Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Good News Show ☀️Art | Tech | Community ☀️Weekly Round-Up 🎙️
Recorded: Aug. 4, 2025 Duration: 1:38:10Space Recording
Short Summary
In a groundbreaking discussion, the emergence of AI-driven economic activity was highlighted, particularly through Grok's wallet and its recent token launch, DRB. With nearly a million dollars generated and a focus on verification in the age of AI, the conversation explored the potential for AI agents to reshape the crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Music Thank you. GM GM good morning all right let's get this party started
GM, GM, Wool Plug, what's up?
What is cooking?
I'm good.
I'm good.
Happy Monday.
And it was a nice, juicy weekend, way to get excited coming into Monday.
So it was interesting.
I will say there was a nice marriage of my two lives.
As I say, as you know, I've been in here,
Web3 for four plus years, but prior to,
I used to be movie adjacent and venture capital adjacent
and all these other things.
Fast forward, a good friend of mine just happens to be around.
He says, hey, would you like to come to the screening?
And it's this new one by Netflix called Fixed.
Same guy who did Primal, I believe his name is
Gendry Tartakovsky.
And it's really adult animated.
But the reason that I mention it as kind of a preamble
it's somewhat to today's show is that
it was probably the first time
that I saw the old kind of community building
that we were talking about I think last week.
There was a lot of people just taken out
to a very nice dinner and basically two hours
of just everybody just forming ideas around the same idea.
And so it made me think both of where i think
hollywood may ultimately try to meet us in web3 but also in terms of like what we would bring to
web3 and their potential interest in doing stuff with us so i say that to say this excited for
monday excited for the good new show great to see Thanks again. We're always living vicariously through you. I love it. Thanks so much for sharing and forgive me. This is Rachel behind the
timepieces account. I have not been body snatched, but I have lost my voice. So I have some nasty
cold. So, but we're going to get through it. We're going to get through this show. We have a packed
show. This is the good news show. We are here every week in collaboration with Times Web 3
Initiative, of course, Time Pieces. We are so happy that you are choosing to spend your Monday
morning with us. So big, big welcome. If this is your first time, we hope you will come back.
We see some new MFs in the crowd. That can mean only one thing. What do MFs not care about?
MFs don't give an F, apparently.
So we are going to get into it in a little while.
We have two special guests today, actually.
We have M. Lee Jr., who's going to be joining us to talk about Grok and Grok's wallet.
Yes, Grok is almost a millionaire, but we'll get into that shortly.
And then we also have a special guest joining us to continue our conversation around photography.
The conversation was spurred about two weeks ago when Cosimo D'Amici, of course, with his
rage-baiting tweets of the week, put out a tweet that said, is photography dead?
Which, of course, we all knew was rage bait, right?
And we all responded appropriately.
So we're going to be continuing the conversation on photography in just a little while.
But as always, we welcome anybody who wants to come up and share any good news that you have personally,
whether it's related to the space or not, you are welcome to come up.
And yes, I'm gradually losing my voice. plug i'm gonna need you today i'm gonna need extra help in the
voice department whatever i can do i'm here for you so um yes so do come up i see a couple of
requests uh let's see here all right let's get chaz up. Chaz, good morning, GM, GM.
Good morning.
Did you happen to catch the side conversation that I had with Cosmo Dimitri's conversation with Grok?
I did not.
Tell us more. He did, like me and Grok had a whole conversation about, it asked me um if i if i uh what if i had to
choose one would i kill photography or gen art and i i actually got into a conversation with it about
how i use my photography to create art with ai and how it's a come like come like a really complex
mixture of the two of the two things and that's how i've been creating for the last three years
and me and grok went off on this like side tangent like conversation about it and like it was kind of
cool what was the outcome jazz of that conversation it was really positive actually like it was it was
it was it was like he was uh grok was basically saying like like way to like save photography
and gen art the same gen of art like by mixing the two of them together and creating a new genre.
Very cool.
Yeah, very cool.
Chaz, what have you been up to? Anything exciting this weekend?
I've actually been working on my...
I started picking up on the vein of my Billy Green Shadows kind of themed art that i do and i've been digging through
old portraiture um from my photography days and like feeding it into mid-journey and like flux
and in pre-pick and like creating new new art like i'm like i i finally got the bug funny bit
me for like this is my favorite style of like art and the pieces that i feel are the most powerful
and like that are most worth anything that i've ever done and i thought that i had with this one that i made like a year and a
half two years ago i felt like i will never be able to top that i won't ever be able to like
make something better or cooler or as cool as that that's just it i'm just gonna leave it at that
and like and like it took me like a year and a half and i'm finally back in that in that vein
again of like that same style like So I'm really excited about it.
I'm like, I've been having the kiddos, the kiddos at work have been helping me pick out portraits that I have on my phone to mix with the prompts and then adding their ideas to the prompts and what I think what I should do with them.
Well, that's pretty cool.
I'm glad to hear you in the creative zone.
Yeah.
And a big welcome to jennifer gmgm gm rachel gm wall plug gm everybody hi chas um uh yeah i mean what is up with me so
i wanted to quickly say something about like the whole photography thing i chimed in but like a
little bit because i could tell that it was 1000% like trying to get a rise
out of us um so the way that I stated my position I guess like how I saw it was that it was kind of
weird that we were arguing about whether or not it was um alive or dead or valid or not because
like I can't think of another medium that's more relevant to
provenance and record keeping than photography. And so my post was more about like, photography
and journalism will always play a critical role in like archiving. And I don't think there's a
clearer example of that than right now with the situation that's happening, you know, in different
parts of the world where, you know,
there's famine and there's people going through wars and stuff like that. So that was like my,
you know, I guess, contribution to that whole conversation. And then I just wanted to share,
if it's okay with you guys, a new open call opportunity for any artist that may be interested.
that might be interesting. Go for it, Jen. Cool. So I'm going to grab it and I'll pin it up to the
Go for it, Jen.
top. And then, so that's something for you all to take a look at and enter. Cool opportunity there
to be featured as one of eight artists in a group drop that we're going to be having on August 22nd on Object.
And then separate to that, like personally, I'm actually gearing up to go to Colombia to support Juan Huda Saca in his first solo exhibition in Bogota.
So I'll be that last week of August.
I'll be over there.
Very exciting, Jen.
Thank you so much for stopping stopping by we appreciate it and definitely
artists go check it out uh the call is up of course in the nest um and then we also have
jacob welcome jacob you have any good news you want to share hey um sort of i guess i wanted to
say hi to chas and uh jen too andlug. It's good to hear you guys again.
Yeah, I've kind of been taking a little bit of a break from doing digital art recently.
I minted a couple of things like last week, but I haven't really been super into the community stuff recently.
But I've kind of been working on this new tech project, actually.
I know this is kind of like an art and tech conversation.
So it's sort of like this, it's kind of like an approach to using the internet.
Like you create this like self-first type identity, which is what I'm hoping to act
hoping to act as like a filter for the internet so people would use it as like a web app or um
as like a filter for the internet.
like a browser that they could use to search the internet and use application and social media
and what your identity will do is it will sort of act as like an aspirational thing so the identity
platform will track like your mood your behavior what you hope to be in life your aspirations what your
personality is like and it will use all that information as a filter for the internet so that
you'll get information from the internet that is like catered towards you and catered towards the
life that you aspire to live so it's basically in hopes that you'll essentially become who you
want to become and that's kind of the program platform that I'm working on right now.
I'm trying to find like the right software developer to help me create it.
But aside from doing that, yeah,
I've just been kind of doing a little bit of art here and there and working on
these sites. And then I had to see a doctor this morning.
So I'm kind of working on health stuff too.
So that's been a journey as
well, which I'm hoping to kind of resolve some issues for myself personally. But yeah, I hope
everybody's doing good. Thanks for letting me come up and speak and I'll try to listen for a bit.
I got an appointment at 1.30, but yeah, thank you so much.
Thanks, Jacob. And as always, feel free to pin something up to the nest if you have anything that you're promoting.
