Dave Mustaine traces his discipline from martial arts—starting Shorin Ryu karate at 12, training under Sensei Benny Urquidez (debunking the Bloodsport "Frank Dukes" myth), and earning belts in taekwondo and jujitsu—while critiquing Jehovah’s Witnesses’ rigid control, including his disfellowshipment for refusing to pledge allegiance or celebrate holidays. His born-again Christian phase shifted lyrics toward apocalyptic themes like the Black Plague, but he now focuses on art’s uplifting role amid economic struggles and personal redemption. Mustaine also details his cancer battle (31 radiation treatments, 13 chemo doses), neck injuries from headbanging, and his pivot to Web 3.0—launching Megadeth NFTs on his birthday (September 13th)—while praising VR concerts and Fight Camp’s boxing tech, contrasting it with childhood model kits and Pierce Brosnan’s "worst" Bond performance. [Automatically generated summary]
Of course, you know, being in showbiz, that there's different degrees of how excited you can get.
You have one of those days and it's like, yeah, shit, it'll never be better than this.
And then, you know, you keep working hard, you keep applying yourself, associating with the right people, and there's always going to be another level.
My sensei out in California, I used to train with Sensei Benny the Jet Yuki Des, and he would say...
And what a great place to do it, too, because that family, those people, Benny, Blinky, Lily, all those people that were attached to them, too, that's a giant part of the history of kickboxing in America.
I mean, they were the elite of the elite.
Benny was the Baddest motherfucker ever during his time.
One in particular that I really like, he'd gone to Thailand and he was fighting a guy.
He said, look, I'll come to your country, fight your rules, your champ, your ring, whatever.
And he went there and, you know, all I can compare it to is in Star Wars where they have those guys with the big hat, you know, the big forehead, the Klingons, whatever they are.
Sensei Benny had kicked him across his forehead with a shin kick so many times that his whole entire forehead just had this contusion on it, looked like Like, almost like a Darth Vader helmet, you know, after he'd had his head cut.
And it was, in a way, I guess, you know, maybe he was taunting him a little bit, you know, just, you know, slapping him around on TV because it was in front of, the whole nation had shown up there to watch this fight.
I guess he's had a lot of fights like that.
I heard that the story about Frank Dukes was actually about Sensei Benny, too.
From what I know, this is what I know, what I was told.
So I don't know how accurate this is.
But I heard from the people who participated in this whole thing.
So what had happened was the movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Frank Dukes, I was told that Frank Dukes wasn't the guy who had actually been the fighter in that and that it was Benny the Cheyukides.
And that when...
He had come home or something.
He had his school in the Los Angeles area, Simi Valley area, somewhere like that.
And Sensei Rubin, Benny's older brother, and Sensei Arnold, his other brother.
People don't understand, I think, that before the UFC, before we got to watch mixed martial arts, meaning like an Aikido guy could fight a judo guy or a wrestler guy could fight a karate guy, before we saw that, We didn't know what was the best art.
We didn't know.
And there was a lot of, like, speculation, but very few mixed-rules engagements.
Like, there was Judo Jean LaBelle fought a boxer once, and he made the boxer wear a gi, and he just took him to the ground, strangled him unconscious.
I've managed to be really smart and stay out of a lot of trouble, too.
And that was one of the things that Cincinnati Benny told me when we first started working together was, you know, a guy's coming down the street and he doesn't look like he's your friend.
Change sides of the street.
If he changes sides of the street, turn around.
You know, I don't go looking for trouble anymore.
There was a period in my life where, you know, that kind of people, those kind of people, and that kind of stuff was, you know, go out, get drunk, cause some problems.
We lived down in Huntington Beach, you know, all the surf kids who go down there and fight people from another neighborhood or another school or something stupid like that.
What they were trying to do, like, oftentimes in documentaries, like, they'll start following someone with a very specific objective, but then the whole world changes.
Well, somebody said something to me that the guy had his head under the towel and that they were doing something with him in the corner during the fight.
Do you still watch the UFC? I do sometimes when I have the time.
I love watching matches if I get the time especially now that You know, going from practicing karate mainly to, you know, doing grappling and ground fighting and stuff.
That was part of the Yukitokan style was there was a little bit of jujitsu in it.
But nothing like the extent that I've been studying now.
I think he tours now, but I'm not sure if he tours as Cat Stevens or Yusuf Islam.
I feel like he was not in America, though.
Does he tour in America?
I think there was like an issue with the Salman Rushdie comments.
I think there was something going on when, you remember when Salman Rushdie, before he got attacked recently, like when they first instituted a fatwa on him, I think he supported it or something.
Meanwhile, he supports killing Salman Rushdie for writing a book.
I think when people say they support killing, I don't think they really understand what they're saying sometimes.
I think they're saying it, but if you were there while it was happening, while the guy was getting killed, you'd be fucking horrified.
What you're saying is that horrific violence is justified for someone writing something down.
That's crazy talk.
That's crazy.
Unless you don't know what horrific violence is, you're talking about it like it's some ethereal, non-existing, non-real thing because you haven't experienced it in real life.
Well, maybe he did experience a lot of it in the peace movement in the 60s and 70s because he probably got sick with America and going back to Afghanistan and changing your name probably had something that spurred that on.
It probably wasn't just a knee-jerk reaction.
I know that the music business is way, way different than it is now.
For example, Elvis, the way that his life ended and the way that the music business was back then, it was throw drugs at the problem, throw sex and money at the problem.
And I don't know that had he had...
Modern management or even if he was with, you know, somebody who, you know, like a handler, you know, that would say, hey, it's probably not a good idea for you to say that.
You know, nowadays we have people who are, their sole jobs are to help keep us from, you know, stepping on it, you know?
So, and I've got people around me, they used to be real busy with me, but, you know, fortunately growing up I've learned a lot of stuff that, you know, you can and can't say, so...
Well, specifically, I mean, in this day and age with social media, it's so easy for someone to just tweet something really ridiculous without someone saying, Kate, don't fucking say that.
You're on Adderall.
Sit down.
Don't write that down.
Don't say that.
You know, it's just back then.
Do you think that the drug and alcohol thing is the same today in music?
Or do you think it's less?
Do you think it's just not promoted by, I mean, what do you think the difference is between the influence of drugs and alcohol in the early days versus now?
Well, I think in the early days in the music business, first off, the drugs weren't as strong.
And, you know, they didn't have, like, for example, something as simple as, you know, the marijuana that I used to smoke when I was a kid versus what's being manufactured and grown nowadays is way different.
And I think that the stigmatism for people about smoking is less.
And I think that there's a lot of other things that people use out on the road to cope with things that could be dealt with with, you know, good management, good support system.
And most importantly, you know, Having somebody who's going to tell you the truth.
You know, I'm a grown-up, I'm a big boy, so when I have stuff happen in my career, And it could have been avoided or somebody didn't tell me and I find out later, that sucks.
And for a lot of people, when that stuff happens, they respond in a negative way with either self-sabotage or they medicate themselves.
And I remember back when I was drinking, there was a thing someone said at one of those meetings and I thought it was kind of clever.
The guy said, You know, I drank when my team won, and I drank when my team lost, and I drank when my team played, and I drank when my team was in the off-season, and I thought, all right, well, that's about me.
