The Tim Ferriss Show - #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control

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Starting point is 00:05:06 So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drink AG1 dot com slash Tim. Last time, drink AG1 dot com slash Tim. Check it out. Now would have seen an appropriate time. I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all different disciplines to tease out the habits, routines, lessons learned,

Starting point is 00:06:09 and so on that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today was a blast. We cover a lot that can be applied to life, business, thinking, game design, and a hundred other things, a lot of tactical advice, a lot of specifics. My guest is Justin Gary. Justin is an award-winning designer, author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is CEO of Stoneblade Entertainment and creator of the innovative and award-winning Ascension Deckbuilding Game Series. Prior to designing games, Justin was the youngest ever Magic the Gathering US National Champion. He has studied creativity and applied the principles of design to create dozens of products over his 20 years in the industry for brands that include Marvel, World of Warcraft, and the

Starting point is 00:06:53 Wharton School of Business. Today, he designs, consults, and teaches creativity around the world as a digital nomad, and there is a lot in between. We get into the weeds in the best way possible in this interview, cover a lot of ground, a lot of varied ground. So I hope and think you will enjoy it. You can find Justin online in many places. Think like a game designer.com is one such place. And I highly recommend the podcast by the same name on Twitter at Justin

Starting point is 00:07:20 underscore Gary. And we will link to everything else linked in Stoneblade and much more in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. And without further ado, please enjoy this extremely, extremely tactical and I found very, very entertaining conversation with Justin Gary. Justin, it is nice to see you. Very nice to see you again. Yeah, Tim. Great to see you very nice to see you again yeah Tim great to see you again as well and you are at maybe undisclosed you could disclose but you are overseas at the moment so we are across the pond or many ponds as it were I'm glad we were able to make the timing work. And I thought we could begin with Magic. So Magic, Magic the Gathering, is a game that I never really became familiar with because I was

Starting point is 00:08:14 older guard at that point, Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of the very first editions. But my younger brother, on the other hand, really became immersed in magic and actually competed on some level. And his friends were just obsessed with Magic the Gathering. So could you please, for people who don't have the context, explain what magic is and, I suppose, how you became involved and what that trajectory looked like? Magic's a trading card game invented by Richard Garfield. What trading card game means is that you can buy it, not just like a normal game like Monopoly you'd buy in a store,

Starting point is 00:08:52 it'd be a single box. Here you buy packs of cards like you would baseball cards, and each one has different gameplay elements. And the way I like to describe it for people who don't know is it's sort of like a cross between chess and poker, where you get to decide what deck of cards you a cross between chess and poker where you get to decide what deck of cards you're going to play and what pieces you get to play with. So there's the poker element of I'm drawing a hand of cards and maybe I can bluff what I have and you don't know. And

Starting point is 00:09:13 there's the chess element of there's tactically, once I play those cards, there's tactically ways I use them and kind of battle back and forth. And then of course it has fantasy characters. And so it appeals to people who like Dungeons and Dragons. So you'll be playing wizards and dragons and warriors and stuff like that. And so I first got involved with magic in a pretty funny way, actually. So I used to be on a competitive laser tag league. So I'm a very competitive person by nature. I've been involved in pretty much whatever I do, I'll find some way to compete with it. And in between games of laser tag, people were playing this card game that looked really cool. I'd never heard of before. And I watched them play and I was like, okay, what is that? And so, okay. So I go to the store and I just buy a pack of cards. And as I

Starting point is 00:09:52 mentioned, the cards are totally random. So I just took all the random cards I bought and just went to go play and I got my butt kicked. And it was of course, okay, you actually have to construct and build your deck and build your strategy. And that helps come to life so i came back the next week and okay now i i played a little better and a little better and eventually at one point all the guys from my group were all going to go to a state championship tournament and how old were you at this point i was 16 years old okay yeah so i was i was a young kid so i was like oh hey come along right come on the car ride and you know those are some of my best memories in general just like you know a bunch of guys hanging out, jumping in the car, just talking about games, riding up. And as it turns out, I won that tournament. And so I ended up becoming the

Starting point is 00:10:33 state champion. And that got me an invitation to the national championships. And again, I was not ever taking this sort of seriously. I wasn't even intending to go. In fact, I was supposed to go to debate camp that summer. Yet another thing I was arbitrarily competitive in. And it ended up being my parents couldn't afford to send me that year to debate camp. So last minute, again, my friends were all super supportive here. I ran a tournament at my local game store. They let me run the event. I collected the entry fees from that tournament. I used that to pay for a plane ticket to fly to Columbus where the US National Championships was happening. I slept on a friend's floor. And I was now 17 at this time. And I ended up winning the US National Championships. And that ends up taking me on a career of traveling around the world playing magic for a living. So let's dive into a bunch of things that you mentioned.

Starting point is 00:11:25 And I was not aware of the debate camp component, the debating piece. And I have watched debates. I've never been part of a debate team. Could you just explain for folks what a debate competition looks like or a debate as a game per se. What does that look like and why were you good or at least competent at it? There's a few different categories. I'll just talk about my favorite one, which was called Lincoln-Douglas debate at the time. And that basically means that you have a topic that you're debating. Say the US should have closer relationships with China, or it's better to sacrifice the good of the few for the good of the many, or something like that, some topic.

Starting point is 00:12:11 And then you would have to pick one side of the argument, and there's a judge in the room, and you have a certain amount of time to make your case. Then the other person has a certain amount of time to make their case, and then you have some time for rebuttal, and they have some time for rebuttal. And at the end, the judge or judges would then decide who won. And there's a coin toss to decide who goes first, because that seems like a major advantage. It varies, right? So from round to round, you'll go first or second. And this was sort of how we did it in high school.

Starting point is 00:12:36 My favorite version of debate was what I did in college, which was called parliamentary debate, where you could literally make up any topic you wanted and just start talking about it. And the other side would have to defend the other side. And you would just play and have fun and try to figure out and convince people that this was the way to go. And it was such a fun exercise and just persuasion and kind of tactically how you wanted to frame everything. And it became something I really spent quite a bit of time on and really enjoyed. And then it ended up being very useful for quite a few things later in life. Turns out being able to speak good has value.

Starting point is 00:13:11 So if we look at, say, the Lincoln-Douglas format or the parliamentary, I suppose the former is maybe a better example to use here, knowing nothing about it. But how much time do you have to prepare? Once you are assigned or have chosen one side of, let's just say, the US should have closer ties with China and you're either pro or con, how much time do you have to prepare that? And are you just basically making it up, but you're using the strength of your logic that you construct, even if your assumptions are off, to defeat your opponent? How does that work? So for those formats, the same topic will hold

Starting point is 00:13:45 for a while, for like months, like a season. And so you can prepare very much ahead of time. I see. Got it. So those formats. Then there's other ones like the parliamentary one, where you have no idea what you're going to talk about until you start going up there a lot of the times. That was more fun because it was a little bit more extemporaneous. There's varying degrees. When you have the same topic over and over again, you'd start to notice common threads about how people will present it. And then, you know, you try crazy things. So maybe that the U.S. should have closer ties with China, and you would take a position, actually, the U.S. should not exist anymore. It should dissolve.

Starting point is 00:14:15 And you start making arguments around that. And you just kind of have to take the argument seriously, in a sense, because the job of the judge is to sort of leave outside their preconceived notions and just hear what you have to say. And so having to think on your feet and react and be able to kind of come up with unique answers and change the flow of things was really quite a bit of fun. Okay. So Eden, I will move on to everybody listening. I will move on in a moment, but I really want to understand this because I suspect, as you mentioned, that these are threads that tie into other things later, at least some of them. These are not isolated skills. And if you're practicing, say, the parliamentary style, and you are developing this approach to structured thinking and presenting,

Starting point is 00:15:03 and you don't know what you're going to be speaking about until you really sort of get on the stage and somebody hands you the mic. It's like a freestyle rap battle. When you get up and then you give your spiel, how do the judges judge? What does that look like? Because presumably they might not know anything about the topic that you're discussing, so they can't really fact-check a lot of what you're saying, I would assume. Yeah, that's right. There's no live fact checking in these formats. So you kind of just have to, it's about your persuasive ability.

Starting point is 00:15:32 So if I were going to break this down into kind of core skill sets and what the judges are doing, which is also what I'm doing as a competitor is anytime my opponent is saying something, right, I'm writing down their points, right? So I'm breaking them down into kind of concrete notes. And I want to make sure that for each point that's brought up, I am addressing it in some key way. And a lot of times I can make some broader point that will maybe take out a few of their points. And because you only have a certain amount of time, how efficiently you're able to use that time to both refute the points that they're saying, as well as bring up your own points that are hopefully harder to refute. So it becomes a kind of process of being very good at listening

Starting point is 00:16:09 and taking notes, then being able to structure how do you want to set up your replies so that you're gaining time advantage, if you will, with your persuasive ability to give you more time to make your own row of arguments so that hopefully they don't have time in their thing to properly address and attack everything. Okay, great. So as promised, I'm going to move forward. This is great. I've never been asked about this before, so this is fun. Yeah, trying to do my job as best I can. And returning to magic, so you mentioned that led to all these adventures traveling around the world competing. What does that mean? Could you explain what that looks like in terms of incentives, stakes? How profitable is it for someone to be a full-time magic player?

Starting point is 00:16:58 I imagine it depends on the person, but what does it mean to travel around the world and compete? We're taking this back now, date myself a little bit, but this is 97 when I won the US National Championships. And the core of my career was about the six years from 97 to about 2003. And that time there was what was called the Magic Pro Tour, which was put on by the company that made the game as a way to promote it. And they would have millions of dollars of prizes available. So at any given tournament you could win. So my biggest tournament winnings would typically be in the $30,000 range. So a pro tour in Houston where I won that or these different tournaments. So to give you a sense,

Starting point is 00:17:34 first place in one of those tournaments was $30,000-ish, all the way down till top 32, maybe you'd get $1,000. And then you'd have to get invited to these tournaments. There'd be maybe 300 people-ish that would get invited. And so I would do a tournament in Prague. Then there'd be another one in Sydney. Then there'd be another one in Seattle. There'd be another one in Tokyo. And so we got to literally just meet up. And again, I'm in high school. I'm a teenager, right? So this is just like crazy. It's a lot of money. Oh my God, it's crazy money, right? So I was just like, such a fun thing. But when you think about it as an adult, it wasn't a crazy, crazy amount of money, but it was great at the time. You can't

Starting point is 00:18:10 win every tournament. But when I was playing at my peak, it was maybe $80,000 a year I was making. So it's still not- That's no joke. No joke. At that time, it was great. I mean, it's how I paid my way through college. Better than flipping burgers, I'll put it that way. What was your major in college? I was a philosophy major. How did you choose philosophy? Well, as you might guess, I love debating. I mean, I've always been very interested in just sort of talking about the deep questions, right? Trying to get down to the fundamentals of

Starting point is 00:18:38 what is interesting and what matters. And I tried a few different majors, history, and I was on my path to be a lawyer because my parents are lawyers and that's what I thought I was supposed to do. But I found most classes, when I went to them, the job as a student in the class was to regurgitate whatever it was that the professor told you back to them. And that bored the hell out of me. Whereas in philosophy, the job was to make a reasonable argument. It didn't matter, just like in debate, right? It didn't matter what your position was. It was, can you defend it? Do you have good logic for it?

Starting point is 00:19:10 I loved being proven wrong. I loved when I would have, this was a kind of strength and a weakness. I loved debating with people, and I loved it. When someone told me something I didn't know or convinced me I was wrong, I was like, that's amazing. That's great. It took me a very long time to realize most people are not like that. In high school, I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say. So I learned to be a little bit more cautious and compassionate in my conversations with people, but I really enjoyed

Starting point is 00:19:35 it. So philosophy let me explore that space of really what matters in the world and what matters to me and really refine my thinking and get challenged on my thinking when I was unclear or fuzzy. I want to mention for people who may not notice this pattern, that on this podcast, there is disproportionate representation of former philosophy majors. However, that could be severe survivorship bias. I'm sure there are many, many philosophy majors who do not end up on large podcasts. However, it is notable to me, right? You have people who are deeply interested in philosophy who also end up in these conversations with me. Reid Hoffman would be another example who I'm not sure if he majored in philosophy, but he has taught philosophy and takes it very, very seriously. Why were you comfortable and maybe even invigorated

Starting point is 00:20:26 by being proven wrong or converted in that way? Did that come from being raised in a family of lawyers? Did it come from something else? What contributed to that? Yes, I think there's two factors here. I think one, you're absolutely right. My parents were wonderful in the sense that as a kid, I could argue my way to a later bedtime, or I could argue my way to, hey, if I finish my homework, I can get an extra setting of dessert or whatever. They encouraged if I could kind of debate my way to something, then I could cutthroat games of Monopoly around the kitchen table quite a bit. And I found they did. They reinforced that after the game, what did you learn? If you lost, what did you learn from it? And that's the biggest thing that I credit for certainly my success in Magic.

Starting point is 00:21:18 And I've tried to apply that everywhere else in my life is that when you lose, which you inevitably are going to lose in life. It doesn't matter what it is that you look first to like, okay, what could I have done differently? How could I have set this up differently so that I wouldn't even be in this position, right? It's easy when you're playing a game like Magic where your opponent draws a lucky card. It's a one out of 60 that they draw that card and they beat you because of it. And you'd hear in the hallways, other people would be complaining about what's called bad beats, right? I got unlucky. Oh my God. But the best players wouldn't do that. The best players would say, actually, you know what? If five turns earlier, I had made this different play, it wouldn't have mattered

Starting point is 00:21:51 what card they drew at that turn. And that skill set was something that was drilled into me. And it's something I definitely credit quite a bit of success across a variety of fields. This might seem like a strange question, but do magic competitors or did they study games in the way that chess players study historic games of chess where those moves and decisions are recorded in some way? I'm not sure if it lends itself to that. Oh, it absolutely does. And people would break these things down so again let's we're going to take ourselves in the way back machine right 97 98 this era the internet is still relatively new right still relatively light and so people would go yeah super new to what at the time was called the magic dojo which you can now find like the

Starting point is 00:22:39 internet archives and it was where everybody would post tournament reports of okay here's what i played here's what happened and people would comment on them and break down and you know kind of more classic bulletin board style and that's where the core of magic strategy and discussion started to form and now there's dozens of sites and dunces and places where you can find this but it was a you know unlike with chess where people have been doing this strategy and breaking down games for hundreds of years, magic's 30 years old or whatever. And at the time it was very new. And so you got to see the origins of these strategies come together and break down individual games and individual moves. And it became obsessions. I mean, if you look at my old college notebooks, they are covered in magic deck ideas and scribbles, and at least as much as there

Starting point is 00:23:25 are notes about philosophy or whatever it was I was supposed to be studying. What were the main innovations? If you had to try to identify some game design elements that led to or contributed to magic becoming such a global phenomenon, what would you say were the innovations? I mean, there's definitely the slot machine-like dopamine potential of buying these packs, just like buying baseball cards, right? But what else is there in the game that made it at least have the possibility of exploding in the way that it did? There's a lot of factors. There's kind of a deep answer, but we have a long-form podcast, so if you don't mind.

