The Billion Dollar Industry of Esports

not do previously. That entire process has led me to think increasingly about what kinds of human engagement can happen in virtual space. One direction this might take us, and I hope to discuss this in a future episode, is the question of virtual reality, augmented reality, and the new modes and platforms of engagement that will take place in our lives. Another is to think about activities that increasingly take place not only in the real world but also

almost exclusively online. Gaming is one such activity. We hear a lot about the gamification of trading, a topic that we've done an episode on, and about the gamification of a wider range of human interactive activities, including coding. But

what about the gamification of gaming itself. What I'm referring to is the esports industry, in which it turns out millions and millions of people watch others playing games, either at an extraordinarily high competitive level for rewards and for money, or alternatively in an entertainment mode, as gamers who are particularly clever or sophisticated or knowledge of stream their own

games for the edification and entertainment of their fans. This is an emergent industry whose participants tend to be young, and so perhaps it's not surprising that leading figures in this industry are young themselves. Case in point, our guests today Nicole La Pointe Jamison, who's the CEO of a North American esports organization called Evil Geniuses or EG, which is one of the oldest and most recognizable brands in professional gaming, or so I'm told, going back all the

way to nineteen ninety nine. Nicole, for her part, barely goes back to nineteen ninety nine herself. She was born in nineteen ninety four, which makes her an unusual person to be running a large and growing organization as a CEO. To top it all off, she's a woman at an African American in an industry that tends to be stereotyped as one for men, primarily for white and perhaps for Asian men. As you're about to hear, Nicole is an extraordinary person, and she sat down with me to explain

her industry and what she does in it. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me. This is one of those episodes on Deep Background where instead of talking about some well fummed area where I and the listeners all think we're big experts, were instead exploring a whole field of human endeavor that is not actually all that new, but is new to many of us as observers, and

that's esports as an industry and as a concept. So I wonder if you would start by just assuming that we don't understand exactly what esports are, we don't understand why it is that other people would want to watch people playing video games, and begin by just explaining to us what this industry is and why we should start caring about it. Of course, and first of all, Noah, thank you for having me. Always glad to bring others

on board to the surprisingly vast and deep world of esports. So, if you're coming from zero esports is competitive gaming where we bridge industries that resemble a lot of traditional sports

but also resemble modern day entertainment. And so the best way to think about my universe I run an esports organization called Evil Geniuses, is think of us like the University of Michigan, like UM's athletics department, where they have basketball and football and soccer that have distinct players on distinct schedules, and a very robust back office that bridges athletics to sponsorships, to brand, to health and wellness, all

to support the different players in their seasons. But instead of University of Michigan, I am Evil Geniuses, and I have Counterstrike and DODA and League of Legends, distinct player athletes with distinct schedules, and all of the same back office needs to support and make sure we are competitively viable, financially viable, and culturally viable. And it is often surprising people to hear the level of play for these athletes.

Isn't someone that could just mosey on and say, oh, you know, I'm pretty good at Mario Kart, Let me show up one day and be a esports pro. These are athletes that have typically been playing at the best level that exists in the world from a long time, at a young age, and when they come into an

esports organization, it looks like traditional sports. You have training time, you have physical fitness health wellness time, you have scrimming and review, and the infrastructure around these athletes and players is robust and deep, and we heavily invest in these games.

And so a lot of this mirrors traditional sports. Where I think the analogy falls off, and I don't have a really good way to paint that picture yet, is we also have what I mentioned earlier, this entertainment side, where unlike traditional sports where fans tend to be geo affiliated or inherited, we are digital and global. Our players come from all over the world. We're not locked into a region. I'm not even though we're Seattle based, I am not the Seattle something. The Seattle eg our fans

are truly global. So many questions immediately come into my mind. Let's start with what maybe is a silly question, which is there's a movement from we all play sports outdoors to we watch sports on television. And you know, a whole generation, an older generation even than mine, was skeptical of that saying why don't you go out and play the sport? Why do you want to sit at home

and watch the sport? And now that objection seems hopelessly dated because of course as possible to do both, and televised sports became a vast multi billion, maybe even trillion dollar industry over the course of fifty years. Are there similar objections? There must be similar objections to esports saying that somehow, why are you watching people do something that they're in fact doing technologically? And is the answer just

