Welcome summoners! You have found the portal to the background of some of the more prominent members of this community. In this edition I was able to sit down and talk with @jarvie, one of the creators of Peakd and Peakmonsters. We go over everything from Peakd and Peakmonsters to his humanitarian efforts with the Syrian refugees. So, strap yourselves in because this one is epic and may take a few sessions to get through!
Hope you enjoy 😎
Platypus: Jarvie! Welcome, thanks so much for being here and doing this interview, Just to let you know, I'm using a discord recording bot to record this interview.
Jarvie: Hey man, Uhm hello recording (laughs).
Platypus: So yeah, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Your technical background, I guess.
Jarvie: I've done a lot of social media over the years. Uh, as a full time photographer for 13 years, and that that kind of coming from the, you know a lot of, tech interests and social media, and the arts and aesthetics and stuff. That's my background and then, I got into cryptocurrencies and started to learn market. Trading to see if I had a disposition, and I don't think I necessarily have the disposition for buying buy / sell, you know, market trading. But I ended up getting into blockchain and crypto that way and then when we started, uh, Peak D or at that point it was SteemPeak. I talked to my business partner and I said, hey. You want to create a marketplace cause? I know how marketplaces work, not like great at buying and selling but, and I know I understand most all the concepts and I like, I like creating. I'm kind of, an entrepreneur at heart. I Have been for a long time and I like creating things and creating websites as part of the creation process so…
Platypus: Yeah cool, well that leads me to my next question. I was gonna ask you how long have you been involved with the Hive network and were you involved with Steem?
Jarvie: Yeah, so joined in when it was steam in January of 2018 so coming up on four years, and, uh, Yeah, we had created a sight on there and the peak monsters was on Steem and then, Uh, it's been almost two years when we all switched over to hive. I'm also a one of the main block producers for the hive blockchain, you know, well, you know our company is I should say, Yeah, so been involved with both of them quite a bit.
Platypus: OK, so you did brush on this next one a little bit, but what actually got you involved in creating tools and Dapps on the network? Was it purely just the interest in creating a marketplace, or like where did the Peakd idea come from? You did mention that you were involved with social media in the past. Is this sort of lead on from that into the crypto space.
Jarvie: Yeah, so I got into crypto and then had some tokens and was looking around and learning about different projects and found Steem, and then Asgarth the developer started to create the social media platform a little bit. I joined in like a couple weeks later or a week later before it launched, I guess I should say and before really creating things. And then I thought, Uh, you know Aggroed and Yabapmatt announced about SteemMonsters, and I thought, well, I've got a little bit of the steam so I'll buy some of these packs and then ah, Didn't really have a marketplace, at that time we were just all trading things back and forth,Uh, just you know trusting each other, all that sort of stuff.
Platypus: The p2p sort of method.
Jarvie: Yeah, just on discord, like hey, who wants to buy this and sell that and I think that was around the time when I was, I told that Asgarth can we make like a like a marketplace to, to help people buy and sell these, and he surprisingly said, yeah so.
Platypus: Yeah cool. So yeah, what is your goal with peak monsters and peaked? Is this like a full-time job for you now or as a side project?
Jarvie: No, yeah full time. Peakd is supposed to be the main project, but peakmonsters, During these last three months or so has been pretty intensive because of, you know it exploding in popularity. So definitely been doing a lot with that and just working on getting hires or Well, for probably both of the companies, but mostly Peakd so that we can, I thought because it's going to be the bigger long term project, but peakmonsters is great. Great money, Peakd is just a lot more, meaning a lot more utility for the world. All that sort of stuff.
Platypus: Yeah, OK, I guess it can be, Uh, more useful for more people that aren't interested in Splinterlands, I guess. Well, while we're talking about Peakmonsters, what's your favourite feature of Peakmonsters?
Jarvie: Well, the one that I always think of is renting cause, uh, I do well because of renting cause I have a lot of cards. Uhm, it seems unique in the blockchain world. I helped design the whole concept of how it's done, I guess. Uhm, better or worse or whatever, but not the concept of renting itself, but like of how it would you know when we designed it, how it would be done, we did a version one for over a year. I don't know maybe a couple of years, Uh, Just on peakmonsters, but we wanted it to be kind of like a bigger, more inclusive sort of thing so then we decided to. To talk with Matt and see if he would help create a protocol to make it possible. To make it work between all different types and just work a little bit better.
