe, as far as we know, is aware that one day they will not be here anymore. My dog does not know that one day he won't be here anymore, but you and me do, and that's our burden to bear, and that's the point of religion is to take that away. So the point of religion is not about death, it's about life, and part of living your best life is not worrying about death. You know what I'm saying? That is the fucking system, and that is consistent across every single religion. And I feel like anyone listening to this will understand what I'm saying that what a Christian person, what a Muslim person, and what a Jewish person get out of their three separate religions on while during the time they spend on this earth, what it gives to them as a person is about the same. It's the same structure, it's the same feeling of importance, it's the same understanding, the the passing down of wisdom, the community. Because this podcast is supposed to be about drive, motivation, not about afterlife. It's supposed to be about how to succeed, how to how to live your best life, you know what I'm saying? And and that's why I don't want to shy away from the conversation of religion. I'm gonna start talking to it about all my guests, because it's religion is is if not one of the most the most important reasons why we all are being driven to do such cool things while we're here, you know? Yeah, but we don't realize it. We think it's this thing that's there for insurance for later, but the importance of it actually is how it affects your psyche, your psychology, your mindset, your behaviors, your life now, you know?

blasé 1:46:11

Yeah, for sure. No, I totally agree with you. I feel like we sort of said the same thing. We're all getting the same benefit from it, what no matter what your source of it is. The ideas I I feel like overlap in such a way that it should be defining the best in our lives to some extent.

Tom 1:46:27

Okay. So I feel like we we agree on that. Cool. So let's move into like the specific aspect of it, which is storytelling, under the context of everything said, what do you think makes a good story?

blasé 1:46:38

For religion or just in general?

Tom 1:46:42

Just in general. I'm just saying acknowledging how important storytelling is, it's extremely important. You could use one of the stories of a religion to explain to me good storytelling structure or what makes a good story. I know that you tell stories through your music, so but music doesn't always have a it doesn't music doesn't always need a story to go through it. For instance, I know a lot of musicians will look to like movies, you know, to like find a story structure to put into their album. Like Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid Mad City is a hip-hop albums version of um what's that one director who does all those gory movies? He does fuck he did uh Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Tom and blasé 1:47:25

Oh, the Kill Bill.

Tom 1:47:26

He does the Kill Bill movies.

Tom and blasé 1:47:28

I know. Why can't it uh Quentin Territino?

Tom 1:47:30

Duh, I'm so serious. So so there's a Quentin Teratino in the 90s, a Quentin Teratino movie in the 90s, um, Pulp Fiction. Okay, so you know how Pulp Fiction jumps around all those timelines and stuff like that? Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid Mad City, it borrows that similar structure of this whole album takes place in one day, you know what I'm saying, and you're jumping from different points of it, and it feels like a Quentin Teratino-esque movie. And that's how I would explain that album. So, like, I'm just curious, with you and your music, where do you go looking for sit certain story structures? Where do you draw inspiration from? We can talk more about the hero's journey. I actually read a book on that after you told me about it last, but I want to stir up a conversation about just some like not necessarily about music storytelling, but just about like how you think about storytelling in general and where you where do you draw inspiration from?

