This Digital Sports Company Might Just Be the Spotify of Video Games | Titus Walker (Part 1/2)

America leads the world in medicine development. It matters. We get new medicines first, nearly three

years faster. Five million Americans go to work because we make medicines here at home,

and not relying on other countries keeps us safe. But China is racing to overtake us.

Will we let them? Or will we choose to stay ahead? When America leads, America cures.

Let's tell Washington to keep us in the lead.

Learn how at americancures.com. Pay for by farm.

One thing no one tells you about hiring globally is how unclear the costs can be.

It looks simple at first and then the fees start stacking up.

Pebble brings clarity with upfront all-in hiring costs and enables you to hire the world.

Pebble is an AI-generated global human resource platform built for founders,

HR leaders and operators who are hiring and supporting teams around the world.

Pebble helps you hire, pay and manage talent in over 185 countries with fast onboarding that

can be done in minutes. Instead of juggling separate tools for contracts, payroll benefits and

compliance, Pebble brings everything together with building guidance and local expertise to support you.

This is especially helpful if you're managing teams internationally or planning to grow.

The fastest growing companies in the world use Pebble to stay organized and reduce risk.

And founders use it to scale faster without failing like they need to become HR or compliance

experts. Bottom line, it simplifies global people operation so you can spend more time growing

the business and supporting your team. New standard discounted pricing at $3.99 USD per month

per employee helps you contain costs. Go to highpebble.ai to get a free estimate. That's high

p-e-b-l.ai for a free estimate. 5am, I'm up with a crisp Celsius energy drink.

Running 12 miles today. Grab a green juice, quick change and head to work.

Meetings, workshops. One more Celsius, no slowing down. Working late, but obviously still

meeting the girls for a little dancing. Celcius, live, fit, go. Grab a cold refreshing

Celsius at your local retailer or locate now at celcius.com.

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate.

Instead, use Indeed sponsor jobs to find the right people with the right skills,

it's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate seat.

According to Indeed data, sponsor jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs,

so go build your dream team today. With Indeed, get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash

podcast, Terms and Conditions Apply. 98% of the next generation is playing video games.

98% that's male-female does not matter anymore, so that being said, if we're going to reach

the next generation and educate them, we're going to need to kind of meet them where they are.

Welcome to the Millionaire University podcast. I'm your host, Brian Geer,

and back in the saddle with you today, and on this edition of the MU Pod, I'm joined by Titus

Walker. He is the founder and CEO of the Ultimate Endgamer's League. It's where gamers go pro,

and guys, you can think of it as the UFC of gaming. So Titus, welcome to the show,

my buddy. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I'm super excited, man. This is,

so growing up, I'm a millennial. I played games growing up all the time on my PS1,

my PS2, and my PS3. I was always into the sports games, so the NCAA football, the Madden,

the baseball, you name it, but all of my buddies where they weren't even deeper than I were,

but it has been years since I've played games. So I'm going to get back into the swing of it with

you here today, and what we're going to be talking about is building a gamer community that helps

its members acquire real-life skills, but also that I've got a million questions about what this

league is like. So first, let's jump in. Give us your origin story. How'd you get to doing what

you're doing today? Yeah, so my origin story, I started gaming when I was four years old. My dad

actually introduced it to me, and I saw it as this equalizer. It was the one thing that I could do

with my dad that I could actually beat him in at a young age. So it was like, that was, you know,

fantastic to me. I was like, oh my gosh, like this is something that I'm actually able to win at,

whereas throughout the rest of life, obviously, like you can't really beat your father at anything,

until you get much older. And so for me, it became this like really exciting pastime that I could

grow in fast forward. I started doing sports, and I've always been extremely competitive, got into

insurance, and then real estate sales, not as an agent, but I did a new construction. So basically,

real estate development, we would take a plot of land, and we would turn it into an entire community.

And we did my largest community. We did was a super community. It had over 3,000 homes in it.

So, yeah, I did that for eight years. And then one day I was just, I had been searching for like a

side, not a side hustle, but being in real estate and studying real estate through and through,

I realized it was pretty cyclical. So I didn't want to get stuck in a down cycle in real estate.