Platypus: Yeah OK, yeah when I started in June I, I think yeah you guys are the only ones renting out and Splinterlands didn't have an in market rental place at that time. Did you find that transition affect the business much?
Jarvie: Had been only like last year, It had been planned since, like this last year this time and just got delayed in their plan for a long, long time and then they're like, oh, we're finally working on it and it ended up being like coinciding with the launch of their governance tokens, so everything kind of like came together at the at the same time.
Platypus: Yeah, everything went crazy didn't it.
Jarvie: Yeah, but we had been doing renting to a degree a different way for, I don't know, a year or so. Well, it was, it needed to be upgraded. It had a lot of Issues, but it's just like, it wasn't worth upgrading we wanted a new protocol from that which would work directly from splinterlands instead of us having to be custodians of money, which is what we had to do, and there's just issues and we didn't like it so.
Platypus: Ah yeah, so you've just released pretty much a whole bunch of upgrades for peakmonsters. A new rental bidding system and a few other things. What's the next sort of feature you're looking to work on? Do you think you could tell us about that?
Jarvie: OK so I will tell you about the second. My second favourite is all the compare stats stuff, the compare analytics in the Buy section.
Platypus: Ah yeah, yeah, I love that.
Jarvie: That, and it's a concept that we can keep extending you know, but each one of them takes a little bit of time to work on and do and I have a list of some that I would like to see, like one that I would like to see, one compares stats since that's also part of your question is, like to compare a gold level Gold league card or like Silver league cards or maybe max cards, like compare the price of all max card, like every monster, see how much it is to have the cheapest gold league card for each monster card, I guess the easy way to look at it and like well now this part is, Is this gold foil Yoden, you know $60,000, you know, or the regular version is, Uhm, well, still expensive. You know $5000. But you could get this card for maxed out for$10, you know, $20 or something like. That so people all go looking through and it's you know, there's different prices, but there's different rarities, and there's different things, and it's, it just be really nice for users to go, well, what’s the cheapest way. To get cards for this league, like what are the 50 cheapest cards for this league? OK click, click, click, click, click done you know so?
Platypus: Yeah, yeah why not. That sounds like a really good one and I hope that comes out, yeah?
Jarvie: Takes a lot of time and effort and probably, it'll be updated like, I mean, you can't update that on the fly. You have to like calculate it all out. It takes a decent amount of time and API calls, and making sure splinterlands doesn't get mad at us for Ping, for looking so much, but maybe just update it like every half an hour or one hour or something like that and or let someone come in and pay a couple, you know pay 1 SPS and will, you know, run it again for them so and then put their name out there. Everyone can thank them for running it.
Platypus: Yeah nah fair enough.
Jarvie: Well, I think that would be awesome and then maybe do a few more like compare stats like that that take a little bit more intensive calculation so, But I mean, we’re not done with rental market stuff, there's still a lot to go. There's a lot of UI changes that are on the list that didn't get done before release, but we needed to get it released as quick as we could It wasn't like perfect timing at the end of the season but yeah, card, card bidding UI, you know, change and then help the owners to be able to know what someone has bid on a card so they can help maybe place that card in their hand though you want it for five DEC, alright cool, click done, you know.
Platypus: Yeah, that sounds pretty good, I reckon that might be a winner.
Jarvie: And then that that tell you tell people like what cards are bidding? How many are being rented, through the auto bidding, Uhm, because we can't. We don't know how many cards are being rented. Uh, Splinterlands has not decided to work on that project, so. From three to four months, then yeah, yeah, yeah, it's coming. But we know that story, they've got other more important things. Yeah, we, I wish we could get information about the cards that are being rented, but we just have zero unless you were to go into different people accounts than you can see. So, like for example alright, there's Neald’s cards. OK so he's renting them out for this amount, but you know so maybe that's what they're worth we don't know so. It would be interesting to see how just how many chickens are being rented out, how many. How many Oshannus? Djinn Oshannus, you know like it would be pretty cool and then be able to see, uh, you know what they are going for, so like give people a good idea of maybe even going out and buying cards they know can be rented.
Platypus: Those kinds of analyst tools would be amazing to be able to see what the volume is of a particular card and its rental prices and average price and all that stuff. Yeah, it would be amazing.