blasé 1:48:16

So, inspiration for the storytelling, I feel like is based on what I consume and what I enjoy as a human being. In my personal case, I gave this example last time. Even the way I structured my album was based off of the way the Marvel Cinematic Universe does their movies. They're all separate stories, they all have their own path, but they find ways to converge here and there in like those crossover whatever is. And I always picture like my songs with other people as crossover episodes, I guess. In terms of borrowing structures from other works of art, I feel like that tends to be where I go, mainly because again, I'm I'm a big fan of like collaborating and they own that category to some extent, you know? They're the ones breaking all the records by doing that that sort of thing. As far as storytelling goes in my life, I feel like there's so much value to be taken from that, but I also feel like a word is only as important as you make it, as many things are in life. And what I mean by that is some people don't care about the words, specifically in music. Some people literally do not think twice when it comes to the words, and other people it's completely life-changing when they hear it, you know? Mac Miller, for example. I I can tell you listen to his words sometimes, and you're like, you can kind of feel what he's feeling, right? And it's only for people who like choose to let words have that power over them. And then there's other people that might listen to Mac Miller that like his voice, like they like the way he sounds, they like his production value and stuff like that, they harp on that. And then there's some people who like a blend of something in between. But when it comes to storytelling, I I I like to consider all those angles. You approach it from a point of empathy when you do it, to the point where if someone is listening or like watching, or you know, whatever the medium is, like if they're Paying attention to those tiny, tiny details in your story. If you know that's about to happen, you better put in all the work you can into those little details. But you should also make it consumable for someone who doesn't care about those details and just wants to see what's on the surface. You know what I mean? A good analogy for that is like iPhone cameras. When you first open up the iPhone camera, the picture looks crystal clear. But I don't know if you've noticed it, but when you zoom in, the quality becomes like some trash. It gets blurry and blurrier as you go. Right? I think of amateur storytelling as that entire concept where like when you first see it, it looks great. But then once you zoom in, everything gets fuzzy. Like, you know, there's like some gaps in a concept, or there's a gap in like a character arc or something like that. The less of that you have, the better of a storyteller you are. Just our conversation goes into so many rabbit holes. If you approach storytelling that way, you'll fill in those gaps really well. It's like anything. When you give a presentation, they say make sure you're presenting on something you actually know really well, because whatever pops up in your mind, whatever someone asks you, you'll have an answer for it. I feel like when you're doing storytelling, you kind of have to do the same thing. Usually when I write stuff, I create a scenario around it. Like even when I'm writing for other people, I'll be like, Where is this happening? Who's there? What's your sobriety level? I ask those questions so I can paint a picture in my head and use that as like that's my canvas. And whatever I put on top of that has to make sense within that frame of mind. A lot of things do that really well, and I feel like a lot of things don't do that really well. And like I said, words have power, but only if you let them have the power. Going back to religion, although I don't really want to, some religions use metaphor very heavily, and people take it too literally. But they know like a lot of activists these days, they'll take the literal interpretation of certain things and they'll like plaster it and like shove it down people's throats. The Bible is a perfect example. They'll be like, oh, it it says like you can't do this and you can't do this in the Bible. But half the time they're lying about stuff like that. They're lying by omission, basically, where it's it doesn't explicitly say that, they just mention the opposite of whatever point, and they kind of like drive that point home with whoever. But the point is, like, sometimes it's just a metaphor. In the Bible, for example, people kill their firstborn son every other day for like the the point of the story. No one's asking you to do that in real life. There's like an underlying meaning between behind some of that, you know. In the case of that story, it could have happened. I don't know. I'm not here to fact-check anyone, but the point being is if you zoom in and it makes sense, and then you zoom out, it doesn't make sense. That can cause a lot of discrepancy for people, depending on what you're reading. I just gave the Bible as an example because that's the one that you know, the talks around abortion or the talks around homosexuality, that the most popular thing that gets brought up in conversation is what the Bible says. I'm not here to say yes or no to any of those things, but um I feel like people can use the vagueness of a story or like the specifics of a metaphor and twist it into whatever you know narrative they want to have. And so there are pros to having it being so vague as the Bible and you know, whatever other things have it, to the point where it's like sometimes the story is meant to be openly interpreted, but there's also like scenarios where people use it negatively. I'm not saying any anything I've mentioned so far as being used to target or negatively affect people, but that risk has always been there, and that's kind of what people don't like about it. I take it for what it is, I understand the context in which it was written, and whenever I do come across anything that someone says that was based off of it, I interpret their opinion with that lens in mind. You know what I mean? It goes back to like putting yourself in other people's shoes when you hear them out or whatever it is. You have to understand where the context is coming from, and only then can you really know you can you can't make an informed decision on anything without understanding the full context. And if you do make a decision beforehand, it sort of invalidates what that opinion is, you know what I mean?

Tom 1:54:07

I feel like I'm really I do agree that the point of a lot of these religious stories and just stories in general are to be metaphors that you can take away. I do also, just to play devil's advocate with that idea, and I'm speaking in generally, I do feel like there is power to performing an act in real life in order for the metaphor to resonate stronger. You know what I'm saying? So I feel like you're like, oh, they always kill their firstborn son. Yeah, maybe they didn't do it, maybe they did. I'm not here to say that either, but I'm just saying there is power in actually killing your fucking firstborn son for the sake of generations of people to learn a lesson that you like you carried out something that someone else learned a lesson from, and if you didn't actually kill your son and you just then they thought you were a liar, then it wouldn't necessarily mean the same amount. So I feel like at times, uh strictly like for the sake of the metaphor, things have actually happened that are actually carried out, and therefore it does give the metaphor even more meaning, you know what I'm saying? But I want to still keep this conversation focused on just storytelling in general, right? Yeah, that's that's where I'll put the brakes on the religious talk because you were you're talking about some other cool things when it came to stories, and I think this ties into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where it's like you were saying like the best storytellers, they will it you zoom in and and the pictures bl or it's not blurry, it's still crystal clear, crystal clear. And like the best books and the best like novel, the best stories basically that the biggest following will be one where like say like Game of Thrones, if you went and asked the writer of the book a question about like, hey, in chapter 15, it says Sarah walks, you know, to the next town, and then it just skips to when she's in the town. Be like, what happened on this like that week she was walking to town? He'd be like, Oh, well, actually, and he'll know everything, you know what I'm saying? He's like, I just didn't have I didn't I didn't have like the ability to put it in the book because I had to make the book more concise. But if you ask him all the details, the master of the story, the the creator of the story, he's he's not just telling a story, he's creating a universe, you know what I'm saying, and then building a story around the universe he's created. So, as the god or creator of that universe, telling the story is super easy because he just has to tap in, he he knows all the the corners and the details of that universe, and that's what allows like someone like Marvel to tell so many different stories that intertangle because they've in their head, or I guess Stan Lee did it, right? Created a universe to go back to like Greek mythology. The Greeks had a the normal world, and then they had the Greek mythological universe that was their MCU, and they had all these gods, you know. I'm saying, in the same ways that we have all the Avengers, those were the superheroes, and those stories were real to them, but it was this whole universe that intersected, and all these different gods, timelines, and stories, they all fit together because they created this universe. And and yeah, I just want to like stick on that idea. And you were gonna ask about my app, we can do that at any time, but I showed you what I've been working on beforehand. I'm I'm trying to build a space story into the app where your workout programs align with the story I'm telling. And I feel a little bit held back because I need to make sure that the workout programs actually like they fit to a certain topic. Some of the topics would be like strength endurance, max strength, stabilization, right? And then different muscle groups, and there's a lot of real life things about workout programs that I have to fit these real life molds, right? But I want to tell a story with it, so then I I I create this universe with this spaceman, right? And he has to go to these different planets, and and that builds the story where he has to work out for whatever reason. Right now, I'm making it up to fit the workout programs because it's important for it actually to be tangible for people. But at the same time, I feel like your advice to me would be make sure that the actual universe I'm putting the spaceman in is so detailed that even if I don't talk about part of the planet in the app, that I know in the back of my head what's going on in this space universe that I've created to place these workout programs inside of. And the more detail I can imagine, the more I'll actually be able to share that and bring forward for someone to latch on to and and kind of resonate with.

