 the wide world of eSports, the show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Katharine Noor. Today we're talking about eSports Circus, the ultimate collegiate mobile venue. With me is eSports Circus ringmaster, Jeff Stansfield. Hey everybody, welcome. I love your hat, that's great. Thank you. My gold hat, it goes in my gold jacket, my tie and my sparkly gold skirt. Even my shoes are gold, you can't see them, but. Well, you know, you're definitely the ringmaster. So tell us about eSports Circus. Yeah, so eSports Circus came out of my love for the circus as a kid. I love the idea and the majesty of the circus. I remember as a kid going to the circus and seeing all the clowns and all the wonderful acts and stuff like that. And I know that in the late, we've sent all the lions and elephants back to Africa where they could in Rome and be happy. And I said, and I've always loved that magic. I wanted to relaunch it and find somebody to do it. And when I was building an eSports arena in early 2000, well, in 2019, I came to me, I wanted to get involved in eSports. I wanted to be more involved. I was already involved in the broadcasting end and buildings, building arenas and infrastructures and stuff like that. But I really wanted to be involved in it. And I've always been a showman all my life. You can, as you can tell. And so I just came to me one night and said, you know, build this eSports circus and invite people to come on. So I wanted to do it and I had that dream. And I made it happen. I made the dream happen. And we've been successful. We had some great success events in early 2020. And we're going to have some great events and lay this year and in next years and so on and so forth. Okay, well, let's show the video and see more about it. Absolutely. I'm Jeffrey Stansfield. I'm the ringmaster of eSports Circus. I'd like to invite you to come and run with the circus. The eSports Circus helps schools develop eSports teams and host in-person events at the schools, allowing students to play on massive stages they might not get the opportunity to do. The problem in the industry is that most schools don't know how to develop teams, monetize teams or recruit students and find career paths among many other issues. For example, most schools build a land center when building out their eSports area, putting many computers on desks next to kids like they did in the 80s. This workflow is not flexible and opens the door to things like vanism, theft and uploading of dangerous stuff. The eSports Circus has a proven workflow that can secure and can move the system anywhere on campus in minutes. Schools usually are too far away from large stadiums and the stadiums don't like to host collegiate events because it hasn't been as much profit as coasting professional events. We had this issue by working with schools to develop programs to meet their needs and work with student clubs to bring their dreams alive of having an eSports team on campus. We host events at schools, bringing the eSports Circus to the schools. We invite other schools from around the area in a massive circus environment. At the eSports Circus, the college and high school athletes can compete on stages and participate in other activities to help foster STEM creativity with eSports, robotics, virtual reality, game design, production and many other disciplines. The eSports Circus gives profits back to the schools to help them build their program. If a school hosts us on campus, they get 5% off the profits. We also have opportunities for hosting schools and participating schools to share in revenues with a 25% discount on ticket sales and a 50-50 sponsorship revenue split on all sponsorships they bring in. Even though we have recently launched, we have many years of experience behind us. I'm a broadcast engineer with over 30 years of experience building hundreds of TV stations all over the country. Other executives have over 10 decades of experience in marketing, branding, production, social media and sports. This year, we actually received the prestigious STEM certification for outstanding achievement in our past and our revolutionary program for developing a full package of STEM activities for schools. If you have any questions about our program, please visit our website, esportscircus.com and I will see you at the circus. Impressive, Jack. And what I wonder about, okay, so I know you're not bringing elephants and tigers and lions to the venue. I know that's not what you're bringing with you. What are you bringing with you when you travel with the eSports Circus? Well, we have the big circus tent. So if you go to our website, esportscircus.com, you scroll down, you can see our circus tent. We have broadcast trailers. We're bringing in, of course, some clowns and some magic tricks and stuff like that, but we're bringing the majesty of the circus, keeping that magic that we all love alive. And, but in filling it with eSports and robotics and we have a virtual carnival because you can't have a circus with a carnival, right? So we bring our virtual carnival. We have our robotics. We have our eSports games. And so that's what we bring in and replace with those lovely little animals that we all love to stay when we were kids. So are