Jarvie: So I don't, I don't know if that's going to come anytime soon, but at least we can now see bid rentals, but it's going to take some time for it to really catch on, and I haven't even checked today I was, I was out sick most of the day, so, Haven't even seen if those bids are filling up or anything and get a good sense for, Ah the price of renting, so yeah I'm not sure but it seems like it's really time to do it, man. Uh, playing in like Gold League, you get a lot of DEC right now and it seems like a really good time to rent.
Platypus: Yeah, I think with everyone getting pushed up into those higher leagues from the bronze nerf, I guess it's making rentals a bit more valuable. cause you kind of have to if you can't afford to buy those higher powered cards.
Jarvie: But also like, if you know the changes they did, the DEC is just making it so that the higher leagues are more profitable, more valuable, and incentivizing people maybe to do that, but I don't know if they are. I don't know how many more people now are playing Gold League versus Silver League or bronze versus silver. You don't really have those details; I don't suppose but it it's simply profitable to play at those league now at least the last couple of days. Maybe that's just early season things.
Platypus: Yeah, well I'm a Silver League player and the Silver League is a lot more dec per win right now compared to end of season. Yeah, yeah so but that could like, just be a start of the season thing that tends to happen.
Jarvie: It could be that yeah, but also well, you know. It's also probably cause DEC went up 10%, so now they, you know, a million more DEC being given out as well, so, is it just the combo? of all three things, early season, the DEC price went up and the DEC distribution changes that they made. But now I mean, it looks like at least double.
Platypus: Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges you face. Would you find that the HIVE ecosystem being on a crypto network is the biggest challenge to the work that you do?
Jarvie: No, no. HIVE is really nice to work with in my opinion. It’s great. And we just work with APIs really. We, you know, APIs, well, obviously we work with Hive and helping create transactions that you guys make to your keychain or hive-signer, I guess if you're. You know, a masochist. It's been great to do that. It's just that we have so many things like he's (Asgarth) very, very fast at developing, compared to any developer I know but we're just doing so many random things. And the rental was a lot of moving parts, the auto rental like I guess has a lot of moving parts. It's, you know, our whole philosophy on both sites is that we give a lot of information and help users. By giving them good information to make good choices, but the issue is how to put that all into an intuitive design. Because it's easy when, Yeah, some people, the Way they handle design is by saying, like the Apple design method is like, Be very minimalistic, you know only give them certain choices. Like we know it's tough for you, let's just make that. That way you know and so they, if that's the kind of design method that was popular for a while and it's just not my thing, I hate that sort of thing, and I don't like Apple or anything like that I want I want to be given choices and information to help me make good choices.
Platypus: Absolutely!
Jarvie: And kind of Uh, expectation and maybe even push to stop coddling people. Look you can make grown up decisions too and here's some information and you know; I hope it pushes people and it helps them to learn and then make good choices. But I know that sometimes they don't always make the best choices like, what in the world were they bidding? That low of, for that high of an amount at the end of the season, I don't understand the reasons behind how high they bid for a collection power at the end of a season. You know six reward chests? I Don't really think it’s worth it.
Platypus: Well, I suppose maybe it's the gambling chance of it. I suppose, that's the only thing I can think of. It’s FOMO you know, fear of missing out.
Jarvie: Yeah, I mean, maybe they do get the epic. Uh, you know the Uraeus or the other one you know, like OK cool, they get an epic or where they get a gold card and it all turns out just fine, so.
Platypus: Talking about cards, what's your favourite splinter and what's your favourite card?
Jarvie: Well, I am, You know, I play a lot of fire and water, but you know, I gotta go back to Death splinter cause I helped write, I know it's before your time. But there was a, uh, a competition for creating, uh, the lore for the different splinters. Though I did the death or the black splinter, the undead and yeah for that one back in the day and I helped create a lot of the foundation for what it would become, and then they hired people, and it took on a life of its own, and I've had zero input. Or, you know, I've been busy as well, but it you know there was that time when, I helped to decide a bunch of different things about the deaths splinter. So, you gotta love something. It's almost like your little child.
Platypus: No, that's awesome. I'm actually going through the whole encyclopaedia at the moment, reading up on all the lore. I feel it's a bit, almost a forgotten piece of splinterlands, like I don't think a lot of people know about the lore, the law sides of it.
