The Social Ledger EP 1: From Studio Ghibli to Solana: How Memes Are Shaping Crypto & AI

Jrb (00:00.827)

We can just go whenever, right? Cool. Well, hey everyone. My name is Jesus Burguaba. You can call me JR. I’m the founder and CEO of Social Market, and I’m here with my partner Leon Hitchens, and we are Social Ledger Report.

Leon Hitchens (00:02.284)

Yeah, whatever.

Leon Hitchens (00:13.644)

Yeah, and this is the first episode. So I think we’re gonna feel our way through this. But I’m pretty excited for this. It’s part of the Boost network. We’ve got a few other shows and I like that we’re gonna be talking crypto because that’s well, when we talk crypto JR like it’s just it’s just memes for us and that that’s the best part of it.

Jrb (00:37.778)

Yeah, I mean, you know, I have a coding background and I did AI research and, you know, just a little bit of context. I could have gone into AI, but I think, you know, personally, crypto just has a lot of the, you know, appeal for it to be fun, but at the same time, technical where, you know, a lot of things happen every week and it’s kind of entertaining. I mean, of course there’s a lot of

problems with the ecosystem, know, like ConArt isn’t, you name it. But, you know, I think, I still think, you know, what we’re doing with social market is something to the extent of influencing what’s to come in the future for the space. So all that to say, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s still a great space to be in.

Leon Hitchens (01:21.942)

Yeah, and crypto is like the early, it’s like the wild wild west. It’s figuring things out. It’s like, you know, when Yahoo was Yahoo and, you know, Tumblr was around, like everything felt like.

You could, you know, accidentally steal stuff. You could, or not just steal stuff, but you could get your stuff stolen online if you didn’t know like the right URL, like, you know, scams were rampant. There was just so many things. That’s kind of the crypto world. It’s not until

like regulation comes in, which is it’s starting to and everything kind of like settles down and big companies are all involved. Like, you know, the big one now is like a Coinbase and you know, you’ve got Kraken and, and crypto.com like they’re buying actual arena names like that. That’s, that’s like kind of like proving this out as a, as a big thing. And I think there’s still some

some utilities to be figured out, but that’s also part of what we’re doing. Figuring out the best way to like make these like a digital currency, like actual utilities, because they do have like real world purposes. It’s just how does that play in and how do you make it like actually usable for the normal consumer? But

Those are fun things. But we’ve got some fun things to actually talk about. Like I’m kind of excited about this first one. This, and I’m gonna like mispronounce it totally. It’s the Gullibee, the Gullib? Ghibli, there we go. I won’t get it right.

Jrb (02:53.97)

Oh, it’s Jibly. funny enough, Oh, no, you’re good. So funny enough, there’s some reason why we’re talking about Jibly. mean, aside from it being the talking point of the entire week, first of all, social ledger reports for now going to be a weekly report where we talk about the weekly the week’s, you know, biggest trends for crypto. Now, why am I talking about AI, you know, AI here, you know, everything popped up on Twitter. So here’s my personal

or X if you guys want to call it Twitter or X. If you, sorry, what was that? Yeah, good point. So on Twitter, unless you were living under a rock or you use Facebook, you would have seen all these different kind of memes that we’ve known for a long time, probably since the beginning of the internet, just be jiblified. And if you ask me, I think this is a great way to express our…

Leon Hitchens (03:24.46)

No, no, we’re calling it a Twitter. We’re calling it Twitter.

Jrb (03:51.325)

thoughts, our humor, and you know, it’s just taking the entire internet ablaze.

Leon Hitchens (04:02.038)

It really has though, like the White House tweeted it out as a meme, like everybody has done it. What is kind of interesting about it too is that the big brands hopped on it quicker. It used to be memes would take like, you know, it come on Twitter and everything would happen and then you’d turn around like 2-3 weeks ago. I think it was… there it is.

Jrb (04:06.396)

Dude.

Jrb (04:29.116)

This is so bad,

Leon Hitchens (04:32.142)

It really is, but also the fact that the White House just jumped on it is kind of like, it just encapsulates them going on Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughn, everything. It’s kind of astonishing to see it, but this is one of the most viral things that happened in, I would say, to 48 hours. I have not seen…

Jrb (04:37.746)

Yeah.