sort of grow up? You know, Like that's the same objection that people made to watching basketball on television and didn't make any sense really, and it makes even less sense in this context. I actually think the analogy transfers really well. Like the beauty of esports, both the athletes and the fan is that we're young, digital and very diverse, but the altitude of play and competence at the pro level, because then these are oftentimes six figure to seven figure

based salaries of athletes. These aren't the run of a mill picked up off a street corner players. They are the top thirty in the world. So similarly to why you want to watch NBA, the depth of prestige and ability to perform in some of these games is unparalleled, and so that's exciting to watch. The esports athletes also play for the same reasons. They just do it so well. The answer is, they just do it so well, and the specific skills that they have are some combination of

hand eye coordination, conceptual ability, strategic ability. It's a full range of skills. Presumably yes, probabilistic thinking, quick communication, similar to an options trader or a sports athlete. Right, let's talk for a second about this non locality that you mentioned. So one of the fascinating things about sports, both at the university level but also at the professional level, is that over time it came to be one of the leading factors in a lot of countries in unifying people

within a geographic area. Right. Originally, the reason you had local teams is that people had strong local identities, and people who were starting teams wanted to make money, and they said, well, if we identified the team with a place or with a university, then there will be attachment to it. But then things flipped and as our identities as members of a neighborhood or a region weakened, the

sports teams became the glue that held us together. In that sense, what your industry is is about cosmopolitanism in the deepest sense, right. It's about a world where we no longer think, oh, I'm from New England, so I'm a member of Red Sox Nation by default, or you know, I have to be a Patriots fan and there's nothing I can do about that because I was born that way. It's like my religion in your world. I can pick and choose my affiliations no matter where they are in

the world. So how do people choose whom they're going to root for and root against? I love this question because it's surprisingly contentious in the space, especially when talking to people that come from traditional sports into the esports area. Is the lack of geo affiliation is puzzling, but I find it exciting for us because we have a bigger pie to play from. And that's again where the entertainment sprinkle comes in. More like WWE than even you know,

the Lakers or the Yankees. The brand identity of the organization matters, and how an organization presents itself beyond just what games they compete in, because not every sport team or organization plays the same games, So there's some fan stratification by what game are they in. If you're a Rocket League fan, you tend to not be a fan of League of Legends per se. And then it's how does the org represent themselves and some of that, just

like in traditional sports, is a win loss ratio. People like to follow the winners or they like to follow the underdogs, So there's that bimodal distribution. But then how do we and how do organizations represent themselves in the culture and engage with fans in unique ways. That's the big why for creating a compelling esports organization with a distinct set of fandom. One of the things that stunned me and preparing for our conversation was just the size

of the industry. If someone had asked me to guess, I would have been off by orders of magnitude. Yes, it is a huge industry, whatever way you slice the pie. If it's active viewers on different distribution platforms, because you can watch esports in a variety of ways, especially if

you have an Internet connection. If you count gamers as part of the esports industry, people who game, there's more of those than people who don't game, especially under the age of thirty, and if you consider the global reach, especially in the APAC region, the millions of concurrent viewers you could have at a time in a day is unparalleled to many other traditional sports. We can sometimes reach on our peak seasons on social media more viewers in a day than certain hockey teams get in a season.

And though the fandom the eyeballs are large, what I find more as a businessperson compelling and exciting is the dollars are starting to pace and grow to reflect a lot of the magnitude of sponsorship and spend in traditional sports. In the esports space, as people start to understand the true volume of fans that are hard to advertise, too hard to reach organically in other ways, and where they

are and who they watch. Finding brands, finding distribution platforms, and even finding linear distribution platforms like TV try to reach and understand how can they have E sports showcased is unbelievable, and so I believe there's a new Zoo study out that shows E sports industries valued a little less than a billion targeted for next year in terms of spend and revenue in the space. So it's it's

exciting how quickly. It's growing. From even five ten years ago, it was relatively grassroots and not well established or defined. We'll be right back Nicole. Your Wikipedia entry, assuming that it's accurate, has you as twenty seven years old. Is that true? First of all, it is true. So how does a twenty seven year old end up as CEO of a major company in this developing space? A lot of stumbling up. It can't have been that much. There's

that's not enough time. So I have a very nonlinear path into esports, and I would say my age is maybe surprising for the space, but not completely unprecedented, as historically leaders and esports either were in esports veterans for a while, who typically were players and kind of worked their way up, or traditional sports executives who were plopped in. That's changed a bit. Prior to this, I actually worked

for an investment firm in Chicago. I focused on distressed asset turnarounds, which is maybe not a great signal for those that are more financially savvy understanding my entry into esports, but EG came to me actually as an investment opportunity. I was all jazzed for a board seat, but at the time the company resembled a distressed asset or a

true startup. That being said that, what was interesting about EG is, despite me coming in a little less than three years ago, it had been a brand that it is actually one of the oldest esports organizations in the world.

