NZXT PODCAST - #069 - Leyline

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

This week on the podcast, we are joined by Dolly and Jeremy from Leyline! The crew discuss a new way to save the world using your PC! Follow Leyline on twitter.com/leylinenp Listen live to the NZXT 💜 CLUB CAST on our Discord server at discord.gg/nzxt every Thursday at 10AM PT and submit your questions to [e-mail]! Thanks to Killy#1000 for the artwork!

All right. Then that Christmas trap is always just like super, super nuts. Hello, everybody and welcome the episode 69 of the N60 Clubcast, the official podcast of the N60 community. This podcast was recorded live every Thursday at 10 a 10m, Pacific Standard Time, the official N60 Discord server and is available to stream on demand on Apple Cod podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, and SoundCloud. In case you're wondering, guys, this podcast is only built for Cuban links. My name is Dennis, and Ivan is working hard. But today we have some special guests.

We have Dolly and Jeremy from Layline. Hi guys doing. Hello. Thanks for having us on. Hello, Dennis. Hello, NZXC community. Good to chat today. Again, yeah, thank you as well.

Yes, we're really exciting. It's always weird starting these podcasts because it's like, hi, nice to meet you, but we literally been speaking for like almost an hour now about all kinds of crazy topics like it and whatnot. I was trying to pretend like a bit like that just like never happened. Right. There's a fourth wall breaking as we were talking about Christmas trap earlier. I mean, that's a good time.

And band camp with choirs. Mm-hmm. I was I was supposed to be a band kid. I don't know if you guys know that or not. I was supposed to be. Supposed to be. Yeah. So what happened is that like, so.

So there's like a certain like skill set that you need to like be successful in school, right? And when you're the childhood immigrant, sometimes your parents just like don't know that, right? They don't know the things that you have to do like all the ins and out. So when I was in junior high, I took I took band classes, right? But it was more like, it was more like, you know, like banned for like babies, right? But when I was going to high school, you know, you had to fill out your whole elective sheet or something. And then I was supposed to get a call from someone from like the band. when I called department at the high school was going to, but I didn't know.

So what I did is I left for Mexico for like a month to go visit family during the summer when I was supposed to be doing like band camp or something, right? So when I get back, they're like, we don't know what to do with you. So go sit in this back room for like a month where we figure out under the class for you because you obviously like, you know, can't learn anything. Oh no. Yeah. So like in like a different reality, I would have been like the biggest band geek in the world.

I probably would have been the best trumpeter, I think. I was going to throw that one out there. No, I feel it. I was destined for this trumpet and you were denied your fate. Yeah. But yeah, actually, you know, like we were talking about, I was definitely a major band geek back in a day. So I was a, so you could try to visualize this.

I was five feet tall, 190 pounds, and I was playing the piccolo in marching band. Piccolo? Piccolo. Out of all things. It was like tiny little tiny flute, like walking around the football field, marching around. It was a very, very interesting.

sight, I have to say. Listeners at home, I'm learning a lot from the instrument the trumpet and the piccolo. Wow. Yeah, I was going to say not even a not even a real flute, like a clarinet, right? Exactly.

Exactly. And I didn't like hit puberty either. So my voice was super high. So I was singing at like a tenor one. So it's like this, you know, like short, chunky guy with a super high voice with glasses of buck teeth walk around. Wow.

You're really painting a great picture. Oh, yeah. I had my fair share of bullying back in the day. So it builds character. I'll say that. That's what they all say, right? That's what they all say. Yeah, we have to be like that's all we can get out of it.

Don't forget the, it's a glow up. We're the glow up. That's right. Look at where we are now, guys. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, at the end of the day, what are you without character? So I think that's it's super important. And it's a very good experience for me to, you know, to face adversity and, you know, come out on top.

Hopefully. I have no idea if I'm out on top right now. I was supposed to say, like, how are you? How are you sure? But I will say that, you know, music is just so awesome for your brain, for your creativity, for even just building relationships. and like just creating joy. So that's always, you know, been very inspiring for me to just appreciate music and have the ability to, you know, play it every now and then and share it.

So happy topics, as Eugenia is. I don't want to go down the dark side here. So when I was bullied, no. I've been like a learner of guitar and piano for like, I think 15 years now in the sense of like I'll start up for like a month. I'll learn some stuff and then I'll go play video games again and then I'll forget everything. And then I'm like constantly relearning the same stuff over and over.

Yeah. You know, that's interesting. That's the same with me, but with books. I will read the same line several times and then fall asleep and then have to read it again. I don't know why. I don't know. It's just interesting.

But then with games, like I just get immersed into it and I pick it up. but I remember the tactics. But reading, I don't know, I've got to keep reading it again and again. I know that feeling for sure. Retention. Yes. I do the thing where I'll read a whole page and then I think back for a second. Like, wait, what the heck did I just read?

I don't know what was on this page. And then I go back and reread the whole thing over again. I'm like, okay, now I get it. Like, why don't I do this right the first time? Like, why is reading so difficult? Oh, yeah. It is. Especially when you had like book reports back then.

You had to recap it. Yeah. I was like, oh, God. I read the whole book. I have to reread the book. I don't know if you get this as well, but there's this inner dialogue that takes place where it's like,

why am I not understanding this thing? And then you end up having this conversation. It's like, why? And you're just like stuck in this cycle in your head, not being able to read a paragraph. It can be quite frustrating. I like how Eugene is in the chat. She's like, hey, guys,

if you want to ask questions, I can answer them. And she's like sending photos of her dog. I love it. That's the best thing ever. She's the best smile of it. Eugen is so awesome. I'm just just post photos of dogs.

All right. So Layline. So for those who don't know, even though I just literally just announced it, Gina Jeremy and Dolly are from Layline. Can you guys just give me a rundown or give the audience a rundown? What is Layline?

