Think Like A Game Designer - Morgan Page — Finding the Shared Rhythms of Music and Game Design, Maximizing Creative Collaborations, and the Importance of the Fundamentals (#54)

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

Morgan Page, the renowned DJ and music producer, has etched his mark in the world of electronic music with hits like "The Longest Road" and "In the Air." His influence transcends pulsating beats and catchy melodies, extending into the realm of songwriting, sound design, and even the science of creativity.In this episode, we unravel the layers of Morgan's creative endeavors, delving into his artistic pursuits and insights into harnessing one's creative juices. Whether you're a budding game designer, musician, or someone seeking to inject creativity into your daily life, this conversation promises a treasure trove of knowledge. Tune in and Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Morgan Page. Morgan Page is a legendary producer and DJ with two Grammy nominations. He's played at every major music festival around the world has over a decade of Vegas residences, a weekly mix on Sirius XM. He's remixed everybody from Stevie Nix to Deadmouse, and he scored music for Tesla, SpaceX. He is a true world-class performer, and I am so excited to be able to bring his insights to you.

Now, for those of you that know of Morgan Page, you're going to love this, but for those you that don't, for those you that aren't necessarily into electronic music and the things he produces, I encourage you to stay with us because the principles that he talks about are universal. whether you want to bring it to your game design, business career, writing, any of the creative ideas that you have. The principles that Morgan talks about are universal. In fact, what attracted me to him was the fact that he created his own set of creativity cards, what he calls quick tips. And those have these principles that are 100% universal. They're developing better workflow and better art, embracing Wabi-Sabi, maximizing emotion, minimizing bandwidth, first-order

retrievability, how to approach bottlenecks, all these principles that absolutely will apply, or what creative thing you want to do. And so it's really exciting to see someone from a completely different industry and be able to pull some of those insights over. And this is something I'm hoping to do in a lot more episodes going forward, pulling people from great writers and great artists to really get those universal principles that we can all apply to live our best version of our creative lives. So I'm going to let the introduction end here because there's so much to get to. Morgan was very generous with this time. I was really enjoyed this conversation and I'm sure you will as well. So without further ado, here is Morgan Page.

Hello and welcome. I am here with Morgan Page. Morgan, it is awesome to have you here. Very exciting. What's going on? Glad to be here. Yeah, yeah. So we connected here. First of all, I've been a fan of your work for many, many years, gone to see you at shows, loved your music. And then you reached out and shared with me this project that you'd worked on, your kind of quick tips, creativity cards. And going through them, I realized there were so much incredible overlap between the kind of creative work and design that you do for your music and what I do for game design. And I thought it'd be awesome to have this conversation. So I'm really glad to kind of dig deep into this with you. I always like to start with

my guests just kind of going through a little bit of the origin story. I've read a little bit about how you got started and that you kind of had to teach yourself about music production and workflow. So I'd love to dig a little bit into that and kind of how you got into this space and then we can kind of jump around to some of the principles that you've highlighted. Yeah, let's do it. Well, you know, first I got into, it was radio of all things. So that I started to just sort of mess around with electronic music. I heard it on a little college radio stations in Vermont where I grew up. And there wasn't really a way to discover music at the time. There was no blogs. There's no MP3s. So it was all about the graveyard shift, the late night slots on college radio. So I discovered electronic music there.

It was naive enough to think I could make my own music and make something radio worthy. So I would send in, I started making music. And you know, PCs weren't very powerful back then. But like in the late 90s, mid-night. 90s. So I would send in cassette demo tapes to these radio stations, then later on started to work for the radio stations as just a volunteer. You didn't have to be a student to be a DJ at the University of Vermont. So that led to working in the music industry and then did college radio when I was actually a college student route. So that just pulled me in. It was just something about that merging of technology. And I think it was the first time I saw someone demonstrating what MIDI was like that just flipped switch. It was learning about style up modems at the time dating myself, and then seeing that a computer could talk to keyboard and communicate musical ideas. That was just mind-blowing. It's still crazy now that it even works. Yeah. And then for people that aren't familiar with MIDI, maybe a quick explanation of that, just so I know our audience, some people are not going to be as familiar with this space.

Yeah, yeah. Midi is just a way of communicating note data of like how hard you're hitting the keys, which notes you're hitting. And I don't read music. Like I learned a little bit of piano, But to me, my language is MIDI and just playing my ear. But it's just an easy way to trigger keyboards and sound sources. Yeah. Yeah, I actually took a music theory course in college that was one of the hardest classes I ever took because I didn't know anything about music. I kind of got into the class by accident.

