NZXT PODCAST - #199 - Travis Gafford!

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

On this week's episode of the #NZXT Podcast... We're joined by the legendary Travis Gafford! We dive into his journey from humble beginnings to becoming one of the biggest voices in League of Legends! Oh, and we put his LoL knowledge to the test with a special minigame! Follow Travis on his socials: https://linktr.ee/TravisGafford

Hello and welcome everyone to episode 199, almost 200 of the NCC podcast, the official podcast of the NCC community. This podcast recorded live on Fridays at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on the official NCC Twitch is available to stream on demand on Upup Podcast, Spotify, and SoundCloud. My name is Mike out with me as always is Ivan. How are you doing, Ivan? Doing great. How we do, baby boo? Happy Friday. Happy episode 199. I can't believe next week. is going to be episode 200. That's going to be a special one, but today is also special for a couple of reasons. One is because we have a not-so-special guest and one because we have a very special guest. I'll let you guess when I'm talking about Rudy.

I'm just kidding, Rudy. I love you, man. That was a joke. No, but Mike, I'll let you introduce our special guest here. Who is it? Oh, everyone. Welcome. And this is probably one of the biggest guests that we've had on this podcast.

Introducing the man who's ruined with Double Lift interviewed Faker with his lifestyle of books, league, and a lack of anime watching, surprisingly. He has carried NA League of Legends media for years. You know him as a guy who asks what's going on with N.A. And still believes in N.A. winning worlds one day. Maybe. Sometimes suit. Hopefully.

I don't know. The man, the myth, the legend, Travis Gafford. Everyone. It's a round of applause for Travis. How are you doing? Good, good. Great to be here. I know we talked about me coming on the podcast for a while, and I think we were trying to figure out when was the best time. So I'm really excited that it ended up being today. I'm really excited. Well, for those that want to know more about you, please introduce yourself and tell the people who you are and what you do. Well, I don't know if I could beat the introduction that you just gave me. But yeah, no, I've been covering League of Legends e-sports for almost 14 years now.

But in addition to that, I've also started doing a bunch of stuff in the magic space. And yeah, just generally do some dabble in fantasy books. I've done a couple pieces of content with Brandon Sanderson for those that are familiar with his work. So it's a variety of different things. But yeah, really excited to be here. All right, Travis. My first question for you, what got you into e-sports? Okay.

So, oh boy, this will be half the podcast, I think. No, back in college, so I went to college at Long Beach, Long Beach State for anybody who's familiar with that university. Same. And I really got into e-sports there. I mean, I'd grown up playing video games, and I think in middle school had started playing RTS, so Starcraft Breed Warrior and then Warcraft 3. And played a ton of World Warcraft, was just really interested in online multiplayer games and competitive games and had been vaguely aware in high school of Brood War e-sports over in Korea. But had not really seen other than, you know, I was aware of like Halo competitions and all that stuff with MLG.

So we definitely had some e-sports here, but it was, I think, primarily console e-sports. And so when StarCraft 2 came out, I got really into watching competitive StarCraft 2. So I would stay up even though I had class the next day until games at like 1, 2 AM, 3 a.m. over in Korea watching GSL and all that stuff with Tasteless and Artosis and was a big StarCraft 2y sports fan. But had been playing League of Legends at the same time. And I think in, so I started, I was within the first five. 500 accounts of League of Legends accounts made. So I started in the beta because I knew a guy named Vagar,

who the champion eventually got named after, who had played Dota with. And so I was playing a lot of League of Legends, but was not watching any competitive League of Legends because it had kind of just started off and nobody was really watching it. When I graduated, a lot of people know that Double Lift ended up living with me

when he was like a rookie who was just starting off and trying to establish his career. I totally, you know, I was trying to figure out I wanted to work at a games company. And I was talking to double of Peter about wanting to do this. And he had decided he was going to go full-time e-sports. I said, I wish I could do something there. And he's like, well, you could interview people because you have a degree in communication studies. This was like a month or two after I graduated.

And he, that made me realize I'm like, okay, why don't I care about legal agency? ESports, even though I'm playing a ton of League of Legends and I watch StarCraft 2 ESports, even though I'm not really playing StarCraft 2 anymore. I just realized that there was a lack of coverage in League of Legends. You know, I didn't know who to root for, who to root against. I wasn't sure what, you know, who any of the players were, what was happening on the top end of the competitive spectrum. So started a podcast called State of the League, which was born off of my favorite

StarCraft 2 podcasts at the time, which was. called State of the Game. So that was how that was how things started and it was supposed to just be a little hobby to do on the side while I applied for game companies and was able to show them like look here's something that I'm doing. But it really took off. And so that is that is the story of how I got into e-sports. Wow, that's an interesting story. And I am very curious though. like what made you want to volunteer and become a reporter for League of Legends when the game was so young because not many people were doing that. What inspired you to do so? Yeah, I think it was a lot of, you know, it's funny because when I first started, I was not really thinking of it as

reporter or journalist, which I know is a moniker that I eventually picked up and had for a while. but I think it really was the desire to tell the stories of the players because I was like nobody's fans of these players yet there were some people that were watching some of their streams or whatever but I don't think that there was much fandom because people just didn't know anything about them and I wanted to see the same fandom in league that I saw in Starcraft and so that was sort of my mission as I started was like hey let's let's interview these folks and try to build fans of these players you know You kind of talked a little bit about it.

So you talked about State of the League and it was inspired by Starcraft one. He also made Whose League Is It Anyway as well on top of it is. So like what made you decide talk shows should be like the route to kind of start at? Yeah, I think it was because State of the game initially for me was the thing that made it. Like I could I could tune into that for two hours every week. and I would get to meet, you know, by proxy or through the podcast, the personalities of the StarCraft players. And I would also get updated on all the latest things that were happening in the game

on the competitive side and what people were talking about at high levels, like the meta shifts, why the meta's were, why meta was shifting this way, these types of things. And so I felt like that was really valuable. Um, Whose League is it anyway was a bit of a spite podcast because I, I had a lot of like, there were a lot of people who were enjoying state of the league, but there was also a lot of feedback like, oh, these episodes are so inconsistent. We don't know if Travis is good at this, et cetera.

And what I had was kind of feeling was that pro players were not always the best talk show guess, uh, because they are just not interested in, and they, be talking as much about stuff as they are playing the game, right? And so Whose League is it anyway was born out of the idea of like, let me find some other personalities in the space that I really enjoy so that we could create something that I feel like is a more polished approach to doing a show versus like me trying to get all these random pro players on. So I wanted to see what a consistent cast would do.

And that was, that was, I believe it started with shocks. Me, Nick Allen and Alex Penn. So this was again, like the beginning of Shox's career as well. She was doing this with me. So it's kind of fun to see wherever you went. That actually leads into my next actual question, which was, do you have fun stories, you know, working with Shox and Nick Allen during this time? Like, literally, this was like the start of their very long careers.

Like, do you have any fun stories? Yeah, I'm trying to think through, like, ones that are, Safe to tell that my friends will not get angry at me about I think like for me it was very It was very fun because shocks was essentially doing what I was doing But in Europe and so I think one year into my career That 2020 July 2020 Shox and I both went to Korea for the first time neither of us had been it was my first time out of the country

I said 20 2012 It was my first time out of the country And I Heron and I just had so much fun the entire week Going around and like we would work so so hard during the day Get all these different interviews because this was Before there were competitive leagues in Europe and North America there was one in Korea

And so they invited Several different teams from North from North America and Europe over we had like CLG and CLGU and a couple others and so they all got to compete and there was not any coverage being done English speaking coverage of this tournament and so both her and I saved and went over there for this period of time and it was just so fun to run around Korea together again first time out of the country you know her and I would just go out and drink with friends that we're making over there in the evenings and pop at a cab at 2 a.m. and go back to the hotel we were staying at and like wake up so early and start grinding out again.

It was just like a really, really fun, wholesome time. You could just like walk into team houses and like record stuff and do interviews with the players. There was just a lot less red tape and bureaucracy and polish, you know, like it really was kind of the early days of bootstrap fun. And I think similarly with Nick Allen, you know, at the end of 2012, that was when he was doing IPL and just going to these events in Vegas where it really was everybody doing, everybody was doing what they were doing for the very first time. And so that made created a lot of chaos, but it also created just everyone was super

happy to be there and it didn't feel like a job to any of us. So it was just a very very fun and unique experience that I don't think you could ever replicate again because everybody now is like looking at it in a very different lens, you know? Yeah, everyone's like a little bit more professional as well like you have to have certain requirements or certain experience.

Actually, I'm curious on how you selected people back then. Like what was it that like, hey, made it a good idea to bring on people to like for the show? Exactly, yeah. So the other part is like, you've also, you have a history of like bringing in people that tend to make it in the industry. So it's like, it's almost like you lay a foundation for other folks to be able to get good at the thing. And then later on just like, you know, do great things.