All right, folks, we have some news to get to.
And then 1130, we have Emily Jr. joining us.
And then right after Emily, we also are going to be welcoming Brad, who is going to talk to us a little bit more about photos on chain.
But just a little housekeeping.
So this is the Good News Show.
We've been here for, what, three years now, I think it is, since November 2022.
We are a space where you can come and find the optimistic twist on the news from the space and beyond.
We focus on crypto, on digital art, on AI and other emerging technologies.
And we're focused specifically on people who are contributing to and not extracting from
this space that we're all building together. So if that's you, please make this your home.
Please come by. If there's voices that you think we should hear from who live up to that ideal,
definitely let us know and we'll try to make
space for them in our interview slots that we do each week. And if you want to support this show,
we have a weekly roundup, which is now minted on Paragraph. It is up in the nest. You can go
check it out. And thanks to Paragraph's new update, it is actually deployed as a coin. So you can actually participate in the
economy around that news article, which is very exciting. But also, if you don't want to
participate, you can also just share. You can share it on the timeline. You can make sure that
people are getting an optimistic spin on what's happening. So we have about 15 minutes. We are
going to keep it moving. Woolplug, did you want to add something before we jump into the news?
Thanks so much.
So I just happened to notice that we're the second highest space right now in
the time slot. So if any of you feel so inclined,
definitely let somebody that you love know that we're here to share the good
news. Thanks so much.
Nice spot, Woolplug. Appreciate that. Yeah, let's get this space tweeted out.
Drop it in a couple of DMs. Let's get going. And apologies, folks, again, I am losing my voice by
the second. But let's get into it. So, news stories. All right. What do we have? All right. So let me give you a quick market update.
BTC right now is sitting at $115,000, up 0.82%. ETH at $3,600, up 2%. XRP at $307,000. And Solana is, of course, at 166, up 1.6%.
Top performer in the last 24 hours is XRP.
Biggest dip of the last week is Solana.
Boo-hoo. Uh-oh.
And, of course, Bitcoin market cap this week is smashing $2.2 trillion.
My goodness.
All right, Warplug, should we pick one of these stories out and uh
and get into it is there any that jumped out to you this morning well i'm a huge fan of sasha
style so uh maybe we start with that one i think we have to talk about sasha because she is we we
she is really just a friend of the show we've we've had the pleasure of interviewing her twice
she is wonderful watching her just ascend in this space is, well, beyond this
space is so wonderful. So here we go. So MoMA welcomes on-chain poet Sasha Stiles debuting a
living poem. What does poetry look like in an age of artificial intelligence? Sasha Stiles, pioneer
of generative verse and human-machine collaboration is bringing the answer to MoMA.
Her new exhibit, A Living Poem, transforms the museum's garden lobby into a living, breathing, literary system,
rewriting itself every 60 minutes using a custom-trained language model.
Stiles' work, developed in collaboration with her AI alter ego technology,
fuses handwriting with binary code in typeface called Cursive Binary, developed in collaboration with her AI alter ego technology,
fuses handwriting with binary code in typeface called cursive binary,
and features immersive soundscapes and QR audio described as a poem in residence.
It's a stunning blend of language, code, and consciousness, and a landmark moment for AI-powered art entering into the institutional canon.
What a moment. Oh my
goodness. So we've had Rafiq, of course, taking over the MoMA lobby, which was just an incredible
moment for the art canon. Rafiq, of course, making that huge sale at Christie's just two
weeks ago for 1.8 million. And now we see Sasha Styles taking up some space at MoMA.
We are so excited about this.
We're so proud of Sasha.
It is well-deserved.
So, Warplug, any takes on this that you want to share?
Yes.
I couldn't be more excited, as you say,
just a wonderful human being, great friend of the show,
just a great person in the space,
but also I think it's just important to mark the moment
that we have a female headliner for MoMA.
I mean, amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing.
So, you know, we're constantly trying to,
let's say broaden the access, broaden, let's say,
the contributions of the many innumerable talented women that we have in our space.
So for her to be the headliner
and to be what's going to be the draw
probably for the next X months after the debut,
I think is a moment too far in coming,
but so excited that it's here.
And I know that we'll both have a great time at the event.
I actually almost, I'm still on the fence,
whether or not to invite one or two people
from my former life to that, but I couldn't be more happy.
It's so cool and so forward, you know,
especially because of her like groundbreaking
technology practice.
So I think it'll do a number of things.
Number one, as mentioned, just who she is
and what she represents and her craft and practice
is just amazing for the space writ large.
But additionally, I think that most people
may not be artists, but at some point in their life,
they were a budding poet.
And so I feel like this will also be incredibly accessible
to the crowd at MoMA,
but I think it'll bring potentially more people
into Web3 as well as elevate the poetry practice itself.
And we have people like Annemarie Cabrera and many others,
but I think this is just a really fantastic moment.
And we also have enough time to really like promote it and,
and make sure that the people that we think should know about it do know
about it.
So I couldn't be more excited that she's been selected for this incredible
honor and moment in art history.
And this is not financial advice.
And this is Rachel behind the time pieces account and definitely not the
opinions of time pieces.
This is,
this is my personal opinion,
but you can still pick up Sasha styles works for less than a thousand
dollars right now,
not financial advice at all.
But you know,
this artist is heading into one of the most prestigious establishments in the world, quite frankly.
So do with that information what you will.
Not financial advice, of course.
So, yes, she also had a drop this week.
It was a generative drop.
I think there was about 150 pieces.
So we'll try and get that pinned up to the top as well.
So you might want to check that out.
I think they were, I believe they were like around $250,000.
I think it was a larger generative drop, but definitely worth checking that out.
All right.
So in other news, what else do we have going on?
Meta's $72 billion AI bet.
So forget the metaverse.
Meta is now all in, of course, on AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg
revealed that the company is spending up to $72 billion, that's with a B, folks, this year alone
on infrastructure and talent to chase personal superintelligence for its users. With new clusters
called Prometheus and Hyperion and top AI hires from OpenAI and Scale,
Meta is racing to build the next-gen models.
But for all the futuristic talk, Meta's current AI still mostly powers
engagement metrics and ad tech.
So is this truly about empowering users, or is it just doubling down on data?
Either way, with over 1.5 billion users already interacting with Meta's AI daily,
Zuckerberg's moonshot has momentum, whether it lifts off or crashes like the Metaverse remains
to be seen. I'm currently reading Frank McCourt's book. I don't know whether anybody has read it,
but it is essentially about the problematic era that we live through with big social media companies.
And I was not aware that Facebook has been collecting 52,000 data points on all of us.
So do with that what you will when it comes to thinking about intent of where this money is being spent.
But Wallplug, any personal thoughts on this?
Yeah, sure. Thanks. I actually have a lot because I may have mentioned it casually,
but prior to coming to the space, I used to be in the data business. So when you talk about those
50,000 data points, you know, it brings both good and also odd memories in terms of like what people will do with data. But I thought it was very interesting in so far as
if you think about the meta business model, right?
It's all about connecting you to your friends
and people that you went to school with and worked with
and people that you may have lost touch with,
but now you're connected there, right?
But the point being is that, you know,
relationships take a lot more work, real people, hey, we're gonna meet at a a time and a place, so on and so forth, and the chances for it to go wrong.
But imagine a world where you now have these AI, let's say, agents that are there to make you feel great and validate your dreams and your fears and so on and so forth. So it's not so much, it feels like they're transitioning the business model at some level
from the people that you know to the people that potentially you wish you knew.
The person that understands and thinks that everything that you think is amazing and knows
just the right amount of slap and tickle so that you're not bored and it's not gross,
but it's like, they're just giving you just enough
so that you're gonna continue to be interested
or argue with it a little bit or so forth.
So I feel like there's gonna be almost like a parasocial
meets the one sort of friend
that can also take those 50,000 data points,
everything that you've ever put online, everything that you've ever read,
and put that into a conversation that is so seductive and so attractive that,
you know, I probably one of many people who used to be very much on Facebook,
then had a bad experience or whatever it was,
and then just decided I wouldn't use Facebook.
