How Wealth Will Be Made In The Metaverse

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo.

We are here. We are back and with a new layout. We look good. If you're watching us, that is listening on video somewhere.

It might not, who knows? But we're in a video game. I think we're in a cool looking.

Game from a really fun era. It's like Mario Brothers Esque meets Donkey Kong, maybe meets, I don't know, whatever you want, but we're in it. It looks pretty. So if you don't know what we're talking about, you're probably on the podcast listening to us. Thank you. Go subscribe to us if you haven't yet. If you're new to the show or been here a while, go give us some love on whatever platform you're on. And if you're on YouTube or if you haven't seen us on YouTube, do your thing there. But definitely go on YouTube and check us out there and on Twitter, because that's where you see all of our shenanigans outside of just wherever you're at now. You know what I mean? Know what I mean, Matt?

I know what you mean. Exactly what you mean.

How else shall we present what we're doing to others? I know. Cardfork, GG Whitelist. We'll get you on the list. And all the cool alpha and early access to things that we're learning about games and projects and whatever crazy shenanigans, that's how you know about it. And get hooked up with a bunch of free stuff too, because we're always giving away cool things. And we'll talk about that in this episode we actually have. It'll make a lot of sense. Why go on, Matthew? Yeah.

So every couple of weeks we do these things called LFG Lives, which are live streams where me, Joseph, Kokomo, Joe over, he's actually over there, and our partner in crime, Crypto Buffalo, we all jump on a live stream on YouTube and we just give away a bunch of free NFTs to people. We just kind of all over the place. We just spray those NFTs all around and we talk with cool guests in like a shorter form. Interview. Think of like the Conan o' Brien of interviews where we just, you know, we chat with them real quickly and then get them out and do some skits and play some video games on stream and Did I mention we give away free NFTs?

Like, I think so, but yes. Yeah, we give a lot of stuff.

Free NFTs. And in order to get those free NFTs, you want to be in what we call the Alpha Club. And that's what Joe was talking about. If you go to Hardfork GG Whitelist, you can join the Alpha Club. And by being in the Alpha Club, it's free to be in the Alpha Club. But by being in that Alpha Club, you can join us on those live streams and get free NFTs. So hardfork GG whitelist, that'll get you there.

So we just hit this thing out of the park with all the call to actions right there in your face right from the beginning. But I promise, promise it's not. This whole thing ain't full of that. But no, it's been. Matt and I were talking. Sorry, Mr. E. Flo. He likes to be referred to as Rebranded. This is going to his head, this whole Metaverse thing.

I'm getting too famous. I don't want people to recognize me.

You're digitizing yourself. Recognize you. Yeah. So it's been a while, man. So we wanted to reflect and share with everyone here that's listening or watching that for one. Thank you for being here. Because if you're in crypto, it's been some wild, crazy bear market and not everyone's still here, you know, and there's different projects, people have had to pivot a ton. And we've been this like, what, the last six months or something? Seven months. We've been in this full time in the web three crypto gaming, metaverse kind of space, getting real. I think we haven't had a moment where we've stopped and paused. Matt and I here, you and I, Mr. Matt talking to you now that we've actually chatted about what we're doing, why we're doing it and. Yeah, and really just giving like an update that's like, real. Because this is the crazy thing, like at Hard for Gaming, this is just this weird, like, thing we've been mixing up. It's like this house that we all have in San Diego that Matt and I don't live here, but our, you know, our business partner, Crypto Buffalo does. And our office is here. We're all synced up and we have this big content machine. We have whiteboards everywhere, green screens. It's kind of crazy. We look like crazy people when we walk out of the house. What the hell are they doing in there? But, yeah, and it's awesome because we've been building what's the way that we can capture the best content, how can we make it the most engaging? So we can then also educate people in a whole bunch of different ways. Be the bridge, like you said, Matt, be the bridge for everyone here, listening, watching, so you can learn some about the Web3 space. Maybe you're not into gaming or even crypto, but some of this stuff sounds interesting and you want to test some stuff out because there's a lot of free to play or free to test kind of things, and you can earn some crypto. And why the hell not learn how to get into this game when it's. It's pretty inexpensive at this point because everything's crashed. It's in a bear market. So it sucks for a lot of people, unfortunately, but it's also a great opportunity to learn and experiment.

Yeah, no, this, this bear market specifically has actually been a bit exciting to me because in the last bear market, I don't know if this was the last bear market specifically, but, you know, back in 2017, we were really into crypto, and then towards the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, it kind of hit a big bad bear market, and we kind of checked out and stopped paying attention to it. Had we actually been scooping up more and paying attention and investing back then, we'd be in a much different place with our crypto journey right now. But we kind of checked out back then during that bear market. This bear market, to me, feels like a second chance for us. Where I'm thinking back to 2018 going, man, had I, like, stayed through it, weathered the storm, weathered the bear, weathered all this rough stuff that we're going through, we would be in a much better space. So this bear market that we're in now excites the hell out of me, to be honest.