And so I was like, let me, this was 2019. No, no, 2018. I started looking for other businesses,

tried a few different things. But then in 2019, I was playing the video game and my wife was just

like, you should turn that into a business. And I hadn't thought of gaming as a business. I like

everybody else kind of think of it as like just a consumer activity. That's pretty much it, you know?

And so I started thinking I was like, oh, this is something that I love that I enjoy that maybe I

would, maybe I could turn into a business. So I started doing research, went to a research

community and asked them to do some research on the industry as a whole. And we found that it's

massive. There was a three, you know, 3.3 billion gamers out there. You know, it's almost a $300

billion industry bigger than movies and music combined bigger than sports. It's massive. And

so I started looking into that and I'm like, okay, well, this is something that maybe I could tap

into. And that's what happened. Wow. Okay. So that this is fascinating to me, the concept here. And

basically, you're like the Dana White of gaming. So tell us all about the UEL, the Ultimate

End Gamers League. How did it come to be? You saw the opportunities and we know that much. But

what is it? How does it work? Who's a part of it? Tell me all about that. Love that. I love the

Dana White comparison. So yeah, so essentially what we do is we look at the landscape of gaming.

As we were doing the research, which is something I'm really big into research before you dive into

an industry. And so I started doing some research and realized that the average gamer is playing

24 games a year, which is it sounds like a lot, but it when you're a gamer, you understand,

like that's two games a month. It's not really that crazy. It's kind of just like you're trying

different things. And that was that that was back in 2019, 2020. It's even crazier now. But

with that, we realized we started trying to focus on my thought was if I'm going to service a

community, I'd want to service the average gamer more than that like top 1% of gamers. So I

wanted to have a competition, but I wanted the competition to be more about the average gamer

kind of capture more of that market. And since they're playing 24 games a year, I was like,

I'm going to find a competition that does multiple games. And there wasn't any. And so I was like,

well, I guess then I can create it. This is a gap in the market. You know, I studied markets. I

knew, okay, when you find a gap, if you, if you, you know, attack it, then a lot of times you can,

that's how you create a business that that's worthwhile worth having. And so, and so I did. So I

started coming up with the concept of I studied the NFL NBA, the UFC. And similar to the UFC,

what we did, UFC took fighting games sports game. I mean, I'm sorry, the UFC took to Jitsu

Taekwondo, all of these different fighting genres and created the mixed martial arts, right?

Where you're going to fight and you're going to determine who's who's the best fighter. So it

doesn't really matter, you know, what type of fighting you do, whoever wins, you know, wins. And now

there's that mixed martial artist that covers all the different fighting styles and really needs

to understand how to attack and defend different fighting styles. So we were like, we're going to

do that same concept in gaming. We're going to take all of the different genres of games,

fighting games, sports, racing, shooting and strategy games. We're going to combine them all

and then figure out who's the best gamer, which we call the end gamer. We created that word. And it's

just the master of gaming. And then the ultimate end gamers league was created. So we studied

and created the sport and then master the sport. It took us about four years to five years to

really master the sport. And I always say we had to create, we had to create something that was

fun, fast, fair and entertaining. And so those things, it took some time to be able to develop

about four to five years. But then once that was developed, it was, okay, let's focus on the business.

And that was kind of that was kind of the beginnings of of this sport.

So tell me how this league works. How do you guys make money?

Yeah. So there's a couple ways. One, there's, so we have the sport itself that's holding competition.

And then people are trying to make it into the, the pro side of that sport. And so if you want

it to become a professional within the gaming landscape, you have to, you can go to the combine on

our website and you can play the different games and earn points to then make it into the pros.

