Videos Games: The Key To Financial Freedom?

The same opportunity exists at a much smaller scale at NFTs. I can go and buy one of these Pegaxi horses and it's going to cost me, let's say $2,000. Well, I can go and rent out this horse for $50 a day for players. So that would come out to. It's 40 days. All right, so a month and a month and a couple of weeks. You actually make all of your money back on the investment from people who rented your horse from you. And the value of your horse will probably stay the same. If not, go up.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Shark podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

We're back. Woo.

We're back again.

We are here. We're here. It's 2022. We are. Is that the year? It is. That's the year.

This is our second podcast this year.

Although we're felt rusty on the first one. Nick, you did? No, not really, but I thought we would be. Cause it's been a while. It's been a minute.

I think it went smooth other than the fact that we were using Riverside to stream it and Riverside stream.

So I'm just gonna say now. Riverside. Come on, man, figure stuff out. You know, UI's getting better, but when it comes to the streaming. No, you gotta figure that out. That is. Is definitely. You done screwed us a little bit, but yeah.

So let's give a shout out to our sponsor, Riverside. No, I'm just kidding.

Don't think that'll happen.

If only they could be so lucky.

Ah, that's funny. Wow. Throwing shade from the second one. I like it. Yeah. Yeah, it's good to be back. It is back on the recordings. Like on the new recordings. Yeah, it though the first month of the year, it's crazy. It's already February, but January was rad with the rewind episodes. You crushed it in terms of the new commentary.

Oh, thank you. Each episode, I legitimately listened back to every single one because I did a re edit on all of them. I don't know, it's probably not super noticeable to the audience, but I went through and I sped up the pace and cut out a lot of the uhs and ums and there was a few things that we talked about that were relevant at the time but are no longer relevant. So I spliced some of that kind of stuff out. So to do that, I listened back to the entire episodes to clean them up. And every single one of I Was seriously blown away the second time through. More so than doing it live. It's like you do the episode live and then you kind of forget what you talk about, and then you go and listen back to them, and it's like, equally as mind blowing, but you also find some cover, some stuff that you forgot you even talked about. Or maybe in the moment, we were so into the conversation that something just passed over us that we didn't even think about.

Happens all the time.

So it was really cool to kind of go back through and listen to those again because I was expecting to edit out a lot more. I thought some things would be less relevant, but damn, they all fricking held up really well. Is like, just as relevant, if not more relevant now than when we recorded them.

For sure. You know, they were pulled from what the last, like, few years, I think is what those were. And those were all.

Some of them are all the way back in 2017, the Michael Taggart episode where we talked about bitcoin. That was a 2017 episode.

Hopefully we can get them back. We're in contact again. So we're just working out timing and stuff because he was a crucial guy along this journey of us to get into crypto, but also just open our eyes. What's possible here. So, yeah, those episodes, if you haven't listened to the rewind episodes from January, go check them out, because those were curated specifically, specifically to highlight how far the show has gone, how it's progressed, but also where it's taken us along the journey. And I know a lot of you guys in Discord and elsewhere. Actually, we're not really checking elsewhere. We check Twitter and Discord.

That's pretty much it.

So if you're not following us or. Or hanging out in the Discord, what you doing with your life, huh? Yeah, you're not finding us there.

Screwed up somewhere along the line.

Yeah, no Discord. Quick shout out hustlefluechart.com Discord. It's a great community in there. I think we have a lot of lurkers. We were talking about that, but that's cool. Ye.

We don't care.

Lurk all you want as long as you're in the group.

Yeah, I mean, we love. We love it when people ask questions and engage and share cool stuff that they're stumbling across and all that sort of stuff. But we love the lurkers just as much. If you want to just kind of come in, hang out in the discord, see what everybody's talking about, be a fly on the Wall. Totally cool too do it. There'll probably be some perks and some thank yous in the future to those that engage a little more stuff up our sleeve. We're happy just for anybody to be hanging out with us there.

And then on Twitter, that's the other place where, you know, like in terms of Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff, honestly, it's just ain't got time for that stuff right now. But you know, quick check ins. But if you want the consistent stuff, you're seeing us on Twitter now. Yeah. So Matt R. Wolf is how you find Mr. Matt or eflow. Yeah. And then I'm over at Joe Fear and we have Hard Fork Gaming, which is our newest organization, group company. I don't know what we're calling it exactly, but in this episode we're going to break down what that is and why we've moved that way and really where the show's going to in terms of like how we're actually, we're putting the pieces together and this is like blowing our minds daily of what's happening and what's possible here. So can't wait to share that.

Yeah, so that's, that's at Hard Fork Gaming. It used to be at Hard Fork Media, but we actually rebranded to Hard Fork Gaming, which I think will make sense by the end of this episode.

I think so.

But one thing that we haven't said.

What's that?

We hit a milestone with this podcast.

Oh, well, you just told me this last night and I was like, yeah, a milli.

Yeah, we passed a milli downloads.

A milli downloads. That's. That's crazy.

And we did it during a month where we were doing reruns.

That's right. Actually, the re. Like things have been picking up a lot lately. It started around the rerun period, actually. Like, that's interesting. Should we just rerun all of our episodes?

It's kind of funny. It's like, hey, let's. If we go and round up the best shit that we've ever put out and put that out for a month, people seem to listen to it.

We haven't been the best at marketing the show lately either because honestly, all of our attention has been in on this new thing that we're building right now. And to look over there and be like, oh man. And like, we're still going to push out those episodes. I mean, Nick Peterson was a rock star and shared it a ton. So, you know, Nick, if you're listening, thank you, brother. That was a fun episode. And yeah, it was just. It's cool. Like, the community that's supporting this show and also this pivot has been very interesting. It's cool to just see everybody kind of in the mix together.