What team are we not rooting for anymore?
But, you know, there's so many reasons why people make it or don't make it in the music business, and I think, much like yourself, getting to know each other earlier this afternoon, You know, you have to take care of yourself.
You really, really do.
And there's so many things in the music industry that, you know, the history, the people that you're working with, you know, a lot of people don't want to say anything bad about somebody.
But, I mean, imagine how much better things would be if somebody really said, you know what, he's a nice guy, but he stole from us.
This guy is good at this, but he's terrible at that.
Everybody's afraid to offend anybody with stuff like that.
But yet, in other areas of life, offending people doesn't mean shit.
So we've had some times where we've had some people on our crew and tours that we've been on.
The last tour we were on, not my band, but another band, their bus drove right up to the Canadian border and the driver got out and left them all sitting there.
Well, not only that, but the things that it makes the people do and the kind of people that are around that.
I think that, again, like I was saying, herb is less of a stigmatism, so people are a little bit more open with that.
But as far as Coming backstage and it's smelling like, you know, somebody's back there burning chemicals or something like that or, you know, people falling out in the hallway from heroin or, you know, tweaking around on meth or coke or something.
You know, we try and associate with people that are like-minded with us, you know, the people that are about their careers and that really are into taking care of themselves.
Two of the guys in Five Finger Death Punch do jiu-jitsu.
They have a sensei out with them.
We all are doing jiu-jitsu.
When we were out with Trivium, the singer for that band does to Jesus.
So we try and hang out with bands that are really health-centric, you know, that are really looking into, and not just from here down, but here up to.
Oh, yeah, the guy from the Howard Stern movie, too.
That guy's awesome.
Yeah, that whole thing with psychiatrists or doctors or, you know, whether it's a manager or someone that you have that can get you drugs and that keeps you on them, that's how long...
Outstanding story.
That's been going on a long time.
Especially with really talented people, a lot of times that person, they can benefit financially from controlling them.
So they go, look, I'm just going to babysit you, keep you on drugs, and then suck money out of you.
And then there's a lot of those guys that wind up keeping these incompetent managers for years longer than they should because the guy gets them drugs, too.
Because the guy gets them girls, he gets them drugs, he sets up parties, he does all the stuff that doesn't help the band.
It doesn't help their music, but it helps keep him around.
Yeah, there's a lot of people that get really lost on drugs.
But that's why I'm always happy to speak with a person like yourself that's, you know, had your problems and put them aside and bounced back and, you know, got healthy and is open about it.
You know, I think it's so important for guys to hear.
And also that it's a trap, too, that you can get sucked up into that trap.
You can be a good person, a solid person who's, you know, got confidence, you can accomplish things, but you can get still sucked in that trap.
Yeah in the beginning it was a lot of traveling and since I was homeless you know having a hotel to live in and and a venue basically to live in that that was good for us you know David Ellison didn't have to go home ever because he had his family to fall back on I had no home to go to so I had to make it last and and So,
to a degree, being on tour in the venues, in the hotel rooms, it was a step up for me from being a fan.
Panic was the band before Metallica, and that was only for a short period of time, and I was 20 when I was in Metallica, so I probably started when I was around maybe 17, 18. But just think of that, just that statement.
Well, most of them, yeah, but Kirk got my royalties for Metal Militia for many, many years, and he has to see the check, so I know somebody saw that I wasn't getting paid.
I don't know what brought that up, but I thought, oh my god, I can't even believe that.
And thinking about where I'm at now today and just how the slightest deviation from where I was going could have ended me up anywhere else in the world.
Because I wanted to do so many things.
I wanted to be a professional athlete.
I wanted to play baseball.
I had a cousin who was a fighter pilot, and I thought that would be really great too.
You know Dave, I think that's the case with a lot of people that wind up becoming successful at things They could have gone in a bunch of different directions They just chose to go in this one but they still have other interests in things because I think the type of people that become really successful like with you at playing guitar is There are the type of people that can kind of be good at anything.
They just have to love that thing Like I'm sure you love playing guitar, which is why you're so good at playing guitar if you loved something else As much as you love that, you'd be just as good at that.
I think it's an expression of who you are as a person.
I think that's one of the more unique things about guitar playing to me.
We were talking outside earlier about Gary Clark Jr., about if I listen to Gary Clark Jr.'s riffs, I can tell it's him.
His sound is so distinctive.
He's playing with the same instrument that other people play with, but his sound is so uniquely distinctive that I could pick it out.
And that that was the case with Hendrix, and that's the case with you.
It's the case with a lot of great guitarists.
Like, you hear the sound, and you know who's playing it, which is really crazy.
If you think about this instrument that basically anybody can buy, You can get them in so many different places, and so many people know how to play them.
But some people specifically, who they are, comes out in their music.
And as a fan of music, that's one of the cooler things about guitar playing to me, or any kind of music playing, is that there's an expression of who the person is who creates it that comes out when you listen to it.
I mean, if he was alive today, he'd be one of the greatest guitarists alive.
Not just one of the greatest ever.
Like, even though things...
Look at this right here.
That's his psychedelic V Wow There was a photo of a bunch of photos that were released that someone sent me today I don't know when they came out, but it's Jimi Hendrix in Ringo Starr's apartment.
So you can find those.
There was like 10 of them that I'd never seen before.
Jimmy wearing this like cool blue suit hanging out in Ringo Starr's London apartment smoking cigarettes.
It definitely sucks, but do you think that any part of having a sucky childhood is responsible for, like, the amount of energy that you had that put into music?
I think sometimes when kids grow up in a sucky way, those are the kids with athletics that's often the case.
It's often the case with comedy.
When kids grow up in a sucky way with a lot of bad experiences, those are the ones who wind up pushing harder to do great things and other stuff.
It's always interesting when you look back though, right?
Like being a person now who's gone through all that and you went from that and all the drugs and then into, was it Alcoholics Anonymous where you became a Christian?
Did you do it from getting sober or were you a Christian before that?
My sister got disfellowshipped and the girl that brought the accusations against my sister had lied.
She had said something about my sister and this other dude being together and I knew that it wasn't true because my sister liked the other brother.
So she got disfellowshipped and that was pretty much when I started to want to get away from it all because You know, I wasn't really old enough to see any other inner workings of organized religion or stuff like that.
And when you stood up at school, which back when I went to school, we were a very patriotic country and kids would stand up and they'd say the Pledge of Allegiance and do whatever.
But we could not.
We were supposed to stand with our hands at our sides.
And you did not get to celebrate Christmas.
You did not get to celebrate birthdays.
And that's enough right there to get just about any kid in their right mind to say, screw this.
You take away my birthday.
You take away Christmas.
You take away all celebrations.
And if I do something wrong, in your eyes, I'm set outside of the fence.
Thirteen, so right when you started playing music.
Perfect timing.
What a quick life right into some wild-ass music, though, to just have a life like that and then, bam, at 20, you're one of the founding members of Metallica.
Well, so the curses I did, I did one-on-one guide it.
I was at school, and my nephew had told him that I was practicing Kung Fu Sun Tzu at the time.
So he was like the school tough guy, and it was my first day at school.
So he walked past me and sucker punched me in the stomach, and I buckled over, and I thought, oh, here we go.
