Friction is Freedom with Scott Greenberg

before we get into that, let's talk about your origin story. How did you get into this whole web 3 space? My origin origin or how I got into the web 3, you want to start? A little bit of both. You can mix it up and keep it. Sure. I was working animation at an animation studio called Film Romain, which I rose up the ranks. And then

we launched, which produced the Simpsons in King of the Hill. And we launched Bento Box in animation studio about 12 years ago, 2008, 2009. And I sold that business to Fox Entertainment about three years ago. It was the first acquisition they completed after they sold all the major Fox assets to Disney. And it was really a build in animation business for Fox since that was a

home of prime time animation. For me as an entrepreneur, somebody who's just always curious and creator driven and technology, friends of mine and people work for us started. I saw a year and a half ago, two years ago, seeing people, Justin Reuland and Michael Kusak selling art as NFTs. And I was like, what is this? And so I started tracking that. And for me, what I

want to do next in my career. And I just really saw a major moment in time where both cryptic and crypto and blockchain technology and NFTs and really the metaverse. It was really a moment of a true monumental shift for the creator economy and the business. So I was, as an entrepreneur, I was fascinated. And I thought it wasn't going to be the next thing I

do on my own. And in my Bento Box board meeting, you know, part of my meeting is about pitching new business ideas. And I just said, this is something I'm interested in. It's kind of a company that's interested in. And Charlie Collier, CEO of Fox Entertainment, my work for. I've been tracking as well. And then I found out, locked the murder off the CEO of Fox

and Paul Cheez, where the CTO has been tracking Web 3. So Fox is a very unique place where it's truly an entrepreneurial company and forward looking and seeing the future. And, you know, I think we all align that there was a great opportunity for the future of entertainment. So they're very uniquely positioned to set up blockchain creative labs here inside of Fox. Fox is a true

startup, not a marketing business, not a licensing business, but what is a future of entertainment? And so that's how I got here. It's a long, it's a long answer to your question. But yeah, that's where I am today. Very cool. And I'm really eager to kind of hear what you can share about what you're working on with blockchain creative labs. But I remember in March of

this year, South by Southwest 2022 happened. I was there and got a chance to check out. The experience that you guys had, it's like a whole street corner. And it was really a fantastic experience. But I'd love to kind of dig into that for just a couple of minutes. I want to I want to understand what that was for you guys and what you were trying

to really showcase. Yeah. So, you know, kind of picking up for my origin story, the name blockchain creative labs is specific. Right. Blockchain has and we believe in the future of blockchain technology and all the attributes that I have. Can deliver Fox is a creative company on this core. You know, it's creative roots from the studio and the network and sports and everything we do. And

Bendo box, you know, the core of my business is creators and clearly with Web 3, the notion of creators and and fans together and labs as in such early days of Web 3. We have many hypotheses of what this can be. So, the purpose of South by Southwest was really meant to be. Now, part of us really kind of we want to be part of the

conversation. And I think it was very important. People say, what is Fox doing here? What is Bendo box? So for us, the installation had a couple attributes. One, we had something called. We had our blockchain. Our exchange, right. Which we want to have a conversation. So we hope was a big tent. It wasn't about, you know, we invested in a company called Aluvio, which is an

amazing decentralized video delivery system on the blockchain. But we basically had with Southwest. We had a, we had speakers every day talking about different topics. And for us, we wanted to say, we believe this is the future of entertainment. Our hypothesis is, and I think why Fox is here. We, there's early adopters, amazing. How do we get mainstream adoption? How do we teach? You know, every

day Americans who are on the world, understand what it means, own a digital good. Why is there's value here? Why is it better for them? So we want to have that conversation around entertainment business. And that was one, two, we wanted to show off some of the, I mean, great material we were working on ourselves. We worked closely with Southby creating a marketplace for musicians and

filmmakers there to sell their music as an NFT to truly on it and sell posters of their film as NFT. And really show where the future could be. And, you know, it was a little bit of how could we create at Southby for that moment in time? What the world looked like in five years. And one of the coolest experiences we did, we had an artist,

a musician who was on a panel talking about the future of music. And then we had an installation where people were sitting or listening to his music and then bought one of his songs. And he literally saw in his wallet. He saw his person listen to his music, buy it. And he saw the money drop in his wallet. That was really cool. That just showed the

real connection of the two. And we also had a visual installation, which is trying to visualize what the blockchain looked like at, in Southby. And so for us, it's really about being a conversation and saying, Fox wants to be a future. And then, you know, then we, the culmination was we brought Dolly Parton to Southby Southwest. And we, we worked, she was the premier event at

the Moody Theater. And we streamed it on the blockchain, using her partner, Louvio and so a live stream on the blockchain. And then you could buy the episode as a, you basically rent it. And then you can buy her album as an NFT truly on it. And again, I think this is just a beautiful thing about an NFT as a media file, not like on Spotify

