Hey, what's up welcome back to my channel now in today's video. I'm gonna go straight into it You clicked on this video because you want to learn how to charge premium fees and How to get clients ultimately to invest more money into your services now this Spreadsheet here is exactly what I went through earlier with one of the coaches that I work with one-on-one He sells a package. It's four thousand dollars per customer and I'm not gonna go into detail about what he offers But I'm going to really just go through the questions that I had him answer Once he answered these questions. He was way more clear Not only with what he's offering, but who to offer it to and he was way more clear Like when he takes on a new client how to onboard them without spending more time Right. So these questions here. I have six questions Let's go through this together.  I'll send it to you I'm not gonna put that in the link in the description For lazy people if you're serious if you want the spreadsheet text me and I'll give it to you now Let's start with the most important thing first, which is what is the deep problem? I solve for my clients. This is something most coaches and trainers never ever think about They're thinking well, I'm just gonna go put on sessions for my clients Coaches are not thinking about what is the actual transformation that I am delivering to my clients what is the outcome that they should be getting and That's not just about like for example, if you're a basketball trainer soccer player That's not just about them playing better right and You know, if you ever have a chance to get on a call with me one-on-one I can go into probably more detail about what's the real deep problem that you're solving For for your clients, but this is the thing you have to understand you have to clearly answer that and When you clearly answer that ultimately what you have is you have a business that solves deeper problems than other coaches and trainers in your area Right, and when you have that you can always charge more because you are talking directly To parents who have kids that suffer with that type of problem that you're solving Right, that's different than just being a skills trainer This is why coaches that I work with always end up charging way more money for their services because we pinpoint What is the problem that they solve? I can't tell you what that problem is that you're solving because this is a YouTube video and I'm not you're not in front of me right now Right, but that is the first question second is how long does it take? For my clients to get the transformation. So does that take three months six months? nine months a year What is that for you and the only way to really? Understand that is by looking at the metrics in your business and looking at the results When I say metrics, it's lifetime value of the customers. What what are your customers achieving? What's the results that they're they're getting when they're in your program? What's the drop-off level are they dropping off a month after they join your program? Or are they really committed to your program for years? Right, so that is a question only you can answer All right next here is if paid in full. What is the price I command? So that example I gave you earlier with the coach that I'm working with he charges 4k so 4,000 per client That is the paid in full price So with that, all right You can just do the math here if he if he gets 25 clients in one year, all right at 4,000 That's a hundred thousand dollars per year, right and that's assuming that 25 of those people they stay in his program for a year, which is what he has And they drop out right they drop out after a year. He's starting the second year over again That's not the case with his business because he has very high retention rate So he might have he might close 25 people in one year the next year he might close 35 And he's adding to his program at this point, right now. I'm just using these numbers a simple demonstration here He has way more than 25 clients that he's working with So the higher that you charge though ultimately the less clients that you have to work with Right, if you charge a very low amount you need to have a lot of clients that you're working with and It's very difficult to charge a low amount of money If you're solving a huge problem Right people who have a really big problem are willing to pay way more than you think to have that problem solved Right, so that's why we always need to charge a premium Right, if you're going to solve a big problem for solving small problems, guess what expect to charge a very little amount, right? Next one here if it's a split payment, how many months have paid off? so one of the changes I made in my business recently is I don't do like Annual sorry. I don't do like monthly payments anymore. That's something I've done for years I've gone away from that recently where If a client wants to work with me one-on-one Or in my group setting whatever They're either going to pay upfront for everything or I'm going to break it into three payments that are due in three months from now So they'll have more skin in the game immediately than a monthly payment And all of those payments roll in over three months instead of 12 months And I can tell you just from experience making that change has simplified my business a lot and I would recommend if you have any sort of upfront option That should be something that ultimately if they pay that they're getting your training at a discount And if they choose the three payment plan that I'm talking about here, they're paying more total than they would if they're paying upfront All right. So again, that's a question you should answer Next one is how many clients total do I need? to make 100k in the next 12 months Now you could replace 100k with 50k or 200k or 300k that's up to you, right? If you haven't gotten to a hundred thousand dollars per year yet with your business Then I think that would be a good goal if you're just starting your business I think a good goal first is to you know make $50,000 in one year All right It shouldn't be try to make a hundred thousand dollars one in the first year of business because you Probably won't get there unless you're really good at sales at the beginning All right, so this just comes down to numbers All right, and with that example, I said four thousand per customer per year Um, you know, he just needs 25 clients. That's closing one client every two weeks during the year which is unbelievably doable All right, if you're marketing if you're confident with sales and if you're solving a big problem If you're solving a small problem, you can't sell something for four thousand No one wants to pay four thousand dollars for a small problem to be solved All right And lastly here, this is one of the most important things if I add a new client Am I the trainer? All right in the business or am I working more hours for every client that does come on? So here's what I mean if you Add two new clients that pay four thousand dollars each Are you having to work more with those clients or are you putting them into a system? Right and there's a big difference because one would be like every client you add you're putting them into private training Right and a lot of coaches don't do this But this is something I do and something I would coach you on if you ever part of my consulting program Every new one-on-one client you get On average if they're in your program for a year, you're going to be spending minimum 52 hours extra with that client Over the course of the year if you see them once a week over the course of 12 months All right, so if you have two clients that you add at four thousand Like that's eight thousand dollars upfront, which is great, right? But now you're spending 104 hours extra time For that for those two clients and that time compounds with every single client that you end up adding right And so it can be this scary snowball of time that gets Just completely lost even though you're generating money, which is great Right all of your time gets followed up now if you have this set up for group training Those two clients now that just got got added are being put into a program that already exists And that way you're not spending more physical hours With those clients, so it'd be like you adding two clients. They pay eight thousand dollars total They get moved into a group that's already functioning And you're not working more hours with that group you're working the exact same amount of time And this is why a lot of the coaches that I work with one-on-one or in our group program They end up working way less and when they close clients, they're not having to spend more time with those clients They're putting them into a system Now if you watched this video of all those clicks and you want like more coaching To to get ultimately get more clients that pay more money Upfront or over the course of the year I really encourage you to go to my website go to build my sports biz dot com And there is a tab there and I'll show you here So if you get to my website And go down the page and you click on consulting options If you're serious, you've watched some of my youtube videos, you know that I can help out and and you want help you're hungry to get help go to this page here Watch this video. It will show you how to apply To either get my help one-on-one or to join our group coaching program. That's it for this video Install what we're talking about. I know that's going to make a massive difference in your business It's the same exercise that I do if I was working with you And when we get crystal clear on that you get more confidence with your offer because you know the problem that you're solving That's it. Hope this helps and catch you later


Regardless of your views on the state of California's coronavirus response policies or their public health policies, I think any person left-right liberal conservative who goes to their physician and asks them a question about COVID treatment or COVID interventions wants to actually know what their physician think. No one wants a doctor who's just reading from a script that was written by the California Department of Public Health.