Starting point is 00:24:11 Love deep answers. Yeah. Take all the time you want. I teach game design, and there's sort of five major categories of what people are looking for out of games, and magic hits all of them in ways. So I'll talk about the categories first, and then I'll talk about why magic succeeded in such an incredible way. So the first is immersion.

Starting point is 00:24:28 You're looking for certain experiences or you're looking to tell, craft a story. The second is connection, right? You're looking to socialize. You want to help other people. You want to kind of connect with others. The third is aspiration. This can be in competition.

Starting point is 00:24:41 This can be like achievements. You want to win. You want to prove you're better than, prove you can achieve something. Then the fourth is growth. You want to learn. You want to continue to kind of move up and improve your skills. And the last is expression. This idea that you want to customize or role-playing works this way because we express different parts of ourselves through role-playing. And so those are the kind of the major categories. And I think magic allowed people to both not only have these competitions like I was doing, but it allowed people to customize and grow in a world where it's infinitely deep. At a certain point with chess, it's a deep game, but there's only so many pieces. I can learn them all. I can know kind of the frame I'm playing it. With magic, there's constantly new cards coming. There's constantly new things to do. And I get to own, I get to customize and own my experience. So to relate it to something like you're more familiar with, right, Dungeons and Dragons, the idea that you get to tell the story, that you get to create the character is so powerful

Starting point is 00:25:38 and so immersive. And magic is very similar. If you want to build a deck with all elf cards, you could do that. If you want to build a deck that has every card that you could imagine and is 300 cards deep, you can do that. If you want to be the hyper-competitive, hyper-focused guy, you could do that. There are so many experiences that you get to, in a sense, design your own game. And it's one of the things that I've learned, much like you talked about a lot of philosophy majors end up on your podcast, a lot of the game designers started from a game like Magic or Dungeons and Dragons. And because as you play, you're crafting your own experience.

Starting point is 00:26:11 And I think that was such a unique and powerful thing. And Dungeons and Dragons could be a little intimidating for people because it's so open-ended. No, it's so intimidating. It's so complex, or at least it can be. It can be. It's a real commitment. Exactly. Whereas Magic, you're playing inside of these box and these rules, but once you start exploring it, then this whole world opens up. And I think that was really the magic of it, quote unquote.

Starting point is 00:26:35 And it really made it feel like something that was very new and spawned an entire genre of games. And I remember at one point, I think it was certainly at the time, I think TSRr i was reading this book called i believe it's art and arcana or arcana i'm not sure how you pronounce that word properly even though i've read it a thousand times which is a visual history of dungeons and dragons and at some point they realized one of the major stumbling blocks was people having to develop from scratch their own characters. And they provided out-of-the-box templates, which was one of the ways they jump-started wider adoption. It's giving people an easy place to start with

Starting point is 00:27:16 some type of positive constraints, let's just say, in a sense. And that makes me think about Magic. Now, can you remind me and listeners of who developed Magic? So Richard Garfield was the lead designer. He created the game, along with, of course, a lot of other people that supported it. But he was the lead, the creator. I remember listening to, and you're going to have to fact check me on this, but I think I'm recalling this correctly, listening to at least one, maybe two interviews with Richard on your podcast, Think Like a Game Designer. And he was talking about game development and I guess folks who are auditing the cards and the decks and the idea that some cards would get retired or removed from circulation or banned because they were too powerful. But if there were no cards that were too powerful, that they were also erring on the

Starting point is 00:28:10 side of caution, something along those lines. Could you expand on what I'm very clumsily trying to recall from an interview I listened to a year ago? So there's this idea in games of balance, which is a term that people throw around a lot but gets very confused. And the principle of it is that you don't want some part of your game to be so unfair that nobody can beat you. If it's a, in tic-tac-toe, if you get to make three moves at once, that would be pretty unfair, right? The game is already over. You've got your three in a row, and that doesn't make any sense. So the game's no fun. So the idea is you want to make sure that everything, you know, there's no one strategy that's too good. But there's also, some people think that that means everything needs to be

Starting point is 00:28:50 exactly the same. And that's also not true. Because the idea, if every card is just as equally good as every other card, then that you deny people that discovery. You deny people that ability to learn and say, oh, wait, hold on. As a new player, you don't know anything. And then you can learn, oh, actually, you know what? This card's better than this card. Or the excitement of chasing and finding something that's very exciting that now you can combine with something else that you have, and suddenly that gets better. And so the way I define balance is not everything has to be equal. It's that there's no one strategy that should be unbeatable.

Starting point is 00:29:20 The best analogy is if you think rock, paper, scissors, perfectly balanced game. Rock is great, but if I know you're going to throw rock, I've got a plan. I could throw paper and I'm going to be okay. So there's a lot of ways that you can approach balance, but that can give you a sense of what it should look like. And so for Richard, he wanted to make things that were exciting and chase, and you're really hoping you open up in a pack. Of course, he didn't have any idea that the game was going to be as popular as it was when he talked about in the podcast episode that he thought you would just never even see all the cards that some people would have a couple of packs and other people would have a couple of packs and you just discover it as you went.

Starting point is 00:29:55 And that is actually, it's an exciting prospect, but very quickly people would buy all the cards and now there's spoilers on the internet and everybody sees everything immediately. And so it's changed a lot since his initial concept. As the next lily pad, I want to explore one of two things. We're going to get to both. So you can choose which you think makes sense to talk about first. So the first option is your path to where you are now as a senior partner at a law firm. Just kidding. So law school. The other is what happened in your magic life after winning the nationals and that story. So which of those do you think makes sense to tackle first? Or you could talk about both in tandem, either or. We'll go in kind of chronology order. So the Magic career kind of has its arc before my law career has its much shorter arc. I'm 17 years old.

Starting point is 00:30:51 I win the US National Championships. This was like a huge, awesome, cool thing for me. But then I go to the World Championships. And at that point in Magic's life cycle, the US was dominant. The US had never lost a World Championships ever. And I was not just me, but a team of people that were representing the US was dominant. The US had never lost a world championships ever. And I was not just me, but a team of people that were representing the US. And unfortunately, we did not win. We did not do very well. And so that world championships, I was then had this albatross around my neck of being the first loser US national champion. This is the story I was

Starting point is 00:31:20 telling myself. So I was like, okay, this is not great. And my career was good. I was doing good, but it was something that always stuck with me. And so I kept wanting to try to get back on the national team to redeem myself. So fast forward five years later, finally, the US loses again, loses to the Germans. So now I'm not the only loser. Not that I was rooting against the US, but it was nice to not be the only loser. And then the very next year, I make it back on the U.S. national team. And so this is my chance, like my chance at redemption after six years. And I'm with two other people on the team. And the two people that are on the team with me, they were like pretty new to the game. They were, you know, kind of had come out of nowhere, just like I did when I first started.

Starting point is 00:32:04 And I was so committed to making sure we did well. I paid to fly both of them to Boston where I was living at the time to like stay at my place and work. And we trained for like month, month and a half together with my team, who is a year move games was the local store and group we would play test with. We trained, we slept on my couch. We worked together to be able to make it back to that year. The world championships were in Berlin. So we're going into enemy territory and it comes down to literally, we make it to the final table, to the final game. It's comes down to me playing this match.

Starting point is 00:32:39 And you know, this is, we've got stage lights, we're covering it. This is like everything I have worked for. And there's some online records of the experience, but I am like, I remember just sort of feeling in that moment that, you know, I'd been in tournaments, I'd won tournaments, I'd lost tournaments. There's a certain amount of excitement and pressure. But for this one, it was so much of a personal story,

Starting point is 00:32:58 a personal kind of drama that was playing out for me. And I drew my hand the first time for this final match where everything's on the line, people are watching. And there's a rule in Magic where if you don't like your hand, if you don't like the starting cards you have, you can take a mulligan. And what that means is you throw the cards away, but you get one less card.

Starting point is 00:33:16 And it's a big deal. Less cards is a huge disadvantage in the game. But I draw my hand, and I'm trying to make this decision. And I'm just like, all right, do I deal with what I have or do I just take a shot? And I didn't like the hand. I wasn't going to let the world championships be decided on that hand. So I mulligan, throw the cards away. My teammates are groaning in the background.

Starting point is 00:33:35 It's like, all right, here we go. Shuffle up, draw the hand. And it becomes one of those moments where you kind of see it come together. The hand was good enough. We start playing it out. I get some board advantage. My opponent's kind of on his back foot and he's got a couple of tricks. There's some cards I have to play around. I'm not really sure. And then finally, you know, I'm able to kind of get to the point and win this fight after however long people rushed the stage, like able to finally like take that off of my back. And it was a very

Starting point is 00:34:04 exciting moment for me. It was a very fun journey. And it was a result of a lot of hard work, right? It was a lot of dedication that got there. But it kind of felt for me, it was like the end of my magic career. It was the thing that I had been striving to do, that I kind of checked those boxes. And that was kind of what let me move to this next stage. So before we get to your short arc in the world of law, was there something, coming back to your previous comment, that you learned after losing on the world championship stage first? Was there something you learned or decided to change about your approach after that?

Starting point is 00:34:41 I think that, you know, we're talking about years of gap in between, right? And so what I, what I did learn and the major thing that I realized in that, like magic is generally a single person game. I'm playing a match against somebody else in competition, but in this case, it's a team game. And I think the biggest shift in focus was I didn't just think about myself. Like I had to think about how do I lift everybody else up and all thrive together to be able to make it through. And it really changed the way I focused there, changed the way I focused with other teams I've worked with.

Starting point is 00:35:13 It made a huge impact. And then just being willing to, again, come back from a loss and not let it discourage you that you can't overcome it. But I think that being able to work, typically most of the games I've played have been single player. Whether it was debate or wrestling or most of Magic, it was all about like, I'm here to win. And I think my shift in mindset was, no, I'm here for us to win. And that was a really huge turnaround for me.

Starting point is 00:35:37 Yeah, it's a big shift in terms of looking through the prism. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. These days, every new potential hire can feel like a high stakes gamble for your small business. So you want to be 100% certain that you have access to the most qualified candidates. That's why you should check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the right people for your team faster and for free. Add your job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring. Simple tools like screening questions make it easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience,

Starting point is 00:36:18 so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. It's why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster. So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Tim. That's linkedin.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. So law school. Yes. Tell us about law school. Just to frame this, right? So I've already mentioned both of my parents are lawyers. My mom's a lawyer. My dad's a lawyer. My stepdad's a lawyer. I was debate captain. I was supposed to be a lawyer. That was just like my path from as early as I can remember. That's what I was supposed to do. And even though I had been making a living

Starting point is 00:37:04 and traveling around the world playing magic, at no point did it ever occur to me that I would can remember that's what I was supposed to do. And even though I had been making a living and traveling around the world playing Magic, at no point did it ever occur to me that I would make a living in games. None. It was just, oh, this is a fun thing to do while I'm in college. I had this mental block. And so graduate, go get into NYU Law. I teach the LSAT for a while. I go to law school. And I'm lucky. I'm a pretty happy guy by default. But this was the first time I was really depressed. I was very unhappy for an extended period of time. And I will remember very specifically, there's one day I'm getting up. I'm living in Brooklyn, snowing outside, just covered in ice and the floor. And I have to get trudged up and put on

Starting point is 00:37:44 all of these ridiculous clothes and go get on the A train and pretend like I'm not staring at anybody else. Everybody has to studiously avoid looking at anybody else in New York. That's just the rule. And make it all the way in, have my Boston cream donut for breakfast because that's just how I lived back then. And I go into this NYU Law Library, which is like, you could picture this just cavernous giant library with old oak and towers of books. This was back when you had to use books to learn things. It was a wild time. And I checked out the law books I had to read before class. And I stack them up, these just towers around me, and I'm just there. And I'm there for hours,

Starting point is 00:38:23 just reading case law and just not very happy. But a couple hours later, I realized I got to get to class. And so I sit up and I have this jolt of pain through my spine, jolt of pain. I can't, I can barely move. I'm hobbling to get out of there. And I realized I threw my back out from reading, from reading. That is how unhealthy I was, how I was over about 40 pounds heavier than I am now, how just like miserable I was. And I like, this was my first clue that I'm on the wrong path. And I think this is something I just, it's a really important lesson. I think for, I imagine there's a lot of overachievers in your audience and that this path of trying to win whatever games in front of you, it can be way worse to win the wrong game than even

Starting point is 00:39:05 to lose one that you actually enjoy playing. And that was a big shift for me. And fortunately, that summer, I had an opportunity to go, instead of interning at a law firm, I got to go work on a Marvel Comics card game, a Marvel versus DC Comics card game for a company called Upper Deck in San Diego. So a summer internship working on comic book games, that sounded great. And so I flew across country to go and work there for the summer. And again, even though I knew I was miserable, even though I'd had this terrible experience, even though I now had a opportunity in front of me, it's still, my assumption at this point was, I'm going to go back to law school. I'm going to go back and that's just, I got to finish that path. But I come out to start working on games and I am in love with it. I'm going to go back and that's just, I got to finish that path. But I come out to start

Starting point is 00:39:45 working on games and I am in love with it. I'm super passionate about it. I'm enjoying it. Again, we're debating these really interesting ideas about design and definitely happy to dig into what that looks like. But then when they offer me a full-time job, I'm still stressing about this, you know, and it's still finally, when I make the decision, I tell my mom, she, she literally cries when I tell her I'm leaving law school to go become a game designer, right? Like it was so hard. And I look back and it's so silly to me. This is one of the things you've taught me. I didn't have these words at the time, but I learned it through you, right? This idea of like fear setting where in fact, I wasn't really giving up anything. I could always go back to law school, but it just didn't feel like that at the time. And so being able to break out of that spell

Starting point is 00:40:23 and then go follow a path that was really passionate for me and that I was really excited about, one of the best decisions I ever made. How did you find the internship? This was fortunate because of my magic career. They had reached out to me to kind of just like vet their game and, you know, kind of check it out and stuff. So some of the other people on the magic pro tour, people who I'd known had already kind of been hired there. So they were like, hey, and they knew I was miserable. I would chat with them. They're like, hey, come out for the summer, come work on this thing. You got nothing to lose kind of deal. Has your mom come around or is she still hoping for that day when you returned to law school?