Jarvie: You know, uh, in that book? It's funny cause I was like I don't think I should open it, I want to keep it unopened, and I should open it and also, part of me is like I know they changed some really cool stuff to kind of commercialise what I had written and I really wanted it to be very philosophical and I'm not saying that I'm the best writer, but like I really wanted that, that Splinter to be very unique and philosophical and have some really good depth to it. Like why is it that? You know, like. These guys exist and why is it they are proud of what they do, and you know like and give them some real interesting stuff, but then you know, like lore has, like you said, been somewhat forgotten, so it's not like I'm really diving too deep into it’s just to be the only you know group of like a few people that are like way into the lore. I'll be way into the market aspect for a while but I, I mean, I'm fascinated by that story, I just know one of these days years from now I want to like rewrite, Uh, like that forgotten lore. Because history is always a, so there’s several takes on it right? You got the encyclopaedia on or start writing one like, you know the with other historians like that bastardised piece. If it's like, you know, like some disgruntled Victorian, that's like they got to go talk, they did a good tonight and they didn't even like, do they even understand? You know our religion or something like that? You know of the death splinter. Yeah, it's like some outsider coming in to write our history and like it and make it so it's like I understand where the encyclopaedia historian came from and why they thought these different things, but they didn't really get it right. You know like we have way more depth than that.
Platypus: Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. I really hope at some point in the future when everything steadies down with splinterlands that they actually try to involve that lore aspect more into the game. cause I think it's, I don't know if it fleshes it out a bit more.
Jarvie: Yeah, yeah some of these popular things. I always think of like Star Wars, how there's so many different books and talking about different things and you know some of them are considered canon, similar offshoots, you know? Kind of interesting.
Platypus: Yeah, yeah, we get the legends and whatever.
Jarvie: Anyway, that that's my take, but then my favourite character. Obviously, it should be pretty apparent of what it is?
Platypus: (pause) Uhm, no. I don't know, I don't know.
Jarvie: The one I helped design?
Platypus: Well, you didn't actually say which one it was, I'm not sure, which one you designed?
Jarvie: Its the PeakRider. Get it Peakmonsters, Peak...Rider.
Platypus: I do, I do, well, I don't even know what Peakrider is? I’ll have to look.
Jarvie: Legendary White Summoner from Untamed is one of the very first ones that people could design. So, we had, I had won that one and the did the Peak Rider.
Platypus: (Looks up Peakrider) Ahha! The Peakrider, ah there we go, so you created that character?
Jarvie: Created the character, I think it was a little bit busy to do much of the Lord, so I don't even know what it says, but I know what it is supposed to be. There we are beta, Uh, yeah. Now he's a, he's a fallen, like he was a death splinter dude and basically left their society, their cult like fanaticism and became like, decided to live again, to makes sense, you know, in a weird sort of way, so.
Platypus: Yeah right, nah that's cool man.
Jarvie: That's why it's kind of like in like he's black. He's a dark, you know, like the black splinter. So, he's a black splinter dude. As you can see, he's all black. He has white armour on so.
Platypus: The opposite of a fallen, a risen, so to speak.
Jarvie: Yeah, I know, yeah, exactly. If I was to win again it’d be some other peak something I'm sure.
Platypus: Well, I wonder if they’ll, do that again. I suppose with the new chaos, if you buy enough stuff you get a chance to help create something.
Jarvie: Yeah you do.
Platypus: Yeah, yeah, so are you in the running for that or are you a bit out?
Jarvie: Oh, I think I'm, I don't think it's a good economic move to try to get that.
Platypus: Yes, it's a, it’s a little bit more than it used to be I take.
Jarvie: Oh yeah to get what I need to get that thing it was it wasn't much. I don't think I can't remember what it was so. It didn't cost that much. Back in the day.
Platypus: Yeah nah, that's right. Well, early adoption, you guys take the risk in. You guys get the rewards you know 'cause I don't think there'd be too many people that would be too upset with the way that works.
Platypus: Have there been any other sort of NFT games you've been involved in, or are there other ones that you kind of like or is splinterlands been your main focus?
Jarvie: So yeah, that's the main one. Uhm, I mean, I play a couple, I've dabbled and a couple other Hive related ones like Dcity.io but there are a lot of the games tend to be like hands off sort of games you like, set something up and then it kind of goes on its own sort of thing. I have a lot of Dcity stuff, but who knows? You know you don't have to do anything, so it's Just sitting there. Uh, I also did get a bit of gods Unchained. I was just thinking about it today, that's been a couple of years, um, like I should go in and see what my cards there on gods Unchained are worth. I don't know. Are they doing well? Have they gone up in value since the very first edition? Has the very first edition gone up in value? Don't know. OK, yeah, I'm guessing it has most of all these do so. I mean, I recently I've been getting the only other NFT project that I'm really that interested in is, I like baseball, so I've been doing, uh, I did the WAX baseball series but then MLB sold the rights to a different company other than Tops. So now they sold it to. So, I have those tops ones and it's fine. They're fine. But now Kandy digital is a new company, and they got the right to do in NFT for MLB. Baseball and which I know you know, it sounds like you're Australian, so you probably don't know too much.