college-based global community, and we are delighted to have a number of those students here with us tonight. I'd also like to extend a special welcome to our young professionals here tonight. We hope all of the YPs in attendance will join us afterwards for an informal post-program discussion with our speaker over drinks and advertisers that may or might not grow downstairs. And now to introduce tonight's speaker, I'd like to invite Richard O'Han, council officer and president of the Invest Group to the podium. Thank you, Johnnie. I'm delighted to welcome back to the council's podium, Paragana. He's been with us several times and participated in a terrific panel discussion on superpowers of the 21st century in 2008 and in 2009, he was a keynote speaker for our inside Washington week and was rated one of our top speakers. My dad, he would have loved to have been able to open the inside Washington program this week. It's on, it's just you're taller than us. But unfortunately, he'll be in Singapore during that time. However, we are lucky to have the opportunity to hear him tonight and you can also join our Washington week program in April to hear many other great speakers. Now, let me tell you a little bit about it. Prague Connick is the director of the Global Govern... These are great titles. The Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, which I think is located in New York, Washington. He is also a partner in the advisory firm, Hybrid Realities and with his wife, Asia Connick, directs the Hybrid Reality Institute, which explores human technology, co-evolution and its implications for society, business, and politics. Dr. Connick served on the Foreign Policy Advisory Group to the Barack Obama for President campaign and during 2007 was a Senior Political Advisor to the United States Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier, he held positions at the Brookings Institute, the World Economic Forum in Geneva and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In 2008, he was named one of the Esquire's 75 most influential people of the 21st century and was one of 15 individuals featured in Wired Magazine's smart list. In 2009, he was honored as a young global leader in the World Economic Forum. Dr. Connick is widely published and quoted in media around the world. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Forbes, Time, and Newsweek. He has been featured on a number of TV and radio programs including CNN, BBC, PBS, Al Jazeera International, and National Public Radio among many others. He is the author of the international best-selling book, The Second World, Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. And his latest book, How to Run the World, charting a course for the new Renaissance, will be the focus of this evening's program and will be available following tonight's program for signing and sale. Dr. Connick holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and a bachelor's and master's degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. A truly international figure, Dr. Connick was born in India, grew up in the United Arab Emirates, New York, and Germany, and has traveled in more than 100 countries on all continents. And tonight, we are delighted to have him here in Philadelphia to speak with us. Dr. Connick. Thank you. Good evening. It's great to be back here. This is one of those moments in time where people like me, geopolitical junkies, this is what we live for, is the kind of moment where you rip up your speech and you just meditate and reflect on how amazing the world's dynamics can be, kind of moment that you wait for actually and have to keep on waiting for no matter how much you know, no matter what kind of expert you are about the world, you never really know when the tipping point is going to come. But I will say to back up about five years when I was traveling around the world two and a half years to write my first book, Second World, I spent a tremendous amount of time in the following countries, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, so on, so on, months and months and months and months and months and got okay at Arabic, but mostly was meeting everyone I could. Students, bloggers, activists, revolutionaries, politicians, members of parliament, ministers, taxi drivers, waiters, waitresses, you name it. And I sort of sized up my methodology is kind of different from other political scientists. I read the books, I take my notes, I integrate into a framework, then I pack it all in the drawer and I go and I travel. And so after when I was finally ready to leave Egypt, this is at some point in 2006, you know, in my notepad and my notes, I said Egypt is ripe for revolution. And there it is, there are those words stand somewhere in the middle of my last book. And so I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for that to actually happen to vindicate me. And you can see I'm kind of smiling about this. And obviously things have been, it's been a mixed picture the last few weeks. Obviously all has not been pretty, all has not been good in Bahrain. There's been a lot of trouble, a lot of unrest. Look at Libya, there's a lot of brutality. Syria as well. You know, revolution is not a dinner party, Mausadam famously said. And this won't be either. But let me say this, it could be so much worse. These regimes have been so much worse than what we have seen them do in the last few weeks. And all those times that they did, all those nasty things to their people, and maybe we were even supporting them. This time is actually different. You know, for decades and decades we have faced this paradox. We have either explicitly or quietly talked about democracy, promotion, economic reform, and progressive governance. But we never wanted to touch the leaders. And that was a paradox that we simply could not transcend. So we just waited and waited and waited. And then it happened, it happened for us. And now we don't face that paradox as much anymore because a lot of these regimes are gone. They're going or they're gone. Now, as familiar as anyone can be with the fact that even if you bring in next generation young leaders who talk about reform, they're still surrounded by their daddy's secret police and secret services who are going to maintain a grip on power. That's what's happening in Syria right now. Even Saif al-Qaddafi himself, who talked about reform for six or seven years, didn't get very far because of who his father is and who his father still is, in fact. But that said, one way or the other, they're all going to go. They're all going to go, or at least they're all going to modernize, they're all going to change. And therefore, very, very logically speaking, if this part of the world has had the worst governments that they could have had, it could only go up. It could only get better. And I think it will. And I think it has a lot to do with the combination of a certain set of factors. I want to mention those factors. I want to say that it's important to distinguish between what we're seeing right now and how deeper forces and deeper trends at play, which is what a lot of this book is about. A lot of people say failed states. That's a trend, right? You can pick up any magazine and say, what are the top trends of the 21st century? You can say, failed states this, or technology revolutions, things like this. Those are not trends. It's very important to be somewhat scientific about this. Those are just manifestations of much deeper trends. The deepest trend that's played here in the Middle East is what I wrote the middle chapters of this book to. It's what I call post-colonial entropy. That's a fancy way of saying the world is falling apart. Okay. Why do I say that? The world has 200 countries. 60 years ago, the United Nations was founded, there were less than 100 countries. We've doubled the number of countries in the world. Are they all really sovereign, equal, competent, coherent, even respectable nations and governments? Not really. Those are the words that come to mind when I think of Libya today. Probably isn't for you either. What these countries have experienced in the last 60 years since independence, decolonization, has been largely lack of investment infrastructure, very corrupt governance, tripling or quidrupling of their populations. No new national ideology that compels loyalty among the people and a general sort of pattern of suppression, externalizing the enemy, blaming Israel, blaming America, blaming anyone, but not taking responsibility for themselves. That is decay. It had to come to a point where that decay crosses over that tipping point into collapse. So when people say, what's the trend that played here?  The deeper trend is this entropy. This entropy is ripping, not just the Arab world. It's actually kind of a worldwide phenomenon. A lot of people have been asking me lately, is this going to spread outside the region to a place like Pakistan? And I'm like, hold on a minute. Pakistan is already way beyond what the Arab countries are. What do you mean is this going to spread? It's already in such an advanced state of entropy that I don't think the country can even hold together at all. In the Arab world, we're talking about reforming governments, improving them, fighting the people, and building state capacity, nation-building, all these things, because we still believe these places can actually hold together. I don't actually think that a place like Pakistan, which can even do that, is much larger, almost 200 million people. So just bear in mind this concept of entropy. When you look at the map of the world today and you're starting to track and see and plot where these revolutions are happening, Jordan and Syria last week, now we are. A week before that, we weren't talking about other places, one by one by one by one by one. There are 200 countries in the world. More than half of them are post-colonial countries. Most of those are borderline failed states or already over the edge. And it's not something that started at the end of the Cold War, last 10 years, 15 years. It's not something that's just very, very recent because of Twitter and Facebook, even Al Jazeera, which I celebrate because of the way in which it shines a spotlight on a lot of these governments. This has been going on. These countries have been dying since the day they were born. And that's what I devote some chunk of this book to, saying, well, so what do you actually