This is going to suck, this school.
So we're going home, and the bus is a two-bus ride, a big bus to a small drop-off, a little bus out to where we lived, out in the rural area.
And we get off the first bus and everybody circles around and he's gonna beat me up and nothing happens and so I get in the bus and he gets in the bus and he walks out and elbows me in the back of the head when he's getting out and I had some chewing tobacco in my mouth so I swallowed it and I got so sick and I knew I had to do something that was gonna keep happening.
So I put a hex on him that he would get physically injured, and he did.
And the other hex that I did was the girl in night school we went to in Marina.
Yeah, but do you think that he got hurt because you put a hex on him or do you think he got hurt because he's an asshole and he's probably doing stupid shit every day?
I mean, James Randi did it, and he's a non-believer.
But, I mean, Penn and Teller can do it.
All those magicians can do it.
I saw Banachek do it in person.
I saw him do it in front of my face.
He did it.
And he didn't tell her those guys are yes, they're amazing They're amazing and they're so good for for magic too because you they'll tell you that it's bullshit And you know they're oh, I've seen that show Yeah, well that the show bullshit was about all kinds of things some of the things that aren't even bullshit like yoga But one of the things that they were doing was like doing magic and letting you in on the joke Like letting you know that it's bullshit,
but still doing it in such an amazing way that you were blown away by it genius show Anyway, I don't not believe in magic.
It could be real.
I just haven't seen it.
Weird things can happen with people's minds, especially when people believe things.
I'm not exactly sure if I understand the interface between people's minds.
I think there's a lot more going on with people and their minds, like the way we interact with each other, than I think we would like to believe.
We like to believe that we're independent thinkers and that we're not that influenced by other people's thoughts.
I mean, Jamie could find it, because they made fun of me a lot.
Who was they?
People on the net and shit like that.
Those terrible people.
Just saying that I would get wimpy with my playing, and it certainly didn't change anything, because, you know, when I... If you look at any of my lyrics, a lot of them are from the book of Revelation and Daniel.
There's a lot of, you know, those scary nightmare stuff that they talk about.
Like, Washington is Next is about Daniel talking about dreams and interpreting dreams.
And, you know, Holy Wars, of course, Blackmail the Universe.
There's so many, many, many songs that talk about, you know, End time stuff, you know, stuff that's gone on during time, any kinds of super awesome stuff like with the spiritual stuff in nature where great things happen to good people, you know.
Like on our new album, Soldier On is a song about...
Kind of walking away from something.
Some people have said that it's a song about abandonment and some people said it's about perseverance.
For me, the song is about knowing somebody in your life, like you and I talked about earlier, the difference between people who make it and who don't.
You have to make that painful decision to walk away.
And in that song, I talk about somebody that I knew that was making some really bad decisions in their personal life.
And that I needed to walk away from it.
I needed to soldier on in order to take care of myself.
You know, it's like the masks that come down in the airplane.
They say, you know, if you're traveling with a little bastard and he's fighting you, you know, put your mask on, let him pass out.
Well, Coke was still, not old, old Coke, still, new Coke, the Coke that you have not right now, not new Coke, the flavor, but Coke that's available in 2022. It's made with cocaine.
They process cocaine.
They take out all the cocaine, and that's part of the flavor of the Coke formula.
This is like fact.
It sounds like conspiracy theory.
But if you find that the company in this country that processes the most medical, pharmaceutical cocaine is the same company that supplies the...
So once he finds a good version of it, we'll read it.
But the crazy history of Coca-Cola is really interesting.
I mean, it really originally was like a cocaine supplement.
Like you drink Coca-Cola and you get a little jolt of cocaine, which was normal.
Okay.
Pharmacist John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1885, making the original formula for the beverage in its backyard.
He advised Coca-Cola as a patent medicine that could cure headaches, upset stomach, and fatigue.
Patent medicines weren't regulated.
They often contained addictive ingredients like cocaine and opium and toxic ingredients like mercury and lead, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The NIDA said in a 2020 blog post that Pemberton's recipe contained cocaine in the form of an extract of the coca leaf, inspiring part of the soft drink's name.
The coca leaf in its natural form is a harmless and mild stimulant compared to coffee.
But cocaine can be extracted from its leaves according to the Transitional Institute.
That's why people chew it.
When they chew the coca leaves, it's really like a mild stimulant.
Gregory Collins, PhD and Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Texas, San Antonio, also told Verify that the cocaine alkaloid is present at very low levels in less than 1% in most coca leaves.
The cocaine alkaloid can then be extracted and purified to produce the drug cocaine.
Coca-Cola likely contained cocaine alkaloid as part of the coca leaf extract at very low concentrations and similar to the coca leaf teas.
Cocaine was legal and a common ingredient in US medicines aimed at curing a wide range of ailments when Coca-Cola was invented, which is pretty wild, according to NIDA. People thought cocaine was safe to use in small amounts at the time.
It probably is.
In 1970, cocaine became an expensive recreational drug.
Now, find out about Coca-Cola in today's form, because in today's form, I know they use something from the coca leaves.
They're trying to say, despite this, Coca-Cola US directed, verified to a statement that says, cocaine has never been an added ingredient in Coca-Cola, and the drink does not currently contain cocaine or any other harmful substances.
Now, it doesn't contain cocaine anymore, but I think it's flavored.
With the coca leaves.
I think they use coca leaves and I'm pretty sure that the company that does it also makes, I think they process out the cocaine and they use that for medical grade cocaine.
Not even as big as a pencil eraser will fucking kill you.
It's really potent stuff.
I mean, in a flat circle, like the size of a pencil eraser.
I don't even mean like a thickness.
That will fucking for sure kill you.
But just the surface area of the eraser of a pencil will kill you.
It's a terrible, terrible thing.
Okay, just one company in the U.S. is licensed to import and process coca leaves.
The Stephen Company of Northfield, Illinois.
After Stephen processes coca leaves at its Maywood, New Jersey plant, it extracts the cocaine.
The company uses the spent leaves to create a cocaine-free extract and sends the extract to Coca-Cola.
Good, I was right.
Coca-Cola is grandfathered in as far as receiving the extract.
It's the only company in the U.S. licensed to have it, making it the only soft drink to have coca leaf extract as one of its ingredients.
Pretty fucking wild.
The cocaine that's been extracted from the leaves is sold to malign-cropped Pharmaceuticals, the only company in the U.S. licensed to purify cocaine for medical use, specifically cocaine hydrochloride, a prescription jug used in hospitals as a local anesthetic by eye, ear, nose, and throat doctors.
Malinkopt is a longtime St. Louis company that was sold in 2000, but its operations headquarters is still based in St. Louis.
I was just thinking that right now, you're talking about all those gorillas dragging backpacks full of shit up into America, or getting it into the vacuum coming up to America, some of this stuff.
You were talking about them chewing, and I just pictured guys stuffing that stuff from the pirate.
They were originally just fishermen, and people were dumping shit off the coast of Somalia.
Yeah.
I think they called themselves the People's Coast Guard of Somalia.
Google that, the People's Coast Guard of Somalia.
I'm pretty sure that's what they originally started calling themselves.
They were fishermen who were dealing with people dumping toxic waste into the ocean, and they were killing all the fish.
