NCI: From Music Producer to Bitcoin

NCI_ From Music Producer to Bitcoin Chat with Lumida Client Kevin Churko

Ram: [00:00:00] All right. I'm thrilled to be joined by my friend and Lumida Wealth client, Kevin Chirkow. It's a very special Thanksgiving podcast. We're making this live so you can follow on YouTube. We'll have it on Spotify tomorrow and wherever you listen to podcasts. So we're going to draw back the current on the music business, right?

Music business, two words. Second word is business. People don't talk about that. Kevin is a prolific music producer. He's worked with the greats including folks like Quincy Jones, Ozzy Osbourne, Five Finger, Death Punch, Shania Twain, many others. He sold a music catalog. He had bitcoin miners in his studio many years ago, in the early days.

We'll talk about that also. And Kevin is a, he's a gatekeeper and a tastemaker. His job is to create music that people like and give artists feedback. We'll talk about that. The creative process speaking of creative [00:01:00] process, we're also talking about psychedelics, so Kevin is a friend of Rick Strassman who wrote the book called The Spirit Molecule as well, so really going to be a fascinating conversation today covering a range of topics, so Before we get started, I want to play this short clip, it's of Kevin at their studio in Vegas called Hydro, and that's where Kevin is right now, and I'm sharing my screen here, I'm going to hit play.

Kevin: A little more of my claim to fame, although it does go around the corner and into the next hallway too. We literally just had Gene Simmons in here yesterday, it was unexpected joy. I turned around in my studio and he was there, he came for a tour. Shania Twain? Yeah, that, that was Britney Spears? Wow, I didn't realize it's such an eclectic those were not as producer, those were engineer's engineering credits when I worked for another producer.

Wow, this record did pretty well. Yeah, I only did one track on that, and, that was my first job with Mudd. That's how it all started, and then as I started to produce. I was always more of a rock guy because this is my youth. As [00:02:00] I started producing and not just working for other people, then I was able to do what I wanted to do.

So this studio B, this is mostly where I work and my clients work. This is the second biggest room. If I'm just editing or something like that, or even guitar playing, I hate watching myself. 

Ram: It is a little it is a little kind of funny watching yourself, right? You you get so critical and do you have regret when you see yourself?

That's what I do. 

Kevin: I'm already regretting this and we haven't even started yet. We'll regret it tomorrow. Yeah, no, I'll regret it probably for the rest of my life. But the interesting thing about that little clip you played is that's exactly the room that I'm in. So it's almost like I walked into this room, and here I am.

Ask me any, anything. So I had a 

Ram: wonderful privilege to stop by your studio. Yeah, it was awesome. Because you showed how you have vintage Music technology, it just shows you how little experience I have in the industry and you compare that to your understanding of the value of bitcoin. Do you want to draw that connection, [00:03:00] Kevin?

Kevin: The interesting thing about gear, and I wish I would have thought of this years ago, but it was hard enough to get my wife to approve, the, not to approve, but to go with me on the financing of buying this huge studio and all the gear and everything. But there was so much vintage gear here that I bought.

I had no idea how well the vintage gear held its value. There's a finite amount. There's never going to be any more. You can't make a tube from the sixties or the fifties. You can't, you there's tubes or replacement tubes, but not the same ones. You can't make I don't know if you can see so much of my gear here on the back here, I don't know if you can see that sort of stuff.

Ram: This thing 

Kevin: here, sixties. Same with these that, that sort of thing, the mics that I have, the valuable ones are the old ones, and I think about the appreciation, especially with inflation, what a great protection against inflation too, which I wasn't even trying to make the point that bitcoin is all those things, but it is, it's a finite amount, going to be a finite amount, 21 million hopefully, it appears that it's a hedge against inflation.

Should [00:04:00] only go up. Obviously the big crashes too, which we, which I've weathered. Even the Mt. Gox days, I was one of those guys that got it all tied up on Mt. Gox and, got, I don't know, 13 and a half or 14 percent back, but, overall, anybody that bought it is making money or at least let's say it's, I don't like to think of it as investment as, as much as savings.

It's a savings. It'll only grow, if it was up to me, I'd have all my cash in Bitcoin, the wife had something to say about that too. So back when this last dip went down to 20, I said, we should just put it all in there and of course, but I'm more the gas and she's more the brakes no, let's diversify.

And that's how I found you. 