Leon Hitchens (04:58.414)

a meme or a video or anything go this viral this quickly like it kind of feels like everything’s accelerating because everyone’s got it at their fingertips like before like one meme was one meme like JD Vance you know was the butt of a great joke for everyone through AI but this was the first one that was just kind of like fun it wasn’t really hurting anybody

Jrb (05:23.201)

Yep. Now, you know, you talk, if you ask me about AI, you know, I get excited still, you know, but I mean, it won’t get me near as excited as crypto, but, um, you know, I think this is generative AI for what we’ve seen has been a really powerful way to entertain and to improve the way we communicate because, you know, we had, we had emojis and we had gifts or GIFs if you, whatever you call it.

You know, we had that kind of media to express ourselves, to talk to one another, you know, to humor ourselves. And now we have AI to kind of make anything you want. Well, at least with Chagy BT, it does have some guidelines like, hey, you know, I cannot use this brand. I cannot use this logo. And funny enough, I’m not sure if you’ve, I’ve been playing with it all week. Funny enough, I want to say maybe at the beginning when this update came out, I think on Tuesday.

Leon Hitchens (05:53.314)

GIFs.

Jrb (06:22.372)

It’s when you could kind of generate almost anything, but now it seems like, you know, want to generate this Red Bull can or whatever. It’ll say, I’m sorry, but this is a brand that, you know, us generating a brand logo would go against our policies. But I’m like, wait, I literally got something generated of, you know, a Nike or some other brand. So that makes no sense. My only theory is…

They probably rolled out an update, a soft update or something under the table just because of all the scrutiny or rather all the allegations or I don’t know. Backfire, I guess. Yep.

Leon Hitchens (07:01.752)

Well, I saw that the studio sent a cease and desist to like that one app that was just about like every image gets like jubilied fide like automatically It was that it was that TJ little John on Twitter Like

People were saying the letter was fake and everything, but I could imagine this studio especially just being, you know, based in Japan and Japan’s got some pretty like…

not strict rules, but like they’re, they’re culturally, like, if you want like real anime or any of that, it’s gotta be made in Japan and it’s there. So I can imagine that these, the like open AI turned around and was like, Hey, like we’re kind of making everybody mad. So they, they probably pulled back a little bit, but man, I mean, everybody jumped on it. it, it was amazing.

Jrb (08:02.662)

Yeah, you actually bring a good point. Sorry, not to cut you off, but actually part of the reason why I’m talking about this is because, know, we’re kind of trying to uncover a lot of the biggest buzz happening in the tech space. So yeah, I mean, to your point, the creator of the Ghibli studio, he actually sued or I think it’s a seasoned assist here. It doesn’t go too much into it, I believe, but sent some form of, you know,

legal documents saying, Hey, you know, got to pull down what you’re doing. And this was to an app called jibbly fi, which it was trying to be like, you know, a mobile app, I believe, where you could submit a file and it’ll jibbly fi for you. And I think it was trying to make money off of it. So it’s a clear IP, infringement. So I think, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m Miyazaki is the name of the, founder here who, I think he’s in the right. It’s all I’m trying to say.

Leon Hitchens (09:01.238)

Yeah, so there there’s actually like I guess like legal precedents for that in the past I believe and I’d have to look it up a little bit but there’s like the Andy Warhol style of like art

There was like a brand that or like an artist or somebody used that Andy Warhol style and like the Andy Warhol estate sued for like hey Stylistically he he like invented that pop art modern style in a very particular way and Kind of said like hey, you know when you do very particular things With his art or use his art in some ways you could do it but like the part though here is art is like

Everyone steals art, you know, like it there’s never an original to it. Like everyone steals and iterates on it. But this this one, the difference is it is actually just like copy and paste of that same style. Like I wonder if other like videos will pop up, like if they’ve got any claims. I’m really interested and I’m not a lawyer. I just want to see what happens because everyone’s talked about AI.

Jrb (09:53.106)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Leon Hitchens (10:15.848)

on the writing side, but the art side really hasn’t been talked about too much. So this is going to be the first real conversation about art and AI and you who owns the copyrights to a stylistic thing. Like most of time you can’t copyright that, but also maybe you should be able to do it when AI could just like stamp copy print.

