The new In Gen C. The C stands for crypto, but it also stands for creators, the connected consumer and collectibles, both digital and physical with on chain provenance. It stands for culture and characters, the ones we play in games and the companion ones that AI is building alongside us. It stands for community and digital citizenship and the new set of transparent and trustless tools being built to govern them. These are the people who were raised on a different philosophy on how they look at money, how they look at identity, how they look at privacy and how they look at the hybrid, digital and physical spaces being built all around us. And finally, how they reimagine their relationships with the communities and companies they interact with. We focus on how brands, large and small, are building for these audiences. Welcome to Gen C. Sam, I feel like everybody besides us is at career blockchain week. Are you also getting a little bit of FOMO? I am, but I'm also not because I've been traveling so much this summer and I have so much travel coming up that I'm like, if I get to stay home for four weeks, I'm so happy. So true. I am in Miami for the next week and a half and I'm so excited. This is that pre -Labor Day, get all of our house in order, work -wise and life -wise. So it's really nice to actually, you know, have a little bit of head's down time while everybody else is on vacation. Absolutely. Avery, I've noticed in your head's down time, you have not bought one share of Sam Yuen on Friend Tech. So what's going on? What do I got to do to get you in the Sam Yuen crypto community? I need to do that. I haven't even gotten Friend Tech set up, to be honest, because I think that I've seen this movie before on Friend Tech. And while I hope for all the success in the platform, what I don't love is the sort of like Ponzi -nomics ecosystem that I've seen happen many times before and I think can at times create the wrong incentives for people who don't have the right intentions. So that's one of the reasons I personally haven't gotten going, but I need to do that just to get my hands on the tech. I'm going to take that as an action item for myself by end of day today. So I will shortly invest in Sam Yuen on Friend Tech. Amazing. For anyone who is listening who has not yet gone into Friend Tech, it's a crypto platform on base. Coinbase is layer two, and it does allow you to, in essence, buy shares in personalities, your friends, and that share gets you into a private chat community with anyone else who holds those shares, which, you know, it's been one of the fastest growing crypto apps in a while. It's second only to Ethereum in number of transactions at the moment. They also did about $800 ,000 in fees just in the last 24 hours. So there is a lot happening in it. And one of the things we saw over the weekend was people like FaZe Banks, who's part of FaZe Clan, and some basketball NBA stars started coming on, which has sort of broken it out of just being crypto and crypto influencers. But yes, to your point, this idea of, you know, now I have to pay two Ethereum, five grand or whatever it may be to jump into someone's private chat community where I don't really know what I'm getting from them until you do, feels a little too crypto -pumpy to me. Yeah, Sam, you know my perspective on this sort of overt early financialization of things like relationships where I could just text you or telegram you or call you or do a podcast. And of course, there are oftentimes sort of other ways you financially support the people that you're friends with and you're sort of emotionally invested. That's one of the reasons why I've never been hot on this idea of like crypto dating apps and that type of thing. And like there's some things that don't need to be overly financialized, though, of course, when it comes to something like a celebrity or a community where you're like really gleaning valuable insights, I'm all for supporting the creator economy. So I need to get a little bit more hands on and get a more educated perspective because right now I'm sharing an outsider's view. But Base has certainly been the star of the summer, if you will, you know, Coinbase's Layer 2 solution. I was just walking in downtown Miami and saw they actually have outdoor ads for Onchain Summer. So got to get Jesse on here. It's awesome to see some activity happening on Base and I hope that it's sustainable. Yeah, absolutely. I've been trying to collect as much as I can in Onchain Summer really just to play with all the different brands. Atari is there, Coke is there, an amazing set of artists, DK Motion's piece, you know, 70 ,000 Mints, you know, for an open edition. Yeah, I got that one. Yeah, pretty awesome. Next story I wanted to get your thoughts on was we've talked a little bit before about AI and music, but I was reading a blog post yesterday that YouTube put out and it was about that they are actually working with Universal Music Group directly and the estates of like Frank Sinatra, the jazz drummer Max Victor, there's a global pop star Anita, Yo Gotti who's part of the hip hop world. All of them are coming in to say let's explore what AI and music can do together really as a precursor to setting up kind of set of guidelines of how musicians and AI creators can work together. And it's all kind of working with YouTube also through the lens of how do we ensure that there are creator royalties and rights that are happening within this. So I thought it was an interesting first step. You know, one, working with artists who don't have any say in their career anymore, the Frank Sinatra estate, but also working with current hot artists who are willing to say maybe there is a world where co -creation is at the DNA of part of what we do together. Do you have any more thoughts on that? I think there's no stopping the AI train and I think these musicians and the estates of these musicians are smart to lean into this and smart to be working with, you know, an established platform like YouTube to figure this out because it's going to happen anyway. It's going to happen with or without them. And, you know, to have their voice at the table, I think is critical and is ultimately going to be helpful both to educate the platform on what's