do about it? What you do about it is many things. And I want to kind of bring it straight to the headlines as well because Obama is giving a speech tonight defending his policy so far. And he has to defend about two levels. The first is why are we going to war isn't this illegal? I would say no. Because for one thing, there are regional organizations involved that have invited the United States to support humanitarian operations. The Arab League has sanctioned this. The European Union is involved in this. And the UN Security Council has approved this. We are not necessarily at war. As you probably know, we have an outright declared war in quite a while. It's something of a lost art. In fact, there is a book that came out recently titled The Lost Art of Declaring War. And so it wouldn't be such a thick book if we weren't finding very clever ways to not declare war while doing it. But I don't think that what's happening right now is the kind of thing where it requires a sort of congressional sanction. I would like for Congress to actually get its act together and do that, much as I would like the United Nations to much more quickly deliberate on whether or not Gaddafi has been conducting atrocities and therefore sanctioning more aggressive operations against him. But alas, these things take a lot of time and I don't think that Obama should be wasting time waiting for them. So that's one thing. The other more important question is does he have a strategy? And this is where I really like what we're doing. It's all too easy for people to attack him from the left and from the right. From the very beginning he said that this is an Arab situation. The Arab League is actually convening and doing something which is a real shock for anyone who follows the Arab politics. The Europeans have gotten together and decided to do something to recognize the National Council government of eastern Libya and to put together a military coalition. France has been lead. For anyone who follows European politics this is also a great shock. So for those of us who have been raised on a healthy diet of America as the world's policeman no one can do anything without us, whatever you know finally we're seeing some action and Obama is saying yes America has very unique military other kinds of capabilities that we are willing to use and support and sometimes we'll take leave we'll do strikes before others we'll strike targets others can't that's fine but we're doing it because the Arabs and this is the Arab world that's at stake here have invited us to do it we're doing it because the great powers that are proximate to the situation have to deal with the aftermath of this more than we do the Europeans they are on board in fact they have taken the lead they recognize this Libyan this would not have been the case in the last ten years right and yet that's exactly what's happening now so we have managed to combine caution with action that's really really remarkable so I actually applaud the way Obama has been handling this so far but don't expect him to provide the long term answer to what is going on a lot of people are going to say what's the strategy, what's the outcome what's the end state what's their own revolutions which they are doing right now which we have in many cases stopped them from doing remember based on our support for some of the dictatorships in the region is to let them decide where this is going to go and just to make sure as much as we can exercise as much leverage as we can to make sure that there isn't an unnecessary loss of life in the process and again we're actually doing a moderately good job of that maybe we shouldn't be dealing with any kind of what Saudi Arabia is doing there are trade-offs, there are double standards there is a bit of hypocrisy that's always the case but just because we're not stopping the Saudis from what they're doing it doesn't mean that we can't help the Libyans and we can't help people in other countries so we have limited capacity but we do what we can so how does this all this tie into to this book I've spent a lot of time in the Arab world and writing about these deeper forces of IC play, particularly this issue of post-colonial entropy what does state building really mean how important are regional organizations which is an entire level of international organizations that we just tend to ignore we tend to think of great powers, superpowers multilateral organizations and everyone else is just a little just a sort of icing on the cake in fact it began to be regional and organizations are very important and that's another big theme of this book a lot of people right now we're talking about global security issues are saying we will have a better global security system if we reform the UN Security Council let's expand it from 15 countries to 25 countries, let's have India have a permanency, Brazil should have a permanency Japan should have a permanency and so forth no one is asking is that actually going to lead to action is that going to lead to a more efficient model of global security and I challenge anyone to tell me expanding the UN Security Council as legitimate and noble the goal is that maybe to salvage the legitimacy of that core part of the UN tell me how that's going to save anyone's life and I'm not sure that it will and that brings us to the kind of core message of this book I'm not interested in global governance as we know it's it's a term that's on my business card global governance and there are a lot of people who work on it and 99% of the people who work on global governance basically sit around and play with order charts I know I've been doing this for years and those order charts are usually order charts in the United Nations World Bank, IMF World Trade Organization and so forth as if that map, that organogram really reflects the reality of the world but I attack those maps I attack those charts I'm telling what I just told you earlier about Postal and Entropy is my way of saying that that complete joke that the borders that are on it countries that are on it in half the cases don't reflect anything like a neat and tidy reality well the same thing goes in spades for the maps and charts of global governance we will not solve the world's problems by talking about silver bullets like reform the Unsecurity Council strengthen the IMF let the G20 handle all the world's problems right, financial stability Iran, climate change a new global environmental organization right and that will tackle climate change, let's have another summit Kyoto, Bali, Copenhagen Cancun, pick the next sunny resort of your choice where there will be a big summit and people will fly there and burn lots of emissions and get around to negotiating a treaty that will never ever be ratified this is the global governance system that people think of when they think of global governance and it gives global governance a bad name and it gives diplomacy a bad name and the very purpose of this book is to turn all of that completely on its head in one sentence the best global governance is local governance and in one sentence the diplomacy of talk is the worst kind of diplomacy the diplomacy of action is what we need a lot more of the reason these organizations are losing so much legitimacy the reason they are being bypassed by NGOs by companies that are in trouble and wants to go and do something the reason is because legitimacy doesn't just derive from where you sit on the org chart it doesn't derive from what international law what powers international law gives you the world is very impatient legitimacy derives from doing something that's why the Gates Foundation is not a democratically elected legitimate organization but I haven't been to a country in Africa or in Asia that doesn't give priority to a meeting with Bill Gates or his representatives over any diplomat from Italy or even from the United States because he does something so this is not rocket science those org charts are wrong in the way that they map out global governance and for me legitimacy now derives from action and the diplomatic map that I try to paint in this book is one in which it's not about against states it's not against international organizations it's about releasing resources and empowering local actors as much as possible let me give you some examples of that we've been in Afghanistan now for almost 10 years right 9-11 is coming up the 10th anniversary this year it took until or late last year for the Pentagon to say oh my god we're going to be occupying this country forever unless we actually bring in private actors investors, businesses, companies we need them to turn this country into what it has been or was for thousands of years which is the Silk Road it's a landlocked country, it has resources you can transit natural gas and oil through it you can extract minerals from it you can grow pomegranates and raisins there but yet this really wasn't the central focus of our policy we said well Afghanistan is a security problem right, therefore the military leads and the security problems and 10 years later we haven't solved the security problem, the stability problem or the terrorism problem because you can't let you can't treat issues in these silos the way we do and the way a lot of these international organizations do and the way our own government does instead the Pentagon created something called the Office of Business and Stability Operations last year where it said we need to start flying some CEOs in here so they did they've got American businesses we also opened up a factory in Kandahar we started building some roads around at Lazari Sharif please help get some of these businesses going so Afghanistan can export some goods so it can earn some revenue so it can not be dependent on us so that people have less motivation to join the Jihad or the insurgency again, it was so obvious and yet for almost 10 years we hadn't been doing it the reason is because we still think diplomacy, leadership and our foreign policy is only that which our government does and that's the biggest mistake we can make in the 21st century diplomacy is so much more than just what Hillary Clinton does it's so much more than just what the State Department does you all know how emasculated the State Department is we only have 5,000 foreign service officers is that the sum total of American diplomacy? it's not what our military does is diplomacy what our companies do is diplomacy we