Yeah, no, it's been a cool ride. We passed that milestone. And, yeah, it's. I'm really shocked because January of this year was one of our better download months that we've ever had, and that was a month where we did the reruns. So.

Milli, Milli, Milli. Yeah, More coming, though.

I wrote an email. This kind of dates the day we're recording this, but I wrote an email today kind of talking about everything that we've been up to and what's transpired over the last few months. And one of the things I talked about in that email was it kind of blew me away that when we made this transition into, like, let's put a little more focus on web3 and crypto type stuff, that we had this assumption that people didn't really want to hear about that and that we'd lose a lot of subscribers and that people would leave our email list and just stop paying attention to what we're doing. The opposite has happened.

It's totally opposite. Yeah. And it's so cool.

More people started paying attention and we're like, we stopped marketing. We haven't been mailing our list about new episodes. We haven't been putting as much content on YouTube lately. We haven't been, like, emailing as much. Yeah, we haven't been emailing as much. We haven't been doing a whole lot of the marketing stuff you think we should be doing. And we had one of our best months ever. And the only thing I could credit that with is this transition is interesting people more than I realized it would.

I think that's accurate. And based off of the folks that we've chatted with, there's a lot of people that we hold up as mentors and just people that support us throughout business. A lot of the folks that you see coming back on this show and the repeat episodes, these are a lot of folks that we look up to. And, you know, a lot of these folks were like, hey, thanks for doing this and for sharing the journey along the ways, because you're kind of showing all of us what's. What's happening and maybe what's to come a little bit. Because really, this whole thing that we're exploring in crypto and Web three, it's still early adopter, if not even. Maybe even earlier. The more that we're playing around and some of this stuff, we're like, whoa. Seems like pretty early, but it's all blue ocean. It feels like there's a lot of gaps in the market where we can apply what we know and have been doing for a lot of time in the marketing space, digital marketing space and stuff. And we're just looking over here like, wow. But the fact that we can report it back to people and also still share the folks who are building also epic things on there as well with the existing community and a lot of these mentors, we're getting the thanks. And I think that's where it's maybe peaking some interest. I feel like we know what to do with this space now. Whereas before we were just dabbling, learning, trading, random stuff that we didn't really know what it was all about. Yeah, well, we find we're not trading really anymore either. We're building now.

We found where we can bring value to this world. And before we were just kind of learning about it and going, this is really cool, and going deeper down the rabbit hole and studying and to understand it. And then we formed a little crew of people around us who are kind of on the same wavelength with us. And collaboratively we kind of found, like, this is where we can bring value to this space, you know, and. And we also niche down deeper and deeper. And now we're focused just pretty much solely on the gaming space and the gaming piece of web3 and kind of feels like an elephant in the room. Right? Like, maybe we should address the fact that I think a lot of. And this is. This is most likely us just kind of getting in our own heads, thinking that people are paying more attention to what we're doing than they really are. But we get in our own heads about, like, man, we've pivoted so much and people probably think these guys don't know what they want to do and there's all these pivots, but really it's not as much pivots as it is honing in. And we've just kind of. We found this big picture of Web3 and crypto and went, ooh, this is really, really exciting. Let's just talk about that. But saying that we're going to go talk about web3 or we're going to talk about crypto is like saying, hey, we have a podcast where we talk about Internet stuff. Yeah, it's like any, like, it's such a broad topic with so many little nuanced niches and rabbit holes that you can go down so then we kind of narrowed down and went, all right, we're really into NFTs, DeFi and gaming. Those are the spaces that really start to excite us. Right, because there's a lot of action going on with NFTs and then with DeFi, I mean people are getting better yields than they are getting with banks. So there's actual real world application and people are using that. Same with gaming. Like you can actually see people play the games. There's streamers out there playing the games, earning real money. And so those were the worlds that we saw the real world application actually playing out and people adopting them. But then we went, okay, that's even too broad. Like NFTS is a broad topic on its own, right? There's NFTs in every single space. Defi Defi has a long way to go. Let's just say that. Right.

There's a lot of, a lot of barrier to entry. There's a lot of scams. It's wild, wild west. And people are betting with their money and some people are over leveraging with their money too. So they're getting wrecked because they're taking and debt out in crypto and then it's like wiping out all of their crypto and the markets go a little wild.

Yeah, there's a lot that needs to be sort of solved in that area. I mean, we're involved in defi, we're invested in defi, we're excited about it. But pretty much all of our biggest blunders so far in crypto where we thought we were going to get a Lambo soon and go to the moon as everybody says. And it's pretty much all of the Defi protocols that wrecked us the worst over time.

Right.

So like defi has a long way to go. And it's also a very in depth, nuanced topic that you need financial advisors to even explain what the hell is going on behind the scenes.

And a bunch of time to explore and learn. Yeah, that's why I said earlier it's like we're super early on the early adopter and we've heard this on the show. Nick Peterson was talking about it last week too. And it's just more and more, that's what people are saying. We're like, man, it's so early. But if you're curious of this space, what better time to learn about the infrastructure and the foundation of what's being built than now? Because the later you go, it's the more away we're gonna get from this foundation. It doesn't mean you need to learn all the techy details of all this stuff. But dude, just get involved. Or chick, get involved, not dudes. Yeah.

Well, all that coming back full circle, all that kind of led us to gaming. Right. That's where we've decided, let's take our magnifying glass and let's hold it over gaming, because gaming is where we see the biggest potential. I've said it on Twitter, I've said it in. I wrote it in my email that I put out today. I think the gaming industry will be the biggest industry in the world, hands down, full. Stop it.

Well, it's pretty much there already.