there competitions then, basically eSports tournaments? Yes, absolutely. So we bring in, we usually have a set of games that we have, plus we find the games that are in the neighborhoods and the areas that we are developing. Like one thing we're doing is we're planning an Arizona trip. We're gonna do eight areas, eight setups in Arizona, or no, sorry, New Mexico. We're gonna add, we're gonna do eight events there. We're gonna have Seattle, we're going to Valley Forge. We're going, we'll be in Daytona, Florida. We'll be in El Paso, Texas, so on and so forth. We're, Belflower is probably gonna be our closest event that we're doing. Belflower, California. And we're just gonna bring eSports. We're gonna bring it into the community, involve the community so we can help build the business of the community back. We're going to involve the, and really help the local economy grow, help the kids expand into the career opportunities that they wanna have, and, you know, help everyone grow. Now, is this targeted only for college or does it also, you also go to high schools or, you know, just the community? Well, yeah, all three. We're mostly collegiate eSports tournament company, but we involve high school teams in what we do. We may have some high school tournaments, but mostly what we're doing with the high school kids is we wanna have them come in and get internships with us. And so they can help, you know, be volunteers and run their relations. And then, they introduce to the high, to the colleges, and maybe make some positive connections and grow that, grow their collegiate career. Are you able to do more than one event at a time right now, or is it just one event at a time because of like one tent and one operation? Well, eventually we're gonna franchise this whole thing. Eventually I wanna franchise this and have multiple circuses, not only eight or nine circuses in the United States, I wanna have circuses in Canada, we've already been talking to South America, we talked to Canada, we went to Xi'an, China, we went to South Korea, we didn't go to North Korea, but and we talked to people in Vietnam, Thailand, India, and the UK and all over Europe. And so eventually we're gonna franchise this and have them all over the world. And so yeah, we could definitely have multiple teams running circuses, because we're just really starting out, we've been to the tech school, we really wanna start and doing one circus route at a time and then as we branch out and build these up, we'll have multiple circuses, and then of course we'll have franchise opportunities so other people can take advantage of this incredible opportunity and have their own circus. Okay, so in Hawaii we have, there's a school where Obama graduated from and that was Punahou. And every president has a Punahou carnival and that's one of their main fundraising activities. And I wonder if you could have an e-sports circus kind of in conjunction to existing carnivals. Yes, one of the things that we're doing is we're gonna be working with Daytona, Florida during the July 4th, next July 4th weekend, we're gonna be in Daytona, Florida during the race track time, we'll be at the track and so they're gonna have that whole big festival that they have and we're gonna get one of those, we're gonna get a giant hanger that they're giving us and we're gonna build the circus in that. And so we'll, so we can definitely work within that. We also talked to a couple other cities that are having their annual fairs they have and we're gonna be in conjunction with that so they wanna bring e-sports into these fairgrounds, into these nat state fairs and so we're working with that as well. So yeah, we can definitely pop up. The great thing about our platform is that we can pop up anywhere. I can pop up in a park. I can pop up on a lawn at a college, a baseball field, football, any place we can pop in. The reason we like to have a college is so much is they have everything we need. In order for us to set up, we need a place to play, power, internet, security and bathroom. And colleges have all that, they have campus security, they have internet, they have power, we just have to route it to wherever we are and we can do that. And then we work with them, we give them percentage of profits, like you saw the video and the college can make revenues for sponsorships and ticket sales and stuff like that and they have a great amount of energetic students who, you know, the alumni can sell up to the alumni they can sell up to the student unions and sell up to those. So there's a lot of opportunities for the students to really help work with us and partner with us. But we can, we go anywhere. Okay. And you know, let's talk about a theme. Okay. What is it stand for and what, how is that relevant to what you do? Well, STEM education is a very important part of eSports and the technology in eSports. STEM stands for science, engineering, mathematics, arts. So it's actually arts and mathematics, my dyslexia there. But so STEM is all part of that. If you're a game, you know, if you're a game player, you know, one of the things that separates some of the best teams is in, you know, analytic data analytics of how games play, science of engineering of all that data gameplay. If