 So my talk is about me podcasting while black for the past year and some change. I did kind of name it in something that was a little bit hyperbolic and saved my sanity. It kind of did. It kind of set me up to be able to talk about things like this and other people to kind of set them up to be able to talk about what they do and how they fit the space in gaming. I run a gaming podcast. We'll talk about that in a bit. That's me. That's my face. It's really big on the screen. No doubt. There are some sliders on the bottom. Curling is dope. It's 100% curling. If you like curling, you should get up with me and say what's up because we should talk about curling. Also, I can halfway swim. That means I can almost not die if I get into water. That's kind of cool. So I'm trying to figure that out in that space. This is me now. This is like a year ago at my job at a retreat. I'm 36. This is me introducing myself in a slide. That was me when I was about seven or eight, nine. I look salty as shit in that picture. The funny thing about that picture was it was super hot and I had a big face watch before everybody else had a big face watch. So I was doing it big way back in the day. Even I had a fro and it was super hot. I don't know why I was mad anyway. The beauty of that picture is to a certain extent I shouldn't be here. The next slide you'll see in a second is actually let me do it. That's my grandma and that's a naked cup. The thing that makes this kind of important is that woman right there saved my life. I am a child of two drug addicted parents. My mother and father were both on drugs. My grandma saved my life by taking me in and she could have put me up for adoption. She could have saved me and put me somewhere else but she took me in. She said you're my child. I will take you and raise me even though I was a salty bastard in that other picture. A couple of things that she gave me. This cup has some significance you may not be able to see because it's a little bit dark but it says black is beautiful on that cup. A couple of things she kind of gave me. She gave me some self-awareness about my blackness. She told me that I was beautiful all the time. She told me she loved me. She told me that black people although we did not have a great space in the world in the planet that we were both to be talked about and exalted in some ways and kind of given the space that was equal to other people because we are all human beings in the end. The other thing she gave me was not the train. That was the other slide. This slide is coming after that because I was raising a bronc so I had to put a New York picture in there because that's what's up. During the 70s and 80s it raised me during a very, very, very hard time. The city was not fun. It was not great. But they did have Mickey Mouse graffiti which was pretty bad ass. Besides giving me that kind of self-awareness, she also gave me video games. She was the person who introduced me to gaming. She was the person who bought me my first console. She was the person who was the first person to say you will be able to do this and be smart and play games and also besides the fact that she bought me all these things and she didn't buy me all these. She bought me because we were balling on the train. Besides the fact that she bought me consoles and video games, she did it for multiple reasons. One, it was a gateway into computers and tech. Two, it was to keep me safe from being outside in the 70s and 80s in the Bronx which was not that fun. I'm sure you have seen the Warriors movie multiple times. Thank you, Warriors. So again, it was one of those things where she saved me from lots of things that would have kind of ruined most people being in those places. I have lots of friends who didn't make it. I have lots of people in my life who didn't make it out of the Bronx during that era. Drugs were not the move but it was everywhere and always around at all times. So fast forward a little bit to me being an adult. This was me about a year and a half ago, not actually me. That is a proxy me. That is an, I don't even know, some black guy. But this was me at my old job. So I used to work at a municipal union doing IT stuff for them and it was not amazing because they didn't want to give us things like Chrome or Wi-Fi or things that make tech actually work when you are not in the Stone Age, like things like that. So I had to try to figure out another way to kind of fulfill the things that I wasn't getting out of my job. So I started a gaming website. So I started a site called thesmallpointblog.com. We won some awards back in 2013 or something like that. And it was great. I got to write. I'm not a writer by trade but I got to do that for a little bit. I got to kind of build a community around that. And I wanted to give writers of color and marginalized folks a space that they could write and a place that they could talk about the things that they do and about the games they love and the games they want to make. That happened for a bit but as we see most times people don't read what you write on the internet unless it's in bullet points. And that sucks. That's not fun. So we decided actually about two weeks ago to shut down the smallpointblog. So rest in peace smallpointblog. But to coincide with that we decided that we would do a podcast. My friend and partner out in Chicago who we have not met, we've been doing a podcast for a year and a half. We have never met. We decided to do Sponemy podcast. So we said what is that going to be? That's Cicero. He likes Highline and he's really, really into bourbon. So we decided to make a podcast. A podcast we said what are you going to do because everybody in there mama has a podcast at this point. And we said well that old picture of me being salty as shit. I want to give that kid the ability to know that he'll have an awareness that other people who look like him are able to make games. There gotta be people in the space that are doing games, who are making games, who are talking about games, who are the folks who are the developer, the person who is programming, the person who is the artist. You've got to know that those folks are out there in the world. And how can we give them a platform? I remember there being a discussion and some statistics that came out probably around 2012 or so that talked about the lack of diversity in the space. We all know there's a lack of diversity in tech. And there's a really big lack of diversity in the game space. We know that this is true. We've seen it. We've heard it. We've heard all the conversations. There's a couple of stats that stuck out to me that needs a little bit old. But this is from 2002, the Kaiser Family Foundation study. But kids from age 8 to 18, African