Just what is Layline? Yeah, absolutely. That's super open-ended for no reason. It is many things, but I would say our mission is we want to create this economy of altruism. And what I mean by that is right now it costs you time or money or access to your networks to do good in the world. We want to change that such that you're actually being rewarded and celebrated for doing good in the world. And at very little expense or cost, we want to make it super easy. and to feel good about it and to have some kind of tangible reward attached to it.

So we're building a platform that's going to enable that. And it's already under development now and in alpha testing. So we basically want to spread the word because the good in the world that we're focusing on is actually accelerating scientific research on massive, massive problems like COVID, like cancer, climate change, space exploration. And we can activate the 2.7 billion gamers on the planet to just donate their spare computing power and accelerate these solutions by orders of magnitude. So that's currently our primary mission right now. But there's a lot more to go because this platform can scale very easily.

So that's the very, very quick pitch. And I think it's great that we have this long conversation because we can dig into quite a bit of the details. There's a lot to unpack. Right. And I think what's a beautiful thing about what Jeremy is saying about Layline is you don't need to think so hard to do good and you get rewards for it. If you're doing your computer, you're donating to research, to science, even in your sleep because we're trying to get rid of the thinking and just getting the feel good out of it. Right. Like when you're doing good, you feel good about it, but you're also changing the world. And that's, that's,

the goal at the end of the day. I am all down for less thinking. The less thinking I've got to do in my life, I think the better people are going to be. Exactly. It should just be easy and passive. Like literally, we're aiming to just like have five clicks and then boom. You're contributing to science. You're building

up your social reputation, earning amazing in-game items, and you're getting like value from gift cards and donated unique items from game developers and hardware manufacturers. So we're trying to just create this super stacked value proposition back to the user for essentially free.

Like, you don't have to do anything except create an account and start getting, you know, start donating your computing power, leaving on overnight. And that's the amazing thing is that if we activate just one percent of gamers on the planet, that's already going to be a thousand times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer. This is the opportunity space that we're looking at right now. And now just imagine a world where this pandemic and lockdown continues. for another two months. Like, we know how horrible, horrible that's going to be.

And imagine a world where we solved that a month early. How many lives can we save? How many livelihoods can we repair and save? That's the big opportunity. And that's what I'm saying. Like, gamers can save the world here. Like, really make a big difference for almost zero incremental cost, because we're running our PCs all the time anyway.

And gamers have the most powerful GPUs and CPUs on the planet. it hands down. So it's like there's this like massive opportunity. And the only trick is how do we align the incentives and the economics such that we're rewarding these contributions and how do we make it so easy that you could just do it in five clicks. We've got the solution for it and we're building it right now. So the key is just getting the message out there and saying this is possible, guys, we can come together and have these tiny little incremental actions that by yourself doesn't really have this big impact, but all together collectively, we as a community can literally change the world. And so now it's like we just got to let people know and then have them

understand what we're trying to build and most importantly to trust us because, you know, a lot of companies and corporations may not necessarily have these kind of like core principles driving them, you know, because more often or not it's about hitting the bottom line. but our project is nonprofit, open source, and open knowledge. Everything that you want to understand and see about us, we will give you access to that. Whether it's our source code or a budget or even like our major all-hands meetings or key decision points, all this stuff is going to be transparent to the community. And we want the community to be a part of the development process.

So we've got a very active discord, or we set up a pretty robust discord community, and then they're going to be able to participate in the direction that we take this thing and to see how we're doing and hold us accountable to these values. Oh, no worries. Yeah, going off of what Jeremy is saying, I think transparency is key, right? We're a startup, we're a nonprofit, and we know we don't have all the answers, but we're willing to share the process with anybody who's willing to come on board and figuring it out, telling us how we can do better,

how we can improve our process at the same time having all the questions answered because it's right in front of you, right? And that's what Jeremy's saying, right? There's companies out there who have this big ask. We want you to donate your time, which time is like the biggest thing you can ask from anybody. But there's no transparency. There's no understanding of what their intentions are and we're trying to eliminate that entire thing and being like your time is important. You are valuable and we're having you along the way. So anything, any confusions you have, it's all out there for you to ask and speculate. So I kind of want to roll it back a little bit and just ask like a quick question.

And it's like so Layline is a way for people to donate their competing power, correct, to basically help fund charities or how does it how does it work so let's say let's say i am let's say i'm just a gift gummies here right and he has two computers at home he wants to help how can he help yes this is a i think there's two components to it one is so layline in and of itself is this platform that any non-profit or humanitarian or environmental cause can just plug into and we provide this reward system or rewards the economy on top of that. So what happens is we are partnering now with a lot of different brands and sponsors, gaming companies, including you guys at NCXT, where these companies donate like very

exclusive items or discount codes or just straight cash, which then we can convert into gift cards. So creates this like super cool random prize pool and it just gets bigger. bigger, the more partnerships we land. And that prize pool is going to be the hook for people to come and say, hey, listen, yeah, totally. I'll leave my, you know, computer on and get a bunch of, like, exclusive items for my favorite games. So what you do is, or what we do now is that we've got that prize pool, and then we partner up with any number of nonprofits. So our first use case is actually a partnership with Boink. And that's a project coming out of UC Berkeley. And this is an open source

platform, it's been running for over 16 years now, and it's actually produced, you know, over 100 or so white papers, like for scientific progress. So we're actually helping them out by saying, hey, we're going to have this great incentive model. It's going to be super polished and super easy, and we can bring a lot of users to your side. And that's a perfect match for them because they're amusing users. They don't have, like, the engagement and retention incentives to keep their users over time. So it's all just people that just care a lot and they're willing to go through all the hoops to do the donations. So that's the strategy as our first partnership, but it scales. So when you're a user, you sign up for layline, you just set up your account super quick and then you can

pick and choose the causes you care about. So for now, Boink is a top priority and accelerating science to just get us out of this nightmare pandemic. But we are also adding on more and more altruistic activities. And so the next thing, actually the latest feature we've deployed in our alpha test is actually a daily exercise check-in. And the reasoning is that, hey, listen, exercise is universally great for everybody. It makes you healthier, more resilient to disease. It makes you smarter and happier, and it builds your social connections. And we can actually tie that to real data because there are plenty of public APIs for all these wearable devices. So now we can reward people with layline points and for doing good things for them.

which then ultimately help others. And then another partnership work non-currently is with the Red Cross. So it's quite easy to validate that you've actually donated blood by just having an account link. So literally, if you donate blood and it gets verified, we'll throw a bunch of layline points at you and give you some super cool, unique exclusive items that show up on your profile that make you sparkle and glow and, like, fly around and like all these amazing, you know, aesthetics. I was a year old when they found out that, like, I can link an account. count to the Red Cross. It's actually really cool.