That has a, a monthly, that's kind of the B to C model. So that is a monthly subscription. They pay

and they earn points to work their way up into the pros. So it's a clear path all the way up to

professional sportsdom, if you will. Then there's the second piece, which is kind of the more

lucrative piece would be with the community that we have, what we've done is we've taken the

community and then we go back to those that are developing the games. And we say we have a community

of, you know, 100,000 gamers, we're selecting 33 different games for this season. Do you want to

be one of the 33? If so, this is the cost. Wow. Okay. So you go to the game, the game developers

themselves and essentially provide them the opportunity to be part of it. And they pay you to have

their game be featured or be one of the, the league games. Exactly. Yeah. The industry that this

industry is very clouded. You know, when, when we were kids, there was 10 games on the market,

right? Like that was it. Most people had every game. So when you talk about games for like the

Nintendo 64, you can pretty much say any game and anybody that had an Nintendo 64 had that

game because there was, there wasn't so many to choose from. It was like everybody's waiting for

what that next game is. Nowadays, you know, there's millions of games developed on a, every year,

every year. And so, and it's, it's only growing more and more because it's getting easier and

easier to develop games. And so there's no longer that, like, that barrier to entry for a game

developer, which kind of leads to the next piece or the next trouble that is actually getting

into the market. So once you've developed your game, now it's so dense and it's so cloudy,

it's really hard to build a community. And so what we do is give them access to a community like

that, right? You don't have to guess whether your Instagram ad will work or not. It's right there,

right? And so we've started tapping into small communities and large communities like Arizona,

Arizona State University. We run their gaming program. You know, they have almost a million

students a year, largest university in the US. And that gives, you know, the developer access

into that community. That's that's one collegiate example. But then you have like high school,

K through 12 examples that we work with in Atlanta and Maryland and in Virginia. And then

and we can give pieces of those communities, right? Plus the professional community. So,

so it kind of, it scales pretty expensively. Wow. Okay. And then is the benefit to that game,

they get in with this community. But then does each individual member still, you got to like buy

the game, right? So that's kind of the key, right? Like in order to be elite and be in the professionals,

you have to, you have to buy the game, play the game and master the game. And because if you

don't do those things, you're not going to make it in the pros, right? And so, so that gives them

the incentive to participate within the games that are selected. Gotcha. Okay. And are the,

just for for my knowledge, are the games played on traditional systems like Xbox and PlayStation,

or is it computer? What is that? That's the beauty of today. So it's one of the benefits to us

creating this today instead of 10 years ago is now cross-platform is a norm. So you can really

play wherever you're comfortable, you know, PC, mobile, PlayStation, Switch, or Xbox. It's,

it's all the same for most games now because cross-platform has become the norm.

Okay. So tell me how one goes from joining the community and then rising to the ranks of pros.

Obviously they have to play the games, they have to master the games, they have to accumulate the

points. How many people are considered professional and what is their earning potential like?

Yes. So there's about two to two to three hundred professionals. It really depends because there's

12 teams owned by team owners that draft those players and sign them the contracts.

The team owners really only need like seven to 10 professionals on their team. However, some

team you can get up to a roster of 18. So depending on the team owner, some sign more than others

based on other strategies like they like to have a lot more of a selection. They have practice

teams. There's all kinds of stuff that they they would sign more players for. So anywhere from two

to three hundred sometimes even 400 gamers, but it really depends depends on the teams, the seasons

what they're trying to accomplish. Once the player enters the combine and they rise the ranks,

the top players in that combine then go to an in-person event where they are graded. Their skills

are graded. So speaking on the topic of the podcast, what we learned over creating this sport

over that five years is each genre of games teaches a different skill, like a real life skill.

Real change doesn't come from some big flashy moment. It comes from the routines that you commit to.

We know that is entrepreneurs and that's also the idea behind Nutrifull. It's built around a simple

consistent approach to hair health that works from within and delivers visible results over time,

not overnight. Here's what sets Nutrifull apart. It's the number one dermatologist

recommended hair growth supplement brand and it's the number one hair growth supplement brand

used personally by dermatologists. Nutrifull's hair growth supplements are peer reviewed, NSF

certified for sport and clinically tested to measure improvements in hair growth, quality and

strength. Nutrifull offers multiple formulas for men and women tailored to different life stages,

like postpartum or menopause and lifestyle factors such as plant-based diet. So you get the support

that's actually right for you. Adding Nutrifull to your daily routine is easy. Order online,

no prescription needed with automated deliveries and free shipping to keep you on track.

