In this episode of the Edge of NFT podcast, the hosts delve into the world of web three gaming and the immersive metaverse with special guest Benjamin Charbit, the CEO and co-founder of Life Beyond Studios. Benjamin shares his journey from the banking industry to becoming a strategic leader in the game development world. He discusses the inspiration behind Life Beyond, a gaming metaverse where players where players shape their own roles in a tokenized economy with true ownership, and how it integrates blockchain technology and NFTs to offer true ownership and a player-driven economy. The episode explores the concept of agency and entrepreneurship within the game, the importance of community partnerships, and the roadmap for Life Beyond's development. Tune in for more details!
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Listen to the podcast here
This is Benjamin Charbit of Life Beyond Studios, building the feeling of a game with the stakes of reality. I am here on the Edge of NFT, the only game in town to get real Web3 content.
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Stay tuned for this episode to learn how the Game Director of Assassin’s Creed has in-game assets to serve the player through the Web3 gaming ecosystem, Life Beyond.
Plus, how Counter-Strike propelled our guests from eSports competitor to creator of one of the greatest gaming franchises of all time. Learn how a tokenized community-led platform can lead to better internet and an awesome fest in the woods to be Friends With Benefits.
Finally, hear about Denarii Labs‘ unique twelve-week accelerator focused on tokenomics design, offering teams up to $200,000 in funding.
Before we get started, we are launching a brand new show by August 2nd, 2023. Dive into the captivating world of artificial intelligence with the Edge of AI Podcast. Join us as we explore the frontiers of AI and its impact on our lives. You can subscribe now on your favorite platform. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for exciting updates and insights.
Don’t miss our exclusive launch event on August 2nd, 2023, in Venice Beach, California. You can get tickets and be at the forefront of the AI revolution. The subscribe link is EdgeOfAI.xyz/Subscribe. Our Twitter handle is @EdgeOf_AI. You can find us on LinkedIn as Edge of AI. You can get tickets for that event at Lu.ma/EdgeOfAI. Join us on the Edge of AI Podcast and discover the limitless possibilities of artificial intelligence. We will see you over there.
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In this episode, we spotlight Benjamin Charbit, the visionary CEO and Cofounder of Life Beyond Studios, a gaming platform offering unparalleled immersion. He transitioned from high-profile roles in banking and private equity to the game industry, making waves as a Strategic Leader at Ubisoft and Game Director of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.
Inspired by Neil Stephenson’s works, he became committed to creating an MMO that offers more than play. It offers Life. A subsidiary brand since 2022, Life Beyond Studios previously, Darewise Entertainment, comprises an international team of game development veterans. They leveraged the potential of online games to create social interactive experiences.
Life Beyond Studios’ flagship project Life Beyond is a gaming metaverse inviting players to establish a new civilization on Planet Dolos. This sci-fi world blends a player-driven tokenized economy with NFTs enabling players to shape their roles in its society. The game embraces the open metaverse philosophy, marrying immersive experiences with digital societies emphasizing true ownership and interoperability. Benjamin, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. I enjoyed listening to everything you were saying.
It is like daily affirmations. It is like, “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough.”
It sounds great because you are working every day on this project. You don’t take that much distance from it, especially for us. We have been hard at work since 2018. It is our daily grind. I hear all that, and I’m like, “This is what we are doing. This sounds exciting.” Thank you for that.
As Ethan was reading all that, I was reflecting on how different this is from what other folks refer to as the “metaverse.” The metaverse occasionally gets a bad rap for not being immersive, engaging in, and allowing people to have this type of unique experience that keeps them coming back. There are a lot of empty, dusty metaverses out there, but that is not going to be the case with Life Beyond. I’m excited to dive in here. Before we do that, let’s start at the beginning. How did this concept for Life Beyond come about? It is this interesting social tech society.
It is going to resonate with what you were saying already, which is, as you introduce, we are all game developers coming, most of us from Ubisoft, having worked on these blockbuster games, mostly focusing on open-world games like Assassin’s Creed and The Division. Back in 2014, I read my first book by Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash. Sorry to disappoint your audience.