So they were violating international law, these people that were doing that.
So what they would do is they'd kidnap those people and hold them for ransom from what they did to the ocean.
And then they realized, well, fuck this, let's just start kidnapping people.
And then they'd just chewing cat and jacking people.
Here it is.
Somalis initially banded together to protect more than a thousand miles of the country's coastal waters from illegal fishing vessels and the dumping of toxic waste.
When Mohammed Sal Bar was ousted in 1991, Somalia disintegrated into warring clans, each with its own militia.
Fourteen different national governments followed, but have failed to unite the country.
Ethiopia inspired and supported...
Yeah, so they started off just trying to protect their waters.
They got turned into characters in a Tom Hanks movie.
That's what's so nuts about pulling stuff out of the ocean, pulling oil out of the ocean, when you realize they have to cap a broken pipe at the bottom of the fucking ocean that's spewing oil out.
And you're like, hey, do you guys have a backup plan?
You know, we have a song on the new record about Chernobyl.
Oh, yeah?
It's called The Dogs of Chernobyl, which was about when people got the evacuation notice.
I had watched that B movie.
It was just something like an extreme vacation thing where these guys were going into Chernobyl.
And then they had something else that was on TV in LA. I think it was a series on Chernobyl.
And a lot of people thought that I wrote that about that.
But I'd watched that other movie and there was a scene where the kids that had gone on this extreme vacation had seen all the dogs that were left behind in Pripyat, in the city where Chernobyl is.
And the song, believe it or not, is...
It's a love song.
It talks about abandonment and where the person realizes the girl, the person he loves or whoever, left him behind without a peep.
And he's like one of the dogs at Chernobyl because I was listening to the movie and watching the guy and he said they just left.
And imagine what it must have been like to be a pet owner and having to leave and you can't take your pets.
Well, imagine what it's like to be the pet and be completely abandoned or whatever.
Yeah, so I use a lot of weird metaphors like that.
When you were saying about, you know, the meltdown and stuff, I did a lot of research.
In fact, my radiologist who did my treatment for my cancer helped me write some lyrics on the end part of that because I wanted to know what the terminology is.
I mean, you seem very...
Well, with your vocabulary, I know what I'm trying to say, but I didn't know a lot of the terminology that I want to use with radiation chemotherapy, any of that kind of stuff.
So I asked him and he came back with this stuff that was magnificent about radiation poisoning and all the different stages.
That's an interesting thing for me too, just not being an observer in life and making sure that when I meet people, just kind of try and learn a little bit about them.
When you were talking about the meltdown again, it's like I can see so many pictures from that movie.
And trying to get that across in a lyric is really, really tough.
I don't know if you've ever really talked to any of your guests about getting into research on lyrics and stuff like that, but that's usually the thing that takes me the longest to get a record done, is doing the research on the lyrics.
That's interesting, because I've never talked to anybody who's done research on lyrics.
Most of the time, I guess, obviously there's different ways of writing lyrics and different things you want to project.
Have you always been the kind of guy that, when you write a song, you have a theme to it that you're trying to express, like with this Chernobyl thing, and you want to make sure that you get it through research, you want to make sure you get it through the proper use of terminology, but also...
Has that always been a way that you've done music, or do you just...?
In fact, in the very beginning when our albums were just first coming out, I'd always try and use some words that would require the listener to look it up.
Not just because I was being some kind of smartass or anything, but I just wanted to use something a little bit different than simple lyrics or have to dummy down a lyric because I can't find anything that rhymes with quarter or orange or something, you know?
So like with Conjuring, like that was something that you would, there's something in that that you don't even want to sing anymore because of it, because you had the history of it.
People think that's about the pandemic, or the scamdemic, depending on who you are.
I know that when this happened, I was going through my cancer treatment, and I wanted to just put one foot in front of the other and get to the studio, do my job.
And when this lyric started to come together, it was actually Several years ago, Joe.
I was watching Frankenstein.
I think it's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the one with De Niro.
Anyway, so this is what the inspiration was, you know, with bringing to life the reanimation of Frankenstein or Shteen, if you're Gene Wilder.
So I thought, wow, this would be a really great thing to talk about instead of being about, you know, the pandemic, which is obvious, to sing about that, would be to talk about the Black Plague, you know, because that's more along the history, what Megadeth writes about, you know, scary things.
Things that have happened in history.
So that's what this is about.
It's about the Black Plague.
It starts off, it says, the ship sailed to Sicily, and it was the fleas that bit the rats that bit the people and infected blood, and the stage was set.
And that's basically how the lyrics on that song...
I love that bands still do this because when I was a kid, and I know I'm old, but for kids today, a big part of the getting an album experience was the artwork.
The good thing about this record, we have a couple different versions of it.
We have the version that you're holding with that lenticular cover.
It's like a 3D cover and it has bonus tracks on it.
We also have a 180 gram German vinyl that we had made.
It's a two-fold album, three songs each side, so the groups are very far apart.
It sounds really great.
Unlike Black Dog, you know, when you listen to that, it goes, hey mama, hey hey mama, you know, because the groups are so damn close together, you know, you hear it bleeding through the track, and For this album, it's just pristine.
We had Ted Jensen master engineer it, and Chris Raikstra and I produced it with Josh Wilber mixing it.
God, I just lost my trend of thought.
The last thing I was talking about was the vinyl.
Oh, I know what I wanted to say.
One of the vinyl has rare tracks on it.
It has a cover that we did with Sammy Hagar.
This Planet's on Fire from when he left Montrose before he got into Van Halen.
He had this raging song called This Planet's on Fire.
So we did that and I called Sammy up and I said, hey, would you want to play on this?
He said, yeah, sure, send me the track.
So we sent him the track and he goes, I'll sing on it, but dude, I ain't fucking playing on that with you shredders.
And I went, oh man, that's cool.
Because I really looked up to him.
And we played that song This Planet's on Fire in panic before I joined Metallica.
I think I listened to different stuff than James and Lars.
James was kind of being held hostage in Ron McEvney's house, so whatever was being played there.
Or whenever they would go to the local import record store, they would get cool stuff.
We usually went up to the record plant in San Francisco.
There was a really cool store up there, and they had the greatest vinyl patches, t-shirts.
Every time we'd go up and play the Stone or the Mubuhay, we'd go in there and we'd get patches and t-shirts and stuff.
And not so much vinyl because, you know, you're traveling, you don't want to get vinyl and take it home and have it all foobar by the time you get home.
But that was a real cool thing, was the trek from L.A. up to San Francisco and whatever souvenirs we'd bring home.
So what was happening was James, I think he mentioned something about, I can't really remember much about him when we were growing up together, but I think his dad died and then his mom got really sick and he moved out.
He was living with Ron and I'm joking when I say he's being held hostage by Ron.
But he was living at Ron's, and then when we kicked Ron out of the band, James moved in with me and my mom down at Costa Mesa, which was really uncool.
Me and him sharing a bedroom that was about the size of this table here.
I don't know if he's still drinking or not, but we would drink vodka like crazy, and he had this little pickup truck, and we would drive from Costa Mesa up to Huntington Beach where we would...
Celebrate and party with all my friends from Huntington Beach that James didn't know because James was from Norwalk and Downey, kind of an uncool little area where he was living at.