Biggest, biggest industry in the world. It's only going to get bigger as people realize that they can earn incomes by playing video games, and investors realize that they can buy assets and let other people play with their assets and earn passive income through the assets that they own. And all of this kind of nuanced stuff we're going to dig into in this episode a little bit. But, like, we really realized that gaming is where the opportunity is, and that's where we've put all of our focus and, you know, podcast episodes going forward. We're going to talk about blockchain and foundational stuff in future episodes, but you're definitely going to see a bigger and bigger emphasis around the gaming space. Because if you're listening in and you're looking for. I just want to know where I should be paying attention to create that generational wealth, to create the lifestyle I've always wanted. Well, we feel the opportunity is in the gaming space. And so it'd almost be like a disservice to the listener to not point people in that direction. Right. If you're paying attention to this podcast because you want to know where the puck is going, so to speak, and you want to kind of go down the rabbit hole. Well, we think the best rabbit hole to be going down right now is crypto gaming, which is play to earn gaming, and Metaverse gaming specifically.

Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit, because I pulled up some stats to back up what you're saying there, Matt. Yes. What I was tooling around with over here. So you hear Metaverse a lot? I feel like everyone has heard. I mean, it's like meta, you know, Facebook with their whole rebrand that's very, you know, they're just trying to swoop on the narrative, man, their IOI from Ready Player One.

They want to be that. They want to be that.

And they're tanking right now in the stock. So it's very interesting.

Poor guys.

Poor guys, yeah. And gals. But you know, there's opportunities for all. And you know, when things are getting shaken up like that, I feel like it's an indication that there's something else bubbling up. And there is. So Metaverses, Metaverse, I don't know. There's a lot of them, they're all different. So like just explore. Some sandbox is one of them, you know, like that's just an example that's made a lot of news. If you look up, they partnered with a ton of people. Snoop Dogg, all these companies are investing in land and other partnerships. It's really. But what they're seeing is that there's a new environment being built and there's a lot of people interested in building and investing and using that environment for a variety of reasons. That's the instant utility built into this space where it's not instant utility when you're just investing in a coin or speculating on whatever, even defi and hoping things go up and not down. There could be obviously utility built behind some of that stuff, but most of the cases that's not what's happening. Or NFTs in general, you know, profile pictures, Bored Ape Yacht Club, like, yeah, there's utilities and stuff built in, but at the end of the day, and there's games even that are starting to be built and partnered with them, they're brands. You're basically investing in a brand or a Rolex via jpeg, which nothing wrong with that, you know. But when you think about the utility and the depth and just like what is possible in the ecosystem, when you start thinking Metaverse and gaming specifically play to earn, then you're kind of wrapping everything into one. Like you have massive utility immediately when someone chooses to play a P2E game, a play to earn type game, they might have to invest in an NFT or a few of them to play. And that's okay because that NFT can be a profile pick, it can be a Metaverse kind of wearable thing, it could be a whatever, but it also can give you access to this gaming environment that has built in defi economies in there has a. A crap ton of utility that even if you weren't earning money, you'd probably have fun playing it. Yeah, but the fact that you can actually earn money and then you can like stack your yield and get all crazy going down the rabbit hole here. But all this is to say is like, this is why we made the pivot to the gaming sphere because there's just so much cool stuff and there's adoption happening at a such a fast rate.

Let's talk about the numbers immediately right now. Let's break some of this stuff down just to kind of like solidify what you're saying here is like this gaming industry and the adoption that's happening there is going crazy and most of the big name like gaming streamers haven't jumped on board. In fact, a lot of them have actually been a little bit resistant to gaming because they see this, this idea of like, oh, I've got to go buy this NFT and I can't play the game and earn money unless I have this nft.

Well, but you know, let's talk about that evolution, huh? Because that's actually something I pulled up here and this is so Matt and I have read a ton of white paper, a lot of blog posts and YouTube videos, all that stuff.

Had conversations with game developers, a ton of them now.

Yeah, I mean these are like, we're chatting with developers from AAA games like gaming, big studios that have developed the biggest games around. The cool thing is a lot of these folks, the developers and the gamers, but the developers are starting to move over from these big production houses like Blizzard who just sold for what? 7 billion. Was it 7?

I think it's 7D.

I think it's 70. Yes, zero. Quite a little bit.

It's a big difference.

Some change there, 70 billion to Microsoft. That was like a week or two ago. That just shows you the type of money that's flowing through this space. But the problem is a lot of that money ain't getting to the developers. It's definitely not going to the gamers and it's going to investors, the owners, blah, blah, blah, you know, like so a lot of developers are starting to see that and they're moving to this space where they see, oh, I can do what I'm already doing, but actually make it maybe my own, bring my skills over here and make a crap ton more money, but also big, make a bigger change and be on the forefront of this, this whole adventure, this frontier over here. Because the gamer and the adoptions like it's gonna happen. The demand is there and I'll get to that in a sec here. But that's like the evolution of what we're seeing is that something we read is that you have the pay to play traditional gaming model. That's like you ain't gonna earn anything from that model. That's like, you know, the whole Nintendo's all the way up to PlayStation and whatever you're paying to play. And then you have a pay to win model, which is essentially like, they're calling it the freemium kind of model. So that's like a fortnight.

Yeah, yeah. Some of the big games that streamers are doing now where you can get into the game for free, but you got to pay for skins, you got to pay for weapons, you got to.

Pay for upgrades, whatever.

Yeah. Various upgrades in the game and things like that. And you buy those upgrades and the game still owns those things that you just bought. You might buy that character skin, but the game still owns it. You can't go sell that character skin later on an open marketplace or anything like that. Right. So you gotta. They call it Pay to Win because a lot of times you need these special weapons, you need these special potions, you need these various things that you have to pay for in order to finish the box or whatever.

You can't get through it.

You can't do it on the free version. You have to have some of these extra assets in order to. To reach the goal of the game.