Starting point is 00:40:58 My mom has come around. I'm sure she'll listen to this episode. Hi, mom. She did. And this is the thing. The people in our lives, there's a lot of pressure that we all feel, right? Whether it's from parents, from friends, from like, they want the best for us, right? So you just want us to be happy and safe and comfortable. And, you know, you've got to realize that you, in order to find the path that you actually want for yourself, the path that you will be fulfilled by, you got to be uncomfortable. You got to be unsafe, right?

Starting point is 00:41:24 Parents, I think, try to protect their kids so much. In reality, you can't. You've got to be able to push past that. And she knows that now, and she was very happy it all worked out. Yeah. All right. Well, we're going to fill in the gaps for those people who aren't your mom listening. Hi, mom. Since we have a lot to fill in, and look, now I feel like I should defend your mom also. Certain paths are more predictable than others. There is the perception and maybe even the reality of safety, consistency, stability with certain choices.

Starting point is 00:41:56 But as you said, choosing the right game is more important than winning the game that just happens to be in front of you. And at least certainly in my experience and the experience of a lot of people on this podcast. And just because something is unpredictable does not automatically make it unsafe. It just makes it less certain. And as you put it, many of these things, for instance, I'll give you another example. And this is very analogous when people invoke the names of, say, Zuckerberg or someone else who dropped out

Starting point is 00:42:26 as this throwing caution to the wind, burning the boats behind them to take the risk of entrepreneurship, whenever possible, I try to point out that's actually not the case for most people who, say, take a leave of absence from a Harvard or Stanford. They can go back anytime they want to go back. Yes, 100%. And again, you've said this better than honestly anybody. This idea that most of the fears that we have, this resistance to uncertainty is just made up in our head. There are so many ways that you can recover and go back. And if you can just remember that, I could have gone back to law school later on when I quit my game design job to start a company. I could always get another job. Those illusions of uncertainty and fear, if you can push past that, it changes everything. I mean, most of the times we take risks,

Starting point is 00:43:12 we're not jumping off cliffs or into burning buildings. It's just, okay, yeah, your career takes a different path or you're behind in school or whatever. It's a very low cost. Most often recoverable. So I'll link to fear setting and people can just search fear setting, like goal setting with a hyphen in it. And all sorts of things will pop up if you just search that or go to tim.blog.com slash TED, because that was the topic of my TED talk, I suppose quite a few years ago now. But moving on from fear setting for a moment, it might come back into the conversation, who knows. But what did that first year or six months,

Starting point is 00:43:50 month could be the first week, however you want to frame it, of designing games look like? What was that experience like? It's a really fun question because people just make this assumption that because I was good at playing games, then that means I would be good at making games. And they are 100% different skills. I did not think of myself

Starting point is 00:44:10 as a creative person. I thought there was just some kind of like magic special secret sauce that other people had, and I was just going to fake it and go out there and see what happened. So when I go there, I'm having serious imposter syndrome. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to make this come to life. And I researched a ton. I've read some great books on creativity. A whack on the side of the head is one I'd recommend. And I started to talk to other people who I did respect as designers and kind of break it down.

Starting point is 00:44:38 And over time, I realized that there is no, there's no thing that differentiates a creative person from a not creative person other than process. And so as an analytically minded person, I was able to break it down into what I call the core design loop, which is a six step process of how do you create not just games, but I think every creative field that applies to. And so learning that, and I was very lucky. I'll talk about the details of it. I won't leave you hanging on that piece. I won't let you leave me hanging.

Starting point is 00:45:08 You're good at that. Just to immerse the experience of it, right? I was lucky in a sense in that I went to go work at a company where I had a lot of friends that were already there. And I had immediate deadlines. This game is going to release. You have to turn over the file with the cards and the things within two months. And so there was no choice but to act. What I say is that deadlines are magic. It doesn't matter if you have no idea what you're doing. You have a deadline.

Starting point is 00:45:33 Yeah. I was literally going to just say the exact same thing verbatim. It's like, what a beautiful constraint. It's just remarkable what you get done. So that was, I think, a real powerful tool about why. So one, really short deadlines, and my job was on the line, so I had stakes, right? And I didn't want to go back to law school. And two, that I had other people that I could ask and talk to who were smarter than I was, who had done it before, and I could get some insight into, right? So being able to kind of find either books or mentors or other people that you can talk

Starting point is 00:46:02 to has also helped accelerate it. That eventually turned into this kind of step-by-step process. So if you'd like, I can go into that now or we can jump to other stuff. Let's actually, before we get into the process, could you explain why a whack on the side of the head was impactful for you or what you took from that that was valuable? Because in the course of doing homework for this conversation, I noticed that you had mentioned this book before, and I actually have a deck of cards designed by the same author.

Starting point is 00:46:32 But could you speak to, I have not read the book, however, could you speak to why that had an impact or why you recommend it? So it's nice in that it helps to, in a sense, demystify creativity and just bring it down to like a very simple granular level. I'll give some examples. So, you know, one of the principles in it is that I've used all the time is basically, and I forget how they word it in the book, but basically like turn the object around in your mind, right? If you take something that you normally think of one way, how many different ways can you look at that same thing? So if you have a pen, you can say, all right, well, what do you do with a pen? Well, you can write with it. Okay, well, no, all right. I could use it to help

Starting point is 00:47:11 force me to smile by biting it. I could use it to prop up my microphone. I could use it, right? You could like trying exercises that give you different frames were very powerful and ways to like break you out of your thinking. The idea of using random constraints. So one of the exercises that I encourage anybody to do if they want to is like, if you're having a problem, some creative challenge, some block, go to a random book on your shelf, open it to a random page and point to a random word, right? Some substantive word. Now figure out how that word relates to whatever your problem is and journal on that for like five minutes, 10 minutes. And you'll be amazed at how all of a sudden it can crack open something because we get so linearly focused on the problem

Starting point is 00:47:49 in front of us. And even a completely random constraint can open up the door for you. I will give one more to just move past the quote unquote right answer. You may have an answer and say, okay, that's fine. And then you stop. Most people stop. Instead say, okay, I'm going to look for the third right answer, the fourth right answer, the fifth, right? I'm going to look beyond that to go deeper and find more things. So just these little exercises, and you could just do those exercises would suddenly see like, oh, wow. Okay.

Starting point is 00:48:13 I'm already seeing myself be more creative. I'm already seeing myself do more than I was. The book was impactful because it could just like, by the time I was done reading it, I had already seen myself do creative things I didn't think I could do in ways that sound pretty stupid. I'm sure to me saying it like, Like, pick a random page in a book, be more creative. Trust me, try it. It works. Without having read that book, I've used this approach in actually writing teachers that I had long ago, back when I had hair and was in school,

Starting point is 00:48:37 also would offer these types of random constraints. It's almost like the I Ching approach to creativity, right? It's like, okay, you just throw a bunch of Scrabble tiles on the floor and you pick the three that are closest to you and that's your constraint or that's the filter in a sense or what directs the exercise. Very, very powerful. And I wanted to mention since you were talking about going past the right answer and finding the third right answer, actually reminded me of something a former guest said, Derek Sivers, who's one of my favorite people. He's been on a few times. And when I asked him who he thought of when he heard the word successful, he said, well, my first answer might be, say, Richard Branson, but that really

Starting point is 00:49:23 ultimately depends on his goals in life. And if his goal was to have a quiet life undisturbed by entrepreneurship, then that wouldn't be successful. So let me skip the first answer, get to the second answer, get to the third answer. And he said, what you should ask people is, who is the third person who comes to mind when you hear the word successful? And it's really a powerful heuristic that you can use in in all sorts of ways all right so that's a snapshot on a whack on the side of the head let's talk about the the core loop before we jump into the core design loop i'm going to give one more thing it's not from a whack on the side of the head but it's something i've actually developed more recently as a process that i find super

Starting point is 00:50:02 valuable and one of the things that we try to do in our company is always surface our assumptions. There's a lot of things where you're assuming a game is going to be fun because of this. We assume people are looking for that. We assume we're making this category of game, et cetera. And a really great exercise to do that's in this spirit is once a quarter,

Starting point is 00:50:19 we'll do an assumptions challenging exercise. And what that means is you surface every assumption you can. You can do this by yourself or if you're on a team, everybody writes down on their own all their assumptions. You put them all up on a shared board or a shared Google Doc if you're doing remote like we are. And then you one by one, okay, what if that weren't true? Or to use your terminology, what if I did the opposite?

Starting point is 00:50:38 And it's so powerful because sometimes it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes it's like, okay, that doesn't make any sense. You move on. But without fail, by the time we finish that exercise, we find some core assumption that all of a sudden changes everything. And that ability to just take what you assume to be true, one, making it explicit in the first place is super powerful, just so you know really what you're doing. And then two is this inversion process is incredibly powerful. Could you give any examples just to make it a little concrete

Starting point is 00:51:07 in the minds of folks listening, of what those assumptions might be? I made this game called Soul Forge with Richard Garfield, the guy that created Magic. And we did this over a decade ago. And we made it as a digital trading card game. And so purely you play it on your phone, no physical objects at all.

Starting point is 00:51:23 The game was successful. We ran it for a few years and eventually we took it down. And we were talking about, we wanted to bring it back because we loved the game. We wanted to bring it back. And one of the exercises we did was, okay, Soul Forge is a digital game. And then we're like, wait, what if it's not? Like, what would that look like? And we had built it to be a digital game.

Starting point is 00:51:40 But then all of a sudden we're like, well, now it's seven years later, digital printing technology is way better than it was. You can actually algorithmically create one of a kind cards and bring things. And that started us down this road of investigating this new technology. And so the new version of Soulforge called Soulforge Fusion is now a physical card game that has this new technology built into it, which never would have happened if we had just gone with our assumptions of, oh, okay, we're going to remake the same game again. So that's like one example of this was recently impactful for me in this. sure I would do another one, but I've been very strongly considering it. And I've been not in written form, which would be more helpful, I think, but in a sort of meandering mental form, which is sort of a mix of reverie, skepticism, and daydreaming,

Starting point is 00:52:39 looking at some of the basic assumptions. Is it a book? I think of it as a book, but does it even need to be a book, period? Or I should say question mark. And if it is a book, for instance, generally, if you're going through the publishing process or you have been through the publishing process, your thinking has been shaped in a certain way over and over again. You're like, okay, I have to do print, audio, ebook. And you sell all of those to one person. Well, what if we split those up? What if there was no print whatsoever? What would that look like? And just testing these very basic assumptions, right? And I'll give you one example also, which people might not realize, or if you're outside of publishing, why would you

Starting point is 00:53:24 realize this? But none of my books in the US have ever gone to paperback. And if you were to ask most authors, why have you gone to paperback? The answer would generally be something along the lines of, well, the publishers always do that. A year and a half after the hardcover, they lower the price to make the market larger for the book, and you come out in paperback. And I was like, but if you look at the math, does that make any sense for you? And then they think about it and they're like, well, let me think about that. Okay, I was making 15% on each hardcover book, which is already discounted on Amazon to something very affordable. And now when I go to paperback, wait a second,

Starting point is 00:54:06 my royalties just got cut to seven and a half or six and a half. Now I have to sell twice as many books to make the same amount in royalties. Oh shit, that makes no sense whatsoever. It's also not really relevant in a world where ebook is an option, if that makes any sense. If somebody is looking for a lower price, they can buy it on eBooks. So hence, from the beginning, none of my books have ever gone to paperback. Okay. So let's, if you're open to it, we can certainly, I mean, I love, as you know, you know this very well. I love digging into testing assumptions because your assumptions are the operating system that governs your life in a way. And you want to make sure those rules can be justified on some level. But maybe it makes sense to hop into the core design loop and talk about that a bit.

Starting point is 00:54:53 I think it's a perfect segue because exactly what we're talking about with assumptions is going to come into play in the core design. So the core design loop is how games are made. It's how creative projects are done. But we're going to focus on games. That's the kind of main topic I teach it in. So the core design loop is six steps. It's inspiring, framing, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and iterating.

Starting point is 00:55:15 So step one is inspiring. What is it that's driving you? What's the core of what you're excited about? So it could be you want to make a game for this IP, this world that you love. Could be you want to make a cock punch game. Could be you want to make a game about fantasy warriors, right, hypothetically speaking. Or miniatures, right, if you love miniatures.

Starting point is 00:55:32 Yeah, exactly, yeah. You love miniatures, you know you want to make a miniatures game, right? Could be a component, could be a theme, could be a mechanic, could be you want to make a game about dog walking, whatever it is, right? You're excited, what is at the heart of what you're doing? And in general, that heart is going to be an experience

Starting point is 00:55:44 you want to create for your audience. But you start at something, whatever high-level thing gets you excited. Then framing is a lot what we talked about, right? We want to put a box around it. We want to put constraints around it. And so that constraint should always include a deadline, ideally a short deadline to whatever your next step is. So I'm going to have a prototype to test in two weeks. It could be one of the most common mistakes I see game designers make. They come to me, okay, I want to make a game that's like Halo and World of Warcraft

Starting point is 00:56:09 and Grand Theft Auto, but all rolled into one with a bunch of cool stuff happening. These are massive games that take millions and millions of dollars and teams of people. It's like, well, you've never made a game before. Maybe let's start with a simple card game. Constraints with your components, constraints with time,

Starting point is 00:56:26 what's the space I'm playing in? Step three is brainstorming. And brainstorming is where you ideate and come up with your ideas. And I'm very particular about how I recommend people brainstorm. And this comes from research from the Wharton School of Business and work I've done with them. But the basics are three phases. And to get really granular, because I know that your audience likes that, I break it into three steps, 20 minutes each. First is where you're open exploring. You write as many things as you can, as many ideas as you can, and don't stop. There's always this critic part of our brain that's like, no, that's stupid.