But then once I started learning about the principles of how chord progressions work and how you can, you know, what is naturally sounding good to the ear, and it became like this really fascinating breakdown of like, no, no, okay, there's like real structure and principles and things. that you can pull out of this. And I started geeking out on it for quite a while before shifting into other fields. But I find that. So there's this sort of geeky element to it in terms of like how computers talk to machines.

There's this period where you did work in the field. Just again, you know, kind of was it, were you a paid position when you were doing the radio position then? It was all volunteer. It was just you'd get new music. Maybe you get some extra CDs from doubles from the promos that were sent in. But it was all kind of, yeah, a lot of it was just. interning and then you know I managed a radio station for a little while in college and

did their website I had to learn these skills of like I wasn't a web designer I was like pretending to be a web designer so I would do that for record labels and for radio stations using Dreamweaver to like put together poorly made tables and yeah yeah you just had to pick up those skills but but I think it was yeah it was that intersection of music and technology and then and then later interning for record labels in the summer that was just a good way to get your foot in the door yeah no and again I just to to highlight and underscore this principle is I've seen this across a bunch of the other designers I've talked to and even for myself, like working for free and leveraging the skills that you have that kind of are tangentially related to the thing you want to do to get in the door is so critical. Right. Okay, I'm a web designer now. Okay, cool. I can host a radio station. Even though what you're trying to do is, you know, produce music. It gets you in the industry, gets you around people. It gets you connected and it moves the ball forward. So that seems like a very tried and true way to kind of get started. Do that if you want to be paid to do something, do it for free. Do it for free first. Right. I didn't walk into the radio station and say, like, this is my salary, what I'm expecting to get. Right. And I think it is abused a little in the entertainment world. Well, definitely a lot. But you find your way to create value and worth later on. But for that early stage, that's really the only way in. And it's crazy now that there's, you know, I remember even just for this internship in New York working for these small vinyl record labels, there was, you know, multiple people you had to compete against just to get a slot working for credit or for free.

Right. Right. Yeah. It can be very competitive in that in that space. And so I think it's just for people just getting anything that they can do to get their foot in the door and practice in the thing that you're passionate about. And I know we'll get more into this later. But I think you, you know, you've talked about this. You have to find things that you would love to do for free and are excited about the grind of the process in order to stick with it. Because to do, to get to the tier that you've gotten to be able to succeed is just so much of it is that daily grind. And if you're not willing to, do it for free, not say that you should always, you know, do it for free forever. You got to get paid at some point. Then, then it's going to be, you know, if you're just envisioning the success and the fame, most likely you're going to fall off of it because that's not, you know, most of what you do is not the accolades and success. Most of it is grinding and moving through it. Yeah, you have to be internally driven. And, and I think, too, when, you know, touring a lot, you get sick. So you have to be able to do what you love when you're also sick and not feeling 100%. And you just got to get through it and drink a red bowl, whatever, you know, whatever takes. That's what I have to.

do when I'm DJing and you can't cancel a show because you have a bad cold. You know, it has to be like life threatening or something. So it's too hard to reschedule a show and break the contract and get on their date set up. So it's like, yeah, rain or shine, sick or healthy or whenever you're feeling the grind, you've got to push through. Yeah. So that's one of the things I always also like to really dig into is like, where does that come from for you, right?

And I'll give you two parts to this, right? Because one is you started sending in your demo tapes early, right? you're young, you're making things and you're just sending them in. A lot of people are very scared to do that sort of thing. A lot of people won't take that step. And so where, you know, do you think that came from for you, that ability to just like put yourself out there and try? And then where do you think this kind of drive to push through these potentially grueling schedules and sickness and, you know, lots of hours of work and travel and all of that? Like, where does that come from or what helps you to support you through that?

I think a lot of us you're wiring and like your innate part of your personality that I don't think your personality has to be destiny, but I think that there's part of you has to have that drive and part of that, that helps to be born with that. So I don't know if it came from a personality. I've always been an introvert. So it's a weird combination of like I'm driven, but sort of inwardly focused and more solitary. I was an only child growing up. So I had to learn everything myself. I probably was a slow learner, so I had to learn. It's almost like, I don't think I was dyslexic, but I feel like if you, if it takes more work to learn something or to get a task done, then you have to sort of, you develop that grind and that, that perseverance that pushes you

through. And that's why I see a lot of, you know, dyslexic entrepreneurs out there. So, but for me, it was just like, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a math whiz. I'm not an artistic genius. But I just, I think I learned a way to sort of keep pushing through the obstacles. And in Vermont, there wasn't a lot of alternatives. There weren't a lot of career choices or there wasn't that energy of these kind of jobs around. It didn't have the flow of a city. And I don't know. Where did you grow up? I forget. Well, I grew up in Miami, but I actually, I went to college in New Hampshire and I spent a lot of time in Vermont. So I have a good, I have a good vibe of that of that space. But yeah, I grew up in a little bit more metropolitan area. Yeah. And, you know, nothing against Vermont. But it's like,