And that's not super interest in general, but I would say it's quite insightful for EG and that to exist from nineteen ninety nine as a then niche gaming club and survive and bring in sponsorships and keep your brand and build and grow and build that long term fandom and survive tech changes, game changes, and still say culturally

relevant was exciting. So from an investment conversion into operating position, it wasn't that different from things I had done before, but definitely the coolest operating company I've been able to get my hands on in my history of ensure tech and SaaS businesses and hardware technology. But I've always loved gaming from a personal passion point, so I understood the space.

I was familiar with the space, and I was excited to help carve out what ought to be in esports as I wasn't seeing voices or perspectives like mine and

our firm represented in this space. So I'm wondering whether the sort of stereotypical picture of the industry, which may not be accurate as heavily male, heavily white, and Asian, as an African American woman, is that a plus for you that you come in and say, hey, I have a different perspective, or is it altogether irrelevant in an enterprise that ultimately is about avatars on screens much more than it's about who you are on the other side

of the console. It was a bit of an interesting challenge more from a personal perspective, as I think you were quite polite with it. Gaming has stereotypes of who is a gamer and what do they act like that are not good? Are not positive? Rife with toxicity and juvenile behavior, to call it nicely, and coming into a space where I was different industry background, different in how I appeared. I was a newcomer into a relatively gate kept community of who's any esports and who's not, had

personal and professional challenges. But I think that actually has becomes war cry and how we have been able to thrive in the past two years and differentiate our brand and I can't underline that it can't undermine really that it was easy, because it wasn't. It's truly carving a path that hadn't been carved. And the anonymity of the Internet can be difficult to navigate as people love to

use that to their advantage to be toxic. But like tends to attract like, and I've been able to I'm lucky that I've had mentorship and leadership, a strong advisory board, and friends in the space that are excited and compelled by why and what we do to make sure the space is safer. So, Nicole, when you talk about toxicity, is toxicity an existential threat to the esports industry or

to the gaming industry? And alternatively, is the perception of toxicity also a kind of existential threats separate from the underlying reality. Oh I love that you've broken it up into two. So for the former, there is a threat of toxicity because just like how people tend to make bad decisions in group think, people tend to make bad decisions under the cover of anonymity. And we actually we

did a study on this. We partnered with you gov, a data and survey company, and looked to understand toxic behaviors and we found that a lot in gaming, whether it's through harassment or rude language, etc. Is learned doesn't appear until later in life. But if you know, if parents don't understand what their kids are doing, if there's no checks and balances either by the game in the system itself, that perpetuates and becomes an acceptable standard, which

really isn't acceptable. You can't act like you might in a Call of duty game in the workplace or in a group project in college. And that needs to be addressed. And there's a lot of moving pieces in terms of who is the address of this problem. Is it parents,

is it developers, is it the content creators? But it's something that creates tangible and what we found in our study is we actually it does create tangible negative results and that people either don't want to, for example, have their mic on in game and talk, which impedes communication for certain games and impedes results, which for me from a team side, impedes potential future talent from developing and

coming into the pipeline. So we care about this because it has long term material impacts into who is represented in the space, especially if toxicity is aimed at certain groups or demographics of people. The perception of toxicity. However, is also damaging because in a lot of spaces this has gotten much better. I would say gaming is probably more inclusive now than it even was five years ago.