Starting point is 00:56:58 No, that won't work. Turn that off. Just write down as many things as you can. If your pen stops moving for more than 10 seconds, you're doing it wrong. As many ideas as you can. If your pen stops moving for more than 10 seconds, you're doing it wrong. As many ideas as you can on the paper. Then the second stage, also recommend 20 minutes is organizing, where you take this massive, ridiculous,

Starting point is 00:57:14 some cool ideas, some ridiculous ideas, and you start to try to find patterns between them. And if you're trying to make something specific, you start to kind of think through, okay, if I'm trying to make a game, what's the victory condition? How do people figure out what are their moves? How do they interact? You start trying to kind of put some structure around it. Or if it's a book, okay, what's the opening of the book? How is it going to help people? Who's my audience? Whatever it is, right? As you start making these connections,

Starting point is 00:57:37 you're naturally going to see gaps and you're going to fill those gaps in. And then the last step, which is also 20 minutes, is elimination. And that's where you went from starting with as many ideas as you can, and now you want to get to as few ideas as possible so that you can start moving to testing them. And so that's where you go and you'll try to like, okay, what's the minimum amount that I can prototype, which is the next step, to test my idea, to test my assumption, to test the core of what I'm doing. And so prototyping is exactly what it sounds like. What's, you know, talk about an MVP or, you know, this minimum viable product. What's the smallest thing I can do to test my idea? What's the easiest way I can do

Starting point is 00:58:14 this? And then step five is testing where you actually show it to somebody, you get some feedback, you actually figure out what's going on there. And then step six is iterating where you take what you've learned and then you cycle back through the process. And what I've learned is that the skill of creativity, specifically with game design, but really with anything, is how well you can kind of flow through that process and get the most out of each loop and go through as many loops as possible. All right, we're going to come back to brainstorming in a second, but what I want to do for people listening is highlight, and you said this already, but I want to just make a few notes and give a few examples. This process can apply to almost anything. And for instance,

Starting point is 00:58:55 you want to start a podcast. I'll use that as an example. Inspiration, thematically, where are you going? What is the format that you're excited about? What is driving you to be considering starting a podcast, right? Setting parameters, thinking about the constraints. What are the constraints? How do you keep it interesting enough that you continue to do it, but simple enough that you don't quit after three episodes? And the example you gave of like, I want it to be like Halo plus World of Warcraft plus Warhammer. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, easy. The reason there is an elephant graveyard of a million dead podcasts that stopped after episode three is they're like, I love This American Life.

Starting point is 00:59:34 And I think it's going to be like This American Life meets Serial meets Joe Rogan. And I'm like, whoa, slow down, Tex. There's a reason the credits are five minutes long at the end of This American Life. I'm not sure you realize how much goes into making that. And then brainstorming, right? Coming up with whether it's guests, ideas for questions, et cetera. Prototyping, giving it a go. Maybe you record as I did five or six episodes before publishing your first so that you have a chance to kick the tires and try to figure out what's working. The testing you're going to get in this case, right? Testing with your guests, but also with test listeners, let's just say, and then iterating. This also applies to books.

Starting point is 01:00:14 This also applies to really any creative project that I can think about. And to come back to the brainstorming for a moment, when you are brainstorming, what is your personal preferred method of doing this? Whiteboard versus pen and paper versus typing on a keyboard versus a tablet of some type. How do you like to do it? I am a huge fan of, in particular, an app called Workflowy. And it's a totally free app. And it's basically a series of nested lists. And the nice thing about it is it's infinite. So I can continue to make lists and sublists and sublists and sublists. And I can link pieces to pieces. And so I find over the years now, I've been using that for seven or eight years. That is my personal favorite tool.

Starting point is 01:01:01 The important advice for people is not to copy the tool, but whatever works for you you, whatever's the easiest flow, like the least resistance, right? So there's a lot of people like notion is a similar type of tool, but it's like bulkier and a little bit slower in my experience. And that speed is everything. I don't want anything that's going to slow me down. So that's where pen and paper is great, but I don't like, unless I have a giant sheet of paper, which I do enjoy if if it's a big, big poster board and I give markers and bigger things, especially if I'm working with a team, so either a giant white board or a large poster board on the table, because you can all share the same space and see ideas form. That I think is great. But a small sheet of paper, for me, my brain,

Starting point is 01:01:40 when it sees a page start to get full, my brain just subconsciously thinks, okay, well, you don't need any more ideas. Your page is full. You're good. It's like the goldfish in the fishbowl, right? It's like, all right, I'm not going to grow anymore. This space is getting a little constrained. Yeah. So I like Workflow because it's got that infinite kind of growth and I can shrink or grow nodes or like, okay, I want to dive deeper into this idea and link ideas together. It's been my favorite. And what are some of the ways that you like to prototype? I'd love to know where you think people most often get stuck, like in between

Starting point is 01:02:10 or after which step do people get stuck? And as someone who's been, as you know, because we've had conversations about this and you've been incredibly helpful, thinking about prototyping and games and design, I've been very excited about this for a while now. I tended to get stuck at the prototyping phase because, well, it's also my first sort of rodeo with this, but the inclination is to try to make something that's really good and kind of polished. I know I'm not trying to make a finished product, but the more I have studied what you've done, listened to the podcast, talked to people like Ilan Lee or others, the more I appreciate how quick and dirty it is. Yes. Yes. And also, just as a reference, I think I have a blog post about Stephen Key,

Starting point is 01:03:04 who is an inventor, product developer, who's based in California, at least he was at the time, who has done extremely well developing toys for major companies. And the toys are ultimately some finished product that look great, but he will use construction paper and newspaper to prototype. And based on that and a description and maybe a video of how it functions, he successfully licensed products all the time to huge companies. So could you speak to maybe the prototyping phase? Yes. And you've already hit on the core of this, but I'll just leave it. Keep it simple, stupid. The KISS principle. It is the tendency to overdevelop and make your prototype super nice

Starting point is 01:03:45 or not feel like you can show it to somebody or test it without it being super nice is the graveyard of the most games probably of anything on the planet. And the most ideas, frankly, in general. So let's make this very concrete. Probably one of the games I'm most well-known for is a deck-building game called Ascension.

Starting point is 01:04:00 I first prototyped that game. There was another deck-building game. And a deck-building game, for those that don't know, it's unlike Magic, which is a trading card game where you're buying packs of cards and trying to build a deck. In a deck building game, you have a fixed box of cards. You buy it like a box, like you would Monopoly. But during the game, you're acquiring cards for your deck. So it's like you get to play the game of building a deck, deck building. So there was another deck building game called Dominion, which was released. It was the first of its category. And I fell in love with that game. I started playing it a bunch, but then as I played it like a hundred times, I was like,

Starting point is 01:04:31 ah, you know, there's some really some things I would like to see differently. I want to see the cards are too static. There's too many rules and resources. I wish I could change it. And so my first prototype of Ascension was literally just, instead of having Dominion cards, which are all kind of laid out at the beginning of the game, takes like 20 minutes to set up, I just shuffled them all together and dealt them out and said, what would a game look like if it was randomized? And I played that way. And the game was not good, but it gave me enough of a proof of concept that like, oh, you know what? There's something fun here. And if I spend the time to do this, I can now move forward.

Starting point is 01:05:03 And just for clarity, you were using the Dominion cards, but changing the rules to see how it impacted gameplay. Exactly right. So if you can prototype using something like a deck of cards around the house or take a Monopoly set, I know I keep using Monopoly, whatever, most people know it. So, you know, say, oh, hey, what would this look like if instead of going around Go,

Starting point is 01:05:23 you actually had like dinosaurs that would like try to eat each other as you're moving around the board? What would that be like? Okay, that sounds kind of fun. Let's see what happens. So it's literally that simple. So for my prototyping tools, my first round of prototyping is just I have a bunch of stuff. I have a bunch of dice and, you know, my D&D dice with all the random signs. I've got decks of cards.

Starting point is 01:05:40 I've got random pen and paper. I will draw things. In fact, yeah, like when you and I worked together a little bit, I showed you some things. I showed you what like my early sketch prototypes look like, and they are ugly. I talk about like the phases of design. And so every time you go through the core design loop, your questions go from bigger to smaller and smaller. And as you go through it, you're going to care about polish more. So if you're just trying to figure out like, where is the fun? What is the idea? What's the theme? What am I doing here? You don't want to think about, imagine you're building a house, right?

Starting point is 01:06:08 And before you've even laid the foundation, you're worrying about the paint color on the walls and where the furniture goes. You're not going to get very far. You're wasting a lot of time. Make sure you've got a solid foundation first. Worry about the paint color later. And so I think a lot of designers start by worrying about the paint color being wrong and they're never going to finish a house that way.

Starting point is 01:06:25 Okay. I'm going to stand in. I mean, this is a lazy sort of rhetorical trick here. So I'm going to defend the newbies, including myself for a second, and ask a question, which I think is actually really important, at the very least helpful in all sorts of disciplines, not just game design. One of the reasons a lot of writers get stuck or aspiring writers is that they kick out a first draft. It's rough. It's ugly. It's really, really rough on all the edges. And they compare their rough draft to the final draft of incredible writers.

Starting point is 01:07:07 And the rough draft of those writers is invisible. They never see that rough draft. So what has been helpful to me, for instance, when thinking about potentially writing comics, is seeing the original scripts and how they were tweaked and how the concept art was modified over time to ultimately land on what we see in the finished product. Because then I can see the ugly babies in the beginning. I'm like, oh yeah, okay. That's very reassuring. And it gives me more confidence to work with my ugly baby to try to shape it into something that ultimately is good. Because if I'm comparing everyone's finished product to my rough product, it can be really demoralizing.

Starting point is 01:07:50 So the question is, is there a way for folks to see the rough drafts of games, the prototyping, and so on, if they wanted to explore this as an example? It's one of the reasons why I started my podcast is to sort of unlock a lot of that stuff for other designers, right? Talk about their origin stories, talk about where they're, you know, the things that inevitably fail.

Starting point is 01:08:14 You can also go, there are a variety of places where people will have prototype testing. So let's say you have a favorite game company or game designers. We do this at Stoneblade at my company. You can join our Discord and then we will periodically put playtest requests out because we want to get feedback, right? We want to get feedback from people and they could see how terrible those

Starting point is 01:08:31 games are. Now, we've already gone through a few iteration loops before we put it out into the public. So to see the most raw forms, I think there's not enough of it out there. I think it's something I really want to encourage more of because it's really helpful. I've been doing this for 20 years and my first prototypes are hideous. So if you want, I can share some, I'll put some up on the think like game show.com slash 10 or the show notes. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:53 Whatever. Because I want to demystify that process. It is okay. In fact, it's better. In fact, I'll go even further, right?

Starting point is 01:09:00 Because not only is it faster, you know, you don't get hung up on making it really pretty. It's faster prototype. It's actually better to change. It's easy because you need to iterate. So if you put a lot of time into making a beautiful board and beautiful cards, and then you realize you've got to change a card, you're going to feel weird about it.

Starting point is 01:09:16 Yeah, your sunk cost fallacy is going to come to latch onto your back. I have a card that I messed up. I'm just going to cross out something on it with a marker and write something else. And then, okay, now it's this. Go. And I'm making a little note, right? The resistance to change is so much lower. So it's actually net negative for you to invest in making something pretty early on in the process. Makes perfect sense. So you've mentioned your company a couple of times, but last time we left young Justin in our chronology, he was working at a game design company. So could you fill in the gaps for us and tell us how you went from working for somebody else to working for yourself? This is a fun story. And this is, you actually come into this story,

Starting point is 01:10:00 Tim. So I'll share it. So I moved from working on pure card games to I had an opportunity to lead a project that was the World of Warcraft miniatures game. And this is a very exciting project for me. I get to build something that's super cool with an IP everybody knows. And I had worked on it for about 18 months. And the company that I worked for was called Upper Deck. They had made trading cards forever, most known for baseball cards, and they made Yu-Gi-Oh! and this Marvel game I'd been working on, but they didn't know how to make miniatures games. And so they eventually, if we're going to kill the project,

Starting point is 01:10:34 the executives come and they tell us, after 18 months of working on it, and this is pretty common in games, but I had never had a project I had worked on get killed like that, and I was devastated. My dream project, I'm going to change the world with this game. It's going to be incredible. Now all of a sudden, ashes. And so I didn't want to let it happen. And so I said, listen,

Starting point is 01:10:52 I don't know what I'm doing here either, but if you're going to kill the project, give me six months. Let me see if I can figure it out. You got nothing to lose. And I was able to convince them to let me become a project manager and try to figure out how to make games,

Starting point is 01:11:05 how to make a miniatures game specifically. And so same kind of process like I did when I first started to design. I was like, all right, let me talk to people who know what they're doing. I've already got a very clear deadline. I talked to Jeremy Cranford, who's an incredible art director. And I talked to the guy that made the Dungeons and Dragons miniature lines. I just work months and months and months trying to figure out how to make this work, fly to China, fly to the factory, figure out how the plastics and paints and all this crazy stuff. And making it work, just for my clarity, is making it financially work for the company? That's exactly right. Financially, how do you make it work? Because Blizzard,

Starting point is 01:11:36 who makes World of Warcraft, had very exacting standards about their miniatures. They have to have spiky pauldrons this high and these amounts of colors. And nobody had ever done anything quite like that before. And it needs to be financially viable to make this product for the company I was working for. So that's a partnership. And so I have to go figure out all these logistics, set all this stuff up, finally. And this is where I first read the four-hour workweek.

Starting point is 01:11:59 So this is actually super impactful for me in being very efficient, using 80-20 principles. And I've learned to set up auto email replies so people didn't bother me. So I'm already getting my efficiencies in it, but I'm in this zone of just, I'm going to finish this mission. And then I have the opportunity to speak to the executive team. I'm going to make my presentation. I'm going to make my case. Is this project going to live or is this project going to die?

