Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 887: The Fastest Growing Sport in the World with NRG Esport Co-Founder Andy Miller

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin speak with Andy Miller, co-founder of NRG Esports. Esports is now the fasting growing sport in the world and in this episode they go into detail about the Esport world, how it is beginning to overtake other professional sports, the digital athletes that play and how they train. Andy has a fascinating entrepreneurial background and shares his story in this episode. Andy’s origin story and the ah-ha moment that introduced him to the world of Esports. (6:14) When did Esports take-off? (13:00) How do you become a professional gamer? (17:28) How being a part of an Esports team is the same as being on a professional sports team. The path to becoming a pro gamer. (19:22) The secret sauce to the success of gaming: Live Events. (26:40) The evolution of sports and how does Esports play a part. (29:50) Are there different styles of play depending on culture/race? (32:42) A young man’s sport: The importance of correctional exercise and movement to stay optimized. (36:20) Does he see a backlash from these kids making so much money so fast? (39:50) Is there a starting 5 in gaming? (42:30) How often are players tweaking their style of play? (44:38) Are there rivalries in gaming? (45:45) What do the analytics show when it comes to gender in gaming? (47:28) Are there markets/brands that are popping up from the growth of Esports? (49:45) Who are the superstars in Esports? (53:03) As an investor, what are the biggest challenges he sees with gaming in terms of growth? Opportunities? (55:00) How to optimize these players bodies to play at their highest level. (59:00) How big will this thing get? (1:04:00) Will virtual reality play a part in gaming? (1:06:20) What was his experience like working under Steve Jobs? (1:08:55) The moment he decided to sell his company to Apple and his selling pitch to Steve Jobs. (1:11:50) Does he have his hands in multiple businesses? (1:19:02) Mind Pump: The exclusive fitness programmers for Esports? (1:22:47) Featured Guest/People Mentioned: Andy Miller (@amiller)  Twitter (@king_babybay)  Instagram San Francisco Shock (@SFShock)  Twitter Tyler Blevins (@ninja)  Instagram Links/Products Mentioned: Felix Grey **FREE Shipping & FREE Returns** NRG ESPORTS G Fuel Energy Formula This 26-year-old makes $500,000 every month playing 'Fortnite' in his bedroom — here's how he does it San Francisco Overwatch Roster Reveal - YouTube Apple acquires mobile ad company Quattro Wireless Hometap CLICK MANAGEMENT AND NRG ESPORTS ANNOUNCE THE LAUNCH OF "CLICK" The explosive growth of eSports

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Man, what a what a surprising treat that was to hang out with Andy Miller, man. I think that that was such a great call Sal on your part. I know that we had a great interview with Mark Mastroff who was a friend of ours and an old boss, CEO of 24-hour fitness, who has a partner in the Sacramento Kings and a business partner in this world of gaming.

Man. And he is really into it, which was really fun. I mean, somebody that's investing typically, you see potential in a certain direction, but I mean, he is fully immersed in this world. Well, what really sparked my interest is, I have a 13 year old son, most 13 year old kids today in America, he likes to play a lot of video games and he gets real serious about his video games. And this is how him and his friends

Connect which is very different than when I when we were kids where you would go outside and play football or whatever And so I was talking to my son about this one day and my son was telling me about these professional leagues And I knew they existed, but I had no idea how big They were how lucrative they were and so I started looking up like top players and seeing these kids were making tremendous amounts of money And these leagues were yeah, amounts of money and these leagues were Yeah, they were getting more views than football baseball That's the massive stadium. It's insane And then I remembered our interview with Mark Maastroff and when we talked to him afterwards He said how he was invested in the eSports arena or gaming arena and he talked about his partner

Andy and so I'm like, you know what, it would be, what a great person to interview, just to talk about this whole world because I educate us. I firmly believe, you know, eSports are going to eclipse traditional sports in the very near future. That's a very strong statement, and I think he makes that argument in this.

I mean, that was one of the questions that we asked, I asked, you know, what do you think the future of this is in comparing it to regular sports? And he's got a lot of sports knowledge too. So what a great guy to talk about. Oh, he's a fan. He's a fan of all his sports. Yeah, and the writings on the wall. I mean, you see how many professional sports people saw the same thing and are investing in with and too, which is interesting. That's the thing that blew me away. A-Rod and Shaquille O'Neal and other professional athletes are actually invested in gaming, professional gaming sports.

So it's pretty crazy. We talk to Andy about how do you become a professional? What does it look like? What do these competitions look like? How much are players making? What is their training look like? Because of course, their professional athletes in their respective field.

What does their training look like? And he actually said that physical fitness, like working athletes in their respective field, what does their training look like? And he actually said that physical fitness, like working out and stuff like that, is part of their routine. And of course, that makes sense, right? You're sitting in a position for a long period of time. You want to be in top physical shape to be able to play these games at sometimes they play for only playing grueling hours. Yeah, like four hours, five hours.

He said some games are nine hours long. And Andy, he's a great storyteller. So it's a great podcast He's very charismatic. He's also an extremely successful entrepreneur Having sold two Companies before ever investing in eSports both of which combined he sold combined for over Half a billion dollars one was two hundred and thirty something Two hundred seventy two fifty and two seventy five man I mean insane and it gets funny because we talk the first You know more than half of this podcast all about gaming because I was the original reason why we brought him down here

But I just there's no way I was gonna let this interview go without me Pairing into his his previous experience in the other businesses ran which was was Quattro, a startup that he started, was a part of sold that for 250 million. And then he sold his next company over to Apple, where he then ended up being the VP over at Apple, worked direct, he was a last guy to directly work underneath Steve Jobs. So we get into that a little bit, I had to ask him

what it was like. Well, I'm glad you did. Yeah, he gave us some great stories about Steve Jobs as well. Right, cool. And then he talked about some other things that he invested towards the end of the episode. One of them is Home Tap, which is actually brilliant, if you ask me, so if you're an investor,

or you like to look to the future of how to potentially invest your money, check them out there, HomeTap.com. Now, in this episode, we talk about things that can help your gaming experience in the sense that, you know, what's going to improve your performance, how to prevent certain muscle imbalances. One of the things we brought up were blue light blocking glasses. We know of the dangers that blue light posed to your, your eyes and your cognition right away. Studies

now show that blue light is almost always damaging. And Felix Gray is one of our sponsors and they make these blue light blocking glasses that are designed for day use. They're designed specifically to block out the harmful blue light rays. And not the other rays, so your brain doesn't think you're in the dark and make you sleepy. It actually still keeps you alert, but protects your eyes. If you go to Felix Gray glasses, that's F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y glasses.com, forward slash Mind Pump. You'll get free shipping and free returns. Again, they're one of our sponsors. As far as Alex, excuse me, Andy Miller is concerned. The league that they own is NRG, the letter

N, the letter R, the letter G, so you can go to NRG.GG, you can check that out. I think they have a big tournament, right? The California Cup coming up. Yeah, that's November 10th. November 10th in Oakland. He invited us. I hope we can make it. That's going to be really interesting.

And then I guess you can get the details on Instagram at SF Shock. So that's SF and then the word shock, SHOCK, go check that out. Before we start the interview, I do want to remind everybody that this month, Maps aesthetic, our Body Builder Physic Competitor and Bikini Competitor program is 50% off. If you go to MapsBlack.com, make sure you use the code black50, that's BLACKK and the number 50 for 50% off. And if you have any questions on other maps, programs, go to mapsfitnisproducts.com. And that's it, without any further ado,

here we are talking to Andy Miller. I have a 13 year old son, he loves gaming, he CSGO, I believe is his game of choice, plays that all the time. And he, you know, he was telling me how big gaming is in the world. And how, I guess, much money, some of these athletes will make, and there's leagues, he's massive.

And I was totally oblivious to this. So I started looking into it, and I was blown away. Blown away by the professional sports, the professional leagues. So, we had our friend Mark Masroff on the show and we talked him about the gym industry one night. And then he told us off air that he was invested

in e-sports and then he told us about you. And I think it's absolutely fascinating. Admittedly, we don't know a whole lot about that space. So maybe you could kind of, what's your background? How did you get into it? And then what does it look like? What does this whole space look like right now?

Great. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. So my background is entrepreneur, started a couple of companies. And from Boston, definitely Boston Sports Kid grew up. They know playing all sports, love the red socks and the Patriots and Celtics especially. And started a couple companies.

And I was fortunate enough that one of them Apple bought. So I moved out here and I worked for Steve Jobs at Apple for a couple of years and had some money now. And I went, actually went and bought into a minor league baseball team out in Modesto, the Modesto Nuts, which were the Rocky single A team. I loved it, I loved baseball. But you know, you don't do anything

as an owner there between the White Lions. It's like the movie theater business in the minor league baseball. You own the concessions and everything else, but the Rockies handle all the players. So I met Mark and a couple other guys and we had been told that there was some serious stuff going down with the Sacramento

Kings and that Steve Bommer was going to buy the team and move them to Seattle. So that's a whole long, ridiculously long story that Mark talked about, but it went back and forth. We put a group together, worked with Mayor Kevin Johnson to buy the Kings and fortunately it didn't get into a bidding work as we never would have survived that with bomber and Got a stadium worked with that was the key. We got a stadium with the city of Sacramento kept it kept the team bomber Got the Clippers we got the Kings built a beautiful stadium the rest is history as Part of the Kings we were just looking over

The demographic breakdown of the audience who's buying season tickets, you know You look at baseball, which I love so much And I know I can't get my kids to watch. We're in the world's series right now. The fucking rest are in the world's series. Yeah, I'm like, hey, you want to come up? It's the night that I'm playing for tonight. I can't really come up right now. I'm like, oh, please.