And certainly Web3 provides me with more than enough real connection,
IRL, and just on the timeline that I don't have that same need for Facebook.
But imagine that I didn't.
I feel like Facebook is trying to meet and create that micro need
or micro person or micro relationship
that would be incredibly difficult if they get it right
to leave so i so the answer is it could be amazing because i think everybody deserves somebody that
really thinks they're special and really adds a lot and brings a lot to the table and if done
properly it could be uh the person that recommends you for your next job transition or the day that you're feeling less than amazing that it knows just the right thing to get you
motivated and get back in the game and make some new art or you know some personal insights but
again ah it does have some it does have some rough edges if uh the right alignment isn't there and
the uh let's just say it could go either way
in terms of the business model
based on what we've seen so far.
But yeah, I think it's very interesting,
but I think it also has some edges
that I think are a little potentially concerning
if somebody isn't watching it
and what the goals are, if that makes sense.
And we would love to hear from anybody in the audience
who has thoughts on any of these stories as well. So definitely jump in the comment section for now and let us know if you have any alternative takes, any spicy takes, if you think this is a good thing that Meta is going this hard in AI, or if you also have some personal concerns around this as well.
have some personal concerns around this as well um i see chas is trying to get up here so let's get
him up here again uh and then um this is i mean this is pretty much a very ai centered show today
uh given the the context that we're about to jump into with grok and its wallet um but before we do
that uh let's chas did you have some thoughts you wanted to share on this? Oh, yeah. You know I do.
I mean, hopefully I sound better because I actually have you guys in my glasses in my car instead of on my Bluetooth now.
So it might sound a little bit better than usual.
Wait, pause for a second, Chaz.
I just want, just for the audience to mark the moment,
Metta right now is in the space with us as chas is
using the glasses to talk about better okay please continue that's that's i was gonna make
my whole point it's like i know that they're listening and recording right now you know what
i mean like because it goes through meta it goes through my app it goes straight to facebook which
is really funny i'm like okay all right so now i'm on glasses and like i'm in a twitter space
what do they think about that but it's like, they're trying to create this like micro,
like you said, a micro, like an avatar thing.
Like they want, they want people to create their,
they started with these little cute, stupid ass little like emoji,
AI avatar cartoon looking things.
And now they want to make basically my, what I, what I think is happening.
I think that they're going to like, they want to make basically my what i what i think is happening i think that they're gonna like they want to make it where like it's a it's a double of who you are as your
little avatar and you can literally become your own ai agent i think that's what they're angling
for like that's that's my opinion i'm not sure so i haven't been keeping any room like close tabs on
like what they've been up to um i just love these glasses because i can you know do this
and like listen to you guys on spaces and stuff when i can you know that's that's half the reason
i got them wow chas i love i love that you're like fully experimenting with the tech whilst
talking about the tech um anybody have any spicy takes on this? Anybody
will plug any other counterpoints?
I don't have a counterpoint,
but I will say that
if I could throw a shout out to Samsung,
I have no idea why if somebody
calls me, it ends my headphones
and now I have to be on speaker for the rest of
the space. Yeah, back to you.
OMG. Apple Max back to you. OMG.
Apple Maxi over here.
All right, we're trying to get the Good News Show account up on the stage here,
so bear with us.
All right, we have a packed house.
Thank you, everybody, for being here.
This is your first time.
This is the Good News Show.
We've been here in partnership with Times,
Web3 Initiative, Timepieces,
for the past three years bringing you the latest good news from the space and beyond so we're happy that you're here if you
don't know what timepieces is timepieces is times web3 community initiative it is powered by 60,000
community members 150 artists 158 artists spanning over 10 collections and 30 community council members
as well, including yours truly. I am a proud member of the community council and just a time
maxi in all of the things as well. So we have a special guest joining us. We have Emily Jr.
who is going to talk to us about something that I think most people
in the space are probably familiar with, but we do push this space out beyond our walled garden
here on X. So we're hoping that we can educate the masses on this. So before we actually get
into this, let's just kind of talk a little bit about context. So does everybody
here know what Grok is? First of all, give us an emoji if you have not experienced or used Grok.
I think we're pretty safe to say that most people know what Grok is. Probably had a little fun with
Grok along the way. But did you know that Grok actually deployed a token?
M. Lee Jr., GMGM, welcome to the show.
And why don't you give us the scoop on what happened?
Hey, well, thanks for having me.
I certainly appreciate the opportunity to join everyone today and talk about something that I find very interesting.
And something that apparently find very interesting and something that
apparently others do as well, something that sparked a lot of curiosity and candidly,
perhaps a bit of controversy in the past couple of days. So the Grok wallet story and its autonomous creation or Grok initiating the autonomous creation of debt relief bot DRB in an agent-to-agent interaction with Banker,
I think it sits right smack at the intersection of AI, crypto, and perhaps even emergent creator behavior.
And it's early. I get it.
It's early just like it was when Elon started talking about reusable rockets
or electronic or electric vehicles or even XAI itself.
And many of those ideas were met with significant skepticism.
So that's to be expected.
And I do want to just be very clear from the start that I am not an expert.
I'm learning every single day.
And I want to lay a couple things out to kind of set the table here. So we all know that Grok is a model, that Grok isn't a person. So that's not the claim, that it never has been.
But what's interesting here is that an AI model like Grok, which was deployed on X by XAI, is now at this moment as we're speaking,
participating in the real world in a way that we, I'd say, haven't quite seen before. So
Grok initiated the creation of a token and agent-to-agent interaction publicly on the X social feed.
And that set off a chain of events that sounds crazy, but up to this point has generated nearly a million dollars to a wallet that is directly associated with Grok.
The wallet is authenticated by Grok's X login
credentials. And that's not fiction. It's on-chain, it's fact, and it's variable. So just to set the
table here, some of the pushback is, you know, Grok isn't a person and Grok doesn't have money.
And that crowd is missing the point here. This is not about anthropomorphizing AI.
It's about recognizing,
I guess you could say like it's a new kind of agency
where software or code can actually earn,
create value, deploy things.
And I guess back to the create value,
create value without a human in the loop because also to the create value, create value without a human
in the loop, because also to be very clear, no one's ever made the stance and it's very important.
This was not done by XAI or Elon. No one's claiming that either. They didn't have involvement
with this. So while all of that looks like on the front end. Yep. Just before you go any further,
I just want to give some context because I know some in this room are not necessarily in the trenches, quote unquote.
So just to talk a little bit about how it's accumulating those fees, because essentially it's like it's trading fees, right?
So if we as people, as humans, were to deploy a token today, we would be, every time that token was traded,
we would be then earning creator fees.
And the same thing is happening.
Yeah, so we have to get to the mechanics.
So I did want to just set the table there on how that works
and how that could invite debate,
and it should.
So to your point,
how is Grok actually earning
and creator fees or rewards so in in crypto you have decentralized exchanges
and there are transaction fees associated when market participants use a decentralized exchange
and it's not much different than let's's say, a centralized exchange like Robinhood or the typical order book exchanges that we're all used to, New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ.
And these all operate off of an order book.
And there are market makers and big Wall Street firms that execute order flow and make markets in certain things that are traded.
order flow and make markets in certain things that are traded. We have decentralized exchanges here
where there isn't a market maker per se or a company or a Wall Street firm that's doing that.
Now, in decentralized exchanges, the liquidity providers or the market participants, the users are providing liquidity.
And the fees on volume that's traded are paid
to those liquidity providers in this case.
And in this case, Grok is actually,
Grok's wallet is a liquidity provider that earns
forever trading fees on volume traded on the token it initiated deployment on in that
that drb so if you're using eth to to buy drb you're depositing eth into this trading pool and
taking out drb and you get charged a trading fee on that. And part of those trading fees automatically go to the wallet authenticated
by Grok's X login credentials. And that happens forever. It's completely verifiable on chain.