Starting point is 01:12:22 And I'm just some kid who wants to make a game and i've got to convince so i'm there and i will never forget i mean they had this like ugly green carpet i'm sitting waiting for my turn to get called in it just i don't know the details are super stuck in my mind and i'm like you know go down this long corridor and my palms are sweating you know you open these huge like oak doors and this is you know this is a huge sports memorabilia company. So there's a Babe Ruth signed bat on the wall and a Michael Jordan jersey and a Tiger Woods golf club and the rich mahogany conference table. I mean, this is boardroom cliche, right? But it's very intimidating for me at this time.

Starting point is 01:12:57 So I get up there. The owner's sitting in his leather chair and staring me down. And I'm like, okay. I give my presentation and I'm stammering through it, but I've done my research, right? I've done my homework. And I go through the presentation and, you know, heart's beaten, finally I stop.

Starting point is 01:13:12 And there's this like pause at the end. I'm looking around like, what do they think, right? It's like COO, CFO, all the bigwigs, right? And they start talking about the idea and they start jostling around. And I started to think, oh my God, I think they like it. I think this is really going to happen. And then they start like pontificating and they start talking, the idea and they start jostling around. And I started to think, oh my God, I think they like it. I think this is really going to happen.

Starting point is 01:13:27 And then they start like pontificating and they start talking, oh, well, there may be this problem with this thing or this thing. And it took me a minute to realize this, but as they were talking, I realized that they had no idea what they were talking about. I had finally done enough research that I knew they didn't know what they were doing. And I just said, up to that point in my life, I feel like I had just assumed that the adults in the room knew what they were doing. This is a company that makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Of course, they know what's happening. And now all of a sudden, that illusion is shattered.

Starting point is 01:14:02 And I started out terrified i'm terrified i mean we're literally this project you know it's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to hopefully make millions or could lose millions who knows and nobody knows what they're doing and so i'm like oh my god like what do we do and then i walk out of that room my heart's beaten and i'm just like what's gonna happen how do we do this and then all of a sudden like a cold splash of water in my face nobody knows what they're doing. I cannot know what I'm doing, at least as well as anybody else. This idea that the difference between a leader and somebody else is not that they know something or that they have some special access. It's that

Starting point is 01:14:36 you're just willing to make some assertions and own the consequences. That's it. That's the difference. And so then I finally clicked for me the other parts of your book, not just this efficiency and automation, but this idea of defining what you want and then creating the freedom for yourself to do it. And so that's where I suddenly started doing the fear-setting exercise and going through, okay, what's the worst case scenario for me if I quit and I do my own thing? And the dreamlining exercise, which is basically, what is it that you really want? How do you define what you want? How do you make that very concrete? And so then that transformed. It was like, okay, I'm going to get this game out the door. I'm going to save up enough money so I have a year

Starting point is 01:15:15 of savings. And I quit. And that's exactly what I did. And it was a life-changing moment for me because it was exactly that, taking ownership of my future. I'm so grateful for you as a key part of it. And I'm so grateful for those executives because they really opened the door for me. And I don't pretend to know what I'm doing all the time either. Most of the time, we're making stuff up, but it's being conscious about that, surfacing our assumptions, and learning as you go. It's been a powerful journey. Thank you for sharing that and for saying all that you said. And I would love to know when you did the fear setting and you're trying to identify the worst case, how you can mitigate against the worst case, what you would do as sort of a backup

Starting point is 01:15:55 plan in case the entrepreneurship does not work out or maybe it doesn't work out at least with the first inning. How were you thinking about that at the time? What gave you, in addition to what you already described, which is the realization that, oh my God, almost all the emperors have no clothing. So I think I can do that. At the very worst, I can also do that. How are you thinking about risk assessment and what you would do if things didn't pan out perfectly as you went into entrepreneurship? So I got very concrete, right? So what is my actual minimal living expenses? What do I need to be okay and have what I need? And I figured out what that number was. And then I was like,

Starting point is 01:16:35 okay, how much time am I willing to give myself to run this experiment to see if I can figure it out and make entrepreneurship work? And I decided a year of savings was what I wanted. And so I focused on saving up. So I have that cushion, right? Because if you're in the red, if you're like, I don't know how to make my next paycheck, I don't know how to make rent next month, you can't be creative and be free, do the things you need to do. You're making decisions for the short term. And I wanted to be able to make decisions for the long term. So step one was have enough of a cushion that I could feel comfortable. Now, other people can do this as a side project or after hours, whatever. But for me, I wanted space to just focus on this. And then the other

Starting point is 01:17:08 piece was like, okay, well, let's assume it doesn't happen. And after a year, I've got nothing and it's not working. I had done enough in my career at that point. I could just get another job. I could either be hired back at the same place or hired in another company. It's not like I was going to go hungry on the streets or I have to live on a friend's couch for a little while. That's not that big a deal either. So I went through all of those things. I go bankrupt. My house catches on fire, like hilariously, like, like you did in the book. Right. So that's where like, it highlights the same kind of lesson as before, which was when I quit law school, it sounds scary. Everybody thinks, oh my God, you're such a risk taker. Like I'm not,

Starting point is 01:17:40 I mitigate risk at every turn. Like, you know, when you're playing magic and you're trying to like set up so you can't get outdrawn on a game i'm just mitigating the number of ways my opponent could beat me over time and in this one i could always go back to law school when i quit law school i could always go back to a job when i started as entrepreneurship and same thing later on when i became a digital nomad sold all my stuff it's like i could always buy more stuff i could always get a house again and so so I strongly encourage people to just go through that. If you really, really think about the worst case scenarios, 99 times out of 100, they're totally recoverable within a year. It's often way less. And what was yours, knowing how methodical you are? You were not just

Starting point is 01:18:18 hopping out of this job with savings with no plan. So what was your plan? I'm sad to say that it wasn't that savings with no plan. So what was your plan? I'm sad to say that wasn't that much of a plan. Well, I guess with the core design loop, I guess you are going to be following some version of that probably. But did you have an inkling of what type of game or what types of games you wanted to make? You know, obviously, card games were kind of my specialty. And so I knew that that was a space I wanted to be in. But I really wanted to create that open space to figure things out and so as you mentioned of course the core design loop was part of it I didn't have it as clearly defined as I do now but this idea that like I'm going to try things and prototype them and test them so I would during the day I would work on some designs make up some

Starting point is 01:18:56 prototypes and then I would go find my friends who were still working at the company or elsewhere to like try it out give me some feedback and come back and you know I didn't have any ideas like i didn't i hadn't designed a game ahead of time i didn't know what i was going to do ahead of time but i i had enough space that i could figure that out and then it worked out that another person from another company contacted me to see if i could do some contract work for them and so i started working on some kids toy based games which was great and so here's another fun story so they knew me because they used to work at upper deck where I used to work. And then they started working at this other company. And he's like, hey, we need someone to help us design a game. Can you do that? And I'm just like, again, no job, no plan. I'm just figuring it out as I go at this point. And so I'm like, yeah, definitely,

Starting point is 01:19:35 I can do that. Okay, well, give us a quote. I'm like, okay, quote. How do I quote? I've never quoted anything before. So I'm like, okay, I will, let me just think about it. All right, how many hours do I think this is going to be? And then like, what's my minimum like hourly rate that I think I should be paid? And I'm like, okay, that's what I'll charge, you know, make it easy. And I send them the quote

Starting point is 01:19:53 and he literally laughs in my face. It's like, yeah, okay, sure. Sure, man, no problem. And you're like, uh-oh, wait a second. I'm undercharging. Yeah, yeah. I'm undercharging. So the next time, you know, I still try to over-deliver, do a great job.

Starting point is 01:20:07 Next time I get another opportunity, okay, what do you quote? I doubled my number. They still laughed at me. Okay, great. All right, doubled it again. My strategy was I kept doubling what I asked for until I met resistance. Until someone was like, I'm not sure. I'm like, okay, that's what I need to be charging.

Starting point is 01:20:22 That's the number. There's one other story I'll just, as a side note, mention, which also just underscores the fact that part of the frustration, but also joy of entrepreneurship is you have to figure out a lot on the fly, right? You cannot prepare for all the eventualities. You don't know what you don't know. And I recall, I might be misattributing, so my apologies to the founders of Nantucket Nectars if this is misattribution, but when I took my first entrepreneurship class, first and only actually, high-tech entrepreneurship with Professor Ed Hsiao, who changed my life in so many ways, he used what a lot of people refer to as the Harvard case study method, where you have sort of a business situation, then a problem, and then

Starting point is 01:21:04 there's a break, and you have to try to figure it out. And then only after you've had the chance to try to figure it out on your own as a class, then you read the outcome and the decision they made and so on. And there was part of this Nantucket Nectar story where these guys are selling juices in Nantucket and they end up with a tiger by the tail because their drinks become really successful. And they decide to make the shift to retail and they meet with a distributor and they're talking and talking and the distributor's like, so do you have good plans for POS? And they're like, look at each other. They have no fucking idea what he's talking about. And they're like, oh, we have great plans for POS. We've thought it through and we think we have an excellent

Starting point is 01:21:42 strategy. And he's like, okay, great. And then they leave the meeting and they're like, what the hell is POS, point of sale, right? Displays. So it makes for a lot of good stories. So you start to figure out your pricing by doubling and doubling and doubling. And maybe you could flesh that out a little bit in terms of you're doing this contract work for people who are giving you specs of some type or another. That's right. But you have some money coming in the door. Correct. With fewer and fewer laughs at your proposals along the way. What else is happening in that first year? So I'm using my kind of spare cycles. And there's this really interesting thing, right? The difference between an entrepreneur who has no employees or anything and some dude just sitting on his couch can be very subtle yeah yeah you know until you start like really kind of getting income coming

Starting point is 01:22:31 in and start making things happen right so there was there's definitely a window of uncertainty i mean even now in my life the distinction's pretty blurry but yeah right it is you know it's you know now i got a team and the people it's like okay i feel like i got a I've got a business. But it's not an easy distinction. And when you're trying to create something where you don't necessarily know what it is, it's even harder. So what I would do is I would, in between doing this work for hire, I would work on just projects that I thought would be fun. And so I would just make prototypes, try them out, try them out on friends. And I remember it was actually with Ascension where I didn't make Ascension specifically to think, oh, I'm going to start a company with this game. I made it because I really wanted that game to exist.

Starting point is 01:23:10 I'd played enough of Dominion and I was missing something I really, really wanted. And then I showed it to a friend of mine, Rob Doherty, and he has his own. He actually was the guy that owned Your Move Games, the store where I used to play when I was younger. And I show him the game and he's like, dude, you have the ball, run with it. This is great. Make this a thing. And he had been an entrepreneur for a while. And so he helped me kind of like, okay, now let's do this. And that started down the road. And so this is going to be my project now. And I started, my early prototypes were ugly and I'll find a way to share them with you. I mean, some of them are horribly inappropriate.

Starting point is 01:23:44 Like we had just really just rude, and I won't share those, but just ridiculous, because it's just for fun. Rude pictures, how dare you? Yeah, I know. I'm imagining that's code for lots of dicks everywhere. I mean, I'm not. I'll leave it to the imagination of the listeners on this one. Not appropriate for public consumption.

Starting point is 01:24:04 Leave it at that. You know what? Just to defend my Dick's comment, I will say there's a place called Hotel Barone in San Francisco. Great wine spot, excellent place. And I don't know if this is true, but I heard at one point,

Starting point is 01:24:19 this is one of the first places with a console for digital signing way back in the day and the rumor was that of all the guys who went there and bought drinks it's like 75 just drew dicks which i thought i thought was actually it was pretty hilarious well there's an important game design principle i didn't talk about here which is the t TTP, which is time to penis. Any opportunity that you give people to create their own thing, at some point, someone's going to make a dick. That's going to happen. TTP. All right, I'm going to add that to my metrics.

Starting point is 01:25:05 Key show notes. But I mean, so what it is, I mean, the more broader point is like, anytime you allow people to customize, you have to think, what are they going to do with it? And how does that share? And how does that build your community? But TTP is the shorthand for that. So it is an unfortunate reality of our society that that is just going to happen. Okay.

Starting point is 01:25:21 So you'll share some, Rob? I did not see this interview going this way. I'll tell you that. Oh, I didn't either. Thanks, Coffee punch coffee. So let me try to right the ship here for a second. So you're talking about roughs and the prototypes. You'll filter out some of the rude pictures and we'll share some of that. When you were chatting with, if I'm remembering correctly, Rob, and he's saying, you got this, run with this. Were you at that point at all thinking of how it fit into the potentially competitive landscape and how it was differentiated? Or was it just enough for it to be something that you used to scratch your own itch and you assumed, hey, if this is exciting for me as one person, as someone who

Starting point is 01:26:05 plays a lot of games, I assume it's going to be attractive to more people. So three things, right? One, absolutely, it has to scratch my own itch. And I have to love it. I loved it. I wanted to see it exist. All of my most successful projects by far are the things that I make for me and that I really want. And then I know they're going to be great. So that's, I think, really important. Two, I do not chase trends. I hate chasing trends. In fact, every time I've tried to chase a trend, it's been unsuccessful.

Starting point is 01:26:31 The idea of like, I'm trying to build something for some hypothetical, I think this is hot right now, has never worked. However, there's a third point here, which is important, which is it can't be just about you. And so the rule I like to use is I will show the game to people and I'll prototype it and test it. And when people start asking me to play again without me prompting them, that's when I know I've got something. So it's not just me. That's why like Rob,

Starting point is 01:26:55 who I respect a lot, he was like, no, no, no, this is great. Like play again. And I would show it to some other game designer friends and show it to some other people and like, no, no, this is great. So as you're going through, you're getting like a wider and wider sphere of feedback that's helping you move forward. And if your game is targeted at a different target audience, right? So I make a game called Bakugan, which is a toy-based game for kids. Obviously like how much fun I have playing it is not nearly as important as a five-year-old or an eight-year-old, right? So you have to test with your target market in that sense. So I don't say that, you know, target market and testing is not important. It is, but don't try to chase a trend, make

Starting point is 01:27:28 something that you know is fun and that you enjoy, and then get the feedback and iterate as you go. And so as you get that positive feedback, now I'm willing to invest more and more into the product. So now I actually am going to go and start putting some real art on it. And the story behind the art is, I guess it's at this stage I can tell. So back when I was living in Boston, I met the guy that lived down the hall. And he comes and knocks on the door and says hello. And I have like, at this time, I just moved out of college. So I'm like, blacklight posters on the wall.

