 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, the show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today my guest is Tom Leonard. Our topic is play games, create jobs, change lives, making a difference, one podcast at a time. Welcome Tom. Thanks Catherine for having me on. So I understand you have a podcast too. Tell us about your podcast. Yes, everyone should have at least one podcast. I've got a podcast that I started a few months ago called Gamers Change Lives. And what it is, it's a show about how to create an eSports business really from anywhere in the world. And one of the things that I found was I want to tell stories from them. I want to tell the stories of people who are creating eSports opportunities all around the world, not some person in California telling you how to do it, but hearing how it's done in Ghana, how it's done in India, how it's done in the Philippines, in Vietnam, and so on from people there. And the focus of the podcast is how eSports can create jobs. Jobs are, especially youth unemployment is a big deal in the world today. And eSports is not always considered an avenue to create jobs. So I know that we were going to have a guest from Ghana today. And unfortunately, he just couldn't join on time. And now you're looking at Africa and Asia and Europe. And what is the breadth of your podcast in terms of who you're talking with? What we want to do is we want to tell stories from people in emerging markets. So we're talking to people in Asia, in Southeast Asia, India, a lot of people in Africa, and also in South America as well. So all around the world, not so many people from the United States or from Europe or from Central Asia, but just more of people from emerging markets. That's where the biggest opportunity is to create jobs, the biggest need for creating jobs. Years ago, I was a Peace Corps volunteer. So it gets in your blood. It's like, okay, how can we create jobs? And the way this really started out was there was a buddy in Ghana, Quacy Hafer, and he's a legend in eSports in Ghana. And one of the things he was telling me one day, he was creating these opportunities, because I was showing on social media, it's like, Quacy, what you up to here? And he said, I'm trying to create these jobs for these women so that they don't have to be on the streets. And I was thinking, wow, that's that. I mean, he's just that kind of a guy. But it's just like there's an opportunity because eSports is already creating jobs all around the world. And people don't always put the two and two together that it can create jobs really for people at all different levels. And so what kind of jobs are we talking about here? That's the great thing because so many times people think of jobs in eSports as being the player. I want to be a pro player. I want to be a YouTuber. I want to be a Twitch player and so on. But what happens is, and we know that, but not everyone does that. That's just the little tip of the spear. I always tell people it's like, it's like the entertainment business here in LA. It's like people think of the entertainment business as being an actor. But it's not. It's like all the jobs that the industry creates. So when it comes to eSports, there's all the jobs. If it's a team, there's all the jobs created in supporting the team, the marketing, human resources, things like that, tournaments. It's like, think of all the marketing for doing a tournament. I was talking to Eni Ola Edan who created this group called Gamer in Lagos, Nigeria. And they put together a Gamer X10 nation tour. And she was telling me all of the jobs that she was just mentioning. And then the one that stood out was the drone operator. They even hired a drone operator. I was like, wow, that's really great. I had a really good job. But there's such a wide breadth of jobs. And that's one of the things we want to talk about in the podcast. So people aren't just thinking, you know, just the player. It's like, no, no, no. There's so many other opportunities. Sure. So how do you find guests? I mean, you're talking about places all over the world. And I would think it would be difficult to connect to them. One of the things that has been a really pleasant surprise is people have resonated with the idea of the podcast. So even though we've been new, our producer, Reginald Asawa, they're from Ghana, he's just been so good at finding good guests around the world. And a couple of things that I learned from him was just ask. I mean, it's like, if you're looking for guests for your podcast, just get out there and ask people if they would like to be a guest. Because if you don't ask, you don't get. And also to be able to have a good message, to be able to tell. And with Gamer's Change Slides podcast, it's a pretty good, easy concept for people to get behind. And also, there's not, you know, I haven't found very many other people out there that are doing the same thing. So or really anyone. So we're fairly unique that way. Sure. And, you know, I can totally relate to the just ask because there was a few guests that I've had that I was kind of surprised that I did ask. I remember I was on a panel speaking at an eSports conference. And I think it was a casino eSports conference. And it was in a, because it was during COVID times, it was in a like a virtual reality or 3D kind of environment. And so Fatality, he's on my panel. And he starts telling us about how there's a place you can go fishing in that virtual reality environment. And so I said, how do you find that? He goes, I'll show you. So his avatar led my avatar to the fishing hole. And so he was showing me how to fish. And we were fishing. And I go, would you like to be a guest on my show? And he said, sure. And that's how he ended up as a guest on my show. No, that's great. No, just take the initiative. And don't be afraid to ask people. That's great. And so what's been the response from your audience? We have had, like I said, you've been really pleasantly surprised on the response. I have been doing a little bit of Facebook marketing. And in the last two months, I've had literally, it's been stunning because I've had over 2 million impressions on Facebook. I mean, we're