negotiate with other governments with other companies we form supply chains we gain access to markets we invest in foreign countries we develop their labor force we change their regulations all of that is diplomacy too our NGOs do diplomacy America is the most charitable society in the world hands down what Americans donate to causes has a big impact on the ground what our universities do 40 American universities operating across the Middle East at a time when we are such an unpopular government students are lining up to apply to study at American college campuses that are in the heart of the Middle East why because they actually want American education we have an enormous global footprint and that footprint goes well beyond what our government alone delivers and so we have this big misconception about diplomacy as being something that MNA is only from Washington but to me I want to hear that the World Affairs Council runs multiple trips to Iran how many American diplomats have been to Iran way more members of the World Affairs Council have been to Iran than there are American diplomats that have been to Iran at least post 1979 right and when I was in Europe last week in Germany and in the UK they have diplomatic relations with Iran and they are always saying that our Iran policy is so messed up frozen for 32 years now achieving absolutely nothing we have all this knowledge about the country all this time spent on the ground but your diplomats spend all their time row-eating us to not engaging with Iran that's an in and out shell American foreign policy for Iran now it hasn't strengthened its weaknesses diplomacy is obviously about coercion and persuasion about lots of different things a mix of characters and sticks obviously that's exactly the problem our policies have been so black and white and if it's broke you've got to fix it and we haven't been necessarily doing that it brings up the point really about engagement if you're not engaging then you're not exercising diplomacy at all you're abdicating your participation in diplomacy which is precisely why when World Affairs Council delegations go to me that's a form of diplomacy and there's a whole field built around what's called track to diplomacy citizen diplomacy citizen engagement diplomacy are actually extremely important and I think that they play a very complementary role toward governments too take the issue of Palestine us, time and check, we still don't have a two state solution or any solution but we've had rose garden ceremonies about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute we've handed out several Nobel Peace Prizes for that dispute for the last 30-35 years it hasn't really gotten us past the finish line I think one dimension that we have ignored to a large extent is people diplomacy which is absolutely essential if you want people to live in peace side by side we've ignored the economic dimension we've thought that oh no, no, you have to sort out the security issues or to negotiate the final status issues and then all of these things will just magically happen what if you just put that on its head what if you say, if you actually built a viable Palestinian economy then that entity could actually survive on its own in their case for its own independence it wouldn't be either a political and security dependent on others, it wouldn't be an economic client of various UN agencies and donor values like this but that's not the way people tend to think about these things, they think that you can regulate it all on paper have lots of cute ceremonies about it give out lots of prizes but they'll still bring us to where we are today so I'm for diplomacy on all of these different levels that involves citizens, involves companies involves NGOs, involves government agencies, the UN sort there is no either or, I'm not one of those people who says the market's going to solve all the problems or let Bill Gates and civil society solve all the world's problems and it'll all be okay it's about smarter partnerships between public and private actors it's about .gov, .com .org, .edu and also the .god religious groups and those actors they're all very very involved in this landscape of 21st century diplomacy I think there's enormous potential in that if the world of intergovernmental interstate policy has gotten us to where we are today and we still have so many problems so many unanswered questions, so many challenges climate change, human rights, democracy promotion, economic growth, public health you name it well, governments have done about as much we're not giving more money to foreign aid are we other governments aren't either the UN certainly doesn't have enough money or enough resources to solve these problems where is it going to come from where are the solutions going to come from but there's an enormous amount of resources that are out there in NGOs and civil society, in our corporations, in diaspora groups in universities and so forth harnessing that potential is really what the future of diplomacy is going to be about finding the resources from these different sectors that's what's going to generate the kinds of solutions that we need and you can see example after example I think this book could have been twice as long while my editors didn't want it to be just a laundry list of all the wonderful things that are actually going on out there when you see public and private resources combined but the examples are literally endless and so I do organize the book functionally is there an economic growth you could have a stimulus package, a stimulus package but you eventually sputter to the stop or you can attempt to stimulate innovation in the private sector and that ultimately is how you do in fact create jobs in public, private cooperation you can talk about terrorism you can say we need to drain the swamps we need to bond them to whatever but you also need to create jobs through foreign investment risk insurance guarantees things that banks do, things that UN agencies do things that governments also do things that local entrepreneurs do that's what it actually takes to drain the swamps it involves more than just governments more than just military you want to solve a climate change? well again you can have lots of big summits in world capitals but you also have to have innovation, clean technology coming from Europe, coming from Japan coming from the United States finding mechanisms to subsidize it to transfer those technologies to so that they will reduce their emissions you can't legislate that you have to innovate that governments don't innovate those things companies do probably you want to promote human rights well at the United Nations it's premised on respect for sovereignty so how are you criticizing what China does in Tibet? you can't actually do much of that at the United Nations but Amnesty International can do that and they do, Human Rights Watch can do that and they do as being an opposition to governments or simply being on the outside being on the margins let me tell you what the fastest growing NGO that I'm a Western NGO in China is it's called Business for Social Responsibility they used to have a staff of like 6 in Beijing now it's a staff of 36 that's the invitation of the Chinese government because they said we like you, you provide us with technical assistance and you help us actually improve and enforce labor rights and labor standards in our factories we actually train our factory managers so an NGO is doing more to improve human rights on the ground in China than sending over our bureaucrats to go and read out lectures to the Chinese government they're not listening they're not listening to that but they're actually welcoming the NGOs that are helping them reform so those are just a few examples of the amazing stuff that's actually going on the ground if you look at diplomacy not through the traditional framework of just what governments do but what I call mega diplomacy the combination of public, private, civic kinds of actors and the mega diplomacy framework is what I try to project in this book because really the genie is out of the bottle this is an irreversible sort of situation the empowerment of all of these actors companies, NGOs and so forth is not something that's ever going to be reversed because globalization is of course greater than all of us it distributes, dissipates it spreads power and authority in all kinds of directions and therefore we actually have to come to grips with it we have to stop the conversations about who gets to regulate who who has the upper hand and start thinking much more about who's partnering with whom who's deploying the resources how are we collaborating and I find far too much of the former conversation going on in Washington and a far more inspiring amount of the latter conversation going around outside of Washington and that's why maybe that's why I spend so little time in Washington but it's certainly I think the best way to get fresh ideas is to go and travel and to see this incredible display of creativity, diplomatic creativity innovation that's happening all over the world and what I've tried to do with this book is just to start conversation around that kind of basically rid us of any excuses that we might possibly have about why we don't each think of ourselves as diplomats because I officially think of all of you here in this room as diplomats thanks very much from the audience so Dr. Khanna I'm sort of I'm all in favor of democracy Middle East Arab, Libyan, Egypt and everywhere but is there a they never had an opposition party or leaders like we have in India two party system like in England and do you see any leadership that can take over like Mubarak and Karachi thank you so you're asking if the next set of leaders might be as bad as the ones that just left office that the current dynamics in these countries will allow that to happen already in Tunisia and Asia you have seen Prime Ministers and other cabinet ministers being sacked within one week of the job because people went back on the street and they said you appointed this rubber stamp guy and he's actually not delivering get him out and they're going to keep on doing it week after week after week until the Egyptian military and the Tunisian power brokers realize that they can't get away with it everyone is watching now everyone is holding government's feet to the fire and forcing them to reform a lot faster than they would like and so