I feel like that was a good, that was a good kind of driver that people were like, what's electronic music. There wasn't a lot of interest in, and that was weird to be making your own music, too. That was very strange. And you were kind of an outlier. If you were, if you were making your music or doing something that was unconventional, that was considered odd. So that was, that kind of motivated me more. Like, that's weird. Like, I was working at the college radio station, UVM, and they were, as a high school student. So I was only high school student there. And then you have people that aren't even, you know, older, older DJs that are, you know, doing coffee house shows, things like that.

But it was so funny. Everyone else was just like they wanted to do the traditional path. And I always think it's more interesting to just take that unbeaten path. Yeah, well, you're preaching to the choir there for sure. Yeah, I think it's a very, so it's funny because I think there's what I heard you say is that there's this, you know, not only this desire that when something is hard, it kind of, you almost get more motivated to do it, right? It forces you to like think about it more and move to.

it and that drive to be unconventional, that drive to kind of break from the mold. And I think it's one of the things that traps people the most, honestly, is there's this frame that people are in that this is what I'm supposed to do. This is what society expects me, my parents expect for me, whatever. And then we get trapped living somebody else's life. And it took me quite a while to learn that lesson. I've told that story before, but I think it's a, you know, were your parents supportive of this? Did you have family that kind of gave you that, do you have a model that you were going off of or any mentors or people that helped you? Or you just naturally were driven to this and found your path along the way?

I think I just felt as soon as I played a synth the first time, I just knew, I just felt it in my blood. When you start playing instruments and you just know if that connects with you or not, it was too hard to organize a band. And so kind of like the solitary life of electronic music, you start as a producer and then become a touring DJ and all that. that path makes sense. But I think, yeah, you know, family was supportive. They were, they still probably think it's as strange, but it's funny that it's become, I never thought

it was a viable way to make a living. And I think you have to be naive. You have to be, you have to be a little overconfident in it. And otherwise, you wouldn't try. If you knew how hard it was and how many obstacles would be in your path later on, you wouldn't do it. Oh, that is, that resonates so much with me, man. There's so many projects. So many projects that I have successfully completed, that I look back on it. I'm like, no way if I knew what I had to go through, I would have done that, but I'm very glad I did it. Yeah, it's like if you have too much information, if there's too much transparency and you can

see exactly the traps that are ahead or the challenges that could very easily psych you out. Yep, yep. This is a, you know, kind of, go ahead. Sorry to me. I was going to say, if you, I remember a family member saying like, like to do, to be more reasonable or be more realistic. And I was like, that was like the worst advice ever heard. It wasn't my parents, but like, if you do that, you're going to have a very boring job in the real world that's going to suck.

And you'd be mad at the world, you know? So. Yeah. Well, and in particular, I think like that window in your like teens and 20s, like that's the time you should be taking the most crazy risks, in my opinion. Right. That's the time you have the most flexibility. You have the least overhead and like responsibility. It's like take your chances, take your shots.

Because even if you do, you go down this path. Right. And I think, you know, you have to be realistic, right? Most people like, people that want to become games owners, people that want to become, musicians and DJs, like most of them don't succeed, right? And if you, but I would rather be in the case of I tried to do the thing I was really passionate about and I didn't land there. And then I, usually you'll end up in some tangential path from that.

You'll learn something. Then, oh, if only, I wish I could have and I never tried and I never know. Like to me, even the worst case scenario of trying and failing is far better than, you know, I just let my dream die before I even gave it a chance to try. Yeah. And sometimes it's fun. I mean, I think there's a lot of people that get the enjoyment. out of privately doing music.