Is people are becoming aware and understand that what is culturally accepted as shifting, but the negative, sometimes misunderstanding of what the gaming industry represents hurts us from becoming mainstream, financially viable and supported. If someone is like, oh, gaming's bad, I'm not even going to listen to what these people

have to say. That closes off the potential for both us to develop and grow, but that person from developing and growing, and whether that person is potential parent of a talent that we'd want to recruit, a sponsorship partner, a university that is trying to understand if esports curriculum should be supported, and so breaking down both the perception and the reality is something that we try to take a decent stab at as it relates to our wheelhouse

and our expertise, but is a multifaceted problem that I'm hopeful more and more people as we continue to talk about, address and try to tackle and solve in their own way, because what we have found is again the learned behavior not inherent. I've been very influenced by writing by a scholar at Dartmouth called Will Chang, who's actually in the

music department. Believe it or not, but he wrote a book called sound Play, one of his great books, which is specifically about the use of sound in major online gaming platforms and experiences. And as part of that account, he also talks about the whole range of behaviors, whether they're supportive or abusive, that come an association with difference with gender, with sexuality, with disability status in the online space.

And one of the things that emerges from his work, and I'm oversimplifying it a little bit just for our purposes, is that there's both a lot of the toxicity you're talking about and a lot of tools for capturing and pushing back at that toxicity and reshaping and reforming it.

And I wonder, when you think about that from the standpoint of esports teams and franchises, what are the strategies that are available to you to say, we're going to make sure that our organized and our teams are contributing in the positive way to this stuff rather than to the negative. How do you make those two things work together.

It's been interesting for us as I've been a pretty big stickler, and so I can give good examples of how One of the problems we faced is finding good talent that want to come into esports because I need a head of finance. It's really hard to convince the forty five year old controller at EUY to come on over to an esports organization that I've never heard of

the space. They don't really understand it. And when you google gaming and esports, not wonderful things came up about the stability, the perception inclusion, and so we've been tackling this through a couple of different ways, some of that are less sexy than others, but maybe forever all the listeners rolling their eyes. But the first thing we pushed was really a suite of back office benefits and support that emulate what you would find at a lot of

our local peers in Seattle. Benefits, maternity leave, paternity leave, full suite of healthcare, a lot of the mental wellness and physical wellness support first of its kind in esports. And people were surprised, why are you spending on this esports as sexy? There's so much young people that want to come in. But if I can't attract the full multigenerational audience of experience workers, I've already failed in inclusivity

and that hurts our bottom line results. So there's a lot of programming we put there to ensure we were getting a wide net of talent. On the competitive side, though, the esports space has been plagued despite being digitally native,

plagued by lack of good data use in scouting. It's a lot of who you know who the coach knows, which becomes an incestuous, self fulfilling pool of the same fifty people are becoming pro players, which is crazy because we have such opportunity for talent elsewhere, and so we are claimed to fame, especially in one of our games, League of Legends, was we've been using data and analytics to scout and recruit unknown quantities unknown talent and bring

in and develop up over time talent that we wouldn't have found otherwise because they weren't already in network. That also led that same method led to us being able to start one of the only mixed gender rosters in esports. So between the back office infrastructure, the empirical methods for scouting and then of course showcasing where we have wins.

In the education space, we do a lot of K through twelve programming, do a lot of university partnership around curriculum, anti toxicity, anti bullying, how to create a good personal brand for yourself on social media. If the gaming or entertainment space is important, that investment of time and labor, which is authentic to ourselves but also helps us build long term returns in people that think positively about what we've done in the space, is critically important. So it's interesting.

One weird nuance with esports that is cult is unlike an NBA team, like you know the game you're going to play, the game is there forever, like basketball is probably not going to go anywhere, and you kind of know the rules aren't going to all of a sudden change. We in esports are beholden to a series of developers. Riot does not act like Valve, does not act like Epic, and they can do whatever they kind of want. Some

of that gives us perks. We own more ip We own more rights than traditional sports teams might own of their athletes or their gameplay. On the flip side, eg used to be one of the best teams in the world at a game called Halo. Halo is no longer

a competitive game that exists. So we have to be careful and always thoughtful of what games do we invest in because it's expensive to run an esports organization, and but also be good at the predictive nature of what games will resonate with certain audiences, certain fans, certain sponsor needs.

And that's an art of esports leadership. That was probably my biggest learning curve as there's no playbook for that, and that's the how you pick your winning jockey, and esports leadership is finding good leaders who are really attuned to the developers and changes of fan interest in games. And so why that's relevant to your question is those

factors of what game do we invest in? And why the in game avatars and what they represent is actually a meaningful metric in understanding do people play a game? And I don't want to use names so I don't want to get angry phone calls later. But there's this one game it's very popular right now. It's a first

person shooter game. It's having a hard time proliferating certain region in Asia that is known for being very popular in gaming, and it's a huge region from a financial standpoint, huge region culturally, and there's a lot of theses as of why, but when we use in some of our derived stats around, we call it the matrix, like how we evaluate game titles to be in competitively, when we look at style of game, like first person shooters do well in certain regions and they don't, that impacts our

decision as well as when a game has characters that look like people of that region, conversion tends to be higher, and we noticed this region didn't have any characters that looked like them. It's kind of why Overwatch was so popular.