First, it was Reamde. It was a fantastic thriller. Most of the book takes place in an MMO called Terrain. I read this book. I see the implication and the connection between the digital and the physical world. I’m 39. I was born, raised, and brought up in this digital space before it became such a mainstream thing. I was on RRC. I was playing online games when I was 12, 13, and 14. I made many friendships over there, real ones and meaningful ones. Navigating between these two layers of reality has always been my daily life.
Reading this book took me to the next level. I was like, “When I think of the MMO genre, that is the next step.” The next step is building these virtual worlds that impact our lives where we can come to play but where eventually expand our presence there. We stay for other reasons. Rather than constantly being the hero, we can also be any other member of this society.
That is how it started to grow in me. I’m sharing with the rest of my partners. Most of them come from the same generation, which is not Gen Z. It is more like an older Millennial type who were all big MMO players. If we could one day get to experience this, we would be happy. That is the crazy challenge we decided to tackle.
I’m over the line of what you defined as your generation, but I’m excited about it. I saw Richard nodding his head. He is excited about it too.
Assassin’s Creed is one of my favorite lineups of all time. Black Flag was the jump-off point where things started to go in the right direction. It aligns with everything you said about not necessarily needing to be the main character or being able to have some identity and do some things within that game.
Being the leader on that, I’m sure you had a lot of creative direction with that, which aligns perfectly, and I think that is cool. Shout-out to Jalen. This is your favorite game of all time. Be jealous. I will make sure to share this with you because this is sick. Web3 tech and blockchain allow you to define identities in Life Beyond. Do you delve more into how players can utilize these technologies to shape their endgame personas?
The idea of blockchain is the relationship between the game, developers, and community is radically different. Before, there was a completely unbalanced power of the developer. That could unilaterally make crazy decisions that sometimes you didn’t enjoy as a player. The bargaining power is completely different. The game has to serve the assets, and not the assets have to serve the game.
The game has to serve the assets and not so much the assets have to serve the game. Click To Tweet
As developers, we have to serve this community, which also means that now this gives many more opportunities for the players to enter this world to play other roles than the traditional or I’m going to walk around slaying dragons and monsters. Not that we want to dismiss this part because a lot of us come for this, but how many players, every year, buy farming simulators and all of these other games where they can do many different things, social, economic simulation, and management gameplay? That is what we wanted to do.
We wanted to create a world where we could bring all of these people together and offer them many different gameplays. These gameplays would be connected by this economic and social loop, which is the same thing as the physical world. You have a job, I have a job, and together, because of the free market economy, we can bring value to each other.
That is the same idea, which also means it is a crazy project. It is bigger than anything we have ever done before because it is many games together, and this is also where only Web3 development could allow you to do this because we can’t focus on building this thing behind closed doors for several years and eventually publish a game. Instead, we could onboard the communities, talk to early adopters and different types of persona who want different things, and start testing our assumptions on paper or sometimes prototypes. It is a radically different way of approaching it.
It sounds like a lot of fun, responsibility, and a big-level perspective. It is fascinating to consider a type of project to take on with your colleagues and friends. Within what you are doing, we have The Hub. It is touted as a place for innovation and interaction. It sounds like one of our events. Can you explain how this contributes to the player’s experience in Life Beyond?
The Hub is a good illustration of what I was introducing, which is rather than developing the game completely and getting to an alpha stage, we are building the game step-by-step. Every system is going to go through each of these stages of conception, pre-production, production, alpha, and beta of what we call gold master when it is ready to ship.
The Hub is this destination or the spaceship, where all the players are stuck and orbiting around the planet. In this lobby, we invite everybody together. It is a social space, but it is also the place where we are going to keep introducing whatever we are developing. Sometimes it is a piece of lore, partnership, or a prototype, but it is this central destination, hence The Hub, where you join. It is your gateway to the Life Beyond experience. It is simple, but it is going to expand over time into much more of a theme park because this is where you will be able to test and experience a bunch of things until you are finally able to get into the proper game.
My mind immediately moved toward the moment when I learned that Game of Thrones had multiple different directors and was similar to Mandalorian. I’m curious about The Hub and all these different subgames. If you cast different directors and producers for these things based on their personality, is there this ghoulish world where the person behind is a little bit darker but still a cool person?