So I'm curious to know as to like what the early selections look like or what you're looking for and then how that evolved. Yeah, I think for me, one of the things that I have been pretty skilled at, at least in my adult life is seeing like one, I tend to get along really well with like very smart, competent people. And so that ends up being the type of person that I would like to work with. But I also can just see like whenever I think somebody is like really good at, you know,

it's like I think that they're really successful. They're really talented. And I think early on I'm able to identify that in just my conversations with people or whatever. And then I also, you know, like one thing that I think probably all industries, but as ski sports could do a lot better of is like asking around before you start working with somebody. I'm like, hey, what is the person like? I certainly don't wish ill will on folks, but there are some people who I feel like, you know, maybe they're doing the job because they need the paycheck. And I get that that's important for a lot of people, but there's some people that

need the paycheck and do the job and then they just kind of phone it in and it's it's you see them then go get another job after everybody that was working around them was like having to pick up their slack and and so i think i've tried to sort of blend the ability to like go around figure out who is great to work with talk to other people and then as you said like for those that are really early in their career i'm just like hey i see a lot of potential that this person could do something great and then we end up working together and then eventually they leave and they go off and do. So they're great and then I have to find somebody new again. But, um, but yeah, I think, I think that that sort of was the philosophy and trying to find

people. I mean, with, for instance, Alex and Nick and Shocks, they were all people who I considered friends, which I thought was going to be really important for a consistent show. Yeah. And also people who I thought represented a lot of different experience, um, and knowledge in the space. And, you know, like Shocks could speak a lot to the European stuff, Nick was had a great viewpoint as a T.O. Alex Penn went off to go eventually, I think, become somebody running league ops for the Call Duty League. But he at the time was running the wiki, if I recall correctly.

And so he just knew a whole lot of like the stats information on all the different players and a lot of the breakdown stuff. And so he was kind of a knowledge base. And so I think, you know, looking at that, I was like, hey, this is a great group of people who I am friends with who I think are really competent and smart, who have a lot of opinions on the space that I also think are really well informed and who represent a lot of different experience and knowledge in the space. And so that was the sort of philosophy that I used to create that show. Out of all the different guests you've had in your time of talking to people,

who has been your favorite and why was it your roommate, double lift? I mean, Peter, the funny thing about Peter is that he is both a great guest and a not great guest because he will say outrageous things and be very entertaining. You know, there's a clip that still exists from whenever he was on Hotline League or not Hotline League, State of League, where he was saying that Korea would never catch up to the rest of the South America in terms of strength in League of Legends. And obviously that did not age well. So I think he was always been a great guest because of that. But I also think, you know, he does not, he does not care as much, especially at the early days about being on a show. And so he was not somebody who I would say was like locked in in the early days because he was doing it more as a favor to me. And because I think he knew that it was probably helpful for his career versus, you know, other people who I've done shows with.

Like I did Rift Reaction with Emily Rand for a while. And she's, you know, somebody who professionally speaks about the game for living. And so she, I think it was strong in a way that that Peter maybe was not, you know, because his focus was always going to be on streaming and playing the game and competing in that type of thing.

During these early days, what do you think was the toughest part about producing and interviewing all these people? Yeah. Yeah, there were a couple different things. I mean, one, you know, we're saying this on the NZXT show, so it's funny to talk about hardware. But hardware was a huge problem, right? Because this was back in like 2011, 2012, and it was really at the advent.

I think the, as I was trying to stream, if I recall correctly, there was a like period of time right at the beginning where I forget if it was called like livestream.com or something. but you know if you wanted a live stream you were paying money to a service to let you live stream and you know the i think i still have like the vods i think of some of those early shows and they probably have like five fps because the pc that i was streaming like a 480p stream on was just not able to handle like live streaming even even non-video game play or video game content uh gameplay you know it was uh it was just the podcast stuff so the hardware was a huge issue. And then you know, your guests would similarly have not as great hardware. And so you just were really trying to get anything out there, you know, like if people could hear them

and maybe kind of see them, then you were doing okay. So the hardware thing was definitely interesting. But I think just there was also the challenge of this was nobody's job. And so some sense, like they really had no super need to do it. They were just, it was nice because in a lot of cases, people were doing it for fun, which I think brought like an extra element to it, but it also just made it really difficult because you were not able to make a, like, a pitch that was like, hey, this is good for your career to, like, come on the show and do this. And there was not, there was also no money in the space.

So, no, you know, everybody was doing it truly for fun. You know, it's not like I was paying anybody for, for Whose League. It was just like a fun thing we were doing once a week. So it just, it made it a low priority for a lot of people,

I guess. I guess this is actually a good time to kind of talk. For those that want to get to ESports, this is like the man to listen to. So like during this time, so you were an ESports contractor

and a senior content creator for GameSpot. Yeah. So I started independent. Yeah. And then at the, the end of 2013 game spot hit me up no i guess in a 2012 game spot hit me up and said hey we need like a freelance contractor to like cover stuff so i did that for them in a couple days a week

and then eventually they hired me full time then yeah says you're about to say like went off to go run e-sports over at yahoo it's it's crazy because like this is like i mean i i i can't even imagine uh esports during this time like oh i can't dude yeah i I remember like, sorry to cut you off there, but like I still remember Travis coming into my CSUOB Esports Association. He's like, yeah, I founded GameSpot. I was like, oh my God, this guy's a big deal. No, I'm just kidding. Everyone kind of was like Travis Gafford is that guy for a game. This was like 2014, 2015. And so my first time meeting Travis, I still have a picture of us, by the way. I'll send it over to Mike during during this to see if he can't put it up. But this was like, everybody was like,

super early game game yeah days of league of legends we had one person playing on a laptop but everybody was super interested in understanding how to get into league of legends and the only content that existed at the time was game spot content or anything that Travis was putting out um and so it was a big deal when we realized that he also was a CSU'll be graduates we invited him over to do um what is it to just kind of talk us i don't remember exactly what what it was, Travis. But it was like, you came up, you talked on like our pseudo stage in a class,

and the musk was gamer musk in there. And he talked to us for like 30 to 45 minutes. Yeah. I'll try to pull up the picture, but like, sorry, to what you were saying. Like, I can't remember. Like, I can't imagine what those days were. Like, I can tell you, brother. I can even tell you to smell the room.

No, thank you. I can go past. So, I mean, gosh, like, during this, so you went from e-sports contract, so you went independent, then a sports contractor, did see your content creator, and then you also became head of esports media for Yahoo. How did that kind of come around?

And like, do you have any tips for people now of like getting into the e-sports realm? Well, I think, I think, don't quit your day job at the moment for e-sports. But, yeah, so the way it happened was, I, GameSpot wanted me to work part-time for them. So I was doing that. Then they launched a website called OnG gamers,

which was a sister site to GameSpot. Very short-lived experience, unfortunately, because I don't think they were able to, like, bring in the sponsorships they were looking for. Because I think maybe a little too early, right? A lot of people did not know what e-sports was. And also, the e-sports audience was not consuming content in the way that, like, a GameSpot would display it,

which was an issue that we tried to work around with Yahoo as well. But eventually, you know, I was still at GameSpot. I had a really good gig there. Quite frankly, I was, quite frankly, they were paying me a full-time salary to work only on the weekends because they could only support me in terms of like, hey, go cover LCS. And sometimes they could convince them to pay, give me some money

to go cover international events, but even then a lot of that I was doing out of pocket. And so I found myself quite bored because the original promise of on gamers was that we were going to be creating all these content because content we were going to do all these different shows. A lot of that fell through. And so they just kept paying me full time because the viewership that I was bringing in just from LCS interviews at the time was enough for them to be like, this guy's worth being a very well compensated full-time employee. So I was sitting around during the weeks being bored, and I just wanted to do something else.

I heard that Yahoo Sports was interested in getting into e-sports. And so ended up going and talking to them. They initially were going to hire me in just to be the League of Legends person, but I had had so many lessons from the last like 24 months working at GameSpot on how e-sports media businesses could fail. And so I was just very vocal consistently. Like, no, no, we can't do that. No, no, we should do this.

And they, I think, picked up within the first couple months of like, hey, actually, we should just have Travis sort of run this team for us on the media side. They partnered with a friend of mine named Hunter, who they hired from Riot. And he came in and worked on the business side of it. Though we kind of tag teamed both things. He had opinions on the media side that helped inform stuff, and I had opinions on the business side. So we ran that together and did up until,

and quite frankly, had a really great team, and I think had built like a really great product until Verizon acquired Yahoo, a year and a half later and laid off a quarter, including the whole e-sports team. So that was what caused me to go independent. I was originally thinking, like, oh, I can't go independent.

and I won't be able to find anything that like a sponsor or anything to support me. And I don't think that the money makes sense to do that. And it's going to be tough. So is that what, so that moment is what made you dive head first into Travis Gafford Industries? Yeah. I mean, so you say dive head first.

It was kind of like a tiptoe because I thought that I would go, like I talked to L.A. Times like the week after the layoffs, I went in and talked to L.A. who was interested in getting into e-sports and wanted to hire a lot of the team, but I just knew that it was like we would get in and then things would just sort of replicate them, themselves again, as an issue. The owner at the LA Times at the time seemed like a pretty chaotic individual, I guess, was the best way to put it. And so I just wasn't sure that that was the right fit.