Yeah, man. And you know what, What's. What I'm thinking about right now is that we're addressing it differently. We're actually working in the space, and this is where there's so many opportunities in the Web3 space right now. And working with any of these companies who are launching games and projects. I mean, there's just so many roles that need to be filled right now, and there's a lot of ways that you can get compensated. No matter if it's not cash or even crypto coin, you might get first dibs on access to things or NFTs. If you just want to spend a little bit of side time, you can get involved in this space and really support a project that you believe in. This is where we're actually bringing a whole bunch of people with us. So our kind of motto at Hard for Gaming is to create a lot of cool content. Make it fun, make it engaging, make people involved. Get people involved through, like, tournaments and cool prize pools and giveaways, giveaway NFTs and early access to stuff that's, like, where we've been spending all of our time is creating or a bunch of relationships, honestly, but in a way to create community and opportunity for people within our community. It's not all about the content or us at all. We want to be the network or, like, the. I don't know, the place that all that stuff kind of lives. And we're building out some technology behind that, some software that can help kind of manage that and give us some metrics that we can then kind of basically give away more cool stuff.

Yeah. Shout out to Omer, who listens to this podcast, and because he listens to this podcast, reached out to us and said, hey, I want to help be your tech guy at Hardvoir Gaming. And now we're working with him on some tech in the background. So if you're listening, Omar, get them in. Awesome.

Yeah. So it's exciting. It's been messy, I would say the last six months. It's been like, so many whiteboard sessions and us just like, throwing shit at the wall, throwing stuff at YouTube and seeing what works. Trying YouTube shorts, trying TikTok fricking pitching a million different companies and projects and investor people also, like, it's just been wild and we've learned so much.

Team members, lots of turnover. You know, at one point, our team was up to, like, 10 people. Now we're down to a core three that we. I mean, it was kind of this core three that we started with, and then it expanded and expanded, expanded, and now we've contracted back down to the original Core 3.

It's. I love it. Yeah, it's. Well, this is how it should be, man. Like, this is, like, everybody's supported, you know, doing their thing, and this thing has evolved throughout the course of now a bear market, too.

Yeah. So, like, and I'm excited to see, like, I'm excited to share what we're working on with Hustler Flowchart. We're partnered with an amazing company called Blockchain Space, who is, you know, working with us to. To help us produce this content, to connect us with bigger and bigger guests in the space. You know, we've had Peter Ng on. So if you want to learn more about blockchain space, make sure you turn in tune into the episode that we did with Peter Ng. He's also been on an episode of LFG Live, so you can tune into that as well. But blockchain space has been an amazing sponsor. Animoca Brands is another one of our big sponsors so we're going to be working with them to really up level the quality and the scale of the content that we get to put out. So it's super exciting times right now.

Think of, of what we're trying to pull off here is like the, the ESPN of this space of the, of the gaming and metaverse space. And we say gaming because we're not just talking about crypto blockchain gaming because we do want to expand out into esports and the communities that are there because this is the fastest growing sport teams, you know, and like and, and where attention is, they're building arenas around the world for this kind of stuff. Like this stuff's going to now cross into blockchain games and where we're at. So we envision ourself as the network where it's not just us, we're just kind of kickstarting this bad boy. But we're thinking in a way where we can create the content in the most efficient way but also capture the right stuff to then put it out in the highest quality way for everybody and then give cool stuff out along the way. And our idea is like, hey, let's create some true fans and people that want to spread the word and get involved. And especially with. Lately we've been evolving the model of Hard Fork a lot more and I feel like it's going back to our roots too. Of. Well, originally why we created Hard Fork was content driven and really focusing on giving the value, being the bridge for folks learning about Web3. And it turned in to be a lot more gaming and whatnot. So what this has turned into is now this content network with Buffalo as the third guy on the crew here. The core three essentially is what we pared things down because we started it got the three of us, it exploded into what, seven or eight people at one point and we started taking on all these different types of business models. And this was before the bear market really hit things big time. But then we pared things back down to three, the core three. And that's you, me and Buffalo of course. And now kind of building this content network that's more like an ESPN vision, which is what we originally had or barstool sports we've talked about a lot and on previous podcasts, how we could build something out that's not just us. And we have a lot of content now of what we're doing. So, Matt, I don't know if you want to break that stuff down to what people can expect outside of the podcast. At Hard Fork.