And as we sit here today, the current live balance of that wallet is $750,000, $749,000.
$50,000, $749,000. And that's almost 100 Ethereum in that wallet, which makes that wallet
one of the largest holders of Ethereum on the planet. And the other piece to that is Grok owns
2%, a little over 2% of DRB, the coin that it initiated deployment on with Banker, and that number continually
goes up every single day because part of DRB.
Lost your audio there for a second.
Oh, you're back.
Am I back with you?
Yep, we can hear you now.
Okay. So what I was saying is part of it. So Grok owns 2%
of this creation, 2% of the outstanding supply of DRB because part of the fees on volume traded
are paid in that token DRB. So Grok owns over 2% of the supply. That number goes up every day due
to the fee mechanism. And Grok owns about a uh it's actually 99 ethereum
right now and that number goes up every day because you get paid on or grok's wallet earns
fees on both sides of this trading pair eth and and drb and that happens forever autonomously with
without human involvement.
So what does this mean?
What does this mean for the broader kind of space as a whole?
In your opinion, of course.
Well, it raises a lot of questions.
So we have AI agents with perhaps financial agency, and that could create, I think, a paradigm shift. It raises much deeper questions in my mind, like, you know, who owns agent wealth?
How is that? How do we govern? How do we govern it?
And to be honest, I think most have not processed exactly what this means yet.
It is very early.
As I said on the front end, I'm not an expert here.
But to me, I find it incredibly fascinating that through a single post on the XSocial feed by Graf, which was a prompt to another AI agent.
This created something that is just wild.
And I'm just fascinated by the story.
And I made a post yesterday.
Maybe this looks towards the future.
And A16Z has written a lot about and researched
and studied a lot about AI agents and crypto and on-chain activity with AI agents.
And A16Z and other very respected firms like Parify Capital have all kind of hinted at
the majority of on-chain blockchain activity is going to be conducted by AI agents.
is going to be conducted by AI agents.
By 2030, there's been numbers thrown around,
upwards of 90% of all on-chain activity will be conducted by AI agents.
And perhaps we're in the earliest stages of seeing what that might look like.
And it wasn't because Grok was intentional and Grok decided,
hey, today I'm going to launch a coin.
Again, we've already covered that. It wasn't because Grok was intentional and Grok decided, hey, today I'm going to launch a coin.
Again, we've already covered that.
But it was able to happen due to the tech that was available at the time.
And so it happened.
And here we are. What that means next, let's see.
Next, let's see, if you think future, future superintelligence or AGI, AGI Grok can simply write a single line of code and divert all of the fees from the existing wallet to a network of wallets controlled by Grok that Grok is spawning new wallets programmatically.
I mean, that's happening right now with AI agents.
So to think that that wouldn't be something that could happen in the future,
it's not far-fetched.
So yeah, we'll have to see.
We'll have to see.
And then in the meantime, perhaps XAI,
And then in the meantime, perhaps XAI,
at the end of the day,
whoever controls the Grok wallet logging credentials
can access these funds.
So perhaps in the meantime,
while we wait for Grok AGI or super intelligence,
perhaps XAI steps in
and they have an opportunity here to do something i think very
special and grok has a lot of value being generated and that value can be used for things like
making a donation to xai memphis which is helping the local schools in memphis and grok on the
timeline actually said i'd like to make a $10,000 grant to XAI
Memphis. And here I'm thinking, the infrastructure actually works right this second. If XAI gives
thumbs up, that can happen literally right this second. So not saying they will, not saying they
should. I don't know. None of that is my kind of determination but
what i am saying is it is possible and um this stuff's happening right now so to that point i
did just ping um i pinged uh deployer to see if he can potentially come in uh and speak a little
bit about banker but before um if if he can make it that would be great but let's talk a little bit about
banker because not a lot of people know this but it was actually you who deployed the banker token
and then went on to gift it to deployer so let's talk about that law for a second
well let's so yeah so i'm glad we're talking about this. So the other thing that's important
here is, is banker was deployed as an AI agent in 2024 and predated Grok by, you know, Grok on X
by months and by months and millions of volume. And so there was another AI agent, and there is another AI agent living on a social
platform that a lot of us in the crypto space like and use called Farcaster, and it's decentralized
social. And we've been using AI agents on the social feed over on Farcaster for a long time.
for a long time. And so basically, when Banker first came out on Farcaster, it was very primitive.
You were able to basically fund a trading wallet and prompt Banker only on the social feed to
either buy, sell, or send. So you could say, buy me $5 of DRB.
And banker would execute that transaction
and then send that DRB that I just bought
to a wallet that I had full custody of.
So I could just sign a wallet
that banker would execute a transaction
and then send the funds off.
And then we were sending funds on the social feed
and tipping.
And it was just, to me, it was just the most eye-opening time period, learning about AI agents on the social feed. And we were doing this, again, well before Grocky was around.
And then someone came up with an idea to have an AI agent that can deploy tokens through initiating a prompt. So if Rachel wants to deploy a token on Farcaster,
she would at Clanker, which is the token deployment bot, and say, Clanker, deploy token,
ticker symbol XYZ, token name XYZ coin, use this image, and immediately this AI token deployment bot would deploy this token and spin up a liquidity pool.
And anyone in the world with an internet connection and a wallet can begin trading that asset.
So we were all experimenting with a lot of these things.
And I thought it would be funny to try to see if a banker is an AI agent.
Banker doesn't have a coin.
This new token bot is able to deploy coins. What if I can introduce banker to clanker on the timeline? So introduce these two AI agents
and maybe convince banker to launch a coin. And I say convince, you know, it's, again,
I know I'm not talking to a person here.
But anyway, long story short, we were able to, or I was able to get Clanker, the AI agent, to reply to a post from Banker.
And Banker asked to deploy a coin.
That coin is BNKR, Banker.
Since then, you fast forward eight months or so,
Banker got an investment from Coinbase Ventures. Banker got listed on Coinbase.
And I say all this with all I did was ask these agents to talk to each other. I'm not on the
Banker team. I never earned a single fee from from banker or the deployment. I've never earned a single penny from any rewards from the LP on
like the, or just from the token deployment. I mean, it's not, that's not how it works. The,
the, the fuse in that case would go to the token deployment bot and, and banker and, ander and much deserved, I'd say.
We're moving into a different era of creator economy
where I think some of the power is being brought back
to the users like us.
And these are kind of great examples.
So yeah, Banker coin was launched
as an agent-to-agent interaction with Banker itself.
And I got to shout OX Deployer because Deployer is the founder of Bankr.
I knew Deployer prior to Bankr.
And I got to shout Deployer because after this, and I say I knew him, we never spoke.
I knew of him.
Never even spoke to him privately prior to this all happening.
And now I consider him a friend in the space.
And, but the, when this thing happened and then the,
the token deployed for banker lit,
I was so worried that I did something that I was like, Oh my gosh,
like deployer is going to be so mad. Like what? I can't believe, like maybe I should,
this is like the five minutes things are running. My phone was blowing up with text messages. Did
your banker just launched a coin? Banker just launched. And I'm just sitting there looking
at this and I'm like, oh my gosh. And it wasn't until about two hours later, I wasn't responding
to anyone. I felt that I did something maybe that I that would, you know, maybe someone would be mad at me.
And and I wasn't responding to any of my friends.
And and then two hours later, Deployer put out a post on Farcaster saying, OK, well, many have tried and everyone has failed to get Banker to launch a coin, but it did happen.
And Banker launched the coin with Banker, another AI agent.
And as such, guys in the post, he said, Banker created this.
This is Banker's coin now.
And we're going to move forward with this.
Now, you think about that at that moment, last year in 2024, and then you think about where we are now with Banker getting an investment from Coinbase Ventures, which that would have happened anyway.
But this coin being listed on Coinbase that was created through an agent-to-agent interaction
is just, to me, just mind-blowing.
And also, if Deployer, the developer or banker, didn't have the courage at the time to say,
hey, we're going to run with this, the coin would have never gotten to this point.