And I think that's great. That's maybe even more noble than like just putting music out on Spotify and hoping it's going to do well amongst 100,000 songs a day. But then there's also interesting cases where, you know, I've mentored some people that are, they are, they've made their money, they made their fortune, they have a jet and they just want to make electronic music and just enjoy it for the process. And then you have people like CEO of Goldman, like David Solomon, who, you know, he, he just loves music and he woke up one day and decided that that was his passion and he

called some people at c s xm said i want to learn how to you know make electronic music and how to DJ and he doesn't because he loves it but it's interesting he gets scrutiny for doing what he loves as a sort of a financial public figure which is which is kind of sad that like people go after that you should be able to pursue multiple passions you shouldn't have to be on this narrow narrative for your entire life yeah no and i don't think i've talked to talked about this publicly before, but like producing music and having that ability to be a DJ up on stage is absolutely one of my dreams as well. Like I don't need to be that as my, as a professional career, but something that's been on my list. I'm a big believer that you have to like,

you can do anything, but you can't do everything all at once. So it's been something I've kind of deferred, but I 100% want to go through it. Like I'm very passionate about music. It's something that, you know, as much as I love games and I think games connect people and create incredible experiences and emotional highs and, you know, real like powerful experiences, music is, so visceral. It's so immediate. It's so like, you know, nothing I think connects people or moves people. I can't think of another art form, you know, that connects people and moves people as much as music does. Maybe you could argue movies, but I think for me, it's music 100%. And are you going to rewatch that movie a million times? Yeah. There's a consumption that's different. Yeah. Yeah,

there's something weird about music specifically that the more you listen to it, the more you love it, right? I mean, you know, I guess sometimes songs get overplayed. But, you know, for the most part, it's like you become, it becomes more a part of you and more connected. Do you have a theory as to why that is? I think I do, but I'm really curious to hear your opinion. Well, it's been really interesting. I have two young daughters. I have a two-year-old and a five-year-old. And when they're in the worst mood, which is often, music just calms them down. And I'll play even my own music they want to hear, which is like the best reward when they actually want to hear the dad's music. But it's, I took music for granted for a little bit. Like during the pandemic, it was like,

okay, I'm not a first responder. I'm not saving lives. And I started to do streams. And it's so easy when you're this close to it, to take it for granted and think, it's just music. It's just a commodity. And it feels like it's gotten cheapened by streaming.

But, I mean, that's the cynical side of it. Now it's way more accessible. It's actually the best time in music and technology. I think it's ever been. It's just a lot of competition. It is harder to get stuff out there. But I feel like there's something innate about music that it's just weird that our brains are wired to be so satisfied by it and doesn't cost you anything.

It's not like food where it's costing you calories or you're going to wear that food later on. It's just satisfying to the brain. It's this call and response and tension and release. And it's producing drugs in your brain. And that's my job in the studio is to create goosebumps. It's a goose bump factory. Like I've got to get in the studio.

It doesn't happen every time. But I try to make a song every day. and I do a beat, a core progression, lead, baseline, additional percussion, and I just think, like, how fast can I get an amazing idea down? And just that process is enough of a rush that it's a similar rush to going for a run. You know, it's your endorphins and serotonin. And you're able to kind of produce those chemicals in your own brain at no cost. Yeah.

So it's just, I love that. I love that. You get into a flow state and you come out and things taste better, colors seem more vivid. And so that's really what I try to seek. But I don't know why, you know, I don't know why music has such an effect on people, but I think I appreciate it more now seeing how it helped people through difficult times through a crisis. And seeing how it helps with kids and seeing how kids relate to it with no filter and they're not holding anything back.

They're not putting on a front. They're not wearing a mask. They react very honestly when I play new mixdowns from my kids in the car. I can tell, like, if it's working or not based on how quiet they are. You got your own little focus group, your mini focus group. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just, it's fascinating. But who would have thought that recorded music would still be so effective and part of your daily life? And you know something is missing in your life when you haven't listened to music in a while. It feels, things feel like a little black and white. Yes. Yes. You're just missing music. Yep.

Yep. No, I've, uh, I've been, um, uh, just fascinated by that power and impact of music. And when I, you know, just I need like my tendency is, when I have free time, I'm going to listen to an audio book or a podcast or like fill it with some knowledge and like word based information when I can. And I have to, I consciously break from that to be like, nope, I'm just going to listen to music and I'm going to go for a run or I'm going to get in the car or I'm just going to like go dance. And it helps me so much because so much of what I do, my tendency as an analytical person is to just be up in my head and music gets me in my body,

gets me out of my head in a way that's like very powerful. And I think that to, there's so many things that you said there, I want to like underscore and dive into, but just to circle back to the original point first, the, you know, we, as babies, right, as young as we instinctively react to music. We instinctively react to the tone of our parents' voice for things that are soothing, for things that are, you know, danger, for things that are like, you know, different forms of tension and response and approval and disapproval. Like we, there's cross languages they've done really fascinating studies that the tone of voice and the, you know, rise and fall can impact the emotional responsive kids. So we. We, we.