Jrb (10:37.586)

Yeah, I think, you know, as we evolve, I mean, something that maybe a lot of people don’t realize is United States government and as a nation, it’s still pretty young nation. And I mean, with that account, humanity is still pretty, you know, fresh, you know, in the grand scheme of history of the world. So we’re still kind of figuring out things as we go. If you ask me, with that said, I think we still have

We have yet to come up with any sort of guidelines or set of laws that can protect both artists and consumers and businesses as far as using AI-generated content because it was just 2022 when ChadGPT came out and kind of just pushed this golden age of AI use or rather as the YC

the current person who’s at the top of YC, Gary Tan, he says that it is the golden age of building. Separate topic, but AI has influenced a lot of what we do online now. So maybe within this administration, or possibly the next, is when we might start to see some sort of set of laws that can at least enforce when it’s okay to do AI-generated content and when it’s not.

Leon Hitchens (12:03.096)

Yeah, yeah, it’s gonna be interesting like all the copyright laws are old like everything was you know, like there there is no precedence for what we’re doing in the You know the modern age so it’s gonna be interesting to see I don’t Part of me is like, you know an artist should

Should be protected but also this is helping them like most people didn’t know who they are I bet you there’s gonna be a large swath of of increase of people looking at anime as as you know, like ability to watch it and then there’s gonna just be like a like a wave of support for them, I think in a way that They they don’t

quite know yet, but also I could see that there’s probably going to be a hit to their their market because people are probably going to try to spin off and do their their stylistics video style in you know, new animes and they’re going to have to go sue for that.

Jrb (13:04.186)

Yeah, I agree. So, you know, there’s still one more topic here that I want to cover. you know, this kind of all goes back to my first point where we talk about AI and we’re like, hey, you we’re actually talking about crypto. Well, you know, first of all, know, Ghibli has been a pretty big thing right now. So in the crypto space, and I’m actually looking this up as we’re talking because I totally forgot to pull it out. So.

You know, if you’ve been in the crypto space for a while, you’ll realize that meme tokens have kind of taken everything a storm and it kind of goes back to… Sorry, I’m actually gonna have to ask if we can cut this because I’m having a hard… I realize I…

Jrb (13:53.149)

I’m having a hard time finding it. I think I found it. Okay. Yeah, sorry. all right. Starting from the beginning, or from the top here. So, you know, moving on to another new topic. So, we were first talking about JBL, but you know, there’s a reason why, and you know, we kind of intersect here with crypto and AI, but if you’ve been in the crypto space, you know, you’ll realize that in the last maybe year or so, a meme comes up and it’s subtle becomes a token.

So if you are not aware, which let me help you here, a Ghibli token came on. It’s called Ghibli or Ghiblification. And I believe it came out maybe over this last week or so. It’s really new. I think it’s Solana based. Yeah, it’s Solana based. So the price right now of it is just two cents. And a lot of that is because people will follow any trend.

So, you know, what do think about that, Leon?

Leon Hitchens (14:56.428)

Yeah, I like one I like really interesting it ends up on the slana network like that’s almost always the the what it’s based on Is it on? On that chain or is it on the base? one

Jrb (15:13.382)

Yup. So I don’t know if it’ll let me zoom in here, but the contract right here on the far left, it says, you know, it’s based on Solana. The wallets you can get it on, it’s on Phenom Wallet, on Backpack, and Solflare.

Leon Hitchens (15:26.262)

There’s there’s a few Ghibli focation tokens that’s why Yeah, cuz you were talking about that. I was like, but it’s Okay, so the main one which is man, there’s like five of them. That’s the problem but

Jrb (15:32.462)

that’s interesting. Yeah, yeah, so.

Jrb (15:45.907)

Yeah, so here’s the biggest problem also with the crypto space is there’s a lot of fraud. People are just trying to capitalize on moments, on trends. So, I mean, always be careful. Always do your due diligence. To answer your question, I think it’s just under the FAT, I think it’s six letters, G-H-I-B-L-I. So that’s the token name. And I believe every token name has its own almost unique name.