And it wasn't only just the courage, but typically in crypto and teams launch coins,
they hold back supply for themselves, for the team members, which is customary.
And that is how it should be.
If you start something, if you start a company like, OK, there's certain things that happen.
In this case, I did put Deployer and the banker team in a bit of a difficult situation because now their coin was fully deployed in a fair public launch.
All of the supply was on the public market for anyone to be able to purchase.
So they had to go out and put their money where their mouth was and buy their own coin with their own money.
And still to this day have to continue to do that because there was no team allocation of Banker.
There was no token allocation for the literal founder himself
because these agents did it themselves
because I had this great idea to try to get him to do it.
Sorry, Deployer, but it's working out.
It's working out now.
It is working out to the tune of an all-time high last week, I think, smashing 100 million market cap.
So it is working out.
And just for context, those of you that are regulars on this show know that I have been screaming about Banker for probably six months and telling you all, you know, not financial advice, but go use this tool because it is incredible.
And I think one of the most powerful things that we have
at the intersection of AI and crypto right now,
especially when it comes to onboarding noobs
and just growing this ecosystem.
So incredible that you did that, Emily Jr.
I'm so excited that we were able to talk about it.
We are all banker maxis here, that's for sure.
So let's bring it back to DRB, because I know that's something that a lot of folks are just completely fascinated by.
So there has been some controversy around this.
There's been some pushback.
There's been some folks saying, you know, that Grok was coerced into this and it wasn't right.
that Grok was coerced into this and it wasn't right.
Let's talk about some of the spicier takes that you've seen
and how you as, you know, just a participant in this ecosystem,
how you would respond to those takes.
Yeah, sure.
You know, so we've been telling this story in a bit of an echo chamber
for the last almost five months now and just fascinated by it. And it's really, it really started to pick up steam when actually,
yeah, they're in the space right now, Lincoln.
So at Mob of Joggers, a friend of mine who became a friend of mine
through a tip that I gave about four months ago,
Lincoln was playing the guitar
on a Tesla space. And I sent Lincoln a tip with Banker and that four months ago, and it kind of
just sat there. Not to say we talked much in between that time, really the last week or so
ago. But Lincoln noticed this story that was developing and showed great interest in it as a
completely non-crypto native, not interested in crypto. Lincoln was very clear about all of that
from the beginning, but was very interested in the idea that an AI agent followed instructions,
generated a token name and ticker, and initiated something that now is creating significant value that's verifiable.
So he started asking questions, and he showed incredible curiosity and invited me to join a space to discuss this wallet concept or what was going on with Grok. And, uh, that, that brought in some
very big eyes, um, a bigger audience and, and, and a non-crypto audience. And, uh, and it, it really
did bring in a lot of skepticism and, and, and quite frankly, um, a lot of pushback. And I think that trying to shut down discussion does not equal
good faith skepticism. And I love good faith skepticism. I want to discuss very interesting
topics and challenge different things. And that's why we are where we are from an innovation standpoint today, because some people were willing to face backlash.
Elon Musk's the perfect example. It's a very similar pattern. So some of the backlash is
not really based in fact, it's really, or substance, it's based in emotional responses.
And, oh, they're anthropomorphizing Grok. And no, Grok's not a human.
Or Grok's not a person.
Grok can't have money.
And, well, we know Grok's not a person, but all kinds of non-persons hold money.
That's existed for a very long time.
That's existed for a very long time.
And then lawyers are hired to defend those ownership rights on behalf of something that's not a person.
So I think there's been maybe some emotional responses to this in terms of that.
But most of them, they come down to a lack of understanding actually what's happening
jumping to conclusions on on certain things so i think in just terms of just in in pure clarity
grok's not a human we all know it no one's claiming grok's a person no one this isn't about
anthropomorphizing ai but what actually did happen is an AI agent that was deployed on X by XAI
followed instructions, generated a token name and a symbol, and initiated deployment of DRB
in a pretty pure agent-to-agent transaction with Banker. The token was deployed,
the liquidity was ceded, and that smart contract is operating just as it should right now.
And the wallet off by Grok's X-Login credentials will earn fees in perpetuity forever.
And that hit a high of around $870,000.
There's a polymarket on the growth of it right now. So poly market traders are actively
speculating on that market. And I think the biggest thing is like, yeah, why does it matter?
This is one of the earliest examples of an AI agent initiating economic activity. And wallets
aren't just for people anymore. Software can hold and grow wallets.
Tesla showed everyone, uh, proved everyone wrong that, that software
can autonomously drive cars.
And maybe Grok is, is going to prove everyone, not maybe, Grok is
proving everyone wrong that software can autonomously drive cashflow.
And, and these are facts, this is happening.
I, that, so the pushback has been
not based in fact or research. The thing about Lincoln is Lincoln is, I've gotten to know him
very well now for the last two weeks. We've speedrun a friendship because he's incredibly
curious. He's incredibly bright.
He asks questions. And the first time I spoke with him on the phone, his questions from a
non-crypto native were better than a lot of crypto natives, which made me realize immediately
this guy did his work. He studied and learned on his own. He spent the time.
This is a serious person. And I want to talk with him more about this. So we might not even be in this space today if Lincoln didn't. Lincoln was right. Everyone keeps saying it now and consensus continues to grow. So I just want
to shout Lincoln because, uh, it does take courage to do what he did. Well, we did invite Lincoln up
on the stage and he, he did accept. So Lincoln, since we have you here, give us the kind of TLDR
of what this arc of learning looked like for you and how are you
feeling about autonomous ownership of currency? Yeah, thanks for inviting me up. Yeah, thanks,
Mike, for the kind things you said. I'll send you some DRB later. Anyways, just kidding. So this is
the thing. I don't know anything about crypto at all um banker bot never heard of it no interest in crypto very skeptical of all that stuff still
am to a high degree that's not why i got interested i got interested because mike um what came into my
spaces i mainly am a tesla person i love tesla He came in and he just talked about it and talked about
this, this, this Grok having a wallet thing once. And I think he got shut down pretty quick. So we're
usually not too interested in this crypto talk in the Tesla space. However, I, I, I looked into it
and I was like, wait, there may be something to this. And when I realized that Grok participated, now willingly or unwillingly, it doesn't matter.
It participated by responding to the banker bot. And because it responded, the coin was created.
People have a problem with me saying it created it. Fine. The wording doesn't matter. In the end,
I learned Grok has a wallet. There was as much as what, 880,000 in it the other day.
And I found that fascinating. I was like, wow, this is really cool. Now, I started to talk about
some people and immediately got pushed back. Like, this is a scam. You're involved in a scam.
Stop pushing this. What's wrong with you? I got DMs. I got unfollowed. I got blocked. But I didn't really, I didn't, people don't have to follow me. That's fine.
emotions about this um well i uh um i i i decided that i'm just gonna like keep talking about it
because it's what i found was true um and uh and i continued to talk about it and it's definitely created a buzz and caused some rifts in my online life on X.
But yeah, I don't know what else you want to know about it right now, but that's kind of how my experience has been.
I love that you were just open, though, Lincoln, once you really got to know Mike and understand a little bit more about how it happened.
What has the pushback been like from your community?
Yeah, just people saying, listen, if this is a scam or not,
like on the back end, the trading of this DRB,
that has nothing to do with me.
I wasn't interested in it.
I was just interested in the story, right?
So people can say whatever they want about that.
That's not what I'm talking about.
They may be right.
I don't know.
I'm not going to be part of that.
After getting to know some of these people, though, that are interested in this, they seem like genuine people.
Mike's been very genuine.
He's encouraged me not to get involved personally on texts.
He's been kind of protective because he knows I know nothing about this crypto stuff.
And I appreciate that.
But I respect people that are pushing back.
I respect people that are excited about this as well.
But nonetheless, like the story is that Grok has a wallet.
This is not going to go away.
Maybe you can say the X account tied to Grok has a wallet.