But I was talking to other companies trying to figure out what was there. I had some severance from Yahoo, but I wanted to keep covering. You know, I was not going to, it was just because I couldn't cover it for Yahoo, I wasn't going to stop going to the LCS and doing interviews. And so I started uploading them on the YouTube channel that I had sat basically dormant for the previous like three or four years since the early days, right, where I was there originally. And those just started taking off.

And then I wanted to go to LCS finals. And I knew that I couldn't afford to spend like the four grand to get over to Boston and the hotel and have a video person and all that stuff. And so I just found like an endemic brand that was down to help cover the cost. And I just wanted to be break even. So and I started calling it initially I started calling it Travis Scafford, e-sports, whenever we would do like press conferences because it would be like, you know, this is still at the heyday. So it would be like, I'm so-and-so with the ESPN, esports. I'm so and so with USA Today, blah, blah, and I would just be like,

hey, I'm Travis Gafford, Eastport sort of as a joke on that. And then eventually, Azale joked, jokingly called it Travis Gafford industry. But I just kept finding sponsors for these things. And so at the beginning of 2018, I was like, okay, we're going to try. I'll try. Can I make as much money as I did at Yahoo? You know, that was my metric.

It's like, I want to make the salary that I made at Yahoo. and I want but I'll try to go independent and so the first year was a bit of a struggle but by the end of it I had locked like a pretty big deal a pretty big sponsorship so yeah that was that was sort of the path and what was the hardest part of that whole experience for you um i think honestly a lot of it was the financial component and the financial uncertainty because when I first started doing esports stuff, you know, I exited college with a lot of college debt and some credit card debt. And then I increased my credit card debt in the early days of working and flying myself to events before I was working with anybody. The GameSpot stuff

allowed me to pay off my credit card debt and the Yahoo stuff allowed me to pay off a lot of my college debt. And I took a lot of my severance towards that. Um, but then I was just, then it was, then I just had money, you know, that was like, here's a little bit of money left over from Yahoo. I did not have savings, really. Um, and so the uncertainty at the time of not of being like, okay, well, I hope I can get a job if this doesn't work out. Um, that was, that was a thing that was pretty spooky. Um, but. Yeah. L.A. is an expensive city to live in.

I guess that's what I'll say. Yeah. That was a big part of the nerves that I had early on. It's a little too expensive if you ask me. Well, now that, you know, Travis Gafford Industries is rocking and rolling, what's the average day to day for you? What does that look like? Honestly, I would say there isn't an average.

It has changed so much over the years. I mean, Mondays are the only day that I think is like consistent because that's when I do Hotline League. You know, friends will be like, hey, you want to go play Magic on Monday? I'm like, I do Hotline League. I've done it every Monday, you know, every now and then we have to shift it to like a Tuesday or something. But for the most part, it's every Monday since 2017.

So that's the only consistent thing. Other than that, it really depends, you know, and it's changed a lot over the last couple of years. So for a while it was like trying to create a lot of content with the teams. I think there's, worst off, less teams these days, but also less demand for that type of content. So now, you know, we've shifted to doing things like the surprise tests, the quizzes, all that type of thing. So working with editors on that type of stuff, we have, besides NST, who is our only year-long sponsor for which I really appreciate, there's always different sponsors that are coming in.

So, you know, like boot.dev has done a couple activations with us. So it's, you know, maybe working with my video producer to try to figure out what video we're going to do for this boot.dev sponsorship. or what other interesting things are happening this week that we need to cover and talk about outside of the podcast. But there are also times where it's like the average week or the non-average week, I guess, is like I'm in a different country for a while.

You know, like in July, I'm going to go to MSI and I will be there for the entire duration of the event. And for two weeks, I will be creating content and coverage of that and going to the stadium where it's, can be held our arena and doing interviews and all that type of things. So it just really varies depending on on the time of the year. Going to LTA is something that happens whenever it's in season, a lot of the weekends. But that is not always happening every weekend. So it's it's really a unique job. And I enjoy the variety, I guess is what I would say. Well, I'm, I'm glad that

you mentioned NZXT was a year-long sponsor of Hotline League because I do want to congratulate you on reaching 365 episodes. That's literally an episode a day for an entire year. So that's amazing. Congrats. Yeah, I do not know that until you mentioned. You mentioned it very briefly in our quick conversation before the show started. And that was the moment I realized I'd hit 365 episodes.

So I appreciate you for letting me know. I mean, that's one year's worth of content, man. Yeah. That's crazy. And the reason why I think that's even crazier as someone. who also does like a podcast. Even our podcast is only on episode 199. I remember when we started doing this in 2018,

Mike was still an intern at NZXT and I told him, Mike, let's start a podcast and let's set a goal of trying to do five episodes because I remember reading a stat that most podcasts only last five episodes and that's it. So I was like, all right, cool. If you can do six episodes, that means it's a success. man you did 365 of hotline league so that's i mean i'll tell you it is probably the fifth

or six podcasts that i've done um over the years because i've done you know i did do stay league whose league is anyway we had to show it game spot we had to show at yahoo um rift reaction etc but uh almost none of those lasted but i don't know if any of those hit 100 episodes so the fact that you guys have hit 200 uh your batting average is much higher than my own i guess is what I would say. So I think maybe you guys have the secret on how to do extended podcasts. It took me a lot longer that it did you guys to get to a 200 episode podcast. Hold on, guys.

My brain is breaking. Travis, you do these every single week, right? Hotline league, yeah. Almost every, like every, I think we usually take off about two to three weeks a year.

So like we often don't do one during like the holiday season and maybe we have to skip one every now and then if like nothing's nothing that the math on that is nuts it's it says here you've been doing this for seven and a half seven seven seven seven to seven and a half years yes one episode if consistently one episode per week it's six point nine five years of hotline league if you take time off because I'm looking at the videos right now and some of them are like you know maybe two weeks apart from each other a little bit sometimes a little bit more that lands around 7 and a half to like eight years of hotline league coming up on a decade yes yeah no it's been it's it's been uh it's it's honestly been i think the thing that i am

happiest with in terms of a content piece in my career um i think it is one of the more unique contributions that i've made to the esports space and uh and it's been really fun to collaborate first with Mark as the co-host and then whenever he went off to go run, literally run the LCS. It's been great to have Cubby come in as well. What would you say was the number one inspiration for you to start Hotline League in the first place? Honestly, it was a couple different things, but one of the things I remember the most in terms of like, I should maybe do something like this was I turned into, tuned into a Lily Pichu stream,

one night at like 1 a.m. And Lily was like had this, her stream title was like awkward talking awkwardly to my viewers on Discord and she would get in and like her viewer would be

stammering and stuttering and she would be stammering and stuttering. And I was like, this is really interesting to see somebody just like talking to like overvoiced to people from their chat. And I think that was when I was like,

I wonder, like, that would be an interesting talk show concept. And then, Mark, I think we both had similar ideas around the same time on this, because I think I brought up it up with Mark,

and hilariously, he was also thinking, like, yeah, like some sort of show that had like a call-in element would be interesting. So, yeah,

I will say there's an element, there's almost an element of laziness to it, too, because what of the things that I used to not enjoy about doing state of the league and whose league is anyway and all stuff was going through and being like, okay, let's make the agenda and come in with all the structure and here's how, what are we talking about? What are the questions? What are we? All this type of stuff was like the least interesting part of the show like process for me. And so like with with Hotline League, we know here are the big things that happen this week.

But really it is the callers that dictate to us what it is that they want to talk about. And we pick those callers based off of like what we think would be interesting conversations. But it is, it's cool because sometimes we go off in a direction that I would have never written on a Google Doc and shared to people beforehand. Right? Because I would have never thought of that being an interesting topic or something that, you know, people might spark a conversation. So I think in a lot of ways, Hotline, one of the things I've enjoyed the most about Hotline League is that it in a way that a lot of podcasts and talks. shows that cover like an e-sport or sport or whatever are very much reacting to the conversations that are already out there. Hotline League has oftentimes started conversations because somebody calls in with a take

that you would just never expect, you know, or they point out something that like the group think of the industry has not really caught on to yet. So I'm very proud of the show. Do you have a favorite episode? I don't know if I have a favorite episode. I mean, we have some callers that have been fun. We had for a while, we had a guy that would call in. His name was Mahmood.

And he initially was calling from Iraq, which was fascinating. He was such such like a fun character. Actually, you know, we were unsure at first if this was like, we've not really ever had prank colors that much. But like, we were like, is this guy just affecting a character? Because he's, he was so over the top and fun and, and just a chill dude. But it would just sort of say these outrageous things. And then we, you know, it became clear he, he was a person who was living in Iraq and had crazy opinions, was a huge fan of certain players.

You know, he called, initially called it. And he's like, you know, I live right next a street that's super busy. And so you would hear, you know, all sorts of crazy noises coming in through the microphone. Then he, of all places, ended up moving to Arizona because I guess he had some family that was living in the U.S. And so he was just like a very legendary caller because because everything about his call was like very shocking. His opinions and takes would just be crazy and hilarious. And he very much was obviously following the league. But also just like the chaos that was always happening in the background was interesting.

