And do me okay. Let's go
Hey everybody welcome to a hashing it out personal's episode
You know me I'm your host one of the hosts the aka blacks were done aka for a ladi
aka double seven point five all verified names
Today we have a guest special guests
Dr. Andy Boyan
GPP turned
elevated past GPP
founder
CEO president
Puzzle creator extraordinaire leader over at infinity keys
Father
husband
Has better hair than you?
Andy and Dr. Andy Boyan
Welcome to the hashing out person. Thank you for having me on I am super happy to be here
Known you guys for ages and ages now and so
It's great great to hang out and chat a little bit about what we got going on
Very nice and ages is true because the one regular
Year is like 17 years in crypto right like it's like dog years. Yeah, we've been through some times
That's for sure at 2019 session was
rough
and rough
It's not a pleasant but you know good company to make it through and I think most of us are still around
But you suck through it, you know, you suck through the I mean living in crypto is kind of like I don't know
Like one day you have a bed the next day you're sleeping on cactus
the next day you have a luxurious bed and
The day after that you're sleeping on nails like this is very up-sea down-sea. I had a fortunate
Occurrence happen and so when I got into crypto
I was looking for use cases and so I came in in 2017 when the money got hot
Like I came in right before so I saw $20 turn into $100 fast and so so whoa that was fast
Well, why did that happen?
And then I just started digging in and learned about smart contract use cases pretty quick through Laura Shins podcast
And I was like there's knowledge here. I need to find every other podcast and so I did I went endless to every single crypto podcast
Which included the Bitcoin podcast which was very shortly thereafter also hashing it out and
Then you guys had a slack and so I joined the slack and getting plugged in there
With a group of people who are not only concerned with the financial aspects
the financial aspects are a
Reason why stuff people are incentivized to do these interesting things that keep things secure and balanced
Having that as like a foothold just cemented where I was and so I was fortunate to find the community that we have and the people that are still in there
whether they're newer or older
Folks who have been around that that's why I'm still here
It's because of you guys and what you guys built and the people that are that are still in there today
Yeah, man. We we're slow grow in a community in crypto. We're hoping that we get our own
Corner real estate in crypto and in the slack if you guys this is a good time hold away second join the slack
Come join us. You can have conversations with the likes of myself
Cory jesse
Christian
Everybody else in the slack that's doing great things right at this point we have like founders in there builders in there
Investors in there. There's a whole slew of people in there, but anyway, move people there. There's a progression where people move from enthusiasts
to investors to technologists
To founders like like it's very clear
And there's like you know these kind of cohorts that have gone through and you kind of see where people are in their journey
And it's it's it's cool to see and like it feels like a force like regardless of how many people are in there
Doesn't matter. It's about like quality of people people are in there doing really interesting things and have for for years and years
so
the slackman
let's uh
let's keep it personal. Let's
Let's go back to like what were you doing?
on the daily before crypto creeped into your psyche
And started to kidnap all of your brain cells like what was it? It was the daily life of dr. Boy
So I was a professor had a small private liberal arts college and for
nine years and uh
I researched and taught about new media phenomena
And mainly video game mechanics. So when I when I started
uh graduate school, I did because
I was kind of good at it and I wasn't good at other stuff. And so like let's just keep going to school
Um, but but in particular
There was one scholar who knew what he was talking about with video when it came to video games and effects and at the time
People were really interested in video game violence
And so they would say these scientists would look at mortal combat
And say okay. There's blood there and murder that must be what kids are learning and then that's determined the entire
Perfect um community for for 10 years and which was
Stupid it was it's just totally asinine
Um for anybody who's played a video game. That's not how you learn and that's not what you learn is like
How do I rip someone's spine out? That's not like
That what were you're learning? You're learning the button combinations, right?
Like how do I do this in the right time to get my thing over? So then sub zero on the screen will do this hilarious disgusting thing
um
And it was so clear to me like
that people are learning other stuff besides what the content on the screen and so that that's what I went to school for is to
Um try and explain that and try and study that and I was fortunate enough to find a mentor who
Was all about it and supported it and had some really interesting ideas of his own
Uh, and so that's what I studied is game mechanics
Um when I played world of warcraft, I still don't know the character's names or like the story
I know some of them, but like I never paid attention to that stuff
I paid attention to the mechanics like the shot rotation and mana efficiency and and like, you know
All the all the mechanics the stuff behind the game that actually the stuff that you do
Um when I played tech in I played tech in three and anybody want to step to me. I will still play tech in three
Like I still remember
I will take that challenge. We can play some tech in and I will lose but
I will hit you at least twice with brian firi. That's it. That's all I got. Yeah, sorry brian fiers a little slow
But he's gonna
Wait, wait a second. Why'd you make that face like oh this
This bitch uses brian firi. No brian. That's good. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine
It's not the most technical, but that's okay. No, you don't need technical for every way
Anyways, it doesn't matter
But like I still remember combos and I haven't played that game for 10 years
And that's because I didn't learn how to do moi tie with brian firi
I learned the mechanics of the game. What's the hitbox? You know, how do these things work?
So that's what kind of got me down the path of understanding
Technology systems. I was interested in like what makes these systems work. Why do people?
What do people learn when they do them?
What happens when people push the boundaries of those
And that's what you know a lot of my research
And teaching career was also about because because if you take that the step beyond video games and you say okay
New social media systems. How do we understand those?