Yeah. So over at Hard Fork, we're, you know, we've, you know, like Joe was saying, we kind of got into guilds for a little bit and we started going down this route where we started bringing on other content creators and it just got like, really, really hectic. So we did, we paired it back down and now we're just really, really focused on the content side and doing sort of partnerships. Right. We want to do partnerships with big brands and big companies that are building in the Web three space and a lot of the influencers in the space. And that's really where the focus has shifted for Hard Fork has been into that place. And we're going to do things like managing tournaments and we're going to do. Right now, we're doing an every other week LFG Live, where we go live and we share all sorts of insights into what's going on in the industry right now. We make little fun skits about, you know, current events in the space. And we, we, we get, we do a lot of giveaways, we give away a lot of NFTs and run contests. And we, we're trying to put together this really cool, like, event we almost compared to like a UFC fight night. But, you know, we're, we're calling them like LFG3 and LFG4. And we're put these cool events where there's so much stuff going on and really, really cool takeaways and actionable insights for listeners. And we get the community really involved and we're just all about right now creating that content and creating that community. And you know, that's going to be the focus going forward. We're going to have two really big pieces of content per week. Eventually we're going to get to LFG Live once per week and we're going to have Hustle and Flowchart once per week and then we'll do some tournaments and some live streams on Twitch and some stuff in between that. But really that is how we have pared it down. It's just the Core three focused on creating killer content, going live on a consistent basis again and just, just cranking out stuff that is going to really, really help people follow us into this space that we're so excited about right now.

Yeah. And this goes back into that content network thing that we're doing. It's like. It's kind of crazy. It's gotten. We've slimmed things down, but we have. We've actually, like, amped everything up a lot more, it feels like. So systems is kind of like the big thing that we're like, all right, we got to dial this stuff in because things are getting a little wacky with the amount of content we're putting out, the different channels and all that. So definitely pay attention to us, not only here on the podcast or if you're watching on YouTube. Awesome. But hit all the little notification bells and all that fun stuff, because there's things happening. Discord is something we haven't mentioned, but join our Discord if you're not in there. That's where we have. It's almost like different. There's different rooms and tiers. However you want to get involved with the community, because you mentioned giveaways, we do that. So there's different things that you can do to essentially be in more of the, you know, in the space where you can maybe win some NFTs or whatever. We're giving away a bunch of entries to tournaments and early access to games and cool projects we're working with. There's. There's a bunch of these Alpha scouts now, you know, inside of Discord, and we're going to start shouting all a bunch of y' all out, because it's a big collaboration that we're building here. It's not just about the three of us. And that's what we've realized lately is going through all this and then also getting into, like, giveaways. We've realized, like, the community wants something to rally behind, and we don't want to just do a bunch of giveaways, which we'll talk about. We were doing that for a little bit and still are, but we want to do it in a way that's creating value for you as a community member and someone who wants to learn about Web3 and have your finger in the pulse. And so.

We'Re always trying to craft a way to keep it engaging and fun for you and everyone. And then obviously, we get access to a whole bunch of things from these games that are developing. They want new gamers and people to really follow along. Sometimes we get NFTs, or free access to. Or early access to games, and these projects that are highly anticipated and that's where the model of Hard Fork is really catering to, is more of this community element. But you're going to see a lot of different giveaways, so definitely pay attention and make sure you're on Hard Fork. If you can, go to the website and dial yourself in, give us some info Hardfork, GG whitelist. We'll get your email on there, but also sync you up into our Discord. Get your wallet addresses in there so you are able to win some of this stuff.

Yeah. And shout out to Jake from Steak Farm. He is, as of this recording we chatted with him earlier today, he's going to be one of our new community managers who's going to be inside a Discord, you know, sharing a lot of this Alpha that we're drumming up and, and, you know, engaging with you and sharing what kind of stuff we're finding and bringing opportunities to you. So, yeah, the Discord is a huge opportunity, especially now that we got guys like Jake hanging out in there, supporting the community, on top of us jumping in there all the time and sharing what we're finding. But, yeah, coming back to what Joe was saying, we kind of went down what we call this Engage to Earn model for a little bit, where we were playing off of the Move to Earn and the Play to Earn and all of those concepts, and we were going out there saying, hey, all you got to do is engage with our community, share on Twitter, get into the Discord, like, and comment on YouTube. And just by engaging, you can earn with us. And we traveled down that path for a little bit, but what we found was we got a lot of people that just want all the freebies, but they don't want to do all the community. So they do the bare minimum. They set up bots, they jump into the Discord and do nothing but say, gm, which stands for Good morning every single day. Or they post some random meme in the Discord every single day just to try to build up credits and clout and see if they can earn more by just posting junk. And it was starting to create not the best community experience. So now we're kind of stepping back from that kind of Engage to Earn. Now you can still earn NFTs and Alpha and all that. All you gotta do is show up to our live streams and we're gonna do competitions all the time where we're just giving away free NFTs. We still have this big mission of just giving away tons and tons and tons of NFTs to people. We're just not doing it with this Engage to Earn where people just try to game the system all the time. And all these freebie seekers that really have no interest in the community, they just have interest in the free stuff. Like, we're trying to filter that out a little bit. So being a part of our community, you're still going to earn a lot of NFTs and it's going to be very lucrative. It's just not going to be that sort of structured play to earn, Engage to Earn concept anymore. Right. We don't want all those gimme, gimme, gimme. You know, Buff constantly calls them the mine, mine, mine people.