They covered it with a freeway now so it gives you an idea how significant the neighborhood was.
But I remember driving back and forth at PCH and it was foggy.
I mean, bad fog.
And this guy would be driving pretty quickly down PCH and we were both drinking and I... It was probably a safe bet if we would have done that too many more times we were going to get in an accident because I lost a friend the very first time we played down in Dana Point with Panic on the way home.
The drummer in the band got in a car crash along PCH coming home.
So it's always been a sore spot for me, that area in Huntington Beach and the coastline.
I preferred, you know, when I went to the beach, I went down by Huntington and Newport.
I used to surf down in Newport.
And that's where a lot of the punk rock stuff that influences this new record came from.
I was a big fan of Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys, and we ended up doing a...
Dead Kennedys cover on this record, again, Police Truck.
I don't know if you've ever heard that song or not, but the Dead Kennedys got banned playing up in San Francisco because of some of the things that Frank Mangiello had said.
I think it was either in an interview or in his lyrics, but they weren't having any part of it anymore.
And I just loved that band because, you know, I was a little surf punk.
His album, he had Jell-O do something on a song called Shut Up, Be Happy.
That's how I ended up becoming so close with Ice.
We met at our management's company, Lipman& Kahane, and Ice and I were in there talking, and I said, you know, that's the desk that Gretchen or whatever the girl's name from the Nymphs or the Pixies or whatever pissed on their manager's desk.
That was the famous desk he was sitting on, and so I told him, yeah, I might want to stand up.
So then we ended up becoming friends.
I did a Raider record one time and the guy says, what's your top five records?
And I said, OG, OG, OG, OG. And he heard about that and he thought it was really cool.
You know, I had heard some of his stuff and I had no idea it was even ice, like Colors.
I love seeing those guys still doing it today, too.
When I was a kid and rap was first sort of coming out, I was wondering, are we gonna see rappers tour in their later years the same way that we see rockers tour in their later years?
Because when we were a kid, we thought of it as being a young person's game.
Rap or rock and roll, really.
But it seems like there was a renaissance somewhere, at some point in time, where people wanted to see those old guys get back on the road again.
I have never really gotten that immersed in the rap or hip-hop world, so I don't really know a lot of the players.
I know the regulars...
You know, NWA, you know, obviously Ice and Ice Cube and all those guys.
And there's...
Not anybody that really came to mind to do that part.
We have Ice singing on one of our songs.
Did I tell you that?
On the Night Stalker track on here, we actually had him do a guest voice appearance for me now because we're ping-ponging back and forth to guest appearances on each other's records.
So he is playing Colonel Kretz from Apocalypse Now, so to speak, in the lyric where In the Night Stalker song on the new record, I was going to write it about Richard Ramirez, and then I did some research on him, and Joe, I thought, this guy's just too evil, too sick.
I would never want to write anything about him.
So I ditched the Night Stalker thing, and then I found out my daughter was dating a fighter pilot for the bass up in Kentucky with the Apaches, and And I thought that was pretty cool and found out that the battalion up there is called the Night Stalkers.
And I went, all right, I got my title back.
I got my title back.
So I met a friend of mine who I'm very close with named John Clement who was a pilot and told me a lot, introduced me to several of the people up at the base.
And we started our relationship with the Night Stalkers there.
The song has Ice in there playing pretty much like how Lou Gossett Jr. did in Officer and a Gentleman.
When gear goes...
I got nowhere else to go!
While he's holding his nuts, right?
And I think he was the one that got kicked in the balls.
And I just thought, you've got to have that kind of grittiness.
And then cross that with Colonel Kretz and see who could do the ice.
Ice is perfect.
So I said, this is what I want to do.
This is what I want to say.
And I gave him an artistic license to do whatever he wanted to do to what we sent him.
But you would never imagine that, because none of those people from the early days, I mean, I don't wonder how old James Brown was when he stopped touring, but most of those guys, you didn't see them in their 70s doing rock and roll songs that they would sing when they were in their 20s.
For me, it's kind of hard to sing about anarchy when I've got Aston Martin in my driveway.
Of course, right?
I thank the fans for that, and I don't want to ever lose sight of that and think that this is my own doing.
I work my ass off, Joe, and I know you do too.
The things that I have I know came from the support for what we're doing.
And we sing about stuff not everybody wants to sing about.
There's a lot of stuff on this record.
Like Junkie, for example.
We started off really heavily on this conversation with Drug Talk and stuff.
I think the beauty about that was we talked a little bit about it.
The people who are out there that are struggling heard what we were saying.
I heard maybe something in what I said that maybe made them, you know, not hear me, but listen to me and maybe find out, you know, I don't like Dave, but I like the fact that he was dying and that he was able to pull the nosedive up.
And boy, things have sure gotten good for me lately.
Well, that is always a great message for people to hear, especially someone they admire.
Someone they admire that has gone through everything that you've gone through that you've been open about, from drug addiction and chaos, and now health, cancer-free, doing great, doing jiu-jitsu, living healthy.
That's so important.
Important for people to hear because so many people when they're they're on a certain trajectory They feel like there's no way getting off the train.
They're headed to a fucked up life and When a person like yourself can say you know what I was on that train to and I said fuck this I'm getting off and turned it around A lot of people are afraid to make that that jump though.
They're afraid to take both feet off of first base and Consequently, they'll never get to second base and for me I look at a lot of the things that were holding me back and And I needed them, Joe.
I needed them to beat my ass.
I needed to get all of the stubbornness whooped out of me.
You know, I was a person that if I wanted something done, I was going to get it no matter what.
And now I step back and I say, you know, If I want something done, it's what's right that needs to be done.
And if it's not what I want, it doesn't matter.
It's what's right.
Because we have a huge, huge organization, and there's a lot of people who are counting on us to be able to bring them entertainment, especially now with the way the economy is, the way that people are just feeling like, what's the use?
We come there, we help them just let go, just for that hour.
Yeah, that's a beautiful thing for a fan, you know, that you're continuing to do that.
And for fans of everything and anything that artists produce, when your life is shit, but you know the fucking new Megadeth album is coming out, and you get pumped, and then you hear it, It elevates you.
That's the beautiful thing about art.
The beautiful thing about someone creating something that people can enjoy is that for those people that it hits them like, oh yeah, they feel better.
Mentioning earlier with you about Schwarzenegger was on it, but it was this hour-long motivational thing called Let's Fucking Do It.
And I downloaded it, and I remember I was going through a real hard time in my life at the time.
We'd just moved out to Nashville, and I was having this real awful human being in my career.
He was trying to say he was...
You know, working with us as a manager, but it was farther, nothing farther could be from the truth because we went 60 days one time without talking.
And I wrote him a letter that day, and I said, look, man, you know what?
You're done.
We're out of here.
And I went over to 5B. The last seven years of my life has been the Dave Mustaine Charm Offensive, and we've been really, really working on getting our rightly space in history and our position in the whole touring world and recording world.
Some things we had to let go of, like some people that we were really close to, and they were just bad for us.
Yeah, well, that's one of the unfortunate things that does happen in a journey.
And that's one of the things that I admire most about bands, is that they can figure out all those internal disputes between band members, which are inevitable.