It's one of the first games that had a variety of characters and personas of different body weights, different skin colors, different nationalities that really brought in new fandoms and audiences that weren't there before, Versus a game that trying to not be offensive, but like Counterstrike where it's just terrorists

versus counter terrorists, army looking white dude versus terrorist. You know, that doesn't attract certain people, and so it's actually really important and something that we think about deeply in terms of what games do we enter into. Because there are some games if you look at how they're structured, how the avatars are represented. Are you a human or are

you a car or are you an animal? That really can dictate what fans are attracted and where viewers come from, as well as what sponsors feel comfortable sponsoring that title. But it's critically important for us to be aware of to understand where we invest our time and money and focus.

It's really fascinating to imagine. It's as though James Naismith, you know, the guy who invented basketball, owned the NBA, the NCAA, Basketball, International Basketball, and every basketball league in the world, and could just say I'm changing basketball now. I mean, so you know, they're obviously there are evolutions

within those games. The game looks really different than it did when Nasmith created or when my great grandfather, who was about five foot four was the semi professional basketball player for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association team, and you know, he would talk to us when we were kids about what basketball was like in those days, and it was you know, it was even then hard to conceive how he could have been one of the handful of best

basketball players on the East Coast. So things evolve, but they evolve more slowly and in a more decentralized way. I think to some degree here, as you were saying the games are wholly owned, what is to stop the developers from trying to own the universe of esports entirely? From saying, you know, like, we want to create our own teams and franchises and have those operate within our universes.

In other words, from a sort of business organization standpoint, why is it efficient for something like EG to have to field teams across a range of different platforms or games rather than having everything consolidated in the platform owners Well, this answer will vary by region because how this is reflected in China is very different than how it's reflected in the US. As you probably could guess, there's more end to end ownership in especially the APAC region than

you'd find here. But I don't even claim to be an expert in APAC region, so I can speak to North America. Part of it is the beautiful limitations of capitalism, right. Making a game is very high level of effort, like company initiative, huge vast upfront in investment exactly, and it's rife with problems, rife with human component risk. It's just it's an incredible undertaking. Adding a league that is hard to do. I know, I just pose a logistics problem.

A developer could do that, but I don't know if it's always financially viable to own all components at the scale or without heavy future planning. That being said, there are certain developers that are a higher touch, especially in the franchise leagues. The leagues that we have to pay to be a part of, and the incentive to us

is league guaranteed revenue. But we have provisions and controls and rules that we must abide by versus some developers that are very hands off LEAs a fair but there aren't many rights of provisions protecting us besides the logistics and the time. So what might happen in ten years could be different than what's happening today, But current state gamed we're probably protected just by the fact that game development is such a big undertaking to support as an individual.

It probably doesn't make as much sense or is the smartest vertical integration to jump from game development all the way to esports team big picture question assume that esports sort of continue on this trajectory towards greater and greater growth. How will they How will esports as an industry change the way we broadly think about sports and its relationship to human experience. I mean, what do you see as the biggest impacts. You've already mentioned the geographically localized versus

the non There's the on screen versus off screen. There's the do you attend matches in a big urban you know dome or do you do it at home? There's probably television versus streaming. I mean, there are a range of different ways that you're involved in something that's going to disrupt a very big industry with a lot of capital in it and a lot of power and a lot of social importance. So when you think about the bigger social impact that growth in esports is likely to have,

how do you imagine that that going well? I could share a hope around and what we try to help bridge the big gap we have, especially if you continue to like in the strictional sports. So we haven't figured out partially due to the maturity and age of our space as well as the accessibility to understanding, we haven't figured out the multigenerational or inherited audience type pathway, you know,

traditional sports. You know, if your dad's a Patriots fan, you're probably going to have to watch some Patriots at some point in your life. I mean, I was just at a family funeral of my great uncle who died at ninety two, who was a lifelong fan of the

Washington sports team. He was sixty plus year season ticket holder and the Washington football team, and that was a central theme of the funeral because he was a central theme of his life, and it was a way that he bridged family connections and generations, and it was central. So it really was generationally exactly the way that you're describing.