It's too long, it's too slow. And the average age of the season ticket hold, I think, is in the 60s. I basketball is younger, but it's still old. It's older. And I started to watch my kids, just like we were talking about earlier, and what they were playing and what they were watching. The big aha moment for market and myself, we sit together at the King's Games, Master

of Corner of the Kings. And we talk and we have boys around the same age, and we both had boys playing travel sports, big time travel sports. And my was playing baseball, fortunately, was past tense. And I watched these boys, they go all over and they're told alpha males and they get up at six in the morning, they play baseball

in the first game of the tournament all weekend, right? And they're all day, right? They've had four games and two hours of downtime and the parents are sitting there. And they didn't talk a word about baseball. Like Bryce Harper never came up. Not, no one ever came up. They were talking about phase clan and video games and what they're

playing and that was it. And I was like, do you even play? They're like, well, I don't even play that much because I play baseball. But I watch them play. I was like, where do you watch? I watch some on Twitch. I watch some stream. I watch some on YouTube. So I started watching and I started seeing some of these numbers. I'm like, okay, these guys have bigger audiences than we have for our King's Games. Every day. Actually, every minute, concurrence. If you watch on Twitch where they stream,

you can see on the bottom it says, how many people are watching right then? 2,000, 4,000, 10,000. We have guys who have 50,000 at a time. And those are concurrence. So maybe at King's broadcast gets, X number, tens of thousands of households or viewers. These are every minute.

So how many people came in and out? If you figure they're streaming for three hours, five hours, something this guy's streaming eight hours a day, because that's what they do for a living, they'll have hundreds of thousands of people come in and out of their stream a day, start maybe in Europe and East Coast, and then move to the West Coast

as the time zones change. And it's a big business, right? These guys, it was really interesting. So Mark and I said, we gotta get into this thing. So we went and we bought a team, and we made a ton of mistakes, the brands energy, and our G, or energy. Everyone pronounces it, and our G, which drives me crazy.

What is something like that cost? I mean, how do you go, and how does that work? How do you go buy a team of kids that play video games? Yeah, it's interesting. So it depends. That's actually a really complicated question because you could buy into a league. Like we are now the San Francisco shock.

That's our other brand. So we have 10 teams, nine of them are NRG or energy, playing all sorts of games like Counter Strike or Rocket League or Smite or Fortnite or you name it and one is overwatch. And all that games and teams have a different structure. So a publisher owns the game. The negative is with the NBA, the Sacramento King's own one-thirtieth of the NBA and the commissioner, Silver Works for the Owners.

Here we don't own any of the IP because the games are owned by the big publishers by 10cent or Blizzard or Activision. And they can decide, hey, maybe the best way to market our game is to put together a league. And some have giant grandiose visions like Bobby Coteck who's a visionary CEO for Blizzard Activision, giant public company. And he's like, I wanna build the NBA of eSports.

And that's what he did with Overwatch League. And we bought our group, bought the San Francisco franchise for $20 million last year. And the crafts, the Patriots bought Boston and the Will Ponds, the Met's bought New York and Comcast's bought Philly, the Cronkeys brought L.A. Team, they're in Seoul, great team in Seoul, which is like the home of eSports.

There's a team in Shanghai which went O and 40, which was really hard to watch the whole season. They didn't get their act together. London won the whole thing. Philly, Delphi, so we had Year One, and now we just expanded to 20 teams. And those franchises go for 30 to 40 million dollars. It's a very structured league all the way down to super fun games like Dragon Ball which is really hot again, where it's not really a league structure,

it's a bunch of individual guys, but there's a structure like you win a minor tournament or a semi major and you get then to play in the national, think of it like golf or tennis, the US Open, Wimultin, etc. I just really take off once the online, like you were able to connect to like your friends and I mean, like as far as the esports go

because I remember even back in the day, they had tournaments and like even Nintendo would throw tournaments for people to play, but I never really saw it take off, but I guess I'm just oblivious. No, I don't think you are like the idea, this has been a watershed year, 2018 because of Fortnite,

which isn't really the greatest of eSport, but it's an awesome game that everyone plays around the world, and it doesn't matter who you are. So your eight year old can play or I play, and I can play together. And there's no skill entry point. So I may end up playing with you. And what happened was it sort of opened eyes to parents,

kids, investors, brands, like, oh, everybody's kind of a gamer. You know, we all played something. I mean, I'm old, I played Atari and television, and I played them all going up and, you know, the games at the arcade and all the way to now. But now they're realizing like, you know, everyone's a gamer.

We have a deal where the official energy and shock are the official eSports or of Cal Berkeley. And we are, they have a great intercollegiate and club, the biggest gaming club in the world, for college, 6,000 students, they just opened the gaming center, we're on the wall, it's terrific. Like some massive percentage, I forget,

of their incoming freshman class, when you identify, are you liberal, are you a vegan, do you like to do this? They identify themselves as a gamer. That's what they do. So they're like, wow, we don't need these common areas with TV screens, and I was watching them, right? We need to set up gaming centers,

and that's how people interact. So like, everybody woke up like, okay, the gaming is here now. Then that made this thing get a lot of attention. What year are you talking about right now? This year, right now. Right now. Now it's mainstream. Everyone's a gamer now.

It's cool. My sons and nerd, my sons of football player, my sons of debater, they don't talk at all at school, but they go home, they strap on the headset and they play Overwatch together. Right, and they come over the house, and they go, you're heckin' out with the wrestling kids. It's like, well, we play Overwatch, okay.

But if you back up a few years, there's always been the tournaments and the leagues, but they've been less structured and formulated, formatted, and now when you have structured leagues, like Overwatch League, you have revenue models and business models that are very similar to the NBA, so you could get the craft to say, I get it. I'm going to add this to my empire for the for the Patriots or brands to say, okay, this makes sense. I sponsor the Golden State Warriors.

I also want to, because I love Northern California, and that's where my brand is. I want to sponsor the SF Shot because that's where they're bringing it. Now, this is obviously like big time. I went on the your website, the energy website, and it has a list of investors and it's like Jennifer Lopez and Shikilo Neal and there's you know professional athletes on their investing. Yeah, it looks like a massive investment opportunity At the moment because I can only imagine I mean gaming worldwide probably already earns more money than Then professional sports to movies sure sure He earns more money than professional sports do. Movies, sure. The Call of Duty's new version came out.

Black Ops last week did 500 million during the first weekend. Wasn't Grand Theft. I didn't break some records in terms of beating Hollywood's. Yeah, exactly. You think about it. You put out a movie, hit or miss, and if you're lucky, how many movies become a franchise and maybe you get you know Raiders of the Lost Ark three out of it or whatever and sometimes they don't work worldwide because the Asian audience is not

Doesn't understand it or the American audience. It doesn't appeal you put a game out You get a hit that game goes forever you you were mentioning Counter Strike earlier Counter Strike's been around for like 20 years legal legends been around for a long time and You have people who come to our match as we have a very good Counter Strike team, we're like seventh in the world. And you look at the audience at those matches, we just had one, an IEM match, which was, sorry, ESL1 and Barclays Center. And it was not like, we had the Overwatch League finals there and it was two nights sold out both nights, but this was probably 7,000 people there

and I looked around and it was mostly dudes and they were probably all 30, you know, 25 and up because they grew up playing Counter-Strike. Now they have jobs, they can't play Counter-Strike all day but it's still their game, it's their sport, like the Red Sox and my team, I watch them all day long. These guys are watching the professional teams play the games that they love and their games are counter-strike

So you see that generational shift. Wow. How does how do these how does it work on the professional level for these competitors? I like how do they get paid? How do they become a professional? Let's say somebody listening right now Yeah, well likes to play is really good You know, I'm talking to my son about this I have a 13 year old as I said earlier and you know I see him play games and I limit his time because he has to do his homework and understand the other. And I'm looking and I'm like, gosh, you know, if you're telling me all this about leagues, like maybe we could turn this into something like what is what are the steps? Yeah, what are the standards in all eyes or something they can go off of?

Yeah, it depends on the game, like how much money is involved in the game and how sophisticated. So the most sophisticated games are probably, or leagues are legal legends, and now probably Overwatch. Players in legal legends, it's a giant global game, hundreds of millions of viewers. They're final, they're World Championship, which is going on now, is gets two times a Super Bowl audience.

Worldwide, right? A lot of Chinese viewers, but worldwide. And those players will make, they're really good players and the good teams will make, their base salary will be a million dollars a year. Wow. And you know what, they're actually doing themselves somewhat of the service in a way,

because if they're that popular and they're that good and they decide it, I don't wanna be a pro, because you have to really wanna be a pro. You have to grind, you have, you're not playing six different games. You're playing legal legends, you're playing Overwatch every day. You're one of the best in the world at your position.

You're either the point guard, or you're the center, or you're the, you know, you're the whatever, the playmaker, you're the in-game leader. And, but if you're entertaining and people love you, you could be a streamer, like Ninja is for Fortnite, and you'll make way more money. Wow. Way more money, just being streamers. So what they do is they build their audience as pro players, and then they retire at whatever age they, you know, it happens, 21, 25, depends on the game, counter strike older, and then they become YouTubers and streamers, and they make more money doing that.

Now with professional sports, you have practice, the team shows up, you do strategy. What does that look like for these teams and these leagues? Do these people like live together? They train all day long? What does that look like? It's becoming more and more sophisticated, obviously, as professional teams are moving in and you have the coaches for the Patriots

and the nutritionists for the Rams. So everyone's sort of figuring that out. It used to be that the sort of like the move was to have a team house and you have all you guys in the house and you live there and you play there online and you have to qualify for the bigger tournaments that you travel to. So think of it like your counter strike, you gotta do really well in your online league

and then you go to a LAN, which is a local event, you know, and it's a big deal. And then you win that and you go get to go to the majors, if you will. And that has been surpassed on some level by the fact that now like Overwatch League, all of our players live in Burbank. Every team plays in Burbank right now.

All the ones Shanghai, Seoul, everybody lives down there. And we train in a facility. Some people have dedicated facilities. Our guys live in this giant mansion where we have a whole training center down there. And the coaches are there. And they have a very rigid schedule.