So think about it that way. It's like your income's still going to pretty much be zero, if not negative, because you have to continue to keep investing in this thing as long as you're hooked on their little gaming theory or, you know, like the whole algorithms that they're building in the games. And then you have the evolution of where we're talking about is, which is play to earn the P2E. And that's where you're going to start seeing a lot more of this adoption happening. Because I'm pretty sure in the news with all these games, like, there's a lot of consolidation happening in the gaming space right now, and that money's not flowing to the users and the ones that have actually helped build up these studios. It's kind of. Does it sound like Facebook to you? Sound like Google. Sounds like Amazon. Yeah. Okay, cool. All of you guys.

Just to clarify that reference there, everybody who's going on Facebook and spending time writing thoughtful comments, well, guess what? Facebook's making money off of the content that you're creating.

Dang. Right.

And you're getting how much of that money from the content you're putting out.

There, charging you for more reach or for you to see what you actually want or to engage with the community that you've built that you're giving value. Maybe you're running your business business on back of all these things. Yeah. I mean, it's just. It's just showing there's a migration happening. And these are all the hints. I feel like these are a bunch of hints. And it's happening in all the industries. So this Play to Earn industry is. It's kind of the future, but it's also the now. It's just like if you look at the games in the Play to Earn, let's be honest, like a lot of them are not the games that you would buy on PlayStation or whatever on any other platform. That's like the Paid to play or even the Pay to play.

They're getting there, though. They are definitely getting there. I mean, like, Sandbox is not fully released yet, but they had an alpha version and it has very, very similar gameplay to Minecraft or Roblox.

Right.

You've got games like Phantom Galaxies and Star Atlas and some games that are really high production value built on, like, Unreal Engine that look like what you would play on PlayStation. Got games like Synergy Lands, which is a game that we're invested in and really excited about. And that one feels very similar to like Diablo 2. No gameplay yet, but they have gameplay footage. It looks very similar to like the old Diablo kind of games and that. Better quality.

Better. Way better. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of the games that are out there right now that have a lot of active players are games like Axie Infinity, which is kind of shitty graphics and pretty boring gameplay. But they didn't put it on the map.

Well, they put PDE on the map. They basically created it.

And then there's Town Star, which is a game that my wife actually plays a lot of. And it's very, very similar to farmville. If you've ever played that kind of like a management game where you gotta have like, you know, people chomping down lumber, and then you can use the lumber to build houses. And then once you build these things, then you can produce food and you can build farms and raise chickens and sell eggs. And then you meet a certain goal every day and you can actually earn money. The problem with Town Star is in order to make really, really good money, you have to buy NFTs that you place in the game. And these NFTs starting price are like $1,400.

Oh, wow.

Right. So, like, there's a barrier to entry for a lot of the ones that actually look decent and have really fun gameplay. There's a high barrier to entry to get into the play, to earn part of it. And then the ones that have a low Barrier to entry to get into games like Axie Infinity and Crypto Raiders and some of these other games that exist out there. They're a very easy barrier to entry. But the gameplay is not the greatest. The graphics aren't the greatest. They still have a long way to go. So there's sort of this give and take here. Do you want like a really high quality, really fun, really sort of addictive game that you're not going to make much off of or one where you're going to make. Make fairly decent income off of, but the game isn't that exciting.

Yeah. And that's. I mean, let's put a bookmark on what you're saying there because you know, the pay to earn, or maybe we can talk about it briefly. I want to get to the stats a little bit more too.

That's where we were going.

Yeah, that's where I'm ultimately we're getting to. But the play to earn, like that is a. What you're saying there. There's usually some upfront investment and it could be smaller, like a couple hundred bucks or it could be a couple thousand bucks and it could require one NFT to play or no NFT to play, depending on the game. Or it could require like three.

You need three.

Yeah. There's a lot of games that like and then they have these other mechanisms we're not gonna get into now, but breeding and multiplying your NFTs. Let's just save that for later. It's very interesting, but I know this could sound really weird. When I explain this to like my wife, she's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, just. Just hang with me. Like literally that. It's interesting. Yeah. And it works. But the play to earn, this is where things are moving to and this is where you can earn income as part of. Of like playing this game. And right now, like you said, Axie is the. It's like the whale of this whole space, but doesn't mean it's the best. It just happens to be on the map. I think they came out in 2018, so they've been around for a little bit. And you know, there's a lot of people in like the Philippines, Southeast Asia that are making a living off of this. They're supporting their family. They're actually getting bank accounts now.

Because how do people in the Philippines who can't afford to buy the Axies play a play to Earn game where you have to own NFTs?

We'll get to that. We have a solution for that. But yes, that's a problem because most people can't afford the 500, the thousand, two thousand to get in on these things. But they see the opportunity. So there's an opportunity there with exactly what you said. But now finally to the stats open in the loop. Yeah, yeah, we got notes this time, y'. All. So we actually came prepared. Not going to be too tangible.

We haven't stuck to them so far. But let's get back to him.

Yeah, I know this is going to be a while if we just keep going this. But the stats, I mean this is where the gaming stats like you were saying earlier, look so damn interesting is that There are roughly 3 billion gamers right now, like global gamers. We're talking about all the games right now in the market and it's projected to continue to grow. Right now only about 1% of those people are playing play to earn Games. That's 1% of 3 billion people. And we know where the trends are going. We see developers from big gaming places moving over here. Not going to say this is all going to move over here because it won't. Because some people are just going to be maximalists of the games, of the traditional games. And that's fine.

I mean, I still love my Nintendo Switch. I don't see any play to earn coming out on that anytime soon.