I think that's actually a very positive when you see when you wake up in the morning and you turn on the news or you open the newspaper and you read about how a government has been dismissed they've been sacked or something like that that's a very good thing it means that another attempt at a corrupt holding on to power by the old guard has been thwarted and rather than letting it ossify like a Mubarak for 30 years instead it lasted three days and I want those governments to keep falling I want government every week to keep falling because then those old regimes who think that they can cheat the people trick the people get away with it are going to finally give up and realize that they can't do it anymore day one it was okay fine I'll reveal the emergency laws day two it was okay fine I'll appoint a vice president day three it was okay fine we'll have early elections and then finally it was oh damn I really need to get out of here because they really aren't satisfied and yes it's a very imperfect and ad hoc form of accountability to take things out under the street but it's a lot better than waiting for what are sure to be flawed elections in fact what just happened today Egypt announced it's probably going to delay its next round of presidential elections I'm not at all surprised I'm not at all surprised that if we focus and you've heard this critique for many people standing right here at this podium when we talk about democracy we focus too much on elections and not enough on substance I mean at least 20 people are probably still here saying thank you here's what I have to say I don't believe I don't care who the next president of Egypt is I don't care if it is a flood thirsty Islamist and I'll tell you why what I care about is that the constitution prevents anyone whether his name is Mubarak or whatever the case may be from actually ever having the kind of power that Mubarak had and therefore my focus is not at all on the election my focus is on the constitution I want to see the constitution reformed and I want to see them fighting out every single letter and article and measure and amendment until it makes clear the president will never again be a powerful person that will be a figurehead and that's it the last thing you want these countries to have actually is a republican form of government they already have that this is what makes us ironically not very good at promoting democracy or at least not the kind of democracy we want these countries to have we want them to have multi-party parliamentary democracies we have two party presidential public we obviously have checks and balances and separation of powers we want them to have that but we don't actually have a lot of experience in training multi-party systems that's what Europe looks like Britain, Germany is like that Italy is like that and so forth they aim to actually be in the lead in doing this because we want those countries to look like western european states and you can only do that by changing the constitution we focus a lot on elections and that's always been the problem it's who comes next it should never matter who comes next a good government the symbol of good government is having the what in place such that it doesn't matter who is in power and that's what we need to be pushing for in this part of the world especially since we don't really know who the next person is going to be I'm curious what do you think curious what you think the reason the contradiction finally came true what changed my thoughts on this it's a loaded question is the spike in food prices ultimately is what drove them over the edge and created things to be untenable not just in Egypt but across the region and with that being the case then it really doesn't matter who is in power because those fundamental demands aren't going to be met by whatever groups in power well you know this was the third way of a food rise that the Arabians had in the last four or five years right so it isn't solely attributable to this spike in food prices though I completely agree with you it was a major contributor so was the food that nerve who set himself on fire so was the leaky meat stable and corruption whole set of sparks sort of came together obviously though the most systemic factor in the short term was the rise in food prices but again the longer term or the deeper instability in those societies has been planted for a long time again the corruption the overpopulation and all those kinds of things so I think this has been it was truly inevitable I think we'll debate for a long time if number two from now Saudi Arabia falls the house of Saud collapses are we going to say it began back then with the food riots did it begin in Tunisia or was it something else to me the fundamental conditions are common across all these countries that make their collapse inevitable so I wouldn't say it's any one thing but I do agree that the food issue was one of them and yes you're right that if they don't deal with fundamental economic questions providing basic goods and services in particular then whichever government it is that comes next is going to collapse the next time there's a food crisis they have been encouraged for a very long time to improve food stocks to improve local agricultural productivity all sorts of things and they haven't done it well and so yeah this is certainly something that needs to be fixed in each of these countries I would hope that one lesson that whatever regimes come next in any of these countries would get out of this and she have to address of course the food supply issue first and foremost back yes unlike the Middle East and North Africa if you're talking about change of government and so on what about places like Yemen and Southern Asia India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and so on where change is except for India where there is severe well there's a great deal of lack of literacy how does that affect how there may be changes or may not be changes I don't know if you can attribute future revolutions to I think a lot of these factors go hand in hand I mean societies that are poor that are agricultural and so forth have a little literacy where I thought you were going was other areas where we have strong man dictatorship types of systems which you mentioned we backed Mushara for almost a decade and we tolerated him we thought that he was we bought his rhetoric about being anti-corruption about improving economic growth and all these kinds of things he didn't really do any of that literacy decline agricultural productivity decline under Mushara he brought some semblance of political stability but that's actually literally a euphemism for authoritarianism so that's not the kind of stability you actually want case after case we learn that when they fall, these dictators fall and we lift up the hood we see just how corrupted corrosive the whole situation was underneath and we ignored it because we had one guy you know and we prefer the simplicity of that so Pakistan has literally collapsed in the last several years in a precipitous way if Mushara was doing half of the good he said he was doing there's no way it could have gotten so bad so fast he never did any of those things so yeah literacy overpopulation again the food supply issues all play a really big role and you know speaking of India there's even even liberal comfortable elites who I know in India today are writing articles in The Guardian saying we're next I'm like what do you mean India's democracy all these things they say but the elite is still very detached divorced from ground level realities much of India is still of course very poor there's a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction with government performance and those are the common factors that can spark or instigate revolutions I'm not saying that India is actually going to collapse I am saying that it's not just authoritarian governments it's any place where there's poor governments right any place where there's even in a democracy you can have a revolution and so I think that that's something that basically the entire world needs to be careful what would the possible or in my word probable financial economic collapse of the United States mean to the rest of the world well I don't think we're going to have you know precipitous economic collapse I mean we run all kinds of scenarios on issues like what if there's a run on the dollar obviously we have China's launches on credit rating agency and downgraded us we deserve it after all but I think that a lot hinges on what's happening right now in terms of our budget debate because you see I mean our debt is not really a number it's a number so large it's not really comprehensible 3, 4, 5 trillion dollars what does that actually mean that's not 15 right that's not a number that you actually ever pay is it that you can actually so it's not a number it's a concept right what foreign creditors are looking at right now the United States is not a country that has the capacity to pay this back right we don't what they're looking for is a country that what they're looking for is policies that could make us a country that could develop the kind of economy or modernize or shift to the kind of economy that will generate the kind of revenues that one day pay that number that concept back and turn it from some ethereal number that's too large to ever comprehend into something that's actually concrete and can be hacked away at bit by bit and so what's happening right now is that there are sort of deficit hawks particularly in the Republican side who say got a free spending the spending is getting out of control but if you free spending making it productive and actually increasing exports all these kinds of things you're actually sending the wrong signal the short term policy of freezing spending pretending that that's actually satisfying international creditors who don't want to see your deficits rise that's the exact opposite of what I hear foreigners saying foreign creditors are saying America needs to invest in infrastructure America needs to upgrade its infrastructure it needs to invest in new sectors of the economy it needs to create new jobs it needs to generate revenue and they'll be pleased to see us spending that money because they'll be pleased to see us spending it right instead of wrong and so I think that right now what is on the line in Congress is actually something where if we don't