We feed them, make them work out, make them exercise. We try and actually limit their game time because they want to, they want to stream themselves after they practice for eight, 10 hours or scream. We do a lot of screaming against the other teams a couple times a day and it's just like being an NBA player. You have your practice, you work on stuff to coach this. All right, we're going to do our scrimmage today against Atlanta. We wanna work on this. We don't care if we win or lose,

but we wanna work on our dive compositions or our plays here. We're gonna swap guys in and out and see who has the best communication. And then the coaches are sitting there, they're assisting coaches, and they're recording everything. And there's pretty sophisticated software now to take a game apart and look at it

from the angle of one player or from a statistical level. And then they do their video review and they say, hey, you know what? Sinatra, who's one of our big stars, where were you today? Dude, like you missed every signal, you didn't make the play calls. You know, or you rock. You're monitoring their stress and everything too. Like I know, I've been introduced into a lot of the latest like sports science, you know, with teams behind the scenes. And I was just curious if that's made It's where I think it's it needs to more I think it's actually more heightened with video professional video gaming than any

professional Sport because if you're LeBron James and you play and everyone you know everywhere you go Everyone knows LeBron James right our guys everywhere guys everywhere they go, don't know them, some places they do, but everywhere they go, they don't. But LeBron James doesn't come home and fire up his Twitch stream, put his face on there, have chat going off on the left side and people telling him, you fucking suck,

you blew the game today, or you're unbelievable, I love you, I wanna have your baby, and you're 18 years old, and that happens every day for them. After every single game, world wide. They're just get bombarded with praise or hate. So it's hard. You have to be, you have to really want it. You have to work very hard.

The good news is, the bad news was, there was no path to pro before. It was like, you were literally playing in your mom's basement and we see you on the rankings, on the ladders and you're like the third best player at this particular hero in Overwatch and we're like, hey, do you want to try out for the San Francisco shock? And he's like, sure, and we can literally type you in and you're playing, right? As opposed to, we have to scout Dominican Republic for a ball player and send them on.

And then it's like, you're on the team or let's go bring you here and see if you can interact with the players and you have, you know, because online everyone can be a hero, but obviously when you're on a big stage it's a different story. Oh yeah, and a team, what's the turnover line? Well, that's the big part, right? So these guys don't, they didn't play on 6A, U teams and go to three different high schools and go play for Calipari and then they're ready to be a pro and had media training like then.

So now though, and they were just thrust into it and playing in front of, you know, we averaged hundreds of thousands of viewers a night for a particular game, depending on the team, around the world. That's a lot more than almost every NBA team does for their regional broadcast. So and they're young. Now there's Path to Pro. So there's some minor league stuff. There's a lot of college scholarships.

I don't remember how many scholarships. There's scholarships? Yes. A lot of division one scholarships now for different games. Overwatch, League of Legends. Just type it in. You can pull it up and you'll see how many colleges offer it. This is insane.

This is great. Cal that the clubs are huge. So you could play, in fact, our guy, we have a guy named Moth, from Boston. I love their names. Is that a name? Is that a Moth, real name? These are all their handles, right?

The funny part is like our guys lived together, right? They have no idea what their real names are. Hey, Sonata, come on, Natalie. What's Sonata's real name? I'm not Tilly. It was from, I don't know. They only know them as, you know, the Moth Sonata, right?

So Moth was an exceptionally bright kid Where's he from? I don't know. They only know them as, you know, the most. The most, the most, the most. The most, the most. The most, the most. The most. The most. The most. The most. The most. The most.

The most. The most. The most. The most. The most. The most. The most. The most.

The most. The most. The most. The most. The most. The most. The most. The most. The most. He plays a position on our team where he keeps track of everything that's going on. He lets everybody know where everybody is and what everyone's sort of power level are and ultimates and things like that. And he is now on the World Cup team, which is going to be, he's in the semifinals where we are. He's on the USA team with Sinatra, so two of our players are two of the six down at Blizzcon

in a couple weeks and hopefully they're going to win the World Cup this year. We'll see if they get all the way through. But not that long ago, he was in his dorm room at WPI and he was playing with some like online leagues. And then he got found and then he made a minor league team, you know, just for the conversation. And then a contender's team picked him up, which is a team that we all have like minor league teams ourselves, Boston picked him up, which is a team that we all have, like, minor league teams ourselves, Boston picked him up, but it was like their minor league team in Toronto. And we watched him play because we picked one of the coaches from Toronto, and he's like, this kid should be all the way up here.

So in the middle of the season, we bought him and moved him up, and he started for us, and now he's on the World Cup team. And he was in his dorm, not even a year ago, not really even in any pros scene, and now he's on the World Cup team and he was in his dorm not even a year ago, not really even in any pros scene and now he's on the highest level of play. And that won't happen again, I think, as the scouting gets better and as it gets more sophisticated and you can see now that we're in season two, but they're developing all these path to pro levels.

So you're 13 year old kid or whatever. They start playing in tournaments and stuff. There's academy teams in Europe, just like for soccer, for pro soccer teams, there's academy teams in Europe, just like for soccer teams, you know, when you're 15 or 16, you get on Barcelona's academy team. A bunch of teams have those as well. Because the best players, depending on the game, some games are super young.

Like Rocket League, we have 15 year old players, and some games are much older. Like our captain of our Counter-Strike team is, I don't even know what he is, 26, 28, somewhere around there. Are these teams co-ed? I mean, I'm assuming because it's not a physical sport, so it's not divided by men and women. Can girls compete in them as well, is it all? There is no reason why they can't, but it's still made a very- It's rarely exception. There is one woman in Olive Overwatch League. She's on Shanghai

and she's Korean. Wow, this is f- She's great. Now, I read an article where you were being interviewed and you were talking, I can't remember what a Reenet was. It was a newer Reenet that was just built and you were commenting on, it was, how it was in advanced arena, how it's gonna be perfect for you. As a king.

It was the same arena. As a king's arena. Okay, okay, and you were saying how it's gonna be, oh, this is gonna be a great esports arena. Do you see this happening more and more? Or, I do. Some of the, some of the, the orgs have built in their own. So it depends how you want what your business model is.

So everybody wants to host eSports events now. I actually got two calls today from people in Boston because they saw some article like, hey, could you help us host an event? They have arenas, they have theaters. They want to get 18 to 30 year olds in there. If you ever go to these events, you'll be blown away. Like, it's not.

Well, it's a no brainer, right? Because most, one of the hardest things, the pack town. One of the hardest things for like arenas to do is to make money year around, right? I mean, it's one thing. Exactly. You have an envy.

Right, right, right. There's a lot of downturns, you have concerts and other things like that is what you normally fill it with. When you got something that's so big like this, I think it's kind of a no brainer that almost everybody's in a way. And who do you get? You get 18 to 30 year olds who are gonna spend all day

there and they're fired up because they're finally spending time with their community. That's the real secret sauce to all of gaming. If you love Counter Strike, you probably don't like Smite. If I love Smite, I probably don't. I hate Fortnite, right? But if I'm gonna go to Smite event, I'm gonna finally be with my people. Like, we take it for granted that I love basketball so I love Sacramento so I can go to a Kings game and hang out with 17,000 people and talk basketball. But they haven't ever been able to do that if you're a gamer. You've just been online trying to find your friends who love the same game that you do and

you spend so much time at it. Now you get to go to a event where there's a 1,000, 10, 20,000 people there who all love the same thing you love for the first time. And it's the only thing where you can, you know, do you ever go to a event where there's a thousand, ten, twenty thousand people there who all love the same thing you love for the first time. And it's the only thing where you can, you know, do you ever go to line and walk up to a guy to a football game and be like, you know, a beer line, hey buddy, wanna throw a ball around after the game? You probably don't touch me dude, right?

But what happens at a professional esports event, you make friends and then you say, what? Trade handles, right? Yeah, and then you go home and play with them. Yeah, totally. So they love it. And they spend, they spend, they drink Yeah, you do, and then you go home and play with them. Yeah, totally. So they love it. They spend, they spend a ton of beer,

they spend all day there, and it's loud. It is like being at a concert all day. That's crazy. And do they sell tickets to watch them? Is it, do you pay to go watch or is it free? No, different than going to the Kings game. Totally. And then it happens in the event, right?

Now, how does that, where I'm curious, because I was just at the Warriors game the other night. And, you know, as you get closer to court side, I mean tickets get really expensive. How do they do the pricing and all that it depends on the event like For they try and make a lot of it more festival seating for the lower bowl The Barclay Center sold out for two nights for the world championship this summer for overwatch and there was you know Sars out. Yeah, how many people? 20,000

24,000. And then many, many more watching on. Oh, yeah, I don't know how many millions. I mean, we, we, seven million, I don't remember the total millions. It was, for the way, it was on ESPN, ESPN1. It was on ABC the next day. Oh, legal legends, you know, they had their world championship a couple of years ago.

I believe it was at the nest in China We're in was it Shanghai where they had the Olympic the Olympic NASA 80,000 seed state it was sold out Well, if this is if this is already starting and I have like my own This is probably my own high ideas here. It's from smoking too much weed And but I also goes great with video games, right, it does. And so, and I think that performance in the hands of it. I've speculated on the future of sports already. I just, I see what's going on with gaming. I see what's going on with AI. I see all the issues with concussions and injuries

and things like that. And it makes me really wonder what the evolution of what we're talking about is going to look like if there's gonna be some sort of an integration of the two. What do you think? How does your brain work when you see this? Like, what do you see the evolution of this? Yeah, I think that you hit two really big points.

Like, we have a shock player, Baby Bay. Very handsome, beautiful boy who lives an amazing life because he's very popular in his handsome and I'm sure he has like the most fun of anybody in the overwatch league with his group of fans. But his dad was a semi-pro or pro hockey player and baby-bay Andre, it was a pretty amazing hockey player and he was gonna go play hockey in college.

And he was like, you know, I don't really wanna get hit. My dad was like, you know, been knocked around for a lot of years and I'm pretty good at this video game thing. So I think I'd rather do that. And if you go look at the high schools who are having trouble fielding, junior varsity football teams now, are not enough kids for a full team because it's tough.