Platypus: Ah yeah, I follow American sports quite a bit, NFL and NBA, so I know MLB stuff. Yep.
Jarvie: OK. Yeah, so I've been. I've been grabbing some of those and interested cause, uh, NFT’s are fascinating at times and ridiculous at others, so about 80% ridiculous 20% other, so.
Platypus: Well, people like collecting things and that's what I kind of look at. NFT’s like, they are just collection, I guess.
Jarvie: yeah, well, I do hope that they have value more often and that's like Splinterlands, they have value. They play a game.
Platypus: Well, obviously yeah, the NFT’s that involved with products that are sort of like in a game and usable must have you know, they do feel more valuable to me. If I ever see something I don't know like uh crypto punk digital art. I don't really kind of see where that's gonna go, but.
Jarvie: Yeah, and then I jumped on to NFT showroom. You know I like, I like my Hive stuff and you don't have to pay fees to buy art there. So now I'm actually just like, oh crap. I haven't been on there in a little bit. I'm gonna go look, to see if there's any new in NFT art. Oh this kinda cool actually. I might buy this one.
Platypus: Yeah, yeah I picked up a couple of those Splintertalk NFT’s ones, the ones based on the Splinterlands game. Uhm, are you is, Peakd looking at maybe doing some sort of NFT Market place?
Jarvie: Hmm, will they, hmm…
Platypus: Will they? Oh will they Oooo…?
Jarvie: Good question, good question. My follow up question is do you know several developers that are very talented developers looking for a job?
Platypus: Ah no, I don't know any developers at all, unfortunately. So I do know one developer but he doesn't know anything about crypto.
Jarvie: We are just Javascript developers, mostly JavaScript developers, you know, UI developers is most of what we do.
Platypus: Oh yeah, well I know one of them.
Jarvie: I mean, we still need to post job listing. Just got a few things. Like you're too busy to go out and find people to help you do your work. Oh well.
Platypus: Yeah, Yep. Uhm, I reckon if you put out a couple of blank adverts on the Hive Network you’d probably get a billion bloody people trying to apply for it. Probably, you see people writing posts on them all the time about that sort of stuff, so yeah.
Jarvie: Yeah, then. We’ll see.
Platypus: So what's your relationship with the Splinterlands team? Do you guys sort of have a close relationship or is it more of a sort of, you’re a third party site, that kind of thing, you just go to them and they get you when they can?
Jarvie: I mean, we've been around since, like almost day one you know so we’ve known them and hung out at different conferences, and they have a channel. We chat all the, you know like we don't talk to him that much, but we just keep up to date. It's pretty decently separated, you know. Like we do our thing they do theirs. I mean they recognise that. We helped them get where they are. I you know like part of the history is we used to be way more used than their marketplace so. It was hard also, though, to know exactly because the stats and the numbers weren't there. You know back then, but they didn't really have that useful of a marketplace. There was a lot of things that their marketplace couldn't do and that we did so well, and they've come a long way though, and in building up their marketplace, so that's cool. We can see more of the transactions now each day so. It's understandable like people just don't. You know, for a while, everyone that was involved, all knew, Uh, who we were. But now with 10s of thousands of new users coming in, you know every month. Uh, most of them don't even know peakmonsters exist, so. They're going to use the regular Splinterland Site. Because that's all they know.
Platypus: Oh really, OK. I would have thought peakmonsters was more widely used. So do you know what the market share of peakmonsters is like? How many per users say you guys getting kind of thing, percentage wise compared to what's available?
Jarvie: Uh, I think it's probably like 20 to 30%. And then for years we were over 50%. But then for a long time, splinterlands is kind of not doing much.
Platypus: Yeah, OK.
Jarvie: It wasn't too much action, and we didn't do too much development and all that sort of stuff so. We've just gotten back into peak monsters development this year (2021), so. Trying to recapture this sort of stuff, so.