talking Warner Brothers level of reach there. So, you know, particularly people in Africa, in emerging markets that have been interested in learning more about the podcast. So, you know, over time, obviously, you know, we're going to be getting better and getting better at getting the word out. One of the things I've learned on the marketing side, make sure you do videos. That's why you're really smart, Catherine. You're doing videos every week, because that's something that people can just pay more attention to a video and a little text somewhere, even an image. So, videos came. Now, are your podcasts, is it just to listen to or do you have video? No, we're starting out for season one. It's audio only for a couple of reasons. It's just like, just to make it easy to start out. It's like, let's learn the simple thing. But at the same time, the service, the platform that we use, does produce video that we're able to use for marketing purposes, so we can get little clips and put them out on social media to get some attention. Sure. You know, I remember when I had Sharuk Tanveer, he goes by Jack, he's in India. And I had him as an early guest and I had him on a second time. He was a favorite guest of mine. And he had to get up at like in the middle of the night to do it. It was at around 3 a.m. his time or something like that. Do you have challenges with time zones when you're dealing with Africa and India and other countries? One of the things that I've been, another pleasant surprise is that people are really willing to do things at some odd hours themselves. So we're able to work that out. As long as it's not too early in the morning, I can usually cope with that here. But yeah, I mean, we're talking to someone in Africa or we're talking to someone in India. We're talking to someone in Vietnam. It's just the time and really does come into play. But you do what you ought to do. So what are you learning about esports in other countries? Like where is that in relation to the United States? Because, I mean, if you look at South Korea, they're ahead of us. But, you know, and they're, you know, I don't think we can say that United States is like superior in esports. I mean, I think we're doing well. But, you know, how does it all compare? I have been amazed at how well the, how developed the esports world is in some of the most unlikely places. I mean, we're looking at doing, I mean, one of the things starting out was doing Mortal Kombat tournaments in Sub-Saharan Africa. These people, they were able to put on a tremendous program, a tremendous tournament that would have been just as well done there as it would be done here in Burbank. So that's been really impressive. The things that I find that are challenges, especially in Africa, are connectivity problems and in particular, ping rates. Because if you're in Zambia and you're trying to play Mortal Kombat and you're playing against someone in the UK, their ping rate is really, really low and yours is really, really high. So to compete on a, on a level playing field is really, really difficult. And talk to anyone in esports in Africa and they'll talk about servers. The servers are, some servers are in South Africa, but not nearly enough. So we have an episode coming up soon on someone from, it's going to be able to talk about servers in South Africa because that, that is a huge issue on the professional level. Now, if you're just playing casually, that's different. But at the professional level, it's, we're talking to Queen Arrow, who's from Kenya and she's a fighting game professional. And for her, it's like, it's completely different. She traveled to South Africa. It was so much easier for her to play in South Africa than in Kenya because the ping rate there, the local ping rate was a lot better. But what you see is that these people will, people all over the world, they're, they're just really resource on what it is, what it takes to make it happen. And maybe that's the, the most interesting thing. And those, those are the kinds of stories that I like hearing the most. Sure. And, you know, I can kind of relate to that because Hawaii has the ping rate that's a challenge. Yeah. You know, Overwatch actually came here because the problem was between Japan and the U.S. mainland, there was a ping rate issue. So they felt like, okay, if we bring our teams to Hawaii and we put in, you know, use a cable between Tokyo and Honolulu, that we can reduce that ping rate and have a fair tournament. So they did an Overwatch series at University of Hawaii and that worked pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. Things you just wouldn't, just don't come to mind if, if, if you're in a place like here in California. Right. Because you kind of have a nice situation there. You know, I would think that, that you don't have that problem. But you know, if people in the U.S. mainland play other countries, you're always going to have that problem. Yes. Yes. It's something that's always going to be there no matter what. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I think it's kind of an equity situation. But you know, when I think about Hawaii, if, if Hawaii people play each other, they don't have that problem. And I'm sure that they can have local tournaments and not have those problems. But in Africa, like, so what are the, what have you learned are the most kind of saturated E-sports places? Is it Ghana, South Africa? Is Nigeria in the mix? Or, you know? Nigeria is huge. Kenya is huge. And of course, North Africa is also huge. You know, Egypt, Anubis, the team there. And Tunisia has, has quite a few people. Ghana is, yeah. That has, has quite a E-sports industry there. South Africa is, is, is big as well. So, yeah, kind of where you'd expect. Right. And how do you know, have you learned anything about how they're adopting, adapting to this, you know, kind of the where we were shut down because of COVID and then, you know, kind of emerging out of it. Do you, have you learned anything about how that's influenced E-sports around the world? Yes. I mean, it made a huge impact while it was a, the biggest problem. And it kept people from doing a lot of different things. A lot of the