I Now am using AI as a thinking partner I'm literally asking a bunch of AI tools questions like why is long hair coming in, why are caps back versus not You know, why are people consuming this beverage and so I think for the creative class they they default into thinking AI is going to take away my job instead of realizing Ai's about to become your thinking partner. You're a celebrate entrepreneur, a major advocate for the Esports and web3 gaming space, and you've also started your own web free platform like I mentioned at the beginning the friends. So for those people in the audience that don't know about V-friends can you just break that down for us and just tell us a bit about that, You know I'm 47 years old I was born in the Soviet Union I came to the United States when I was three and I grew up in the 80s where an enormous amount of intellectual property was created on television and through toys. So Transformers and Care Bears and My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake and GI Joe and so I've been very affected by pop culture my whole life and um, 14 years ago I started a marketing company Vaynermedia.

But really what it was actually looking to do was build a Global Communications framework that would allow me to accelerate extracting attention to whatever I wanted to do. My main point was in the back half of that mission was to really create a new form of private. Equity When I think about private Equity Um, those organizations are very good at buying businesses in a smart way and cutting costs and running a more efficient business. What I was always fascinated by and have done in my entire career has created hyper Growth.

So I wanted to create a platform, an operating system to create hyper growth. My plan was to buy an established historic intellectual property that I grew up with Casper the Friendly Ghost Gumby Scooby-Doo Wherever my professional career took me and my financial capabilities, I was going to go and buy one. When I started seeing what was happening in Web 3, it became very obvious to me that's similar to after school television or video games like with Mario and Zelda or other formats like books we've seen in history that this was a platform to create intellectual property. so be friends in its simplest form is the in my view, a basis of almost 300 characters that kind of takes the essence of Sesame, Street and Pokemon and brings them together so a very high focus on being competitive uh, like Pokemon but a very strong message of Civility and kindness empathy that comes from Jim Henson's world.

So I launched that a couple years ago and I'm pretty excited about it. It's very early I'm only two years into the journey, but it's um, it's something I planned on building in a very significant way. Yeah, you say you're only teasing to the journey, but from what I can see, well, I can see it's very successful in the early stages. It's amazing for you.

For me for 40 years I've been looking at trading cards and comic books and movies and television and marketing and so it's it's it's I've had a lot of practice in it. Yeah, yeah, um and I'm enjoying it. yeah I Love that little stroll down memory lane as well. make me feel a bit old mentioning all those.

Um, well, you know what's fun though And it's good timing because back to films and back to video games. I'm sure it's very much on everyone's radar how well the Super Mario movie is doing right now. Commercially, you know, for me, gaming, you know. obviously it's a big week for me.

Um, I'm a part owner of Version One with the Will family that owns the Minnesota Vikings and in the US So obviously we are super proud of the win we had here in Rocket League and so I've been in gaming for a long time. Vayner Sports is a sports agency uh, that I own that represents a bunch of athletes including Clicks and Booga who are very prominent. Gamers So this is a space that I've spent a lot of time paying attention to and been involved in. It's interesting to hear what Michael's speaking about and kind of the way I'm thinking about intellectual property, we haven't because we're only 24 months in.

we're very early on the be friends IP But to me if I'm able to accomplish what I'm trying to achieve, it's inconceivable to me that I can do that without having a major win in the gaming space. And so I spend a lot of time paying attention to it because if you look at again, the Mario's the Zeldas. um, the things of that nature plus more modern things like Angry Birds Intellectual property being built on the foundation of gaming is is very clear and obvious, and the affinity and the emotion and the attachment to those characters through this format. Yeah, very similar to sports.

very similar to film is very evident in human behavior. and something I spend a lot of time on? Yeah, yeah. So an area that I want to touch on I Think we can't have this conversation without the acronym Nft? Yes, and you are one of the most quite prolific voice in this space. Yes, what are your thoughts on the viability of Nfts in the future? Economy? Is there a future for this? This method? This form, of course, where Nft sits right now for most people in this audience and around the world world is where the Internet sat in 2000..