you're a game designer, you need to, you know, be able to create these great art things. One of the greatest things that we love about games is the graphics and art behind them. And someone has to create that art, you know? And to design games, to do the program of games takes engineering and mathematical skills. And, you know, and even in other parts of eSports, like robotics with drones and robot wars and all that, it's a very engineering and engineering, mathematics design feel. And in VR, you have also all these disciplines. So art and engineering and mathematics, all these, and science, all those levels of science is ingrained into what eSports is. Everyone looks at the game says, oh, that's great. But they don't think about all the engineering and art and development of sciences that goes into developing games. So that's an art program of how we've been helping students for the past 10 years and things like color science and data science led us to develop a really rest of East STEM program which is why we received last year the prestigious STEM certification that we got. So this is not just going to the circuit. This is actually a benefit for people to broaden their horizons in STEM. Is that right? Absolutely. We want to teach people, we want the students, we go to college, we don't just want the college to come and compete and play. We want to deal with the college engineering department and the video production department, audio production departments, all the different departments at that school, whatever they have a discipline in, we want to involve them and have them work at our event and become part of it and build their career opportunities because there's a lot of opportunities for career opportunities in eSports other than just playing games. And other things we stress is diversity, diversity is a big part of what we do. We want to train diversity and diversity initiatives are a big part of what we do. So whatever you're into, as far as you're going to college to learn this, do this, we want to involve that in eSports because it's all a part of what it is. Okay. And so there is a question from a viewer and that is 20 years ago, your career wasn't even possible. What advice would you give people to prepare for careers that don't exist yet? Well, Mike, the circus existed 20 years ago, video production existed 20 years ago, games existed 20 years ago. I played games when I was, before I was 20, you know, and I'm a little bit older than that. So, you know, all this existed, eSports in a name didn't exist 20 years ago, but it existed. And just because, and these words we see today came out of traditional gaming technologies and all this. So, and just because you don't see this, you may not see this come to fruition right now by understanding and developing what's you're interested in. Don't worry about finding your career, what's going to be in 20 years. Find out what you're passionate about today and excel in your passion. Because if you excel in your passion, your passion will become the next great thing in 20 years from now. Sure. And, you know, I think a lot of people who are fairly new to eSports, they don't really know the history. It does competitive video gaming goes back to 1972 with the first competition. And there were games that were developed in the early 1940s. So it is a really longer, it has a longer history than a lot of people are really aware of. But during the pandemic, we, you know, we've certainly learned a lot more about it because the focus has been less on traditional sports and more on eSports. So what has happened during the pandemic for you? Well, you know, we, okay, so in January, we held the first great event that we had. And it was a fun event at the North America, that's right here. This is at the North American Music Merchant Show. This is a show for music stores like the Carter Center and Sam Asch to see what the new technologies are. And they've been getting hit by their members to do something in eSports. And we've been going to MAM for 20 years. So we told them we would do this. And we set up a gigantic booth at this thing. We had 10 PC gaming consoles, four VR consoles, a VR experience fair, broadcasting area, we had all this stuff. We had over a thousand people sign up and play tournaments at our event. We had 10 times more that come by and look at what we're doing and experience what it is. And the stores are really excited about it because they're looking for ways to bring people back into the retail stores instead of going to that startup called Amazon or Walmart, just online, thing that people have been going to when they want to give you back to retail stores. Well, if you have a eSports or virtual reality area in your music store, browse people back into there and then you can sell them a sure head set or a blue mic or a HyperX mic or something like that that they already signed up for these lines and then it would just increase their sales. But I digress. So we held this event in January. We did also another event in February. And then we got shut down with our events. We had five more events scheduled last year. We got shut down because of the pandemic. But like all good entrepreneurs and business people, we did this thing called