So really, really great caller. And we've just had some consistent callers as well, some that the chat always groans about. Some that have become in some cases personalities on their own. right, sort of doing TikTok stuff, stuff and all that stuff. So it's been, it's been really cool to see that transpire. But I don't know if I have like a favorite episode. I will say the tour that I did was really fun. Brittany, did you have something that you want to say?

No, no, no. It was going back to just sort of how he structures his content because I think he kind of answered it a little bit because I'm looking at his channel. And there's a couple of things that stand out, right? It's like, how do you structure what to cover and sort of how to piece that on the channel? you have an overall strategy for YouTube itself because I'm looking at, um, actually hold on. I just pull down the tab,

but I have hotline league, but then I have some snippets of, you know, they're trying to get Kobe a cat. I'm like, what, like, what makes that interesting enough for you to put it on the channel or like,

what, uh, what constitutes like it being content for the channel? Because you have several, I guess if you can walk me through. Yeah, it's honestly, a lot of it is intuiting what I think would be popular.

So like the Kobe cat thing, It's like an ongoing meme because I live with Kobe, the caster. He really wants to get a cat for the apartment. I don't want to get a cat for the apartment. And so he started like a, he started like social media. I mean, literally as the show was starting, we saw somebody in chat who was saying that their cat ruined their NZXTPC by spilling tea on it. So, but I, that became, he started like a social media campaign where people were showing up at events with signs that say like cat for Kobe.

And so then FlyQuest. noted NZXT partner, uh, was doing for opening weekend of LTA. They had like a collaboration with, uh, I'm sorry, I forget the name.

I think knew me if she's in chat would remember, but, um, a charity, a cat and pet, uh, charity. And so they brought cats to the LTA.

And so Papa Smithy actually reached out and said like, hey, do you want to do something with Kobe here? And so I was like, oh, this would be fun for the channel. So like, there's sort of these culture beats where you understand,

like what the culture of LTA fandom is and what do you think will hit really well with it. But then also what are the interesting storylines? You know, oftentimes some of my best content has just been inspired by other stuff. So for instance, I do something called Surprise Test where I talk to all the different players and quiz them on fun little things. And I'm sorry something random. I might be like, show me, you know, what is this country? It'll be Australia and they'll have no idea because pro players are.

so focused on competition that they end up missing a lot of the very basic things that the rest of humanity understands. And so that was just inspired purely by LAC Pop Quiz, which was the European League, their show, they were doing that. And like, for some reason, right, and North America refused to do their own version of it. I think because of like an ego thing. I was like, I have no ego around this. I'll just take that and do it myself.

It's incredibly popular. It's the most popular piece of content, so I started doing it. So I think it really is just sort of a, it's a little bit of experimentation in terms of what I think will do well on the channel. And sometimes I'm wrong on it. But, you know, if it's the right topic, if it's the right kind of fun, goofy thing. I'll tell you one of my favorite things I've ever done, there's a pro player named Palafox. and in 2022, Palafox was a player who a lot of people thought was really good, but it was sort of like the hardcore fans and also the analysts and pundits like myself.

And World's in 2022, he was there, not competing, but he was there with his team. And there was a TikTok trend. Oh, man, I forget the name of the guy, but he would walk around with a celebrity and he would say, man for one dollar name this person and it'd be like Paul Redd and the person is always super flustered because he's like running up to them with Paul Red and so I was like this would be really funny to do with a pro player especially if it's a pro player that like you know you could do it at an sports event where you would presume everybody would know who this person is but if it's somebody who's not very well known so I did that with Palafox and the vast majority of people did not

know who he was and they were guessing other pro players and all this stuff yeah so the content piece we clipped it together and it worked really well, really well. So much so that like just went super viral. And Palafox was a good sport about it and all this stuff. And then it became a meme. And then the next year, his team won. And everyone knew who he was at that point in time. And during the final weekend on in the big arena with like the giant screens in the center,

Riot took the video and would air it both days. They aired it. I think multiple times. And the whole arena was laughing about it because of how crazy it was that like within one year, this person went from somebody nobody knew to a person who that's the thing for people were filling the arena for. So like those are the pieces of content I think that like really I'm proud of because I'm like, oh, I think this will work.

And then it works so well that it becomes like a storyline, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. And you know, that actually kind of like comes to my question. Like, you know, you started doing all this type of content back then, you know, to And now, like what, in your opinion, like, what's been like the biggest change in how you film content?

Like, your first ever video was Chipotle with double lift. And like breaking down the cost of traveling to Korea to interview players and stuff. Like what, what's something that has really changed throughout your journey as a content creator? Well, I'll tell you, the secret is that's not my first video. There are several videos. There are many more videos from like the first year because I think that was probably a video. that I made one year in that are up in the channel but they're private.

A part of that is just because like when you say what's changed? The very early days, this was not a career, there were no stakes and so you know, I'd interview pro players and they would maybe use language that was out appropriate for sponsors and stuff that would come through later on.

So I made the decision and like I should probably just private the stuff because they were probably making jokes that would, you know, everything has changed in the past decade plus that would not you know people could go back and be like oh this joke is inappropriate or something um so that that has been part of the change right and i think it's been a good change right like the the scene has leveled up and civilized a little bit more and become more appropriate um but that is part of the reason why the first

video says chaplain with level if but i i think in other ways of stuff that has changed is like The nature of content has changed a lot. So for instance, I think while I still enjoy doing these longer interviews with the players, I do a lot less of them because people consume content differently. And those interviews are not as in high demand as they once were. So there was a time where I would go every day to the LCS and I would do potentially five interviews. And it's crazy to think about uploading like basically 10 interviews over the course of a couple days. because YouTube nowadays, like, you just don't want to upload really more than one video a date to YouTube.

It's just like the algorithm and everything just not service the other videos. And it's not, it's not going to pop off. And especially in the last five years, fans have really pivoted towards watching short form video. So I've done some short form video, but it's either short form video or it is video on YouTube that if it is longer form, like, you know, six, eight, ten, forty five minutes, you need to make it like very snappy. It's got to feel like short form video. Like surprise test is an example of that, right? We're like, we're quickly, quickly, quickly going from each, we're just doing hyper quick cuts from pro players all reacting.

I ask a question and then you see five or ten answers all in a row right afterwards and you you don't sit on a pro player for more than like five seconds. And so that has been part of it. Obviously, the exception of that, ironically, are these like second screen experiences like what we're doing right now with the podcast or Twitch. Like you can kind of have this long form content, like very long form content that is mostly unedited and not super dynamic because people will just put it on while they're doing something else. And so you have to be providing somebody an experience that is like really getting their brain going at any point in time, either by giving them something else to do while they're doing something or just. like shooting a ton of stuff at their face all at once and so that is like what has so i still like doing the interviews and i think there are a lot of people that like him but uh it is it's been a

huge shift for me as the person who started and and really became i think uh popularized in the space by creating so many of these long these longer interviews And yeah, and that's so good to know. Sorry, sorry about them. Like, the reason why I'm chiming in also is like, I guess the question is you didn't really, you didn't really adjust like the content type to like what the platforms are now like pushing forward, right? It was more so like, how do I adjust the content style of editing?

I guess the composition of it to like adjust to the changes that we're seeing across these platforms. Is that kind of hit the nail on the head? Yeah, yeah. I think it was it was a lot of changing the edits and all stuff. And some of that just happened naturally, right? Like, oh, I see that pop quiz is popping off in Europe. So that's something that I should do.

Okay, now I've done like the shift that a lot of people have started. So cool. I mean, we're, we've been talking about basically your journey through interviewing and content, everything like that. But a large majority of this has been around Lee. And I have seen it time and time again that people call you the backbone of any media for league. So like what do you think about people calling you that with like how consistent and honestly,

honest you are about league and any media? I mean, I, it there's part of it that is very enjoyable because when I first started off in the space, you know, I definitely feel like my craft has leveled up in terms of knowing how to interview people and how to present myself in content and all that stuff. But I do remember so many people for a while who would say, you know, in Reddit threads, oh, Travis is only here because he was friends with Double Lift and like as soon as somebody else comes in that knows what they're doing, he's going to be gone. Or, you know, like when the real professionals come in from the big media company's like that Travis will have to figure out what he's going to do or he'll go behind

the scenes or something. What's so funny is I ended up being one of those people at the media company, right? And like running the teams and hiring the people when I was at Yahoo and stuff. So, you know, the person who remembers, you know, myself sitting there on the computer reading comments like that and feeling like I was confident in myself in those moments. But also it's so difficult to not to push back against like the internal imposter syndrome where, you know, I'm like, okay, these videos are doing really well. I'm getting a ton of people who really like them. They feel it feels like they're doing a lot to build the pro players and create fandom in the space.

But I'll see these comments and it's like, it is true that like I had stumbled into this job post college. And it was true that like for a long time, the major media companies had not come in and were not doing coverage and stuff. The thing that and so it was, it was difficult. I think what was funny is people, when they did come in from those media companies and were like sports interviewers and we're trying to do these interviews with players, oftentimes like the community didn't like watching them because those people were too formal. They were too television and network and all that stuff at a time when this audience was not looking for that. And quite frankly, I think one of the failings and mistakes that the industry made over the past six to seven years, was like, hey, we want to get closer to broadcast television. We want to get closer to traditional sports in terms of presentation and what we're creating.

