Ripple’s chief technology officer David Schwartz confessed that he once faked fan questions for Black Sabbath and filtered the responses of recently deceased rock legend Ozzy Osbourne during what was meant to be an authentic Q&A with fans — an experience he now regrets.
“I cheated,” Swartz said in an X post on Thursday.
“To me personally, it was a failure, but to everyone else it was a success,” recalling his time at WebMaster when, as an employee, he was assigned to type out responses to fan questions for Osbourne — who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 76 — and the rest of Black Sabbath band members using the company’s ConferenceRoom software.
Fans didn’t have interest in anyone but Osbourne
As a self-proclaimed fast typist, Schwartz explained that he was asked to speak with the band members over the phone, relay fan questions, and type out their responses in real time.
But it quickly became clear to Schwartz that fans had no interest in anyone else in the band; every question was for Osbourne. “I specifically asked the moderators to give me questions that weren’t for Ozzy. There just weren’t any,” he said.
Schwartz kept a set of pre-written “canned questions” on hand in case of technical issues, which he ultimately used to avoid leaving the other band members out.
“I passed a canned question to each of the other band members in rotation. And I mixed what I could make out of what they said with the canned answer from their manager,” Schwartz said.
“At the time, I felt really bad about the whole thing. It wasn’t the authentic interaction with celebrities that I wanted it to be and that I tried to make it,” he said, adding that only “two or three” legitimate fan questions ever made it to the band.
Schwartz reveals he cleaned up Osbourne’s answers
Schwartz also admitted that he removed the profanity from Osbourne’s answers:
“Ozzy’s answer featured the C-word a lot. The bad C-word. The one that Americans really don’t like to say. It was pretty close to the only word I could hear clearly.”
“I typed up Ozzy’s answer as closely as I could, probably getting it way off due to the poor connection quality. I censored the C-words,” he added.
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Meanwhile, Cointelegraph reported on Friday that memecoins inspired by Osbourne skyrocketed as tributes flooded over the icon’s death this week.
One known as The Mad Man (OZZY) pumped over 16,800% to trade at $0.003851 and hit a market cap of $3.85 million.
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