The truth is every attempt we have tried in this industry to replicate the movie industry into the gaming industry has always been a disaster. We tried to have executive production houses that would ideate the game and work with a team of developers to make it. It never worked. It is interesting because the benefit of having multiple directors end up as a viewer to have multiple flavors still within the same lore. For us, game development is a different type of production that is usually closer to animation. I would not even know how to organize a development like that.
I was curious. That makes a lot of sense. It is part of my naivete, but I wanted to at least ask. At the same time, commuting partnerships and having a lot of those are pivotal to the metaverse, in particular, Life Beyond. I know you guys are leveraging community partnerships in some interesting ways. Could you talk about how they are enhancing the game environment?
There are many different aspects. The first one is we never wanted to build such a massive game in the shadow. Connecting with our community, getting feedback, and getting desire was an important part of the process. We have to be reasonable. It is not like we can address every single need, but we have built a unique relationship with what we call our founders. The founders are the holders of our founders key, which is our most premium NFT.
Every two weeks, we host a town hall with this community with the founders. It is not like we come here to present something. We go there to discuss topics. Not because we want to keep them updated but because with Life Beyond, we are building the playground and systems, but the life over there will be completely created by the individual players and player organizations. We are not building this game for ourselves but for the community. Engaging this way genuinely has always been an important part of the process.
The second reason is, especially when you have been a triple-A developer for some years, it is a little bit of a traumatizing experience because you are going to spend multiple years. It is never 1 or 2. Even in the press, when they say, “It takes 2 to 3 years to build like this.” This is never the true story. It is more than 5, 6, or even more. When it is a brand new IP, it can be 8 to 10 years.
Time is the most valuable resource that we have. You want to make sure you are not completely going off track. That is why we are building this relationship with the community. The next step for us is to have how we are engaging, onboarding, and bringing this community to start creating its own presence in the world.
I like that response, and it gives me a lot of hope for where Web3 gaming and the metaverse are headed. A lot of earlier versions of Web3 games, unfortunately, weren’t built for where your hardcore gamers are coming from. It does take years to build the type of games that a lot of these gamers come and play over and over again to have that stickiness.
The other part of it that you spoke about was the community side by having these town halls and feedback. If something sucks, tell me. You are open to that. If you like this thing, it was like, “Let’s talk about it. Let’s have this be a back-and-forth and not a one-way. Let me build this thing, and here is why you are going to like it.” Tell me why these features make the most sense and why you have been doing that. There is always a defining moment for a project. What has been that moment for Life Beyond? Why do you think it is significant?
The first moment for us was in 2019 when we opened the game for the first time to test something because it was out at the same time we opened a Discord server. We started having people coming in. It was small at that time. We had this strong connection with this small group of players who are still there several years later.
After many iterations and throwaways, what I was saying is we only see the last two years of development of a triple-A game, but you have no idea what happened before and how many times you threw out your art direction, creative direction, and narrative direction. You had this technical, technological obstacle. This was a strong moment, but there were several of these pivotal moments.
Another important one was when we decided to move to the blockchain. When we started Life Beyond, it was a Web2 project, but it was a project that was designed from the get-go for ownership. Whatever content you would have, whether it would be your vehicle or equipment, all of this was supposed for us to be your property and you were entitled to do whatever you wanted with it. We were building a completely traditional architecture to give you these rights.
When we pivoted to Web3, that was a big moment, especially with the defiance that some of our community members were experiencing at this time. We had a few movements in the community. There is not that much drama. The good level of transparency and communication helped us get even closer to some of our community members.
You mentioned a moment ago the promise of true ownership going on in here. Within a game, this idea of agency is important to the users. They want to feel like they can affect things and have a role or credit for contributing to things. Could you get dive a little bit deeper into what this entails and how it manifests into this reality within the game?
There cannot be any innovation if there is no entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is going to rely on you being able to do whatever you want in this world with the assets that you own. You can sell, rent, and provide services. The beauty of smart contracts is composability. We think of smart contracts and NFTs as digital property, which is an important part of the value proposition. Even the most appealing part is composability.
Our world is made of composability. Uber is an example of composability. If you have a car transportation service, you create Uber. It is the same in Life Beyond. The fact that you own this asset and it is not even hosted on a central database but on an architecture we don’t have any control over. It means that in a completely permissionless way, anyone can start building services on top of the experience.