And we haven't seen that play out yet because I would say probably the first generation of die hard esports as we know today fans are the older millennials at this at this stage, um, but seeing how we bridge esports to a younger audience continue to be multigenerational be important because and I don't want to sound pessimistic, but why I love having these conversations is it is hard to convince. You know, even my parents. If you ask my parents, would what does your daughter do? She's like, ah,

she works in tech. Like they don't really understand what I do. And I don't know if they sat. They're proud of me, but they don't really get it. I don't think they know how I get a paycheck. But um, it's harder to bridge those that older audience, and I hope younger audiences are able to carry some of that heavy lifting to help this continue to be multigenerational, to

be sticky, fascinating. So transgenerational connection would be a desirable thing for sure, And if it did, it might supplement or even displace some of the other kinds of identity based features of sports, and that might have some impact on the way we identify around place, around country. You know, in the Olympics, we're always thinking about country identity, right, and yet that's a very seems like a very dated

way to think about. You know, athletes at the greatest level internationally, right, I mean, on some level, who really cares what countries they represent? And when they play in professional leagues, they come from all over the world typically to wherever they go, and that's pretty cosmopolitan. What you're working in, what your industry represents is an even further globalization or cosmopolitanization of sport. But I also wonder if there might be some loss of some of the familial

or identity based features that are more generationally bound. It's a tough thought to ponder because part of what I see esports as is quite beautiful. That you can be someone who loves you sports and find community with people countries and time zones far away you don't even speak

the same language of you. But I'm hopeful for this because I think it is a natural progression of the attitudes and behaviors of our youngest generation right now, how they engage in the digital world and how they consume content. It is much less where am I physically allocated to who has values, beliefs, and ideas like me in a broader scale. So I'm optimistic, a little bit biased, but optimistic. Nicole.

Thank you for educating me and our listeners. And I'm very confident that we're going to be hearing a lot from you in the future, whether it's in this space or other spaces that you find yourself in. And I really want to extend my appreciation to you for spending some time with me. Thank you, Thank you so much. Noah, We'll be right back. What I learned from Nicole is genuinely fascinating, with serious implications for society, for our future, and for how we interact with each other in the

spaces of entertainment and sports in the world. Listening to Nicole, I felt like a whole world was opening up to me. And it's a world in which I think certain elements are familiar, but others actually seem to be extraordinarily different. I confess that for me, and I'm someone who loves to watch sports, the idea of watching somebody play a

video game is still new and novel. Listening to Nicole, I was able to see that the mere excellence of the people performing it is actually reminiscent of the joy that we take in watching people perform any activity to an excellent degree, and we all experienced that during the Olympics, when we watch some sports that we don't ordinarily watch and are nevertheless gripped to see it done the highest

possible level. Furthermore, as Nicole pointed out, there's an entertainment component, especially with regard to streaming, that is actually more laid back and fun than a lot of the watching of sports that we do, because we're not just observing competition, we're also observing fun being had, and that invites us as viewers to tap into that experience of fun much more so than we do when we watch professional athletes, who to a certain degree are having fun, but to

a much greater degree are all business. Another takeaway that really struck me was the idea that in the world of esports, where you're from has nothing to do with what teams you root for. I don't think it's possible to overstate how transformative and effect expanded esports would therefore have on cultures in North America, in Europe, and elsewhere around the world where local and national identities are bound up in sports teams, whether those sports teams are university based,

regionally based, city based, or even now nationally based. In our world of fading national and local identity associations, sports have become important glue for holding us together. On the other hand, sports also have the capacity, via those local identities, to bring out the worst in US and to make

us polarized and regionalized. In contrast, esports both hold out the hope of true cosmopothanism, where you could root for anyone from anywhere, and also of potentially weakening some of the local ties that are in fact of some value to us. In living in civic communities. Last, but not least, I walked away from this conversation with Nicole with a sense of being extraordinarily impressed to hear a young person so dynamically committed to the growth of an industry so

deeply steeped in its details. And based on this conversation, I'm pretty confident that we should be all watching her career going forward alongside career of evil geniuses. Until the next time I speak to you. Breathe deep, think deep thoughts, and have a little fun, maybe watching esports. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication

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