Like, like, now can I want to just like go donate more so I can like, have like like a cool high number and it's like flex on people. It's like, look, guys, I've given this much blood.

It's all about the question for me. It comes back and forth. And I think to simplify it, right, because it is a very complex, uh, thoughts and terms. And I,

I want to simplify in terms of like what I asked to when I was thinking. about donating your computer and what that means. Because I was like, I don't get it. There's so many computers in the world. What does donating my computer do? Or how does it work with science particularly? And the best simplified way would be, you know, there's a lot of power involved with trying to process math, you know?

Yeah. And understanding that is really important because, right, learning about cancer, learning about the roundness of stars. One computer donating helps quickly compute the math, the math to this research. Right. Right. And that's where if we activate millions of people, even just the tiny increments. I mean, these scientists don't have the money to pay for Google Cloud servers and Amazon Web Services.

So they're essentially looking for people to help donate. So yeah, I mean, you should just think about it. Instead of crunching data for, you know, two weeks to get some results and to analyze it for the scientists, that can happen in like two dates. So this is the big opportunity space for sure. So here's like another question that like I'm sure we're going to get eventually is. So during the beginning of the pandemic, we all kind of like as a company, we like teamed up and we started doing this folding at home thing.

So is the Bionic platform kind of like similar to this? How does it differ? Why are you guys using Bionic versus using something like Folding at Home, which I think like a lot of people are like already already using? Yeah, absolutely. They are parallel products. So they're both open source platforms. And it's just a question of which research projects they're focused on.

Okay. So actually we intend to have all of that part of the platform. So folding at home has actually been very successful because, because of the lockdowns and the pandemic. So they've actually done a great job of, like, you know, getting off a ton of energy and, like, resources. Unfortunately, Blink did not get that opportunity. So we're kind of prioritizing them because there's, like, so many,

they haven't even broader range of projects, you know, including math and physics and, you know, climate change, whereas folding at home is largely around protein folding. So it tends to be more health and disease-oriented. So we wanted to broaden the range of science that we're going to, and accelerate and help an organization that's like actually really struggling right now. Because, you know, frankly, these guys are scientists. They're not marketers or like game developers. They don't have like the chops to get out there, get the PR, and then to retain the

users. So it's kind of this great match where we're like, hey, we come in from the game space. We know exactly what's going to motivate individuals, what's going to have them engage and have fun and enjoy this thing and feel the sense of reward and fulfillment. So we could plug in those mechanics onto this really crucial research. And we're basically helping them make that user experience much better. So at the end of the day, folding at home has a public API. So we can very easily just plug in and supercharge them as well. But we wanted to start incremental.

Like one by one, we're going to start to knock down these partnerships, demonstrate that this thing works and then continue to scale more and more. And the end goal is that we want to supercharge every nonprofit on a planet. There's nothing really stopping us from doing that. And we've got the economic design to make that sustainable and to actually grow. So, yeah, actually we want to help everybody. And there's actually not a competition, I think, because at the end of the day, all of our goals are aligned. We just want to make the world a better place and solve big problems.

And most organizations that seem like they be a competitor are actually turning into our partners. And that's the beautiful thing that we're experiencing right now. So, so yeah, we want to do it all. And we'll be little by little, little by little is the key. And you've got to execute. I hope that answers the question. No, no, that does. That's actually really, really cool.

You can't really answer, like, all the stuff. That was going to ask you. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, but I kind of want to learn a little bit more about you guys. Like, how did you guys, like, end up working with, like, a nonprofit organization that basically takes all of our computer resources and saves the world. How did you go, you know, how'd you end up in this spot? I'll let you go first, Thali.

Well, I guess my experience before I met Jeremy was I was, I'm a photographer outside of this. And I work with nonprofits such as wine to water, documenting change, going to the Amazon. And I've met Jeremy on a political campaign, actually, because we were tired of how our government was running. And we just connected on just wanting to change the world. And he got me on board being like, hey, I have this great idea. How do you feel? I know it sounds crazy.

I do want to change the world and poverty, get people to eat healthier, but also mixing it with a fun community, like the gaming community. And that's how I met Jeremy. Thanks, Ali. Yeah, I think by my personal journey is that I, you know, I've been in tech for a long time now. It's almost at 17 years plus, not counting the entrepreneurship but in college. And the last 10 years have been at Blizzard Entertainment. And I got to do a lot of different roles there.

You know, as a producer, building out a lot of our websites, our underwerect, relying infrastructure with BattleNet, launching a bunch of our AAA games like Overwatch and Diablo, StarCraft, Hardstone, World Warcraft, etc. I moved out to Paris for about three years and started to run a lot of our digital marketing, platform, data analysis, and data science, and then came back to the U.S. to help launch a lot of our e-sports leagues. So Overwatch League, StarCraft Leaves, hard some leagues, and I focused a lot of international operations and business development. So I got to see so many pieces of how these mega corporations function, how they do business, and how they kind of connect with other brands and networks. And so I saw this gigantic opportunity.