Our world is made of composability. Click To Tweet
In the example of composability, let’s say you want a car rental service. You can do that. If you own a bunch of cars, you can create everything the front end, the back end, and the smart contract that is going to use your NFTs. Without even messaging us, you can run this whole service. This is a game changer, especially coming from the MMO world, where we were limited in what we were able to do with our assets.
I wanted to touch on the roadmap mainly for selfish reasons. When do I get to play this thing? What are the other collaborations, partnerships, and features that we should be on the lookout for?
The first question, which is burning everybody’s lips all the time. I like to ask the same question to the team sometimes. We are going to keep pushing it. You can join The Hub and play some of our prototypes, but as our community knows, we are rolling out a completely new art direction over the summer of 2023.
The original art direction was cartoony and Fortnity a little bit, but also something we could afford with the limited resources we had back then when the point was to prove the point. We were not, at this point, in the heavy development. When other brands arrived and we joined them, then we became able to completely deliver this level of quality, which we have been developing.
We are rolling out this art direction which also means that we have some interesting things coming out in September, October, and November 2023. You are going to be able to experience some parts of the game. It is not going to be massive, but it will give you a first flavor, and we are going to keep doing this. We are going to use the rest of 2023 and a big part of 2024 before we are able to get into beta stage work. You have the full open-world experience with a big focus on our power-first gameplay called pioneering, which is the arrival on the planet and now the first step before we can get to a sustainable settlement.
The second question you asked was about the partnerships. When you build a world like Life Beyond or GTA, you have two ways to do it. You can author everything or bring in partners and they can populate the world. There are content creators in the world. We are more interested in this opportunity rather than ourselves recreating every stakeholder and entity of this world that makes it in the whole world-building process.
We haven’t made these announcements yet, but we have some massive things coming out. There are some NFT communities onboarding. There are some famous brands from the physical world. We are playing on many different tracks now, steadily building this world. It takes a little bit more patience, but we are talking about a few months, and we will have some major announcements to make.
Thanks so much for giving us the lowdown on what you guys are up to. Another Animoca portfolio company is doing cool stuff. I appreciate all the years you have been putting in. I’m glad to give you that sense of accomplishment that helps every once in a while by reading a solid intro. Let’s move on to the next segment. The next segment is our Hot Topics segment. We are going to bring on another special guest for that named Drew Coffman. It is great to see you.
Thanks for having me.
Let me give an intro for you. Drew Coffman of FWB, which is Friends With Benefits. It is a new social network made up of creatives and builders who believe in the promise of a better internet. Yes, we could make this better. I feel it was good and there was some degradation. Let’s see where we can go from here. Welcome, Drew. I’m excited to hear all about Friends with Benefits.
Thanks for having me. Benjamin, it was great listening to you back here on this bookshelf somewhere is Reamde, which is one of my absolute favorites. You have a fan for life and Life Beyond because we have an affinity for the same types of metaverse ideals. I have been on my own journey through Web3 and seeing our internet turn into a much more on-chain decentralized internet.
FWB has become my primary home for that. It is a community of artists, creatives, and all types of different people who are interested in coming together and thinking through what needs to happen to create the next digital age that creates a set of values that we think is lacking from the Web 2.0 experience we have had. It is great to be here.
Kudos on reclaiming the term Friends With Benefits. I never liked that term as it was originally designed. It was cheesy, to say the least. You guys have made it something special and powerful brand in the space. I have known about FWB since the beginning. I remember our early days of podcasting in Bright Moments. Everyone was also talking about Friends With Benefits.
It is not easy to build a tokenized community. This is your second fest. I wasn’t able to make the first one because I was traveling. I’m excited to be coming in 2023 with some of our crew, Audrey and Zach, getting to experience a special innovation festival. We tried to put a lot of je ne sais quoi into our event. I know you guys do. Can you tell us a little bit about what we can anticipate at the fest?
FWB started as this token-gated Discord. That is where a lot of people started meeting each other and having these genuine conversations about the future of the internet and art. We wanted to have a space for us to all meet physically. That space ended up being this amazing art campus in the middle of Idlewild, California, which is in the Palm Springs Area.