We're built in to us to have those responses as a way to connect and sort of teach and raise our young. And then you see it, you know, as a way of community and as a way that we connect. And so this is one of the points I wanted to kind of kind of get to, you know, you alluded to it and that, okay, streaming is now everywhere. We have these different ways that we experience music solo at home versus a live event and a connection and what gets you goosebumps. And I think that that connective power of music is one of the other things that's so powerful. as a community, when you're all there, singing along to a song or jumping up and down to a song, like there's this communal power that's just very different

than even listening to my favorite song by myself. And I'm curious when you're designing and creating, is there one side or the other that you're leaning towards? And I mean, is there a, do you think about it, both impacts together? Like, is there types of ways that you approach the music that you think impact better or bigger when you have a room full of people,

versus on your own. I'm just curious how that influences you if it does it all. It's funny how the music will almost sound different based on how big the room is or how full the event is. And to me, it's like, it feels like hot air in a balloon. You're trying to, you're trying to build up the energy and sustain it and you let it out for a little while during a breakdown and you had to rebuild that energy back and earn the audience's trust. Like, you have to work for it. Some crowds are more loyal and easier. And sometimes it's easy to just do a festival, like Coachella or EDC, you've got 10, 20,000 people in front of you, and it's a very different emotion. You can't even see the whites of people's eyes. So that can be amazing, and that can also

be a little bit removed. But I look, I mean, I'm always thinking about how a song is going to resonate with a crowd, and that really informs the arrangement because I'm thinking like, oh, the crowd's getting bored. Like, this breakdown is too sparse. I'm just flapping in the wind here. Like, I need to get to the drop. I need to get to the progressions. So it definitely informs how I will. Yeah. And I want to I'm going to keep circling this back because again, a lot of our audiences, people in the game industry and games designers, I just want to underscore like how much this overlaps with the same sorts of stuff we do. That build up and release of tension, I think is such an important part of all art and creativity. In a game, I'm trying to do the exact same thing. I want to make sure that there's high drama moments and I want to make sure you're super engaged. And there's other times where we've got to pull it back to create that contrast and those elements where it's going to be, okay, this is simmering for a little bit. Now we need to build it up and have a big moment and make sure that that attention stays with you all the way to the end, right? If the game feels like it's already over halfway through and you're stuck until it's done until the end of the round, right, you get bored, you get lost. And I think that that skillful managing of excitement and tension and the different

kinds of emotions you want people to feel is like, it's such a, it's a skill you just, you know, develop over a lifetime and just continue to tune your instincts for it, depending upon the instruments and tools that are available to you. Yeah, it's just fascinating. And I remember I used to be like addicted to Halo playing games like that. And it was, I remember with matchmaking it would try to get you into a scenario where you would be just hard enough to push your comfort zone a little bit. But whenever it would drop me into a situation where I was getting my ass kicked, it wasn't fun. And there was a lot of games that don't take that into mind where they, if you're playing for the first time, if you're getting obliterated, you're not going to keep playing the game.

So you need to be slowly, slowly get into it, but just pushed slightly, just a tiny bit of tension to keep you playing. And if it was all easy, it wouldn't be enjoyable, right? If you have all the cheat codes. Right, right. Yeah, I actually thought you had an article talking about cheat codes that I saw recently. I think that that's exactly right, that hitting at the right difficulty level, getting people, you know, prepared for what they're doing, either by on-ramping through some kind of tutorial or a walled garden where only nobs are playing, or having a game that's very consciously not trying to make, it makes losing still feel like winning, give people lots of opportunities to win, right? So, for example, the deck building game I have Ascension, it's you're going through this process of building your deck and getting, better over time, you're not really disrupting other people as you play. So even if you lose,

you still feel this like, I started here, I ended up over here. This felt really good. And then at the end, okay, I lost, but now let's try again. Right. And so thinking about those types of things as you go. And I think there's another interesting aspect to this. And I'm just jumping around because I find this just super fascinating here, that you're not just building on, you're also building on the stuff that people know and what came before by default in creativity. But I think in, in, in an industry, and I've noticed as a fan of EDM music, you know, the types of things you can do now, even 10 years ago, you couldn't really pull off because we didn't have the ear. We hadn't been trained over time by the kinds of types of music and types of things that existed and were built

up. And so the types of things you can play for a sophisticated audience that really knows music super well, and they're going to look for this next kind of wave of thing versus people who've never heard anything in the genre. Again, same applies for games, is very different. Like when you're building stuff. Do you think about those kinds of things as your crafting music today versus when you were getting started? Yeah, I mean, now that the crowds are much more educated and I think tasteful because there's better access to the music, whereas before you would have to dig the crates and find records, and you were trying to find obscure things and, like, educate the audience, and it was a little bit like an asymmetrical relationship, and now it's a little more balanced,