If you remember, in 2000, all the internet companies were wildly overvalued in public markets because the hype of the Internet engulfed us. Pets.com was worth eight billion dollars with No. Revenue Obviously all those projects failed and a lot of people wrote many articles in 2000. Is the Internet of fad? The web's a fad from Hollywood to Wall Street but the technology was too big.

The same thing's happening right now in Nfts. The last two years, there was way too much greed. Way too much not realness. and what happened was the brand itself is being recorrected right now and being reset.

But anybody here that is not paying attention very deeply to what's happening with blockchain blockchain technology, especially if you're in the gaming space, is making a humongous mistake of opportunity. I Think over the next decade. When you think about what ownership means, think about all the games here that make remarkable revenue on the digital assets being sold in a closed ecosystem. It's a closed ecosystem.

When you start understanding the Dynamics of how that plays in an open ecosystem like the blockchain and how that's transferable and what that means to The Gamers and what they are able to amass within games, you're trading your FIFA points for a Call of Duty Point. Think about the kid that goes from mind share and Roblox to FIFA to Call of Duty and you're able to own those digital assets. I I'm positive that next World 2030 is talking about Blockchains and Nfts about 50 to 70 percent of the panels today. because of the greed of the last year or two in Nft land, everyone's putting it on the side.

Yeah, much like Internet 2001-2-345 that was the time to actually build. and I think the one to two percent in this audience that are thoughtful and understand their history of technology and understand pattern recognition will Deep dive deeper into web 3 and I think it's an inevitable outcome. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because you know the kind of the way Nfts blew up and now there's a bit of a stigma attached to it. And I don't think worse.

People really truly understand the power of blockchain the power of this technology to basically give back the the ownership to to Gamers to users and not putting it in. The power that happened with Nfts is people forget that only one percent of things work right? Everybody thought every Nft project was going to work, only one percent of films become iconic, only one percent of iPhone apps become successful, only one percent of art or trading cards, or Collectibles become the top. And so what happened was it was such a new technology. Everybody thought all of it was going to work when in reality, only one percent of a genre can ever reach the levels that people anticipated.

So it's cliche, human behavior. The breed took over now we reset, but the macro technology of decentralized servers will be one of the most significant things that impacts, uh, everybody in the world. And when you think about the context of a country like this, that is so Dynamic Moving so so much faster than the rest of the world I I Do think it's a missed opportunity for people not to take things like blockchain and Ai and all the emerging technology serious, because that's where all the opportunity lies in the next half decade. Yeah, do you think they because you know emerging? Technologies There's this inherent fear wherever big companies, small companies, big players, little players just to to get involved in that space because it's it's new territory.

It's Uncharted Territory Yes, that's why it's so lucrative when you're good at it. Michael Michael Please educate everybody here How Hollywood looked at the internet in the late 90s, early 2000s? Well, um I was never computer savvy. So um, how did they look at it? Um I thought it was pretty groundbreaking. It was groundbreaking.

Definitely. I mean I remember the Apple thing with little discs, right? Um, but uh, and then it's used for piracy quite a bit. Um, you know the music industry, the film industry. Bill Gates was at the top of the technology sphere.

yeah, in the mid 90s and completely poo pooed the Internet of having any viability. Yes, so I Think the biggest thing for everybody in this room is to understand that the incumbents of any technology are often not financially incentivized to support the new technologies because their money is at risk, right? Yeah, and that is always where the opportunity is based on consumer. Behavior not based on your pockets. And so there will be many decisions made by entities, governments, entrepreneurs Enterprises that are always wrong because they are worried about their short-term finances instead of how humans are actually interacting.

Yeah, just ignoring all the signs. It's like right there. Come go this way and it's like, well, no, it's it's another version of the greed that screwed up the Nft brand. In the short term, people are worried about the ROI of their money tomorrow.