These same kids are playing, I guarantee you everybody in that football team is playing a video game. Oh, ours. Yeah, ours, right? My son does diving over at Stanford, and I pick him up, and I was wearing my shock. I think they're short here.

My San Francisco shock shirt, right? And the Stanford football team just finished practice, they walk right by the diving thing, and these guys are like, so not trash shock, let's go over watching. You guys gonna suck this year, you're gonna be good. I'm like, ah, this is great, right? Because they, I also had a Patriots hat on,

but they didn't seem to care about that. Right, yeah, so. So what do you think is gonna happen? I think that you're gonna see just more and more kids playing pro gaming, because it's maybe a better career for them or safer physically and But then you'll see the merging of the two right now I think everyone thinks it's about who's like the fastest twitch kid and who you know who can move the quickest to shoot or to move around

It's really who makes the best decisions like the Korean kids are they win everything and they're incredibly Disciplined and incredibly quick at looking at all these probabilities as to what's happening out there and making the right decision and then letting them know There's baby babe up there letting them know what you know Everybody know where to go and what to do and I think you'll start to see with virtual reality, with some of these. We've already seen video games where they put you in the game, instead of playing it with your mouse and keyboard, you're running around. So it's really like ready player one. Yeah, so I think it'll see athletic component to it as well. And every game would be different. Some games will be some treadmills and everything. Yeah, those are pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. So you talked about the Korean

kids. Are there different styles of play from different regions? Yes. Oh, really are pretty cool. So you talked about the Korean kids, are there different styles of play from different regions? Yes, so you could tell. You could see. Oh yeah. Most everybody tries to copy the Korean style for the games that they dominate. Now, why are they so good?

Do they spend more time playing? Does the culture embrace it more? Oh, the culture definitely embraces. It's prime time TV. They're like the Patriots of gaming. They are, right. It's prime time TV. They've played in Patriots of Game. They are. It's primetime TV. They're the video games.

They'll sell out everything. If you're on an important team in Korea, South Korea, you are Justin Bieber. Really? Yeah. There's the sole dynasty, which is our Korean Overwatch entry. They had a going away party for their boys to come to America to play in the league and they sold the whole thing out, and it was live and it was all girls.

I was screaming, it was like, you know, those Beatles videos. Screaming. Forget it now. Now all the boys are gonna want to play. I'll believe it, yeah. But the South Korean teams are, they're very disciplined. And no one really wants to pop off and be the hero.

Like, baby, baby, he does something great. He's thrown on the headset. He's like, ah, let's go. There, that's like, no, my team won, terrific. Or my team lost it. I don't care if I did well. But they're just very structured in their thinking. So it's all about understanding everything that's going on

and going to the highest probability option. And they have to do that in a split. I think there's something like 250,000 different combinations of things that could happen in an Overwatch game. And someone has to go through all that stuff. Like, Moth is our example of that guy. It's gonna be interesting because what we saw with sports,

as sports or traditional sports, as you say, as they evolve, you saw the kind of the democratization in the sense that, you know, wide receivers all started looking a particular way. And wide receivers all started looking a particular way and Line men all started looking a particular way and you started to see, you know, genetics play a larger role with gaming It's gonna be much it's much different, right? It's just how Or is it? I mean, I don't know you're gonna have to I imagine and I'm sure you're because you're great with the sports analogies here I bet you could say that there's probably kids that are better leaders who are probably running the floor

or running the team and letting them know. Because he's got that sports back. Right, right. So that takes on leadership. There's probably other guys that don't need the limelight that can hang back and probably be more different. And different. Yeah, so I bet you, depending on the game,

but communication is number one. But if you don't, if you guys can't communicate on an incredibly quick level and be super intuitive, I remember the old Celtics games, Larry Burr, whatever it was, they lost like four games or something. They would say that their practice was harder

than their games and they would kill each other green versus white in their practices as opposed to the games, which was like whatever. And by the time they got into the games, they knew everybody knew where everybody was gonna be and there was just an unspoken communication. Like you need to get to that level. Well, we see that exact,

I talk about this on our show, I'm a diehard warriors fan. I mean, I think we're seeing that happen with them right now. I mean, you see the way these guys just know where each other are. I would think it's very similar. It's just, you're not gonna see body types as much as you're gonna see,

but you're gonna see the mental difference. But we are starting to see some on the body types. Oh shit, this guy is baby-bay is ripped and you can't not work out anymore. Yeah, great not. It's a great point. Eat well. It's a long day, it's hard. And some of these games go on a long time.

Counter-strike, our guys just played in a very condensed, ridiculous two weeks span. They must have played 30 games because of the way that it worked. They played at nine o'clock in the morning. Then they had another game at two o'clock, then another game at 10 o'clock at night. Sometimes they're all over the play and it's exhausting. And then you got to get up the next day and do it again. You need to get into real shape to be able to do that.

We were speculating this earlier when I had first, scheduled you for this interview and I said, you know, we see as personal trainers, these, we call muscle imbalances or posture deviations that are becoming more common nowadays because we work on computers and we're in desk forward, shoulder, forward, head, a lot of these different issues.

And I was talking to the guys, I'm like, you know, with the popularity of eSports, you just exploding, it would make sense to have these dedicated workout programs to fight some of those things, and you're saying it improves their performance in the gaming as well. Without a doubt, yeah.

Wow, wow, so you guys are making this part of their training. We're trying, yeah, we have a really popular streamer, named King Richard, who plays Fortnite, and he's a pro, but he's streaming after 10, and he streams, but he likes to just grind, and get out at 10 hours at a time. We were talking last night, I can't stream today or tomorrow, I think. My neck is done.

I must have been hunched over for 10 hours. If he doesn't stream for a couple days, he'll lose a lot of money. It's a living for them, for the real hardcore competitors, it's an advantage. I think that's about the last year, year and a half where, oh, the patrons are having their nutritionists and their trainers come work with their guys. And, you know, the guys just can't sit in a room and play video games. Now, has there been any innovations as far as like

gesturing or like things that they've considered in terms of like helping out with these types of recruitment patterns and these locked positions that they're in the whole time? There needs to be more, there's a lot with the equipment. So the chair, the mouse, the keyboard, there's even now mobile games are becoming esports as well. So arena of Valor is on by 10cent,

which is the biggest mobile game in the world. There's a lot different when you're doing this than when you're on a mouse and keyboard. We have a lot to learn there for sure. And it's a young man's sport because it's so demanding right now. I can only imagine and the travel is brutal depending on the teams. Counter-strike guys, our counter-strike guys are good. So they've won and they've been invited to everything. I was just looking to, they've been to Russia twice, they've been to Australia, They've been to Poland all over Europe, London, Dallas, New York, Chicago. I mean, it's mine.

All over here. All in the last six months. Whoa. Whoa. Now with traditional sports, they're, you know, nutrition plays a huge role and what you eat before the game. Even supplements or, you know, to increase or improve your performance. Is there anything like that in the gaming? Are there things that they eat in particular? Do they take supplements? I would assume something like caffeine is probably a big thing.

Yeah, it's all new, it's a bit of a well-wrested. So there isn't drug testing yet and I don't think it's a giant problem. I don't think the kids are on in whatever ADD medicine to get everything out ofole powder to make them, I'm sure somewhere, but when we, it's pretty easy to monitor your guys because we all live in a house together

and they see each other 20 hours a day to other with the four hours a sleep. But a lot of G-Fuel, which is like more of a gaming focus powder supplement right before the match. Is it made specifically for gaming? Yeah. Oh gosh.

A supplement mark is going to explode in this work. Yeah, and the game is endorsed. And they use it. A lot of, everyone has their own philosophy. Like, we do, right before our match, is our coach has some scrim. Another team who are not playing that night gives them a little break makes everyone take a nap.

Shots the lights, lights off, chills out, and then they all eat something, they have to, and then they can do whatever they want for a little bit of time. There it is, right up there. Oh wow. What about what you see like in other professional sports, which is these kids that come straight out of high school

or college that are not used to making very much money, and now all of a sudden they're making millions of dollars. Do you see a lot of backlash with that or problems where as an owner you guys are kind of having to manage that a little bit of these kids that are putting weird shit on their Twitter or like, it has the funny part, not zero. Because it's so not about the money at all.

Like they're all like, all right, I'm gonna take my money and maybe I'll, because they told their parent, I'm gonna go college someday. So I'm gonna save that money. They don't have any time or any freedom. It sounds wrong, but to get into that type of world, really, because they don't live on their own. That's fast, so they live with us.

They don't go grocery shopping. They don't do their laundry. We do all their stuff for them. So there's no, like, they just pocket their money, they don't do anything with it. They buy, you know, they're into the shoes, they buy crazy, you know, sneakery spend a ton of money on that, maybe a watch, you know, depending if they're nerdy,

they don't care at all if they're, you know, Sinatra's got like the best shoe collection ever with his off-wides and his, you know, supreme. Like, that's about it, you know. But you do have to watch the social media. That's the hardest part, because they're streaming, they're playing games, they're just talking to their fans, and there's people who want to bait them,

want to click on things where they'll open up something on their screen, and they'll be something objectionable on it, and they'll get banned from Twitch or something, you know, it's a big game. But, just gotta be smart, you know, we train them, we try really hard. There are also some of them are very shy, we wanna do promotions, we have our big match up here,

the shock is playing the LA Valley and an Overwatch on November 10th, if I could say, and the Eastport Serena and Oakland. And it's the first time that they've ever played outside of Berkeley. So anyone can come and buy tickets on our, our shock Twitter, which is at SF Shock. And in those matches, like they've never really been outside of that environment

for so they're kind of on their own interacting with fans. And they haven't been trained to do that necessarily. When you're playing a studio, you're playing a giant stage, you figure, oh, okay, they're used to that, but they're not. They just go up on the stage, they play in front of 20,000 people,

and they go back. But now they're interacting with fans on a 101 basis because it's like a friendly match. And we have to go through all this stuff and some of them are painfully shy. They don't want to do any of that stuff, right? To get the guys to do our hype videos for this match, we have to go through a couple of guys

before we got a good one. Because it's just not, they're not used to being college basketball. Right. You were saying they had groupies? It depends on the guys. Yeah. Wow. And it's just like regular fans like you would see with any other sport. It is. So is there is there like a starting five and then you have backup players and you rise rotate them? Yes. It depends on the game. So for something like Counter Strike, it's like these are our five guys and we only have five guys and that's the team. For something like Overwatch, we have, it's very sophisticated. We have 12 players on the Major League team. We have another eight on the minor league team and you can go back and forth.