blasé 1:58:27

This is where my mind kind of jumped when you were just saying that, and like also after you showed me the working visual for your app, I'm super fascinated by space. I watch all the documentaries, all the shows revolve, like even the sci-fi ones that kind of revolve around it. And like I want to almost say that in collectively, if you look, there's probably something story-wise in all of those where they had like a scientific or like a constraints of space reason for doing certain manual actions. And I feel like that would be a cool way to like a cool thing to integrate into uh your app. And my the first one that comes to mind is Interstellar, because you know they actually went planet hopping to find signs of life or something, or like, yeah, ways to like sustain life in one all those places. So I'm wondering, like, maybe not that idea specifically, but I'm wondering is if your workout, I I don't know if your workout has this yet, but like an end destination when it comes to like you know, working out and building your body. I I almost want to say that's not there's there's never like a finish line. I feel like that should be like an ongoing thing. Correct me if I'm wrong though, but like I'm wondering if there's a way you can kind of factor in that concept of it being never-ending to like the abyss of space. You know what I mean? I understand the tangibility of having like a spaceman kind of whether it's like an animation or just like what what this like made-up character is doing within your app. I feel like if you can add layers to it in terms of where where is this place in the universe, and how can you relate that to the working out aspect of things itself? Like, not to jump back to what we were talking about way before when we were having our little philosophical question about you know self-discovery. You know how you were saying there was like phases, right? Or like stages, where like one is like you you just you do your the self-discovery for yourself, you share, and then you like do it for others, basically.

Tom 2:00:18

Help them self-discovery, yeah.

blasé 2:00:20

But when I I remember thinking when you said that, it's like that's kind of like an endless cycle that doesn't just stop once. And you sort of mentioned it with your app. It's like the app is never gonna be done, the workout training is never gonna be done. The common theme across all those things we sort of talked about is that it's never ending, and you have to find ways to kind of make it exciting no matter what, right? So I'm wondering, and I feel like a lot of people gravitate, no pun intended, towards topics in space because it's so vast and the possibilities are quite literally never ending. So I'm wondering if there's a way for you to write a story around that that whole concept of the universe ever expanding. Your goals don't have to like necessarily have a finish line, it can just be like updated over time. I don't know if there's like any connection there, but do you do you get what I'm saying though?

Tom 2:01:08

Yes, for sure.

blasé 2:01:09

For me, that makes it so much more exciting. A lot of people say the journey is like the best part. When you get to the end of, I'm pretty sure one of your podcasts, the one of the people that showed up on your podcast said the same thing. The destination is important, but the fulfilling part is going on the journey to get there. A part of me like feels like a dread when I know I'm getting towards the end of a journey, you know? Like at the end of a family vacation or like any vacation for that matter, when you know it's coming to a close, that you kind of lose your excitement for it and you might not even see it through all the way as a result. You kind of want to want to hold on to like whatever you're feeling right now, you know. I can't speak specifically for the fitness aspect of things, but I would imagine there's like a similar thing where it's like I put all this work getting my body to look and feel one way and get myself to like mentally and physically feel a certain way. I don't want that to end. What could you incorporate into your app to kind of give them that rejuvenating sense that like this is not the end, this is just a checkpoint in the longer journey. You know what I mean? And I feel like, again, because because I'm a fa like a space fanatic, every the every single show, every documentary I've watched, they're never they're not saying Mars is like the end of the line. Like once they find a way to live on Mars, they're not saying that's the end. That's just like the next big stepping stone to allow them to go even further out, you know? So for me, that's really exciting. One, because it's a huge unknown, but somehow I still want to like know more about it, you know? And I feel like that's a very compelling thing. So I'm wondering if there's a way to tie that. It would like result in a story-driven thing, but like I'm wondering if there's like a feeling that feeling if there's a way to evoke that in the form of a story for your app as well. I bet there is, but that's like my immediate thoughts as far as like you know, your fitness app and the space concept is concerned.