people in Africa, for example, were not able to travel outside of Africa to go to events I'd say in Singapore. I know for one, one instance. So travel outside of the region was really, really tough at the time. The word that I'm getting now is things are pretty much back to normal, back to what it was before they're just going like everywhere else in the world. Sure. And so what's the most surprising thing that you've learned in this adventure? Probably the biggest surprise is the, the receptiveness of the, the idea that E-sports can create jobs and that these jobs aren't just players playing, but there's, there's a whole, you know, the drone, drone operators, there's, there's a whole list of other jobs out there. So I, I guess one of the surprising things to me, I've never really had to explain people more than E-sports can create jobs. Everyone, everyone that I talk to, they're nodding their head. It's like, you know, I don't have to try to convince anyone of that. The other thing that I've been surprised at or noticed as a consistent message between most of the guests, especially the people who have created their own successful E-sports organizations, is that they saw a need and they created their own job. So talking to Sagranes, talking to Sagraner in India is like, but there was no one talking about E-sports. So they created the Times of E-sports. Well, they created the Times of E-sports. Well, no one was, there was no platform to, for players to play. So they created clan. So what I noticed is the recurring theme is that people see a need and they go after it. They don't sit there and wait for someone else. Yeah. I wish someone else would do this. It's like, no, how can we do this is kind of their mantra. Terrific. Okay. So let's look at your motto, play games, create jobs, change lives. How do you think lives are being changed? Anytime that you create even one job, you are going to change someone's life. I mean, it's just like, you know, it'd be nice for us to think that, oh, we're going to be able to create all kinds of jobs. But, you know, maybe we'll be able to do that as we progress. But just to get people to think of, you know, if first to go from the play games, create jobs. It's like, okay, we're establishing that you can do that. And it's just going to be well known that if you are creating these jobs, because we're not talking about necessarily, you know, some big cushy job in an office sort of thing, a lot of these jobs are part-time when I was talking again about GamerX in Nigeria. And she was talking about they created over 250 jobs over the course of that week. And it's like, wow, that's pretty amazing. If you have 250 jobs, what if there's a tournament every week or every month, these jobs start to add up. And it makes a huge difference to a lot of people who may not, you know, think of the training that you need to be in eSports. You don't go and get a degree in eSports. You've had some really good guess talking about eSports at the University of Hawaii that have been really interesting. But in most parts of the world, there's not necessarily training for eSports specifically. So people aren't coming to it, you know, with this big background in eSports management sort of thing. So people are coming to it from all different levels. And so there's room for all kinds of people to be able to have a job in eSports. You know, Danny Martin, he has that company Exposure and they do a lot of training that allow people to get jobs in eSports. Is there any equivalent to your knowledge in other countries? Have you heard of all at all? Very little that I've come across. And that was one of the reasons that I was really happy to talk to John Cash here recently who created an eSports program at Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina. And what was interesting talking to him was in kind of getting his blueprint, how do you create these kinds of programs in an existing university? How do you get people to buy it? How do you get the school to buy into it? How do you get it funded? Things like that to maybe give some people in some other places some ideas on how they might be able to do that. Because the other thing that we find is governments, government organizations are a lot more invested, a lot more, you know, part of the eSports world than they are in the United States. I mean here, you never would think of the government as being the supporter of eSports. It's like, no, that's just not, you know, that that's just not not the culture of the industry here but talking to Mitch Esquiera from Galaxy Racer, he was talking about one of the Galaxy Racer works with a lot of governmental organizations. They are huge in that. And I was asking him about what's in it for him, what's in it for Galaxy Racer, what's in it for the government. And it was really interesting because he was saying, you know, eSports needs the recognition, you know, the recognition that governments can give to them as a real business. And governments need access to their population that's, you know, younger and they don't always know how to get a hold of them. So he felt that one of the reasons that they worked with so many government organizations was that it was beneficial to both sides. Sure. And I would think in other countries, especially developing countries that the government has plays a little bit bigger role in the citizens lives and that it would be a more likely match to use eSports, you know, in a like a government program as opposed to like the United States. Yes, yes, yeah, completely different. So that's something different that you just wouldn't think of automatically coming from here. Sure, sure. So what, okay, so if you were to get a guest from a country that you haven't had yet and what country would you really are you dying to have a guest from? Brazil. Really? Brazil. It's like, oh, you've talked to Ulysses and he was on your, he was on your show and he's going to be on our show here coming up soon. Hopefully we're putting that together. So he's going to be from Chile, you know, from, but yeah, talking to people in Mexico or Central America or South America is kind of a gap in, I mean, we don't have, you know, we