pivot that every business does, you pivot. And so we pivoted and turned our attention to really defining what we're doing and then also working with schools to help them develop their team, which was always the second part of what we really wanted to do. We're big infrastructure people. We work with schools to help build their infrastructures in ways that most of them don't do. Like I said in the video, building a land center is putting a computer on desk as a kid is dangerous thing. We have ways that are much better workflows, much inexpensive workflows, much more powerful workflows that allow you to take control of your eSports arena area. And then we all do with marketing and branding because these teams are built this thing and then they don't know how to monetize their team. They don't know how to brand and market their team. And so we have experts that are experts in branding and marketing. One of our partners is Don Montcoy, who's an angel investor. He's exited many companies and got those IPO. So he knows how to take a brand and make that brand profitable. So we helped him develop and we worked on that all last year and building our own personal brand. And so now we're coming out of this new year and we're just getting hit by all these companies and all these cities and all these schools are saying, we want eSports circus here. And so we're going to bring them. Wow, that's really exciting. So is there an element of giving back in your company? Absolutely. The first, I mean, we give back in a lot of ways. First of all, we give back because we train people how to do the jobs that they may not understand in eSports like production, audio production, video production, broadcasting, event management, running our event store, running, helping run operations and also helping them actually do other things in that, we're running out of diversity initiatives. And then learning how STEM is really a part of this whole thing and our partners. We have partners that train and help schools do much more than they're doing now. So we're able to that. Plus we have the financial give back where students can actually make money coming to our event by bringing us, if you go down to the local Starbucks subway or GameStop and you're next to your school to, hey, sponsor the eSports circus, do it better for $2,000. The banner costs us $1900. We split that. You get your hat. I get my hat. We're all happy. And then ticket sales, they'll take it to your friends and family and you make a 20 president revs your ticket. So we give back that way. I'm always a big guy from the last 20 years I've worked with the American Red Cross. In fact, I have my pins here for my COVID relief pins. I got my COVID pin here. I got my silver presidents pin here that I just got yesterday. I got these yesterday for doing that. I've been a part of the big brother, big sisters for many years, volunteering and mentoring over five young men to manhood. So we're, our company is set up on the give back possibly. It's, you know, one of my heroes, Eleanor Roosevelt once said, when you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die. When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die. Think about those words. And those words have resonated in my life. And I always look at everything I do, give back. And whoever you are, whatever you do, the first thing you need to think in business is how can I make my fellow person better? And that's what we did. Fantastic. So do you work with the schools before and after the event? Yes, we do. And when we are planning a school, we'll work with the school to work with them and figure out the best way to showcase their school. One of the schools we're working with, they want to spread the Esports Circus throughout their whole campus, but, you know, games in each of their big buildings so that we can, the kids can come in and see the school of engineering, the school of arts and stuff like that. So we work with them to help develop and showcase the school in the best light we can. When we're, and then when we leave, we work with the schools to help make sure that when we leave, we bring a more positive and better environment than just, you know, we leave more than just popcorn and wagon tracks. It's an old circus term. But yeah, so we do that. And then we work with them to help build their teams in our Esports Builder Program. Sir, okay, so we have more pictures. I want, I'd like to show them so that you can tell us about these particular events. This was, again, at the man event. This is some of the people who won prizes. One of the sponsors was HyperX, who gave us a bunch of headsets and some other and some keyboards and stuff like that. We gave those out as prizes. We also gave a prize called Esports EDU, which was a friend of mine who published a book called Esports EDU that you can get on Amazon. That's a great book. We gave copies that away and we gave tons of prizes. And these were some of the winners. These are the winners of the Fortnite competition we did. So this was in the people who were the, the three winners of the Fortnite. So this was one of, this is our virtual, this is one of our virtuality games. So these console people would walk up, the headset would come down