Tom 2:02:54

Yeah. We're pretty deep into the interview. Uh so I if you want, I'll answer that question with a bunch of I'll start going all tangents about my app and different ideas that I have. Because if we're gonna go into my app, I'm just gonna explode with with shit. But I feel like we're deep enough in now where I can do that. Um so I like what you're saying about keeping it constantly like entertaining, right? Because that was the goal I set out to do, right? Which is it started with gamification. So it's only in the past year I've really kind of, and I think starting with our interview and and other books I've read and stuff, really started opening my eyes to the power of storytelling. Uh, another person, Jordan Peterson, is um a psychologist, I listened to his podcast, he kind of pushed me in this direction too. But originally, it I just wanted to do a video game, right? And obviously, video games do have stories, and I knew that there was potential in the future, but it started off as like, okay, all I need to do is put points to working out, okay, and now you get points for working out, and then create levels, and then make like all video games, make level one only a hundred points, and make level two hundred points, and like exponentially do it so that level ninety-nine requires a million points, and level nine a hundred requires a billion points, you know what I'm saying? So that you you can't really ever get to ninety-nine and a hundred, and then also I had a weekly leaderboard so that you could compete with your friends, and that's when the sharing aspect comes in. So you're simultaneously trying to move up in the levels, and also if you get too deep into like I'm level 78 and I'm not gonna get to level 79 for another month or two, you know what I'm saying? You have the weekly leaderboard, the monthly leaderboard, the yearly leaderboard, and I think there's a daily leaderboard too, so that it always kept you engaged. So just using like points and levels and leaderboards, that was the idea is to keep working out always engaging. And and that idea, it just simply that never got fully realized yet because it was so annoying to add all your sh information into the workout program that it never gained that much traction. And I still want to circle back to that idea or incorporate that idea again once I can integrate smart technology. You know what I'm saying? It's I feel like it's still a little bit ahead of its time. And someone will fucking invent it. I've said this before on the podcast. Once all the hardware can is is available to track all that shit for you, then my app, that version of the app is gonna be really, really fun. You know what I'm saying? To because you don't have to go, you don't have to worry about gathering the damn data. And so that's just kind of a given I put on the shelf and I'll come back to like smart technology at some point in my life, because I think all these sensors and stuff is gonna be easier to build. But then I randomly was like, well, how about without even tracking the data, how can I engage someone with exercise in such a deep, interesting way that it doesn't, there's no it's there's not necessarily points to it. And then I started thinking about storytelling and how there's these video games where it's basically just a movie. You know what I'm saying? It's not about points, it's about like these cutscenes and and this like basically it's not a very hard video game, but you just go through this almost like extended movie where you're kind of interacting with it. And I was like, what if I made something like that? Yeah, that's when I went down the space route, and so certain ways of your making it last forever. Obviously, I could just make so much narrative content that you could never possibly finish it all in your lifetime. That and that'll probably happen someday, you know, once I can put together a company and a team and stuff like that. But like at the moment, right, the it's a four-week program, and it teaches you the four different weeks, focus on four different core concepts of exercising, and then it goes through there's a little narrative part for every week and day, you know, and that connects with the planet or like a an enemy or something to do with space, right? In some in some way, and then I'm wondering if I can take that blueprint of narrative and say, okay, now anyone can make a workout, a four-week workout program as long as it kind of fits this structure, and someone else can come and make a completely different workout program and layer that on top of my story now. Like my trainer, maybe. I have this trainer I pay for. He can make a four-week program that's way better than mine. And you can choose mine, or you can choose him, and you can play that story again, right? Because books and movies and stories are fun to read twice for some reason, especially if they're a little bit different. So that's one way I'm thinking it could be a variation. Also, you layer in the points on top of that. You could try to beat your high score every time, things like that. Also, there is just the potential to create more and more and more and more space stories all the time. But also, I don't know if you noticed, I posted like a zombie picture at one point. It's I'm also not I I want the space story to be a mini game within my Drive Fitness app, my Drive Fitness universe. So the leaderboard, the point system, all of that is now like the background of the app, right? And it's like more like a platform for stories. And so I have this whole zombie idea. Space would be lifting, and the zombie idea would be cardio. So you could run a mile every day, and and every time you run, or you get there was a bunch of metrics. I took like steps, the distance you ran, maybe how much weight you lost, a bunch of other statistics that deal with cardio. And I created a whole narrative plan for a zombie universe where there's certain like crawler zombies, and there's certain like um what's it called? Just like each planet had its own gravity and and the lifting was different for that planet, each each town you went in had a new zombie in it, and there was the zombies that explode, that means you have to sprint fast away from the zombies that explode. The ones that crawl, you have to have good endurance and and run for a long time. You know what I'm saying? I I created this whole other world that had not just like more space stories, but it was a whole nother universe. Unlike the Marvel cinematic universe, where what ties them all together is that these superheroes all exist together. What ties all of my different universes together is the fact that they're all tied to my fitness data. You see what I'm saying?

blasé 2:08:48

Yeah.