or on Apple or on Amazon, where you rent it, as long as you have membership, you have true portability, you owned it. And that was, that was a very innovative moment, showing where the future can be. And Dolly's true American icon was an amazing event. So we really wanted to show what the future would be. So for us, Steve, it was really, it was really about

what's the future and really to be part of that story. And really saying, putting a flag and saying, Fox as a company is forward thinking, we want to be a leading partner. And this is not about us, like saying, oh, we're the only solution, rather we're a piece of this puzzle. And want to go lead the conversation there. And that, I think we achieved that. I

think we helped really lead the conversation. There's amazing installations there. The doodle guys did a cool thing. There's other people's, I've got great speakers, you know, people we love, you know, map all's there, which I love to hear him speak and all these amazing people. But for us, it was like, when entertainment, unless have a conversation because there's a lot of open questions and, you know,

as a studio, as entertainment companies, and technology companies, what can that be? And that was kind of our coming out. And then really from that, pushing where we're going forward. Very cool. Yeah, I think it's really inspirational to see a company like Fox thinking so forward. And, you know, the level of IP that's just kind on chain is very exciting. And being able to kind of

come out at South by Southwest and share with the world that, like, this is here to stay. You're at the forefront and really trying to, you know, show all of the use cases here. And I love that one of the artists seeing his song, cell, the money coming right into his account. And no, no label or anything. It's like directly, which is just such a disruptive

thing. And I'm sure a lot of people just got hyped by seeing that. But they don't really understand the level of disruption that that actually is at its core, the amount of people that just get shoved out from that one, you know, penny drop into his wallet is pretty incredible. Yeah. It's true. You know, it's funny. It's still at early days. I mean, you know, the

baseball analogy, we're still in maddy practice. Melody Hildebrand is my partner running this business who's also the chief information security officer at Fox. She likes to term friction is freedom. Right. So we had a lot, you know, unfortunately, Polygon went down that week. Right. We had it was a perfect storm. And Polygon went down. It had a trouble getting reconnecting Meta mask wall at the rainbow

wall. So every early thing that went wrong to live wrong. And, you know, it's not easy. And but these, you know, Charlie Collier talks about these early days, you know, this is like these were on, you know, prodigy, unplug your phone, plug in your modem, get on the web. We've surfed the worldwide web right now. But there's podcasts. I didn't say I'm going to go on

the worldwide web and connect. It's like, I'm going to click this link. You know, so we're in those days right now. And, you know, people even ask, well, why is Fox here? And, you know, aren't you disimmuting yourself? And I think, you know, the Murdoch's talk about this and for us, the future of content distribution, like, we're not in the streaming wars. We are in a

unique situation. They sold, they're probably. Most innovative forward thinking sold their business to Disney got out. We're not spending hundreds of billions of dollars making content. We are still selling stuff there. But where's the future? And we believe that that that web three technologies will disrupt our content distribution. And so that's where we're headed. This is a forward looking view. You know, is it going to

be next year? Is it three years now? It's a five years? It's going to grow. And we're kind of throttleing our growth to that. Because we ultimately believe community and fandom being active and engaged with the creator. You still, you know, you still need a company like ours to help facilitate that, support it and manage it. And so the next sims is on Fox. The future

will be owned by the creator, the fan us and a brand, maybe multiple brands. And I think it's really compelling. We're not breaking the windows. You know, like we did a dolly, maybe it'll be a premium premiere window like theatrical kind of is. And, you know, and we might actually reinvent home video, right? Bring back the home video window that's dormant and you actually own something.

So, in our mind, this is just additive to the current window system. It's not not going to blow up to, you'll still have streaming, you'll still have other things in the future. But this is really about opening opportunity, also opening up to me for smaller creators. If you have, you know, the, you know, the Art of Laird by a web three talks about the thousand true

fans. If you have a thousand true fans. You know, you can actually fund your content. And, you know, and that that's also very compelling. And, you know, we're one of the things we're doing. We have, you know, we're a crap opulist drop, which we'll talk about. We're going to 10,420 unique tokens for Dan Harmon's show. But if you hold one of those, that'll be unique token

gated access to a screener. So, be able to see episodes early. We'll see early cuts of the episode. So, for us, that's what we're moving to now. And so, we're very excited about that future. Nice. Yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned token gating as well. I think that's so early in the stages of becoming a reality right now. Like a lot of companies haven't, haven't gotten

their hands on it yet. And I think once that kind of thought processes opens of like, wow, this is actually about access and ticketing all aspects of sports, entertainment, everything kind of fall in. And you, you kind of laugh about the fact that we would do it as a paper ticket. Still, you know, with everybody having cell phones. So it's really exciting to hear that, you