possible, do things that are right by their fans and have their voices and their fans' voices heard. So I think it's amazing. I'm seeing all different types of experimentation in generative AI with music. There are, you know, a number of a platform I have been playing with a little bit. It's called like M -verse and you can, you know, say what you want and it gives you lyrics. It actually outputs like a rap. There's a bunch of cool stuff that's like happening with little experimental startups. I'm seeing a huge crossover with folks who are really into web free. I'm now really into the AI space as well. I saw NFT now now has AI now. There are so many of these, you know, I would call them like emerging tech leaders who had leaned into the space of NFTs and crypto. We're now seeing a lot of adjacencies with AI. But just like anything it comes, adoption is going to be driven by products that people actually want. And also very different to what we saw in the NFT world. I think monetization is actually a lot more challenging because this is not a place where there's an immediate commercialization. That's going to be something that comes up sooner rather than later and all of those artists are going to want to find ways they can get paid as a result of, you know, experimenting and exploring this technology because they do see one of the challenges that will be coming up shortly is like how do they make money from this? Agree on all of that. It feels a little bit to me like the frenzy is dying down a bit. Oh, it is. Actually chat GPT usage is down. The speculation is because it's summer, so kids are out of school. Well, not only is it down, but I've been hearing more in relation to text -based AI that people are finding results getting more and more suspect in the stuff that they're trying to create in the sense that GPT -4, which was supposed to be this really revolutionary step forward, actually isn't creating as dynamic output. It's kind of more generic output. There's also these theories on the fact that the more that AI is getting trained on output that's done by AI, that it continually dumbs itself down, which lends itself to the opportunity to say how much is it more of a research tool versus a creative output tool? And then even going one step further, how viable is that at research when you do it? You still have to double check. You don't want to be the lawyer who got disbarred because they were using chat GPT in order to litigate their cases. I guess I just wonder if, and I think this is a great thing, right, as the frenzy dies down, we start to see the actual use cases and the productivity side, which I know you're big on and I'm big on, start to emerge as how does this just make me a better creator, employee, thinker, writer, whatever that may be? Yeah, so we actually just said these five key takeaways of where the AI space is heading. And the first prediction is that AI excitement will wane. I think that that moment of like, oh, my god, chat GPT is magic, that is kind of like ended for a lot of people because they played around with it. And I think from a consumer perspective, there's the fun of playing with it for the first time. But then there's like actually I could just search on Google. So that initial excitement is waning both with consumers and also with some enterprises. The second sort of prediction is that AI will be everywhere. I think we're seeing AI sort of deeply integrated across so many of the day to day things that we use, whether it is Instacart or Gmail. AI is just built in already. So it's like, do I need a separate interface to utilize some of this technology? We also think that corporate strategies are starting to take shape. I know our next guest is probably going to speak about this a little bit, but so many of our partners at Viner are crafting the strategies right now of how we're going to leverage AI, both for marketing, but also this is a conversation very often not owned by the chief marketing officer, by the chief information officer, the chief technical officer. A lot of those conversations are happening of like, what's the corporate strategy around this? And we also believe that negative narratives are going to start gaining traction a little bit like what you just said, Sam. A lot of calling out the misuses of it, a lot of calling out the ethical biases. There will be a few like, oh, no, that just happened moments in the next year that I think will expose sort of the dark side of AI. And our last prediction is that AI is going to be everywhere at the Super Bowl this year. Marketers love a shiny new toy and AI is that many a brief is coming in around how do we use AI end to end to develop our Super Bowl campaigns. And I think it's the right brief, right? It's how do we leverage this technology to do something we're already going to do better, faster, cheaper, more effectively. So I think all of that is going to happen. But the initial hype is dying off in favor of, you know, really trying to understand this stuff. And what you just sort of pointed out was the fact that there are multiple different formats of generative AI and the models themselves. There's advantages to having a model that is trained on more information and there's advantages to having a model that is trained on less. Just hearing a pitch from an AI company we're considering working with on some marketing initiatives and their model is actually intentionally not trained on every single thing under the sun so it can be narrow and focused. So whether you're talking about Claude by Anthropic or barred by Google or any other of the different companies and models that they're building, each of these are a little bit different. And as you become more familiar with them, you see the pros and cons of each the same way you have pros and cons of any like media platform or other sort of tech platform that you use. And I don't think that that many people actually understand that yet. They think generative AI is generative AI and everything is chat GPT and you're like actually it's completely different if you're using meta's llama versus if you're using Einstein GPT because ultimately it's pulling from different information that gives a different output and bigger is not necessarily better.