Tom 2:08:48

And I had a I had even another idea of these great pyramids, you know what I'm saying, where you were a you were a civil. I like the idea of being God and like overseeing like a civilization. In fact, in some of the space narratives, I want uh have you seen like in in Interstellar, you mentioned that where they go to a planet and then they go back off the planet and a lot of time has lapsed. Yeah, I want to use that concept to like every time you go onto a planet and go back, the civilization grows and grows and grows. You go back every 30 years or a hundred years. That way you can essentially play God and like set things up in the story, you know what I'm saying, of the video game and like see a civilization.

blasé 2:09:22

No, and see how it like different episodes.

Tom 2:09:23

So now you're you're viewing this planet across like generation. It's like a it's like a story about different generations, not about a single person. Yeah. I just think about all these different ways I could tell stories within those contexts, is but like they do it in Rick and Morty too, in in some episodes.

blasé 2:09:38

I was just gonna say, I'm like, that sounds a lot like Rick and Morty. So, like these different stories that you have, is the leaderboard keeping track of everything per universe, or is it just collective? Or has that not been integrated into your leaderboard?

Tom 2:09:52

It's all gonna integrate. So, like because I wanted the stories to feel more like cinematic, I took out adding in all of the data. But in the end of the day, once the smart technology can track everything, then so right now, if you want to go through the space story, you don't have to enter in any data. You just literally go next exercise, next exercise, next exercise. It's more like you just watch and learn because that's what people want out of an app today in today's day and age. They want to see an exercise and do it, they don't want to take the time to like track track everything. You know what I'm saying? Even I don't want to fucking track it myself.

blasé 2:10:25

That's why Fitbits are popular too, right?

Tom 2:10:28

So in the point system, I have a whole equation that gives you more points if it's a record or if it you do more weight or more reps or things like that. Since the app won't know exactly what weight, rep, all that stuff you do, you know, right at the moment, I'm just gonna reward you a certain amount of points for completing it. Or I'll give you like a challenge. It'll be like beat the beginner mode, and you get like a challenge. But what will happen is that once it tracks it for you, then I can integrate my point system back into the stories too. So you'll just be going from story to story to story. But just as if you were using the app back when you had to mainly enter it in, since the technology is tracking it for you, there will be a background system of points and a leaderboard that will always be there in the background, no matter what game you're playing or what story you're following, or what workout you're doing. Because I have this big ass equation that tracks points. It makes sense.

blasé 2:11:15

Yeah, I mean, even like the immediate thing I was thinking of for some reason was like Candy Crush. When you play that game, you know how to win, you know how to get points, but I don't think anyone's actively paying attention to the points until the very end when you see like exactly the results at the end of the the session. And also with that game, they make it seem never-ending, also, but really that's just their in-story explanation for our developers haven't come up with more levels yet. So it's kind of like I I feel like you can definitely work that angle as well. But like, yeah, there's definitely a parallel with that, which is interesting.

Tom 2:11:47

And that's what I want the points to do. Like in the first iteration of my app, the points were everything. You remember? It was literally just a calculator that made up points, and like it was like, hey, this is how many points you got, and it could remember your history. But no one's really gonna care about points, no one's really Gonna care about history in the end, or at least when they first start using my app, you would go there and you'd be like, Wow, a space story. Oh my god, you like now I have this thing to pull you in, and it's the story, and that's why I'm focused so much on stories, is because I think it's the story is actually the most important part. It's like if I can make a story, a space story that's so good that and the only way you can look at my space story is if you fucking actually work out, actually, because the technology will track you and it won't let you progress through the story unless you have proper form and push yourself as as hard as you can be pushed, then you will have actually have to do it, then you'll get through the story, and then you'll just start playing these stories and and different like storylines, and then it could be years later you realize, oh shit, they're tracking my points. And like as the stories start to like get less exciting for you, you realize, oh wait, there's certain ways I can get more points by doing this, and like, you know, there's certain there's certain level of enjoying any game. I can pick up Rocket League and play a game right now and put it down and be like, cool, whatever. And then someone else is worried about like his monthly stats on the leaderboard and his his group of like his tribe, and like you know, he's wearing the skin that represents something outside of the game, especially like communities. Like, I'm sure that there could be like teams and com like we've we played around with team features and things like that, different communities or like groups within the app and that integrate into the game in different ways, or it could just be like you're like, hey, I want to see what Tom did, and you can just click through it and not even work out. I want people to be able to like touch it like a hot stove or spend their whole lives obsessing over it in their entire life. I I want it to be it's gotta be both, you know what I'm saying? And that's what you're talking about that zoom in on the detail, like you know.

blasé 2:13:37

I feel like you've put in a lot of thought into it, and it's really cool to hear how it's kind of like fleshed out like that. I feel like that zoom in, zoom out thing. I said that on a whim, but I feel like it actually kind of touches on many aspects of life and like projects that we've both been working on, which is kind of cool to see.