Starting point is 01:27:56 Like, you know, kind of, it's still basically a college dorm room. I just kind of transported it to an apartment. And then the guy comes back over 20 minutes later with like a bag of weed. pretty sure you guys want to smoke this right it's like okay cool so we hang out we've become great friends and he actually turns out as an incredible artist his name is eric savey and you know whatever we became friends i have one of his art pieces on my well not on my wall anymore but in storage now but uh it's actually it's on my wall my dad's place i didn't put that one storage anyway so 10, so 10 years later, when I'm making a game, I'm like, oh man, his art was really cool.

Starting point is 01:28:27 I'm going to call him up. And I called him up and said, hey, would you want to make art for my game? And I built the IP and the story around his style because I knew I could get this batch of art without having to pay for a whole new artist and new things because he'd already made it. So I could pay him less. And he was a good friend. And he hooked it up.

Starting point is 01:28:43 And so now I start bringing art into the game and figuring out how you can use what's around and build the lore and build a style around what's available. Okay, now we've made some art. Now we've got some cool looking cards. So I'm investing a little bit more. And then I take it to a convention called Gamma, which is a game manufacturers association event. It's like an industry insider tabletop game thing. So publishers and retailers and distributors are all there. So not a public show. And I get a little booth and I bring my little fake prototype there.

Starting point is 01:29:14 And I realized actually, as I was going to the show that I didn't have in the game, you get what's called honor, which is like victory points basically. And I forgot to make anything that you track. How do you track how many points you get? how many honor you get? And I was like, oh man, what do we do? And I went to a, like a Michael's store, you know, like a, like a little craft store. Craft store. Yes. Thank you. And they had these little beads, these little plastic

Starting point is 01:29:38 fishbowl beads, you know, and they're all the oddly shaped. It's like, all right, whatever, let's try these. I'll just use these for the prototype. So grab the bunch of those, put them in, and we start demoing the game. And people get drawn to these beads. They're like, oh my God, this is awesome. They're like crows finding a shiny button. Yes, exactly. They're super shiny. And they come over and they play the game. They like the game. It's like, oh, this is awesome. These are going to be in the game, right? I was like, yes. Yes, they are. This is like the POS example you gave earlier. I have no idea how to get these things. I have no idea how to make them. I don't know what to go, but they are definitely in the game. So that show, the response was so overwhelming. The people loved it, stores wanted to order it, distributors wanted to order it. So now all of a sudden, it's like, okay, now I'm going to literally, I'm all in. I put my entire life savings now, all the extra that I'd saved up to print, at the time, was 10,000 units of the game, which is pretty crazy. Probably a little over.

Starting point is 01:30:29 Sounds like a lot of units. Yeah, it sounds like a lot. Yeah, most times people are going to start a new game. It's like, you print 1,000 units, maybe 3,000 units. You better hope to God you don't have a manufacturing anomaly. Yes. Oh, dude, there's nightmare stories around that for sure. That's a whole different beast.

Starting point is 01:30:45 But again, and this is not like, I had worked with manufacturers before. I had made games working for another company. So this part wasn't totally new to me. And I wouldn't have put all of that money into the thing. I used to joke, if this doesn't work, I'm gonna have to build a house out of Ascension boxes. You know, that's pretty much all I got.

Starting point is 01:31:01 But I wasn't, again, just to demystify the risk, right? I had gotten so much positive feedback. I had stores and distributors already waiting to order the thing. So now it's like, okay, it's willing to put the money in and take a risk. Yeah. And also just for folks who are unaware, I mean, there are all sorts of ways to potentially finance things if you have that demonstrated demand. I'm not suggesting this. You got to do your own diligence on these things, but invoice factoring. If you have people who are pledging and signing whatever it is, letters of intent or something more binding to purchase a certain quantity, you can use that with manufacturers to then get finance terms. There are companies that independently do this as well. Ways to work around it. My question that I want to ask next is related to Gamma.

Starting point is 01:31:47 How many exhibitors or people with games like yourself, game developers, were there at the show? Actually, we don't even need to be specific to game developers. How many booths or exhibits were at the show? At the time, I think it was about 30. Okay. Now it's probably... It's now it's probably it's not it's not huge you know now it's it's bigger maybe two or three times that but it's not like you know it's less than 100 okay no no that's one of the nice things the game the table you know

Starting point is 01:32:16 this kind of game industry is still a little smaller than like a new york toy fair is the more big one that's like it's a it happens and that's got thousands and thousands of booths and you're spending millions of dollars to have a presence there it's like a much bigger piece this is this one's a little smaller so the reason i'm asking is that in fact if somebody wants just a separate collection of stories around these types of trade shows and i think it was the new york toy fair todd mcfarland the legendary comic book artist has some stories around this from our conversations which are hilarious. What I was wondering, and maybe it doesn't apply because there were 30 tables or 30 booths,

Starting point is 01:32:51 but did you do anything to draw attention to yourself or the game at this event? Or was it simply enough to pay for a booth and then assume that there would be enough foot traffic to bring the right people to you. So the principle you're driving at is critical, right? You need to get people's attention. You need to find a way at these booths, even at Gen Con, which is the tabletop, more public facing tabletop convention where I actually did launch Ascension. And there's a lot more people and a lot more vying for traffic at shows like Gamma, anywhere, or even on a store shelf, right? Why is someone going to

Starting point is 01:33:25 stop and pay attention to what you're doing? The great thing about where we are in our modern world is it's easier than ever to make stuff. You can print your own books. You can print your own games on demand. You can make anything you want. The downside is we're flooded with stuff, not surprising. And so how do you separate from the crowd? How do you draw people's attention? So at Gamma, I mean, I already told you by accident, almost those shiny beads helped. Nobody had those shiny beads. That was a really attractive thing. But I also invested in a video drop. Like I had a TV screen and I made like a little cool rotating loop showing the things and people, most people there didn't do that. And so finding something that draws people's eye and brings them in. So it can be a cool, unique component. It can be a cool, giant visual.

Starting point is 01:34:06 It can be, I had a game I launched years later called Bad Beats, B-E-E-T-S. It's a kind of play on the poker term of bad beats, but with actual beats. I had someone dress in a giant beat costume. I put one of my team members into a giant beat costume. Yeah, it's gimmicky, but it worked, right? So if you have a great product, it doesn't matter if nobody ever looks at it. And also, all the gimmicks in the world won't help you if you don't have a great product. So step one, have something great. Step two, have a reason for people to pay attention to you. The workshopping attention grabbing in real life, I think, is really undervalued in today's increasingly digital world.

Starting point is 01:34:39 And this applies to, for instance, workshopping book material by giving speaking engagements, even to a very small group. You'll figure out very quickly what works and what doesn't, what's confusing and what isn't, what people remember versus what they immediately forget or didn't even pay attention to in the first place. And the trade show stories are bringing back memories because I recall when I, back in my former life, had my sports nutrition company and I would go to these trade shows. And as you know,

Starting point is 01:35:10 I have to imagine this is true for these other trade shows. Once you get there, you are a captive audience. And if you want a chair, it's like, oh yeah, you can rent a chair for 300 bucks for a day. And I was just going in somewhat naive because I paid the exhibitor fee and I was like, oh, great. I'll figure out the rest. It shouldn't be too bad. But it was pretty bad. So I remember trying to figure out how to draw attention. And at one particular trade show, next to no budget, because there were a couple of things that were mandatory that you had to rent, which struck me as a little bizarre, but it exhausted my budget. So what I ended up doing was also getting, I bought a TV at Best Buy, a big screen that I could return,

Starting point is 01:35:52 and I put on highlight reels of Muay Thai kickboxing, right? Because it's definitely going to grab some attention. But to provide a little context, this was at a, it was a strongman slash sports event. It was kind of like the Arnold Classic in Columbus. For people who might know that, it's a huge event. This was much smaller, but there were a lot of athletes and competitors and so on milling about. And I also brought, I think it was four or five of these hand grippers called the Captains of Crush, which are incredibly and increasingly difficult to close depending on the poundage to the extent that some of them are so difficult

Starting point is 01:36:29 that there are maybe five or six people or 12 people in the world who at that time could close whatever the highest rated Captains of Crush was. So I laid those out for people to test with all these athletes milling about, and then put this video up. Ended up getting the couch and chairs at a Goodwill. And I had to like bribe a guy to help me with this truck to get it over there. And it ended up being a really hilarious experience, but it taught me a lot about what worked and what didn't. And I was able to iterate because it was a multi-day event. And taking a step back for a second, and then I want to come back to Ascension and all the adventures there. What have you learned about good playtesting

Starting point is 01:37:12 versus not terribly effective playtesting? And what I mean by that is when you're providing your game to people, certainly one pass fail is do they want to play it past the point that you need them to play it? That's sort of like the Viagra test, right? Like they send it out to test patients for whatever it was, hypotension, hypertension, something like that. And then lo and behold, all of these guys over the age of X didn't want to send back their medication. And it's like, huh, interesting.

Starting point is 01:37:39 Let's look at that. And that's how Viagra came to be in its current iteration. But there's that. And the reason I'm asking this, I know this is going to be a very long paragraph of a question, is that when I am doing the equivalent with my books and chapters, there are definitely better and worse ways to elicit feedback. If you're like, what do you think of this chapter? It's a crapshoot. And if people are trying to be nice, which comes down to who you select also to be your play testers, in my case, proofreaders, you're going to get a bit of a scattershot of responses and it might not be actionable. But if I ask, read this chapter, tell me the 20% that I should absolutely keep no matter what, then tell me the 20% if you had to cut 20% that you would cut, you're going to get very,

Starting point is 01:38:25 very different type of kind of surgical feedback. Similarly, to someone who's maybe less experienced as a reader, you could just say, note any place that is confusing or where you find your mind wandering. And then that gets you to also stuff that you might cut. What have you learned about eliciting feedback or evaluating feedback when you're letting people test a game? It's going to depend upon the phase that you're in. Every time I go through the core design loop, I like to think of myself like a scientist. I have some hypothesis that I'm trying to test, and that's what I'm focused on in that testing session. So when you're early on, you're like, okay, is this even fun? Is this idea of rolling dice to try to punch

Starting point is 01:39:04 somebody and making combos fun right or whatever it is right you want to just see is it fun i'm not asking is it balanced i'm not asking is it pretty i'm not asking does the game last too long i'm asking is this part fun and that's what i'm focused on and so i know when i'm testing that if i start getting feedback on these other parts i'm not worried about that i can set that aside because that's not what i'm looking for here and the the whole, I want to keep playing, I want to play again, test, the Viagra test, as you put it,

Starting point is 01:39:28 that's not going to come true until later on in the cycle, right? Your early prototypes are most likely not going to meet that. So you're looking for other things. So I do like you. So I have a questionnaire that I'll use. I have it.

Starting point is 01:39:38 It's up for free on thinklikeagamedesigner.com slash media, or we can link it in the show notes, which has a bunch of specific questions. You can just print it out and use it. So I will ask, all right, what are the three things you like the most about the game? What are the three things you like the least about the game? Where did you get confused? And much like your book question, right? You really want to pay attention to where people get lost and confused. And nonverbal communication is at least as

Starting point is 01:40:00 important as anything they're going to write down and tell you. If you say, give me the three things you like the most, three things you like the least, what would you change, whatever, people will say something to you just because they feel like they have to say something to you. It doesn't always mean that that's really what they feel, right? You're prompting them to it. So you have to use your intuition to say, okay, where, A, is this relevant to the hypothesis I'm trying to test in the stage that I'm in? B, does this align with what I see visually of what they're doing? My mom tells me she loves all my games, even when she really has no idea what's going on in some of them, right? She's very nice. But if I see that somebody's

Starting point is 01:40:27 getting lost or leaning back or checking their phone, like watching for those nonverbal cues is so important. And you sort of train yourself over time to get better at that. But yeah, so asking questions to prompt for the specifics, being focused on what's important to me right now, looking for nonverbal cues. And then in best case scenario, just like you mentioned, right? You have some more sophisticated readers and you have less sophisticated readers. You have more sophisticated game players

Starting point is 01:40:52 and less sophisticated game players. So if you can test with other game designers, they're going to be better at zeroing in and okay, yeah, I don't care that the card doesn't have pictures on it or that the numbers aren't balanced. I know what you're looking for and I can give you feedback assigned to it.

Starting point is 01:41:04 If you just take it to somebody, you know, just a regular person, they're going to get hung up on a lot of little things. And so their feedback's a little bit harder. You have to parse out a little bit more of what's important. Of course, as you get more and more focused on the final product, somebody that's in your target audience, their feedback matters a lot. And then the last thing I'll say is a quote that I think is also one of your favorites. It's definitely one of mine from Neil Gaiman. When your reader says that something is wrong, they're almost always right. And when they say how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. I don't know if I'm butchering it, but that is 100% true in games too, right?

Starting point is 01:41:37 If you get your testing with multiple people in your target audience that are consistently saying that something's not good, you as a designer have to fix it. They definitely do not have the right answer for how to fix it. That's your job. But that's another key part when I'm testing is that, okay, I'm looking for themes, looking for patterns. One person telling me they don't like something, maybe I can dismiss it. But if 20 people that are all in my target audience say that, that's something I got to focus on. Yeah. No matter how pretty the paragraph, no matter how shiny the fishbowl pebble you might have. If a bunch of people are saying, I don't get it, it's confusing, you got to cut it. Not always the easiest thing. So what happened with Ascension? So you have

Starting point is 01:42:15 enough Ascension kits to build a house, or at least you put in the order, and what unfolds? So then I go and I get a booth at Gen Con, as mentioned, and this was where I'm going to have the unveiling. And now, again, I'm very poor at this point. Now, Gen Con, for folks who don't know, can you just maybe paint a picture or an analogy for what Gen Con is and the significance of Gen Con? So Gen Con is the tabletop and role-playing game mecca of the United States, possibly you could say the world. From Lake Geneva is where it started.