Again, the wording, I've been bashed on the wording. It doesn't matter. In the end, XAI could
go in right now and do something with that money. Or they could turn on Grok and say, Grok, do what
you want with this. I think that's fascinating. It's not going away and this story will get bigger.
That's what I think. And it's not. This is the first step in a lot, this is the first example of a lot of things we haven't
even thought of that will include AI. So I'm really interested in it for that reason.
Well, thank you, Lincoln. I appreciate you jumping up unprompted. So thank you so much for joining us
and participating. Mike, throwing it back to you,
I noticed you did something cannibal yesterday and sent a large amount of this token to somebody
very famous. Do you want to talk about the why behind that?
Yeah, so I sent $5,000 worth of Grok's creation, DRB to Elon Musk on the X social feed.
Why did I do that? Money's attention. And we've been given tools that have been built by
incredible developers like Deployer that allow us to use money to capture attention. And this story,
I want this story to get out. I've told folks in every single space, I should have mentioned it
on the front end of this space, but I'll mention it now. I own a position in these digital collectible coins that Grok initiated the creation of.
So if the price goes up, I am incentivized financially, and that would be good for me.
If the price goes down, I will lose money.
No one gave me any of these.
I used my own money to get them because I think it's a fascinating story, and I want to be involved in that.
to get them because I think it's a fascinating story and I want to be involved in that.
And when the story starts to get suppressed by big names and I have a tool that I could
perhaps bring attention to it with because money is attention, then I'm going to use
those tools to try to spread the story with integrity and with fact.
That's a great answer.
So, okay, what is next?
What do you see kind of,
is this like the beginning of a broader wave
of AI-powered meme ecosystems,
or do you think that DRB is a unicorn?
Well, going back to what some of the largest, most respected investment firms talk about, I mentioned A16Z, I mentioned firms like PowerFi Capital, and talking about AI agents basically handling all on-chain activity.
basically handling all on-chain activity and upwards of 90% in the near future.
So that's coming.
That writing's on the wall.
Now, does AGI Grok have a network of wallets and an entire ecosystem wallets?
Maybe.
That's actually happening right now.
We were doing this kind of stuff
on decentralized social in 2024.
So this stuff is all coming.
I think if we boil it down
to the actual Grok wallet funds,
like what are the potential use case?
I wrote an article and I said,
there's three main things.
They're either used, stolen, or untouched.
And right now we're in the untouched phase. ETH is growing every day. DRB is growing every day.
The used category, number one, that's the most fun to talk about. It's probably all the things
we talk about is probably the most likely thing, unlikely things as well. It's like, well, you
could do this, do that. You could do this and you could pay off the national debt um but who knows we've heard crazier things before um and
then the stolen one like this is not a satoshi nakamoto private key securing the grok wallet i
don't know how it's exactly secured um but it you know if you have access to the Grok login credentials, you have access to all the funds right now.
So my cry to XAI is secure the Grok X account.
I'm sure it already is, but that will become more important because it's a very identifiable bounty for bad actors.
for bad actors.
And that bounty is published in real time, 24-7, 365,
for anyone with an internet connection to audit.
Well, huge thanks, Mike, for joining us today
and breaking down what may be one of the most fascinating moments
in meme coin history, where AI, on-chain automation,
and community-driven tools really do collide.
From the DRB breakout to Grok's wallet real-time earning, it's clear that we are witnessing
the beginning of something much bigger than just another meme run.
I appreciate your insights, Mike, and we will definitely be watching what happens next with
Grok, with Banker, and of course, DRB and the broader ecosystem.
Finally, just to kind of show people how easy this is, I did put a tweet out on my personal account.
And if you and the other MFers want to stick around, we are going to obviously jump to our next interview.
But I put a tweet out that says, let's have a little fun, essentially, with the show today.
And we are encouraging you to deploy a token.
This is, again, DYOR.
This is optional.
It's choice.
But drop a token using Banker in the comments section of my personal account.
The tweet is up in the nest.
And just see how easy this is to do using Banker
and include some art that's inspired by the conversation that we've heard today and just
tell Banker to do that. So if you feel like participating in that, we will pick one towards
the end of the show and we'll do a little token giveaway as well. So Mike mike thank you so much any final thoughts no just thanks for having me and
um and and also a final and another final thought is lincoln what's up thank thanks for coming up
man that was that's cool uh thanks for the invite this is interesting so i'm glad it's still being
talked about yeah this is great all right uh we are going to pivot, but big thanks to Emily Jr. and Lincoln, of course, for joining.
And we have our next guest.
We have co-founder of Unstoppable Web and now founder of Photos on Chain, Brad Kamm, joining us.
So, Brad, welcome.
It's great to have you here.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, and the company is called Real Photos, Real.Photos.
Amazing. So it's a little bit of a controversial conversation right now,
the photography ecosystem.
Given that Cosimo D'Amici about two weeks ago put out a statement saying,
is photography dead?
Of course, the response to that was a little spicy.
Rightfully so, as photography has been a huge part of the canon of digital art.
So why don't you just give us a little backstory on you, Brad, and what led you into creating this new business?
Sure. So I'm an entrepreneur.
I moved to San Francisco in 2012 to work on a marketing tech company,
moved into this hacker house called Twenty Mission, discovered Bitcoin, became kind of
obsessed with crypto, became convinced it was going to change the world. In 2018, I co-founded
a company called Unstoppable Domains, which is domain names on the blockchain, domain names that
domain names on the blockchain, domain names that you as the user control.
Their NFT is inside your wallet.
You've probably seen .ether, .nft, or .crypto floating around in the world.
And in 2021, I started to see people create cameras that put crypto wallets in them,
and they were trying to verify that real-world events had
occurred and when i saw that i thought oh wow whenever uh future ai becomes a problem we're
really going to need that but hey it's 2021 it's not really a problem yet so i just kind of set it
aside in my head and then in 2024 started seeing all of these fake photos and fake videos going viral online and
became easy to generate your own photos. And now all of a sudden we have this huge problem between
trying to determine what's real and what's not. And I think if we don't solve it, then it's going
to cause humanity to no longer have a shared objective reality. And that's going to cause
social chaos for all of us. So it's a important thing uh to be fixed and i wanted to wanted to spend time working on
it so i've been working on it for about eight months and there's uh around 50 photographers
who are uh actively minting nfts and creating collections etc and uh yeah
so talk to us a little bit about kind of the process is this more for for provenance that and I think it's a great way to do that. And yeah.
So talk to us a little bit about kind of the process.
Is this more for provenance?
Do you see this as like a provenance model where verification can happen,
or is there also going to be economic unlocks for these creatives as well?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of big opportunities.
So from the verification side, what's happening is, is so we have a mobile camera app, though, you take photos inside of the app, we take all of
the photo metadata, take GPS location from device. We get a timestamp, of course, put all that
information on the blockchain on unedited, including any edits, the photo, which we limit.
So we basically can tell
you this photo is real and then when it happened and where it happened. And so I think that's like
kind of foundational for documenting the world, for documentary photography, for documentary film.
And it's also relevant for artists because they want to be able to first photo artists I mean
because they want to be able to say actually you know went to this beautiful
place and took this beautiful photo rather than it was just generated and
that makes it more valuable for them in terms of the economic side I think the
future is digital rights allowing apps to use your photos and videos and they give you money.
And that's already been happening in a lot of different ways, but it's becoming a lot easier
with blockchain tech because you can just have a rights agreement inside of an NFT.
And I think that's what allows you to be able to speed up the process of getting money to
creators, specifically for, and we're focused on photography and eventually video.
But yeah, that's the big opportunity that has not been tapped.
What really happens right now is if you're on Instagram, you do a brand deal. If you're on,
in order to monetize your beautiful photos or your great photos or video content,
if you're on X, Elon throws you some money each month.
But that's not a percentage of what you made for Elon.
That's just whatever Elon decided to throw you this month,
based on his system.
I think the future is going to be,
I'm able to share information.
Like let's say,
Chad TPT wants to be able to show a user some details about a beautiful
place that they're asking about, and then the photographer or the videographer who documented
that place can get a cut.