Tom 2:13:56

Yeah, I mean, that's originally why I started the podcast because I was like, dude, I could talk about this idea every single day for the rest of my life, and I would never run out of like detail to talk about. And it as I started doing the podcast, I realized the best way to do a podcast is actually to care about the other person and and listen to what they're interested in, and like the audience enjoys it, and it just makes for a better listen when the host actually like gets the other person to share things about themselves because I'm the host, you know what I'm saying? My listeners they hear a little bit about the app and the the gym idea like every episode, they get a little bit of it, you know what I'm saying? But they're they they don't really want to always hear me talk about it. I like it when it connects, but I just knew that personally I needed to talk through ideas and get them out and and get inspired by other people and and connect things and and have people like you be like, What have you ever thought about it like this? And like I wanted every guest to come on and just talk about my shit. I've gotten better at being a host, and like I I think it is better this way, and it's kind of like they say you need to get out of your own way, yeah. Because, like I was saying, we all are the universe, so I I can't I gotta be the universe and care about blase. I can't just be Tom and care about my idea. For the betterment of everyone listening, and for the betterment of us, I can't just rant for three hours, even though I could, I shouldn't, but it's tempting not to.

blasé 2:15:12

Yeah, but I I feel like like especially with you know, you you kind of just went into it to like a pretty good extent. I feel like that adds we were we were definitely talking about this before, but like it adds the context that you need. You've told me off off camera like a lot about your app, and I'm publicly saying all the things about the music stuff, and we're both saying to each other, like, yeah, that does line up with each other. And to someone who doesn't have that background, like obviously if they've been following your podcast for like long term, I feel like obviously they're gonna be able to pick up on what you're doing, but like for someone who's listening to this episode for the first time, having that context probably connects a lot of dots, you know, for new time listeners or whatever. So I feel like you know, we were also talking about timing. I feel like as long as you say the right things at the right time, it doesn't matter what it is. Yeah, it's insightful because I literally didn't even know you had this because even when you were saying the space thing before, I didn't realize that was like just one avenue of a bunch, like you mentioned the zombie the zombie, like an apocalyptic world approach to it. Like I didn't even know that was on the table. So you have like a lot of different worlds that you can kind of tap into for different types of workouts, and it keeps a track of everything. What I was gonna say to you is maybe you should look into like the Jackbox type of approach to it all. Where I mean, are you familiar with the Jackbox games like uh Quiplash and all those different things? It's like a group that one's group oriented, but the point is it's like they have different themes to play different like game night games online and it's internet involved and like what is it?

Tom 2:16:43

It's called Jackbox.

blasé 2:16:44

Give me an example of what I can example of the game is like Two Truths and a Lie. There's just like a digital entity. There is a story revolving around it. The best one I can it's like a trivia game, I forget what it's called, but it's basically around revolving around a horror game. And it's like, have you you've seen like uh what's that kind of thing? Saw, right? Where he like plays like the games or whatever, or like it's basically like a like a death trap escape room, basically. All those movies. So it's like that, but like trivia instead. It takes boy basic, boring trivia, which like depending on who you are, you might like that, you might not, but it reels people in with the storytelling of a serial killer forcing you to play trivia so you can like survive with your life. And so like that's like a very dumbed-down example, obviously. But all the different games that you can get in that suite kind of have a it reminds me of what you're doing because you're kind of describing like different workouts with different scenes and settings. And um, they also do the same thing, they they like you don't have to pay attention to the points as much, it keeps track of that for you. But the story is what drives it to like for people to want to keep coming back to that game specifically.

Tom 2:17:51

Here's the thing Can someone else come in and make a story within Jackbox?

blasé 2:17:58

So one uh some of the games are very user input heavy. So like one of them it's basically they give you a prompt and you have to give like a funny answer, and then the rest of the people around you vote on which one's funnier, you know? And there's like different iterations of that. That one, it's it's just the format, the platform, that's all they're providing. The users have to create the fun out of it, basically. So, like in your specific situation, you obviously you need the regiment of whatever workout um kind of baked into the concept, but as far as like what the character's name is, what planet they go to, maybe, like that's kind of like you know, that could be something that like a user gets to decide, you know. Like, for example, you have like workout circuits, correct me if I'm wrong, I I don't know my terminology, but like are those like interchangeable, or do you have to do it in a certain order?

Tom 2:18:45

Right now, the way it's set up, and I want it to be like the ultimate amount of flexibility and a program, like in a structure, but right now, within a day, an exercise day, you have to do those exercises in that order, but within a week, I have it flexible so that you can do any day of the week in any order. So let's say it's chest, back, and shoulders, those three days. You can pick any of those days. I could do chest first, back first, or shoulders first. It doesn't matter. You could do them any day of the week, right? Within that exercise, you have to you have to do them in the order that I've laid out of the exercises, because I have a there's a philosophy to that. And then you can't move on to week two until you finish all three of those, though. The story though parallels with a certain story aspect parallels with the back day, a certain story parallels with the chest day, and a certain story will parallel with the leg with the shoulder day or the leg day, whatever it is. Um, and and you'll see those stories out of order, actually. Let's say on chest day you run into some aliens, let's say on back day you have to carry something, and then on shoulder day you have to like do something else. I don't I don't even know, but you'll see those three things out of order. But then those at the end of the week, those three things will add up, and then there'll be a bigger narrative plot at the end of those three days, and then each week has its own narrative plot, and you have to do those in order. You can't go do do like week three without doing week two. So we play we've played around with letting you switch the order of the exercises. We've played we played around with lots of different aspects of this. There's so many different combinations of ways I could go about it, but I do want it to be here's what you should do, like a structure, but also be ultimately as flexible as you need it to be because everyone's different. That's really hard to do.