When reality, the community got into this because it was very much like a streaming, live stream, Twitch culture. You know, it was scrappy people doing goofy things, which is like what so much of this industry has been built on in terms of influencers doing fun things that you would just never see in broadcast television that you would never see in traditional media. So that was, I think, like that is the thing that feels really great to hear when people talk about how long I've been around and what I've been able to accomplish and all that type of thing because it does stand in such stark contradiction to a lot of the more, you know, frustrating comments

that I read at the beginning of my career. What's the hardest part about balancing journalistic integrity with being so embedded in the community? That is a really great question. And it is one that I have struggled with a lot. And I don't think that I've always gotten completely right. You know, I pride myself on the fact that even after I stopped sort of using the journalist title post Yahoo, that I can.

continue to try to do things from what I thought was a very ethical point of view, even when the community was frustrated, right? So, you know, in notable situations, recusing myself from covering a topic because I might have had like a previous relationship, you know, even if a lot of people are clamoring for me to like go in and talk about that or whatever, being like, hey, guys, this is not something I think that would make sense or be appropriate for me to talk about. You know, it's difficult when I am so, so such good friends with double lift to do interviews with him around stuff that is controversial. I think there's one of the challenges, too, is in managing what I personally view as an ethical decision when that might contradict

with like the commonplace understanding of journalistic ethics. So a great example of this is like there's a perception of, I think, if you do an interview with a subject, you should never pull that interview down or you should never cancel that interview. Whatever they said is what you need to put out there. It's really tough when you're interviewing somebody who's like a 17-year-old kid who's never been media trained as in an emotional moment and says some stuff that they don't actually feel, but is very so he would like to read. And that person comes to you and is like, I'm, I didn't mean that. I was in a heated moment.

And if you put that out, it's going to like make people believe things different than actually what the case is. And you have to kind of into it like, okay, are they doing this because they actually feel this way, you know? Like this is a person who's very young, has not been brought into this world in a way that like helps them ready, make, that they're, were they ready for the stuff? So like, what is the appropriate thing here, you know?

Is it to go get the thing that's going to get me a ton of views, but like might fuck over this person? Sorry, I don't know. I don't know if you can use a swear words. Might mess up this person. Or is it to release it and sort of get the views and harvest it and be like the person who's putting out the raw content? And I, I've made the difference.

decision in both ways at times, right? Like I have been like, hey, I'm going to put this out. I'm sorry. You know, or hey, I'm down to do another interview with you where you can clarify some of the stuff you made in this interview, but it's going out. But there have been times where somebody comes to me and they're just like, listen, like, this is not, this is not representative of how I feel. Can we please redo this? And I will, and I will on occasion, it's only been a handful of times, but I will redo the interview. And sometimes that stuff gets out and then people come after me. and I can only say like, hey, this is, I can only in that moment know that I did what I thought was correct, even if it's going to get me a lot of frustrated comments in the meantime.

And yeah, how do you handle that sort of criticism and backlash from fans? And also even from even other professional players or content creators out there? It is tough. It is tough. because for this job, you have to be so chronically online. And I think that I have tried to find better balance. I mean, finding other hobbies, right? Like getting into magic and stuff like that has been nice because there's times where when you put something out there that's controversial,

people get angry, other personalities come after you and maybe send their audiences at you and all that stuff. When you are so, like your world is so all-consuming league e-sports, It is like everything then feels like it's on fire and you're feeling really frustrated and like it's easy to just sort of collapse it on yourself in those moments. And so I remember, I think it was like 2015 or something like that. I put out some report on this person who ended up being a scumbag. But at the time, people did not think it was a scumbag. And my article was like, this person is a scumbag.

And so I faced a lot of blowback from people about this. And it just felt so miserable. And then a friend of mine was coming to town to one of the cities in which I grew up in. And so I went and visited him and hung out with him and a couple other people. And it was so crazy how I was like, wow, none of that stuff matters. You know, like, this is, I get to go spend time with my friend. And like this might feel like it's the biggest thing in the world. But in reality, it's like this little thing that's happening over in this like niche esport.

You know, this is 2015. Things are small. And so like, at the end of the day, you know, it's like frustrating, but it was something that was very isolated and was not going to change the way in which my life moved or anything like that. And so, um, I think doing my best to, to do that. I think also earlier in my career, I let myself get baited a lot more often by other personalities or people who would come after me and I felt like I need to engage with them or argue with them and stuff. And in the last five years,

I've realized that like, unless it is something that I truly need to address because it's like misinformation. Like when people had said that I had applied for the LCS commissioner role and I had to come out and be like, guys, I did not. Like for the most part, I've just done my job to or I've just been trying to do my job and keep my head down. And like if people show up in my chat and try to say stuff about it, I just kind of ignore it. And it is annoying. But like ultimately, I think there are a lot of people that try to feed off of the like that energy. It's like whenever you try to respond or react to they're saying then they like okay now we're going to go to the next level and then the next level and you just can never beat them so i've i've tried to just do my best to like keep my head down and

i think a lot of people have recognized that over time and i guess on the on the flip side of it do you have like uh you know we talk about a lot about the criticism for fans but do you have like a very fun like your favorite fan moment i don't know if i have a singular one i think that uh it's it's always you know, my ego really appreciates it when I will be in a very random place and somebody will recognize me. There was a moment back a decade ago, I think, where I was in Malmo, Sweden. I was there after an event. I was visiting a friend and it was like a, compared to L.A., it's a pretty small spot. And I was in a shoe store and I'm going down the escalator. And this, he was probably like 16 or 15, like comes up and recognizes me and asks for a picture.

And I'm like, that was pretty cool. You know, like that felt very validating. There's been a couple times where I've gone on dates in the past. And like I get recognized. I'm like, okay, this is like a very nice place to have somebody come up and be like, hey, like a lot of the work that you do, it feels it's like this is a, I didn't, I promise this is not a plant. I won't tell them you pay me $5 to come up to you. Yeah, exactly.

This is not a paid actor. But I think it's oftentimes a small thing. Post-COVID, we did Hotline League Live with Grubhub at an LCS finals. It was the first time that we were back in an arena. After the show, we got a lot of people coming up and talking to me and Mark. And so many people had told. them told me, oh, I'm reading the words of radiance right now, you know, or I'm started misborn recently, or do you would have this? Because oh, during the pandemic, Mark and I talked a

lot about Brandon Sanderson's books, and I had been talking about it for a while. And I just, so many people were coming up to me in a row being like, oh, I've started this book. You know, what should I read next or whatever? And that, that's like a very random thing because it's not even necessarily by my work, but it was just like neat to see that so many people had like picked up on an entirely different passion of mine just through the work that I did. So that stuff always feels really validating and really cool.

And I guess to wrap up the LCS and the e-sports community question, I've seen a lot of people with criticisms or tips or something that they should do. But do you have one or maybe two things

that Riot should do, to improve the NALCSC. It doesn't have to be realistic either. Just like, what do you think would be best? Well, for one, you kind of did it in the sentence. Hey, you called it the NALCS. So it's now technically called the LTA. Everyone's still called to the LCS.

For a while, I was thinking, like, I was, I was, I was like pretty confident that I would just like, okay, it's called the LTA. We just got to keep calling it. at the LTA and there were people that were like rename at the LCS this is dumb and I was like I just think it's too late but this week my opinion on that changed well it's been changing a little bit over time because I'm tired of telling people oh it's called the LTA now or like I had a friend my friend Sloan came over she used to watch a ton of LCS she was at my apartment and I had LCS or LTA on as an

example of the switch and she was like what is this what's LTA you know and it's like oh it's LCS okay um and so i for a while i'd been like okay we're now like five months into the year um and this is not sticking um and the thing that really made me feel good about it uh push me over to the idea of like okay they should really just call it lcs again was the hbo max re-rebrand i don't know if you guys have seen this but max it's horrible max is going back to hbo max and they have made such a great campaign uh this past week announcing it where they took all these clips of their celebrities. People like Conan O'Brien, who does a show for them,

people who've been in like all their different shows on their, on their platform over there's in interviews messing up, calling it, oh, is it called Max now or HBO Max? Oh, wait, it's Max. And why did they change it? It should change it back, like all this stuff. And they've just aired all these clips as their advertising campaign for going back to HBO Max.

And I'm like, honestly, like this feels so. much like the exact situation that's happening with LCS and LTA that I'm like thinking about doing a video that's just like actually just called LCS again you know like I know there are complications but too because obviously like CB Lull is no longer a thing but as part of it it's like I think they can just call it LCS and CBL and then whenever they merge together or when they go internationally it's considered LTA so

I don't know. That's kind of one of my really big opinions right now. That's the thing I'm really thinking about. Besides League of Legends, I know you're also a big Magic the Gathering nerd. Is that correct? Yes, yes. In the last two and a half years, I've become really big anti-magic. So big, in fact, you are also a Magic the Gathering ambassador.

Congratulations on that. Yeah, yeah, for this set. So there's a Final Fantasy set that's coming out at the beginning of June. And so I'm doing I'm doing Magic the Gathering Ambassador work for them. Yeah, some of those cards look pretty epic. I like them.