spend the money that we need on infrastructure and all these other things that actually risks bringing us ever closer to the scenario that you're painting where there is a run on the dollar and a huge obviously a spike in our our orchestrates and it's going to tremendously slow our economy but if you try to answer my question about if there is a collapse you don't believe there will be but if there is what will it be if there is a collapse meaning the dollar is not even a world currency anymore it becomes a an Ecuadorian again I don't think that's going to happen how bad will it be if America is not in the lead we're already competing for the lead America's share of global GDP is less than that of the European Union people play all kinds of funny games with statistics America is number one and Japan is number two and China is just surpassed Japan to be number two and all these things let's face it in every country they're going back to the drawing board and revisiting how they even measure GDP to begin with but the very notion of the economy is not linked to the national so it's kind of ridiculous to not appreciate the European Union as a larger kind of actually by some substantially larger economic weight than we are and that is actually the Eurozone plus so we're not really in the lead in that sense anymore do you need just the dollar as a reserve currency well even that is declining ever so slightly but at an accelerating rate but that doesn't mean that people want it to collapse because we owe people money in dollars so if it's worthless that's not going to do them a lot of good what they do want to do and this is where I actually see a lot of rational discourse going on which is why I don't think this scenario is going to happen because even China and other countries that might wish to sort of degrade our capabilities to use our financial assets to promote our influence they may wish to see that but at the same time they're also promoting these ideas like common international currency diversified basket global currency reserve SDR special drawing managed by the IMF all these kinds of conversations are taking place in which Chinese Americans and others are going about this in a very reasonable way trying to find a kind of a win-win situation because it really isn't in anyone's interest to just see us to see our economy collapse that's why I don't think it's going to happen especially when like post colonialism when colonialism kind of fell people equate self-determination with having their own government so I'm wondering in a world where NGOs are more important than governments how do people have to rethink self-determination right well you know I would never say that NGOs are more important than governments I mean it's not either or you have a lot of countries in the world where like I said the least developed countries the LDCs where NGOs and humanitarian agencies and UN bodies provide a substantial share majority of the public services in those countries they are part of the governance of those countries self-determination is somewhat different I mean when a new country is born like South Sudan last month obviously for a while exists on a certain lifeline from these international organizations and agencies that's why they're all flocking to Juba and setting up their operations and creating something of a very messy sort of mosh pit the same thing is already true in Palestine even though it's not yet the country even when it becomes one it's going to be dependent obviously to some extent on international support Haiti has been an aid of single really for many many years even though it's actually a sovereign country so there's no issue of self-determination there involved at all but I don't think that we should hold the idea of self-determination hostage to the economic weakness of certain countries Kosovo East Timor these are countries that have been born in the last decade even though they're very economically weak but in so many ways their political and economic evolution is held back by being a subservient part of a larger suppressive type of state and so therefore their liberation is painful but it's still something that they can maximize and I think that we should be supporting countries do that now most of my things I'm a big proponent of self-determination and I believe that it's only one the first step and a two-step process the first step is to become independent the second step then is to really melt down the borders that you've just created through infrastructure trade and so forth that's exactly what the European Union is down you have 27 independent countries but there are very few borders between them right they have more or less a single economy the Schengen agreement links a lot of the core countries together there are no borders to cross when you drive between them and so forth so I think that that is what needs to happen in a lot of these places you solve the territorial disputes by creating new countries the first thing those countries do is say thank you for recognizing what's mine is mine what's yours is yours now we can start to do business and that's what will happen between Kurdistan and Turkey that's what will happen between Palestine and Israel that's what will happen between now North and South Sudan that is what will happen the Balkan countries less than 20 years ago the horrific war of disillusion in Yugoslavia five new countries created one of which is a member of the EU already another one which is slated to become a member in the next year or two which is Croatia and all of which have stabilization association agreements with the EU several of which already use the euro as their main currency so these countries have fought horrific wars of independence and basically in a short amount of time they are going to become part of something much larger which is the EU the United States since the Second World War has been involved in many disastrous overseas conflicts what criteria can we use to determine whether we should or should not get involved in a particular area of the world where the Vietnam was a disaster what the president is going to talk tonight what would you advise him to say with respect to those kind of criteria when we should or should not get involved well I'm not going to give you the answer that I think you want the answer that a lot of people are talking about right now is it has to be a vital national security interest those are really soothing words who is going to define what vital is but you might love it we're only going to interview this is obviously not what Obama is going to say but if someone were to say Libya now doesn't seem like all that's for the EU only 1.6% of global oil we don't have a lot of people there and so therefore we're not going to do that one we will do this one we won't do that one it's completely ad hoc even when you use the most precise well actually it's not precise at all but vital national interest it's utterly subjective and you can get around it I would much rather see and I don't know if this is something that can be articulated in the speech but I'd much rather see us saying what are the regional dynamics in any given place what is the capacity of other people to solve their own problems how can we help them solve their own problems how can we help the Arab League police our problems how can we help the African Union and not have to necessarily do so much ourselves and that way you're kind of intervening without intervening you're helping to balance you're helping to promote stability you're helping with peacekeeping operations we're helping with money, with guidance with technical resources but you're not playing global cup in doing it yourself that is I think the correct answer to the question it's one I spend a lot of time in this book spelling out why you should think about the regional level are there people on the ground who can solve this problem themselves and can we provide some support to them so that we don't have to do it ourselves and where we can do that we should do that because you make that investment and you prevent future crises down the road where you do have to get involved thank you


Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today our topic is eSports, more than just competition from education to entrepreneurship. My guest is Martin Olson, the owner of Magic eSports Consulting. Welcome, Martin. Thank you, Catherine. Pleasure to be here. Perfect. So, Martin, OK, so I understand that you are in a small town between Quebec City and Montreal, Canada. And but you're from Denmark. So what are eSports like in Canada and Denmark? And can you compare that to the US? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I am from Denmark and I moved here in 2018 and so far Canada has been great. The main differences I would say from Denmark to Canada and then to the US is that I think Europe and Denmark can particularly jumped on eSports a lot earlier. So they're a bit further ahead education-wise and competition-wise and getting more acceptance in the society. But Canada and the US, they're catching up very, very quickly because not like in Denmark where funding is hard to find, it's easier to find funding in Canada than the US. So they're catching up very quickly. Oh, OK, that's really interesting and I understand that you will be doing some work in Denmark eventually. Yeah, I'll be moving back to Denmark in probably 10, 12 months and then I'll be starting up more stuff in Denmark. That's exciting for Denmark. And so tell us about your consulting company. What does Magic eSports Consulting do? Well, I built the company basically on a note from a friend that told me I'm doing a lot of volunteer stuff. I'm helping as many people as I can, understanding eSports, getting into eSports. And that's all without having a job to support my wife and I here in Canada. So a friend of me said, why aren't you getting paid? I said, that's a good idea. I love doing eSports. I love helping people in eSports. So why not offer up my 10 plus years of experience as a service to help them properly get into eSports? So that's what I do mainly as no matter if it's a company, a school or a club, I will help them find their way into the space. If it's to create just a community, get into competition or educational, then I offer up all my full network and all my experience as help. And I understand that you're very good at connecting people in eSports. And