It is this awesome intimate experience of being around a bunch of like-minded people and talking about stuff that matters. In 2022, there were these incredible talks by different people about how Uniswap was founded and how different music projects were embracing decentralization to figure out how to cross borders and figure out issues stopping them from making their art in the different areas of the globe that they lived in. There is a ton of incredible music acts because many of FWB members and founder are rooted in the music world as a whole.
It is going to be our second time there. We went right back to Idlewild because we loved it so much. It is an opportunity to touch the grass, which I know not everybody who is extremely online, including myself, always has the example to do. As much as I love having these conversations in online spaces day after day, there is something about the physicality of seeing people in front of you, having those conversations, and creating those IRL connections. That is important. We are excited about it.
What do you think, Ben? Can we get you on a flight from Paris? You got a game you are working on. I hear that is taking up a lot of your time.
I’m the CEO. They do the hard work. I come to California often. I would enjoy that very much. I was speaking at NFT LA in 2023 out of rage. I spend a lot of time there. We have some great partners in California. It is a big gaming destination, whether it is in San Francisco or LA. I love the value proposition you are putting together. It is interesting.
People start to get a little bit afraid of the metaverse thinking that would alienate us from the physical world. We believe the exact opposite. We believe in bridging. We always talk about bridging these realities because it is not one is real and the other one is virtual. It is more like one is physical and the other one is digital. We care so much about being grounded on planet Earth as well as being present in this digital layer. It is more about expanding than separating. I love the idea of connecting physically.
One other thing that came to mind for me is the close synergy between the music world and the gaming world. Some of the best games have the best music. I see those two universes coming closer together over time.
Drew, with what you all are doing with this innovation fest, one of the biggest pieces of this is the community. Even on the website, when you go there, it is driven in. You even started as a token-gated Discord, but you have now formed a DAO. What is that vision you have for putting the DAO even further into the hands of the community?
FWB has been around since 2020. I joined randomly in the middle of 2021 without knowing anybody. I started becoming a core contributor over time. That vision of the experience I have had is the experience of what we want FWB to be. It is a limited community. There are around 4,000 or 5,000 members. We want everyone, who is part of the community, to feel like they have true ownership over it. Fest is a cool way for us to all be together in person. We want to use that as a space to rethink what the roles of being a core contributor to FWB look like and what it looks like to submit a proposal to do different types of work or spend the DAO treasury on the type of art that we want to make.
We have seen that. It is time for it to be even more radically front and center for FWB. The Friends With Benefits term has been around for a long time. It is being repurposed for the DAO. Everybody who is a friend and friend with benefits has benefits that they can bring to the table. I love the idea of DAOs and decentralized organizations of any shape, recognizing that everybody has something to offer and contribute. We want to be one of the people who pioneer that idea and make it clear.
If you dug deep into people’s souls and everyone out there, everybody wants to be able to contribute something. We often think of others as inner-focused, but it is only to the degree that they know they have something inside, and they want people to recognize that there is value there. That is wonderful. You guys have the FWB App. This is exciting. What are the features there? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
A lot of people who have been in Web3 for the last few years may have been suffering from Discord fatigue over the last little while. I know that I was. You started joining more of them over time and you felt completely overwhelmed by the amount of Discord servers you were in. Maybe I’m projecting and other people feel the same way.
We also realized that when we went to the fest in 2022, we saw a lot of faces that we weren’t seeing on a regular basis on Discord. Some people are not the type of people that want to be on Discord every day. They might feel a little more interested in an Instagram experience. They might feel way more offline. We wanted to create a space that felt akin to the type of social network we were trying to create. We see FWB, the community, as being the social network. It needed a platform for everyone to be together.
We have created our own experimental prototype social network app. It looks similar to Instagram or Twitter in terms of being able to post there. You can only post there if you are a member of FWB. There is a layer of privacy that is interesting and unique compared to how you feel when you post something for the entire world to see on Twitter and Instagram.
We also have governance features and events piped into the app. We are constantly doing global events. You can use that as your way to get into the events and see what is going on. We are going to continue building it out based on what the community wants. There have been features that people have been like, “We don’t like that feature.” That gets removed. There have been things that people say, “We need to see that exist.” It gets added. It has been interesting to see a community-owned platform take shape based on what they are asking for without any other requirements being built in.