Yes, yes. Actually, a very fun fact, right after this stream, I'm going to, I have to finish an edit, and then I am revealing three cards from the set that they gave me to reveal, which is really fun.

So I'll be putting that out on social media. How long have you been playing? So, yeah, so it started about a buddy my name, Damien Estrada, who works in the space invited me to go play at the team liquid offices in the middle of 2022. And I started playing a little bit then, then started going really hard into it in the beginning of 2023. So it's really only been a couple years, which, you know, for a lot of people, they're like, oh,

you've been playing for a while now. But in magic years, you go sit down and you're talking to people that have been like, I started in 1994, or I've been playing for last like 15 years, but I took a three-year break. So yeah, I'm still relatively new in that world. I was actually surprised by that answer. I thought it was a lot longer, to be honest. Yeah, well, especially given how hard I've gone into it. But I just really fall in love with it.

And I think, you know, as we were talking about earlier with the LTA, LCS stuff, like it's nice to have another passion so that whenever there's a bad week of news in the esports scene, I've got another place to escape off to. Oh, I got a question now, actually. Sorry. I want to ask Travis, do you watch the Travis Gaffords over the Magic The Gathering? I do watch a lot of content creators in that space. There's nobody I think who does exactly what I'm doing, which is maybe an opportunity. But there are a lot of content creators. I've become friends with them. And I'm working on a pretty big project that will be like one of the first big things that I've done in the space that will feature a lot of content creators. So looking for it. to that. Do you mostly play magic in real life or magic arena or? So I will say my NCXTPC, my very, very high-end NZXTPC that has a 4090 in it right now. In fact, I've been playing

with the 5090 edition that you guys sent me. I've been playing Expeachment of 33. But I will say the game that has had the most play on this 4090 is Magic the Gathering Arena. I've played a lot of arena. Mostly I play it, quite frankly, as a means of leveling up for in-person play. So I do play way more in person. In fact, I was playing last night with the new Final Fantasy pre-cons that come out soon. I was playing with some friends to get familiarized myself with the decks. So I do play mostly in person.

I go to a lot of magic events, which has also been nice because LTA has been doing a lot less traveling these days. And so it's been fun to get my travel in the magic world. And speaking of playing with friends, you actually play with a mutual friend of ours. So I must know, how bad is Amanda at this game? So Amanda, I really enjoy. So for those that don't know, Amanda works at FlyQuest. In fact, not to define her by her relationship to Amanda,

but she is wife to Damien Estrada, the person who got me into magic. And Amanda's actually, it's very funny. I think in the beginning, Amanda was mostly there for the vibes and to hang out with friends. And I think the thing that has impressed me about magic is Amanda as a magic player is that while the rest of us are like putting in a ton of effort and grinding to try to get good, Amanda is very, very, like, casually interested in the game, but will still end up playing really, really well. So she's actually, I think, very, very good for the amount of time that she invest into trying to get better.

Because again, I do think she's like less competitive on that front than other people. But yeah, she's great. In fact, fun, fun story. She just asked me for some packs so that she could, yesterday she gave a presentation at the FlyQuest office on how to play Magic the Gathering. Because I guess FlyQuest does a like, teach, learn and play type thing. I don't know the exact details on it. We're like different people on their teams like present.

to the company on how to do stuff. And so hers was teaching people how to play Magic the Gathering because I think Flight Quest has been becoming bigger fans of Magic recently. That's awesome. Yeah. All right.

Last question about magic. What's the most expensive magic card in your deck there? What is my most expensive magic card? I think it is... So I have... I have... I have a...

I have completely... completed my collection of OG dual lands. These are all like the dual lands from the win the game for start. This is a riffbound card, actually. But these have, some of these, I think, are worth around $800. It's either that or when the Lord of the Rings set came out, I opened one of the, it's like a dwarvish soul ring, I think. I run in one of my decks and there were only, I think, I forget the exact number.

I think there may be like only 3,000 of them printed, but it's pretty rare. And so that one I think has also been going up in price over time. So it's probably one of those two. Since Ebon Crux here in the chat mentioned the Black Lotus. I have to share a funny story about the Black Lotus card. So you mentioned some people have been playing since the 90s, and I was actually one of those. I remember Magic came out the summer of me going from 7th to 8th grade. And I remember my friend teaching me how to play in the summer.

and then my first day of school, I showed up with my magic cards, and I had a Black Lotus, right? And back then, like, nobody knew these cards were going to be worth anything. Yes. Like, we didn't know that. Like, the game had just come out, and not many people were playing, and we would literally shuffle these cards. Like, they were, like, playing cards.

Like, no one cared about him. And then I remember some kid, I still remember his name, Philip. He's like, hey, I'll trade you that Black Lotus card of yours for Spawn comic books numbers 1, 2, and 3. And I was like, all right, I'll do it. And I traded him to Black Lotus for the three comic books. And then the very next day, I traded those three comic books for some Marvel cards. But I know, I bring that up because I think about that all the time.

I'm like, man, I'm only able to save that card and then use that money to buy Bitcoin. I wouldn't be on this podcast today. We sold your Bitcoin for Pizza, dude. That's what you did. Yeah. That's horrible. That is crazy. I do, you know, my, the thing I would always wonder is like, where is that black lotus

now? You know what I mean? Like, who has it? Does it still exist? Did somebody end up like losing it or did they get destroyed at some point in time? Like it's- But maybe that's a good thing, right? Because like, what will life would be like? Would you be here with us at a ZXC if you had that?

No, you would not know? You'd be rich. You'd be on a yacht. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So glad, glad you traded that lotus. Oh. The biggest regret of my life. It is funny how often these days it's easy to, yeah, as we look at Black Lotus on here.

Yeah. We're going to go for nowadays. Yeah. It's not even the unlimited edition. It's got to be one of the super OG ones. This is a CG5, which is not good quality and it's selling for 17,000. Not good quality for the 17,000, which is crazy. Yeah.

It's crazy. Oh, that's painful. Well, looking forward to the future, Travis, do you know, do you have any ambitions beyond league or maybe diving into any other games or industries? What are your future plans? Yeah. So right now, I think I think because LTA is just at a point in time where it's demanding less of my time than it ever has, I think that I have been sort of looking around and seeing what else is out there that I'm interested in. The magic stuff is the obvious answer.

And again, I'm excited about the project that will hopefully be announced in the next week or two that I'm working on, which will be really fun for a lot of the people who follow my stuff. But I'm also really excited about Riftbound, which is the League of Legends TCG that's coming out later this year. It is kind of funny because I joke about how if I had gone back in time three years and said, hey, by the way, there's a League of Legends trading card game that's going to come out. You should prepare for it. I feel like I would just be doing everything I've done for the last three years in terms of like getting really into the magic community, meaning all these creators, um, learning about like the economics of TCGs and all that stuff. Like I feel as though I am really kind of perfectly positioned for this product. So, uh, I'm, I'm excited for that. I have as I said, I've already gotten a couple of the cards. This is like a promo that they gave out at Macau, which will hopefully one day be, I'll hold on to this.

I won't trade it for any comic books because maybe this will be worth a time soon. I'll trade you some poochy points for that right now. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I don't know if I'm interested in that transaction, but I appreciate the offer. But yeah, so Riftbound, I think is really, really interesting to me. And then even just like, I've definitely been getting a little closer with Brandon Sanderson's team. and it's been fun.

I was there for a couple of days in February doing some sort of volunteer consulting and hanging out with those guys and just talking about all the different things. So I think it'll be interesting to see what goes forward in that world. But yeah, it's neat to explore a lot of my passions and see what's up.

And I do think that, I mean, there are definitely weeks like this one where I'm just like slammed with work, but especially the weeks where there's no LTA or whatever, it's been giving me some time to go and explore some of these other things. So really excited about what I get to do in the future. Well, speaking of time, we are coming up to the end of the show. But before we wrap things up, I do want to ask you some community questions here.

The first one is from Dis Funk. They want me to ask you about the Gaffi Awards. It's definitely in their top 10 streams. Yes. That is actually something I should have shouted out. So I think that a lot of the award shows, not all of them, but a lot of the award shows in these sports industry are a little goofy. And I really liked the idea of parroting these at one point in time.

And so one of the bigger projects that I've worked on that I did was for two years. I think it was probably 2019 and 2020. I did the Gafford Esports Awards, which was a fully produced, like, live stream event that took place with where I sourced fun, goofy videos from a lot of different teams. We gave out fake awards to people. We had all these esports people would send me,

like videos of themselves on their phone, like presenting the awards and then accepting the awards in very goofy ways. Unfortunately, viewership was never that great for it, even though I think it is like some of the best work that I've ever done. And the people who watched it loved it. I did like 10 minute like monologues at the beginning where I would crack jokes and stuff. Like I was the host or presenter of an award show.