know, you guys are doing collections and things like that. Let's talk a little bit about that. With the brands that you're working with, and the IP and things like that, what do you guys currently, you know, have, I guess, in your stable of brands that are available and out there? So, let's start first with the WWE, which we have a moldware, the exclusive, and a tea

partner for them globally. And we launched MoonSalt, which is their marketplace. So the website is www.wwwMoonSalt.com. And on that site, we're really, doing everything from, you know, they're called flips, video highlights that have, you know, the best moments from different events. And we're going to be moving on to also having utility of in real life and amazing things. And remember, we have SmackDown and Friday nights

and Fox, which is an amazing event, which we use at the pivot. And it's a huge fan base. It's very sticky on social and across. And so, one of our hypothesis, and as I walk through the WWE, you know, the things, it's about educating, educating the mainstream audiences. And it's less about owning a tea partner. We know we have the early adopters. We want to make

sure we feed them correctly. But it's, how do we get hardcore fan to know? It's less about the NFT. You want a digital good. It's unique. It's verifiable. It's transferable. It has value and has other things. So, the MoonSalt, we're very excited about this. A global opportunity. We had a great event for SmackDown. We had Stephanie McMahon and Triple H and picked their top fours. And

we released those. So we're working on that. We have Dan Harming's, animated show that Ben Doebox producing for Fox called Crap Opalus. It's an ancient Greece show, StereoCole. We had, just, we teased it at Comic Con a few weeks ago. We had 2200 people in a ballroom. And we screened a clip and it played great. And so, we're dropping on August 11th. I'm not sure when

this will air, but maybe already dropped 10,420 unique chickens. Because chickens are a form of currency before there was money in Greece. And so, we have attributes in the show. And so, like I said, if you own one of those, it'll give you token-gated access to video screening room, episodes and material. Token-gated access to a merch store. And then, as the show progresses, we're going to

drop other series of different characters. We're going to also sell tokens. You can limited number of people have their background character. And then, if you have a token, you can vote. And that's not going to be, oh, what's that episode about? But you might be able to say, oh, you want this character to work with. This alpha character, that alpha character. You want this character to

hit this person over the head with a fish or a bat or nothing. So, kind of fun stuff like that. We're very excited about that. And that's going to be on Ethereum. And the token-gated access, Luvio for the video. The mass singer was our first project. It was number one show on television. That was really, and we're coming back this fall with it in more integrated

the show. And that was started with collectible cards. We had to collect it together, get utility. This season we have more token-gated. We have more integrated video and premium content as well. And we're integrating with, again, the show really educating, educating mainstream audiences. And then we worked close with Fox Sports to launch Spring Football, the USFL last spring. And that was an innovative product where we

had tokens for each team. And then, the most innovative thing that Eric Shanks, the CEO of Fox Sports, who founded the USFL, worked with Melody and our team, we created player tokens. And really the players are creators. Natalie is a really interesting. And so, the split of the token, they get a majority of the split. And so, really, instead of them going to build their fandom

on Instagram or other social, build it on Web 3. And you have your fans, if you feed them. And so, really excited about that as well. And we have some future stuff coming. But everything for us is about, ultimately, we want to move to what's the future of content distribution. What's the future of content production on chain? So, yes, we're doing collectibles today because that's more

tangible if people understand it. But we're moving more towards token-gated content. And we're excited for the day. I mean, there's still some regulatory clarity has to come from Washington about fan ownership and fan funding. But that gets more clear. It's more clear in Europe, which we're looking at as well. How do we have, you know, an additional fans having early buy and having the social flex,

having the value and really having fans create content. And, you know, I see a vision of the world in the future. Where I can speak around a nation, that's my world, but any TV show, you know, from the rights acquired to the script purges to every person who does a role in the show, their employment is a smart contract. So, we pay through a smart contract.

And then the show is completed. Every distribution right is a smart contract. So, if, you know, the French broadcaster wants the right, they basically go, you know, it's open and verifiable. You'll see it. The right will be there. They can license it there. All profit participants will be into their wallet. You may be, maybe, we'll help Matt. We'll manage that because people don't want to deal

with that. But really a world that's much more efficient, effective, transparent. And I think that's good for young creators. Independent creators, it opens up a market. It's not controlled by one people. And it's better for the creative community. It rewards fans. And we're really excited about that. I think that's what the future ultimately goes. Yeah. Yeah. Like what you said with the employment being a smart

contract. And a great example of why this is going to happen is there's a trend. And on TikTok that I've seen, whenever I go on there, it's kind of a crazy app. It makes me feel older every time I go on there. But there's this trend of actors that go through their royalty checks. And they have like this stack of mail that they open up on