Well, to me the answer was like well
Let's look at the mechanics of the system and see what it allows you to do and see what it encourages and discourages and etc
So you can look at twitter and youtube and all those things that came out when I was in grad school
Um, which dates me significantly, but hey, that's it
Um, but that that's what I studied. That's what I was interested in and so when crypto popped up
Well, well, I got tenure is what happened and so I could look at whatever I wanted
You can start looking for weird stuff when you get tenure
Um
But so when I looked at uh augments reality and virtual reality and big data and you know, it's all interesting new technology
But all right, what's this bitcoin thing? I gotta find out about it
That's what really pulled me in is like, well, what are the features of the system?
Um, why do the incentives work?
How is the system built in a way for people to use it?
Um, so not down to the code level. I'm not that technical, but understanding how systems work
Um, it was really a force for change in my life like
You know to take that from gaming and digital media systems to economic systems
Well, that's a whole new game
Um, yeah, but that's how I got where I where I was going
Way to think of anything. So you threw tenure to the wayside
To go down the crypto rap at all
That did come up with in a conversation with my provost. Yes. He was like, you know
Basically can't fire you and I was like, yeah, I know
But uh, but I can't quit and I'm just damn dude
That's that is uh, that's strong. Let's just draw on statement. I have some comments
Or some questions. The first is
Do you remember your worst student as a professor and the most stringent feedback you had to give them
Uh, and you can name names because the world needs to know where that person is. So, um, bad students are great
Bad students guy
Bad students make you work for it and they want to challenge you and they're not doing this or doing that for some reason
And so so uh, that student is a weird thing
That the worst students are apathetic students who don't care and don't show up and I don't remember they didn't care they didn't show up and so
I'll invest in you what you invest in me and so so so I don't have a good answer to that question
I do remember giving people life advice in college as a professor and advisor and after like when i've gone back and spoken to
Um college students, which is just care about something
Care about it a lot and whatever that is if you care about it a lot and really put forth the effort
It'll pay dividends that that's what that that's how to make it worth it
Is just find something to care about and if you don't know what you care about
Then go figure it out like that's your job in college in particular
And we've had this conversation with with friends as well because dr. Corey peti and I have
Kind of a good history in academia and some really positive experiences
So some people come through the slack and they're like college sucks. It's not worth it. It's all scam like well
It's what you make of it. And so that's my advice is yeah if you're a bad student and you don't care about anything like
Try how about that? How about you try something and put forth honest genuine effort
Um and then see and and sometimes that takes a long time like it's not an easy process of finding
What fits your vibe or or you know speaks to your soul or whatever it happens to be but that's it's pretty critical
Um to living a life in general not just succeeding at college, but like what are you gonna care about?
Nice
No bad students. I'd like to give a special shout out to my fourth grade teacher miss bogey
Now I got bad grades in college. I'm not like some four-point idea leaguer
I went to state schools, you know
I skated by with just above a three-point in high school to make sure I could get into a college
First two year I flunked out of my first college because of extracurricular
herbal activities
attacking
Um, I was not a good student, but you know
I had enough life experiences in college where I left for a little while I took a break and realized like
I want to go do this and do it properly
I was a bad student. Yeah, I'm talking about
Me both and people um
So I guess an obvious question and this question is coming from the audience
uh, why not game development? I mean you
You got all this history you got all this passion towards games
You know the mechanics you were going for hit boxes, which if we play fighting games the other than I found out you're researching hit boxes
I I would be upset with you up. This guy this this fucking guy, but anyways, why not game development?
Crypto had such a whole that you you just were like now. I'm gonna take all this passion
All this research and I'm going that way with it
um
So there are
There's many jobs in the world and there's many fits for different people and learning your own brain and what it needs and how it works is really critical and
uh, one of my greatest weaknesses is
attention to
hyper precise grammatic detail. I'm not graded
To see a tweet come out on my official account on the infinity keys account once a while a little typo in it that happens
Um and to be a developer really and especially at the time like in the 90s and early hot
You had to learn the grammar and the language and be so precise and it was this like smash your head against the wall and learn it
Um sort of thing
Uh, I'm just not very good at it. So those first levels like they didn't inspire me
And you hear these great stories of people who become great engineers
They're like well, I had a problem. I wanted to solve it
So I had to learn this thing to do to solve the problem
I never had that problem. There was never a problem that I needed to solve with software
Instead the problems that I wanted to solve were um, they were creative problems
How do I get people to come along on a journey with me?
And the answer was telling stories
That's what it was and so so you know, uh, you can hook people with stories and you can hook people with games and games like inspire imagination
I didn't need to build that I could tell that story. I duncheon mastered
So I dm because I can use this and I that's like oh man
That speaks to my soul right there creating a world and getting people to play along and do that sort of thing
So when it came down to do I want to build games the answer's yes, but I don't want to
You know create the bricks, um and that sort of thing plus, you know, the more the more you work in that space
What I learned is game development? Um
A lot of it turns out especially the major studios turns out to be
Um
What's the word like getting your chops now like getting your street crit working through the shit part
Sucks real bad like game dev is a factory and you've got to really put in the time and be good to work your way up
Um, whereas I was creative and I could write and I could think and so
Asking the questions and having interesting answers as an academic that that made a lot of sense to me and it was very enriching
as well, so
I mean, it's not like I never made games. I made games. I didn't develop games
Um, and I think there's you know a subtle difference there
Um, but you know board games make your own board games make your own dnd games make games with my kids
Like we just play games all the time. They're not formal. They're not created. They're not published, but it's still making games
I've a very loose definition of things like what is a gamer?