Exactly. It's like whatever. We can't speculate on everything right now. But point being is that there is a massive market. The massive market continues to grow and now you dangle the carrot of hey, you can earn money over here and actually collaborate and you can even resell the thing you bought into for a game for potentially a profit or maybe whatever. But you have the ability to now, like, you're not just gonna. That cartridge or whatever. That thing's not gonna gather dust in the corner in your house or in a drawer now like when you're done with that game or whatever, sell it, you can rent it. That's a little something for you to think about. You can rent. Yeah, we'll talk about that too. But there's so many different ways to basically, I don't know, just be in a better position as a gamer, even as a developer, as someone catering to this space, as a marketer, a business owner, whatever. The point is a lot of gamers number going up and number in the P2E space is like such a tiny fraction. It's crazy. But that's growing ridiculously. And yeah, like what you said, we talked to a lot of project Owners and we're seeing like we're working in this group. Like we get a bunch of conversations and emails sent to us now we're seeing this every single day.

A bunch. That's an understatement.

It's an understatement. It's f ton.

Yeah, it's a shit storm of emails every day.

But they're amazing because these are all projects that are looking to develop in the play to earn space. And we're talking like 10 to 20 more day. Not saying they're all the games that we would probably say were, would, should last. I mean like there's a lot of just people throwing stuff at the wall. Let's be honest.

It's a, there's money grabs happening.

It's a wild west and there's a lot of creative ideas and a lot of talented people but at the same time they're not all gonna make it. And that's okay. Nothing ever does, you know, like that. But point being is like we're just seeing the momentum build in real time. We're like, this is wild and we've never seen this. And we're basically going back to the point of why we're even moving into this space that was long winded. But I hope you see the picture of why we're so excited now and backed up with stats and just Google headlines, even Google some of the play to earn and then the investments. You'll see there's tens of millions, hundreds of millions getting tossed around. Billions even some of these companies are worth. Now there's a brand, Animoca Brands, $5 billion and they were in Forbes, there's a whole write up on them. So don't take our word for it. Forbes, they're writing about this space now. So it's really, really cool.

Yeah. And I mean not a day go by where you don't hear in the news like what celebrity just bought an NFT or what big brand just bought land in the metaverse or you know like it's definitely bubbling up in mainstream media fairly quickly now.

Yeah.

And you're seeing more and more like Twitch streamers and those types of people jump over to these types of games because now they can double dip. Right. You can earn based on people watching your Twitch streams and that's going to be such a huge thing and you get to earn from your assets that you're playing with in the game.

Just wait for. Yeah, I mean you're going to see this on YouTube so much more and tw on Twitter and probably Any other channel too. Maybe even Instagram. I don't know. It's all gonna, like, wherever these creators are hanging out and the ones that are especially interested in gaming, but also just like new stuff, NFTs. I mean, like you said, celebrities are just talking about it. They're getting involved, but like, they're only getting involved in the. In the Bored Ape yacht clubs or like the branding kind of things. But what we're already seeing.

Unless you're Snoop Dogg.

Unless you Snoop Dog. That's what I was getting at. But then there's really smart ones like Snoop or even, you know, Tom Brady.

Yeah.

He just retired. And then the same day he talked about how him and some other folks are excited to grow an NFT company.

Yeah, him and Tony Hawk are in on it. It's called Autograph.

Yeah. So he's like, come on, how many more hints do we need that this stuff. And it's really, if you think about it, the stuff is connected. Games are connected, NFTs are connected, people are connected. Money, Metaverse and all these different ecosystems that then be interoperable. They can start like, they basically are integrated with each other, where your separate games and stuff really don't play that way. But that's the whole point of this space, is to do that.

Well, I think we're getting to a place where people will legitimately have a second life in the metaverse. Right. They earn their income in the metaverse. They have jobs in the metaverse.

Don't be scared of it. It's okay. I know it sounds weird to me.

It's the ultimate freedom. You work from wherever you want in the world to do it. As long as you have an Internet connection, you could put in the hours you want. The more hours you put in, the more you could potentially earn. The less hours, you know, the more lifestyle freedom you create for yourself. It's totally up to the players how much or little they want to put into this kind of thing. But I think people will have this second life in the metaverse where people are going to build businesses, people are going to have careers, people are going to be like, oh, I build, you know, I build slides for people in the metaverse. And that's my role. I build characters for people to use in the metaverse. That's my, my role in here.

So, yeah, what you're describing, which I'm looking at our outline, Matt, like, we've actually done really well. You said we're off topic.

I know we're on topic. I know we're off flow.

Oh no, actually we're right on flow.

We're even in order.

Wow, we were in order, Matt, come on. So what you're describing though is the blue ocean, the fact that this is not infested by great whites and blood everywhere in the waters. Like you're able to as a service provider, as a marketer, as a developer, as a creative, as a frickin someone off the street that has never had a job before and you just want to reach out to a project on Twitter and say, hey, I could do this for you. There's a place for you. And that's what we're noticing is like there's so many gaps right now, especially if you have some industry knowledge or maybe experience and like how to bring marketing skills, how to help creators, how to run paid ads. There's a lot of these things that are just like almost so basic that a lot of these projects are not doing right now. And that's value. Now you can become like a value add investor or you just get paid in it. Straight up. Up. The world's yours.

We did make an episode not too long ago where we talked about the opportunity in Web3, right. We talked about how Web3 still lacks marketing, right? They've got a lot of great devs, there's a lot of capital funding flooding to that space. There's a lot of creators creating content around it, which is kind of the best marketing they've got right now. But there's really not Many in the Web3 space using a lot of the traditional digital marketing stuff that we used to Talk about, the SEO, the Facebook ads, the Google Ads, the YouTube ads, the email email list building and email marketing lead magnets using traditional copywriting skills to write the copy for their sales pages and white papers. And so I think what we're kind of suggesting here is that if you've been in the digital marketing world for so long and you've learned these skills, maybe you have a skill of funnel building or a skill of email marketing or a skill with Facebook ads. Well, that kind of stuff is needed over here and we think the opportunities in gaming, but all of the things that are being built in Web3 seem to need that marketing. We've just decided, decided let's take this skill set we've built up over the last, you know, decade plus two years and apply it to gaming specifically because A, we like games, we grew up as gamers ourselves, games are exciting to us. B, we see it as potentially the biggest industry in the world in the coming Years here and C. And it's fun. It's fun. And that literally is fun. They need it. That's where the biggest gap is right now, is they just need attention.