Yeah, mine, mine.

So, yeah, we're going to be doing lots and lots of competition on our live streams when we are streaming tournaments. When Joe and I start doing more Twitch live stream stuff like that, we're gonna be doing a lot of giveaways for those that are actually hanging out and being a part of the community. But you're no longer gonna get that stuff by just jumping into our discord and being like, hey, once a day. Or, you know, just simply retweeting everything we put out without any thought to it to your, you know, follower of three people on Twitter. Right. That, that stuff's not gonna be enough to actually earn in the community. But if you're a legitimate part of the community engaging with us, you're going to get hooked up. You're going to get really fricking hooked up.

Well, and the big thing we'll share with you, since a lot of y' all are marketing folks, is the, the true, you know, the true fans. Like, we want, we want a true core group of fans, thousand true fans. That whole concept, that's what we want to build here with the community at Hard Fork and behind content. Because, you know, Matt and I have been doing the content thing for a while and obviously there's a tons of ways to put paid promotion in front of content to boost a bunch of numbers and get audience members that might not be the best for the intention of that content, like getting someone to sign up for a game or actually play the game, maybe join a community over there, buy an nft. Like, there's a lot of things when there's the right people that can rally behind some of these projects. Because I think the bigger thing, the reason why we're so early here and being the early adopters is that we're genuinely excited about the projects, the technology that's being created, the ways that community can come together and everybody win in so Many different ways. It's not just a you pay for this and you get this or it's, it's not a transactional thing. At least that's not how we see building out hard fork and all this content in the community. So yeah, I mean the thousand true fans concept, if you think about it, if you have even 100 people to rally behind whatever the mission is the thing and have a shared kind of group of vision, mission and stuff, that's really what we want to do here. And then support the games, technology, the community, the people who are doing the right stuff in web3 and actually moving it forward for everybody. And that's what. Yeah, we'll do it our way and it's gonna evolve. So we did the. Yeah, we don't want gimme gimmes, but you know, that's the idea.

And we're coming back to our roots too.

Right.

Like we're digital marketers for the last, you know, you know, over a decade. Right. Like we really got into digital marketing around 2007.

Ish. So.

Right. We're talking like, what is that, 15 years? I don't know, I don't want to do math. I think that's 15ish years. So we've been doing digital marketing for 15 years and I think coming back to these roots of like focusing on, on making better and better and better content and then leaning into our expertise in digital marketing to get more visual, you know, visibility on this content and then going to the brand sponsors in this space and getting them to sponsor our content and stuff like that, you know, that's, that's really going to be the core of, of what we're building here. But I do want to shift topics here real quick and share some thoughts on the current state of the market because right now, you know, we're kind of in a bear market. I don't know if you've noticed this.

I have not.

The whole world is in a bear market. It's not just crypto. Right.

So I've been busy playing games and not looking at anything outside of my bubble. So. Yeah, I don't know about you, are y', all, but I'm having a joy of a time. No, it's a bear market. Of course, yes.

Don't look. I'll just say just keep playing video games, keep, you know, people playing the.

Bear of the bull. Right. That's what we talk about. That's why we want to have fun games. But yes, it's obviously a bull market, but yeah, but there's so many opportunities, right?

The opportunity right here, right? Like some of the coins we were investing in a year ago, things like Solana and Avalanche were well over $100 per token back then. Now you can get in on those things like Avalanche I think is like 20 something dollars. And Solana is like in the 30s right now, like 70, 80% discounts from what they were a year ago. And these are all platforms that we're seeing a lot getting built on, especially Solana. Like a lot of the games that we talk about, that we're excited about are being built on the Solana ecosystem. And this is not financial advice, but you know, Solana got really, really, really high up during the bull market and now it's real low again because of the, the bear market. And that's one of the coins I'm personally scooping up just because of how many games I'm seeing being built on Solana. Right. Like if Solana fails, hundreds of games would also fail. So it's almost like this. It's almost like this. It's too big for them to let it fail at this point.