it's give and take. But it's a little challenging, too, because the audience knows the tricks, and everything's accessible. So there aren't really any secrets anymore. Yeah. Which I think is fascinating. So that keeps you on your toes. Yeah. Well, and that ties into the, you know,

you've seemed like you've put a lot of effort into sharing your secrets in a lot of ways, right? You've not only have you created these, the quick tips cards, which I, it will get more into in a little bit, but also you've posted a lot of things on your website. You've done kind of mentorship sessions at things like Miami Music Week and elsewhere. What's motivated you to kind of share this so openly? A lot of people are afraid of sharing their tips and tricks and, you know, their secrets that keep them up there. So what, what's motivated you to do that? And how do you feel about that kind of spread of knowledge?

I think it's fascinating because people, people get defensive to like share territory. And I think it used to be more like that back in the day in studios. There'd be like this magic compressor that would make your vocal incredible and like gear that would just change your career. and it was, I think maybe access to equipment was harder back in the day. Now the software is so much better and the gear is so much better, it's leveled everything. So for me, like these quick tips were just a selfish way to keep track of things that we're working in the studio. So I built a spreadsheet and every day or two I'd get an idea for this seed of an idea.

It's kind of like how Ryan Holiday has index cards for his books and you just collect these ideas. And I would write down like, okay, well, this helped me. get into a flow state in this session, or maybe this would be a good thing to try next time to keep it fresh. So I'd write down these ideas, and I would tweet them out. I had a thing that would just randomly schedule these tweets like seven a day. And the idea was, can I encapsulate these little nuggets of ideas, these little cues and starting points into a tweet, back when tweets, I think it was 140 characters at the time. So before it was X. Yeah. So, and then I was just thinking like, okay, so first it was for me. You do it selfishly to scratch your own it.

And then I was like, well, why not share this? Because there's no secrets and everything I've learned I've learned from other people. And a lot has been for myself, but I'm combining ideas. There's nothing that is completely original. I think it's a huge fallacy. Musicians think like, oh, this is my chord progression or like, no. All the chords have been combined and every combination. It's all been done.

It's just a matter of how you weave together different timbers and sound design and ideas. and tweak one little thing out of five elements or ten elements. So there's no secrets. I think before it was things were more closely guarded, trade secrets. That's one thing, industrial secrets. But I think now it's all helpful because you rely on the community to help you get better. And so why not give back? Right.

So I think the self-made man philosophy is kind of a misnomer. It's really like a narrative. It's an ego thing. Yes. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree with that 100%. I think this is great because it's also ties back into another thing I wanted to talk about. So one, you know, I think, I forget it fits one of your cards that talks about this specifically, but there's the variations of like, you know, everything, everything is theft, right? You combining multiple, stealing from multiple things is creativity.

Stealing from one thing is that's, you know, that's unoriginal. And if you don't steal from anything, nobody's going to have any idea how to relate to what you're doing, right? I'm paraphrasing where you were, but this idea that if you, if you, if you're too, original, then the audience can't relate to it. And it's going to be too far off. You need to be able to weave the narrative of what's come before to be able to build something that's, you know, new, but also familiar in a way that people can really appreciate and enjoy. I think is really powerful. And I think then to, I think there's another piece of this because you said earlier, okay, it's easier than ever to make music. It's easier than ever to stream and find music until there's a level playing

field in a sense. And it makes it harder to get discovered. And I actually think one of the things that is really nice is the more you share about your process, the more you open up and provide value just without expecting a return, the more people will by default kind of discover you, will want to support you. There's this really positive feedback loop that's come. And I didn't really realize this as much until I started doing things like this podcast. Like it has been, I just kind of exactly your story resonated so much with me because it was like, hey, I want to learn more about design. So I'm going to have conversations with really smart people to learn about design. I'm like, ah, you know what? I've done this for a while. Maybe I should record these things.

and be able to share them with people. And then I started doing that. And then that's opened up a ton of other doors of people. Now more people come up to me at a conference and know me for this podcast and know me for my games, even, which I would never have expected. And so it creates this really great thing. So I think what you're doing is really is fantastic. And like you said, it also helps you grow.

I mean, I've learned so much when I had these kinds of conversations, when you put something out there and people resonate back to you or, you know, it kind of creates a really positive feedback that I'm really happy for as the way that it's kind of a trust and giving economy now than it used to be because before it was all about can I reach you? And now it's like, can I provide value? And then that will spread naturally over time. Right. Right.