Oh, shit. And of the 12 only six play at a time and maybe three are solid. I'm going to play every single map. There's four maps in a game, but some maps have different, you know, it's not the same game. It's not like first quarter of basketball, second quarter, same game, third quarter, it's the same game. It's a different quarter. Here, it's map number one, which has a certain objective. Map number two, totally different objective. Some guys are way better at a control map than they are at. Right. Right. So, it's a physical game. So baby Bay comes in and the third map, that's all he does He's just and he only plays one or two heroes That's it and if this map is if the coach says we want his widow in there because he's the best widow in the world That's all he does and it's time for the widow baby Bay is in there and if he's not he doesn't play it's amazing

How much it has evolved already and how sophisticated it already is that's fascinating to me That's because you would when you say that I think of all the other sports analog It's like baseball. You have somebody, you have a pitcher and he comes in literally just to go see maybe two or three batters sometimes. It sounds like they've already gotten that far with the game. Like baseball is built around statistics. It always has been. So it took whatever last 20 years for teams and organizations, Billy Bean, Guess All The Credit, whatever, Bill James, to understand. Let's use all these statistics that we read in the newspaper for the last hundred years to our benefit.

Over video games are not played on a field and they're not played in disparate places at once if you want to measure. It's all played on the same game, the same server. So if I want to see how people are doing, I can watch it. I can pull up every possible thing, every movement. How many times they were able to get this particular playoff?

How many times they got killed? That plus minus in basketball, when you're on the floor, was it, were you a plus or a minus? That's the biggest thing, right? You can tell. How often are the tweaking, the physics of the game and some of that stuff? There's two levels.

One, the players sometimes are tweaking there. If you look at Babybe has a video out where he shows exactly all of his setup for his computer, the tension that where his mouse is on, the screen, everything's to give him the optimal responsiveness for that particular character. So they do that on the ground. Yeah, for each character.

Exactly, each hero. And the league changes the game. Unlike basketball, it's what only change in basketball, you know, from the league standpoint over the last, whatever a bunch of decades it was in the three-point line, you know, the game is still played to same dimensions. There's new maps, there's new heroes, and they change the meta.

So all of a sudden, if you're in the Overwatch League and you're great at there was a guy Lucio Lucio was fast and it could do all these cool things and if you were Lucio You're pretty powerful and then so we picked up some great Lucio players and then when Overwatch League came out They're like this is the meta you're gonna play on we changed it. Guess what? Lucio is not important anymore So you got a guy's not playing because you're playing any other heroes and they do that in the middle of the season. Only two. Yeah.

That's dirty. Well, the season. Now, now one of my favorite things about. Got a depth about traditional sports are the rivalries and the shit talk before games and leading up to the games. And you see the cinema MMA boxing season all sports. Are there rivalries like that in gaming where you see teams really more regions more regions? It's like the Brazilians love their kind of strike. You don't fuck with Brazil They're like they will destroy your social media

We once made a joke as we beat one of the Brazilian teams. That was a big mistake There's rivalries in states like NV and Optic are both in Texas. So it's like who's the best there? Like let's roll. But it's usually like Asia versus EU, Europe versus North America, NA. For Counter Strike, it's all EU, they win all the time.

Eastern Europe especially, and there's never a good NA's trash, NA's trash, you watch us play our games, it's all like NA losers, NA trash, NA trash, NA You watch us play our games, it's all like NA losers, NA trash, NA trash, NA trash, and then if you finally beat like a big EU team like Australia, it's a big deal. Right now for the first time ever, history is being made in these sports this week

where the League of Legends finals, so usually you get a European team sneak into some of the quarters or we've had an American team once make it to the quarters or I think that's it, like out of group stage, or we've had an American team once make it to the quarters, or I think that's it. Like out of group stage, kind of like the World Cup, but it's always been like four Korean teams. There are no Korean teams. I think there's two American teams, two EU teams.

There's none. So Korean team is not going to win. An American team, Cloud9 has a good chance to win the world for the first time ever. And that just shows you how far Esports has come in North America in the last few years. And we're even having that conversation. Well, now you were saying, we were talking earlier

about how it's male dominated in terms of who's playing, but anybody can play. What about the audience? Is it a male dominated audience, or is it starting to grow? Yeah, it depends on the game. So Counter-Strike, it's all dudes, is not a lot of women, it's just kind of,

it's kind of, it's kind of, it's something happened. Overwatch, there's not a lot of women in just kind of shit. Counter-Strike is something happen. Overwatch, there's probably 75%, 80% of the guys who play, but if you go to the matches, it's like 60, 40. Oh, that's an uneven split. Yeah, where the boys are, the girls are a vice versa. Fortnite, lot of women playing Fortnite, easy, different games to play.

Seeing a role model, like the woman on Shanghai, as an Overwatch pro has inspired lots of women in gaming. At Cal Berkeley there's a great women in gaming club. There's no reason that women shouldn't be have to guys on a team and have to women on a team. Any game, if they're interested in playing. Yeah, my daughter, I have an eight year old and she's super into it and her friends are getting into it. So I can see that that's going to be a growing segment in the market.

Is there, are there's different professional leagues or is this one main dominant one? Like when I think professional football, I think NFL. I don't think any other. I don't think any other. I don't think any other major league gaming there for a while or did that change. Yeah, I mean, it's 100% dependent on the publisher.

So if you want to play Overwatch, there's the Overwatch League. Got it. And you can't start your own team and be an Overwatch League team because say you're in San Jose and you want to start this Overwatch League team to be, because I own the franchise for Northern California.

Anybody can pick up a basketball, start a basketball team. You can't be in the NBA, but you can start a team. Sure. This is different because the intellectual property of the game is owned by a publisher. Oh, okay. So that means you can make permission from them

to start your own leagues. Okay, so the professional leagues all are by these publishers. And then when they say World Club, they have their different teams or whatever. So it's got to be a home run for these publishers. I mean, if they can get a game out there, that's what gets behind it. It's a franchise that go on for decades.

I'm overwatched last for 20 years. Call of Duty, we all play Call of Duty when we were growing up. Well, Call of Duty is a super hot because Call of Duty, Black Ops coming out for Christmas now and everyone's playing it and everyone's playing Call of Duty again. And there's Call of Duty tournaments

and they change the game. It looks a lot like Fortnite now. It's a battle royale, one of the versions of it. But they never die once you get a franchise. Now the business man and me, when I hear about all this, I think of all the potential opportunities, and the first one that popped in my head, which we looked up earlier, was the supplement

that they take before gaming. And I'm thinking of all the little markets that can start at like basketball, we think of shoes, right? Yeah. Are we starting to see other markets pop up from this? Like in other words, like the gaming mouse that you use for your game or a special type of shirt or whatever. Are we starting to see that? Yeah, we have great sponsors. The endemic sponsors,

we have a Logitech for our keyboard and mouse for gaming. We have OPC, who's our gaming seat. Headset sponsors. There is a lot who help you with the gear. That's been around for a while, but now it's a big, big, big business. I want the same mouse that King Richard uses, or BabyBay. In fact, if you look at our energy, or either of our, you'll see either of our Twitters, right now we just posted the new mouse that our players helped craft with Logitech and they give their input as to what they need for the feel and how it works. So it's like Jordan's, but for a mouse, you know,

that's exactly, right? And now there's companies that come up with street wear. You know, street wear is really big, right? So we have Tiesto as an investor in our company. 100 Thieves has Drake. We're talking to a very famous taste maker to help design our streetwear, and they sell out very quickly when you do limited drops.

But there's also companies now that make gaming wear. I'm gonna wear this shirt because a moisture or whatever, wicks moisture away, very suddenly to working out. Now, we have sponsors on our podcast, and one of them is Felix Gray. They make blue blocking glasses that you wear when you're a computer.

Are they starting to use that kind of technology to do it? Yeah, yeah. There should be more of it. So there's Gunnair, I think, which makes computer vision glasses, and other folks have been looking at it. But if you look around, a lot of people wearing glasses when they're playing, and the eye strain is a big deal. But there's lots of brands moving in now, because you have a great millennial audience.

You see supplements, you see camps, you see bedding. I mean, we should talk bedding if you're gonna talk about sports. Oh, I didn't even think about it. The sports is here right now and it's gonna be here in the same time that all the bedding comes in the United States because Counter-Strike is enormous in Europe

for one, because it's always been enormous in Europe, but you can bet on every game, every match. I mean, our team is getting so good, and I'm like, hey, look how many fans we have in Europe, and then I look at what they're doing. They're like, please win, you know, certainly, win by more than five, and it's all like, there we go,

that's just came out, right? That's Baby Bay with the due Logitech mouse, wireless mouse, right? Wow. They helped design. The betting is incredible. And I look at the names, and it's all like Russian names and Bulgarian names. It's like, it's not our fans, right?

They're making money off of us because we're winning. And you'll see that United States, but if you are a kid and you grew up playing, pick a game, counter strike, you don't play football, you don't play Blackjack, you're not going to the casino when you're 21 to play Crap's, you're not going to the sports book to bet on the Patriots, because you don't watch football, but you think you know everything about Counter Strike

because you play it every day and these guys at your age, you're gonna bet your money on this in the future, you're just gonna pick your rap up boom, and you're gonna bet on whatever your prop bet for that. And then the viewership's gonna go through the roof. Wow, who are the big super, because traditional sports have their superstars that tend to become ambassadors roof. Wow. Who are the big super, because traditional sports have their super stars that tend to become ambassadors for the sport?