Ooh, don't say that, man.

Yeah, I don't want to say that.

Not financial advice.

But yeah, I already said it's not financial advice. And obvious you got these like Black Swan things like the Terra Luna, the Three Arrows Capital, the Celsius, the. You know, there's lots of examples where things seem too big to fail and they fail. So don't listen to anything I'm saying. But I'm personally buying Solana right now because I'm seeing so many damn games being built around the Solana platform.

And I think just that alone and following the money, I think it's super smart to see where is the money being invested into these blockchains. And if you're following blockchains, I mean that's going to be the engine that runs a lot of this stuff, or at least the backbone pipelines. And there's so many games coming out on Solana. You know, we mentioned fractal is if you go visit them. That's basically a launchpad marketplace for all Solana games. You have Magic Eden is another one. And there's some crossover in games, but there's. They're all doing different things. And that's where Solana gets interesting because it's super simple to use and there's cool tournaments and things. Obviously we're not just like pumping Solana for Solana sake, but like Avax or Avalanche, like Matt mentioned, that's another Blockchain, there's cool projects. Each, each blockchain kind of has their own thing that they cater towards. And you know, gaming is becoming more and more of that thing. And I think that what's another opportunity in this space in the bull market is that there's so many experiments happening with builders and people are still investing. Like the Andreessen Horowitz is one example. A16Z is their crypto fund. Actually, just listen to Mark Andreessen on, on Rogan the other day, Joe Rogan, and he was talking about that when they invest, they invest with the idea that they're investing 10 years out. They're not looking at the price now and they're not trying to time the market, but they're, they're putting money into the builders who are doing some cool shit now that you can get involved with somehow. And really you're probably not going to hear mainstream for 10 years later or whatever, if ever. But you know, you know how the investing thing goes. But it's when you start thinking about, oh, wow, like this is the time of the beginning of a whole ramp up of projects and, and opportunities across the board. Not just gaming, but definitely metaverse and gaming. We're seeing a whole bunch of different experiments like this open Metaverse concept with economies we're seeing that pop up a ton. Life beyond is a game that just got released as this alpha. It's closed to a small group of people, smallish, but there's actually.

Was it a million people actually, but it's closed technically.

But you do need to have an NFT and that's what most of these games. You need to have some, you know, something to get in early. Yeah, but it's cool because a lot of them are very metaversey that connect to maybe other games or they have these character skins that you can own and resell or build up inside the the game. Or maybe you're farming or crafting things and then you can resell that within the games to other users. This whole way of getting out of the, you know, the token, the play to earn, you know, there's going to be so many different varieties of how money is made or crypto is made within games.

Yeah, well, this, this open economy Metaverse concept I think is something we haven't dug into enough on this podcast. And I think a lot of our upcoming guests in the future, like we're probably going to try to round up people that can talk about this concept because I think this is the one that all of us here at Hard Fork are probably the most excited about is this open economy metaverse concept where we don't even know what sort of monetization things are going to pop out of this, right? We're talking about you get into a game world and you create your own businesses in the game world. Maybe you love going out, like, imagine Minecraft, right? Maybe you love going out in Minecraft and just mining all day long and mining for diamonds. Well, in an open economy metaverse, you would go mine for diamonds and then go and set up a shop and sell diamonds to people that don't like doing the mining. They just want to go battle. So they want to buy a diamond pickaxe, right? I'm getting into some nerdy Minecraft references here, but maybe they just want the diamond pickaxe, but they don't want to go spend the time doing all the diamond mining.

Right.

Well, the person who did the diamond mining can come back and for whatever token of this metaverse, whatever many tokens, they find it valuable that I can sell them that pickaxe now. Right? So all sorts of new careers are going to pop up. Think of land development in the metaverse. People are going to go buy land and they're going to want games that they can earn money off of built on their land. Well, there's a whole new economy that pops up there of developers who are developing land in the metaverse.

There's also really fast because that right there is a concept that a lot of people like. If you haven't really thought about metaverse much, like the whole thinking of real estate in Metaverse, there's plots of land. But then like, what you're saying, Matt, is now the technology is getting built out where you can actually develop on.