What's really cool with what we've done and it's just why it was so important for us in January to take that month off. And we planned for it before we even knew what the hell we were gonna do. But calling back to Nick Peterson once more, and I thanked him on the last episode for basically doing Nick Smiths which if you haven't done that, I mean he provided a link last week. You could find it in the Discord. We'll probably link it up in the show notes. Go do Nick Smith. It's free and it's worth thousands or more, whatever you want to put a value on it. But it's an in depth thing. It's worth it. In our Discord. There's a lot of folks in there that are saying like, holy crap, I'm about to go redo it. You are too, actually. Well, you haven't done it yet. Tomorrow.

Yeah, I'm going to do it for the first time.

Yeah. But point being is, he stresses, keep open loops, keep things open as much as you can in your life. Don't try to fill the gap or the loop in whatever it is you're trying to do. I feel like that's what we did in January. You and I created a big open space of not requiring ourselves to record any, anything. And it's like we had this time to collaborate with new people. We had conversations galore. Like I don't like our. The fact that we weren't recording. Just basically said we had a shit ton of calls. Like almost every single day. It was like a four hour call at a time. It'll be three two hour calls or something. I mean like we kind of opened up space for the impossible, like the, the unknown, I guess, to come in. And we got connected to some really interesting people over the last month and more. But like, we don't need to go down through all that list right now. But we'll definitely be introducing some of these folks on the show over the weeks and months to come as this thing develops. But like we're bringing some of the. Their friends, but also friends of friends all together. And we all have these different skill sets and it's fucking crazy because it's like we got the marketing cover, we have production, we have directing, we have like full level, we have, we have KOLs, which will describe key opinion leaders.

In my opinion, aka influencers. It's basically the rebranding of the word influencer, in my opinion, but.

Well, your opinion's correct. It's pretty much the same, but, yeah, you'll hear that term. Probably. Kol Key opinion.

That's cool.

Yeah. Call. Call.

That's call.

That's call. That doesn't sound right. So all this is to say is like, this gap and thanking Nick for this as well. That's what I mean by these open loops. That's what we've done for ourselves and we did for our business by shaving off a lot of the stuff that we just felt like didn't have legs for us, maybe for other people, like pod hacker. And Adam's taking it over. So if you're a pod hacker guest, go freaking. Or a member, go check out that.

Speaking into what you're saying. One of the things I remember Angelo told me from Alpha Hippie. He's been on the show a couple times now. Him and I did some coaching work together, and he was coaching me through some stuff, and he said something to me that stuck with me that was, you know, you spend too much time trying to figure out the how, where. If you know the what and the why, the how kind of figures itself out. So figure out the what and the why first and really hone in on that, and then the how will take care of itself. And I feel like that was the position we put ourselves in at the end of 2021 is okay, we know where we want to go. We sort of see the vision, we see the what, we know the why. Now we gotta fill these gaps. And then in the month of January, when we took the. When we had that free space of not recording all the time, not putting out new content or not, well, we were putting out content, not creating new content all the time. It created that white space for the how to present itself.

Yeah, 100%. So it's like, if there's any advice or if there's any. Like, if you're listening and you're like, wow, I haven't figured out this problem in my life, or I hate doing what I'm doing. Start to figure out how to dig yourself out of that. Sometimes the right move is to just quit what you're doing, obviously have a plan and figure out. Not advice. But, like, do you. But at the same time know that when you do some scary shit, like shut down something that you just don't feel anymore, you feel like. I don't know, like, for us, like, we're still getting a bunch of friends connecting us for the podcast and all that. Like, hey, you'd. You should have this person on. It's so cool. And they're great people, but we're like, that's not what we're doing anymore. Like, it's not lighting us up, up. Sorry. Well, not saying sorry, but we've moved and that's okay. It's just part of life. Our interest has moved. And if yours has moved, maybe it's not to this space, but something creates some open space, it's going to do wonders in some way. Who knows how? But I know we kept an open loop on this. Yeah.

So we were talking about how, let's say a place like the Philippines, Axie Infinity, has gotten really, really popular over there. In fact, there's a documentary on YouTube if we can find find it, we'll link it up in the show notes of this episode. But there's a documentary on YouTube that really breaks down the whole industry that's sort of sprouted up in the Philippines around this game, Axie Infinity. Now in the Philippines, the amount that the average person makes in the Philippines is a lot lower than what they would make in the US and these assets, these Axies, these in game characters, are fairly expensive relative to like the income they would make over there. So how are these people getting involved in Axie and building careers and making an income on it when a big majority of them can't actually afford to buy the Axies themselves? And that right there is kind of the problem that we decided that we're going to start working on a new business to solve. And a big piece of hard fork gaming is around this concept of a guild. And I know this is the first time we've mentioned the term guild on the show, even on this episode, but this guild concept is really kind of the rabbit hole that we're going down. And what a guild is. We can own assets, right? Let's say Axie Infinity, you have these little characters called Axies. Kind of think of them as like Pokemon, right? You have these Pokemon, you have to have three of them to play in the game. You go battle other people's little Axies and you get earnings and rewards for battling these Axies, right? Well, as a company, we can go and buy a whole bunch of Axies. Let's say we could go and own 100 different Axies and then, then we can lend them to other players and then the players split whatever rewards they get from playing with our company.

Right?