Plus, with a Nutrifull subscription, you can save up to 20% and get added perks like a free

headspace membership to support your hair health journey. Let your hair become one less thing

taking up space in your head and see thicker, stronger, faster growing hair with less shedding

in just three to six months with Nutrifull. For a limited time, Nutrifull is offering our listeners

$10 off your first month subscription and free shipping when you visit Nutrifull.com and

enter promo code M-U. That's Nutrifull.com spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L.com promo code M-U.

Spring in the desert is absolutely divine and honestly, it's my favorite time of year.

The weather is perfect, not too hot yet, just this beautiful crisp warmth that makes you want to

spend every moment outside, and that's exactly why I've been refreshing my outdoor space with

Wayfair this season. I love working outside during this time, so I needed patio furniture that

could handle both relaxation and productivity. Wayfair made it so easy to find exactly what fits my

style and needs from comfortable outdoor dining sets where I can take my morning meetings to

cozy lounge chairs perfect for those afternoon work sessions. What I love about shopping on Wayfair

is how simple they make it to narrow down to exactly what works for your style and budget.

Their filters and thousands of five-star reviews help me find pieces that other customers loved,

and I could see exactly how everything would look in the real outdoor spaces of my home.

The quality is outstanding and these pieces are built to withstand the desert elements while

still looking sophisticated enough for video calls. Plus, Wayfair's installation and assembly

services make the whole process seamless. No stress about putting together a big outdoor

sectional, they handle everything. Find furniture decor and essentials that fit your unique

style and budget. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's w-a-y-f-a-i-r.com.

Wayfair. Every style, every home. Live shopping on What Not Is Exploding. I first heard about the app

when our son started to buy rare tropical plants. He had so much fun buying that he even decided

to start a side business. There was no complicated funnel. It was just him interacting with plant

buyers in real time and it actually worked. I also used it to shop for my family. I did most

of my Christmas shopping on What Not got expensive shoes for my teenagers. Lulu Lemon had a discount.

It was a ton of fun to bid and win. But what's crazy about What Not is that it's not just for small

sellers only. We recently interviewed John Roman on episode 777. He owns Battle Box, a $20 million

E-commerce brand, and a huge part of their growth and customer acquisition is happening on What Not.

It is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Whether it's beauty, collectibles,

electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies, sellers are building real, thriving businesses.

Buyer spend over an hour a day in the app. And sellers sell 10 times more than on other

major marketplaces because you're building real connections, not just listings. And the number

of sellers making over a million dollars a year has doubled. And for a limited time, What Not

will match your first $150 sold in the first month. Visit What Not.com slash sell to start selling.

That's w-h-a-t-n-o-t dot com slash sell. What Not dot com slash sell?

It's not just something you made. It's the privilege that you get to work with your hands.

It's building something that serves a purpose. Proof that you have the grit to keep going.

At Simblant, we understand you take your craft seriously. And we do too. Which is why our

products are built to the highest quality. We put in the work so you can perfect yours with

purpose in every detail and crafted with intention. Simblant, built on craft, visit Simblant.com

to shop. So think of it like this, like a fighting game. Have you ever played a fighting game?

It's been a long time, probably back in the Halo game. Okay, okay. What fighting game was it?

What fighting game was it? Probably Halo effect. That's kind of a shoot-em-up. Yeah, no,

I've probably never played fighting. Okay, okay. So a fighting game like a Mortal Kombat,

for example, which is in my first game ever. Okay. In order to be good at Mortal Kombat,

really what you need to understand is patterns and memorization. That's it. Once you have

memorization of the buttons and what order they have to be put in, you can then start to do

the combos. If you understand the patterns, then you understand not only what your opponent keeps

doing, but also what you need to do in order to get to the next level or beat that opponent.

And so that's a fighting game. That's really all there is to a fighting game.

There are small other skills, but I'm trying to keep it high level here.

Shooting games are really just hand-eye coordination. You played Halo, right? If you understand

with the controller or with the keyboard, that hand-eye coordination of where you need to place

that center of the screen before you pull the trigger, that then becomes the main skill of shooting

games. And Halo, it's very fluid too. So you have to be able to move. You have to be able to

throw a grenade and place it perfectly in front or behind the person, those types of things,

as well as like holding an angle. These are all skills that are utilized in real life, especially

in today's digital environment, where most things are happening on a computer or on a phone.