Who are the big ones in gaming? Right now Ninja is the biggest in the world. I see him on the Samsung ads, and he's a wonderful kid. And he plays, he's been around playing a bunch of different games, and he hit it with Fortnite, and he's smart,

and he's, he's, what's the word? He's approachable, meaning you can interact with him. He doesn't look like, he looks like you, you know, like you're a kid, you're like, oh, he's attainable. I could do that. And he's funny, and he's an entertainer,

and he's a great player, and he's entertainer, and he's probably, right now I think, if you'd aim the top 10 most recognizable names in the world, he'd be there. So, and he makes a fortune. I was just saying what would you guess his worth is? That article says he's making 500,000 every month playing Fortnite his bedroom. That's just off of like subscriptions and donations off of his, you know, he's got, I bet he

makes a couple million a month right now, maybe more. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. He worked hard. Big Detroit Lions fan, so it's hard to like them. But he's a wonderful guy. We have, you know, you want to break the stereotypes. So, like, you look at some of these kids, like baby, baby right there, it's a big,

muscular, handsome kid. He doesn't look like a gamer. You think of some fat kid in the basement, you know, eating food and playing games, like that. So, a breaking stereotype. Every game has sort of their guy and breaking their stereotypes. These very smart, very different, very articulate kids. And I think the best thing about gaming

is it's very community-based. So someone who's a great ambassador for the SMITE community is very different from someone who will be ambassador. Like the fighting game community. Smash and Dragon Ball and those games, very diverse. is very different from someone who will be ambassador, like the fighting game community, smash and drag and ball and those games, very diverse, culturally diverse, racially diverse, it's wonderful. And those kids, they look, their ambassadors

and their heroes are very different than Ninja. Now, as an investor, what are some of the challenges you see with gaming in terms of the organization or getting it to grow or just investing? And then where do you see the big opportunities? Yeah, that's a big question. So there's a lot of attention and money into this now because pro sports players.

Like our first really investors were Shaq. He's a partner. He saw it himself. He saw a Counter-Strike match going on behind him while he was doing the TNT broadcast from Vegas. And there was another, he watched, because he's a big gamer. He's a big nerd, he's the world's biggest kid.

And he was like, I want to do this. And he called up Master off because they're friends. He's like, I just watched this team energy play Counter Strike. Mark's like, that's my team. He's like, wait, you didn't invite me to do this. And I was like, yeah, you want to do it. And all of a sudden, we know Shaxx are partner, right? But Jimmy Rowlands got in right away

and Ryan Howard with us because they identified with these guys, even A.R. Alex, who's on our board. You know, he's our guys that's lending their name. Alex were doing his own board. He's our board member. And he's like, I was 18 years old when I was thrust into the spotlight. And I have something to say to these kids,

and I understand, I identify with them. So the athletic aspect of it, it's kind of clicked. And then the business model's kind of clicked and you got the crafts in and the cronkeys and folks like that. So now, but we're still only in the second inning, really. Like we're just sort of formalizing our stuff. And the business models are challenging

because we don't own the game, we don't own basketball, we don't own Overwatch, Blizzard owns Overwatch. And if they wanna go right, we go right with them. And what might be right for them might not 100% be right for the San Francisco shock or the Boston uprising. So where are the big opportunities? I think the big opportunities now where we're taking our org is that esports is a very

big, engaged fan base. That's right, the center of the bullseye, but gaming is enormous. So I was telling you guys when it first came in that we did this joint venture with a YouTube crew called Click out of Sydney, Australia. These guys are some of the top 10 YouTube gamers in the world, guys and girls, and they play games on their own and they do six, seven hundred million YouTube views a month, which is insane. I mean, it's bigger than any sport, right? It's, I don't know how many times much bigger it is than all the esports or it's combined.

But they all play games, or Elliot, Mousselc, Mr. Mousselc, who is the, you know, the big star there, one of them. He was an Overwatch player. He was a captain of the thinker of the Overwatch Australia World Cup team. And now he's just an incredible entertainer. So he still plays games, and he has a community around him. Just like we have a community, like I said,

around the game, now there's communities around individuals, and their audience is enormous. So what you wanna do is unite these two things and capture the gamer, the lifestyle of being a gamer. It's cool to be a gamer now. Drake just invested in 100 Thieves yesterday. Being a gamer is cool. So I want gamers shoes.

I want gamer lifestyle stuff. I want to play games. I want to talk to people. I can identify with Moose Elk or Laser Beam or Lacklin or these guys, loser fruit down in Australia. And I love that. I love the games they play. Or I can be a hardcore person.

And I want to be, I want to root on energy's counter-strike team or the San Francisco shock. But they all are gamers. And I think there's a giant opportunity to create more of a gaming brand and more gaming content. It sounds like a strategy now for these game publishers is the, as part of creating the game is how are we going to make this, how are we going to make leagues and how are we going to make people compete in this because it sounds like it's a big part of their. Well, think about it, they have Shaquilo now promoting their game for nothing because we're gonna make people compete in this because it sounds like it's a big part of their. Well, think about it, if Shikilo now, promoting their game for nothing. Because we're one of the teams in there, you know.

We do videos for, we've had videos with JLo, Marshawn Lynch, he's one of our investors, Michael Strayhan and Shaq, all did the roster reveal for last season's roster for Overwatch League. If Blizzard wanted to go out and pay all those guys to do anything for Overwatch League, it would've been a fortune, right? But they're all investors in my company and they love us and they wanted to go out and pay all those guys to do anything for Overwatch, they could have been a fortune, right? But they're all investors in my company

and they love us and they wanted to be involved and it was very, it was great. And so what a boon for a great game like Overwatch. Absolutely brilliant. Now, where are your teams located? Are they here in the... Well, we are trying to move, our goal is to move everything up to the Bay area.

Right now, most of the teams are in LA because that's where the studios are and that's where they play, except for Counter Counter-Strike who just is on the road. Who designs their workouts, their physical fitness workouts? They're really on their own. They do it on their own. We have had people come in. We spent more time last year with Team Psychiatrists or Psychologists. Sports psychologists. Oh wow. From the beginning of how to get to know each other,

how to play as a team. Like we said, they didn't travel. They haven't done travel ball. They hadn't go to college. They haven't played for multiple coaches. What's it like being a good teammate? What's it like being good roommate? What's it like being a good teammate

and going home and living with the same teammate? And we spend a bunch of time and then what it's like getting up on that stage. Because some of these guys are heroes in the practice room and they get up there and they literally are like, you know, they look down and they say, oh, there's 250,000 people watching and then they don't do well. They freeze up, right?

Or they look out on the screen and they, you know, they see 10,000 people in the audience. So that was really important. And then it was about how to be healthy. So we brought in folks to talk to them about how to have a healthy schedule. And we really try and change their sleep schedule. Sleep is everything. Because they want to come home and they want to stream till 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning. Especially some of our career employers because that's when their friends are awake and

career are their fans. And then we get them up, but you know, 10 and then we make them work out and eat, watch some videos, get going, like you have to get sleep. Now it's going to be because we have lots of interested sponsors from the supplements space, from the workout space, from the lifestyle space, who want, we want to show that they're healthy eaters, that they're living a healthy lifestyle, that, you know, it's not crazy gaming where you're just sitting there and playing games all day and they never see the sunshine. So that's, I think, the next evolution. Oh, wow. Well, if you need any help designing some workouts and stuff, we do. I love it.

They love to work out. If you look at their videos, I mean, half of them are at the gym and, you know, showing their sort of transformation. We watched a video. We have that's how half of our selfish reason of having you on here is we saw potentially the need for people like us. That's what we consider ourselves experts in programming, writing programs for specific niche groups. And so we kind of saw that in your guys. That's the thing. Yes.

And you guys don't want to get ripped. They just want to be held. Right. Right. So that's what we specialize in exactly. In fact, we have a program that is like 100% correctional. It's designed just to look at in balances in the body and then and they're it's all body weight type stuff. It's designed just to look at imbalances in the body and then it's all body weight type stuff. It's not improving cognition.

Right. So selfishly, part of the reason why we wanted to have you in and we reached out to Mark was because we did want to get more insight on that. And we see the opportunity to talk about that. Yeah, no, I would love to get to get to know. It is amazing when you see them come off the stage when they're done playing.

They're like, oh, of course. It's so it's like they ran 20 Right like their brain is fried that can imagine because it's everything's going at once, you know I'll locate so many resources. Yeah Yeah, so that's a big big part and studies are very very clear and they show that you know the right physical activity Improved cognition and improves hand eye coordination and speed, which is very important. And then there are specific types of injuries or pain that you'll get based on the whatever repetitive movement you do.

And there's very common ones that you get when you're sitting on front of a computer or on a mobile device. So yeah. If you're making, let's be honest, if you're making 10, 20, $50,000 a month as a professional video of a game player, and you have an agent now, which they all do,000 in a month as a professional video game player and you have an agent now, which they all do

and they have a lawyer, which they all do. You're probably gonna want someone to keep you physically fit, so you can keep playing. More so than you want your agent or your lawyer. And they're all realizing that, like the longer I can play, the more, you know, I can stream, the more hours, then I can have a career here. Just like any other professional athlete.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, you see these guys that we're seeing like LeBron James and the things that he's able to do now at his age. And a lot of people don't talk about what that guy does when he gets off the court. His seven day a week regimen is crazy. It's completely geared around optimizing his body and putting in all the work.

Like that's what you have to do now if you want to be at the elite level. Where we are now in these ports and the professional, the maturity of it reminds me. I'll date myself, but like I was yet really young. I remember Collier Stremsky on the Red Sox and Collier Stremsky was considered a loof and wasn't a player's guy, But he was the first guy to play, to be a professional baseball player, at least for the Red Sox 24-7, 365 days a year. He didn't have a job, right?