It was a collaboration with myself, Broden, who worked with me at the time, but now there's a whole bunch of stuff with offline TV. And it's kind of become famous in his own right. and then Sushi Dragon, who is one of the, I think, the most talented people on Twitch

in terms of crazy production and stuff. That's the craziest Twitch stream I've ever seen in my life. Yes, yeah, but he was, I mean,

he was perfect for this because we were trying to create this, like, chaotic award show environment. He would cut to, like,

I would crack a joke and then he would cut to an audience that was filled with, like, versions of myself, all clapping,

doing different things, like shaking their head, wheewing, et cetera. It was just such a crazy thing that we were able to pull off. And I'm really proud of it, even if a lot of people didn't watch it. I think I gave it a second year and it just never got to the point where it made sense for the amount of work that we were printing into it. And quite frankly, I feel like I probably still would have done it because it was so fun. if Broden and sushi had not gone off and gotten super busy doing other stuff.

And then also we hit the pandemic, which just made it difficult to do that because it really did require an in-person work collaboration with those guys. But yeah, that was one of my favorite things that I've ever done. So I appreciate the shoutout on that. Yes. Thank you, Disfunck. All right.

Sage the plug has a question for Travis. They say, with so many projects and accolades, on your resume, what's the big idea you've always wanted to try, but have yet to find the right opportunity time, group, resources, et cetera? I mean, it's my brain immediately goes to, I eventually wanted the Gaffordy Sports Awards to get big enough that we could actually do it as a live event with like an audience filled with like my peers and friends and stuff and like bring them up and create a very chaotic environment. Unfortunately, we never got to that.

But it was the type of thing where I was like, oh man, it would be so fun to have these people doing like live version, like their own live appearances on this stuff or like prank them in the audience and do goofy stuff. You know, like, I,

I think what are the ideas at one point in time we were going to slime somebody like the Nickelodeon Awards or whatever, just randomly if we ever got to that. Like just so much stuff. So that is something I think about. The one thing we didn't talk about too much earlier in the league stuff was like I loved doing

live hotline league we went on a tour for that for worlds 2022 and did uh I think it was five shows on the road um over the course of of that in in New York and Atlanta and in San Francisco I think doing that internationally would have been really really fun so I'm bummed that we haven't at least so far gotten to do something along those lines um and then I'm trying to think if there's anything too crazy. There's nobody that I've wanted to interview. I often get people asking me, like, who's somebody you've wanted to interview that you've never been able to?

I've been lucky enough that I think I've been able to interview everyone. I've done multiple interviews with Faker. I've interviewed all the North American players. I've interviewed the CEO of Riot and all this stuff. So there's nobody, I think, on that front that's missing. But, yeah, I think just like it would have been really fun or perhaps in the future if I can to like take some of these projects and just like elevate them even more like go bigger and bigger and bigger with them. I think the correct answer was the NZXT podcast, but we'll take that's true.

It's true. I mean, I'm on here. So it's not something I've wanted to do, but I've never because now I've finally made it onto the NXT podcast. Yes, you finally made it. All right. Last community question from Bally 30, 321 TVD. All right. This is actually something I wanted to ask you to.

Did at any point in time say Yahoo in the same voice as Mario says, Wahoo! Yeah, well, first off, congratulations. Like, that was a great Mario. No, I have never done anything like that. I don't know if I ever will. I think if I die having never accomplished that,

then that will be fine for me. There's also the old like Yahoo! Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So whenever I went there, There were a lot of jokes. I mean, it was, it was very funny to be working. There was such a strange dichotomy of Yahoo being a brand that was like known as like

the boomer brand. Like this is your grandma's email as Yahoo. But we were doing like e-sports tournaments and coverage and all this stuff as Yahoo to this audience. And so it was it was unfortunate that that that website and brand did not continue Yahoo! ESports because I think that it was like the only thing that people under the age of 40 were aware of that Yahoo was doing or connected with. So it was kind of a loss for them, I think. Believe it or not, I still have an AOL email address. That's crazy. Yeah. I know a lot of people still

have like hot mail and stuff like that, you know, that still exists. But yeah, it's just, does your AI still work? You know what? I haven't logged on to my AOL email address. in a while but if anyone wants to email me i will check it it's ivan b at aol.com that's a pretty standard name not gonna lie yeah um all right now it's time for a special surprise mike uh mike put together a fun little game he wants to play with you Travis so I might take it away all right we got we got two league players you got Rudy and Travis and Travis I mean you've been into space for a while so I'm expecting big things out of you We're going to be doing guest to champion.

Basically, what you'll do is you'll ask me questions. You'll have a minute. I have a minute timer right here. You have a minute to guest the champion. You can ask me any questions, but it has to be yes or no formats. Okay. All right. For those that are want to play with us, close your eyes.

I will show it on screen for just a second. So keep your eyes close. I'll show the champion that I'm going to show for Travis right now. So close your eyes. I need to close your, I need to close my eyes. Yeah, or anyone that wants to play as well.

I'm closing my eyes. You're good, you're good. All righty. So you have one minute to guess the champion. You're good. You can open your eyes now. You're good.

You're starting to fall asleep, you know, relaxing. All right. You got one minute starting now. All right. A boy or girl. Sorry,

I guess it's yes or no. Is it a boy? Boy. A boy. Okay. Is it human? Yeah, is it human?

No. No. Okay. Is it from the shadow aisles? No. Okay. Is it from the void? No. Oh, okay. Is it Aurelian soul? No. Okay. Not from shadow oils, not from a void. Not an arrelian soul. Is a boy? Is it a bandel or is it a yordal? Yes. Timo? Yes, it is. It's always that, man.

Snipe that. Wow, well done. You snipe that really well. I was not expecting that. Yeah, no, I, Tia, once I got down to yordals, I was like, okay, I feel like, Teno's It's very interesting seeing people's, like, ways of narrowing it down. Now it could be Rudy's turn. So you got you know, Rudy has like the text that I've given him to be a little bit.

We'll see. I'm, I'm still going to do it. Okay. Okay. All righty, let's pull up. Okay. Everyone close your eyes. If you want to play along, I'm going to show it in three.

I get to see it the time, right? You can see it this time. Rudy, you cannot. So three. Right. I'm not watching. I'm not watching. One.

Okay. So that's the, so that's who we're going to play with right now. Rudy, you have one minute. Travis is up one zero. Ready? Three, two, one. Go. Is it top lane?

No. Is it mid lane? No. Juggler? No. Bot lane? Yes. ABC?

No. Support? Yes. Guy or girl? Guy or a boy? Boy? Is it a cow? No.

Is it a shield providing support? Yes. Is it Johnna? No. That's a girl. Um, boy. Does he hook? Yes.

Is it Bloodsprink? No. Is it Pike? No. Is it Thresh? Yes. There you go. That's what a lot.

When he did the shield, I was like, I hope he recognizes that his W does give a little shields. I'm hoping that he narrows it down from there. I was thinking, John, like, yeah, okay, okay, okay. Ooh, that was good. Nicely done. All right. Let's see.

Ooh, okay. know what let's pull up let's pull up this one all right Travis you ready yeah I'm gonna show it to the front people three two one all righty you got one minute ready set okay is it a boy no is it a girl yes okay is it human yes is it a topliner no is it a Juggler? No. Is it a mid-laner? Yes.

Mid-lane girl. Are they... Does it have a CC ability? Yes. Okay. Is it Lux? Oh my God. What?

You snite that on first try? What? Wow. I got to choose harder ones. I was like, I wanted to ease you into it. You snite that first try. I think it was the human on that one. human you know what that was probably it wow that was

dang i got choose a harder one okay i'm gonna choose a harder one let's see wait wait wait no yeah we're gonna give you a harder one we'll do the harder one after okay you know what we will do okay you know what we'll do this one all right we already close your eyes and anyone that wants to play along close your eyes i'm gonna show the screen and three two one all righty Ready? We got one minute. Three, two, one. Is it top lane?

No. Jungler? Yes. Is it human? No. Is it from the void? No. Is it a cloud?

No. Jungler? Is it a boy? Yes. I think. You think. Okay, so it's a creature probably. Is it Iberm?

No. Does it produce shields, actually? That's a good one. No. Does they have claws? Yes. Oh, crap. I don't even know. What could it be?

What other questions can I ask? Does it use mana? Yes. So, manna, boy, he thinks... Oh, I'm so stuck. I got one last question. And it's not human, right? No.

Yeah, one question. I got, no, I got, uh, not human. Is it Zach? No, it is not. It is Biddle sticks. It does have claws. He has claws. It's a boy, I guess.

I asked the wrong question. Yeah, you got to find a way to narrow it down. Okay, so 2.1, Travis, Travis, if you win this one. You win the game. Oh, I got, she's a hard one. Good, jungle again, the jungle is hard. It's like the, the characters that people jungle all the time always changes. That's true.

I mean, Phil's always. Well, not always, but mostly always been a juggler. I think people have been a juggler. Yeah, that's fair. Okay. All right. All right, this one's going to be an interesting one. I'm interested.

All right, Travis, close your eyes. If you win this, you win the game. And you will get a crisp high five as your prize. All right, close your eyes and I'll show it in three, two, one. All right. You got one minute. Ready, set. Go.

Is it a boy? Yes. Is it human? No. Is it a top liner? No. Is it a jungler? No.

Is it a mid-laner? Yes. Most of the time you spend. Mid-laneer? Not human. Is it Aurelian soul? No. Okay.