I’m honored to be part of it. I should mention that this segment is part of a media partnership. We will be doing some coverage before the event and at the event. We will turn some content into a future episode. I appreciate that partnership and the chance we are going to give two tickets away to our community. Thanks so much for your generosity there. We will have an upcoming campaign there. For those who want to learn more about FWB and maybe get over to the woods with us, where do they go for more information?
Go to FWB.help to learn more. You don’t have to be a member of FWB to come to FWB Fest. It is a great way to learn about that type of community and check out all the partners that are coming, including Edge of NFT. That is cool to see a community of communities gathering together out in the middle of the woods to build a better internet. Learn more there.
Edge Of AI will be present. I don’t know if you are aware, but we will be launching the Edge Of AI Podcast by August 2nd, 2023. We got an AI presence in our veins. It will be fun to bring that to the table.
Thanks, Drew, for spending some time with us, and we will see you next time.
Thank you.
We got one more hot topic. We want to delve into it independently here. This is a hot topic that should be interesting to explore. Let’s get into it. Denarii Labs is a bespoke tokens-focused accelerator launched by advisory firm HLV, Horizen Lab Ventures, and investors at RBV, Red Beard Ventures. Josh, tell us a little bit more.
We know these folks well. They have all been leaders in the space, working on some innovative projects and pushing the envelope in addition to deploying dollars. They wanted to start this accelerator in the current market because they think now is the right time to build, and we commend that. It is a twelve-week intensive remote program focused on tokenomics design, go-to-market strategy, liquidity, legal considerations, which are important, and community building.
There are going to be design sessions, lots of speakers, and interactive token design workshops over the duration of the program, culminating in a demo day with investors. It is a cool media partnership that we have with these guys. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. Richard, do you have some more details for us?
If you use this link to learn more and apply it to the cohort, you go to DenariiLabs.xyz. Things that you can watch out for with Denarii Labs include the cohort applications that are live until July 31st, 2023. Your deadline is to get it done by July 31st, 2023. Denarii Labs is offering teams up to $200,000 in funding and tokenomics design support. The cohort is going to kick off in mid-September 2023.
It is always good to see stuff like this and apprise the readers of cool opportunities. Let’s close that one out. Anything else to say? Richard and Josh have been interacting with us guys. Let’s head on to the next segment, which is Edge Quick Hitters. This is going to be a fun one with Ben. I’m sure you got a lot of cool stories from your background and present that we love diving into. It’s a fun and quick way to get to know you a bit better. There are ten questions. We are looking for short single or few-word responses, but you can feel free to expand if we get the urge. Are you ready, Ben?
I’m scared, but I’m ready.
Question number one, what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
It is an easy one because I remember it well as a child. It was a video game. I wish it was something more fun. I was 5 or 6 with the Nintendo Entertainment System I got for Christmas with the Mario Bros and Duck Hunt. That was not the one I purchased. It was expensive for me. My birthday is in early January. A few weeks after, I remember my uncle giving me Francs back then. That is what I did with it. I probably bought candies before, but the first thing I bought was TMNT, Ninja Turtle.
Have you gotten into chiptune music where they take Nintendo game sounds from the old systems to make music out of it?
If you haven’t checked it out, you should. You have to be from this generation. Otherwise, it doesn’t resonate.
Question number two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
It is related because back then, I don’t know if you guys had this habit, but you had this small store. I was not living in Paris. I was in a suburb of Paris. We had in this small town by the store. I would buy games and sell games. That is how I funded the next one. I was saving a little bit of money. I was into gaming early. As far as I can remember, it was the first thing I was selling.
It is uncanny. It is fun to do these questions because you get to see those trends. It is always something deeply connected with the person doing that in the present.
When you take a little bit of business, you are like, “This whole thing makes a lot of sense.”
You need to work some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into Life Beyond.
There is a fantastic device you can find on Amazon. It looks like a Game Boy. It has all of the games. Honestly, I had nightmares. I played a little bit.
I own those three games in the early days. It is a little bit of childhood nostalgia coming back. Let’s see what happens next. What is the most recent thing you purchased?