That's the Concept of a guild is you have an investor who goes and buys the in game assets and owns them, and then they rent those in game assets out to players who want to play the game. And then the rewards that are made are split and the percentages are all kind of negotiable between the player, which in this case they typically call a scholar, and the asset owner. So it might be 50, 50. The player goes and plays a whole bunch of time and makes 50 bucks in a month. Well, $25 goes to the holder of the asset who owns the asset, and 25 goes to the person who spent the time playing. And that's this guild concept, this scholarship concept. And a big direction that we're moving in is building out a guild. So we'll own these in game assets and then people that want to go and play these games can then go and essentially borrow those. That's from us. And it's passive income to our business and to them. They get to go play video games for a living. And that's a guild.

That's it. And see, so. And then we go back to the stats that we talked about earlier and how there's such a. There's this just massive amount of people out there that are interested in games. And then obviously there's a massive amount of people that want to earn more money in whatever they're doing in the world. And I would say with COVID around with just uncertainty in general financial situations of the markets and whatnot, like across the world, I think it, it just heightens the demand even more. So, so then you look at a lot of countries like the Philippines, Southeast Asia, Latin America, you hear just. I think India as well is starting, you're starting to see, come up on the map on play to earn demand is a lot of these folks are going to need assistance to get into these ecosystems because it's just not feasible for a lot of folks. And right now there's a lot of guilds out there. Like, so if you look at these areas, there's like, I think about 4,000 plus guilds in just the Philippines alone. But you know, when we're talking that, you know, it's a guild of maybe, you know, eight people in there and one person fronted the money, let's say, you know, like. And then it gets. Gives people access to this and then they split revenue. That's like probably the simplest guilds out there. What we're doing is bigger than that. What we want to do is like, that's what we envision. We don't need to go in all the details here, but it's exciting and we're definitely going to be documenting how like what we learn and what we're doing across the. I mean you're just going to see it. Follow us on Twitter.

Yeah, well, I mean anybody, anybody listening can do this on a smaller scale. If you've got the, if you've got capital to go and buy NFTs, you can buy NFTs for games. Like, I mean I'll just list off some of the games that you can do this with right now. So Axie Infinity is the, is the sort of 100 pound gorilla right there? Yeah, thousand pound gorilla. Hundred pound gorilla would be a light gorilla actually. Yeah, 1000 pound gorilla in the room. You know they're the biggest. But then there's games like Thetan arena. You can go and buy characters, characters in Thetan arena and rent those out to other people. There's a game called Pegaxi which is like horse racing, but you're racing robot. Pegasi.

Pegasi.

Pegasi. You can go and own some of those horses and rent those out to people. There's a game that I play called Crypto Raiders where you can actually buy these little characters that do these dungeon runs and you can actually rent those out to people and have scholars and guilds in that game. They have a maximum of only, I think you can only rent out 10 of them, but they've got that in their game.

There's a lot of games in general being built with this infrastructure in mind. I've been chatting with some that aren't released yet and almost all of them, I can't say that, but a lot of them, the ones that see the vision, they're actually building out marketplaces inside of their games. So you can do this as an individual user and it actually helps manage the payment process, the rental process you can buy right there. It's a full on marketplace. And what I'm starting to see in these, literally I'm just chatting with the developer team, no one really sees this stuff is that that is a trend that's coming up.

Yeah, all the games now want to build mechanisms into the game that help manage guilds because they know it attracts players to the game. And so I think that's going to be a trend that you just see ramp up and ramp up. But you know, I like to compare it to real estate on a micro scale.

Right.

Because like when you look at like something like real estate, you can go and buy a house, right. And let's just say you buy this house, and just for easy numbers, it's $100,000 to buy this house, and you can get rent off of that house for, let's just say, $2,000 a month. Right. Based on that, you actually break even after 50 months. And then anything after 50 months, you're now in profit on, you know, forever, as long as that house is getting rented out. And then you also have capital gains on that house where the value of the house goes up. So when you go to sell the house, maybe the house is now worth 200,000. So you earned all of that rental income along the way, but you actually didn't necessarily lose any of that original capital. Right. That original capital was just locked up in the house, and you sold it, and you actually got a profit on that as well. The same opportunity exists at a much smaller scale at NFTs. I can go and buy, for instance, one of these Pegaxi horses, and it's gonna cost me, let's say, $2,000. Well, I can go and rent out this horse for $50 a day for players. So that would come out to what is that, a thousand day? I don't know. I don't want to do math. I wouldn't be a thousand days. But I think it breaks even within, like, a couple months.

Right? It breaks even in 40 days.

It's 40 days. All right, so a month and a couple weeks, you actually make all of your money back on the investment from people who rented your horse from you. And the value of your horse will probably stay the same, if not go up.

It's been going up in value. They've been going up for the last week or two. It's like, It's. It's almost $1,000 up, just.

Yeah.

Which is crazy if you think about it. The crypto market's been going down and all that, so this is separate, but go on. Sorry.

Yeah, yeah. So like back to, like, the rental property analogy. You buy it for $2,000, you rent it out for, let's say, $50 a day. Forty days later, it's paid back. And then anything after 40 days on that horse is just pure rental income, property, passive income. Right. And the value of that horse goes up over time. So, yeah, to me, it's like a micro scale of what you see in something like real estate investing.

I think you're right. Yeah. And that's a hell of an analogy. And it actually goes into something we wrote and talked about yesterday, which is like this win, win, win thing going on across the board. And we're talking about guilds again in this mix where basically gamers are going to earn money while the owners of the assets. Assets. Are earning the money on their assets. So we wrote this thing down to. This is actually a line directly from Matt's mouth yesterday. So I'll read it because it's only fitting. We called it the Everyone wins triad title and works TM investors.

How is it in the works and trademark?

I don't know. At the same time. Think about it. It's Metaverse, bro. There's a different kind of trademark.

Just kidding.