Platypus: Yeah, I suppose if you've developed a marketplace for Splinterlands and that's not really doing much, then I guess you guys don't get much of that traffic.
Jarvie: Yeah, well, you know 20% net, 20% of the of the market share is worth a lot more these days than, you know when we had like 80% or something like that so.
Platypus: Yeah yeah (laughing).
Jarvie: 20% is awesome for us. So yeah, that's great.
Platypus: Yeah, so like what, I think the current accounts are over a million or something?
Jarvie: There's a million, uh, something accounts or something.
Platypus: And say what? 40% of them are double up accounts so whatever.
Jarvie: 500,000. 500,000 accounts doing transactions on the blockchain per day…
Platypus: OK, well yeah that’s a lot more than what I thought, yeah.
Jarvie: I think I saw that that today. I could go look, It's on our website, explorer, dashboard. Yeah, look. 508,000 on the 31st that was, you know. That was probably everyone claiming I guess for playing. Or no, that was the end of. Season day OK. Now today's stats are in cause I'm pretty sure it ends UTC. 444,000, which is still decent so.
Platypus: Alright, so mine, mine says account 408,000. On the account section.
Jarvie: Yeah? Oh OK. Transaction 4 million transactions. Uh, active players 444,000. That's how many people are actually using but accounts, It's something different, oh OK, where’s accounts at? Yeah, I don't know.
Platypus: Yeah, that’s alright, so there's quite a lot, but are these dashboard metrics is for Peakmonsters only?
Jarvie: Ah, they're listed on Peakmonsters, so that's kind of the relationship, is like Splinterlands is like, hey there's a lot of things we can't do really well or don't have the time, we wish that a third party would do it and we're like, OK, we get it, you mean us.
Platypus: (laughs) HINT, HINT.
Jarvie: Or, you know. There’re some others that will do stuff as well. There’re some new sites that have like analytics and you know, taking data and analysing it in different ways so…
Platypus: Yep, yep. Alright, so is anyone like, sort of like what's the, what person has inspired you to achieve your goals most do you reckon?
Jarvie: Well, the person that helped me is Asgarth achieve goals, but who has inspired me? Inspired me? Like in in crypto world and in blockchain world? I don't know like.
Platypus: So, think, what is your best inspiration, to motivate, to achieve? Because a lot of people don't like, they have an idea and they go, ah yeah, then they let it fade away and they don't do much about it, you've gone out and you've actually you pushed, pushed ahead, you’ve gone forward, you've made things happen.
Jarvie: You know I just, like, there's random ideas that pop up in my head. I'm like, yeah, it sounds like a good one so. Whoever is placing those ideas in my head, friends, you know like my subconscious. My favourite person is my subconscious that just randomly like. Hey, do this random thing. OK cool yeah that that would actually work.
Platypus: Yeah nah, fair enough.
Jarvie: No, no like, I don't know, I wish.
Platypus: That's alright right, that is a hard question. All right, just got a couple little fluff ones to finish up on mate, so what's your favourite flavour, scent, and colour?
Jarvie: I love citrus. Scents, oranges, lemons, limes and yeah. And colour, I mean I gotta love a good dark or a good purple or I'm sorry not purple. Blue. Like most people.
Platypus: Like a nice Navy blue?
Jarvie: Yeah, or dark blue or I don't know. I'm not. Yeah, I like both. I mean I’m photographer and I did a lot of focus, a lot on, I loved Blues and stuff so. Blue and green.
Platypus: A cat or dog person.
Jarvie: Yeah, both. I love personalities of a, I love that you have a little bit more of a companion and you know you could play with dog, but I grew up with cats and I understand the appeal and, but the issue is that you can, like I'm not a fan of like Scaredy cats. Or like an aloof cat. I kind of want a buddy around, you know, like one that isn't just, like I feel like I'm their servant, you know. Sometimes you feel like the servant of the cat. I mean, you always feel that way with a dog like you have to. Like take care of that. But like if you get a cat like. I don't want to just like, yes your liege. Oh, what do you need now? Like they just come once in a while like you know, like cats are very independent but also, it's like hey. Personality! I want personality in the cat or the dog to be cool like, for them to like, to be unique and interesting and cool to be around. That applies to people too, I want them to be cool and interesting to be around. Some whatever.
Platypus: (laughing) Yeah nah fair enough. You mentioned photography before? Is that, Was that like a full-time position or a hobby or?