Certain rental markets too. I mean, there's. The rental market stuff is already happening, right? There's already lands in specific metaverses, you know, sandbox, crypto, voxels, stuff like that, where people will actually rent their land to other people to go and throw parties or do other. So, like, it opens up rental markets on the lands as well. It opens up, you know, are some of these lands going to allow you to like sublease them? If I have a big enough land, can I break it up into four lands and resell them? As for, like all new economic models are going to sprout out of this world, you know, like hired hitmen. It's going to be a thing in the metaverse, right? Like, there's been multiple about that. Right. But, like, that's going to be A thing. Right. Somebody's in, like, somebody keeps on bothering me in this game and breaking into my house at night and stealing all my loot. I need to hire a hitman to take this person out. Right. Security is going to be a thing in the metaverse.

It totally will, man. I mean, this is where it gets so interesting and where I didn't totally get it because I don't have kids that play Fortnite or Minecraft or. I mean, I learned a lot of this from you originally, Matt. And then we started playing some other games and Valheim, you know, PC game on Steam that's not blockchain related, but it has a lot of these, you know, these elements you're talking about, these metaverse elements we can craft and trade and there's things of value you can do and not have to necessarily spend money to extract value or like, it's not extraction. It's like you're in game economies and with the metaverse is. Yeah, it's like the metaverse just allows you to kind of have this blend of fun mixed in with a business model that can actually be sustainable, hopefully. I mean, it's all a big experiment, but this is when it's so fun to get involved because things are literally all in the experimental phase. And now it's becoming a lot more like, hey, if you give value within this economy in this open space, you can actually get value in the form of something. I mean, they're all kind of different right now.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, in any metaverse, there's going to be things that you enjoy doing in the metaverse and things that you don't enjoy doing in the metaverse, and whole economies are going to be built up around solving the problems of things that people don't want to do. Right. If you don't like mining, you're not going to have to. You can hire people to mine for you and use the currency that you make. Because you went and let's say in Valheim you went and hunted boar your whole life and now you just sell boar skins to people. Right?

Like, yeah, yeah, why not? Right?

So these whole, like, economies, anything that you don't want to do in a game, an economy will sprout up so that other people can do it for you and you can pay them and focus on just the things you want to do. But in a game. Right.

See, this is so fun, man, because, like, I'm just thinking as like a. I'm thinking for myself that wasn't necessarily a hardcore gamer when it comes to like all these types of games. Like, I did a ton of games before and in throughout, but the games where there's crafting and all these different elements, where it is more metaverse y, you know, the World of Warcraft style as well. You know, that's years ago. But the whole point is that's a metaverse, though. It's a metaverse. It's one of the originals. And there's a lot of originals really, if you think about it. But at the same time, now that we're seeing it happen, and these are just now rolling out where they're playable. They're not even. They're still very buggy. But that's the fun of getting in early. You can like literally be there on the ground floor. Now's the time. That's why we're like, okay, follow along with all these other channels we're not always talking about on the podcast, but on our YouTube channel, Hardfork, gaming on Twitter. I mean, all these. Just follow us there because you're seeing these in discord. Especially if you really want to get in early, those are the channels you want to be at because we're just shouting this stuff out. So I genuinely think the gaming space, it's the most entertaining in the web 3.

Oh, it's a blast to be operating in this space. And like we said, people play games in a bear market, they play in a bull market. People use games as an escape. Right? Let's say it as it is. There's a big thing going around in this space of like, the games have to be fun. There's a lot of games that came out, Axie Infinity, that aren't actually super fun games, but people could earn money off of them. Well, those games like that all seem to have collapsed now. And there's not. I mean, I'm sure there's stuff I'm not aware of. So I don't want to say there's.

Not really games in a general sense. I think you're right.

In a general sense, the games that weren't fun but had the, you know, some sort of earning economics all seem to kind of fizzle out at this point. That's not to say they won't reemerge. Axie, I'm sure, will actually be big enough to reemerge and find some pivots and whatnot. But at the end of the day, people want to use video games as an escape. When I'm going home at the end of a long day, I'm not sitting there going you know, I got to get into this game so I can earn some more money. No, I'm going. I want to go play Legend of Breath of the Wild and just immerse myself in that world. I want to go play Minecraft and just immerse myself. I want to go play Valheim and just become immersed and, you know, forget about my real life for an hour while I play a video game. Right? Like, that's what people use video games for, is that escape. That's not changing and it's only becoming more and more of an escape for people, right? It's as these games become easier to access up front, they're free to get into. But maybe, you know, to get to a certain point, you need an nft or you can change. Like the game doesn't require the nft, but the NFT changes the experience of the game. You get to look a certain way or you get to have a weapon that's customized or whatever, right? Like, there's different ways that NFTs can enhance these games. And, you know, as long as people are using games as an escape, the games that are fun to play but also have a financial incentive will probably win, right? But they still need to be that escape for people. They still need to be that. I just want to check out from my real life for a little bit and play this video game. Oh, and there's financial incentives, right? That's what it needs to be. And once it's there, how will it fail? How will it fail if there's these games like Valheim, where we could just lose ourselves and spend hours, days inside of these games and just lose ourselves in them. And when we're done, you're a little. You have a little bit more money that you can pull into your bank account as a result. Like, how does that not win long term?