Racing games are really just precision. Understanding the turns as you're coming through,

I'm understanding exactly how far you need to turn the controller. So precision and an

introductory speed, those types of things need to be understood for a racing game. Sports games

is all decision-making. You played Madden, you said growing up when we were talking earlier,

that's all decision-making, right? Like obviously timing is a piece of it too, but these are skills

that are real life skills. When you're playing a strategy game, it's really just economics. It's

a big piece of it. Understanding a lot of times they have like a gold or something like that. You

gotta understand how much you're using versus how much your opponent's using, how much you're

accumulating. These are all strategy games in competition, right? So those types of skills are all

skills that kind of come together to create what would be like the perfect individual with like

all of those digital skills. They basically, they don't need anything as far as like the digital

environment goes. They have it all, right? And so gamers are known to actually, once they understand

all of those things and get those skills, they exceed in life because of the fact that they can

do all of those things. Patterns, memorization, you know, hand out coordination. These are all

very important things. And so in learning those things, what we found is if we beforehand,

if we do an in-person combine where we test people just on those skills that we don't even,

it's not even in a gaming environment. It's just on those skills. We can tell you exactly what games

that that person will be good at and where they're accept they will excel and where they're going

to need work. And so that's what the coaches and trainers and recruiters do prior to. They just

test them on all those skills. And then they're ranked. And for whatever game they're looking for,

if they're looking for a fighting game player, they look for somebody with really high patterns and

memorization skills. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I recall I've priced my most of my time playing the

NCAA football or the Madden games. And to this day, I credit that to me having knowledge about

football, right? Like defensive schemes and offensive plays like, you know, the Tampa two or the

cover two, I would have as a 35 year old, if I didn't play that grown up, I'd have no idea what

it is. So for me, it enhances the game. I was never a high level football player, but it helped me

understand it. And the same with the baseball games, the hockey games, like I learned each individual

sport without actually having, you know, put a pair of, you know, skates on, right? Which was

cool because I was never going to be a hockey player. But it's fun to have that knowledge. And I

can see the same being true for the fighter games or in the shooter games where you're having to,

you know, make predictive moves or see around the corners. Yeah. Exactly.

And now that, so now that we're getting into education, like education is something that we,

we do a lot of as well. So we're doing camps and teaching kids all kinds of stuff.

Think about what you just said that you had, you learned four different, very complicated sports,

very complicated, right? When you think about football, it is extremely complicated. When you can

go, when you can move what lines matter, what don't, you know, if you think about the rule book,

right, for football, but you completely understood that through a video game, say, and then you have

basketball hockey, how complicated it is hockey, how, how complicated it is based, these are very,

very complicated sports. It's not as easy as put the ball in the hoop. You have to understand,

when you can dribble, when you can't, when you can touch it, when you can't, when you, when you can

pass it, all of those things you learned by playing a game, right? Now imagine if we could teach kids

all of the skills that they need through video games, they would learn that much faster. If you can

pick up a very complicated sport through and through to where you could say you probably know football

at like 90% all from playing a game, right? Like you said, defensive schemes and plays and

these are not things that you can just teach in a classroom, right? But because you played it on a

game, you learned it much faster. So that is kind of the key to all of this. 98% of the next

generation is playing video games. 98, that's male-female, it does not matter anymore. So that being

said, if that's how the next generation consumes, they don't watch movies, they don't watch TV,

they're playing video games, and even the movies that are created are from video games, right? So

every piece of music, movies, cinema, all of that is coming from video games now.

So if we're going to reach the next generation and educate them, we're going to need to kind of

meet them where they are. And that's one of the things that we're doing as well, teaching lots

of different things from game development, coding, building PCs, technology, streaming all through

our education model as well. Okay, so let's dive in on that one a little deeper with the education

model. And you mentioned like coding and things like that. So you can grow up being a gamer,

but then I could see where many would find the interest in how do we actually develop these

games? How do I go make my own game? How do I go become an entrepreneur by making games and

selling them and producing them, things like that? So tell me about the opportunities that you see

or that are available in the industry, and especially from those in your community, do a lot of

them graduate into more advanced actual production of games? Yes, yes. So I have a personal story too.