You know, again, 2.7 billion gamers on the planet. What are we doing with that capacity? So, you know, Blizzard itself is like already 60 million MAU just by itself. And I took a look at it, the numbers, I'm just like, okay, we've got all this value getting generated, lots of money, lots of engagement, and what are we doing with it? Like how much of it is going back to the people, how much is actually going to fix the planet? And the proportion is like so broken. It's like, you know, less than 1% goes into actual humanitarian causes. So I spent quite a bit of time to try and rally, you know, the company to just get more involved. And, you know, even start to orient our products and that level of engagement to start solving real world problems.

Because aside from just the raw computing power, think about the cognitive capacity. When we have millions of gamers, literally solving the most complex problems in the world of Warcraft, like coming together, building giant wikis and like, you know, mapping out entire regions. Like, this is stuff that can apply into the real world. And then my question was, why aren't we doing that? What's the thing that stopping us? And what I learned is that at the end of day, the private sector is all about the bottom line. If you do not have some kind of immediate financial return on it, the company is just not going to prioritize it.

And it's not because they're evil or bad or they don't care. Everybody does. But it just does not align with the numbers that we are told to hit. And so that was, you know, it came to ahead in 2020 when obviously all this stuff is happening. And it's a pretty, you know, critical crisis. and I felt like we got to do more, we got to do way more than we're doing right now. And because of the lockdown, gaming is just exploding. The level of engagement and profit is just going through the roof.

You even just saw World Warcraft. The fastest selling game of all time just happened with the World Warcraft Shaddlelands launch. And so, you know, I was like working with the committees that are like, okay, what's our response to the pandemic? and I had like lots of ideas, lots and lots of ideas. And what it boils down to, the philosophical response is, okay, what is the least amount of money we can spend to check off the boxes on the corporate social responsibility? Like, that's literally what it comes down to. It may not be exactly that word, but that's a decision-making process. And then later on, or like, you know, in the earlier in a year, my mom passed away in April.

And, you know, that was really devastating. And not only was it problematic for me, but I start to think about, oh, my God, how many more millions of people are going through this right now? And I was looking at myself and just like, wow, okay, I could live in comfort. You know, I'm taking care of a comfortable position at a very successful company. And I'm just sitting around on Netflix and playing games all day while the world is kind of, you know, in serious trouble. So at that point, I decided, okay, what am I going to do with my life?

And I want to, you know, I've got two daughters, four and seven now. And what's the future that they're about to step into? And we're not on a good trajectory. So we can change that. And that's the first step is believing that you can. And so I decided to sell my house, pull out all my retirement money, sell all my physical possessions. And I just donate it all to this organization and just hire people and bring the talent that I was able to get access to and say, let's do this thing. Because it can happen. And so I'm incredibly grateful because people believe it and it's happening. And at this point, we've already got 60 plus people working on a project. And a lot of them are coming in as volunteers. So since we announced three weeks ago, easily three to five people are volunteering and, you know, double the amount of people are actually offering to say, hey, listen, we're a brand or we have access to people that are going to be interested in this and we want to partner up. So that's a, it's a beautiful thing to see. to be honest, I did not, I'm kind of in disbelief.

I didn't think that was going to happen. Or rather, like, I was scared that it wouldn't happen. So, yeah, that's a bit of the journey. And I just see it. I see it happening, and I believe we can do this thing. We just got to get the message up. We've got an amazing team that is behind these core values, right? Because you can't be this strong without that passion and that drive for a better future.

And I think that's what Layline is all about in the core, too, being transparent with each other, making sure that everybody's taken care of. I was brought on to Layline when there were very few people. And it's amazing to see how much it's grown. But for me, too, I'm a freelancer. I've never had a nine to five situation. So Jeremy coming in and being like, here's the idea, here's how we're going to do it. believe in this. And I did, of course.

And, you know, I'm selfish with my time naturally. Like, I'm an artist. I want to play games. I want to, like, do artist things right now with my time. But then I was like, at the end of the day, it feels so good to make art and know I'm making a difference. Or play games and know I'm making a difference. And that's kind of the core value of these small things you're doing, like doing your computer while making, really big changes and not thinking about it and also feeling good about it.

And getting rewarded too. And getting rewarded. And many people on this team have great jobs, are super talented and are also spending their time being a part of this because they believe in it. And you just don't get that just having the intent of money or other outside materialistic things. It's really you just got to have to believe in it and be passionate about. this. So yeah, everybody you asked is going to have the same core values and I don't know, I love

being a part of this and I really appreciate you guys letting us be on this show to share the vision. No, for sure. Thank you for being on and for sharing this with our community. Like I know we're partnered, but I think it's really important for gamers in general to get really involved with charities, right? Because there's something that you touched on earlier, Jeremy, where it's like, yeah, these gamers have so much drive to do like the most ridiculous things, right? like there's this mobile game I play on my phone. It's a it's a it's a it's a it's a wifu gotcha game right and like if they ever have any question I know don't worry this is going somewhere I promise.

I love it. I love it. So like I'll have a question and I'll just Google it and someone has made this giant wiki with you know like 50 million like you know work count and they're going through how to you know get every single item here in the game and it's like if just like one percent of that effort right just like how. like 1% of our like competing power went to like solving some of these problems we can just accomplish so much more. So my question is if I use layline, can I get some wifus?

Will it be a wifu gauds because I feel like it's very important that the people know that. Here is the cool thing, Dennis, is that we have no, oh, by the way, my daughter is sitting on my lap because she doesn't want to leave me alone. So in case I hear extra noise, it's she should say hi. She should probably say hi, I think. You want to say hi, Madeline? Say hello. Hello. So, wifus, we actually have a ton of flexibility autonomy

because we're kind of pulling together all these different brands and ideas and we're creating this amazing avatar skins and items ecosystem. So essentially on your layline profile, part of the reward system It's not just the stuff donated by our sponsors. We're actually creating these layline-specific items,

and they're actually built on the blockchain. So the, I'm so sorry, my daughter's... Go for you. It's funny. 2020. We're all working from home now. Yeah. And these items are actually, you know,

the things you're going to get onto your profile in your avatar. So you could have the most amazing, epic armor and helmet, it and you have a double cannon on your left hand and a giant buster sword on your right hand or your super cute pet on the side. So all of these are going to be, you know, items that are secured on a blockchain, which means the user owns that. And so they own it. It cannot be hacked. It cannot be duplicated. And you can trade it for value with other people. And even if layline disappears off the face of the earth, those items will still exist. And it will be ultra rare and scarce.