Band members and then also members of the crew, members of the management.
You know, and including guys like yourself who've come out of that with peace.
It's like in the beginning, like, people are nuts, you know, and they're trying to make nutty music, you know?
It's like there's a lot of thoughts that don't gel together, you know, a lot of people's ways they're living their lives, you know?
I think what's cool is what you're saying that's so important for people is to see that you can have those things in your life and still get past them.
And get past them and then be a guy like yourself who has a very specific ethic that he lives his life by.
And I know you realize it's positive, too, which is really cool, because you talk about it, and you know that it can affect people.
If you think about who you were when you were a 14-, 15-year-old kid, if you'd heard a guy like you that you admire talk about that, it puts it in their head, and they realize, like, oh, yeah, there's a right way to live this life.
And you know that's one of I think a very strong benefit of religion for a lot of people is that it gives them the very strong moral scaffolding to live their life by.
I mean sort of like it's a structure that allows you to sort of like you always have a place to think always have a place to go this is it's like there's there's ways you live period and in doing that it makes trials and tribulations difficult moments easier Because you do recognize that there's a process to life and that there's a way to do this where you're going to be a good person and you're going to feel good about yourself and still you can overcome things and succeed.
There's a lot of stuff that you need to, I don't know, you've got to have the common sense to know you've got to overcome it.
Some people, they just get trapped in that place where you get the, like we were talking earlier about the Brian Wilson story and And all these other stories, like with Elvis, where you have enablers around you.
And enabler is a word that signifies exactly what it means.
It's just people helping you do things that aren't good for you sometimes, that could be good for you, but most generally, most often, it's not.
And those are the people...
I was just working with my son.
He was managing a group with Danny Nozell over at CTK. And they were managing a band.
One of the band members just died because he had someone that he started seeing who the guy would wake up and she would give him...
Yeah, Scarlett Johansson plays this woman who gets a hold of this drug accidentally.
She's like involved in some sort of drug trade thing that goes sour and she gets a hold of this drug accidentally that turns her into a person that can use 100% of their mind and she becomes like a god.
I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but it's a great movie.
If you haven't seen it, go check it out.
But the idea of using only 7% or 8% of your brain, I think that's not real.
I think they used to think that at one point in time, but now they think there's different parts of the brain are for different things, and their understanding of the brain is still, relatively speaking, kind of...
They don't know, really, a lot of what's going on in there.
They know specific areas of the brain.
Create memories or was where you store memories and motor skills and they know that when you get injuries to specific areas of the brain, that's where there's problems and they can sort of isolate that.
But I don't think they think you use only seven or eight percent of your brain anymore.
Your brain varies with how tired you are, whether you're sick, whether you're stressed out, whether you're at peace, whether you've exercised, whether you're in love, whether you're happy with your life.
Your brain varies constantly depending on how many things it has to think about.
That's why I love the sensory deprivation tank, that thing that we talked about earlier.
The ability to separate yourself from as much physical input as possible is pretty amazing in the way your brain can function.
Okay, here it says.
Others have claimed that Einstein attributed his intellectual giftedness and to be able to use more than 10% of his brain, but this is itself a myth.
Another possible source of the 10% myth is neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield's discovery in 1930 of a silent cortex, brain areas that appear to have no function when he stimulated them with electricity.
We now know today that these areas are functional.
Okay, so it was just a...
I think it was just a thing that people used to say.
Where does the myth originate?
No one knows for sure.
Popular theory, as the journalist Lowell Thomas helped spread its myth in his preface to Dale Carnegie's blockbuster self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
There it is.
So he misquoted the brilliant American psychologist William James as saying that the average person specifically develops only 10% of his latent mental ability.
I think when you're around people that are complaining all the time, you're going to want to either help them or if they don't want help and they keep complaining, you need to kind of change your address.
I think what needed to happen for me was just to kind of get my priorities in order and to learn a little bit more about what I'm doing that's right and stuff that could be better in all areas.
Being a husband, being a dad, being a friend, being a leader.
It's evolved to have an organization this big, you know.
So there's a lot of stuff there, and I think that the cancer was a lot of perspective.
Some people can have chronic perspective loss with the music industry, just how distorted things are from reality.
You know, I guess as I started to get healthier with the cancer and the success of everything now, it's making me want to help people more.
I've been saying this in some of my interviews lately about being more philanthropic with some of the younger bands that reach out for advice and stuff.
When you're thinking back on the moment where you got cancer and the shift in your mindset because of that, other than being philanthropic, how did it alter the way your perspective was?
Anything you say can and will be held against you.
Yeah, when you're experiencing a giant health scare, that's generally, for a lot of people, that's a moment where you either wake up or you go further to sleep.
I mean, it felt like a bad Taco Tuesday the next morning, you know what I mean?
So, I guess I just...
During the course of it, with all of the medication coursing through your body, the doctors are trying to kill off a big part of what's wrong inside of you.
So your body's going like, hey, what's going on here?
So eating became a chore.
I still can't eat very well because of spices.
I was drinking that delicious drink you gave me earlier, and all I could taste was the spice in it.
You know, the funny thing is that I went in there to have the little mask put on when they clamp your head down because you can't move your head around when you're doing the radiation.
They don't want to miss with those lasers.
So your head's all clamped down in this piece of plastic.
And they said, well, we've got to heat the plastic up and you're going to sit there for 15 minutes.
I'm thinking, I can't sit anywhere for 15 minutes and not move.
So I said, okay, I'll try it.
So I sit down, they click everything in, and a drip of water, because the mask is all wet, drips down my scalp into my ear.
And it was like I had a boar worm going into my brain.
All I could think about was that water dripping into my ear.
I couldn't handle it.
I said, I got to come back.
So I told him, I said, there's no way I can do this and sit here for 15 minutes.
I just can't do it.
I have claustrophobia.
And, you know, whenever I do those CAT scans and stuff, I have to be knocked out to do that.
So...
I finally got it done, but yeah, it was a trying situation, man.
You don't really know how involved all the technology is until you have to go through it now because it's gotten so much more advanced.
When I think about stuff you would see on TV, you would see people that had cancer, they were bald or skinny.
You don't see how the medication and the techniques have improved.
Especially if you're a person that freaks out about closed spaces.
A lot of people ask me that about the sensory deprivation tank.
They're like, oh man, I've...
I'm claustrophobic.
I don't know if I could do that.
I'm like, I think you can, because it's not like you can't get out easy.
There's a door right there.
Just get into it for a little bit, get comfortable with it, and then do a little bit more next time, a little bit more, and then after a while, your body gets accustomed.
It took me like a year to get used to what you're doing when you lay in there.
Well, it came out to go through the machine, but I don't think that there was ever really...
Leaving you, per se, because there was a connection made, and it wasn't like they took it out of you and took it someplace else and came back and put it into you.
Yeah, they were going to put them under and then they were going to use UV light on their lungs to kill...
Not just COVID, but other things.
Ultraviolet blood treatment.
There it is.
Ultraviolet blood treatment is simple intravenous therapy, which a small amount of blood is drawn from the patient's body through an ultraviolet light-emitting machine and then reintroduced to their system.
The UV light acts as a cell cleanser, killing bacteria and viruses in the bloodstream.