haven't had a lot of shows, but we want to talk to people more there as well, because we talked to people in India, Southeast Asia. And, you know, we were talking to, you know, with people at Ninjas and Pajamas. Ninjas and Pajamas does a lot of work. Their teams are based out of Brazil, a couple of them. And it's like, it'd be really interesting to see why Brazil and how are they going, you know, how does that work into their scheme of things. When you're talking about an international podcast, you do have one barrier that's probably a big barrier and that is language. How do you deal with a situation where someone doesn't speak English? Are you using an interpreter? No, a good question there, because what we're doing is we're ignoring that problem in season one, and we are only in English. And, but one of the things that's really big is, especially in Africa is, West Africa is French speaking. So it's like that's the big thing, but talking to Mitch at Galaxy Racer, I asked him about how do they deal with languages, because Philippines, a thousand languages, Southeast Asia, everyone speaking, he said, he said people, he gave the example of K-pop. He said, people are, you know, are fans of K-pop music, and they can't understand a word. He said, it's not because they speak Korean. And so he said, subtitles. Subtitles are the most important thing in Galaxy Racer. He said, because he felt that the language of gaming was, you know, people would watch other people just to learn what they're doing. He said, but subtitles are the way to give the message across. We're not there yet. Sure. Well, you know, you start in English, and maybe you can, you know, branch out a bit. But yeah, that is a challenge. And it even can be a challenge if you have an English speaker that has a heavy accent, and you have a little bit difficulty understanding them. So what's the most recurring theme that you've heard from? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. When I was mentioning about people, people taking initiative. It's like, that's, to me, that's the fun part is to hear someone talk about how they were doing, I got something just today from someone in Ghana about what they want to do. It's like people taking initiative. It's not someone giving them permission or someone telling them what to do. It's they're just like, hey, we're going to go, we're going to go make this work because, you know, we think it can. And in the meantime, we're going to be playing games and having fun doing it. So yeah, just the initiative that people from all different parts of the world been really amazing. And that's a really good lesson for anyone watching because I think we're, there's this fear of doing something new, you know, we kind of, and I think it is based on fear. But if you're in a culture where you know you can't have that thing unless you figure it out and do it yourself, that, you know, you just do it, you know, without, you know, and you create things from the, from, from nothing, you know, and I think Americans sometimes are a little bit more used to just, oh, someone else will do it and, you know, or I can't do that because I didn't go to school for that. But, you know, you're talking about populations that no one went to school for that. And they may not have had any college experience and, you know, is that right? Yes. Yes. That's exactly true. And that's one of the interesting things just talking to people around the world is to get their perspective on it and how it's different from our perspective here. Sure. So what is the future of gamers change lives? Don't know yet. Don't know yet. We kind of did season one to see, you know, to see if we could do this and to see the response for it. I just think one of the things I want to do, I certainly talk to people who are in the international development space. I've got a lot of contacts at Stanford Seed, for example, from the old Stanford days. I just think there's a lot of opportunity to get eSports further well known in the international development world because that's where there's a lot of money and a lot of resources. And if you're in international development, you're always looking for new projects, especially projects that can help create jobs for young people. And it's a proven industry that can do that. So that's one of the areas that we want to go into. The other thing I want to talk about soon in more detail is the money. Follow the money. It's like, how do you get sponsorships? What do you do with that money? And how do you make it work? Sure. And are you looking for sponsors for your show? Nope, we are not. We're lucky. We don't have to worry about that here yet. Maybe down the road. Sure. Absolutely. Well, I think it's exciting. And as a video podcast host, it's exciting to see you. You were a guest, kind of an early guest actually on this show that's been going on for two years. And now, and then you've kind of moved from, you've pivoted in your work here. And it's exciting to see this. I know. I appreciate your support. Whenever I communicate with you online, it's always, you're very supportive of what we're doing. All right. So I'll give you the last word to let people know how they can reach you and how they can become a guest on your show. Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. We're always looking for guests. That's true. You can find us at our website is Gamers Change Lives Podcast. There it is. Gamers Change Lives Podcast out there. You can subscribe to us on every place that there's a podcast, Apple, Spotify, you name it. We are out there. It's Gamers Change Lives. Listen to it and send us your feedback. We're always looking for what people are thinking about what it is that we're doing. Fantastic, Tom. Well, thank you so much for being my guest today. Hey, thanks for having me. All right. And thank you to our viewers for joining us today. And we are always looking for guests for the wide world of eSports. So let me know. You can email me at Catherine at norlaw.com. And the wide world of eSports is moving to an every other week schedule. So I hope you look for us in two weeks. My guest will be Shane Vanderkwe of Green Mouse Academy. See you then.