Starting point is 01:42:49 That's why it's called Gen Con. It's not there anymore, but that's where it came from. Where the original Dungeons & Dragons people got together and played. It was like the first place where people sort of gathered and it kind of built this core of what gaming became today. And so now it happens in Indianapolis. It's like 60,000 people every year, somewhere in that neighborhood. And every type of game you can imagine, people are playing all hours of the night. They call it the best four days in gaming,

Starting point is 01:43:14 but it's got anything you can dream of is there and many things you can't dream of. So it's like kind of the place to be, if you will, for tabletop and role-playing game nerds like myself. All right. So you show up at Gen Con. You've gone from 30 booths to God knows how many, right? Yeah. Can't count how many. And I'm just a little guy, right? I don't have any... You're at a Taylor Swift concert now, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so what I had was I bought a 10 by 10 booth, which is the smallest booth you can, 10 foot by 10 foot booth. And then they had a newbie competition, like a little submit your marketing plan and we can give you a 10 by 20 booth for the price of a 10 by 10. And I won that contest. So fortunately I got a 10 by 20 booth,

Starting point is 01:43:53 which is still like very small in the scheme of what's there. And I set up my stuff. And this was, people had started to hear about my game because I showed it off at Gamma before. And I start, you know, I'm just kind of putting it out there in whatever way I can. But this is just posting online and sharing with friends. I don't have any marketing budget or anything like that. And then I get there. And not only do we have like, we have some of the early adopters who had heard about it run to the booth, but then they play the game and they loved it so much.

Starting point is 01:44:22 They would then take it, open up, buy it, open it up, and then start showing it to their friends. They would like set up. And so we ended up, this is not allowed at Gen Con anymore, by the way, but they would just take over like nearby tables, like at the seated area and just start demoing the game for me. Like totally for, you know, didn't ask them to, didn't pay them. The Ascension splinter cells activate it did and i would start seeing people play it in the halls and then i would see people carrying boxes around and so it became this kind of like viral before you know we you know this sort of viral sensation in a way that was very it was very exciting it was like a very uh incredible moment and so we sold out of everything we brought you know so this is this is a very rewarding very cool experience my team

Starting point is 01:45:02 every you know it's not just me now i've've got other people there working really hard to make this come to life. The team is like four of us. And then I got an offer that was a very difficult offer to refuse. So at this point, I had an early product that was shipped for Gen Con, but the rest of the stuff was still on the way. So I still haven't sold these 10,000 units with all my life savings tied up into it. And I get a call from another very big gaming company. And I don't think I'll say the name just because I don't know. Anyway, they, and they say, Hey, we like your game. We want to buy it out. All of it. We'll take it over.

Starting point is 01:45:34 It'll be our game. We'll pay you a royalty. You don't have to worry about anything. It'll be all done. Now, this is a very tough moment for me. In a sense, it's a dream come true. They buy all the stocks. So my money's off the table. They are a big company. They can push it. They can sell it. And then I can just go back to making games, and I'll have some amount of royalty, and I'll be good to go. And I sat with it. And at the end of the day, I was like, you know what? This is my baby. I've worked so hard to get it here, and I I want to see it through. I want to see it through. I want it to stay mine. I didn't want to sell it off. And I said, no. And it was like one of those, I might regret this one later. Right. And then 30 days later, product shows up finally after delays.

Starting point is 01:46:16 Funnily enough, the product launch delay was launched such that it actually launched while I was at Burning Man, which was not supposed to be, but there was. When I come back from Burning Man, so I have a little release party out in the middle of the desert on the playa. And when I come back, we'd sold out. Everything was sold out, the entire run. And we had to make a reorder. And it was like, okay, now I can actually, the company is, it's working. I can reorder, start making expansion and start. And like the rest of the company's history kind of evolved from that in a way that, well, I'm glad I made the decision I did. All right.

Starting point is 01:46:52 Many questions. So at Gen Con, how many games did you sell roughly? Oh man, I don't remember exactly, but it's a hundreds. Hundreds. Some number of hundreds. Yeah. I want to bookmark this. This is not going to be my first question, but just how you sell 10,000 after selling a few hundred, was it word of mouth online? Was it something else? Just what factors

Starting point is 01:47:15 you think contributed to that? Because it's not an immediate obvious outcome, at least not for me listening to the story. But before we get to that, because this all sort of undergirds a lot of what you're talking about, how do the economics of, say, tabletop games or card games work? What's the kind of traditional model? How do people get paid? Who's getting paid? What are the percentages in terms of royalties? What is that a percentage of? Could you just give us an overview of what the economics of that world kind of look like as a template? When you're producing games, you typically, most of the time you're going to produce them overseas. So now with cardboard stuff,

Starting point is 01:47:55 it's starting to become a little bit more economical to do it stateside. We do some of our games stateside, but mostly you're doing it overseas. Whatever the retail price of the game is, the cost of the game has to be about a fifth of that. And the reason is that as a manufacturer, you are going to sell the game to a distributor at about 60% off the price of retail. They're going to sell it to a retailer at 50% off the price of retail. So they've got like a 10% margin for distribution. And then the retailer has that 50% margin for the rest of it. So if you are a game designer and manufacturer, then it sounds like 20% margins generally on games, something like that?

Starting point is 01:48:29 Yeah. Now, if you're a game designer, typically if you're an external game designer, you pay a royalty to that designer off whatever you're selling, right? So if you're selling it to distribution, you sell a percentage off the distribution price. If you sell it direct to consumer,

Starting point is 01:48:40 you sell it to consumer price. And that can vary depending upon the designer. So in tabletop games, typically it's going to be anywhere between 6% and 12% at the high end. For more mass market games, big scale games, it can go as low as 2% or 3%. Okay, got it. This is important because it highlights how challenging your decision to say no was, right? Because we're not talking about like, I'm keeping 90%. Well, I mean, maybe with direct to consumer you are, but it's not like 90% margins versus

Starting point is 01:49:13 six. It's like, there's actually a narrower gap, right? Which is also true, for instance, in books for self-publishing and traditional deals. People think they're miles and miles apart. In some cases, maybe they are. But when you start to factor in all of the costs, the delta between the percentage that you take, say, self-publishing versus traditional, it's not as wide as people might think. So thank you for giving that. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that?

Starting point is 01:49:37 Yeah. Well, it comes down to it was a little bit more than just the money and the dollars and the sense of it. It was a matter of like, this was my baby. This is my IP, right? You've worked with publishers where they now take over the rights to stuff and you can't just do what you want with the book anymore. Yeah, right. I would imagine if you want to do like Ascension expansion packs or Ascension A, B, C, D, and E, you want to do a whole derivative line. If the publisher owns those rights or effectively owns those rights, you're in a tight spot. Think about where we are now, 13 years later, there's over 16 standalone

Starting point is 01:50:10 expansions for Ascension. We made Ascension Tactics, which is an Ascension miniatures game, which we did another expansion to that. Ascension has been featured in a major motion picture. We are working on trying to take the IP and make cartoons and make other things, comic books out of it. There's all of these things that are fun. We've had conversations about this sort of stuff. It's fun to create and grow and expand your storylines. When I first made Ascension, I had sketched out a three-year story arc of what the world of Ascension would be if I got the whole thing done. And now, of course, it's 13 years later, so I've had to make some more stories since then.

Starting point is 01:50:43 But that's the part I love. Just like when growing up playing Dungeons & Dragons, the process of coming up with the stories and making it and bringing that world to life is just, I love it. And so I didn't want to lose that. And for people that are listening that are trying to make these decisions, it's not obvious,

Starting point is 01:50:58 even though I've been fortunately successful with it, it's not obvious that it's the right decision for everybody. I spend way less of my time just designing games because I'm running a company. I have to manage logistics. I have to manage people. I have to plan out the marketing strategies. There's all these things that come with running a company. And so I think a lot of people would actually be better off. And if all you want to do is make games, then selling to a publisher is a great strategy. I wanted to kind of build worlds and build something bigger. And so here I am. And I'll just repeat a name I mentioned earlier, Stephen Key. I don't think he does what some people would refer to as venturing, which is basically building the

Starting point is 01:51:34 business to do it mostly yourself or a lot of it yourself. He loves developing new toys and new products. And he's really good at the licensing game. And that, as far as I know, maybe things have changed, but that's the game he plays. And I would say just on the do something bigger side, there are different ways of doing something bigger, right? So if you want to have the freedom to do the extensions and so on, like you have, on some level, you almost certainly have to retain rights. But for a product developer who doesn't have the business know-how or doesn't want to develop it, doesn't want to spend time that way, licensing to a gigantic company that has a global footprint

Starting point is 01:52:09 and distribution could be the perfect path or the best available path for making a large impact in terms of distribution and putting a spin on the ball of culture. Speaking of putting a spin on the ball, the game Bakugan I mentioned earlier is a game that I work on that's Spin Master. It's a company that owns it. They have toy plastic balls, and there's a game that I designed the game. But they own the rights. They own the game. They own the distribution.

Starting point is 01:52:32 They do everything. And that is by far the biggest quote-unquote game I've ever worked on. I mean, it's all over the world. It's in toy stores anywhere you go. There's a cartoon, multiple cartoons. It's enormous. And so that is also fun and also a really cool, exciting thing. And so that path is totally viable. So you can do work for hire, you can

Starting point is 01:52:50 create projects and sell them and make a royalty. You can launch and publish your own things. There's an enormous number of ways to go forward. And a lot of it comes down to just getting clear, defining what it is that you want, what's important to you. It's like, how do I make a living as a game designer? That's like the surface level question, the how questions are a trap. You need to get below that. It's like, wait, what does it mean for me? What is it I actually want? What does success look like for me? And then even deeper than that, why am I doing this? Because I want to make super cool worlds and I want to grow into a universe or because I want to collaborate with people or because I want to reach millions of people or because I just want

Starting point is 01:53:22 to have something to play with my friends and do something on the side, right? There's no wrong answer to any of those questions. But if you don't dive deep enough for yourself, you're going to end up chasing down a path like I did many times where I'm just going to compete or move on a path for the sake of it because I want the most dollars. The most dollars is the wrong game to play. I'll tell you that. Yeah. It can lead you astray really quickly. Important to keep your eyes on the cash flow, but also can be a trap. Don't run out of dollars, but don't just optimize for dollars.

Starting point is 01:53:52 All right, so maybe this ties in. You've mentioned a number of successes. Do you have, in your entrepreneurial journey, after starting your company, any favorite failures or near-death experiences or anything like that that you can describe? Oh, yes, I can. The life of an entrepreneur is definitely one that has a lot of ups and downs, as many of your guests can attest to, as you can attest, I'm sure. And so what I mentioned earlier, the game SoulForge, we've

Starting point is 01:54:22 since relaunched it. But at the time, it was a purely digital trading card game and i partnered with richard garfield this is the guy that created magic the gathering this is a dream come true for me and i'll tell you the brief story of like so we meet we're at a game conference you know like i'd seen him around before but we hadn't really met we're at a game conference called pax dev it's like a developer conference and he's giving a talk on design so So of course, I'm in the audience listening because I want to learn from the master. And he says, at the end, there's a Q&A. And then somebody asks him, hey, what's your favorite game right now? And he says, Ascension. And I literally jump up out of my seat from the back of the audience and go,

Starting point is 01:54:59 like a stupid kid, right? But everybody laughs. But it gives me the opening. And so I go and I start a conversation with him after the talk. We start talking and we get excited. It's clear we're both excited about the same project. And so Soul Forge is born. Now, this was a project that was my first digital game I'd ever done. And I was a little cocky at this point. I won't lie. I succeeded. My first project, Descension, was a huge success. Everything I touched turns to gold. It's all going to be great. We're doubling in size every year. And we do a crowdfund.

Starting point is 01:55:28 And I thought it was going to cost like $250,000 to make that game. We crowdfund with that target. And we end up crowdfunding double that gold. Near almost double that gold, like $500,000. It's like, oh, this is amazing. We're going to crush it. We're so good. And as it turns out, making digital games is very expensive.

Starting point is 01:55:44 That costs $3 million to me. Oh, man. And so I had to go and try to raise funds again. And we have to launch the game before we're ready. And again, we have followers, we have cash, but the cash burn is... Over time, I can see the cash burn is higher than the income and it's not working. And I overextend. I start borrowing more money. I know I can make this work. I'm not going to let it go. This is my baby. I'm going to keep it going. How are you raising and borrowing money? Just if you don't mind adding a little more detail. So it starts off with, we just do a kind of friends and family

Starting point is 01:56:16 convertible notes round. So that means they give me a loan and then in theory, it turns into equity over time as we get yeah and then after that then i start taking some of those refactoring loans like you talked about right so i'm getting loans against my future income on ascension to pay for soul forge and then starting to run up credit cards and like all the things are really are not supposed to do yep and i get to a point where i have to like finally realize like wow i'm I'm going to go bankrupt. Like I can't do this anymore. Like I'm going to lose everything. And this was just one of the hardest things that I have ever faced because not only is it like, I feel like I owe it to my team who I'm going to have to lay off these people whose livelihoods depend on it. We have fans and people who love

Starting point is 01:56:58 the game. And like in a traditional tabletop game, if I stopped making Ascension, let's say, right, you still have your copy of Ascension at home and you can play it for as long as you want it doesn't matter if i don't make any more but when i stop making soulforge the digital game that means the servers turn off that means your entire collection is gone that means you can't play it anymore everything you spent it's all gone so i'm like failing myself i'm failing my team i'm failing the fans like everything and i have to make some very very hard decisions not to mention the friends and family of course yeah people i mean my I literally had my parents had taken a loan against their house to help me.

Starting point is 01:57:29 Like, I mean, this is, I am so overextended. I am so like in thick of it and shame and difficult. You know, like it is tough. And I have to come to a realization and come to the other side of it where I had to like go through this process of accepting. I had to get to the other side of it where I had to go through this process of accepting. I had to get to the other place like, okay, it happened. I've lost everything. I failed. Now what? Right now, this is a different kind of fear-setting exercise because now I'm on

Starting point is 01:57:55 the other side of my worst nightmare. And it took me a little while, but it's like, okay, you know what? I will still be alive. I will be able to pay off some of these debts over time with some other things. I can recover from this. It's going to be okay. The people who got laid off, they're going to get another job. It was not easy. Once I accepted that worst case outcome, and then I was able to say, okay, now how do I make this less likely? And so I had to lay people off, but I also renegotiated debts and negotiated payment plans and reduced our overhead and took on more contract work. And slowly but surely, I was able to dig myself out of the hole. And I don't think there's any chance I would have been able to do that if not for being mentally ready with, okay,

Starting point is 01:58:37 I've lost it all. I mean, I'm talking to bankruptcy attorneys, right? And that gives you a different kind of attitude and approach when you're negotiating with a lender that you owe money to. They're like, you owe me money. You should collect. I'm like, I know, but either I'm going to go bankrupt and you're not going to get anything, or we're going to work something out and I'm going to do my best to pay you off. And so fortunately, I was able to turn that around. And not only did I learn the important lessons, like you can go through a lot and you can recover from it, but also to not put myself in that position again, not to overextend to that degree and learn to make smaller bets and grow as you can. It was a very important and powerful thing, which then, of course, I've now been able to come back to with reinvigorating that very same game.