So we're giving a ton of value to the users, not just in the... So it's massive. And, you know, I've been in this industry and I'm studying the industry a lot. So you can very easily extrapolate if you take World Warcraft. People are selling their, people are selling their,

you know, weapons and accounts for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Oh, I'm going to say. take over for Jeremy. Are you good, Jeremy? Okay. Well, I think what's really cool about what you said about gamers and the Wifu mobile app you're saying, it's because I learned so much from playing NeoPets growing up. Oh, my God.

I was obsessed with neopets. And, you know, it's such a very simple model of a game. You're taking care of your pets. But you learn about getting a bank account, your interest for your shops that you're building on new pets. And through that, I was so involved that I started to learn to code, starting to make skins and profiles and layouts, which transferred onto my MySpace at the time making MySpace websites and MySpace portfolio. And it's like incredible how the gaming community exceeds the like with the skills and talent that you need. And it would be great to utilize that talent and passion into the real world, right?

because I mean, hey, I learned to code the opeds. You know, you're learning that people are making wikis and these websites just to help the gaming community for free, just because, and that's amazing. You know, I'm playing Stardu Valley and I'm like, I don't know how to get this fish. And like there's a whole page of people who are just dedicated to helping you win this game. what would we just want to help you win at life? Oh yeah, it's it's super crazy. Like I remember like I play any MMO or like I play Destiny right and like a new raid comes out.

And like within an hour of it being completed, there's a guide out already. And now I know how to beat it right. And I have the knowledge. It's nuts. Yeah. And this really speaks to the wonderful power of gaming where, you know, these are all these intrinsic motivators for humans, which is, hey, I love to solve problems. I love this like random adventure and elements and discovery.

I love like to see myself progress and grow and, you know, develop my skills and knowledge. I love to connect with other people and build these social circles that we can collaborate and, you know, be a part of a group and have a sense of belonging. I love to compete with others and see, you know, how I can like be way better than and smash these other people on the leaderboard. All of these things are these motivators that gaming just hits so, so well. And we just have to use it for right things. So now imagine feeling all these,

you know, these motivators on your profile where not only you get your amazing avatar and skin, it looks gorgeous and beautiful, it's all collectible and rare, then you have your stats. So you can literally look at your profile and say, I don't have 20 gallons of blood to the Red Cross. And that's like, that's legit. Like it is verified data that I'm not just faking here. And now think about that. Like when you donate to the Red Cross, you have the potential to save three lives just with that one donation. Now imagine a million gamers that have done that, like, what is going to impact on the world? And that's on your resume, your digital resume on Layline.

Similarly, you could say I donated 1,000 hours of computing power to scientific research on cancer and climate change. And the result of my contributions led to these white papers produced that, you know, led to drug discovery, which led to, like, some other breakthrough that's going to help, like, the planet. it. So we want to take that all that gamification, that sense of reward and progress and build it right into the platform. So you, like, we want to just show people that you are having an impact. You are making a difference and it's like costing you nothing. That feels so awesome. And it does not exist today. No platform is out there really focusing on, you know, celebrating the good we do in the world, let alone aggregating it all together into your real profile for you. So the

end goal is we want to bridge the digital world and the space that we're all in, solving problems, doing amazing things, and then tie it back to real world activity that's improving a city. And then we should celebrate that and make that part of your digital identity. Your digital identity is you are a hero. We're going to turn you to hero for almost little cost. And we're going to get you value on top of that. You can help you have a good living. So, yeah, that's a, it's a radical idea. And, you know, but it's totally doable. Like, we, we, we've built the proof of concept. It's happening. It's just we need the, you know, people to just hear the message and sign up for an account on my line.

Sorry for the plug. No, no worries. I've been linking the website. I've been linking the Twitter guys. Go, go check it out. Please go do some good while you're doing some bad in video games. Do both, right? Yes, we welcome trolls. No problem. Because even the bad guys are going to be doing good things. Exactly. If you're exercising, it's personal gain, too. There's preventative measures. You're helping not infiltrate

the hospitals. It's all helping everybody, you know what I mean? So, hey, you can look fit, get the cool skins, and do good. I think I need to grab an Apple Watch now, just so I can start bumping up my layline.

Totally. Like, I kind of want to be like the person who has like the most like plasma or like the most blood donated right oh man we're going to do some really cool stuff with leaderboards and competitions and cooperative missions it's going to be a ton of fun our like game design team is just jab it they got some awesome stuff coming down to pipe so and here you know what's really cool is that because we're open source and open knowledge we can activate an army of engineers designers uh ux data analyst community managers because they can just join in onto fun and be a part of the organization.

And on top of that, we're building skills, like people are getting hands on experience, and networking with, like, really top-tier veterans across many industries. And because we all care and like love people, we're here to train and mentor. So there's this giant opportunity that we're working on right now, which is activating and giving opportunity to students, to recent graduates, to people that have recently lost their job. they're just looking for a way to, you know, develop their skills and, like, meet people that, like, have a ton of experience and expertise in this field. Because, you know, my heart really goes out to this generation. Like, you think about the students that are getting out of college right now.