Um, you know when we came up being a gamer meant a particular thing you would spend
24 hour sessions doing starcraft you would do
uh ball runs you would grind right you would play your
Diablo to max your Diablo character or whatever it was
um and that
That's what I thought I was for a while, but then like like I really I became a father and I didn't have time for it
But I knew I saw a gamer
And like like now I play games every day, but I play wordle every day and it does not take me hours
I don't need to grind I do it once a day. It takes me five minutes and
I am like still a gamer because I play casual games
And I realized like a lot of the conversation about like what's a gamer
Was meant to be exclusion or isn't meant to exclude people like playing solitaire and solitaire's game
Um, bousalitares an awesome game. It's it's stood the test of time. It's fantastic chess. Those are gamers
Crossword puzzles should do it in the paper like people are gamers and they get their fix
Four games in different way and and part of the reason I came to this conclusion is the evolutionary history of play
Play is a cross species
Phenomenon. It's not a human phenomenon animals play fish play like it's it's a really weird phenomenon
Because of the way it works in our evolutionary history. It doesn't mean you have to like be super dedicated and grind in this one particular way
Um, so uh gaming. Why am I not a game developer? I am I did I went down that path not computer programming
But I am making games and I have been for ever ages
There's it's very interesting you mentioned that and I've even I've kind of leveraged that phenomenon you called it in my own life
I used to give these um
Seminars. I think this is what we called them the company I work with and I mine that I made was entitled the gamification of the day to day
and I challenge those
Mid-level managers to gamify the days for their teams that weren't quite being as productive as they knew they could you know
We know we can get
25 widgets an hour, but we're only getting 10 just gamify it say man. I bet if you get 20
Today, I'll buy you lunch. I bet you can't get 20. It's a simple game
But if you got people on your team with the merit, they're just gonna buy into that and they're gonna be like I
I bet you I can I'll get 20 right so um, but anyways, it's very phenomenal interesting around what you talk about
Anyways, that's the key man. That's it. How do we gamify?
Experiences so that that they're authentic and they help motivate people
We're in the business like if I can turn this to crypto. We're in the industry of incentives
Everything works because of incentives and how many kinds of incentives do we have? We have two
We have bribery. We get paid to do stuff and that's an important incentive. I need to get paid
I gotta
Kids got braces like all that stuff. The other one is a regulatory incentives. We don't want to get arrested
right like oh, um, not gonna do a token sale because
I gotta go through all these loopholes and you know all these hoops and things like that
So I I think there's two kind of core incentives, but there's a lot more
That we can tap into and highlight and feature
so um
Games are one of them games and playing games and having that sort of challenge and overcoming things
That is an incentive that humans have relied on for a very long time and a web to and in in in video games
there's lots of um
I see petties chat pop and I'm trying to ignore them so I can focus on what I'm saying
um
Stop it that it questions for the audience or flying in
But but but gamification is at least one more incentive that we can now leverage and one thing
We know about crypto is people like to play games with and they like to optimize and that's a game sort of thing
They like to give themselves challenges. They like to compete
There's a lot of different sort of elements of of gaming and gamification that we can use
to bring forth other kinds of behaviors in people and maybe rely a little bit less on pure incentive
financial incentive behaviors
So I think that
I think it's very interesting to see your journey because you know you mentioned earlier in
This show like you you joined the slag. I think you met kori and like at a conference and then you joined the slag and
It's just been interesting this year development. I want to get the audience
In tune a little bit more with that development. So didn't you start like I guess your crypto career
For that in quotation that was chain link, right?
now that wasn't start that was that's like
my start was uh, I worked for this fin tech and they were gonna um
Do uh some crypto play this was you know 2018
and
And so I was helping them with a white paper and helping them structure like how to explain crypto to banking partners and stuff like that
And so I worked for them for a while as crypto tanked in 2018 and I stopped we stopped doing crypto at all
They that'd be in the whole thing, but I just worked for them. I did this the
public sector and so like
um
Yeah, I we're working with mastercard and department of education and all sorts of like these big clients sort of things
but then
Went up. I was still into crypto and I was doing it on the side a bunch
And then eventually I worked for status. So that's how I I think I knew I did petty before that
Um, but there was an opening for marketing and so I was like well, I can do this part time while I do my job
And so I did and that job was
status
Had released their mobile app and they needed
Someone to write um blog posts and and social and and do these sorts of things about like how to use
apps decentralized apps in the status browser. So this was like late 2019 early 2020 and
um
Defi hadn't blown up yet. And so like I got got in on like how to do uniswap on here and how to use all these decentralized
Protocols in the status app and stuff like that. So that was my real start in actually working
Um at a job for crypto before that shout out to my boy kin and cypher core
Um and jay who is in cypher core as well because I started freelancing for them writing about the cosmos ecosystem
Even before that that was just you know one off articles once in a while
But uh, yeah, Ken was the first guy to actually give me tokens for for work and effort there
Which is hilarious because he didn't have any money
He paid me
Yeah, I see jessie. Yeah, we we all did a little time for Ken once in a while dude deck deck i hustles
He's still a good friend. I talked to him every week. I talked to him on the regular
It's the risk reward for getting paid in tokens is so
So high so so so high. I think there's I think I have mountains of tokens that are worth
Probably the dust that I sweep off my floor every week
So I got this one that um that I kind of blanch and I held on to because you know, I don't know
You know, I just hang on to him forever and who does and and this week it goes get bonkers because of this china thing that happened
Whatever the narrative is but I can't find the keys
I don't know what i put on both of those phones since then like it's a classic case of like, uh
Like because when I came in it's like how could you miss place your bitcoin keys like how foolish are you now?
Did you ghost walk?
Yeah, I don't know where it is. You know what the do you know a ghost walk in you?
No, no what's that when you think you have or you've actually forgotten like where the private keys are
So you have to go like if like you have to go outside of your body to remember what you did the past three years of life and like where you
Could have possibly put it and then you're tagging go. I think there's one private key in particular
I thought I've lost and I had to like I swear at him like psychically connect with kori
And he like patched into me and I was like what what did I do?