Like some of these guys in the 60s, they had jobs. They were dentists, they had jobs. They worked, delivered boxes. He worked out, and he ate, and he worked out like crazy. And everyone was looking at like, what is he, and he bulked up, and he was all about, the off season was about getting rid, so he'd show up at screen trading,

the guy was rips and the rest of the guys had to go drop 20 pounds, because that's what screen trading used to be about, remember, right? And now it's the same thing I think. It's like, you can't be a sloppy kid who's not getting any sleep and trying to keep up with the rest of the world

of professional esports. It's crazy to me how big professional esports is now, and you're saying it's in like the second inning. How big do you think this thing's going to get? I don't think any one game is going to be bigger than football, but esports as a whole. Everyone says esports, they try and lump it all together, but that's every game. In games come and go in popularity. But I think what's going to happen is that it's going to take up the mind share of

this generation of sports fans between the age of eight and thirty. And so if they're playing games and if they're watching their heroes, just like, you know, people say, well, why would you want to watch someone play, you know, a video game? I was like, well, why would you want to watch someone play golf? What's the difference? Right? Once you go out and play golf. Very true. Right. Right. Well, I like to watch golf because I suck at it and I love Tiger and I want to learn and I watch golf videos to learn how to do better. So I can play with my friends. No different. Right. So if they're doing that, they're not watching football.

They're not playing football. They're not watching baseball. So they're not going to be baseball fans and they're not going to be playing Little League and they're not going to be having their kids play those games. So at some point, there'll be a generational shift like we saw with soccer. Like everyone invested in MLS a long time ago. MLS been around for like, what, like 20 years now. People don't realize it. But and they thought, oh, instantly I'm going to be the New England Revolution and have a whole bunch of fans took a generation of people to say like, if you look now, like

most kids love soccer and lacrosse and they're not really necessary watching football. So I think it's going to put a dent in this viewership, and thus you see the Patriots saying, oh, the cross, we should add this to our repertoire. Let's get a bunch of 18 year olds in it to, you know, to let stadiums see the Patriots and see an overwatch. Smart way to wet your bat for sure.

I have to agree. I think it's gonna surpass traditional sports, because when my boy is with his friends and they're all hanging out, none of them watch traditional sports. They all watch gaming. And when you go outside, look, if it wasn't for the organized leagues

that parents put their kids in, I think they would have died by now because kids don't play outside. And I'm gonna play Wiffleball all day. No, they don't. Do we see small leagues like that of gaming, like little league, like we saw, we saw it from the beginning based you're starting to see that

That's a big opportunity a lot of money invested in high school now for high school programs college programs camps You know like a few years ago was computer can't take camp you know make your own game now It's like I'm making the game. It's like learning to play like ninja Wow camp for the summer. Yeah, wow. I want you to talk a little bit about virtual reality just because I could see that being even bigger as you know, as it progresses, but where are we at with that currently?

I mean, are you pretty deep in virtual reality and where that is? A little bit, like it's been a dud for consumers so far, because the use cases aren't there, but there's no doubt that virtual reality, And then a dud for consumers so far, cause the use cases aren't there. But there's no doubt that virtual reality, augmented reality will be here in our everyday lives before we even know it. The first big mass consumer augmented reality thing

was Pokemon Go, where everyone was out of the Finding Pokemon. It was great. But for gaming, I think virtual reality will be everything. Like, I'll have my beats headset on. I'll be listening to my music, and then I'll just take the top and put my visor down. And now I'm in my own world, and I can be playing games. I could physically be moving.

I could be in the game, you know. There's been a lot of talk about esports. We'll be, I'll be able to watch it as a projection, because esports is hard to watch, you know, way on some level level because a lot going on, it's not like I'm just watching a basketball game from the seats, you know. If I projected down and I could look down upon what's happening, like you see those futuristic movies

where everyone's looking at a table and they're moving pieces around the play. It'll probably be like the viewing experience for VR before it'll be the game play, mass gameplay experience. But there already are places where you can go and get on that treadmill and I can fight things and I could do things. So more as a fan and watching first, yeah, for mass, yeah, mass audience. Yeah, interesting. When I've seen the gaming on because I've watched a few on on YouTube, there's announcers and stuff talking about what's going on as well. Just like a professional regular sports.

Castures are great. Yeah, that's the story. How do they keep up? I think I'm most impressed with them. How about we should give you a, you guys should come down to Burbank and go to overall actually match and see, in the control room, the control room is insane because there's six guys, right, on each side and they're, I'll have a GoPro on them as the player

and then there's their player that they're playing, right? And they can switch it out during the game. Like you can die in the game and come right back as it's somebody else if you want. And there's also just stuff going on between the 12 thing, the 12 characters or heroes on the game at once, and all different angles, the ground angle, the above angle,

and different fights going on at the same time. It's very, you know, it's fast paced, believe me, but it's like an orchestra in that control room. They're like cutting camera on camera, it's a cutting down, it's incredible. I love that. I love it. It's absolutely crazy.

I love to come down there. I feel like we did this interview in reverse here because I would be mad at myself if I didn't talk to you. Just glazed over being this serial entrepreneur. That I know you sold you know one of your companies to Apple for 275 million I know that you worked directly under Steve Jobs and if I didn't ask you about that experience and with that was like I'd be mad of myself so tell us a little bit about first of all when I asked right away because I've heard

you know both that he's was just this genius and amazing person that I've heard he was an asshole to work with. What was your experience like? Well, I think you've hit a lot of the high points, dude. If I had any hair, at the time going into it, I would have none now, but it was really stressful. So he bought my company, which he reminded me consistently because basically I bought you, I didn't hire you.

So like, are you an ample guy? Five to a lot, he could do absolutely everything. World's best salesman, unbelievably focused human being. And when I got in there, I worked for a couple years before he died. And so he knew he was dying. And so he was going fast. That's fast as possible to accomplish everything he wanted.

And that was, you know, the most stressful time in my life for sure. Really? And working with him. By learning a ton, most importantly, just how to be an Apple guy, which meant, you know, how to simplify everything down to its core. He would say things to be like, you're a complicated man. You use 12 words when you can use one word. You know, don't hand me a piece of paper.

I don't wanna read your comments. I wanna think about my own thought. And if you notice, that's Apple's whole life. Apple's whole mantra, I remember we did stopping to him. He's like, this is the most complicated fucking thing I've ever, do you even know where you work? I've spent my whole life making things as simple as possible. And here you come, I can't even understand why you work. I've spent my whole life simple making things as simple as possible. And here you come,

and I can't even understand why you would bring this to me. Like that's the way he thought. And if you notice, the iPad was a revolution, right? But when you opened up your box and you got your iPad, what wasn't in the box? Instructions.

Yeah, there was no directions, right? You go to an iPad and it's supposed to work right away. Well, you just, it's intuitive, right? You go to an Apple store and there's a three-year-old for the first time plowing through an iPad. And I was to do right away. Well, you just, it's intuitive, right? You go to an Apple store and there's a three-year-old for the first time plowing through, and iPad notes, they do no exactly what to do. That's simplicity, that's the Apple way. In fact, outside of the Markham office,

there's a big display, whatever I don't know what it is. It's an art work, and it says, simplify, cross-doubt, simplify, cross-doubt, simplify. And that's it, and you have to go through that lens. And everything you do, not just the products, but how you talk, how you train your staff, how you talk to Steve. And it was a lot to learn coming from a startup where we had a couple hundred people run around doing everything too.

Oh, I report to Steve Jobs, and I'm in a room every Tuesday with Tim Cook and Eddie Q and Phil Schiller and Scott Forrestel and all these guys who are just icons of the space and who've worked together for 20 years and I'm in there just messing it up. So you're talking about Quattro that you're talking about? Yeah, Quattro Wireless, we bought it in the end of 2000. And that was your startup. Mm-hmm. Okay, what year was that?

You started that and how long before you started to integrate that with Apple? Like, what was that process? I really got like, I started it and I started that and how long before you started to integrate that with Apple? Like, what was that process? I, we got really lucky. I started and I started a company with my business partner, Jeff Kolas, who is my partner on everything, including energy. He started it really. I joined it called MQ Terrible name. If you ever want to be a marketing, don't never company lowercase M, a hyphen, capital Q, U, B. We're supposed to stand for mobile messaging marketing and it's gonna be a mobile marketing company, right?

It looks cool though, right? It looks, yeah, like, no. No, it looks bad. It's all good. Problem was, you know, this was early days and mobile marketing was not gonna happen. So we changed the whole model and we became an aggregator and it was early days of text messaging.

And if you were on sprint and I was on singular back, then we couldn't even text messages. There was no interoperability, right? Couldn't be friends. So we did all that stuff, and I learned about mobile, and we sold the company to Varysign out here, for like $250 million to, in like 2006. And I worked there for about two months

and said, I don't wanna be here. I got the bug, I wanna do it. My own do is again. I got the bug. I want to do my own. It was again. It was so easy. So, and I understood mobile. So we started the mobile ad network, which was quadri- Wireless. And we were really lucky.

We only in business for three years. And I was at a Patriots game, believe it or not, in London, with my co-founders. And we were like, we got to get away. We're killing each other. Let's go. Patriots are playing in London. Let's have a boys weekend.

We went out there and I'm walking out of Wembley Stadium and and the phone rings and we're all walking and I'm like, hello, this is Steve Jobs. I was like, okay, hello, what was that? I was like, guys, just keep walking. I talked for a few minutes and talked to their head of business development. It was like, we like you to come in or you're interested in buying you. Okay, and I hang up, I was like stunned and I walked back up to the guys, like, who's that? I'm like, that was Apple. I was like, what? That's like, yeah, Apple wants to buy. So I was like, fuck you. You kidding me?

I'm like, yeah. Eight beers and about six hours later, they finally believed me. Cause they thought I was bullshade them. We were on a boys' weekend. It was all bullshade for the whole time. And that was in like, it was football scene. It was in like November 1st, I think, of 2009.