I bought a game. I bought Zelda. I hadn’t bought a game for a long time. It turns out my wife and my kids have been away on vacation. I was like, “I have a bit of time to get myself into a game that is going to take many hours.” I went to the big department store and bought Zelda.
I have a confession. I got hooked on another interesting blockchain game, NFL Rivals. Have you played that one yet?
It is from Mythical.
It is different than what you are building but addictive. My team is already highly upgraded. I may or may not have spent quite a bit of money in that marketplace already.
Big shout out to the Mythical team. We know them well. We love what these guys are doing on many different fronts. Congratulations to them.
With this interoperability, maybe we got some football metaverse experience at some point. What is the most recent thing you sold, Ben?
I am in this time of my life where now I don’t sell things when I don’t want to use them anymore. I usually give them. It is my way of contributing a little bit. I give clothes mostly. I don’t feel like I need to sell them unless it is something of an insane value.
What would you consider your most prized possession?
It is my flat. That is the biggest investment I have done. It is funny because, over the years, I have been less obsessed with owning than I was before. I’m more obsessed with the ability I have with it. I bought a few NFTs. I didn’t sell any. I’m still a big holder for now because I was not trying to make any money out of it. I was more interested in the community or the potential utility I would get from there eventually. I’m still a holder when it comes to the NFT. I don’t care about owning things in general in life now. I have kids. Kids change your perspective in many different aspects of your life.
You already read here first, everyone. He is a diamond hands holder and is in it for the long haul. It makes sense why you are building games in this Web3 space. If there is anything in the world you could buy, digital, physical service, or experience, for sale, what would you purchase?
If it was for sale, I would love to get a ticket to go to space to explore. If I could afford this, it would be one of my dreams to get out of planet Earth and experience something new.
We have had that often. Our favorite version of that is the person who had the foresight to say, “I’m going to buy the spaceship.” Think about that. When you get the next chance to buy something, great, go ahead and buy that spaceship and a pilot.
You have to take care of the maintenance and where you park it. If you take me to the spaceship, I would be happy.
Question number seven, If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
I would say my resilience. I was also thinking of generosity because it is something that has grown in me over the years. If I think of it from a generational standpoint, resilience matters, especially with the world where the future we are facing. It proved to me to be one of the most valuable personality traits my parents taught me because I took it from them. It helped me. Life has become easier when you have this, especially as an entrepreneur. It is always a rocky road. When you have this, and there is another hit, you get back on your feet. It makes your life much easier when you have this.
Resilience matters, especially with the world we're facing. Click To Tweet
There have been times in my life when I have been a teacher of various types of students from university to technical skills. I remember some key moments when you had a timed exam and a student would be trying to do it. They had fifteen minutes to do a task. Five minutes in, something happens. They get discouraged. They go, “It didn’t go well.” Teaching someone to be like, “There are ten minutes left. What are you going to do?” Keep going.
It takes many years to build up these traits and get your tougher skin. It is something I hope I will manage to transmit to my kids. Hopefully, they can get it much earlier than I did. It is not about making your life easier. It is more about more enjoyable. You keep fighting, and you are less hurt when things are difficult.
Question number eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits for the next generation, what would it be?
My impatience. That is something I’m trying to deal with constantly. I’m working on it. I don’t know about you guys, but for me, time is always a big source of anxiety. It is this thing I can never buy back. I can never get it back. It is gone. I’m usually quite impatient. I want things to happen now. It can be equality, but it is also sometimes a burden.
Yes, especially when you are building a game that has an eight-year roadmap.
It is my daily struggle.
This is a little bit less of a struggle. What did you do before joining us on the show?
I had a great dinner. Shout out to Alvie Lyon who is the OG of this space. He was in France for a few days. We had a great dinner together. He is someone who has been active in this space, advising a lot of companies. You were talking about Horizen Live Ventures. He works closely with them. We had a good moment. Shout out to you, my friend.
What are you going to do next after the show? What time is it in Paris?
It is 11:30 PM. I’m going to head out home and go to sleep because I’m an early riser. Usually, I check out not too late.
I feel you on that. I’m the same way. I happily wake up early as I start nights getting a little bit later.
It is not a gamer’s behavior. If you are playing online games, you play late. If I start at 6:00 AM, I’m looking for servers to play with other French people or people in Europe, I feel lonely.