It's like, look at Tim Ferriss's podcast. You know, I think like that wasn't the original aim. It was the books. And then it morphed into the podcast is everything for him. And it's like going to business school. It's like a second, he gets an MBA and the podcast that you're subscribed to. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And it's a wonderful thing because he gets to follow his creativity down this path. and thought things that he's interested in. And then we as an audience get to learn a ton from it. Like it was a really awesome thing to be, being a guest on that podcast was like, first of all, a little intimidating, not going to lie.

And then, you know, being able to sort of, okay, here's like, how do I craft a valuable message to his audience? And then that's led to us having this conversation and, you know,

countless other really interesting things that I can't talk about right now, but I'm very excited about. Yeah. And the weird thing I was thinking, too, is, you know, I did an artist interview podcast for a little, I just did one season to test it out.

And I thought it was so interesting that it was sort of a rarity of an artist interviewing an artist. Or like it used to be like, this person's a journalist. There's a member of the press and they're going to interview the creator. And there's an asymmetry because one person is not an artist. One person is just wearing the reporter hat. One person is the artist. And it's a very different conversation when it's two artists. And I think you do need journalists for a lot of specific types of media.

But maybe it's not the same conversation. you know, if the roles are that defined. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it comes down to the difference of like, what's the, you know, what's the, what's driving each party in the conversation, right? If you're both in, we geeked out immediately about the creative process when we started chatting. So I was like, okay, we've got to record this.

Like, that's what I, like, I just, I love the stuff. I come alive when I talk about it. And that was clear for you as well. And so that's just a different kind of conversation than someone who's, you know, trying to get views for, or doing it for a job or trying to get views for their news, you know, news organization or just trying to, you know, whatever. Like they have different, different objectives. And we're able to go a little bit deeper when you're speaking to another creative,

another artist because that you're immediately going to have those insights that are like, oh, okay, here's how I do this in my process. Here's how I do this in my process. And it's more honest, too. It's not click. You're not just feeding clickbait, which I think if you're, if you're a journalist, you have to get things into a small headline and you have to condense things and possibly manipulate what is, what is truth or just for,

just so it's catchier. And I think there's an honesty to artists or to creatives sharing their process versus one person. Yeah, different alignment of interest for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm a big believer. Like, I, you know, I'm an optimist by default. I think most people want to do good and want to be good.

But I also believe that people respond to incentives. And if it's your job is to get the most clicks and that's what depends on your paycheck, then you're going to do what it takes to get the most clicks, right? Not a judgment thing. Yeah. It may not be malicious. Yeah, exactly. may be by a symptom of the of the incentives.

Yeah, well, and again, as a game designer, part of my job is to create incentives that make people do what I want them to do, right? Now, I'm not working at a malicious goal. I want you to have a good time. And you as a musician, as a producer, you're trying to do the same sort of thing, right? You're trying, you know when you want to get people to jump up and down. You know when you want to get people to raise their hands in the air or whatever, right? You're trying to craft this emotional experience from people by shifting, you know,

in my case, rules and, you know, experiences here, or you're by playing with chords or, you know, different tension ways that you interact with tension. Like, that's part of the job. And so I like to think about how do we, how do we make subtle shifts in my, in my company? I don't,

do you have, do you have like a team that you work with? Are you just still all solo with the things you do? Just a manager, agent, lawyer, so small team. Yeah. So I think, I think about designing, like,

how do you want the team to function, right? And so I create rules for the structure of my company and the ways that I try to encourage that, like, hey, this is something that, you know, our company mottoes work with awesome people, make awesome things and help each other grow. Okay, how do we do that? Like, what does the thing? What does that really mean?

And how do we measure that? And how do we, how do we, you know, design for a well-functioning team? Like the best parts of my job now, I am trying to remove myself as much as possible from a lot of the day-to-day creative work and empower other people to do the same, which is very, very hard. And so now it's a big shift, but trying to change the structure so that people, I don't get in the way as much. But it's a different thing with, you know, you're pretty much solo responsible for the creative work. Although maybe there's a different, maybe there's a parallel here. I'd be interested to hear about your, the difference between you doing a solo production, which also

sounded crazy me, you try to do a song a day. So maybe we can talk about that. I'll give you a few angles here. Two, when you're doing a co-lab and you're working with another artist to build something, or three, when you're doing a remix, you're taking something that already exists that somebody else created and you're building it into your own. Like, how does, how do you approach those different things? or maybe there's some interesting corollaries here. Yeah, I mean, it's all about how long the process takes. So if it's a remix, it's a very fast production process because the top line's been done.