how did that come about? That's, I think that's just me. I've always been this idea guy. I see people who I think should meet each other and have a connection because they have a great mind or a great idea or just a personality that I feel comfortable with. And I make these introductions and for some reason, they just end up making good products or good projects that could really help forward eSports. So it's being, be it educational, like coaching courses, stuff like that. I've made a project between that and then just finding colleges and finding businesses that make sense rather than just saying, you want to make money. So you've got to talk to this guy. For me, it's got to be meaningful rather than just being a big payout. Sure, sure. And I think that that's really important in this space because a lot of it is making the right connections in order to achieve your goals. So who are your ideal clients? Yeah, I've actually thought quite a bit about that. I don't know that I actually have an ideal client. For me, anyone with interest in eSports and a genuine interest in getting into that space and understanding is familial and ideal person to work with, be it a client or a partner. As long as that it's genuine interest, I think that's the ideal for me. So a lot of my guests, I have noticed that there are so many people that don't really understand what eSports is, but they have an opportunity to enter the space. Like if they have a product and they're looking to be a sponsor. Would you agree that we're in a time where a lot of it is educating people of what the value of this is and what it is, even defining it? Yeah, I would definitely agree on that. It's not that difficult to get into eSports, but it's difficult to get in and succeed, as a lot of people are looking to get in. And it's not that hard to find a competition, be a sponsor of something, have a business idea and then pitch it to some people. But getting funding to get in and be successful is where it's going to be the hardest. So what is your biggest success story and what you've been doing? My biggest success story is I don't even feel like it's my success story. I worked at a school in Denmark with troubled kids. So this was autism, ADD, addicts, maturity issues. And I had a student there called Jacob. He was 17 when he was diagnosed with Asperger's. So it was very late to discover it. And when I started working the school with him, if he got overwhelmed, he would leave the school. He would go home and you wouldn't see him for the rest of the day because it was just too much for him. And I implemented kind of my own idea of a curriculum where it was based on creating a community feeling in that class of I had 20 students and using the games that they were passionate about. So in this case, it was League of Legends. So I put him in a team with people and he was very good at the game. And that they started to bond within the game and then that game became they went from the game and then out of the game, they were friends in this very weird transition. There was it was completely fluid. You couldn't see that they didn't talk at all before I started doing it. He was kind of the odd one out. They wouldn't really talk to him because he would get overwhelmed with too many people and they really didn't understand it. So using the games and creating that community helped him build confidence. And after a six month period, he was he was taking his fellow students to arenas to watch major tournaments. He was doing sleepovers at the school. He would be doing grocery runs with the kitchen at the school to get him more into real real work in real life because he didn't want to go into eSports. He wanted to just get a job and and be a normal person as he would. He would say it and just seeing his journey from being overwhelmed and leaving to showing up at a huge event in an arena and then sticking to it and doing a sleepover. It was it was so huge and and I was a part of that. But it was really his journey and his success from from wanting to get out of that space of being. Oh, I have I have autism. It's it's a sentence and he got to well, it's it's my strength now. He really turned it on his head. Well, that's that's a fantastic story. Do you think that eSports and gaming is something that can be used as a tool for other special needs children in order to kind of come out of their shell, communicate and work with others? Oh, yeah, for sure. The the the biggest strength in in eSports for especially for for kids and youth is that you have that anonymity online, which is a huge, huge strength within it because you won't be you won't be judged by race, religion, how you your appearance, because they can't see you. You're a name on the screen and they can judge you for your skills in the game. Although that that same anonymity also opens you up for, you know, bullying, toxic behavior, because they can hide behind an avatar or stuff like that. But having that anonymity and if you introduce it correctly into a classroom or a community, it can it can build bridges that will that will just never fall down. I would think that that would also help people who are introverts as well. Would you what do you think about that? Oh, yeah, for sure. Well, yeah, I have so many gaming friends online who are introverts and don't like coming out, but they do enjoy sitting at home playing games all night. So if we wanted to play for 10 hours the same game, that wouldn't be a problem being five, 10 people doing the same thing. And does that allow them to communicate with people in a way that might be uncomfortable? Otherwise? Yeah, I would say that it's having that online communication, especially if you're an introvert and you have a having difficulties expressing yourself when there's another person in front of you, having it be just a screen or an avatar or being on discord where you can't see anyone, it makes it a lot easier. And I have had a lot of very, very deep conversation with my online friends who I've never met in my life. It's people from people from North America, from the US, from from France and from Denmark, and I've never met them. But we've talked about life's odd ends and having difficulties with loss or in the game, bullying, education. We talk about everything online because it's just such an easy setting. So I understand that you've been in the sports business since 2011. And first, you provide us some kind of background about what you've done in this space. Yeah, I've I started out as a player. I played Counter-Strike Source at a fairly high level in Denmark and started volunteering at events because it seemed like fun at first. But it also I saw an opportunity to learn about this very early on. If I followed the people doing the events and learned how that all works, that gave me more knowledge about eSports and eSports and gaming has been a passion of mine my whole life. So just following them, doing volunteer work, security, brainstorming, cleaning up whatever they needed at events. That was that was my way in. And then I got lucky in 2016. I was hired as a coach and then got to travel all over Denmark and teaching kids about eSports in different settings, which is where my my first real idea of my own kind of philosophy where we could take eSports that came up with teaching students and seeing how they interacted with my my curriculums. You know, it's interesting because Danny Martin, my guest a couple of weeks ago, he advised people if they want to get into eSports that they just go to events and volunteer and it sounds like that's kind of what you've done. That's exactly what I did. And I say the same thing to to students who wants to get deeper into the spaces and just take take a chance and go volunteer or look at stuff up. If you want to be a graphics designer online, you can find minor tournaments and they might need some graphics done and they would you can do it as a volunteer thing and do it for free and they will use it and you can start build a portfolio in that way. Sure. So how since you started in eSports in 2011, how has it evolved? I think the biggest thing it has evolved back is it was all back then it was we had tournaments online. We had tournaments live like land events and stuff. But from then till now, we've seen a lot of acceptance in eSports and gaming. We're not no longer just these basement dwellers hiding with our pizza boxes and our energy drinks. And it's really been accepted as in Denmark. It's almost accepted as a proper sport at this time. Because the athleticism needed to compete at the highest level is very, very real. And the acceptance is probably the biggest. The thing that's moved the most over the past 10 years is we're accepting that if this is a thing and it's not going away. So do you think that the pandemic has increased the acceleration of this? Or how is it affected eSports? eSports has thrived in many ways due to the pandemic because people were forced to stay home. Sports stopped so we wouldn't be able to watch basketball, handball, soccer, football on TV because they couldn't play. So eSports really took that space and do a lot of online tournaments and people got more into it. They would get their own consoles and play the games because they saw the interest. So the pandemic has been very good for eSports, I think. Yeah, it certainly seems that way and people seem to have more time to devote to it. And with traditional sports not being available, then it seems that something had to take its place and eSports seemed to do that. They do have a question from a viewer. How do you teach children the basics of eSports? And what's the youngest age you can teach a child the basics of eSports? Well, that's a good question, but I would probably want to know basic of eSports, the basics of gaming, because I have this, my own idea of implementing eSports and gaming is that I see three levels in this. I see a core level, which is when we will introduce basic counting, basic geometry and teamwork in a game like Minecraft that everybody knows by now. And the kids know the kids, they play it already and we can use that to teach them how to count to high numbers because they can see the amount of blocks they're picking up or whatever they wanna pick up in the game. We can do geometry by building different geometric figures inside of the game and they can see it in a space that has their interest already. The next level for me is to break down