So this is interesting. And you asked, why is it always on Solana? Well, actually, that’s because Solana is, well, there’s several applications on Solana. There is Pump.Fun, is Jupiter, there is those other applications like Phantom Wallet. There’s all these different kind of applications where you can kind of create tokens. The biggest one is called Pump.Fun, and people must have already know about it. If you’re watching this, there’s a good chance you already know about the crypto space.

Leon Hitchens (16:15.201)

Yeah.

Jrb (16:44.304)

So Pump That Fun is where a lot of meme tokens are initially born. So this contract, you can always trace it back on the network scanner or the blockchain scanner, and you should be able to find where it originated. But I say that because I don’t think I can find here on CoinMarketCap where I can find where it originated. okay, you know what? It’s a Pump That Fun ecosystem, so I do apologize. So it was created in Pump That Fun. yeah, I mean, this is just the trend that happens.

Leon Hitchens (17:05.518)

Hmm.

Leon Hitchens (17:14.956)

Yeah, it’s a shit coin and and and I think you know some some people are gonna make money but also It’s gonna you know, like people are gonna put money in and lose money and that’s that’s really the interesting one to it like pump dot fun also has a lot of coins that just are stupid I Don’t know if it’s good for the crypto space but also

Jrb (17:17.19)

That’s a coin for sure.

Leon Hitchens (17:40.622)

It’s good for Solana generally just because then there’s volume on that network and that has always been the problem with Solana, especially on Coinbase. I think that’s more of a Coinbase problem where Solana just is overcrowded on that that part of Coinbase.

Jrb (17:44.828)

for sure.

Jrb (17:56.337)

Yeah, so, so I mean, you totally bring a good point. I think any network, I mean, people who are building blockchains, they’re effectively building financial systems, or the neo financial system. And, mean, any network that has a lot of volume or a lot of money moving around, it’s good for them. So I think they’re going to find a way to get as much volume as they can, which is, know, Solana didn’t come up with pump that fun, but they’re not against it either. So

You can kind of connect the dots there. I mean, not to put on your tinfoil cap or anything. But yeah, so, you know, this is kind of what I wanted to talk about Ghibli. My final point for today would be going back more on OpenAI. So Sam Altman, is actually, in case you guys don’t know, OpenAI doesn’t just do AI for the most part. It also has its own token. It’s called WorldCoin. So…

Leon Hitchens (18:32.494)

Yes.

Jrb (18:55.73)

You know, WorldCoin, I feel like it’s not as trendy as maybe Ghibli or has it been trending for a while? I think it first came out like in 2022, 2021 period. But if you don’t know, yeah, so for those of you who don’t know what WorldCoin is, basically is a token or it’s a crypto token. not exactly entirely sure on what network it’s built on. I think it’s built on ERC20, but

Leon Hitchens (19:11.278)

It’s kind of scary though.

Jrb (19:25.552)

Basically, something that happened a couple years ago is they wanted to throw world countries and they were giving them world tokens or world coins by scanning the redness or their eyes.

Leon Hitchens (19:39.277)

Yeah, like it it’s a weird system. Like what they want to do is create like an anonymous like anonymous index of humans in the age of like AI So they have the world chain and then there’s the world app and then there’s world ID and It’s it’s supposed to be like identity finance and

Jrb (19:51.58)

Yes.

Leon Hitchens (20:06.778)

I they say community or something. I don’t quite understand like what their their end goal is. Like it seems very dystopian with what they’re they’re messaging. But that is it is an interesting one because you know they did go to these these third world countries and were like hey scan it and I believe they gave them some of the coin right there and then.

Jrb (20:19.408)

Yes.

Jrb (20:32.626)

They did. So they gave them a wallet, a digital wallet with some tokens. Right now, I’ll pull out the price for you of Worldcoin right now. So this headline, it talks about how Visa is in talks right now with Sam Altman from OpenAI about maybe creating some sort of payment network system or maybe being part of a network array of other tokens as well, because I believe USDC is already among Visa.

with MasterCard and you know on cards because you know Metamask came out with a card and Coinbase has its own Visa card so you can make a lot of those payments with USDC. So now we’re starting to see that happen maybe with WorldCoin. So you know this is just digital currency being used in the more real world for all kinds of purchases.