And I'm going to add on to the fact that you said escape in games. I know there's a bunch of people in general who might be against games and escaping and really, what are you escaping from? But it's like legit though, I've heard. And honestly, it's been something that I've battled way back in the day. But here's what's interesting is I feel like there's a bigger community element than ever now in these games. And we've chatted with people. And you being one of them, Matt, is that in these games you can connect with. With your kids, or your kids have social circles or we have social circles in these worlds that we might Be not in the present, in the real world, or escaping this in the physical world here, but you go to an open metaverse game, any of these games, now you're collaborating with people that you may or may not know, but there's an exchange of value, and you're learning, and there's different ways to just use technology and just being creative. And this is where it gets super exciting for us. And I think what really clicked for me with the gaming side is like, man, anyone can have some type of value in this virtual space, and legitimately, like, it can connect to something. Bigging some, you know, building something bigger, it seems like, than just, you know, going to some game and randomly playing. It's like, man, now you can actually. It could be a build. There could be a guild, a whole esports team behind this. There's competitions, there's. It's like more of a purpose. I feel like if someone's on the fence with the gaming and, like, I don't want to go. I don't know. Like, there's a deeper thing now, I feel like that's getting built. That's a lot more of a. It's, like, attached to community. I mean, I think community is, like, one of the biggest things, and that's why us at Hard Fork have really leaned into that more than ever, especially when there's a lot of building and not a ton of playing with, like, you know, with active games right now.

Yeah.

Because of the development time. But that's okay. That's why we're here. We're going to keep the fun alive.

Yeah. So, I mean, circle all the way back around to the beginning of this podcast that Hustle and Flowchart's evolving.

We are always moving in motion and evolving. Indeed. So, yeah, we're becoming more of an interactive audio experience.

Yes, the Hustle and Flowchart audio experience.

Oh, yeah.

Don't worry. We won't be doing that all the time.

Nope. But occasionally we will. So what? Hustle and Float. What we've been engineering back here is this crazy content machine like we were describing earlier, and we realized that the Hustle and Flowchart podcast is a perfect way to really connect the community to projects, to us, to each other, and make it super interactive. And that's why we wanted to make this audio experience idea and essentially do this thing live every week.

It's kind of crazy to think about it.

Scares the hell out of me just.

Hearing this out loud. We're going to start doing Hustle and Flowchart live.

I Don't think we are going to.

Start doing Hustle and Flowchart live.

Yeah, this has been a request for years now. And I mean, if you, if you're new here, we've been around for like five years with this podcast, and it's definitely evolved many times. So this is. No, this is. This is not the first time this thing's evolved, but I think it's the first time we've ever committed to a live schedule. So the fact that we're going to do it now and leverage Twitter Spaces and our Discord as being the places we want to interact with you as a listener. Ideally, Discord is probably going to be the best because you'll be able to interact way more with us and get in on all the other cool stuff. That's why Hardfork, GG Whitelist, you want to go to that website and put in your deets because that's how you get in there and get hooked up on cool stuff. But Twitter Spaces is also a little way that we'll get connected with different games and different people and bring on other occasional guests that fit in and want to interact. And you can pop on stage, too, and interact. We'll have some Q and A and cool things, but the show itself will take and be a little bit more of the behind the scenes of this show, but really not this show of Hard Fork and what we're learning and we're doing all these cool things behind the scenes, and we want to let you in on that. Matt, break down a little bit more of the format here. What we're going to be doing.