They do a little bit of gaming to wind down before going to sleep. Richard and Eathan keep me on their toes because they are in two time zones over me. I appreciate the tension there. Richard, do we have a bonus question?
We have a couple for you. The first one is staying on the gaming topic. Being a hard corner gamer and you are there for a long time, you eventually get hungry. When you are binge gaming, what is your go-to beverage and snack of choice?
It is terrible because you catch me at the time of my life when I’m boring. I’m 39 now. I’m getting close to 40. I used to have such an unhealthy lifestyle. I would have soda and eat all crap. Now, I drink water and fruit. It is boring now. If I play a game because I like to have a hot drink, I might be drinking herbal tea. This is where I am now at 40. What an achievement.
Everyone has that one game they have spent an ungodly amount of their life playing. What was that game for you?
It is Counter-Strike. I was an eSport player. That is how I got my job at Ubisoft. I worked as a banker. When I met the CEO of Ubisoft, I told him I was an eSport player many years ago playing Counters-Strike. He was like, “What are you doing here? Come and join us.” That is how my whole journey in gaming started.
Counter-Strike is a game that I’m never over it. From time to time, I need to go back and turn on my computer. I still have a pro gaming mouse I never use, but sometimes, I take it out of the drawer and play. It is going to take me 1 or 2 weeks, and I get addicted. I’m like, “I don’t have the connective skills anymore. It is over.” It has been a game-changer in my life. This is how I connected with many folks in the online gaming community in Europe and France. It had a massive impact on my life. For some people, it might sound ridiculous, but it did in a positive way, not in a negative way.
That is a wrap here on the episode, but we want to do a quick shout-out from you. Does anybody come to mind that you think you might like to give a little bit of a shout-out to out there on the socials or something?
We have a great scene here in France. I’m excited to see how it is developing. First, shout out to my team. We are not going to tag all of them individually on social, but the Live Beyond team and the Animoca Brands group, which is doing something fantastic for this space. Beyond investing, what Yat Siu is doing, evangelizing, promoting, and always thinking about how this can make the world a better place. It is interesting. We are trying to all operate in this way. A big shout out to my folks and friends here at Life Beyond Studios and Animoca Brands.
Shout out to the Blockchain Gaming Alliance because we are trying to push the boundaries together, even though it is not easy because, as you might have seen, a lot of people are acting or thinking negatively about Web3 gaming coming from the traditional gaming world. It is going to take a little bit more time to show them all of the benefits, but first, we need to build these kickass games.
I love that last shout-out. We are members of the BGA. They are passionate about the space. It is awesome that Sebastien started that. For those that don’t know, Sebastien is the Cofounder of Sandbox, and it is his passion project to bring everyone together in the blockchain gaming world.
That concludes most of the show here. We are going to do a closing outro and make sure folks can know where to learn more about you and the projects you are working on. Where would that be?
On Twitter, @LifeBeyond. We are on Discord. This is where all of the conversations happen. If you want to know more, you can find me on Ben_Charbit. I like to give my views from time to time on what is going on in the industry and Web3 world. Come over, and we would love to welcome you all to Discord. It is a welcoming community. It is great. It is a place where it feels good to be.
We also have some giveaways going on. I got a generous list here. Folks can look out on socials for details. We got a Life Beyond Founder’s Key NFT, a Life Beyond Agent Zero Jacket NFT, and a Life Beyond hoodie. Allow these spots for the next Life Beyond NFT Mint. We are going to have five of those. You are generous. Thank you so much. Anything else to say about that or tell people to look out on the socials?
The Founder’s Key is the most premium NFT that we have minted. It will give you a lot of things, but the most important thing is with the Founder’s Key, you will get land in Dolos. When we arrive on the planet, you get your first plot of land. The land is going to be the base of many other activities. That is a great thing. The Agent Zero Jacket is a cool piece of wearable that is connected to a unique lore. We will provide some unique abilities in the game. Who doesn’t like hoodies? Who doesn’t swag? It took us so long to find the right one and design. They are kickass. They are awesome. I’m happy to start giving away some to our community.
We have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs. Thanks for exploring with us. We got space for more adventurers on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us, and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT with no spaces, and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
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