I don't know why Aureliate soul is on my mind. Is it... Does it use mana? Yes. Okay. Manna user, boy, non-human, mid-lane. I want to ask you sports questions, like if it's in the meta or whatever, but I don't want to pretend that you know.

Is it from the Frailord? No. Is it from the void? No. Yeah, 10 seconds. Is it from the Shadow Isles? No. Is it, I don't know if I have anything.

Last question. I think you can answer after. Yeah. Is it Damasian? No. All right. My guess is, who's like a not who's a non-human void boy that hangs out in the mid lane or male male character

uh i got nothing you missed one thing you said it before it was a yordel oh yordel yeah fizz okay fizz okay i would have forgotten about fizz i always forgot about fizz that was i would never have gotten fizz all right really that's also amused to me that i would guess like hymertinger or something Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Rudy, you have to get this one or Travis takes home to high five.

Let's see. Let's choose a, choose a fun one. Oh, all right, all right. Easy. All right. Close your eyes. Close your eyes. Everyone going to show it to you right now.

Okay. One minute. Three, two, one. Start it up. All right. Top line? No. Jungleer.

Yes. rigged. A human? No. From the void? No. Is it fiddlesticks? No.

So it's not from the void. Is it a blob? No. Is it classified as a tank? Yes. Yes. Okay, so tank. It's not human.

Boy? Yes. So tank, jungler, boy. trying to think Lisa? No, because it's not human, right? Fudge, man. 15 seconds? Chaco?

No. So it's classified as a tank. That's the part that I'm missing here. Five seconds? So this is tough. This is tough. All right, you have one question, and then you get a guess. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking real hard about this one.

Um, nothing's coming in mind. That's the weird part. Oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. So, boy, um, does it curl up in a ball? It does. Ramis, it's Ramiz. Wow.

I don't know why. I'm like, that immediately came to mind when I, okay, okay, cool. Yeah, Ramis. Well, done. Do we go for the tiebreaker? I'm fine with a tiebreaker. I'm down. Okay.

All right, all right. I, you know, John's, I'm going to do. here's my suggestion i think we alternate questions for this one oh who gets it okay yeah i like that all right let's uh second i like it so no seconds no time it's just whoever could get it yeah and at the well at the end of it we both have one guess so we let a whole minute go and at the end of it we each get one guess so we alternate questions throughout that whole minute that's what we spend the minute on and then at the end of it we each

get one i like it i'll give a minute 30 since you guys are alternating so because of the this all right Let's choose. Hmm. Who would be a fun one? Oh, yeah. Here we go. Here we go. Let's do this one.

All righty. Travis, get ready to start off and, oh yeah, I'll show everyone. Close your eyes. Close your eyes. There we go. All righty. We'll start up in three, two, one. Go, Travis.

Is it a boy? No. Is it toppling? No. Is it a girl? Yes. Is it Midland? Yes.

Is it a character in League of Legends? Yes. You're not trying to give me anything, are you, Travis? Is this character played in the game? Yes. Oh, God. Oh, I see. Is this character a mage?

Yes. Do they, would you consider their combo, burst. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Is it a character? Is it, but did somebody ask if it was human? Is it human? It is human. Okay. Is it's ulti long range? Uh, no, not long range. It is range, but not long ring. Is it a popular, would you say that it's a popular character? I think it is, yeah, pretty popular. Is it purple? It is purple.

Well, but it seems like we're out of time. Yeah. Right? Yeah, it's 1.30. So what's your guess, Travis? You got the guess? I get to guess first. Yeah.

It's tough because there's a couple purple characters. Mm-hmm. Is it Cindra? It is not. Is it a railing soul? No. Oh. I thought you're going to do it.

It's a girl. It's a girl. It's a girl. Is it? It's Velcos? No, Velcos is not. No, Velcos is a boy. Rudy.

A purple girl with a short... Cindra's the only one that comes to mind that also bursts. Uh, give me a quick second here. It's not fit. It can't be Fizz. Is it... No, is it Tristana? No.

I'll give you a hand. It's a mage, so it's AP. So it's AP. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Purple, mage, girl. Popular. You're going to kill yourself once you, what you, what's you figure, what's I reveal it or someone guesses it.

I'm like thinking through, uh, arcane, human, purple, mage. This is very frustrating. It is, yeah. It's an older champion. It is a relative.

Older champion. He has a sister. Sister. It's not Middle-y? No. Who has sisters? Jinks and Diana, or sorry,

jinks and- Oh, I got it. I got it. I know exactly what it is. I know exactly what is. Oh, you do? Okay,

I need to stall them. Thank you for letting me know. Yeah, one chance. I miss you got 15 seconds. Let's go. 15 seconds? I don't know.

The judge has not said that. I'll see. Who has a sister who is like there's Diana and Leona but Diana is not a mage. I can help you. I guess they're not sisters. I can help you. They're opposite of each other. They're opposite of each other.

Yes. Yeah. Purple mage opposite of each other. The sisters are opposite of each other and you also sometimes might play her as support. not the sister the mid-maid. Oh my God. This is this is crazy.

If you can flavor and support has a sister, purple. Oh, you're gonna, it's gonna be painful once you figure out what it is. That's the problem is I know it's going to be painful.

Who is a sister? Why am I forgetting a character in the midline who has a sister? And a complete opposite suit. Think goths. and blonde. All right, just tell me this is embarrassing. Rudy would I suggest.

It's Morgana. Morgana. Oh, yeah. It was a sister that gave up there. It's so funny. I think of Morgana Moore's support these days. Really? Yeah.

Where my brain is that. Yeah. I think these days she gets played more as support. Maybe I messed up the meta a little bit. No, no, no, no, no. She's also a mid-lainer. It's fine. I should have gotten it, especially with the sister thing.

I forgot about the sister stuff. That's crazy. Yeah, I was like, I was like, oh, what's a way to do? I was like, oh, oh, sisters would be a fun way to bring it down. The moment you said that I was like, I was like, oh, I know. You're so it's funny because when you think of sisters that are opposite, like, like it's like, Leo and Diana, I was like, wait a minute.

Yeah, they are opposites and she's also yeah. All right. So I think that I mean we tied or I lost. You lost this one sadly. But you did your heartbaugh battle. So well, yeah. All right. All right.

Well, no, that was really fun. I appreciate, I appreciate the game. Thank you for having it. Of course. Of course. I'll go into announcements and then we'll have some final words. So just a couple quick ones. One, we're having me to copy text next week.

So we're about to reveal something big and something small. So stay tuned for that. You guys could join us for the club. You can see if there's a lot of people getting points throughout the thing for poochie points. Join the club for exclusive giveways. You won't get anywhere else. So nzicc.c.com slash club or estimation point club in chat. Ivan, do you have anything before we ask Travis some final words?

I just want to thank Rudy for joining us on the NZXT podcast. If you want to say hi to Rudy in real life, he will be at DreamHack next week hanging out with the FlyQuest fam. So stop by and say hello. I appreciate you, Rudy. And I also want to give extra special thanks to Travis for joining us on the podcast. I think this is one of my favorite podcasts. It only took 199 episodes for me to have. my favorite one and this was definitely it man thank you so much for for chatting with us and

for hanging out with the community yeah no it was really fun thank you for having me on do you have any uh like any shoutouts or any special events you're heading to or anything like that you want to throw out there well i know i lost the game but i do feel like you know you know you guys are announcing some cool stuff next week so if there's any world in which you know maybe as second place could maybe receive something cool from the announcements that might be kind of cool. That's a request I'll put out there. The other thing is I, yeah, I will be

at Magicon Vegas next month for those that are interested and play Magic. But I will also be at MSI in Vancouver for all two weeks of that event. A little bit more than two weeks, I think. So that's towards the end of June beginning of July. So you can catch me there, but I'll also be frequently at LTA over the next month. So yeah, thank, no, thank you guys for having me on the show. It has been really, really great working with the NXT team this past year. I've been such fans of the stuff that you guys do. Every PC I see from you guys is already so

beautiful. And whenever friends come over to look at, you know, visit me and they see the lineup of gear and swag that you all have sent me. It's been fantastic. So thank you so much to you guys for having me on the show and for sponsoring me. Yeah, of course. I think that's it. So first, I want to say I'm putting the link you guys have followed Travis on all his socials. I put the link tree in the Twitch chat. So please follow Travis because I mean, you guys heard from this podcast. He's been doing so much and he's been in this space for a while. So, you know, there's no better person to follow than to Travis.

And then also we have our little gleam giveaway giving way three poochie plushes. And for those that are here for the 500 extra entries. for that secret word, a way of holding you guys hostage while we do this podcast. The secret code word for 500 extra entries, as always, no matter what happens throughout any League of Legends, any events, any world. The number one thing is to Nerf Iralia. You got to do it. So everyone, that is the number one nerve that everyone should do.

And thank you guys for joining us and tune in live on Fridays at 10-8 Pacific Standard Time. on the official NCC Twitch. And don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and SoundCloud. You got any questions for us? Email podcast at nzc.com or tag at NZC on social media. Thank you, Travis, for joining us

on this awesome, awesome podcast. Have a safe Memorial Day to everyone. And please stay safe. See you guys next time.