Leon Hitchens (21:26.592)

It’s still like the stable coin stuff really interests me because in the world of The like today’s world status like the US dollar, know like suppose like a lot of people wanted to flake the US dollar bring it down like It’s interesting that it’s all pegged to you know, like currencies in the real world. Whereas, know that is becoming the mainstream trend is

is linked to a stable coin and you know use that rapid and in it you know use it in some capacity but then also you know you’ve got these other ones that are you know

The price is kind of arbitrary in many ways. It’s proof of stake, you know proof of work Like there there’s a lot of changes to it i’m not sure if I really believe like the stable coin is the future 100 I think it is but the part that I The whole gap that I find is like You know, it’s betting on the united states. It’s betting on These currencies staying very stable and worth a lot

You know if the dollar tanks like it could take everything. I was just looking at that chart like I was kind of interested what happened. Why did it go from almost a dollar. I think it was like 97 98 cents to like 85.

Jrb (22:40.722)

For sure. nice.

Jrb (22:50.61)

you bring a good point. its all time price was right about $11 and 69 cents, which is a great number. Now it’s almost less than a dollar. So it’s like a little bit less than a dollar. you know, I mean, you know, the market fluctuates. I believe this token came out in 20. Well, I think it’s first listings in 2023, which I think it actually came out in 2022. But I digress. Yeah. So, so I actually agree with what you said, you know,

stable coins are not the only thing that are going to be part of the future. mean, Bitcoin is already becoming a world reserve currency and it’s not a stable coin. So to me, in the very least, that tells me, non-stable coins are going to be adopted to some capacity in the future. You know, we just need to have builders like you and me build this future with our current app, in this case being social market. So, you know, if you don’t know what social market is,

Leon Hitchens (23:29.56)

Mm-hmm.

Leon Hitchens (23:46.658)

Yeah.

Jrb (23:48.549)

go to socialmarket.tech.

Leon Hitchens (23:50.894)

I love it. I love it. I wonder if there’s gonna be at some point like a stable coin pegged to like Bitcoin or something

Jrb (23:58.407)

You know, there’s always a possibility. think there’s people who are trying to do that. Bitcoin is open source as is, so people will have the ability to do anything they want with it.

Leon Hitchens (24:08.398)

Yeah, because Bitcoin is you know, like a digital gold or store of value, you know, if you build a stable coin and peg it against the price of Bitcoin, obviously, you’ve got to have the reserve for that. But that would be a really

Interesting model because I think again like fiat collateralized collateralized stable coins like USDA they’re they’re backed by off-chain reserves like if something happens to the USD currency like it could destabilize that set of crypto same thing with that new Euro backed stable coin. I forget what it’s Okay, you are see like

Jrb (24:50.414)

EURC.

Leon Hitchens (24:53.93)

it’s going to be collateralized by euro and what happens if something happens there and you know it’s it’s destabilized.

Jrb (24:56.095)

shit.

Jrb (25:01.17)

Sorry, do you? My Roomba just went off. So do you hear it in my… okay, awesome. I’m like, bro, seriously?

Leon Hitchens (25:04.494)

No, no, it’s good. No, I don’t.

It was like, we need to clean, the AI heard you.

Jrb (25:12.57)

Yeah, yeah, it’s like, all right, I’m gonna come against you. Dude, that is such good timing though. That’s hilarious. Great, hey, so, you know, actually that’s pretty much everything that I wanted to talk to you about beyond today. So at our first pilot episode here of SLR, do you have any other thoughts or so that you wanna share?

Leon Hitchens (25:31.926)

No, no other thoughts like if you guys like this episode you can find the show on YouTube it’s on Apple Podcasts Spotify you can look at the Archives of it when when we have archives of it on the boost FM. I think it’s slash the social ledger with little dashes between every word so We should probably get like a cool URL for that to redirect to that

Jrb (26:00.06)

Yeah, absolutely, we’ll probably do that. Editor, please do this. Thanks everyone for watching, appreciate you.

Leon Hitchens (26:03.246)

Exactly.

Alright, bye.