Yes, and they dismiss what consumers are doing the consumer Behavior interacting with the blockchain and AI today today is at the highest level it's ever been. Yeah, and so again I Think people are incredibly. uh, short-term thinking. uh, transactional.

And that is where all the opportunity always sits. Yeah, yeah. I Don't know. It'll be really interesting.

In the same vein that we can look back at the early 2000s. You read these articles. Well, the Internet it's fad that's never going to take off and it'll be interesting the next 15 to 20 years where we're going to be at and how people reacted to blockchain in web 3.. Do you remember this little thing? There are many people in this audience and around the world.

That said, they would never use this because the Blackberry had buttons on it and they needed their buttons. Humans are very good at saying no to new technology. What all of us need to do, especially Dynamic places like this is you must be in the business of maybe you must be in the business of maybe and you must spend your 10 or 20 hours. There are plenty of people in this audience right now that have profound opinions on AI and Nfts and have never played with it.

Yeah, that is the issue at hand in the world in technology. Most people are not practitioners. they're headline readers. Yes, that is very, very true and just my final question to you.

You know there's obviously a current, a very obvious current dip in Nfts at the moment. I Think I know your answer. But would you say this is just temporary is a thing is going to change? I Think it's no. I think it's permanent.

For the 99 of projects that stink, the the Macro is established, Nfts will be here for the rest of our lives. But remember, a non-fungible token is the slang term. We know it today as a digital collectible. What it really is is far bigger than that.

The majority people in this room will have contracts of buying homes doing Deeds Insurance Like day-to-day things will be done in the form of an Nft because it's a more secure contract than anything that sits on. Earth Yes, and so no. I think the brand will recover with better usage. but no.

I think this is the way it was always supposed to be. 99.9 percent of footballers rookie cards are worthless. His isn't because he was great. Yeah, right.

And so the problem is 99 of like that one. Garrett that's good. Thank you 99 99 of Nft projects. It's not going to get any better because the Creator the creative the operator is not capable of creating demand and Affinity but for the one percent it will be like writing a Harry Potter book worked out, writing a bad book did not work out and I think that's where people got it confused.

They kind of lumped the whole genre together. That's like saying gaming does or doesn't work. The amount of games that come out every year are profound. The far majority of them don't get to come to things like this.

and so I think early Technologies get lumped as a genre and they're misunderstood and I think that's where we are right now. Yeah, so there's a massive education that needs to happen right in a minute? Yeah, absolutely. So when I move on to the just, you know, just talk briefly about the Cinematic influence on video games we've seen: AAA Games have huge budget. You know it's that rival big Hollywood Productions if not more so.

Michael What? Hollywood Trends Have you seen that are influencing or having you know a major effect on enhancing storytelling when it comes to gaming with the accent excuse me oh sorry, um what what trends or Hollywood Trends What things have you been seeing and that are influencing or having an effect on gaming or the the essence of Storytelling and gaming? well like I was saying I mean I I Really do think there's games can Aspire with movie people, cinematic, people with the artists and whatnot to to to to try to create together I think you can make the stronger game you know you can make a a the the seek the dirty secret when your movie director is it's time time is your enemy and you have two hours and when you're cutting a movie it starts at three or four and you're cutting it down and then all of a sudden I carry the sheet around. oh my God We got two seconds today we took out four seconds today. Three seconds. It It really matters.

Whereas a game you can have a much more involving story and the the the the I think it's interesting that's different than a movie. uh you can have the the the audience and participant help like create the game help you to to to to help the franchise grow to to uh they could be participants in the storytelling. uh which is kind of a a I think a great thing. um it's an exciting thing but um listen there's been a lot of successful Movie game uh things uh but uh you know yeah yeah that's just I just want to rewind back a little bit.

What I'm saying ultimately is if they participate more together. Yeah yeah yeah I just want to go back to I Just remembered that we had a quick chat backstage I Want to hear your opinion on NF the Nft space on Nfts? Yeah, I'm in the 99 now. It makes a lot of sense what he's saying. It really does.