So my son, he is now five years old. And I introduced him to Mario Odyssey, kind of a I saw it as

like a puzzle platform game, right? So I'm like, okay, I introduced him to Mario Odyssey and like one

and a half two years old. Fast forward, probably about three, four months later, he's playing the game

and he would play it constantly, but I didn't, you know, I didn't know how well or how, you know,

I didn't know how he was doing in the game. Well, one day he kind of hands me the the thing,

right? And again, he's like barely walking. He's like, you know, he can walk. He was he was very

advanced, but still you get the point. He's only been walking for a short period of time. But yet,

he hands me the game and he's like, I need help on this level. So I look at it and I'm like,

hold on a second, this is the last level. Like you, you have beaten, I don't know, you're on the last

level of Mario Odyssey. How did this happen? What, what is going on here? And I'm like, did you,

did you do this? And he's like, yeah, and I'm like, okay, this, this is, this is crazy. And so

fast forward, and we've started to realize he was learning to read as well as he was playing the

game because he had to learn, continue. He had to learn play. He had to learn, like exit, start,

like those types of things. So he had to know what they meant so that he could get to the next thing,

right? So, so we get to when he's, he's like three and a half four years old. He's playing, he's

starting to play like lots of games, Minecraft and and Roblox. And he's, he's really learning.

And he comes to me one day and he's like, hey, he said, I want to, I want to make my own game.

Can I do that? And I was like, I don't see why not. I mean, you can barely read. That's a little

concerning, but, but, I mean, he was definitely starting to learn words and stuff. He wasn't in

kindergarten yet. So I was like, I give him a break. I had him watch some, some videos on coding.

And he's watching them and putting it together. And anyways, he's developed five games at this point.

These five years. Oh, right. And he just sits and develop, I have so many like videos and

stuff because we've played his games. They're good games. But he'll just sit and like play with

it. And when he gets bored, he'll sit and create his own game. He'll be playing the game and then

think, oh, I want to make something like this, right? And then create his own world. And so then

we started to develop this camp. And we started with, we started in Atlanta and we had a bunch of

kids come in. They, they just saw it as a gaming camp. That's what we called it. Just camp and

the gamer. You're going to come in and you're going to play games. Cool. They all show up. There's

tons of them that sign up. We can only take 40, but they had about 200 people sign up. So we take

the 40 and basically what we did was we said, okay, you guys are going to play games. But in order

to play these games, first, we have to build these PCs, right? Now with that motivation, they learned

how to build the PCs in the day. Now they know how to build their own PCs, right? Then it's like,

okay, now step two, let's, let's troubleshoot the PCs. Do they work? Do they not work? Let's

get into the systems and look at the software. How does it work? Follow us. So they learn that

the next day because I'm just trying to get to the game, right? Day three, they're learning branding

and, you know, how to, how to brand themselves, how to develop, how to create their own logos and

all that stuff like that. Then they're learning how to publish and stream and, and stream engineer.

And then they learn how to develop their own games. And then they start playing and then they

have a competition. And then we put on a show for their parents and the teachers and they

have the classmates. And so we created this like gaming, almost like theater, but for video games,

which is like the next generation of theater, right? So in theater, you're doing your play,

and then you put it on for all your parents. In this, you're doing the same thing. You're learning

to develop this game play, right? And then, and then you have a competition amongst each other

that is live streamed and produced all by you, right? As kids and the ages were eight to 16,

I think, was our oldest. And, and yeah, so it became this like, that became this model that,

that works really well, but also it meets them where they are and that, that's where we're at in

education. And that's a wrap for part one of this interview. If you enjoyed this conversation,

so far, be sure to stay tuned for part two. And in the meantime, please leave us a five-star

review on your pod player. It really goes a long way in helping us reach even more fans,

such as yourself. All right, guys, that's it for me, Brian Gearns, signing off. I can't wait to

catch you on the next episode of the millionaire university podcast. And until then, you even start

your business yet. I'll thank you waiting for. We'll see you next time.

Get tickets at smigadoonbroadway.com