And we went in November 13th to make our pitch to sell the company. And they were like, OK, and then I didn't get to meet Steve. And then they said, you have to come back. I was like December, I have it in my wallet actually. I have the little card because it was such a momentous day. But you have to get by Steve, he has to sign off on this. And that was brutal.

That was about four hours, the most stressful time ever. Was he just grilling you? Yeah, I was like, this is it, Andy. This is gonna be the hell you're gonna sell this company or you're gonna fuck this up and everyone's gonna hate you. And I had my partner there. I don't know if you have time, but this is my favorite story.

My partner's name is Echewar, pre-admission. He's, I would have been there. He was ahead of engineering. He was a Steve Jobs fanboy. I mean, I knew Steve, I didn't study anything. He wasn't like my idol, you know, I was, you know, this wasn't my thing, but I obviously knew everything about him that I could, but Echewar loved him.

He was his man and we get in there and we're waiting and they prepped us for four or five hours. Don't say this, be careful with this. You know, because they wanted it to happen. They were great people and we're like, okay, we go in there and Steve walks in and my heart's saying,

because no one really seen him because he was unbelievably sick. He was unbelievably skinny and you know, you didn't wanna shake our hands or anything because he didn't want to eat germs and it was like, you know, he looked like a skeleton. It was tough. It was tough.

And the mood changed and we started talking to him. He asked a bunch of questions and then you realized like, you never get in it. He just destroyed you at every conversation. You know, it was unbelievable and he asked each one, well, whatever our ad's gonna, we're an ad network. Whatever our ad's gonna look like an apple.

And he said, oh, we can do this. So we can, he said, well, how is that going to work on our Apple phones? Our all phones, Leesh, we said, well, we can dumb this down a little bit. And then Steve just went, did you just say dumb down? Like, do you know you're at Apple? We don't dumb anything down here. We're not lowest-cubbing to nomin', you put a hand up in his face. And he said, I'm not talking to him for a while.

And I was like, okay, it's kind of up to me. And it was, and it was, each word, it's a word for a couple of hours. You know, each word kind of like, can I, you know, he was crushed because it was his idol. And it went pretty far. There was some interesting things about they were, he destroyed us and he got the price lowered a lot. As to when I came in, I thought we had a deal, Ag. But the funny part was, you're a big Boston guy, aren't you? I was like, yeah, we love it out there.

It's a big tech center. He's like, there's nothing. You're in wolf the mass. And I'm like, yeah, it's pronounced wolf them. You know, it's funny, you know, different to Ag Boston accent. He's like, you know what's in wolf the mass? I said, no, Steve, what's in wolf the mass?

He goes, nothing. There's nothing there. There is no reason to be there. You have to be where everybody is and all the action is, you all have to move here. It's like, okay. Yeah, I just went on like that and then finally, and then he was like, you know, tell me about your family

and it was really interesting, but that was it. That was the moment of like putting for no, for sure. Wow, that's it. So you know, so, yeah, so 2000, so 2006, you sell a company for 250 million. They need to turn around four years later and you sell another one for 275 million. Yeah, yeah, holy shit.

I wish I kept it all, I did. My life investors, so it sounds wonderful, but I mean, we made great money, it was a great experience. That was a three years, a three years of startup is impossible. That is, we're already past three years and energy just in just starting. So that was really fast. And we moved out.

Actually Steve told us that we did not have to move after all that. And he sent Peter Oppenheimer, who is the CFO, of Apple to come and tell our whole company. I came out, I said, I have a big announcement, blah, blah, but first I want to show you what we're doing. And I showed him Steve introducing the iPhone. And then I said, well, what do you first I want to show you what we're doing. And I showed him Steve introducing the iPhone.

And then I said, well, what do you guys think? The iPhone, because it's 2007, we're just app stores, just starting, we're all into apps. And I said, oh, by the way, how'd you guys like to all go work there? And then we brought up Peter Oppenheimer. It was great. And the place was ecstatic. It was such a wonderful feeling.

I really felt, everyone was levitating that we were going to work for the iPhone. It was the height of the iPad and the iPhone. For sure. And he comes out and says, we don't have to move. We're going to be in Boston. This is where we're going to be. And that's where he went.

And we closed the deal. Like, actually, my birthday, December 14th, and on Christmas days, I got a phone call. Hi, Andy. Steve Jobs. Like, hello. I do it. I had a special ring for him, right?

And every time I hear that, and someone else's phone now, I can shut it up. I still get the same call. Oh my God, because he was, he was him destroying me, trying to teach me. And the phone rings and he's like, yeah, you know, did you get a house yet? I'm like, what do you mean get a house? He's like, have you looked at less altos or power alto?

I'm like, for what? He's like, free the family. I was like, I'm not following. He's like, yeah, I think you guys need to move. I changed my mind. I was like, yeah, we just told everybody we don't have to move. He's like, yeah, I think you guys need to move. Change my mind. I was like, yeah, we just told everybody we don't have to move. He's like, everybody doesn't have to move. Leave the crappy people here in Waltham.

I'm bringing the good people to power. That's it, that's what we did. That's right. And we made offers too. I don't know how to do some people. And most of them came. Oh my God. So are you like Mark Mastroff too,

or do you have your hands in a bunch of other companies to or you all Sounds that you're heavily Focus on the gaming. Yeah, no, I'm not like Mark as much That guy forgets the company faster. Yeah, I'm our operator. So Jeff and I glass we Started a couple companies. So Jeff's on the board of energy. We just started a company called home tap Which is a really really smart idea Jeff's a really, really amazing, better entrepreneur than I'll ever be. He runs that out of Boston.

And what's that? That is a really great, I think it's gonna be a giant company or nothing. I'm betting on the former. So the basic idea is that the American Dream tells you that you should save a bunch of money, go buy a house, have your kids go buy a house Put 20% down to avoid what is a PMI and make those mortgage payments and someday when you're an old man

You can sell your house and go live somewhere else and that doesn't work right the average person sells their house With you know seven years But you have your biggest chunk of equity your net worth is tied up in your house And you can't tap your equity in your house. That's the word home tap. So if you want to, if you want to, it's, if you really think about this way, it's perverse. If you want to get money, you're money because you've been paying into your house that you own and the money you put down. If you want to take money out of that, what do you have to do? Refine, you have to take it alone on your own money and pay interest on your own money. Right. What is that ever happen, right? So that makes no sense. So we thought, is there a way we could work,

and we've had lots of legal work and analysis from state by state? How can you sell equity in your home to someone else? So instead of taking out a loan or paying off credit cards, I own my house and I bought it 10 years ago and there's $200,000 in equity here and I have a $50,000 college loan coming up

or I'm $40,000 in credit card debt or ever. I don't wanna take out another loan. I can't even get it, because I owe money anyways with a home equity loan, right? I don't wanna do a reverse mortgage voodoo, but I wanna sell off a piece of my house. I wanna sell $50,000 worth of that $200,000. Interesting.

So you apply and we have investors, who come and they buy a piece of your house. And we just started, mainly in California, so far in Massachusetts, we've done six so far, and they're great stories. We have someone who, a family who has a trucking business, and they couldn't get a small business loan, which is very, very hard now.

So they put the money into that. We have another family who had like $30, $40,000 in credit card debt a month. And I don't know what you pay on that, like, $68,000. So they sold off $30,000, $40,000 in credit card debt a month. And I don't know what you pay on that, like, $68,000. So they sold off $30,000, $40,000 worth of their house, paid off their credit card debt. And it's like, hey, I have $8,000 more a month now because they don't have to pay that credit card down.

They're not maxing out their credit cards. We have one for college, one for me during their house, one for college loan. And the way it works is that now we're with you, we're along this journey over the next 10 years, most everyone sells a house within 10 years and we're only looking sort of for people who have a sort of 10 year horizon.

And when you sell that house, we take a percentage of the appreciation. That's interesting. And every 10 year, for the last 100 years, houses have appreciated except for the 10 years of the depression. That's a brilliant idea. I think it's a good idea.

It is, because then you have a lot of people who'd want to invest in that. We do, we just raise some money. We're hoping that eventually we make it like an investable security, so like, for the holidays, like, oh, I have a theory. My theory is I want to be in lower income areas where these houses will flip over

and there will be appreciation because they turn over, or maybe my theory is, I want to be in high net worth places, you know, where and I want to invest in families that are there they're gonna be empty nesters soon in those houses like everyone can have their own Actuarial table of how it works brilliant. Well, I think you're gonna hit another big home run Oh, hopefully you know that was embossed and We're just starting but I think it's a pretty good idea. A lot of legal issues. I want to take you up on the control center.

I want to be invited down. You guys should come down. I love you to meet our team. We're invited down to Burbank. Matches for Overwatch League start again in February, mid-February, but our team is, our Korean guys are getting their visas. Visas are a giant part of everything having to do with each floor. It's like, imagine, our best player

on our Counter-Strike team is Bulgarian. And so we've been to Australia. And, you know, Kev and London and everywhere, like I have to get visas and visas and visas and, you know, visitor, it's crazy. But they are just all gonna be together for the first time in our house, and outside of Burbank in the next month.

And we'd love for you guys to come down and talk to them about having a healthy lifestyle. Oh, that'd be great. We could bring our recording team and everything and put it all out. That would be huge. Yeah, we would love that. Absolutely.

100% take you up on that. And then we're bringing them all up here to San Francisco next year, or Oakland. We're not sure where we're gonna have. So next year, everyone at Overwatch League, all 20 teams go back to their home base. Shanghai, Atlanta, London, Paris is a new team of Paris. And so we need to have our training facility here,

which we're gonna build out and love you guys to help us without part. Hopefully it's gonna be sponsored. They're gonna live up here and we're gonna play our matches somewhere in Oakland or San Jose. We'll be there too, man. Awesome. That's our goal.

And then as we build that, we're gonna try and move every team up here. Oh, very cool. Well, excellent, man. Thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for fascinating. It's fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely fascinating.

Well, world, you feel like you just got in this world. It's got a mercenary, right? It's been there forever, though. Thank you. All right, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy,

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