more complex game into skills like communication, resource management, leadership and that's actually what I did at the School for Trouble Kids. I gave them written assignments where they would have to analyze what leadership is within the game, what does an in-game leader do? And I would use real-world models and then fit them to the game so that their interest would still be in it. And the third level is what, like you talked about Danny Martin, the third level is using jobs really closely related to the game or the games in general or eSports in general and teach them the skills needed to succeed on kind of like an internship level. So being a live production, tournament organizing and such. So those are my three levels of teaching eSports and gaming. I hope that answered the question. I didn't veer too far away from it. I think that young children are introduced to gaming very early because sometimes we don't even know we don't even think of what we're doing as a game and for a computer game. And I'll give a couple of examples. These are mobile examples. Like let's say that you are playing Solitaire on your phone, that's a card game, but you're gaming. If you are doing Duolingo, which is learning languages, you're essentially gaming because you can compete with other people on Duolingo. So there is a lot of gaming that people do that they don't even really, it's kind of disguised in a way. What do you think about that? Yeah, I'm a huge fan of gamification in general where you can teach skills using a game specifically. But I see eSports and gaming having kind of a, also like a hidden feature where if instead of developing a game to fit a curriculum, we fit the curriculum to make it more generalized so it can fit into any game. So be it a shooting game or a mobile like League of Legends, the same principles would apply to communication within a team or leadership within a team. So no matter what game is the interest, the curriculum would fit. So when the new game comes out and say five years, the big hit in eSports, that same curriculum would fit to that new game. And we would have the students interest and they could move on like that. But gamification, I am a huge fan of that concept. You know, I think that that allows kids to transition easier in school, like if they're used to playing games for fun and they get to do that to learn, I think that that allows the ability to kind of make education fun. What do you think about that? Yeah, that's like the baseline of what education can be. And that's why I really love this space of educational eSports and gaming because it's gonna be fun no matter what because they love the game. And then we can teach them anything. If you have their interest, it's so easy to teach them anything without them even realizing they're being taught. Like playing on Duolingo where you're learning something extra from playing against another person. Sure. So, you know, and I think that there, you know, when I think about education and gaming, I think of just STEM and how so many elements of creating games or, you know, all aspects of it would, you know, be in a STEM program or even there's eSports law, there's, you know, eSports business, there's so much, it's so broad because almost every class that you would offer in an educational program, there would be an application that would be in gaming. Yeah, you are 100% correct. And yeah, any job that people can think of in traditional sports, that exists in eSports. It's not really that new of a thing because traditional sports go back a long time and the same jobs are applicable to eSports. We just added an E in front of the sports, but it's gonna be the same jobs revolving that space. Sure. So, you know, and what other career opportunities that we not mentioned that would be available in eSports, I know it's kind of like virtually anything would be applicable but can you name some that maybe people haven't thought of? Well, I think a lot of people are talking about this, especially online what jobs is there's opportunities for within eSports, but they would have to also define, is it a primary or a secondary influence to eSports? Is it someone who wants to do live production? Is it a cast or a streamer or a player or a manager? Or are we looking that I just have an interest in that but I also love accounting? Well, the eSports firm need accountants as well. They need lawyers, they need technicians for different things so you can touch the eSports sphere and still have that primary focus, which is not eSports, but it's your regular day job. All right. So, you know, like primary would be more endemic in eSports, but like if you look at your regular job, I think you could ask, is eSports a potential target market? Like you talked about counting and law and there's many other things. Marketing has been huge, of course lately, but you know, what's interesting is if I attend an eSports trade association meeting, within like a networking event, you will see an accountant and then we as a lawyer or you will see other people that just identify eSports as a potential target market where they can help people in the industry. Yeah, I fully agree with that. That is how the space should be viewed. It's a new market, but it's not that different of a market. It's just like any other organization that needs help with law, with marketing, with accounting. It's just called eSports. It's just the scary, because it's a new word for a lot of the, I don't want to be rude here, the old timers, the conservative crowd is scared of a new industry booming up like this, but it's not that different from what already exists. And you know, there's a lot of talk about endemic versus non-endemic and authenticity because you know, I think there's a fear that if you're not authentic in this space that you won't be accepted. Any thoughts on that? I would agree. I've seen it to some degree, seeing some people trying to get into eSports where their heart is not in it. They're not passionate about it. They see a paycheck and they're going for that paycheck. And for a lot of the people early on that got into eSports, it's a passion project. A lot of the big movers that we see now they're having success. They started off not spending a lot of cash on it. They've done a lot of volunteer work. Like I've been volunteering for six years before I got my first paycheck from working in eSports and doing stuff. So that might also be why they're not accepting anyone who's not authentic, because they've all done this. They've all taken that hard stride of I'm passionate. And I've proven it and I have success. You're coming in with no passion, just you see a paycheck. And that's not, that's gonna be frowned upon. All right, I think a lot of people pay their dues for years in terms of volunteering. And then one day after having paid their dues they're sort of almost discovered. And then like for example, a cashier would be an example. After a certain amount of time they could be become quite popular and hired by all sorts of tournaments. Yeah, definitely. So what do you think the barriers are to people who are interested in entering this space? The main barriers is like anything else is gonna be funding and finding the right product because everybody's competing right now especially in educational work. Everybody's fighting to make their own curriculum and make the best curriculum possible. And they're all sitting with the cards held very tightly to their body, not knowing that everyone else has the same hand. They don't wanna communicate. So they're all doing their own thing but they're all doing the same thing. Sir, and do you think that that's a huge problem for esports and getting curriculum moving it forward? I think it's been the same way in the traditional education. Everybody who does curriculum development wants their own to be the best. So I think that it's not that new. The only new things we're seeing is with like I'm doing a project in the fall. I'm volunteering with the Emerald eSports to do a project about autism and the effect it has on how esports can affect autism and their daily life in youth. And those are the things that that's gonna be a game changer once we get proper research on that. You know what's interesting is that it's amazing how much research is going into esports and gaming right now. And it seems like every day I get an email of a new article or research findings on esports and gaming. So it sounds like you're adding to that important research. I'm definitely trying to whatever I can touch esports and help promote it in a healthy way. I'm doing it. So there is another question from a viewer and that is will esports become a subject at school for children? For children? I'm not sure if it will be a subject for children. It might be like traditional sports. You could introduce it in that way and then have that have a class where you would play different games. But when it comes to education we are seeing people doing master's degree in esports and PhD at the moment. So it's already well-rooted inside of the educational system to be something really, really, really big. Sure. And so what do you think the future of esports is? The future of esports is definitely for me education is the competition. Whenever there's competition it's gonna be big and it's already now showing with like the international and the majors in Counter Strike that the price pools are there so it's not going away. So education is where I think that's gonna be the future of esports getting it properly into a educational setting and doing that in the right way and not just doing it in a quick way. Sure, I think that that's true. I think that's what a lot of people are doing. So are you playing a particular game these days? I am a bit all over the place both Valorant and World of Warcraft but I always fall back to Minecraft. And so that's your core game then. Yeah. Okay, fantastic. And it seems like a lot of people are getting into Valorant in the past year or so. So anyway, Will Barton, thank you so much for being a guest on the White World of Esports. Well, thank you for having me, it was a pleasure. And thank you to the viewers who send in their questions and thank you for joining us today. Make sure to tune in in two weeks and my guest will be Dr. Laila Mentes, the CEO of PlayUp and the leading expert on the legislation and regulation of sports betting globally. We'll talk about esports betting. See you then.