Unhealthy cells absorb five times as much Photonic energy and die off while healthy cells remain intact and the blood gains oxygen.
The effect is a vaccination-like response in which patients' immune systems is activated to counter the specific virus or bacteria the body is trying to defeat.
In our clinical experience, this treatment has been highly effective against viral infections.
Is this a real thing?
Bourne Clinic.
Why don't you Google ultra-violent blood treatment debunked?
A SteriPen is something that hikers and guys who go into the backcountry for multiple days at a time, they need water sources.
There's a thing called a SteriPen and you can literally take water from a lake And then you dunk this SteriPen in, and there's a specific amount of time that you expose the UV light to the water, and it kills all the bacteria in the water.
Find things outside of the norm that you guys have in common that you like to do.
Health is something that's really important with us.
Pam's been, you know, my Florence Nightingale when it came down to the whole illness.
And helping me with not only my current issues with the longevity and the continued maintenance that I'm under for my skeleton that's been damaged from the fusion and all the other stuff that I've had done to my body.
And just, you know, being a great moral support.
You know, there's times we fight.
I think every couple does.
And we've been married over 30 years, which is a huge accomplishment.
Well, that probably had a lot to do with Britney Spears and that Kevin Federline 45-second marriage that they did in Las Vegas so many years ago.
That had to do with it?
I think what happens when you have a bunch of little impressionable fans that are listening to a band and the front person or the leader of the band does stuff, absolutely right that people can be influenced.
Do they get influenced?
Do I think that people went out and just got married and got divorced right away because of that?
No, but I think that the Institute of Marriage has been cheapened from people not taking it seriously.
If you're going to marry somebody, it's supposed to be your soulmate.
You see beautiful things in nature like those eagles and their death spiral when they're mating.
I think the flying and a lot of the courting that you see these other birds and animals and stuff when they change their color to appeal to the mates.
That to me is really neat.
I've often wondered why in the animal kingdom that the males are so much more It's interesting.
But there's so many different things, you know, for me when I look at how my relationship with Pam is because I've tried to really, really be in the marriage and in the parenting.
When we would come home from tour, I'd be gone so long that, you know, she obviously had to leak over into being the dad every once in a while.
Which she didn't like and, you know, I don't think the kids liked it either.
So when I came home, instead of coming home and saying, okay, this is how it is, this is my way, I had to really quickly ascertain everything and see, you know, what's going on and to help.
If I didn't like what was going on, I needed to address that privately and in front of the kids and make sure that we were properly aligned, that we were evenly yoked.
You know what I mean?
So that if I come home – because one time I came home and Justice had said something really awful to his mom and I spanked him on the butt and his mom goes – or he goes, you didn't give me many chances.
And I went, okay, your mom's busted.
And, you know, I wasn't a spanker with my kids.
They got spanked a couple times, but it was not something that was done a lot in our house because I'd been spanked so much as a kid.
But I think about when you have two parents and one's gone for so long, especially in the military too.
You know, you come home and you've got to learn that family dynamic.
That's why it gets so difficult because one person has to make do and then someone else comes in and maybe screws everything up, maybe doesn't.
Well, I guess the motive behind it is what's important.
If you discipline with anger, then you're not disciplining because disciplining is supposed to be a conjunction of discipline And teaching.
So if you're disciplining your child, you're supposed to teach them.
You're not supposed to hit them.
So one of the things I've always said, anybody asks me about, you know, advice for parents, I always say, kiss your wife goodnight, tell her you love her, don't ever discipline your kids in anger.
So, I mean, she was a child that could be reasoned with.
And Justice only got, like I said, spanked a couple times.
And, you know, he was...
There was a lot of stuff that was going on, behavioral stuff that Justice was struggling with because I wasn't there.
So I know that the family dynamic really needs to have two parents there.
I mean, it takes a village thing, that quote, whatever the saying, idiom, cliche, epithet.
It's true.
You need to have more than just one person parenting.
You need help sometimes because the parents will get exhausted and overwhelmed and sometimes you need someone to just step in for a second and say, I got this.
Well, that's one of the things that really helps young men with martial arts is to find these figures, these male senseis and martial arts instructors that they look up to that have great morals and ethics and talk about things in front of the class.
And when you're a kid and you admire your instructor so much and it's such an important role model and such an important authority figure.
That has a great benefit on kids, too, in terms of ability to recognize the importance of discipline and being able to do things that make that person proud of your behavior and the way you conduct yourself and also your work ethic.
My work ethic changed tremendously once I started working with Sensei Benny.
You know, also my ability to be able to tolerate people when they would say stuff to me that I didn't want to necessarily hear, you know, because before, you know, people would say sit down and I would sit down, but on the inside I was standing up, you know.
And nowadays it's like I don't need to be in the front row.
I can enjoy the show just as much from the second or third row.
I just was talking to Justice when we were coming back from class the other day.
He's just started training with Professor Reggie.
He's got his first stripe, so he's really excited about it.
And I said, see, the thing, son, is that you never know who you're going to come across who's going to have more knowledge than you.
And right now, you know that as a white belt, with even just one stripe, you really don't know very much at all.
And that you never know when you're going to come across somebody who may look like they're just somebody that you can push around and you say the wrong thing.
Just like that one fighter down in Brazil who tragically lost his life.
I can't remember what his name was, but Professor Richard was talking about that guy.
And I really do believe that for young men in particular, that it's great to find some sort of an outlet in that way where you can express all the anger and all the shit that just comes with being a man.
You can get that out in training and it makes you so much more reasonable in regular life.
I drove to the stage in a golf cart with a neck brace on.
All over the stage, there was paper that said, don't.
Headbang.
Because my neck was barely holding on.
And then I went home and I went to Marina del Rey, I should say, and had my neck fused together.
It took a long time.
I still have that neck brace.
I need it from time to time because, you know, my neck kind of leans forward a little bit.
All the head banging and stuff has made these muscles in here really disproportionately because they had to go through the front in order to get to the bone here.
And this muscle in the front is much like a corset.
So they pulled it aside and this side had to come across farther because they had to go in here.
So when all these muscles grew back, they kind of grew in sideways, and then they had to grow over.
So there's all this weird stuff.
These two lines coming down right here are a byproduct of trying to stretch a lot.
And I don't mind about getting old, but I do mind getting stiff.
I've been trying to see what's going to happen with where we're at with my whole situation with cancer before I start taking any more surgeries or anything.
The good thing about it is you're not articulating those discs.
You're not moving them, but it still strengthens your neck.
You put it on your head like a halo, and it has a bungee cord that attaches off the halo, and you vary the amount of tension on the bungee cord based on the position you are in relationship to where it's connected.
So as he's doing that, the tension on the actual halo itself, you vary.
So in the beginning, like, you could do it very easily and build up to it, and then eventually you can get it to where, see that thing as you adjust that little dial, that red dial?
When anybody has a fucked up neck, I always have a lot of advice because I've gone through a lot of shit with my neck and luckily figured out ways to strengthen it and make it much better.
But that's sort of a common thread in jiu-jitsu.
So many people in jiu-jitsu wind up with fucked up discs.
Well, there's a thing in learning technique in particular with any kind of martial art that's very important to learn it correctly because you can learn bad paths and then those paths, even if you get past them when you get tired, when you get fatigued or when you're under stress, you'll revert to your earliest teachings.