And then there was one private key where I made a river riddle so hard. I can't solve it
So it's just gone. It's just money that's gone forever and I was like making everything the keys puzzle
Why did I da Vinci key myself out of my own fucking wall and like so I can't
I like I put the past phrase and then I triple uh I use one of those like uh
Those calculators that where you put in a phrase and then it'll spit out uh hash
And then so like I triple hashed it and then I put a riddle to how I could get
It was stupid because now I'm locked out of that wallet forever. I I'm never gonna find that that hash that unlocks it
but I mean I've been through that
Anyway, so how many ledgers do I got
And so I pull out the one I'm gonna log in I'm gonna do my my quick thing
I'm my pretty my hot ledger and it won't go and I bork it three times now I gotta find the seed
And then turns out it was just the wrong ledger the whole time and now
You can do that. I do that once every
Couple of years that's all it is right. Everybody does it and it's fine. You ghost walk for a second
It's not fine actually it's you know, it's a UX issue and it need to we all need to be better about it
But
If you're in crypto and you've never had to ghost walk then you're not participating quite enough
There should be a moment where you're like, oh my god. Where did the how but um anyways
So and then so you were working a little bit for kin, you know, scrapping some tokens. He's throwing your bags bags gold
Well, it wasn't just that so um the work we did they were a node operator. They still are cosmos node operator
and um
So so they wanted to write articles featuring
The projects that they staked with and learn like explain how it works
And so it was reading white papers of websites and communities and then explaining it in layman's terms as to what is this which?
aligned really perfectly with
um
Uh with my academic work because I was taking complex
Issues and then teaching them to undergraduates in simple ways so they would understand them and apply them
So it fit really nicely and I was kind of the first
Really niche place where I saw myself as a value add to the crypto ecosystem
It wasn't as a developer engineer or computer scientist, but like oh I can explain things to people
um that that they'll understand and and I still like
Kids teenagers and kids like I explain decentralized networks my kid just asked me like 10 hour ago
What what's a node operator? Was a node operator? Here we go. I was born for this. Let's go
So that that's really where I got my my foot old and then that was status too
That was the same thing. It's like how does this work?
How do we fit it together and kind of explain this use case?
um, yeah
So
Journey's going
And now it's cold my native to a point in in your timeline
Where you found yourself as a founder?
And you've created a project you've created a
a project that is guiding
the
Crypto enthusiasts
And the gamifying them towards learning about crypto that is my elevator pitch for my 10 000
Mild view of the project, but i'm gonna let you
Um elaborate on what's going on over there with infinity key
Well, I call us a gamified task reward platform
That's that's why I tell the investor so that they immediately know okay. I'm doing stuff
And I get a reward for it, but it's gamified. So i'm not just doing stuff
I'm doing gamified stuff i'm playing games and then getting stuff and it's a platform
So it's not just a game. It's a platform which means
Somebody else another project texture punks for example
They come to come to us and use infinity keys to create a side quest
And that there there is one if you have a texture punk
Go check out infinity keys. There's this quest line that's starting. There's two two challenges
And there's more coming
Where you can kind of build these sort of side things now
Um, there's a lot of reasons to do that and and that's where it gets into kind of these individual use case
And what do people want to build them for? The core reason is
It's engaging people like playing games and so we want them to be able to play games
Uh, so what happened with texture punks for example, we made this
Um, have you guys interviewed texture? You should get them on here by the way
Um
Uh, we made this little game and then the community they went and minted
The texture punks and they got involved and then they're looking for stuff to do in nft projects people start looking at floor price
They start complaining right away
And so instead of that
They all play the infinity keys game and now people are asking about keys and solving riddles and having fun and
We we see this sort of
Emergent phenomenon happen in discords where these these games are launched where people start interacting about these other sorts of things
That's what infinity keys is there's a platform to make that stuff possible
And we use web three assets when it's appropriate most of the time right now. We're using nft's and web three assets
Um
But you don't always have to um, so so that's the the core of infinity keys is how can we use games to get people to do stuff?
Which ties back to my whole original thesis and concept
Um for games research and then we just brought it over to crypto because I think crypto needs new incentive systems
And communities need stuff to do that's not just talking about the financial elements of what what is this nft or what is this token going to moon
We need smarter incentives and and smarter conversations and and we can't expect too much of people
So we gotta give them stuff to do so that's what infinity keys is therefore
It's like let's give people stuff to do and let's help people find a way to build those systems and and help them engage
Now to your point like is it an onboarding mechanism sure can be
Um absolutely it doesn't have to be but it sure can be and that's how we're positioning ourselves to a lot of projects. So
Um avagotch you were partnering with avagotch
The dau proposal has passed they're giving us funding their partner huge game. It's killer for us. We're very excited
Um, but but starting to play avagotch is actually really hard. It's pretty expensive. You gotta get agachi and it's expensive
And if you haven't gotten agachi then you can rent one but like how do you do that and which one like all that stuff is a pretty high barrier to entry
Plus it's already on polygon and it's in crypto and so like you're it takes a little while to get there
Which means they got a little problem of onboarding new users
So what we're doing for them is we're greatly simplifying the onboarding process to give people a little taste
And it's a gamified taste. It's not just do x do y do z free tokens sprinkle sprinkle magic tokens
It is it has a plot. It has art. It has story
And it's it's not crazy complex
It's a reasonably simple
But it is something that you can take a link and you can send it to your friend and say here check this out
And you can go and at least see what i'm talking about and then if you're interested you can take those next steps
That's what i'm going to use for
Get it's for the sharing
Now now here's here's where the exciting thing though
I know you got questions because you're good at that, but here's
Here's what's special about it. It's not just giving people stuff to do
It's using composable assets
Okay, so here's where crypto comes in if we use composable assets you do an achievement you earn an nft reward
Now anybody because it's a permissionless system anybody can use that reward that your players have
Can make that a requirement in their quest
So now we can we can build progressive questing but anybody can do it
And so anybody can build their own branches of questing and we can have this
like supercharged squared cubed exponential layer of
Of questing and achievements and things to do across the crypto ecosystem now to me
That's the metaverse. I don't care about 3d pixels. I don't care about minecraft looking stuff
They're cool. They're fine. They're neat
But people need stuff to do and so that's what we're really on about is let's create a system where people will come in
And have stuff to do now as a business. We're also a business and so we do
We contract with projects like avagotchii or whoever else it is and there's many that pay us to help
Create these and work on these and as we go forward
We are growing a community of builders so that we build an ecosystem
Start overused buzzword term, but seriously an ecosystem of people who like creating games and creating game assets and participate in a marketplace of ideas too
Buy and sell their ideas and let people use templates and build ever more interesting games
that's
It sounds like you're tapping into like pure 100% high concentrate engagement
Oh, yeah, which is like a very powerful word in this the year of our lord 2023
so
How's it going so far?