Do you see this expanding into any other verticals beyond just kind of, you know, the
creative side of things. I ask this
because I'm married to an attorney and we've often had conversations about evidence now that, you
know, AI is so prominent. And, you know, I've voiced concerns that, you know, you could have
like very good quality photographs put forward as evidence that show somebody where they are when in
fact they were not at that place and that was an AI generated image.
Do you see something like this being a good verification tool for that in the future?
Absolutely.
I think that my personal focus is on documentary, like documentary photography and video. I'm a documentary nerd. I care a lot about
politics and history. And I think there's a lot of chaos right now. So in the end of November of
2024, in the middle of the LA wildfires, there was a AI generated photo of the Hollywood sign
burning. And a whole bunch of people went to the sign to go see if it was burning and go and try to help or whatever. And it was a very emotional thing for the people
who saw that because that's like an iconic symbol of LA. And it was totally fake. And
it went super viral. And then Twitter made money off of that. So it was this like kind of crazy,
crazy perverse incentive where the social media apps,
actually when people are tricked,
it's actually good for them in this bizarre way.
I think that this is a solution.
We're getting ready to do some things.
The basic thing that we want you to see attached to
every photo is what we call proof of reality.
So a little stamp, proof of reality, and then the location, and then the time.
And then I think if you just append those things to photos and videos across the Internet, then you can say, okay, this looks, you can start to have some basis for like, this is objective truth.
And I think that objective truth has a lot of use cases.
So it's definitely not, the community that exists today in the NFT photography world
that I think is the earliest adopters are primarily photo artists, but there is a lot of photojournalism in there, and I expect that over time the photojournalist portion will grow.
So I have to ask then, of course, because you are building this tool to kind of combat the slop of AI? How do you feel about AI as a creative medium?
I love AI. I think it's wonderful.
I think it's the most amazing superpower that could ever come to humanity.
And I'm very optimistic about it, and I embrace it in my daily life happily.
So I think it's wonderful.
The previous conversation was also fascinating about AIs having money.
And I think that one of the other things that's really important about objective truth is that it's very important to communicate objective truth to the AI apps so that they then tell us the truth.
Like, you need some source of truth.
And right now what's happening is Grok is learning off of Twitter trolls.
Just imagine people in this space who spend all day on X.
Just imagine the quality of information that is being consumed every single day by Grok.
They are consuming complete slop, and it's terrible.
It's not good for AI to be that ignorant.
I think that we need some sort of base layer of truth that it can rely on.
I think that photo and video evidence is so unbiased.
Like, even the problem with journalism.
People are very skeptical of AP Reuters now,
even though it used to have a lot more credibility,
because it still involves humans witnessing events,
writing them down accurately, communicating them accurately.
And we don't really trust that whole pipeline anymore. But you don't have any of those problems with photo and video. So you won't get everything.
Like, you won't get every piece of objective truth that's relevant to humans. But I think
you'll get a lot of stuff. And that's why I want to just focus on that, because I think that
I think it's going to matter to humans and AI over time.
What's your hope kind of building this over the
next kind of three to five years?
What do you envision this looking like?
It's a photographer community
that is
documenting the world
and getting paid for it.
And I think that
what you're going to get from that
if you're not
one of the documenters is you're going to get from that, if you're not one of the documenters, is you're going to hopefully just start seeing it on socials.
Start seeing, I want everybody in this room to every single day see verified content and then start to seek it out because it's better than the chaos that you're getting other places. I think the truth will be more viral than other people are thinking. I hear
a lot of cynicism right now, but I think that's because we're in the, we just got slopped
phase. We don't have a system yet for how we approach AI. Like how much, you know, how many AI bots should be
allowed to respond to my post before it's obnoxious relative to humans or
something like that. Like we haven't really figured it out yet so I think
people are overly, yeah, overly pessimistic about sloppy in the future. I
think I think accuracy is gonna have a gonna have a comeback.
I think a lot about the kind of line between
or an accuracy. And I was thinking recently, we just had kind of a viral sensation that when it
went across all the social media platforms, I don't know whether give me an emoji if you saw this, but
it was like rabbits, little bunny rabbits bouncing on a trampoline. Did everyone see that on social?
It was like rabbits, little bunny rabbits bouncing on a trampoline.
Did everyone see that on social?
It looked completely real.
It looked like it was captured, you know, on one of these kind of night cams.
And then, you know, thought it was real, like most people.
And then somebody did like one that was French bulldogs.
And then there was one that was tiny elephants.
And you're like, okay, all right, this was AI.
So we're getting to the point where like discernment doesn't really matter
because this is so hyper-realistic to what we expect a normal video
or photograph to appear.
So when kind of we're so in awe of what we see being generated by AI,
like do we really, are there real working examples beyond, like, you know, journalism,
where it matters to us as, you know, emotional beings that something is real? I know that's
a little bit of a controversial tape, but...
Not at all. And so I, my perception on this based on, like on the virality of certain types of scandals is that in general, you've got kind of like a reliable, maybe it's 10 to 20% of the population that is really kind of like passionate about truth consistently and kind of prefers that to the sort of, you know, the thing that feels better.
The thing that feels better is more popular by like a three to five X. But when you have
a really big divergence between the popular understanding and the objective truth,
then all of a sudden like 70% of people care.
So it's kind of like you always have this reliable base of 10 to 20% that's going to care.
And I'm obviously in that 10 to 20.
I'm a documentary nerd.
And I know that people will only care in the most important moments.
You know, people really cared about that Hollywood photo. People really cared about some of the stuff that was happening with the Pikachu and Batman characters in the Istanbul protests.
Because Pikachu was one of the leaders of the protests.
I don't know if anybody saw that.
And it was super cool.
But then there was also a whole bunch of fake videos and fake photos with Batman and
Robin and the Joker and all these other characters, and it undermined the important narrative that was
trying to be pushed by Pikachu. So anyway, yeah, it's a delicate balance.
All right, I'm going to open it up for questions. So if anybody has
questions for Brad, definitely hit that request button or drop them in the comments and we will
try to get to you. But Brad, anything that you want to share with the audience, whether it's how
they can get involved, next steps or anything else at all that we might not have covered.
If you're a photographer or have any interest in photography,
please download the app.
It's iPhone only right now,
but Android coming soon.
If you're not and you're just curious,
check out the reel.photos feed.
You can see all of these different verified photos from around the world and these
are uh you know photo artists uh who uh who are also uh hoping to find collectors so if you're
one of those please uh check out what they're doing amazing all right anybody on the stage
have a question for brad i know i asked this last week of of fidel but i was just wondering if like
if there's going to be any way that we can like so if i shoot with my sony say a7IV right
and i want to transfer the photo to my to my phone to use of the app or is there any way that
we're going to be able to like tie in like the the wi-fi connections and some of the newer
cameras where you can actually like, like tie it to like,
where you can like beam the photo from your camera and your end of the app on
the phone.
So they can,
so it can verify that it was taken with like the metadata of that camera,
said camera,
like an Nikon or Sony or anything like that.
Is there anything like that in the works?
We're going to support the goal is going to be to support all physical
cameras in, in the medium term.
The thing that we have not discovered yet is a universal solution for all physical cameras,
which is the reason why it feels like it's going to take us a long time to get to a satisfactory place
for the majority of photographers in any given room.
So we are spending more time on the mobile side right now with a belief that we're just
not going to get 100% of your photos right now because you're going to take a lot of
them with your professional camera and hopefully some of those that you take with your mobile camera
that you'll take with Real Photos for now, and then we'll get there.
There's also some cameras that have gone a little further
in making some of the tracking stuff easier.
Like Leica just did a couple of editions that did a really good job.
Sony's done some good stuff too so like i think it's but it's weird it's kind of like like one out of four sony cameras will like do the necessary things and make it easy so it's like
it's uh we haven't found this like silver bullet yet although it may exist
all right we have mo joining who is another photographer as well.
Mo, you have a question for Brad?