Um, so he's opened my eyes. you know. But that's not the education that I was talking about, it's it's what about hacking? People getting all your stuff stolen? I Think are people worried about that? Of course they are. But to remind everybody? just to remind everybody? I Think history is something people struggle with.

There used to be a time where humans lived on earth without banks. That's real life. It was a long, long time ago. but it was existence.

The you know people used to be scared to put their credit card into a computer. There are many people in this audience that remember credit cards being stolen on the Internet It's just time. Just like in your world. time is a thing.

This is a brand new technology and so I think we cars are better today than they were a hundred years ago. Planes are better today than they were. Phones are better today than they were 25 years ago. So what about those things? They will be resolved.

Yeah with time. and it's you know, interesting that you mentioned hacking and kind of I guess security elements. but that is the beauty of blockchain and the beauty of things like Nfts. It's this impenetrable technology that's a lot more secure, a lot safer.

But it's a perception that people have. no, no, yeah, no, no, that's what you've got to change. It's that's right. it is safer.

The problem is, it's you're the custodial. When your money is stolen through a fake credit card transaction, you call the bank and they fix it when you were the person that owns the keys to your assets on the blockchain. If you make a mistake, which is what he's referring to, it's gone I lose every password so that's a problem. So anyway, it's just early.

Okay, interesting stuff. So I want to talk about now about the the kind of business and marketing of Esports So um, diving into the the business side of Esports what are your uh, Gareth what your strategies or for promoting teams, engaging fans, and attracting sponsors from a business and celebrity perspective. if you've got any thoughts on that. I just I think it's just like saying everything changes with time I think I Think you look back to when I first started.

you're on just the front cover of a magazine that you could only see it when you went into a shop. Yeah, now you can post something for example on my social media. They can straight away go to 50 100 million people within the space of a second. So yeah, things have changed.

I Think in terms of gaming, now is so accessible to everybody. Um, on streaming platforms on like say, social media platforms, everything's really accessible quick, and it's just change with the time. And I think yeah I think it's it's become a lot easier to Market things and to promote things now than it ever has been. because you don't have to travel to places, you can literally do what you need to do where you are.

click a button, upload it, and it potentially goes to the world. So um yeah, I think it's how you get over the Clutter Yeah, yeah and have you seen I guess any any interesting strategies or kind of points of attack from other companies in the Esports space? So you thought, well, it's really interesting how they're trying to get people's attention and Garner that attention from people or Recruit new new people? Yeah, I think it's it's just the way you potentially run your team. The content that you kind of create you have obviously a lot of YouTubers content creators now that can create a different kind of atmosphere around a team. They can make it more fun, more serious, more kind of what Avenue you would like to take and um, like I said, it's just it's so easy to kind of Market that and get it out to everybody to kind of support that team or get involved with that team.

It's really easy to kind of go down that space these days and I think It's been really fascinating just just watching that trajectory as well. Like you said, back in the day, you know you're on the front of a magazine. That's it. and now there's just so multifaceted.

There's so many Avenues so many ways to reach out to celebrities and reach out to fans. and it really is such an exciting time, isn't it? And it's only going to grow and get better. Yeah, that's that's the the crazy thing that you never. you always get to a point you think, how can this get better and some clever mind yeah, like these guys in the world that have such amazing talent and such Vision that they create different Avenues to make things even better.

and yeah, I think that's what makes the individual more exciting than for example AI which is a bit more straightforward. Yeah, yeah, what's interesting that you just mentioned AIS Over the last 10 minutes of this discussion I Want to talk about artificial intelligence and I think we can't talk about gaming Esports It's Hollywood We can't talk about that without AI infiltrating because you know it's a massive talking point at the moment. Um, so with the rapid advancement of AI you know, playing a greater role in the entertainment industry and I'd like to discuss you know the implications on AI and storytelling and business and what role you see it playing I'm going to just throw that out to anyone if anyone wants to take that. I'm spending some serious time in this space I Think again.

similar to the blockchain, similar to the internet in the past, there's a lot of opinions and a lot of Curiosities There's a ton of fear. Yes, um, there's a smaller group of optimism and and looking to go on the offense. Here's what I can promise you one: it's not going to go away. So if you're going to put your head in the sand and hope it goes away, it's it's not.