blasé 2:20:34

Yeah, for sure. I mean, basically what you just said is kind of what I was getting at. So, like, that's awesome. What I was getting, the only specific thing that I wanted to add to that was like it sounds like you you can dictate order on a weekly basis, just not on a daily basis, with like the specific workouts or whatever. But like the game that I was talking to about, they basically have like sassy or like you know, depending on who you are, I guess. If you're into like sass, like dark humor or whatever it is, like if you want to incorporate that into the story depending on the map or whatever, like you can do that. But basically, it would be like if you avoided leg day on purpose, you know, is there a fun way to like kind of poke fun at you for like, oh what's wrong with your legs? How come you didn't start with leg day or something like that? Like what you said, everyone's different. Some people might not like that, some people might even find that discouraging, so you might not even want that at all. But like the point I was trying to get to is like the game responds to your selections and adapts the narration as far as the story goes. The process of the game and like the order in which you do things, that is somewhat predetermined, but the dialogue and how you perceive the flow of events as a story do change based on actual user input.

Tom 2:21:42

So there is outside of the story, and like basically the platform that I had already built the last time we talked, there is basically free mode too, right? And and there are just workout programs that are just workout programs that that just have nothing to do with any story, they're just points and workout programs, and you could even I even have it so that you could just pick out an exercise and do that and enter in some data for if maybe you only care about your bench or something like that. So you do within the world of my app, you do have the free reign to do whatever you want. You don't have to play a story, and you can just do squats every day. And we have played around with ideas. A big thing for me is like I have these animations, these avatars, and by the way, a a big thing in how I think I might make money off of this is make these these animations and these skins a big deal and NFTs and try to do something within the world of interesting avatars, right? And one of the ideas we played around with, we haven't executed this yet, but like say you do a bunch of chess exercises, your little avatar gets a bigger chest. If you are unbalanced, your avatar will start to look unbalanced. There we're kind of motivated to like do balanced workout programs. And that's like the power of the story is someone can just, it's like you're going along for the ride. You know, I put it together, but hopefully, eventually, even someone who's more of an expert than me to put the actual programs together in the stories and that you can just kind of enjoy the ride and have faith that you're gonna come out balanced on the end. You're not gonna be like you can't skip leg day in the story because first of all, like then the story won't let you continue. And therefore, you have faith that uh you're doing balanced routines with you could just enjoy the story, basically. But sure, if you wanted to be like, fuck the story, I'm just gonna go do chess every day. There are funny ways I think that we can incorporate making your avatar look weird or whatever it, you know, or just funny challenges that are like kind of like blooper challenges. We give out medals for good things, we could also give out medals for like always skips leg day medal. I think there are fun ways to incorporate what you're saying, but I want the story to have a perfect balanced regimen for whatever your goals are. And then one more thing I wanted to say because it's a cool idea I've never had before, but you were saying, like, is it like this game or that game or whatever? And I I do want to create the space game and the zombie game or whatever, but also what I'm really trying to do is be like epic games, like someone who just has the platform where other people come and make games. Like, I don't even I just want to show other people like how you could create a story around a fitness program and be like, look what you can do, and then have personal trainers come in and make programs that they can play on my story, and then by the way, have other like arts artists and creators and storytellers come in and be like, wait, can I add a bunch of image like use all the images like I was showing you? Can I add my own images? And instead of a space story, can I do a fairy tale? It's like, yes, that too. And that's when it'll get to the point where you like you were saying, there's a lifetime's worth of of narrative and content to go through because you you give all the trainers the tool to make to add all their programs to stories, you give all storytellers the tools to build stories around programs, and then hopefully if I can just do it right, and and it'll not it'll just go crazy. Because I I think the guy from Amazon said this with AWS the best companies are ones that give people tools and empower people. So I don't want to necessarily be like, I'm Tom, I have a cool space idea. Look at me, you should play my space idea. I'm like, no, I am building a platform for you to build your own story and your own programs and to interact and enjoy everyone else's. But the things that have to be consistent are the points in the background and eventually the smart technology. There's no creative way around the smart technology and and and that has to precisely track all your shit. Yeah. But there's so many other things that I want to build around that that anyone can grab onto and and run with.

blasé 2:25:27

The thing you said about it turning from just an app with the story you made into kind of like a platform for other people to use as a tool. I feel like that's I think that's kind of like the way to go. You're not only just providing value for other people, but you're giving them an avenue to like create value for themselves as well, to some extent, you know? That's a cool source of income as well. If you want your program to be in my app, again, I'm I'm a big advocate for um collaborating with people. That's a huge way to do that, which is cool. But also what you were just saying in general, that's kind of what I was getting at with the label stuff too. I've done it before, I'm proud of it, but I don't want to harp on it. The point is, I can do the same for you with the exact same platform that I did it for myself. It's a recurring theme, but proof by example, you know? And I feel like you're sort of doing that. And you know, if I was a trainer, like I feel like you're you're hitting off all the right points for me to want to like invest my own time and put my own self-created program into your platform in something that's already accessible to people on like a storytelling level. So that's really cool.