Starting point is 01:59:17 So to ask a question related to that, you have this dream come true, partnering with Richard to create this game. How did you two communicate or what led to the ability to maintain that relationship and now work together again? Because there are, I suppose, as I'm imagining, different ways this could have played out. I'm sure there are ways with many different collaborators where things could have exploded and it would have damaged the relationship and that would have been the end of that. So why didn't that happen? You got to be honest with people, right? I mean, like that's, that's really what it comes down to. Like act in integrity. When

Starting point is 01:59:57 you work with partners, you sometimes you have bad news, you tell them bad news. If you have some humility around when your ideas are not working, or when you're trying things and say, here's what we're going to do. And when I talk about like, nobody knows what they're doing. I realized the other executives do it. I don't hide the fact that I don't know what I'm doing. I've learned a lot. I've got good ideas. I've tried things that work, but I, whenever you're pushing the boundary and trying something new, sometimes it's not going to work. And so when you're working with somebody and, you know, again, fortunately Richard is, he's a professional. He's not only has he made games that were uber successful,

Starting point is 02:00:26 but he's also made plenty of games that weren't uber successful too, right? So he knows this. Anybody that's done this for long enough, any creative field, you cannot predict. Everything is not going to be a hit. And so when it's my first major failure, for me, it felt like the end of the world.

Starting point is 02:00:40 But the more you work with professionals, the more you realize that that's just part of the process. What have you learned or what decisions have you made related to your company or entrepreneurship, how you run things that you think are worth mentioning? It could be after that experience. It could just be in general, maybe ways that you have simplified things or challenged assumptions, turned things upside down, anything at all that comes to mind. One of the things that I've realized is that the same way you design games, right? Designing a great game and designing a great company are not all that different.

Starting point is 02:01:17 In a great game, you have clear goals. You know what you're trying to do. It's very clearly defined what you're trying to do. You're getting a lot of feedback and rewards, either that be from points or achievements or experience. You're getting constant feedback loops. The challenge level is appropriate, right? You're focused on learning one thing at a time.

Starting point is 02:01:34 The skill level is appropriate where you want to be. And probably the most important thing about games, right? When we play games, we take a certain kind of mindset. If I'm playing a game, I expect to lose. I expect to have challenges. In fact, that's the whole point, right? If you play a game and there's never a challenge, I expect to lose. I expect to have challenges. In fact, that's the whole point, right? If you play a game and there's never a challenge, why are we even doing it? And so I have tried to cultivate all four of those things in my company. We set clear goals where

Starting point is 02:01:54 it's like, okay, we're going to try to have this specific metric, like our email subscriber list. We're going to try to increase it by this amount, and here's how we're going to do it over this quarter. Or we're going to try to get a new game in this category that we're going to have a prototype ready to go in two weeks, right? Clear goals. We have something that allows us to have daily focus and feedback. What I love is the rule of three. I think I first learned this from Chris Bailey in his book, The Productivity Project, but I've applied it at every level of my company. So what it is, is you have everybody posts their three daily goals. What are the top three things that I want to focus on? And three is really important because we all have an

Starting point is 02:02:30 infinite laundry list of stuff to do. We're never going to finish our to-do list. But if you can finish your most important three things, you can make an enormous amount of progress. And we scale that to every level of the company. So every team, we have three weekly goals, we have monthly goals, we have quarterly goals. And so everything kind of scales down. And I even built this into my own personal life. I have a thing, the Level Up Journal, which I've made, which I've got. It just has a journal that just fits in your pocket and has three goals, three habits, and then a little gratitude practice.

Starting point is 02:02:58 And so every piece of it, by focusing on very few things and making those the priority, it makes a big difference. And then lastly, with the mindset, we set very aggressive goals and it's okay not to hit them. Like a game, when you want to win, right? You take winning seriously, but you don't cry when you lose a game, right? You say, okay, what can we learn from this? How do we get better? And started to take that attitude and approach it.

Starting point is 02:03:23 Sometimes easier than others, for sure. But cultivating that mindset and focusing on what's important and making sure that the goals are clear and everybody knows what they are and you're moving day to day. That's how I structure the company. And it's, again, it came from just the principles of design, applying them to what we do. And I found it to be really powerful. Where do people, if people in the company are posting, for instance, the rule of three, there's three priorities for the day, where are they posting these? So we have a company discord. We have a channel in our company discord that everybody posts their three goals for the day. There's a

Starting point is 02:03:53 separate one for weekly goals, separate one for monthly goals, and a separate one for quarterly goals. And so you can always look back and see what everybody's doing at any given point. If you care to at the main focus, it helps also helps us stay connected, right? Cause we're a hundred percent remote team now. So even though I may not talk to a given person or see a given person, I can quickly glance and see what's most important to them right now. So it keeps us all connected and accountable. Two questions. The first is, is there any follow-up on those three, or is it just the act of someone publicly stating their priorities that makes everyone feel connected and hopefully gives them some felt sense of accountability that you think leads to better

Starting point is 02:04:32 output. Let's start there. So the daily, there's not much follow-up on the daily. It's about staying connected. And I think it just forces you to plan, right? It forces you to assess for yourself, okay, what actually is important to me? A lot of people will just start checking emails and going down rabbit holes and they're working, they are working, but they're not doing what's important and they're just doing whatever's in

Starting point is 02:04:52 front of them. And so this forces, just as a habit, it forces you to think things through. Great point. Then for the weeklies, we do have that. So we have our weekly goals. We have a check-in at the end of the week where people will post, hey, here were my goals for last week. Here is how they went. Here are now my goals for the next week. Or what can I do? If I didn't meet a goal, what am I doing to fix it?

Starting point is 02:05:11 So there is some accountability, and I read through those every week for the team. And that's on Friday? So people are setting their priorities for the following week on Friday? Correct. And why Discord versus other tools? How did you choose that? So we tried a lot of them. I'm obsessed with productivity tools, sometimes to a fault. But so we tried Slack. We tried a couple of other custom ones. We tried Asana. We tried Monday.

Starting point is 02:05:34 We tried a bunch of them. But the nice thing about Discord is, one, it's very easy to use. You can just start up a channel for free. can have voice chat and text chat you can also upload bigger files and you can with like slack restricts that unless you have a paid program it's much easier to like load files and share things and honestly discord started as like a gamer focused thing and so we actually built our fan community in discord so you can go to the stone blade discord it's kind of funny because it's sort of like a front of the shop back of the shop kind of vibe right so it's like the front of the shop it's like all the fans are there they're all chatting about the games we can jump in and chat with them and then we're in the sort of private channels that are you can't see but we're talking

Starting point is 02:06:14 about and making the next things that you're going to be talking about six months from now and so it's like automatically gives us a sense of like connection to our fans because the same place where we're doing our work, one click away, you can see and interact with fans. So it has a nice bonus effect of making us feel a little bit more connected to the community. How much of your work do you do on laptop versus phone? Oh, 90 plus percent laptop for sure. My phone is, I'll occasionally check emails to make sure I'm not missing anything, but I hate working on my phone. Yeah. I figured it was probably something like that. I'm the same way. What is the mobile experience with Discord like? I've never used it on mobile. It's fine. I mean, again, so mostly when I'm there, I can check messages.

Starting point is 02:06:54 I turn off all notifications for everything. I don't want my phone bothering me or pinging me or distracting me. I am using my phone consciously because I want to look at something specific. So it means I have a meeting and I'm not at my desk. I'll go to Discord, go to the meeting thing, check it. Or I have something I want to post in a public channel. This is another key thing about it that's great because you have so many different channels and you can make threaded discussions. One of the things I try to encourage is that we have as much as possible make communications public. A lot of times people will have side chats and side conversations and come up with some great idea and then it will get lost because people are just in a private channel somewhere.

Starting point is 02:07:27 And so we'll make sure that people have public discussions as much as possible so people can add comments and can get involved and stay connected if they want to. But to continue with your question, the mobile experience, it's mostly just for some. I will only use it if it's like there's some specific communication or meeting or connection I need to do. That's when I'll use my phone. If I'm going to work, it's because I'm set up at a laptop designating time to work and connect. All right. We could keep going for hours and maybe we will do more rounds, but there's a prompt here that I would love to explore, which is how a trip to Thailand helped you to escape your need for control. All right.

Starting point is 02:08:08 So as someone who focuses on systems, predictability, controllability, et cetera, this might be therapeutic for me to hear. So could you unpack this for us? I think we're very similar in the sense, Tim, right? It's not, I wouldn't call myself a control freak just because I don't want to say mean things about myself, but I very much want things to be good. And I believe I know how to make them good. And I want to make sure that they are good.

Starting point is 02:08:30 So that's what control freaks say. So the point being, I know I'm good at my job. And for the most part, with the most of the jobs that people are doing, I know how to do them as well as they do. That's how I know if they're doing a good job or not, right? This is the story I'm telling myself. And I hired a lot of very smart, very capable people. And I ended up, every extra person I hired suddenly became more work for me because I

Starting point is 02:08:50 had to keep checking to make sure that they were on track or setting up more systems to have this. And if they weren't doing something the way I thought they should be coming in, or they would come to me with questions. And at some point I'm like, listen, this is too much. This has gone kind of crazy. I need to step away. And so I said, look, I'm going to take a three-week trip to Thailand. I'm not bringing my laptop. You know, I'm not reachable. I'm going to do that in six months. So I gave the team plenty of time.

Starting point is 02:09:13 What do you need from me? How do we set this up so that you don't need to talk to me? And they, okay, we need access to these things that only you have access to. We need to know this, blah, blah, whatever. It was very little as it turned out. And then I go to Thailand. Now, I am still too much of a control freak. So I really did bring at least my iPad with me so I could check in.

Starting point is 02:09:33 But I didn't respond. I didn't do anything. And what magically happened is everybody just stepped up. And they answered the questions that they would have asked me themselves because they were perfectly capable of doing that. And they started taking initiative and building new things and doing stuff that I didn't even think to do. And I realized with some embarrassment that I had been holding them back. That I had, by not allowing them to fail or do things that would be different than I would, I had been constraining them from becoming leaders

Starting point is 02:10:05 and doing the things that they should be doing. And I had built work for myself. I had made them less effective at their job. And I had made my life less good. So that was one of the best vacations I ever took because it actually really changed the entire way that I managed, changed the entire way I viewed leadership. And I love Thailand.

Starting point is 02:10:24 Amazing. Just like building the systems that then persist after you get back. What a liberating experience that must've been on so many levels, the gift that keeps on giving. No, it's something you talk about a lot and it cannot be underestimated, right? What is it? So you asked the question, what would it take for me to let go? What would have to be true for you to be willing to not get into this? It could be some key metric that you care about that they have to report. It could be that they have to stay within a certain budget. It could be that they're in reality, you're just making up stories of, oh, well, I just feel like I need it. Let those things go, let people grow. And it's really,

Starting point is 02:10:58 in my experience, it's just been incredible. I now have a team that can literally run itself. I get in and I focus on the key new projects. I focus on the most important things I think are wrong, but for the most part, I have stepped away from a lot of the day-to-day and I have watched my team get better and better and better. And again, it's part of that mindset, right? They make mistakes just like I make mistakes. And sometimes the question is, what do we learn from it? And don't make the same mistake twice. And we've learned a lot along the way, and it's been pretty amazing. So Justin, we're coming up on almost two and a half hours, two hours and 17 minutes or 18 minutes. I'll ask just a few more questions, and then we can

Starting point is 02:11:32 slowly land this plane. So the next question is one that many long-term listeners will be familiar with, the billboard question. If you could put a quote, a question, a phrase, a word, anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get it in front of millions or billions of people, what might you put on such a billboard? I'm excited to get this one. I had anticipated it might come up. I've listened to a lot of the podcasts. So I'm going to use one as a mantra for myself, which I say to myself every day, which is cultivate comfort with uncertainty and impermanence. Cultivate comfort with uncertainty and impermanence. It sounds a little, you know, maybe a little woo-woo to people, but in reality, it's so much of what we do,

Starting point is 02:12:15 and we talked about this a little bit earlier, is because we're afraid that we don't know what's going to happen. We're afraid we're going to lose something. And the truth is, you never know what's going to happen, and you're going to lose everything. We're all going to die, right? And if you can just be okay in that space of not knowing, the control freak piece of it, the staying as a lawyer or a safer path, and be okay with the fact that things are not going to stay the same all the time, then life gets so much easier. And whether it be your creative path or your relationships or anything like that has been one of the most powerful things for me personally. So I'd hope to share that message. That is a perfect place to begin to wrap up.

Starting point is 02:12:53 And that is exactly what we're going to do. So Justin, people can find Think Like a Game Designer at thinklikeagamedesigner.com. You mentioned the slash media for various things. They can find you on Twitter at Justin underscore Gary. Any other websites that you would like to mention or places you'd like to point people to? Yeah, sure. You can come to stoneblade.com is for my games. If you want to pick up any of my games or join our Discord, there's a link there. And we, myself and my team are all there chatting. So you can chat with me on Twitter and on the Discord. I love, you know, talking with people that have design and creativity questions. So always happy to help. This has been so much fun,

Starting point is 02:13:28 Tim. It's such a blast. People taking up on it. I highly, highly encourage you to engage. And thank you, Justin, for taking so much time. I'm glad we were able to finally make this happen. Really took so many notes. So lots to follow up on personally and to everybody listening, thank you for tuning in. And as always, we will link to everything we discussed and probably much more in the show notes, Tim.blogs.com podcast. You can just search Justin and I'm sure that this will be one episode of very few, maybe the only that pops up. So you'll be able to find everything there. And until next time, please be just a bit kinder than is necessary, both to others and to yourself. And with that, Tim Ferriss signing off. getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend. Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter

Starting point is 02:14:29 called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser,

Starting point is 02:15:15 tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that Thanks for listening. our body and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time. I've been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control

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