Ram: We'll come back to that too. So you had Bitcoin miners. How did that come together? 

Kevin: The interesting thing about all these things is that, Bitcoin is math, music is math, frequency is math, so I think for the average musician, it's pretty [00:05:00] easy to understand.

And I had some my son and his friend, my son Kane and his friend Nick, they were, They were leaders in all this stuff and one of the guys that used to work for me Nick Bling he had a friend who had miners and who had a server center and did all that.

He wanted my son to produce music for his girlfriend. Because everybody wants to be a star still, everybody loves music. That's the great connecting dot of my business. And through that process, they got to know each other and pretty soon I had two miners, at that time, it was, they were just cards, just, worrying away in the back room, I could barely keep the sound contained, had to get another air conditioner just to cool him down. And he set me up with a little Raspberry Pi. I don't know a lot about the technology of it, but I knew how to keep it going and how to turn it on and how to, if I, got a coin as, a collective pool.

But it was crazy because I had to stop in the end. Once they wore out their time, which in those days was about six, six months, you're good on a card for six months. Once it wore out the profitability versus the energy [00:06:00] expense, I ditched it because in those days, the Raspberry Pi would go down in the middle of the night.

I come back to the studio the next day, it wouldn't have been working. I just wasted a day not having the miner going. It's like I wanted to worry about music and concentrate on music, not worried about keeping this Raspberry Pi active and going and the miners going. So, but it was a great experience, a great great real life experience to see how it was done and how it was made.

And what that process was and obviously I was lucky I was involved then I didn't have the money then that I had now, or I'd be filthy now. I'm not, but you have the money you have, and I'm, the first bitcoin I bought was like a thousand dollars during that time period and then it crashed about a hundred 50 and that was my first crash I experienced.

And now I don't even care. It doesn't matter. I don't even worry about it. I don't even tell the wife if we're up, we're down, because it's a long term play and clearly from the thousand dollars, which is all I had at that time, basically, I just built my first studio. So that's [00:07:00] pretty much my savings going into that until now when it's, almost a hundred K, you're doing all right 

Ram: with that.

Yeah, you've had a successful outcome. You sold your catalog as well. We'll get into. Tokenization and royalties a bit as well. You've thought about what digital assets can do to empower creators and really move control away from the studios and push out toward the edges and the studio you're in, if memory serves, the first time you walked in that building, You were renting the studio and now you're the owner of the studio.

Kevin: It was crazy because one of my bands I did eight records with, so five, five finger death punch. We had done the first record basically in my house, because again, I was just basically starting. So we did the record in my house and they wanted to do some promo shots. Didn't want it to appear like they were doing the re recording the drums in my kitchen.

So we rented the studio for, I think it was like $400 for half day. And we came in here and we took pictures and acted like we had recorded it here. [00:08:00] That was in 2000. And it took me until 2016 to buy it. And I had taken other clients here, like for recessions, cause I didn't have enough room in my house, always to track a full band.

One, one time I came in here for a couple of days and the lights were always off and there's four studios here. Only one worked. And I remember telling my son, and he'd tell you this story too. I said, we're going to get this place for a dime on the dollar. Just wait.

There's no way these guys are going to keep it going, and sure enough, they had a lot of investors at the start to spend a lot of money building it, four owners turned into three owners, I sent them a note, do you want to sell? No. Three owners turned into two owners, I sent them a note, do you want to sell?

No. Two owners turned into one owner, and I knew it was close. And then I forgot about it. And then all of a sudden, one happy day in my email box we're ready to sell, give us a offer. So I put together an offer of what I thought it was worth or less than I thought it was worth. And they basically found two other guys [00:09:00] That would pay more.

And a couple months later, those guys fell off and they came back to me and here I am. So it's a great, it's a great thing. Cause there's a picture in my hallway of that first record. It was, I think it was in guitar player or something like that. And so we have a picture of us in that studio, in this studio on the first record.

And here I am. So if that's not manifesting, and if that's not, putting out to the universe, you know what you want, and this is my dream. I basically have my dream in place. I don't need anything bigger, better, more fantastic than this. In fact, probably smaller now, because now that I've had a commercial studio, it's not always fun.

Business isn't always fun. Music is fun. Business is not always fun. I'd rather be in 

Ram: the circle and help us understand the music business. I don't know really anything about the music business. Help us, you live through well, 

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