Give me give me give me your most exciting moment and then your medium most exciting moment and then let's leave the bad stuff out
Um
Two days after the texture launch we go to their discord because we're all in the community like that that's why we participated
We're in the community. It's cool and every channel is talking about the infinity keys puzzle
every channel we're like
Oh, okay
This is a thing and so we get together with the team and they're like, okay
We need to do more let's let's go fast and work on this and so that was like, you know, one of these moments that stood out
There's a couple that are like that
uh
People will will launch a uh-huh to challenge and people will come from another community probably nothing was another one that went very well
Their community really enjoyed it
And they and they and they get the link in the discord and they follow their their brand twitter
And so they go do it on infinity keys and then there's a couple of things to do and you make the treasure run
It's fun and then they come into our discord and they say hey did this quest what's next
Got him like that's it and so what we're also building is a leveling system and progression
That's kind of internal not kind of it's internal to infinity keys so that there's stuff to do you come into our discord and you say what's next
Okay, well now you can do these quests
And level up to level one and what's in level one? Oh, there's actually a library quest where you can go and do this
Well, what's the library quest? Well, that ties into one of these other infinity so so we've got the yeah somebody's saying gotcha
Um, but we have those hooks those gamification hooks to keep you in our ecosystem
So that you're involved and and that's that's what we try to do is get people involved get people thinking about how how do they want to make it
My golden goose
I don't know if that's the word for it
But the thing i'm looking forward to the most is when somebody who's not affiliated with a project
Like as the team comes in they're a bag holder
And they say you know what I just want to promote this
Project that I like because i'm a bag holder and I think it's cool. I'm going to make my own
That's what i'm looking for. That's the juice if any community member instead of doing a stupid meme
contest which are 90% horrible or retreat
They're so bad. You've seen them
But if any community member says okay, what can I do to help this project go make a quest
That's that's really cool. Right. That's what a platform is good for and it's not
And if you have the resource to actually make it good and make it engaging and tap into other communities
Oh, baby. Now we're talking right that that's that flywheel effect
That's that community effect that cross pollination effect that composable assets let you do even more so
That's what about that's the gene right there
And here's another cool moment. This this this dude comes in he's got a texture punk
Profile picture and you open it up and my homeboy chair he opens it up and it says here's the servers that you share with this person in discord
And it's like avagotchi
Texture punks heroes have ever more probably nothing soggy
It's like all the communities that we've worked with so this person has like been through and done all of our stuff
That's our hypothesis. That's what we think is working is
Not every person is going to do everything we put out
But enough people are going to do everything and a lot of people are going to do a lot
um and and
If you make good games if you make the games good and make it worth people coming and playing they'll do that
So that's what we're about
So hence the name infinity keys because the keys can they go on infinitely?
Because of the composability of i mean at eat
Yeah, I know people don't like to talk about metaverse anymore, but i'm like an old school
90s virtual reality research like that that's the stuff I read coming up
That's why I love the idea of metaverse, you know, I got
I got snow crash right here like I love all this stuff
um
So when I when I think about metaverse and virtual worlds there's infinite virtual worlds
Let's give people a reason to go to them
Most of the metaverse projects I see they're trying to give people a reason to stay in them
I want to give you a reason to go to hall like let let's be the tourist center, right? Let's be that quest center. Yeah
That's a very
Man, you hit a lot of good points. Just I have no and I have like no push to want to go in anyone's metaverse
metaverse however cool it may seem
The stickiness isn't there like I tried it like the what are they called the metagoggles or
The VR goggles. Yeah, they were okay. You know played all the birds in 3d. I was like look
I can touch the little red bird now. This is cute
And then I was about it like there was nothing that that kept me there's nothing keep me going with it
But anyways, I just speak for myself probably a lot of people. I love the metaverse out there. So um
Skepple there's um, I know there's a lot
so um other questions so
Now you're at infinity keys not at you are for all intents and purposes
Infinity keys is a team in a community. It's not all me, but I am this guy so modest. I am pretty involved
Um, and you obviously having some highlights coming out the gate
What is your ultimate vision? Like let's let's do one of those lame old questions
like
one year
from today
What does infinity what's going on at infinity keys? What kind of action are we seeing like how many projects or
What's the reputation that you want for infinity keys?