Tom 2:26:34

Yeah, man, there's so many potential business opportunities packaged within my idea that it's almost overwhelming. I do think that Drive Fitness can be like a billion-dollar company someday because there's so many different layers of opportunities to create, to provide people value, to innovate. The fitness industry is just gonna do so much cool shit over the next hundred years, with or without me. It's gonna be so cool, man. We're just scratching the surface. In the 70s, they would just jump rope and shit. Bodybuilders weren't even a thing until like the 50s because we didn't even get to this like standard of like living. We were just fucking surviving, you know. I obviously like gladiators and shit back in the day were fit and stuff, but it was different. Like we've never reached this level of comfortability to make ourselves uncomfortable with fitness. We're just now comfortable enough to we all sit at our desks and do the metaverse and stuff and distract ourselves from reality because society is so great, but like we're also about to be so technologically great that we can properly challenge ourselves the right ways. And that's with all the things we were talking about with religion, and it ties into everything because you were saying that like something bad can be good, right? Or whatever your situation is, it's all about how you phrase it, or you know, we we had a lot of conversations about that, but like people need to struggle, people need to and people need to physically struggle to feel the best in life. At times we struggle too much. Now we're in a society where we don't struggle enough, and that's why everyone's depressed these days. So many people have anxiety or depression. If we can innovate in the fitness field in in really artistically like cool, innovative ways, and then we can really truly enjoy our own physical suffering again, and then we won't have as much mental health and all the all the other problems is like this will solve so many problems if it can happen the right way, you know?

blasé 2:28:18

Yeah, I mean it makes sense. We're getting so comfortable to the point where like I think people do crave like a little bit of discomfort, like you can't really grow without like some form of discomfort. And I feel like what you're doing currently kind of you know harps on that idea to the point I feel like when people say harp on something, like it makes it sound like it's bad, but I in this case I think it's like you know it's something that people don't realize they need in their life more. Yeah, like for me, I was just telling you before, I'm like, I need to like get my eating shit together. I don't have anything motivating me to do it. Everything we've talked about for your app so far, I feel like are all things to get people engaged and to like stay motivated and doing workout routines. So I I think that's really cool.

Tom 2:28:58

You talk about the Marvel cinematic universe, obviously it starts with Marvel, but Disney is a company that runs that, and I love the company Disney, and I love the guy himself. I'm like obsessed with Walt. And one of the reasons I like Walt is because he was just so innovative. At a time where people like really needed something to entertain them, he didn't just create animated movies, he created a new medium for artistic expression. There was no animations. He put the pictures together and made the pictures move in a certain way, and he gave people the tools to actually like imagine squirrels and things, whatever you want. It's not a damn movie, it's animate. It's animation was so freaking different than anything that ever existed on this planet. And near the end of his life, I feel like he was aware that animation was so powerful that it's almost distracting, it almost pulls us out of real life too much. And he was building like electronic stuff, and he was like getting into engineering way more, his imagineers and stuff like that. And I feel like if he had kept going, he would have hit on certain ideas that I have. And I think Marvel is like the extent of how because it's basically animation at that point, bro. All the CGI and stuff, it is like we started with I think it was Snow White or something, one of Disney's first animated films, and now these Marvel movies are the extent of that. But guess what? I don't know if we were at war back then or something, like the quality of life wasn't as high as it was today. But now our quality of life is so high, and and and these movies are so entertaining, they're so good. There's so many movies, right? How many if you added up all the Marvel movies? That's like 48 hours. No, it's like a hundred hours of content. You know what I'm saying? And all the TV shows, it's probably like 180 hours of content. So we have so much entertaining content, right? Netflix, Hulu, all these things, we have so much content that all we want to do is sit there and do nothing. And everyone's wrapped up in this cool animation paradigm shift that happened a while ago. But it's like, dude, the new entertainment needs to be entertainment that helps you also get physically in shape. Like, I don't want to watch Iron Man, I want to be Iron Man, I want to feel like I am Iron Man. You know what I'm saying? I want to go through Iron Man's story and have to get in shape in order to fight all the guys he fought and look, and I want to actually look like him. Well, that's what I'm trying to do. That's what I'm trying to like immerse video games and entertainment into like hard workout programs to bring you into the universe.

Tom and blasé 2:31:14

I get you, yeah, for sure.

Tom 2:31:15

And that's what I think the metaverse and all that shit is gonna help. And I think there's a there's a lot of shit cut like it's all gonna inter interconnect, but like I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do it, but that's like the next level of entertainment. Entertainment that also has physical benefits and is not just sitting on your on your ass for three hours. That's not like the true like peak of our our society, is just making