I don't know. Investors get to earn off of their assets they are invested in. Gamers earn from the games and developers earn because guilds are bringing them more players to their games. So it's this kind of crazy thing that works right now. That's what the economy looks like in these spaces. That's where the demand is, what the needs are there. And people are willing to invest their time or money just a lot into this space. Rightly so, because the trends, the stat, like the numbers don't lie. Yeah, we'll see how it plays out. But it looks pretty dang interesting. So that's where Matt and I have been thinking a lot lately. And we're thinking of like, man, it's just such a cool way to give back in a bigger way as well and have a bigger purpose and meaning behind everything we've been doing. And if you've been listening for any amount of time on this podcast, you would hear our mentions of a North Star. You'd hear our mentions of like, man, we just want to do something bigger than sell info.

Products too.

A limited amount of people. That's why we always wanted to make content free. Like, that was always our push to even start this podcast. That was the whole reason five plus years ago, whatever it was now. And yeah, I feel like this is the ultimate way to even win. Bigger than we've ever imagined. And we gotta credit people on our team to basically open our eyes to like, hey, hey, boys. Hey, hey, you got something special here. And with the right people in the mix and the brains and the belief of it all, all you can make it happen. Yeah. So go do it.

For sure. And I think, you know, we did sort of dance around on this episode a bit and you know, I think Dumbledore, I didn't dance. I don't know. You kind of look like you had to pee for a second there, but stretch my back.

Okay. Yeah.

So we jumped around a bit on this episode because I think we're kind of brain dumping everything about why we're so excited about gaming in the web3 space. But I think over future episodes, we're going to bring on guest experts who are operating in the gaming space and have them break down more foundational levels and the financial side of it. Because I think one thing we didn't break down on this episode and is probably a little too complex to break down on this episode is, okay, so if you play these games and by playing the games you earn money, well, where is the money coming from that you're earning by playing the games? And to be honest, every game kind of has different sort of economics behind it and different ways that they achieve that. Some games that are out there right now have some Ponzi ish elements to them. Right. So there is some of that kind of stuff that I think needs to be broken down a little bit. And that's the type of stuff that we're going to bring on guest experts and the people building the foundational layers underneath a lot of what we're talking about. Those are the types of guests we want to bring on the show so that we can just help further solidify in our own minds how this works, but also help anybody that's listening wanting to go down these rabbit holes with us. That's, you know, we want to bring that information to you guys as well.

I like that. And we're going to do that in a variety of ways, too. Not just the podcast, but we're emailing. Email is the thing that we're getting back into. You'll see some changes there. I don't think we announce anything now, but just keep an eye on your email if you're subscribed. If you're not, go find your way onto our list somehow. Go to evergreenprofits.com guarantee you'll find it on one of those blog posts somewhere. Yeah. And go join us on the discord@hustleandflowchart.com Discord. You'll definitely hear about it there. I mean, that's the place to be if you, if you're at all interested, if you're still here listening. Yeah, you listening? Go to the Discord. It's free. It's something new if you haven't done Discord. But it's worth learning because there's a lot of cool people in there.

And if you go down this rabbit hole deeper and deeper, everybody's on either Discord or Telegram. All of these conversations that you might have with game companies or investors or things like that. They spend their time in Discord and Telegram, those two specific areas which are two apps that I don't think either of us really ever used until a about four months ago.

And I'm finding out that Discord a lot more gamers and there's a lot of NFT projects on there that's kind of like where that subset of people live. And then Telegram is a lot more of the investors and you know, other creators are on there and stuff. I mean there's a blend obviously but it seems like that's kind of the parties of how they operate. So yeah, we find ourselves in there.

And hence why you don't see us in Facebook groups or Instagram or that kind of stuff as often as we used to be. It's because. Because this is where we spend our time. Because this is where the community exists that we're talking to all the time now.

And what up, Jasper? Bram? Jasper. Sorry, did he just say something in the Discord? Yeah, I just saw the notification like from Discord and he was just sharing some cool video. I mean, I don't know, it's just like cool people like him. There's Ryan Carruthers. There's so many names from Steak Farm. Steak Farm. Yep, that's him.

Dwayne Moffatt.

Dwayne Moffat. I mean I don't want to start naming more people because then I feel like we're just going to start leaving people house. So we'll get tears. We don't want to have. We don't want to start the waterworks here for everyone but oh, check out hardforkgaming.com go check that out. It's a work in progress.

It's a very, very basic website for right now but it's getting built out and more and more details about what we're building will be available on that site.

Yeah. So if you want to see how this guild thing is turning out but really just the media company we're building in this space, you're going to see a lot of it show up there and you're can kind of follow along obviously Twitter like we mentioned, you know how to find us. There you go. Anything else?

Matt Rwolfe on Twitter Joe Fear on Twitter Hardfork Gaming on Twitter.

That's it.

Those are the places. If you're still enjoying this show, leave us subscribe a like actually, you know, the best thing you can actually do if you're enjoying these shows. The thing that we would appreciate more than anything is if you shared it with somebody else.

That is absolutely true.

I like reviews. I don't care that much.

Yeah. You know, we read them.

We do read them.

We love them. We don't give us get as many as we. I mean it's just tough to ask for. I mean that's, that's. But sharing. I mean now you're helping a friend.

Yeah, you're helping a friend and you're helping us. It's. It's a win win.

You're.

You're providing value. So they're going to thank you. They're getting value and we're getting value because we get one more download on an episode. So.

That's right. Yeah. So go do your thing and go chat with us somewhere. Find us and Discord is where you find us.

Go fight us somewhere. As long as it's Discord. Or Twitter.

Or Twitter. We don't want to search too hard.

Alrighty, guys. Thanks for girls and everybody in between. Thanks so much for tuning in. Appreciate you all.

Much love. Wag me.

Sam.