They are racked in student loan debt that can't be erased. They have almost little job opportunity available. And it's like you have to squeeze in to get these very few lucrative jobs in a tech. world. And then even if you find that opening, you need like three to five experience to even get your foot in the door. So like what happens? It's like a catch-22 nightmare for all of these individuals getting into the quote-unquote real world. So this is an opportunity to say, listen, we'll take you in, we'll give you his exposure and you can just kind of lurk if you want, just observe and see how it's going because we're open knowledge. Like this is just free knowledge for

you. And maybe it just gives them a springboard to develop their skills and get that opportunity that need, maybe they end up working at Layline. Like all of these are, we had to like really rethink the way that corporations and organizations work and think about how we can help people through this situation. And in doing so, now we can scale to hundreds of people building games and features and the marketplace and like making this thing become a reality. So we really focus a lot on setting up the organization such that it scales. So we're a globally distributed organization, 100% remote. We have people, team members in Canada, US, Argentina, France, Germany, China. And it's just growing. Everywhere, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we know how to do this. We know how to scale global

organizations. We built the knowledge base. We built the project management tooling, the communications. We know how to bring in the right talent and roles to pull it all together. And, yeah, we're ready to activate. We're ready to scale fast. So, yeah, if anybody wants to participate, we will welcome with open arms, plug into the community. And if you even just want to like interact with professionals like that have done this stuff and done game development or tech or e-sports, we've got the capacity. Or rather, we have expertise and we will share it. Like knowledge should just be free. So anyway, sorry, I'm going to keep on to talk.

If you don't stop. No, thank you. Really appreciate it. No, thanks for the info. I think from what I'm seeing here in the chat, people seem to be pretty excited about it. So people are able to start getting in on this thing now, correct? Like, we can just start this today. Yeah, well, you can sign it for an account.

We're actually, the approach that we're taking is we are extremely agile. We ship features and bugs every single week. Okay. But right now we're in our closed alpha test, so it's all friends and family. And what we do each week is we increase the number of people that come in in these waves. So the best thing we can do right now is sign up and get on the wait list. like the weight list is getting pretty high right now. Like we're getting close to a thousand,

and that's growing over, growing over time. So get in now while it's like in the low thousands. And because here's the big incentive. So not only you're getting to participate in interacting directly with the dev team and like having a say in how we develop this product, but there's already $1,000 of, you know, prizes in the prize pool ready to be claimed.

and that'll just keep on growing over time as we'll get more and more partners onboarded. And we are going to set up such that you're going to keep some of these non-fundable tokens that you earn in the alpha, and that's going to be super exclusive ultra rare, never recreated ever in the history of humanity. And the Albatesters will have that. So again, just try to project what this is going to be like two years from now,

and you own the very first exclusive layline armor sets that were only for Alpetesters. So yeah, if you want to be an Alpetester, we can, we'll absolutely bring you in. There's just been pretty good incentive to be a part of it. Okay. My next question is, how do I get in?

Because I'm pretty sure I signed up, like the day we met and I haven't got my email yet. So if I need to bump me up on that list, I can start donating blood like today, thanks. So here's the, I'll give you the secret spots. Well, Dennis, I'm going to hook you up directly. Don't worry about that. But if anybody in a community wants to jump in the Alphi,

very quickly, we can join our Discord community. That's like probably the first step. And then, you know, everybody in this community are the early adopters. So if you want to get hooked up into the afo, we'll bump you up to the top of the list. The main thing is like we just need help testing this thing. So you've got to be active in like using it and giving us feedback. But yeah, what we do is we basically say, hey, guys, here's the patch notes coming out this week.

And here's a new feature development coming in. We would love to get some help testing this stuff. And then people would just say, hey, I'll raise my hand. I would love to test this daily exercise. check and feature. So we just bump them up the list and just get them right into the alpha. And then they start earning my line points and start interacting and, you know, start pulling rewards. So yeah, join our Discord community. It's a lot of fun. We do some cool stuff there. We publish a lot of like our transparency. Sorry, go ahead, Dolly. Oh, it's sorry. I was just saying

we also have community game nights. It's a lot of fun on the Discord. A lot of memes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we got a really cool community growing and it's, uh, the floodgates are now open. Come on in. Yeah, I just linked it, so good luck. Good luck. Yeah. Fantastic. Probably at the default our community team, by the way, Dolly.

Yeah, there goes your chat. Yeah. But no thanks, guys. I really appreciate you guys hopping on and giving us all this info. I think it's important, right? Like, I know for a lot of gamers, you know, we may have like a, you know, pretty nice computer, but maybe we don't have, like, any, like, extra funds to be able to help. And it really feels like sometimes, like, the only thing you can do is just, like, throw up some cash, right?

Which is, like, just one part of the equation, right? It's not, it's not the whole, like, effort that needs to be going in in terms of, like, some of these things that need to be done. So it's really good that this platform exists for people who, you know, already have, like, the kind of, like, power available. They just don't know how to harness it and, like, just where to direct it, right? Absolutely. Yeah, so this is really, really cool. I'm really, I'm legitimately serious. not marketing-y speaker and like that.

I'm actually really excited about this. It seems super, super cool. Like, I'm super excited for it. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of potential for us. All right. So we have a little bit of time left, guys.

For those who are listening live, we do have some community questions and be throwing out to you guys. Don't forget, if you want to send a question off the air, please send an email to clubcast at nzicc.com. That is C-L-U-B-C-A-S-T-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-T. First question is for Dolly. Dolly, can you sing a Christmas carol for us?

Oh, my goodness. They heard you were a singer. Christmas trap? D'allel's music is amazing, by the way. You should check out a YouTube channel. Oh, my goodness. Sure. What song is of love?

What are you guys listening to, to me honest? It's Christmas time. I was in the Christmas trap. I don't know about you guys. Oh, my. goodness, have yourself a Merry Little Christmas. That's all I got for you. Hey, there we go.

For ball. Yeah, actually, Valley, we could get a band together. We've got so much amazing, like, artistic talent on the team. Forget Lila, we're starting to band, guys. Yeah, heck yeah. They're singing the balls in shot right now. Dennis is teaching our next band. Yeah, actually, so, yeah, Dennis, we were just talking about this.