from the little holder and had the ceiling. They would grab the handles and they could pick between four different games. There was a game for little kids. There was a space shoot-up game. There was a skiing game. We just ski down a hill. And there was another game that was golf game. We had gone, no, it wasn't golf game. I forget where the fourth game was, but it was four games to choose from. And, you know, then we had competitions, who was the best and we rated and we had a bunch of people sign up for play and we gave prizes there as well. Sir, do you ever have people dressed up when they attend their circus? I could see. Oh, cosplay, cosplay is a huge part of what we're doing. And it's always been a huge part of every eSports event. You have to have a cosplay. In fact, one of the things that we're gonna be doing is, and this is the first time we're announcing it actually on your show, is that we're gonna be doing a TV show based on Project Runaway. You know, it's a very popular, but we're gonna be doing Cost Play Runaway, which is gonna be a show that we're gonna have a huge cash prize and we're gonna develop the best cosplay art designers in the United States. So we're gonna do a huge, big national event. It's gonna go, that we're gonna have big auditions for and people are gonna join it. His cosplay is all of that. I dressed up all the time. No surprise, I dressed up all the time. And I was at the DreamHack event. I dressed up, I had this really cool outfit I made from Diablo II, which is one of my early favorite games that I played a lot. And so I dressed up as a big demon from that game. But yeah, Cost Play is a very big part of what we're all about. And like they say in Project Runway, make it work, right? That's it, that's it, make it work. Yeah, I love that show. And I could see that being a really exciting thing. So what do you think the future of eSports is? Well, the future is, you know, I mean, eSports, no matter, even though we're just starting out really, we're just starting out of eSports. You know, it's gonna, this whole industry is gonna pivot many times. I think that some of the, you know, new advancements with the new glasses that Google and Apple glasses are coming out are gonna be a very big part of what eSports and I think more virtual reality and augmented reality are gonna be a big part of what the future of eSports are. Because, you know, VR today, big, heavy glasses, no one likes them. You know, even the people, even Oculus doesn't like the glasses. So eventually we'll change out of those glasses into something else like the Google glasses and Apple glasses that they're developing now. And so that I think is the next big thing. Robotics and how robotics has become more important to eSports I think is already, already we see huge advancements in drone racing and car racing, controlled car racing and stuff like that. But I think robotics is also gonna be a big change to how it is. You know, and so there's gonna be a lot of that coming in. And I think the broadcasting is gonna get better. People are gonna are going, you know, there's a lot of people out there. There's 39 million Twitch channels. There's 912 YouTube channels devoted to gaming. Not necessarily just eSports, but gaming entirely. I think that there's a lot of people involved in it. I think that that whole industry, because most of the people are producing content for all these is producing low quality content that is okay for YouTube and Twitch, but not okay for broadcasting. So I think that some of the people who are doing that are going to come around and develop really high quality broadcast shows that can be seen on the networks and stuff like that. So I think those are the areas that I see advancement at. Sure. And I, you know, later in the year of 2020, I did interview some Hollywood agents who talked about their upcoming show, but we're almost out of time. So Jeff, I'm gonna ask you to tell us how people can find out more about eSports Circus and to contact you. Yeah, I mean, we're everywhere online. If you go to esportscircus.com, you can go LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook. You can go to eSports Circus and we're, you know, Facebook.esportscircus. We have a YouTube channel, of course. And so we have all that. You can put our best thing is the website. We have a website. If you wanna look at the things we do for schools, we have a tab, what we do for schools. And you click on that and there's a first thing is a link to our Team Builder website, which is a separate website that goes over all the things, how we work with schools. And so you can see, so our website is the best. And then you can always email me at Jeff at esportscircus.com. That's Jeff at esportscircus.com. Or you can call us 800-287-509 by this 800-287-5095. My personal extension is 105. So thank you. Fantastic, Jeff. Well, thank you for being my guest today. I learned what? Well, I'm happy to be on your show. It's exciting. I was so excited when you invited me and I'm really excited to be here. Fantastic. All right. So thank you to the viewer who sent in the question and thank you for joining us today. Next week my guest will be Skye Kaveloa. Talk about college esports in North America. See you then.