So they threw kicks, but they didn't have the right amount of power because they weren't using their hips properly.
So I tried to express, like, there's a way to articulate your hips.
You're not doing that.
You're just kicking with your leg.
And when they would get tired or when- Just flop it out there.
Or they'd get nervous if they were competing.
It would just fall apart and they would go right back to their earliest teaching, which is- Really, to me, ingrained early on in my mind, you got to learn something right the first time.
You don't want to unlearn shit.
It's very hard, like when you're talking about guitar, it's very hard for people to unlearn.
Like once you learn something, I guess guitar doesn't really matter because some of the greats, like Hendrix, I think, didn't he learn?
It's like, and as I was saying before about music, one of the things that's so fascinating to me is that someone's expressing their creativity through these sounds, and these sounds literally change the way you feel.
They do something to you that just excites all of your nerves and all of your sensations to this point where it's a great song that comes on at the right time is an amazing drug.
Yeah, well, now that I think about it, I was thinking about something else, because I've got some little souvenirs and stuff from touring over there, so I have a little teeny thing from the Hendrix experience I was thinking about sending down here to put up on the wall or something.
Okay, so in the beginning, I did the Twitter stuff.
We were very, very, very active with Megadeth Arizona, which was our chat room, and then we had Megadeth.com, and then we had what was called The Diner, was what they called the chat room with Megadeth Arizona.
That lasted for a while.
Then there was some woman who said she invented it all and we kind of said, look, we don't want to be part of this website over here.
We want to take Megadesk.com and we want you to let us free.
The label was basically doing the website domain hosting at the time and I knew the future of the web.
I knew what was going on with the beginning internet and Now that we're on the cusp of Web 3.0, you know, with cyber currency and cryptocurrency, I mean, and with the NFTs, you know, we've got our NFTs are going to be launching September 13th, which is going to be my birthday consequently.
And we also have a lot of things that are membership oriented where all you need is a little Megadeth coin to...
And it gives you access to all kinds of other really cool things like meet and greets, concerts, early ticketing, or different merchandise nobody else is going to get.
And with the non-fungible tokens, it's so involved with everything.
All I can tell you right now is I've looked at other people's NFTs that they have.
And I think we're a little bit farther ahead from other people with their NFTs.
You know, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, however you say it, was really...
Cool kind of thing in the beginning, and it's taken on life all of its own.
And then, you know, you look at the NFTs that Ozzy did, the Cryptobats.
You know, a lot of people like it because it's 8-bit, and it looks like it's, you know, old, old-school Atari kind of stuff, you know.
But I think that when you do something like that, you also run the hazard, if you will, of...
Somebody's saying, you're not doing it.
Somebody else is doing it for you.
So we try and be as authentic as possible and make sure that we know what we're doing, we know what we're talking about, and we know how it's going to benefit the fans.
I think people really like that in terms of social media too.
When they find out that someone's posting on social media for you and pretending that they're the band or pretending they're the comedian or whatever, people get upset at that.
We did this long enough ago where there's no real challenges to the name.
And the social services, the different ones you're talking about, they're congenial enough, I don't know if that's the right word, but to work with us and make sure that, you know, hey, you've got some imposters, got Dave's name out there.
It's not like You know, Buck Owens, where everybody, you know, Tom Smith.
Because, I mean, you know, you look at a lot of it, and stuff that people are doing, like the hologram stuff that was going on, and everybody was saying, like, holograms, Tupac Shakur, Elvis, oh my god, are you kidding?
To me, what's interesting about that is people that don't have access to your concerts can't go.
I would like it as a supplement thing.
It'd be fucking amazing.
If you had a virtual reality concert where someone...
Could sit there in like the second row and see people in front of them and it feels real and they get to see you guys actually perform the actual real high-definition video of you there but in a virtual space where you can move around and actually watch you right in front of them.
We won a Clio Award for having the best virtual reality performance.
It wasn't about the virtual reality performance.
It was the best business idea.
And this company is known for giving out awards to Honda, to Palmolive, to Procter& Gamble and stuff like that.
And we got the award because the forward and extra cerebral thought process that comes from our brain trust and doing a 360 degree virtual reality concert where they came, they got the...
Yeah, they got the CD package and the CD package came with the helmet that you had to wear.
And what you would do is you would slide your cell phone into this helmet and then you could go through here while we were playing and you could get any position that you wanted to to watch how we were playing from there.
You know, I did the very first interview that Oculus ever did.
They came to my house in Fallbrook and the guy brought a duct taped together prototype of the Oculus camera and gave me the headset and I put that in and the very first scene that I ever saw was a dog walker walking dogs down the beach in San Diego because the guy had just gone there Before he came to my house, and he filmed some dog walkers, and I thought, this is the coolest thing ever.
And I think you might be able to find it online.
They show this picture of me by my pond in my house we used to have in Fallbrook.
It's a beautiful, beautiful place, but the picture made it look like five times as big.
It was really amazing.
And seeing the Oculus Rift thing in its beginning stages, you know, I didn't really have a lot of Oomph!
With my desire wanting to pursue this.
I knew it was something neat.
I knew it was cool.
But, you know, he told me that the guy from Doom, I think it was.
And it's a surprisingly good workout because you hold the hand things and then you put the helmet on and you're in this ring with like this virtual box or this cartoon boxer.
And every time they hit you with a jab, your vision lights up.
Fight Camp is essentially like Peloton, but with combat sports.
So you have sensors that are on the heavy bag, and you have sensors that are in your gloves, and then you follow along with a video that'll tell you what to do, and it's great, because it forces you to do what they're doing, and you don't work out to your pace.
You work out to a trainer's pace.
But these games...
There's more than one.
There's a ton of them.
There's a ton of them for archery, a ton of them for other things too that are fun to do.
But the boxing one is a particularly good workout.
I was surprised.
I was like, oh my god, I'm gassed out.
This is crazy.
Because you're really going after it with this.
And you're not hitting anything, which is actually sometimes when you're moving fast, it's harder because nothing's absorbing your shot.
So since nothing's absorbing your shot, you have to kind of slow it down yourself.
So as you're throwing these punches and you're moving around...
Because you're doing it pretty fast.
You're not doing it just like you're just shadowboxing and moving in front of a mirror.
You're doing it where you're trying to hit this thing that's hitting you.
And so as you hit it, it registers.
You see, as your gloves touch it, it reacts to it.
So it feels...
You don't hit anything, but it feels like...
This is it?
Yeah, this is one of them.
There's many of them, though.
So you can actually duck under punches and move around.
It recognizes where you are in 3D space because the playing area is mapped out.
So you map it out on the floor, and if you walk past those ropes, it would give you a red screen that shows you that you're fucking up and you're in the wrong spot.
And mostly on English cars and mostly Triumphs where you had to take the clutch out.
And in order to get the clutch out of those things, you had to take the whole front down where your feet are, the whole console out of the car and then go under the car that way.
And I thought, surely these guys are making me do this the hardest way possible.
Justice, I gave him an Aston, and he traded it for a Raptor, which I think a lot of people would say he's nuts, but I think here in Texas, a lot of people would probably say they understand.