Like let's let's give us like a one year forecast of what your vision for infinity keys is two things. It's two side
There's one there's supply and demand. Um, so so one
Oh petty read that question because this is the answer. Okay. We're gonna
Go shed the better question. I do petty's version of the question because his version is a lot more articulate
I think I'm gonna do his version. Okay. Okay, but first I'm gonna do the first half
And then read his and that'll be in the second half because because there's two things that I see in a year
One is we're a successful business and as a successful business
Um wildly successful business if that is the case that's what we're working towards is that
Um the same way you go look okay. I'm about to do some marketing. I need to do some content marketing
I need to be good for seo. I gotta write a blog every company's got to do that crap
Okay, I got a company. I need to promote myself. I got to start on instagram. I guess we're gonna take pictures of our signage or something
Like let's do that
For challenges and quests. Hey, we're starting a business starting a promotion
What challenges what achievements over can I do? That's where I that's where I want to be
And I think there's a really good reason to do that stuff is because content marketing
Um push marketing all this sort of stuff that's based on seo and catch words. They don't it doesn't work
It's not very effective
You're throwing your money out the window and it's doing nothing
Right now the way that you get good engagement is you do experiential marketing
You build events and you build games and you do these sorts of things
But it's crazy expensive to do that it is in the millions of dollars in some cases
Or like if you put it on a conference to get people in the door and work with them. It's so
Exorbitantly expensive. It's ridiculous
So this is this is the niche right here is let's do it at way lower pricing
So that people can do virtual quests take advantage of distributed virtual
Society and still give people stuff to do and those experiences and communities to be a part of
So
That's a major goal is like let it be a no brainer for any business who comes up. You're gonna put out an album
All right, let's set up a quest because you got to do it
Let's get the games going on and let's tie it into the other albums in this
In this producer's catalog in this labels catalog or whatever it is. That's my business
Um
Sort of dream and ideals and goals and that's what i'm striving for
It makes the total sense to me if you're playing one game and getting achievements
Let's do them and all the other games and mix them all together
Um
Web to or web three put them all together and make it so so that's goal number one as a business
Just be a go to and let let's find a price point that works for people
And let's find an offering that works for people and make sure that this is successful successful in scalable business
So people can come and build what they need to with templates and tested versions and things like that
Now ask petty's question because this is part two
Oh, you're muted. Help me
Black zordon
You're muted zordon
I muted myself and then a petty question in the event of ik massive success
Uh infinity keys, of course
What emergency will for phenomenal do to see
so, um emergence is
See if I got my emergence book back here
Emergence is a really cool phenomenon that stems from complex systems
And not just complicated system, but mathematically complex systems
And what happens is is you get um so many variables and so many different like components in these systems that interact in in ways
That sometimes there are emergent phenomena that are almost unpredictable
Um depending on your math model if you get something like the weather we figured that out
But most of the other ones are pretty unpredictable still
Uh, but but stuff comes out of them that you can't quite expect
If infinity keys has success the way I suspect it is then it is ripe to become
A complex system and by that I mean if we've got um uh rewards those are like kind of assets and we've got connections between
Um quests and composability. We've got different actors and different participants people creating people solving that creates this web
This network
A layered network of composable quests and achievements for anything for games for nft projects for financial products for
Uh geolocations like just walking down the street and getting exercise attaching your watch to it
The weather the support scores anything that you can bring into a blockchain through an oracle or whatever it happens to be
We can make but like we can track and make that a composable uh not a composable
But make that um a rewardable something that you can uh use to unlock something else infinite keys
That's like this insane ecosystem for emergent phenomena to
Come about and I don't know what those are um, but that's what i'm really excited about is to
Let's see
Let's make that happen. Let's see what happens if we get these things together and make these systems flow
um
If people can talk to each other in in this language of games
Uh, I don't know it's gonna happen, but uh, I think it'll be cool to find out
You're still muted. Zordon come back. I said, yeah, man
I like to hear your um
The problem is i'm not muted in my headphones. I started talking and i'm like I just clearly don't know okay, uh
It's very fun and refreshing to see your passion because sometimes like crypto has gotten so dense
Now
It's hard to find that it's nowhere near as easy as it used to be
Finding that passion that joy and that's really refreshing to see and emergence is a hard thing to tackle
Um, I have a
Cory and I have a mutual friend who likes to study emergence in his free time trying to come up with a
mathematical formula of emergence and I was like
I don't know man. That's possible, but yeah, you know, you read john hall and john holland is uh
The kind of go to scholar. He's passed away a couple years ago, but um
about complex adaptive systems and and you know for any scientific pursuit you got a
Defying your pieces first and so that's still where complex adaptive systems are
Is there some pop versions that say it's simpler than that, but really it's it's still
Uh in a phase where you've got to really label your pieces and and the connections between them
Data science started that and big data started that but it's still
And not quite um there. It's still being developed
Which it's a cool field study because it's like this meta field that applies to every other field and things like that
But it seems so chicken chicken eggy, you know, one of those chicken egg situations that life puts you in a lot
It's like which one of these guy here first
Let's try to figure that out. And so you're gonna be there forever man. Good luck
But anyways enough about emergence and my stupid ass view
And uh, we're gonna go poll we're gonna go ask the audience again. We now have a jesse question
Uh kicking it back to the personal side of person was are you excited for one dnd and the new dnd movie?