So we publish our all-hands meetings. We've got a little bit of delay about two to three weeks, but you get to see all of the team interacting and like talking about our plans, roadmaps, roadmaps, product vision, and learnings. But we're also celebrating humanity. So we're going to have a musical performance from Layline team members. And they're very, very many weeks. So every week we're going to have some new performances. And we got a lot of connections. So we're going to be bringing in some guest stars to perform.

Ooh, exclusive guest stars. Right, right. To our YouTube channel and check out and all the freaking awesome like music and we do art showcases for all like our amazing game artists

that do just like a sick character work. I almost let the F word out. Sorry. Cool thing. Yeah, so like we got a lot of really cool stuff to check out and you know if you want to see like how you know dev teams and businesses operate at scale, check out like how like how.

we coordinate. Like that's again free knowledge and it's entertaining and you get to see the actual humans working on this project who are all wonderful wonderful people. So yeah, sub to our YouTube channel. You're going to see some really really cool stuff. All right. Let me pull up all these links here and just start throwing them out. Cool. Okay, see next question from the community is let me see what we got here. That's Eugenia. Okay, how has your guys' day been so far? It's so wholesome.

It is 10, like almost 11 a.m. right now. I woke up at 7 a.m. And I had cereal. It's been good. What are you, Jeremy? It's been busy. So, you know, I got to wake up and get the kids, like, ready for homeschooling. and cooking breakfast, then I just get on a bunch of calls.

So I've actually had another interview earlier today with game industry.biz. And I'm just like right now I'm just pushing hard on generating funds for the armies. I'm doing a lot of business development and just reaching out to donors, et cetera. So my calendar is very, very packed every single day. but we are making big progress though and it's exciting how about you tennis I'm doing great I sit up a little bit longer than I needed to

playing cyberpunk oh nice yeah so that was the thing and then I have not eaten any breakfast at all actually I've been I've been chilling just drinking tea so we're on the struggle bus right now but I actually you get your fasting in for the morning

Exactly, no, for sure. I do a follow-up question, though, for Dolly, and that's what's your favorite cereal? What's my favorite cereal? Oh, I'm so simple. I love Cheerios. Like, anything just like with honey, like, honey, bunches of votes? Yeah. Are you guys into like, what's that brazen cereal?

Not a fan of the raisin cereal. That's all I got to say. Yeah. I just had to roast a raisin brand for a minute. Those high fiber cereals. You got to watch out. It causes some stomach stuff. You know what I mean?

Can't be playing cyberpunk and then need to go to the restroom. Yeah, for sure. Let's see here. Next question we have from the community is, I just pinned a whole thing from Eugenia, so I messed up my cue here. Okay, here we go. How do you get a job in marketing at NZXT?

What kind of jobs in marketing are at NZXT? So the marketing department here is kind of wide. So we have things like partnership, PR, business development, then we have the social media community. It really depends, you know, performance marketing. So there's like a whole kind of, you know, a whole wide range of stuff you can do with marketing.

Me for myself on the community team and social media. I mean, I just got in by doing a bunch of free work at a bunch of other companies. Freelancing, doing esports for a bit. And eventually someone liked me enough to hire me. And then, you know, it just kind of goes from there. So, you know, it's, it's, the gaming industry is really weird because you can kind of get started in the industry without having like very little like, so it's like official quote unquote training. Just because of the nature of like the type of jobs that are out there.

Right. So for myself, like I came from the like e-sports like production area and then I got hired in with Kakao games on Black Desert to be a community manager. And then eventually, you know, got hired over here and ZXT. But like, you know, it's there's. I'm sure for someone like Jeremy, there's probably a wider range of like qualifications. I also just consider myself very lucky. A lot of it also comes down to this opportunity and who you know is going to be able to vouch for you or just open up the door.

And, you know, I would say another thing that we're doing is try to open up as many doors for people looking to build their career. So we've got a lot of the really triple. experts that did Blizzard marketing on the team. So if you want to develop some skills, happy to, again, share knowledge. We want this knowledge to be free. So we've got almost every discipline now,

project management, product management, engineering, design, marketing, community, data science, et cetera. So just throwing it out there. Right, we have a lot of artists like myself. Oh, yeah, sorry. Sorry, no, no. No, no. What I was more saying is like, yeah,

there's room for artists, editors. If you're into video, graphic design, like it's a whole world of marketing available for you. There's some people who do stunt work, big movies and dancing and singing outside. It's really fun. It's cool.

And there is time meets opportunity, meets luck. But honestly, if you're just ready to learn, ready to do it, I think you got all you know. Totally. And, you know,

this is stuff that, you know, I was trained on in terms of management theory. One of the keys to learning, you know, if you to bucket different activities, there's like, you know, straight up academic educational training, then there's like having the mentorship in someone like guiding you through. But then there's the actual doing of the work. And it's so disproportionate that you're learning by doing is the most powerful way for something to sink in. So the key here is not just to say, here's all the material, because you could like YouTube anything you want, right? Like all that information's out there.

It's being able to apply it in the real world and see things get active in the team. That's where stuff really sinks in. So I think the key here is like if you want to be able to pursue this career, you should just get as much hands-on experience as you can't, just start doing things and building things and connecting with people and just work on projects. That's when you start to build that expertise. And so we're getting into an interview, you know exactly how this stuff works. And you could speak to it authentically.

And interviewers are looking for that. They're asking the questions to understand, hey, have you done something like this in the past? Like, yeah, maybe you could speak to it, but show me the things that demonstrate you have experience, you know, making mistakes and failing and recovering from that and then building something better as a result. So if there's one thing I'd recommend, just go hands on as much you can, even if there's maybe not necessarily, you know, a pain and opportunity, just getting the experience is actually worth its weight in gold. So I'll throw that in there as a potential another vector. There you go, guys. That's the boss. You know, so I mean, you know, if you if you want any advice from anybody, this is the person to get it from.