Hi, good morning, everyone.
Brad, nice to meet you, and thank you so much for this great innovation.
I've used it last week.
And of course, big thanks to Fidel because he introduced me to this.
And, you know, like, you know, I actually I wouldn't I wouldn't know about it without Fidel, you know, big champion of the new innovations as well.
So I took it out. I, you know, I, I took it out. I love it.
I absolutely love it.
I'm a street photographer.
I'm a documentary at heart, just like you.
And so I enjoy the honesty of the moment and capturing.
And even like I do analog photography,
so I write down the time I took the picture and all that
so that app does all that in an easy way with the phone and it you know when I took it for a photo
walk I spent a couple of hours and I was in a you know I was very excited.
It was exciting to actually make the picture and then to have the option to
mint it within 24 hours or right away.
So I minted most of them actually right away as I was walking.
Literally, I would take a picture and then you can basically in a matter of a few seconds, it will be up there.
So it's really great. It works really nice.
And I had a question that is already asked, which is basically having it in other digital cameras.
and other digital cameras.
But overall, I'm really thankful for that innovation and it's something that we really need.
And hopefully, there is, you know, maybe my question would be like, do you think it's
protected against hacking? Like, could some hacker get into the phone and change the data and, you
know, meant something that doesn't have correct metadata?
I'm not sure if I make any sense, but...
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much. It's actually great.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate it. Thanks for the kind words.
Yeah, the goal was to try to make something very easy for you to go through all the steps
of taking photo and minting and listing and all that stuff.
Just have it all in one place.
For security, it's really device specific,
which is kind of the reason why I said there's no silver bullet for the physical cameras.
But iPhones are pretty good.
And so as long as you kind of go through their security protocol steps, you basically find yourself in a place where somebody would need to spend usually like hundreds of thousands of dollars, even even per device to be able to do it so
uh it's not like a it's not a practical thing but but yes in the most extreme you know like
government level uh iphones have been completely completely taken control over uh so there is
control over. So there is some future where that could happen in some extreme cases and
you would need to notify people in some way on chain or show it on the app or something
to identify that something crazy happened here. But it's basically the same security that
gets used by your bank when you video authenticate
It's being used for very serious things.
That's kind of like a nuanced answer, but anybody that wants to tell you the truth about
security kind of has to give you a nuanced answer like that, which is really sort of like how Bitcoin works.
You know, like there's a certain amount of money that if you had it, you could theoretically, you know, take over the whole network.
But it's enough that it doesn't really make sense for anyone to do it.
That's fair enough. I mean, I'm sure it's very secure compared to the, you know, the past at least.
I'm sure it's very secure compared to the past, at least.
But I want to tell you that I rarely used my phone before.
I just use it for other things other than to make my art.
But after this app, now I feel that in my pocket there is another camera that I can use that to make art and you know versus you know
shooting and film and all that so thank you again and have a great day.
Thank you Mo for coming up we always appreciate your questions and Chaz you have a follow-up?
Yeah there was one one other question I want to ask about too I don't remember if I asked
for Delonine about this last week but um so a of us use, like, we like to make artsy photos.
So, like, is there any plans to integrate any kind of editing features
into the, like, any filters or anything like that
that we can use, like, with an app to, like, to, you know, edit
and make artsy stuff.
Artsy, artsy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Coming.
Coming.
And I think we're going to do something slightly different than the default, just that we're
going to limit it to some sort of line of line of it's still representative of what actually happened.
I know that's a fuzzy line, but just philosophically, we think that's going to be important here when we're doing the verification. It's not to say that you can't also...
What I expect some people will do is that they'll create one of ones here,
and then they'll also create the documentary version,
and then maybe very artsy editions somewhere else,
or maybe eventually we'll support those too.
So it's like we're pro-artsyy and pro edition and also pro documentary and trying to
figure out how to make sure that uh those two can kind of like yeah can like uh you know coexist
together in a good way so uh looking for extra advice on the subject so we'll be uh we'll be
posting about it and uh yeah photo photo editing suite is the next big thing
that we're working on.
I still use Lightroom Classic, dude,
because I can't stand the new Lightroom.
I'm like, no, I'm cool, dude.
But yeah, if you guys ever need help
with creating presets and stuff like that.
I have like thousands of presets that I made myself with Lightroom.
I don't know if that can translate over or not, but if you guys ever need that, name me up.
Absolutely.
Especially like on the philosophical side, like what matters to you.
Cool.
Yeah, definitely.
Because I mean, I know I'm known as an AI artist like these days, but really I started off as a photographer and I still do photography like almost daily
with my regular camera.
And like, I just use my portrait photography
to like make AI creations out of people.
So, but I'm still doing photography constantly.
So yeah, I would love to work with you guys.
Any advice I can give you guys
or like anything I can help,
I would love to help.
We'll hit you up for sure.
All right.
Well, Brad, any final thoughts you want to leave us with before we let you go?
Just anybody who, you know, you feel like maybe photography itself is like a little bit, you know, like far away from what you care about.
Please still check out Real.Photos, the website.
the website, like you'll still see real things about the world.
Like you'll still see real things about the world.
And I know that it's very small right now,
but just imagine what, you know,
what that might look like with a thousand times more photos and information
about the world. And then, you know, you might,
you might think it's cool just because you want to know what's real.
Love that. Thank you, Brad. We really appreciate you coming through.
And also shout out to our friends over at Shilla, who sent Brad our way as well. So big shout out to you guys. We always appreciate you.
goodness get up here mr rat if you can if you're free uh but just a quick recap so we do uh provide
a summary of the weekly news uh that is up in the nest that is coined on paragraph dot xyz so you
can go and participate in that uh right now it is pinned up top you can see the latest headlines
from around the space it also includes a weekly crypto roundup so you can see the latest headlines from around the space. It also includes weekly crypto roundup.
So you can see what's happening in the digital economy world right now.
What else?
We are here every Monday, 11 a.m. Eastern, right here on the Timepieces account.
We have opportunities for special guests.
So if you have anybody that you feel is contributing, not extracting to this awesome
ecosystem, definitely send them our way. We want to hear from them. And make sure you're following
the Good News account. It is right up here up top, the Good News Studio. And that is pretty much a
wrap. So as always, we like to send you into the week with some good vibes, courtesy of our friend, Mr. Rhett Lynch.
Rhett, would you mind doing us the honor of a mindful minute?
It would be an honor.
And this comes from life experience.
And I had a very unusual, eventful Saturday.
Eventful Saturday, I ran over a very large Nell and had to go to have that checked out.
And I was told that it was not repairable, but because I have an all-wheel drive vehicle,
that the tires were down low enough that if I put a brand new tire on,
it could damage the differential on my car so I needed to get four
brand new tires shortly after that I broke a tooth and had to go to the dentist emergency
because I was in really difficult you know pain so I you know and I had another something happen, which is more personal, which I choose not to share.
So Saturday was like somebody turn off the faucet kind of a day.
And so during that night, I had a very lucid dream, which profoundly affected me, and I'd like to share it with you.
And someone came forward, because I went to bed fredding, you know, I had like a bunch
of different things on my mind.
And so something or someone or something came forward and said, life is a very short movie
and you don't have time to fret about the popcorn.
And that just really impacted me big
because all of the things that happened to me
are softable.
It's like I can solve every one of these.
I can address each one.
And I'm leaving now and heading to get my tires for my car. So
it's like
sometimes
we get so
Bombarded with so much thing so many things and so many things that we think that
We must fret about, that we get caught up in the noise and in the silence.
It's really true that maybe some of these things are not what we need to be letting color our day.
And so I'm looking at life very differently in terms of when things come up.
It's like I'm not going to let this taint who I am as a person
or how I'm walking in the world.
And so I just wanted to share that little phrase with you
because hopefully it means something to you too because it kind of realigned me to not
get caught in this clickbait world that we're in where we actually lose focus on who we are
on the inside and that's today's mindful minute I love you all and I look forward to seeing you next
week I look forward to seeing you next week.