I'm always excited for dnd movie. Uh, I'm a critical role fan. I love critical role. What I love the vox market a show
Um, I am so I'll watch I like the warcraft movie. It was bad. It was dumb. But like i'll watch i like i like whatever
Um, I think a lot of serious thoughts a lot of the time
So I just like watching dumb movies where they cast spells and bloke skeletons like I don't really care
As per dnd one I have not beta tested and I have not done the homework to see how it's different. I really like five e
Um, I came up in 2.5 and four and four was atrocious, but um
Uh, I really like five e in the way that went it simplified things and so
Um, I don't know. Maybe i'll be an old curmudgeon who wants to stick with five e but um
We'll see what what i'll try it out
Uh, so i'm still a gamer, but I don't play
competitively and I don't play like I don't always play to win
I play to find the mechanics of the system. So I play um
Marvel snap right now. It's like this little card battler
And I don't even care if I win, but um, there's a particular combination that's really hard to pull off that I figured out
Nobody else plays except for me for some reason. I've never seen anybody else do it
But I just like doing that because I want to see if I can pull it off and when I do
It's ridiculous. It's totally ridiculous and it's like resulting in breaking the game and and that sort of thing
That's how I like to play so when it comes to dnd one what i'm really interested in is like
What are the mechanics? How does it make people play? How does it lead to better storytelling or different storytelling and things like that?
So yeah, I'm excited about it. I'm always excited for a new game
Now that I think about it. Nice
You see when you come visit me, we got to pull out my eight box set of dominion that I haven't been able to touch
To board game
That is a deck building game that I fell in love with at the teller in my college career
And went hard body and bought five hundred dollars worth of this game and
Yeah, I got a few expansions
And now everyone knew I didn't know that like new people you meet in your life aren't into that
So i'm like you want to play this three hour long board game. This is really fun and compo like it's you're gonna have a blast
And they're like it's only three hours if you gotta take five minutes to read each card. Come on. Yeah, let's go
Come on. We know what the structure manual notebook that I had to make with a three hole punch and i'm like
Here's a boy. How these can be good. This is not hobby. I should say but this is um something that feeds my soul
Is I like watching how other people explain new board games?
I think it's it's really fascinating
But I love explaining board games that people haven't played before. Oh, yeah, i'm a total masochist petty
but but um
Like listening to see how people construct like what what do you do? I'm a game scholar
So I have spent a lot of time like here's how we're gonna explain this game here
How i'm gonna learn this game and things like that but but that sort of thing that's a ux issue
That's a ui problem that crypto has like how do you where do you start?
How do you explain the stuff and how to use it and what to do?
Um our private keys and our ghost walking right like like this sort of stuff is exactly like part of this
Um, you know, what are the the appendices and the rule books and how do you deal with these sorts of things?
I think it's a really fascinating exercise
So
You're knee deep in
This is an interesting question. This might be one the audience. How do you
Are you building these quests that infinity keys manually?
Or is there a set of?
Simplited requests or like how
Let's kick it a little bit back to the question of massive
I K success
And these quests are coming at a you know if in air is a your team there had infinity keys
That's like it doesn't take this quest. I'm a creator for scratch. I'm making the art
I'm doing the stuff or do you have a different process like how a little bit more is it or they're behind the scenes?
If we are successful
Anybody should be able to come and do those things
So you need to think about um
right now
We set it up
Excuse me. Somebody can come to us and say hey, I've planned out the treasure and the text and all that stuff and people do
We just had that last week somebody came and see a three page
Google doc thing. I was like, okay, we're gonna just put it up and make it happen
Um, we do a fair amount of that now because we want to make sure the product
The way the challenges are fit the product fix like that
But but that's the goal that people should be able to come
And determine here's the core things that I need to make this challenge and put that up
And there's a lot of ways to accomplish that like how do you get good art?
Well in a discord community you can set up a mid journey bot or a stable diffusion bot and and train a model to have a particular consistent art
Uh a theme paddy. I want to talk to you about that by the way
Um, and you can do the same thing for ostensibly you can do the same thing for a chat gpt
You can have sort of a theme and a specific set of parameters for
Text to come out in a particular way. So what does that look like? I'm not quite sure yet
But the intent should be people can come with text and then set it up themselves
Wizzy wig, you know a software platform to do that now if that software platform works
The reason I want to do it is so I can make whatever I want
Right and I can make multi step ones and I can put different images on there and I can link to other sites and I can embed games
And there and all those sorts of things. Um, so so that is really the intent now if you're making a game
There's a few things. Do we make every game from scratch? No, there's a few things we know from experience and testing that work really well
So first off
Make a game and then whatever you make make it two or three steps easier than it is at least
That's like thing one just dumb it down make it easier
um, and
There's a lot of good reasons for that mainly is because um
You're not making a game to find the one you're not looking for Jesus or neo or
Harry Potter. You're not looking for that person
You're making a game for people to play and people play things right?
There's many many people who play things in different ways
And guess what if you make a game that's a little bit easy and somebody beats it
They still feel pretty good. They feel smarter than you now
They feel like they've won and now you've got a great relationship
That's a huge success for our game
You want people to be able to beat your game and most people when they come in if they're not thinking about game design
They're like how do I make this nice and challenging so it's a good reward?
Uh, you kind of got to flip your thinking there
um
But but if you are making a game some things to keep in mind is
um
What is your uh, what's the payoff?
And that can be a tangible reward. You can give people tokens or you know nft or a gift or
You can give them a high five. You can level up. What's you know, there's all sorts of stuff. That's payoff
Um that you want to give people think about that and make that a part of it
What's the challenge? What are they got to do to get the payoff and thinking about?
Dark souls does go against that theory. So jesse says dark souls go against that theory
It does but it's a particular niche game and it's
It's a very very specific niche game that does well because of its meme and there's not that much room for those in the market
Not everybody can make a dark souls
Um, there's just no not enough room
Um, so so you got to have the the payoff
You got to have a challenge something to do to get the payoff and that challenge has to be balanced
And then you got to have the context the the lore surrounding that the theme
And so that's kind of what to come with the game with uh, and that we help find people people find a template
What's a good challenge to find a word for a password?