Americans and Hispanic youth, played more games than white youth. And then low and middle income communities spend even more time doing so. That plus, if you were to take all the characters that we had in games, and you kind of put them in a bag and say, well, what do they look like? About half of those human characters were white, 56%. A fifth of those were African Americans, 22. And if you grouped up everyone else, they would make up less than 10%. These are probably a little bit old. If you probably look at them now, the stats may be a little bit different, but they're similar. Again, what do you do about that? You try to figure out what the space looks like, and you try to figure out how you can make that better. This is a blank slide because I messed that up. There are a couple of reasons, again, why our podcast exists. Here is a statement that is one that every time I see it, it makes me want to kick things. It is that, don't put politics in our games. And the reason why I added that little animation to it, because you need magical fucking thinking to make that actually true, that's a lie. That is stupid. That's dumb. Don't say that. And to those people, I have a nice little gift, because that's silly. It makes no sense where, politics not in what, where, anywho. So that's one of the reasons why we have our show. We want people to kind of understand that, but there's other parts to it. I'm a black male. The year has not been great, 2014, 2015 has not been dope. If you were to ask most black people how their year has been, it's kind of looked like that. Literally, I've been scared for my life on multiple occasions, and not just because I am doing anything that I'm not supposed to be doing. It's just being me, right? We had a bunch of things that have happened. We've had so many people who have lost their lives to police brutality. That has been a thing that has been evident and discussed and talked about on numerous occasions. We've also had those folks who, if you're not aware of Gamergate, there's a lot of discussion that has happened in that space for a long time. They are terrible people. Don't like them. They're not good people. So what we decided to do was we decided that we would have our own show kind of do something in a space that nobody else has done. Our show was already niche. No one was doing what we're doing, but we decided that we could run a gaming event. We wanted to do some social good with gaming, so we made small for good. Small for good was a platform for using gaming for social good. We ran our first event in January, which was a Black Lives Matters tournament, not tournament. It was a streaming weekend, where we were going to take some of that money and share that between two funds. No one was going to be for Eric Garner, Eric Garner's daughter, who tried to lose his life on a sidewalk because he was supposedly selling cigarettes. And also to the New York law, God, I forgot, a lawyer's league out in New York that basically bailed out people when they got put into jail. So if you're protesting, you got put into jail, they would bail you out. So what you do is you gather up all your friends. These are some of my friends. We got them all together and said, everybody, come on. We're going to hang out for a weekend. We're going to stream. We're going to see if we can raise $5,000 for these folks and see what we can do. And one of the most amazing things that came out of that was this. Hopefully it'll run. This is Sharif Jackson, who I love, who did the best dance on the planet after getting a score in Blades of Steel. That made me so excited. I wish you could have heard the other. It would have been dope. So what happened was we did all that for a weekend. We got everybody together and we raised that. Cool. We split that in half, sent those to the two funds, and everybody was happy. But really quick, I want to go to what that means in the grand scheme. So what it means to kind of find your voice in the space, doing a podcast, doing one that's super niche, and it really is not one that people want to hear if you are not in that group, right? We're talking about lots of things that are things that most folks who aren't people of color don't necessarily want to have ingest. They don't want to ingest that kind of information. The beauty of it is we've had folks on our show who are both people of color and not, and we've been able to have discussions with them about things that they might not even necessarily want to talk about themselves. But since we're all in this together, we all have similar issues. These are some of the folks we've had. I'm so happy to say that we have a very diverse bunch of folks that we have had on our show. Some folks I have looked up to for decades. Adam Sessler, that guy. I love him. Great dude. Evan Narciss. Turmusa. Lee Alexander. Some folks up there. The beauty of that, and the reason why I show this is not to brag, it's not one of those kinds of things, but it's to talk about really quickly some of the conversations that we've had with these folks that they might have not have had before. Lee Alexander was on the upper right. We had a conversation with her. She runs Offworld. If you're not familiar, you should definitely check it out. We had a conversation with her about being biracial. She's never had that conversation ever before. Not in a public space, not that we were aware of. This guy right here, Tramel Isaac, he is a person who, if you ever played Fallout, he is the person who has made the Fallout boy. He designed that character. Most people don't know that. You should know that. People of color, little kids of color, should know that. Because then they'll understand that they can do that. And there are also some other conversations in here that were great. Adam says that we had an amazing conversation about ex-clan music, which is an old 90s rap group that no one would have thought he would know. So, in essence, what I want everyone here to do is, you fill in that blank. If you want to do that in whatever space you can, whether it be podcasting, whether it be online in your blog, whether it be whether you program, whether you game, whether you make games. You should be able to fill in that blank with whatever your agenda is. It's not bad to have an agenda. You should have an agenda. The space needs you to have an agenda. You should be able to say that agenda and say it in those ways. So that when people understand and ask you, you can tell them exactly why. You do what you do, why you love what you love. And be able to talk about those in real ways. We do that on our show. We hopefully will continue to do that. It's important. And thank you guys so much. So get me out and all that stuff again.