AI is going to be a humongous implication as a technology for everyone in this room. I Think number two: Like most technologies that are big, it's going to save us a lot of time. Yes, there's a lot of things that a lot of people do here today. spend a lot of money on today on humans or infrastructure Hardware software that AI implications are going to make dramatically more efficient.

There's also a lot of creative ways to work with it. So for me: I spend most of my time thinking about human behavior pop Trends Why people are wearing their hair the way they are or why they wear hats or stickers. all that stuff I Now am using AI as a thinking partner I'm literally asking a bunch of AI tools questions like why is long hair coming in, why are caps back versus not? You know why are people consuming this beverage and so I Think for the creative class, they they default into thinking a is going to take away my job instead of realizing AI is about to become your thinking partner. You're going to have curiosity the same way that many people here use a search engine to expand on something they're thinking through.

that is Child's Play compared to what AI Bots are going to be able to do and AI machine learning infrastructures are going to be able to do so I think for the creative class. for this industry, things are going to be produced quicker because of the speed and and I think people are going to come up with bigger and more exciting ideas because the technology is going to guide them in the same way that a search engine was better than going to the library and looking it up on the encyclopedia. It made it faster. It made it quicker.

It made it more. Dynamic I Think those are two things that are going to be very clear in this industry. Yes, No. I I mean just as a creative person Um, I saw some A writer wrote and typed in an image.

the Ridley Scott image a Michael Bay image a Tony Scott image and I saw it I said where did you get that and because I could recognize some stuff that my team had done What I realized is it was cool but AI has no soul Okay, AI is just mathematics okay and Mathematics does not have a soul. So I'm not worried about it. I'm worried for my music friends. but AI can't predict the shot that I'm going to create.

I always create new stuff in my films. They can, They can't They're not me. Um, but I am very worried First of all that it's going to make people lazy. It could be a tool.

Yes I hear it from medicine. It's great. but I'm very worried that it could be used for nefarious reasons. We were just talking about deep fakes back there.

there's all this news about and they can take three four seconds of your voice. They've got enough pictures of you from magazines and whatever and they can make you say whatever you want and that's going to be a big problem pretty soon. You're not going to know what to believe in the world. But the worst thing I'm worried about because the nefarious of where Humanity sometimes goes.

I was in a room where the U.S military. It's a special room. It's where the two men hold the two keys that can end the world. Now that's a very scary room to be in.

Okay, but they have communication to Russia of all different types of communication and four times in our lifetime we've had fake launches, almost launches that could end Humanity So that's where I worry about it. That's that's just me being a movie director. Okay, we always do. End of the world kind of scenarios.

Okay, um, it's a good movie. Fun to think. but I'm worried about the nefarious things that AI can can. Yeah, and I think at the moment there's there's not enough regulation.

there's not enough kind of understanding of it. And I think to to your point: Gary If it's used kind of to complement things or to work side by side, it's about attention I think Michael's point is remarkably right. I Also remind everybody that there used to be a world without atomic bombs and then technology created them. and yet here we are 70 years later.

I Think it's very easy to default into fear I think it's actually the biggest issue in the world I think fear is weaponized I think fear is at scale or could be a cool movie too Yes for sure and I'm very empathetic to it. and I think deep fake will be enormously a big issue in the world I Fully agree with that. but I Also know back to my earlier point, this is where Technologies like the blockchain are better than Technologies like the internet with the blockchain. When I upload my videos about me on the blockchain, it's going to be very verifiable that it was me.