And there's a bunch of different challenges and templates that you you can apply and get people to do
Um
That's that's what we split. It's like the difference between like zalda and elton ring
Like a lot more people are probably gonna play zalda because you know
They don't like the torture that is a dark souls game
But
Anyways, not just gonna
Way more people still play breath of the wild that came out six years seven years ago or whatever it is
Compared to elton ring. I bet you for sure
Still he's you're seeing
Okay. Well
Casual games mobile games the games where you like log in and you collect your stuff and then leave
Those are the most popular games on the planet
Yeah, hard. They're not challenging you. They're not teaching you life lessons
It's farmville just now instead of back then and they hit on such huge success because they tapped into this
uh massive
demographic of people who just like to do that
I like to do them i'm a hardcore gamer. I kind of PhD in games, but you know what?
I still like collecting my gems like because that it's this, you know human sort of experience
It's still a game. Yeah, how did you might be used to I call those leg numbers because you usually playing them
Well, you know, maybe you gotta take trip to the porcelain pony
And while i'm here, I might as well collect my gems and upgrade my tent. You know, I mean the leg goes numb
Well, it's only porcelain pony. Anyways, um, let's let's let's let's get to our
Let you do our trademark questions and these questions are trademark
So if you try to bite them rest of everyone in the world, we're gonna come after your ass
Um, they're not trademarked. I'm sorry. I just wanted
Has some drama in this episode
Uh, but we did them first. So by the way, uh, the first is is there anything you feel
Uh, I should have asked you that I didn't oh man
I thought of one or before we started and I forgotten it because I got very excited
um
What is uh
So there are a lot of conversations I've had with petty that I would like to continue having with other people
Um, you know the value of academia. We kind of touched on
Um, the problems with pure review things things that are in science. Um, the potential for decentralized science like oh man
I think we should dig into that sometime, but not now now it's not not fine. Eat them very. Yeah. Yeah, we'll talk
And there's a lot of stuff like in the crypto industry
Um, like it, you know, we kind of talked about how do you get involved and things like that?
I think there's a lot of people out there who are still wondering how do I get involved and what do I do?
There's a lot of potential there
We don't have to talk about that now
I got time
Hit me in the slack
This question, although not a trademark question is a question
Uh covering that I should have asked earlier. Uh, did you keep your tomagotchi alive?
No, um, but I like way more people than you would imagine
um
gruesomely murdered sims
Many people plan to see like what can I do with these people?
And this is a
Well studied phenomenon that people now are talking about but didn't at the time be like what happens if I just like
Let people go swimming and then take out all the letters
There's rings of
The torture that people people go through the easiest one
Besides this swimming pool is um, you build a house with no doors and you take off toilets
And it turns into this horror fast, and I don't know what the the state of the game is man
I can assume to what do you do into these fake people?
No, no, this is a well-established phone. I'm you take boundaries of the game mechanics of the game
What does it let you do what happens like that?
That's all you're sorry stuff
On roller coaster tycoon. I used to build the inclines with no decline
So they just kind of shot off the rail and exploded
But you know, I was still making money so my park was dope. So it doesn't matter
You know the other trademark question is as the founder of infinity keys is what you do actually hard
Yeah, yeah, that's really hard
um
It's not the hardest thing I've ever done hardest thing I've ever known as parenting
um, but uh
Good news for all you parents out there. Um, but it is very difficult
it is a massive amount of information and making the best decision you have with
the best information that you have and then
being committed to that and making
making it work and
You know it's tough
Um, it's way easier to work for people than to have people work for you
That's uh, that's one thing that you know, I knew and people say but like it's a different it's a different sort of thing
It's hard. It's really hard
And last
You know one more thing at smart people many smart people
Give me
Really good advice all the time and that advice is often conflicting
They're smart. It's good advice. It makes sense, but it means I can do this this this this this or this which one
They're all smart people
That's why it's hard. It's like you you just gotta
Do the best thing again and if you ignore somebody's advice then they're like, all right. Well, fuck you
You didn't listen to me. I'm like, I had to do something
All right, uh, it's really tough
So fun. It's also the most fun thing I've ever done. It's just a blind also besides parenting that that's actually the most fun thing
Um, but second most fun thing I've ever done
Second most hard thing I've ever done. I've never heard
leadership slash management
Define like that before that's very our take. Let's very uh
That's very insightful actually you've got all these great people on your team giving you great ideas
You gotta pick one of them
No one you're gonna piss somebody out like that's what it is. What are you guys gonna be pissed
And i'm not gonna eat any many mind mo this so get get with it
Um, one guy told me to go pick up disney as a client
Yeah, I mean, yeah, of course, right
And I could do that. I believe that I could do that. I have that confidence
But if I did that I would abandon
All this other stuff that is probably more likely to happen and so like
Like that it's stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, sure
I could do that, but what do I what am I sacrificing if I do that
Or yeah things like that choose a chain pick one chain to build on
Same thing. It's like, okay if I choose one chain then I gotta do this other stuff. It's tough. It's tough. It's tough
and
Very last question
I'll be ready. It is probably the most difficult question you'll ever be asked on any podcast
And ten words or less
Key describing infinity keys
I thought I was gonna describe bitcoin. Oh, I think we're past that. I think I don't know. We right visited one day
Really far we do
Oh that guy I forgot about that guy. Yeah, we got a book it's out there in the wild. I'm an og
Yeah, right it exists
About that damn thing. Yeah, whatever on Amazon. I think still maybe probably not anyways
You got 30 seconds answers question
Uh gamified task or word platform
It's four words
This man can just steal down his vision in less than ten words. That means he's on to something made out of magic
I don't know