Jarvie: Yeah no, Full time. Full time, yeah 13 years.
Platypus: Yep, so now that you sort of stepped away from that part and focusing more on Peakd and Peakmonsters, so do still like getting out and doing photography for fun?
Jarvie: Yeah, yeah, I'm uh, I'm you know, I still have a friend that's been wanting me to do stuff for his family for a while, so I'm flying down to LA on the weekend. It’s no necessarily for fun but it's fun to help a friend and stuff for them. And then I go to Turkey next month for a little bit and I'm going to help a humanitarian organisation and do pictures for them as well so…
Platypus: Oh wow, that sounds really amazing.
Jarvie: So, you know and then then I'll travel around after we're done helping out the Syrian refugees and see some beautiful places and take some pictures so.
Platypus: Yeah, OK, cool. How did you get involved with the humanitarian side of things?
Jarvie: Oh, I know the girl that started the organisation.
Platypus: Oh ok, so just a favour for a friend kinda thing?
Jarvie: Yeah, it did one last January and so like 2020 but in Colombia for the Venezuelan refugees. So, this will be the second one. I've always wanted to go to Turkey though.
Platypus: Yeah, OK, I’ve been to Turkey.
Jarvie: You've been?
Platypus: Yeah, I went to Turkey in 2004 / 2005.
Jarvie: Oh wow! Very cool.
Platypus: Yeah we went to Istanbul and we have a thing, ANZAC ceremony over in Gallipoli every year. So yeah, went over and seen that. Which was really good. But yeah, Turkey is beautiful, Istanbul is amazing.
Jarvie: Cool well, I'll be in Istanbul, couple days and then we headed down to the South and then. That's where the refugees mostly are so. I do plenty of photography now so well, I hope, I haven't done much recently. But I feel my content.
Platypus: When you did do photography, like a lot, did you, what was your, what were your favourite things to photograph?
Jarvie: Well, I got into photography because of my love of travel and exploration, so that’s fun. But it's more meaningful to photograph people and help them feel good and feel beautiful, you know. Like you know, like that sort of stuff and document important moments. Document weddings like that's meaningful stuff. So, I don't know like, I guess the best thing to photograph would be up in a beautiful exotic mountain and photograph someone. (laughs) And photograph, a beautiful girl on a mountain in like some awesome place and the woman now if, like is friend, cause like, I like taking pictures of friends. You know, like in making them like, if I have a connection with that person, and I'm helping that person and we're somewhere cool, like that's all the boxes, I guess so.
Platypus: Yeah nah, absolutely, I've just got one final question for you. What's the best or your favourite story that you've heard come out of the Splinterlands community on PeakD?
Jarvie: The best story?
Platypus: Or your favourite thing? Something that you've read the on PeakD, that sort of come out and you've gone Aww or that you know resonates with you or you thought that was really cool or whatever.
Jarvie: Well, I do You know I'm a well, I don't know if I have a particularly great story, but I mean I love how much it's helped my sister and benefited my sister financially and you know, and she seems pretty happy about it all, so. She bought, you know, like you know, $1000 worth of cards back when I originally bought my cards too and I mean we were buying like hey, do you want to jump in and uh buy some of these common alpha cards, I'm going to buy a few thousand of them? So, she jumped in and grabbed some, you know, and they were like three cents apiece or something before there was a market before anyone knew what they would be. So, it's just cool to see that it's benefited her, you know, I see her account value like, shouldn't put in nearly as much, but like it's still a solid amount and the rental. You know, like. The rental amount that she gets is also pretty cool, and then the air drops and everything it's like. This has, it’s got potential to help people that I care about so.
Platypus: Yeah nah, cool.
Jarvie: So that’s my favourite I suppose.
Platypus: Yeah, absolutely. I can't see anything wrong with that. You know, like I said before. There’s no guarantee that it was ever going to happen the way it happened, and you guys took the chance on an investment on the risk. Yeah, and you’ve come out on top at the moment, so it's all good. Yeah, well that was all my questions man. Thanks very much for that, it was that was really good to be able to sit down and have a chat.
Jarvie: Yeah, no problem, glad we could do it.
So you managed to make it this far? Well done! Because that was a mighty effort but one I'm sure you will agree was worth it. Thanks again to @jarvie and giving us some insight into, not only his business ventures but his personal life as well.
Till next time
-@Platypus-Dundee 