What? I Think it's one big game of cat and mouse right? to Michael's Point There's going to be the bad guys and there's gonna be the good guys. And there's always those technology advances. So to Michael's point today, the videos that I see on in the world I Believe them. Yes, in a decade I will have to do another thing to make sure they're real because of this new technology.

But again, we've always invented things that could be abused or not abused. The Internet is used for good, the Internet is used for bad, credit cards are used for good, and so I I Just think that we There's an opportunity to not spend all of our time dwelling on what is going to go wrong. and I think it's important for people that have practical optimism to look at these tools and figure out what's going to go. Well Yeah, Gary's a very common uh source of this panel right now.

even worrying about AI taking over creative roles and copying the likeness of celebrities and deep faces. The tractor was invented and took. Does everybody understand that 80 of the world used to work on farms around the world and the tractor was invented and people said this is going to take away jobs. It created jobs.

It allowed us to leave the farms and do other things. I I Think we demonize technology when technology has been the one currency that has advanced Society for over 200 years. So yes, I think there should be less worried that it's going to take my job because if it's if AI is going to take your job, you were a commodity to begin with. You can evolve right you.

For 10 years I've been hearing from people like self-driving cars are going to take away drivers. I'm like great. They've had 20 years to think about this. They can do other things.

Yeah, humans are powerful. We need to start under. We need to stop underestimating human beings. Yes, Yes! Okay and for the just for the finally just to wrap up thank you I mean really? I Really appreciate that because look what's happened here in Seven Ten Years Human beings are remarkably capable and so that is the pillar I will stand on.

Okay and just some final words from you. Reaching kind of in your own industry and your own world. where do you see the the future of Esports going? It's just grown and growing. Like I said from a sports world is kind of the next best thing if you are not able to make it to that professional level.

Obviously you can play in your local leagues and stuff. but if you wanna be with your friends and you can become and make a lot of money from Esports it is the next best thing to be in a professional football player. Being a athlete, Being a NFL player, you can play these games in a professional environment online and it literally is the then Express thing. And and I think now with virtual reality as well you're able to get even better graphics.

3D you're really involved with it. so yeah it's it's a it's a space that's really grown in terms of from a sports point of view. um arguably is the best next best thing in terms of golf. You can play on a simulator, you can play with your friends.

they're doing um something now called Tgl where they're going to have like an indoor golf um league so there's a massive space in sports for for Esports and it literally is the next best thing. and I know for me, growing up, everyone but guys and girls wanted to be a footballer you know and it's It's a window opportunity that not many get to go through, so this is a really nice way for people to feel included. It's kind of opening up the realm of inclusivity, so it's really good to hear from you about that. Michael your views on the future of Hollywood and gaming and how they're going to merge and Collide and you know you're kind of leading the charge there.

Well, I Don't know if I'm leading the charge, but um I'm just adding to it. But uh, you know my 30 000 foot view of uh, Just gaming is like you. You get to be your own hero, You get to be your own person saving the world, You get to be your own team. um which is a great wish fulfillment thing in the world? Yeah, yeah.

and Gary what about you? The World of the Future of web Free gaming? Esports What are your final views? What would you like to see happen in the future? I Think the majority of the people in this room and consuming this content right now are aware that gaming has now crossed over into one of the cultural pillars of our society. like movies like sports like fashion. You know, for me, this is the smallest. On this day, as we sit here, this is the smallest that the gaming industry will be going forward.

This will continue to grow. It is a pillar of our society. It's ingrained in the fabric. It is something we will do forever.

It's something we've always done. Board games, trading. you know, cards. It's something we've always done.

This is the next scaled Evolution and I Think we're uh, we've got very prosperous decades ahead of us. Yes. So in a nutshell, watch this space and that brings us the end of our discussion. I Want to give a massive Round of Applause Please join me to Gareth Gary and Michael Thank you so much Foreign.