Definitely not me. And you know what? We're doing workshops as well. So we do workshops on like, you know, resume reviews and we can do interview training. Like we've got a lot of, oh, we're doing leadership training as well. So again, like happy to share that knowledge and help as many people as we can. Sorry, but I got some people here causing a ruckus. That sounds great.

Yeah, like I think, so I traditionally tell people like don't work for free, right? But I think what gets lost when I said that is, or when I say that, is like, don't work and get nothing out of it, right? If it's like a chance to, like, meet some people or like, you know, maybe get like a chance to do some other kind of work, that can be valuable as well. But there's definitely like a fine line because there's something I think it's a lot. last podcast. Unfortunately, the gaming industry in general is like, there's a lot of passion involved, right? So when there's a lot of passion, there's a lot of people who can tend to kind of like overextend themselves and work for like very little in return, right? And I think that when you do try to get into an industry like this, you have to make sure that that, that you

are like 100% comfortable with one, what you're doing into what you're going to get personally out of it, right? And if it's even, you know, just a chance to meet someone who can maybe help you get, you know, a position or like, you know, some work somewhere. else, that's something that you have to like kind of that, like, evaluate for yourself whether that's important or not. Yeah, Ben, as you are so right. I agree. It's to the point that it's quite exploiting people in the games industry to basically really undervalue and undercompensate. And that's also, you can extrapolate that. That's the same crisis in the nonprofit world where, you know, people just aren't paid enough to do the good stuff because there's not a great

business model there. So our approach is very radical. We want to take a lot of these like really powerful strategies and tactics in a private world and bring it into the nonprofit sector. So because we have a real business model and that can actually generate revenue that allows us to pay and compensate our workers. So, you know, obviously we can't like pay Google salaries and all that stuff, but we can make people have a very comfortable living and they're working 100% remote so they can just live anywhere on a planet. And for people, that are going to be joining the movement, we, you know, we've built this kind of very flexible gig economy. And so, you know, people can kind of plug in and work on a project and get paid for

it and then just take a six-week vacation if they want. And they can just plug right big and plug right back in. That's nice. And so it's just, it's very decentralized. And, you know, it's not like this top-down hierarchy. It's like, hey, we got the platform, we got the organization. You choose your path. Where do you want to develop your skills? Who are the teams going to work with what are the projects you're passionate about because there's tons for us to do. And so, yeah, we're creating this really interesting environment where people can really flourish and choose their path and have some real autonomy and agency in what they do and where they want to grow. And then we just supply their resources for them to grow and get that experience.

So it's fun stuff, man. Like, honestly, we can talk a lot more about it. But sorry if I'm eating up all the time. No, no. Like, I mean, as like I said earlier, right, it's like the more you talk, the less I got to talk. So it's totally cool. I'm sure people are like tired of, you know, listening to the same person talk for like six and nine episodes and that, right? It's not to get any better, you know, so I think, you know, the more verbose folks we can have on, the better. Nice. Yeah, but, but with that, guys, we are kind of running short on time. So before we go ahead and

officially end it, I just want to go ahead and go through our community roundup with quick. Are you guys cool to hang for a little bit longer or do you guys have to bounce right away? Let's do it. All right. So real quick, guys, just congratulations to Darkie and gift gummies in the community for being part of our Pucci Professor program. So thanks to them, they're going to be helping out in our hardware and support channels, offering advice to all the lovely community members out there.

So congratulations to them. If you guys have any questions about the program or want to apply, go bug B. She holds the power to all that stuff. She's slowly running the server on her own. Thank you to her for all the hard work. She's an amazing person. And a perfect example of like, you know, you work really hard in a community and you end up, you know, basically, you know, like running the entire company. Yeah, she got, she got hired on as a moderator.

Then we promoted her to like a lead moderator. Then she joined the customer service team. And now she's doing like all kinds of stuff. Like I know like her main job is customer service, but she does so many more things in the company. Like, I don't know where she has the capacity for this stuff. It's pretty insane. So if you guys want to do me a big favor, think it'd be in the chat. She's going to be confused as to why we're tagging her, but no, it's okay. Also, congratulations to, and I just scroll up again, I'm like in 50 million windows here, to Daytona for being our setup of the week winner.

Really, really slick setup. Looks really, really great. I don't even want to ask. how much those nano leaf panels cost you because I'm sure they're ridiculous. I always want to buy those, but they're like, they're like so expensive. They're crazy and they're just like pretty cool, like looking lights, but they look so awesome. And I think it's really pretty much it. Nothing too crazy has been happening. We just been kind of chilling right now. Keep an eye out for cool stuff during the holidays.

You might have some stuff for you. Again, I think it's actually B who's going to be organizing that stuff as well. So think B again. bugger once more during her workday and that's pretty much it so don't forget guys

check out Layline we have it pinned in the in the podcast channel thanks to you Gina for holding down the fort in the chat with all the social links the YouTube answering questions she's been kicking

a lot of a lot of butt on that yeah and thank you so much to Dolly and Jeremy, guys. Thanks for hopping on. Really appreciate it. Oh, man.

Thank you so much. Likewise. It's an honor. And, yeah, I think we'd be happy to come back whenever you'd like to kind of give updates because we move very fast. And we got some also big announcements coming up over next few weeks and months.

I will definitely hold you guys to that for sure. Don't test me. for sure. And thanks to everyone else to tuned in. Really appreciate you guys. Remember to tune in next week at 10 a.m. Pacific 10 in time of the official NZXT Discord server and follow at NZXT on all relevant and irrelevant social media.

And don't forget to send an email to Clubcast at NZXC.com if you want to ask a question off the air. Don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, and SoundCloud. And if you can be so kind, leave us a positive review. if you like what you hear, but especially if you don't. Thanks, guys, and we'll see you next time. Bye, Jeremy. Bye, Dolly.

Bye, Eugenia. Who's hanging in the background. Appreciate it. Goodbye. Hey, guys. Thank you. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Hey, there we go.

I'm just kidding. Okay, bye.