camera. And they show like, hey, this is my royalty check from Save By The Bell. And this is an episode I was in. And it's for 79. And I think that it's such a great example of how like a micro transaction on chain through a smart contract for royalties just is obvious. Like literally a paper check in the mail that these people are still opening to

this day is laughable given how digital everything is. I totally agree. And one that should be, I mean, think about this. We're getting probably 10.7. That's 15 cents. Think about how much, you know, thinking about how much rake is in the middle. Critics and from A16 Z talks about the rake. And, you know, I think, you know, that's a product that should probably move digital. Imagine

the cost that is associated just to just to process that that money. Go directly to create right. So all of a sudden, the 10 cents should probably be 25 cents. So I think there's value to the creator that moving to that too. I think, you know, we move away from having the audit. I think it's really interesting. You know, and we, you know, it's so, so,

you know, we, I was at my father turned 79 last week and I was at a birthday party and this friend's, a table and this friend's explained to me the blockchain. It was like, well, I was like, oh, oh, dear God, questions, you know, but, you know, it's hard to explain to them, right? But it's like, you look at the younger generation now, you know, they,

when they were kids, they looked at the magazine, they pinched it because they really grew up with iPads, right? But now, you know, we have the Roblox generation, the Fortnite generation coming who are five, 10 years away. These children, these young men and women, they socialize in virtual spaces. They engage in digital currencies. They buy digital, they get it. So they're going to expect this. So

I think it'll be, I think it's a product get there. It's going to be much more obvious than paper check. What is the, what is the male? What is it? So I think, I think as the, our, you know, our next core demographic comes up, it is native to them. So I think it's just natural where this is all going. Yeah, agreed, agreed. So that's a

great segue into, you know, you as an entrepreneur, and you're building in this space now, you're seeing all these IPs and these different use cases and things like that. What are you excited about? In, in mass, you know, in this whole space, you're seeing so much movement, ideas, actual execution of those ideas. What is it that just, when you get up in the morning, is the

first thing that pops into your head that gets you really excited? Well, first is getting some exercise to stay in the shape. Look, I think at Fox, I'm lucky every day that I work for entrepreneur bosses with the Murdox and that they've set up this unique place for us to really leverage the tools and resource we have here to educate the masses. Because I'm, I'm excited

for the day where people understand the value of a digital good, right? And that, that there's a virtual space you can have access to this. And so, I'm very excited about that. And, you know, without pumping my, I'm excited for the projects we're doing some, but that aside, I think macroly, I'm very excited for a world where, where content rights and IP is tokenized, right? Or

distribution is there. And content financing is really with, you know, it's evolution of crowdfunding is evolution of peer to peer. It's a better version of, of, of Napster, right? And I think this notion of us build a really make shows and having fans do that. That really excited. an pim docer as an entrepreneur and look at web 3 I'm very excited about the personal privacy aspects

I let that having your own wallet and having a anonymous 12, you know digit code out there taking back our data from Google Facebook other third parties and monetize it for free. I think this is gonna change and so The game company is an axiophacial is played to earn the notion level. I don't know Steve who you are But I can say you're you're right do

you hold this you bought your crap up a listen FT you watch you know the mass thing or thing you go you know you hold this much of of east you go and you just this podcast you know you and so Then you have give the guess okay this number you know you want to Advertiser might say an exchange for your zip code because I know

that I'll give you something for free right or I'll give you access something or hey In exchange for email or more information about you. I'll give you money right also the CPM makeshift rights the money that was taken by these intermediaries from the content owner in a fan She goes you see might get paid for your data or you might get something I think that's really

compelling to get your privacy back and really having value for your time spend time I think there's been very compelling about that or you take that time and money to support a creator to do something and you no longer you need to have A million people watching a TV show you can a thousand fans ten thousand fans can support Independent movie TV show or something. I

think that's really compelling well said well said those are all the questions I have for you where do you want people to go and learn more about? So if you go to BCL.xyz is our company website I encourage you to go to crapopolis.com KRAP hello and that is for our crapopolis animated show which isn't go multiple season I'm very excited about that It's the first animated

show there's a lot of projects out there who are doing web first but we actually have a We're production before a lot of these and we're gonna be on broadcast television. So we're one of the first night We're excited that to grow and seeing that relationship and then WWE moonsault.com is it? So I think and then the mask first calm those are our great projects but

if you go to BCL.xyz you'll like to all those and The last thing I say is we're big tent. I'm very excited about working with other small communities out there, you know, so either Creators or if launch tokens or launch projects we can be a partner to help them move on to media play and so we really we're excited to work with them with a lot

of these upstart you know Today that I'm about talking working with those people as well. Awesome awesome. Well wherever you guys are listening all the links that's got mentioned will be in these show notes But thanks so much for coming on and sharing everything. Thank you. You're time.