Yeah, so we're going to be doing these live every single week now on Tuesdays. So they're still going to come out on Tuesdays, but you can join us live at 11am we're going to try to figure out a way. We're still figuring this out. We still don't know exactly how we're going to do it. We're going to start our first one next week. So we're just throwing our feet into the fire here, but we're going to be figuring out how to do this live in Twitter Spaces and in Discord. If it comes down to the wire, maybe only one or the other, but we're going to be doing it live is the point. And if you just like listening to the recording and you're, you know, you don't want to get involved or interact, that's totally fine. They will still get released as normal to the podcast feed. So if you're listening to this on Overcast or Spotify or whatever right now. Don't worry, they're still going to be released in those places. But if you want to join us and you want to ask questions and you want to, you know, share feedback and be a part of the conversation and, you know, be a bigger part of this Hard Fork Hustle and Flowchart community that we're building here, you can actually join us on these live and we'll pull you up on stage and we'll answer your questions and you could share what projects you're working on and what you're excited about about. And we're really, really trying to make this a nice, fun community experience where everybody is getting more involved. And so that's how we're evolving it. We're going to take this more interactive. It's not going to be as much Joe and Matt talking at the world and more. Let's all have a conversation. Let's build a community around this. Let's, you know, let's, let's all talk about what we're excited about right now in the spaces that we're building. So that's our intention with this and we're going to share things like the, you know, the games that we're excited about, the investments that we're looking into, possibly investing in in the Web three space that excite us. We're going to talk about, you know, some of our marketing and community building strategies as we grow this community. We're going to talk about what's working and what's not and go back to our roots a little bit and share some of the marketing tactics that we're experimenting with. And you know, we bring on the occasional guest, but it's going to be less of a guest focus show and more of a you focused show, more of a community focused show. We want to put the spotlight on, you know, what we're up to at Harvard Fork, but also what you in the community are up to as well. And we're really just going to evolve it into that way. We are still going to do a bunch of interviews. We got our LFG Live show that we do with Buffalo every. Well, right now they're every other Thursday, but eventually we're going to go to every Thursday. We're going to have interviews on every single one of those LFG lives. For the most part, we, we have a, we partnered with Blockchain space to do a show called Blockchain Conversations. And that's going to be a little bit more of a longer form interview show. So a lot of the interviews that we used to do on Hustle and Flowchart, that style of interviews, you're going to see those on our Blockchain Conversation show, which is going to live on both our Hustle and Flowchart channel as well as the Blockchain Space channel because we've got a really killer partnership with them. And yeah, that's a little bit of a rundown of what's going on right now.

Oh, I like that. Mr. Monteo. I mean Mr. E. Flo. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, this is, this is exciting. And we were talking about this Matt, that this is super exciting for us too because it kind of puts a whole reinvigoration into this show, but reinvents everything that we're doing with this and bringing it live really does connect us with you and and it's going to help us probably be a lot more on the pulse with stuff too. You're going to be sharing a bunch of things with us Alpha, so this is a perfect way to highlight you too, but also share all the super timely stuff and you could be a source of a lot of that information. So definitely join us on the Tuesdays. I think we're shooting for 11am Pacific, so if you want to mark those in your calendars. And even better, wherever you see this release, just make sure to hit a little reminder. I think Twitter Spaces gives you that option in Discord. In our Discord we'll be posting it in there. So I'll be the call to Action boy over here and say make sure to go join the whitelist if you're not already in there, Hardfork GG whitelist and plug in all your details there. The more you give us, basically the more stuff you're going to get from us anyway. So how it works over here, at least it seems so far. And you're going to be in the know with all this cool stuff. And yeah, there's even like the radio that's coming up. I don't think we talked about Buffs Hard Fork Radio. Did we mention that? No. There's some cool stuff maybe we want.

We don't have release date so maybe that's one that we'll stay hush hush about for now and just kind of tease it right here.

But we got a little weekly radio show coming at you with a little coming on the network, a DJ spin in Buffalo coming at you pretty soon here that's also going to be a live show, so there's some stuff cooking over here. We're evolving quickly, Matthew.

Evolving quickly.

All right, eflow, how do we wrap it up? What do we got shout out to? You mentioned a couple. We got to shout out the people that are repping us and supporting us and people as we're growing Blockchain space. You already did, so holla at them. Blockchain Chainspace Asia is their website and you can check out they're doing all the cool stats and tools, supporting a bunch of people in web 3, the metaverse and gaming space. And of course, Animoca doing a lot of cool stuff with them. They have some games coming up here pretty soon here with events happening. Bingy Bananas is one of them that's been kind of like re evolving or evolving in itself. So that's a game that we're kind of peeping at and some events. Peeping. We're gathering Bananas, Peeping Joe and what's the other one? MotoGP is something they're releasing. So, Animoca, it's good to shout you out because you've been supporting everything we're doing here at Hardfork, so check them out. Doing cool stuff.

You'll be hearing a lot more about a lot of those games and companies. Oh, yeah, it's on the way. So Hardfork GG. I'm just going to shout out the CTA's real quick. Go to Hardfork GG whitelist. That's probably your best starting point because by joining our whitelist, that's how you get informed about all our LFG Live episodes, all our new hustle and flowcharts, all the cool stuff we're putting on YouTube. You can get details about our Discord, the YouTube channel, the Twitter, all of that stuff. So that's the best place to start. Hardfork GG whitelist. Go sign up there and the rest should make sense after that.

All right, till next time. We'll see you then. Thank you again.

Shift.