There's chords that can follow. You're just breathing new life into a song and bringing it to a different genre and new demographic. So remixes might take two or three days, start to finish. A new original with lyrics. If I do everything, that's weeks. and collabs

yeah, collabs take weeks as well, but different people can divide up the labor and take some of the heavy lifting. And to me, everyone has their strong points. You try to hire complimentary strengths

to compliment your weaknesses. But, you know, it's like for me, the hard part is taking the mumble tracks, taking the melodies, and then putting coherent lyrics to those. So the easiest thing for me to do is come up with melodies

and then the shape of the melodies, The rhythm and the melody, that comes very fast. But when I have to make it have an arc and structure to the song, then that's like the editor hat has to come on. And I have to say, this line's not good enough, or this melody could be hookier. So that's really hard to do. So recently I started doing my own vocals again.

I've done it a while in the past. That's a fascinating process of like training your voice, getting more strength to hit those notes, trying to rely less on autotune. But you can get a really unique sound because I know how to engineer vocals. So I'm engineering myself, doing the lyrics. Usually I don't do all that heavy lifting. Usually it's like, I get a demo from somebody,

and it's like, here's the top line, here's some chords. It's just like block piano chords, sustained chords. And I go, cool, I can bang this out. It's almost like doing a remix, except you have writer share and you own the song. But you give up more writing credit to the co-writers that bring it to you. So a lot of people work with these top line factories from Europe where they just say like, it's like going

grocery shopping. Like here, do you want this? Do you want this sound right now or do you want this? Can you put your name on this? You can work like that if you want, but it's more satisfying and you typically have more success doing a song start to finish in the studio, like I'll record a vocalist in my shoulder and do everything here and everybody who's in the room. It's very clear who did what. And it's a 50-50 split or we split it into thirds. But when you start doing the top line game, you find out producers that they weren't there originally. And then there's like a silent partner who wants a piece. And then somebody played tambourine and they want 20%.

And it gets really messy. And you go, wait a minute, I'm left with like 5% of this song that I did all this work on. So you inherit the baggage of it. So there's so many different ways you can do it and they're all valid. I think the traditional pop factory approach is great. You know, doing it all yourself is great. And then I think maybe the best approach is like a 50-50 split of I do an instrumental. And then I shop that on.

a vocalist and I say, can you hear a melody in this? And I'll mute the leads or I'll create some space and they know. They know. I'll send them three or four songs and then I'll have them come and do like a mumble track and try to form the lyrics. That's what I've done in the past. And the songs have worked out the best. And I assume I know what this means, but mumble track is they're just, they're kind of singing but not singing real words so they can kind of get the melody down. Is that right? Right. You're just waiting for this stuff is coming out of this subconscious stew in your mind, which I think is the most fascinating process in the world. A lot of people don't talk about it because I don't think they want to analyze the process.

They just know if something works and they don't want to mess with it. But most people, from what I've seen, all across the industry, they hear something musical, a chord voicing or a sample or some leads. And then in their head, this little melody is knocking on their head saying, oh, maybe you should do this. It's the muse comes in and kind of whispers in your ear. Like, maybe do this melody. And then maybe it's shaped like this and it has this cadence. and this rhythm to it. And then maybe I was saying this word.

So this is the key phrase. Now this is the chorus line. And then, okay, well, what are the verse is going to do to build up to the chorus? And how are we going to tell the story? How is it going to unfold? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So let's dig into the muse a little bit here because I think this is, this is fascinating. You know, this power of intuition versus logic, the, you know, where these kind of good ideas come from, you know, I think. you have one of your cards, I think it's a gut versus logic. It's a few cards that tie into this idea. What is your theory on that, right? How do you create space from the muse properly? How do you cultivate that intuition? I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I'd be curious from your perspective, where does that come from? Or how do you make it show up when you want to, or ideally, as often as possible? I think a lot is the prep and the prep and the

maintenance. Because I look at it like it's this whole process, this holistic cycle that has to happen where it isn't just like creative genius moments followed by a brief period of rest and it just begins again. You're getting the plumbing sorted out ahead of time in the studio. There's nothing needs to be labeled. Your cables are color coded. Things are properly hooked up and powered. Nothing's broken. There's no batteries missing from your keyboards or if they're plugged in. You know, everything is functioning so that you can get into a flow. state as quickly as possible. And if you don't, if you're going back and forth between left brain, right brain, analytical, so creative, you are not going to stay in a flow state. You're not going

to even get to a flow state at that point. So I have to start with a template or something. It doesn't mean that the template is dictating the song, but it's got some structure. It's got my drums are color-coded like this. The leads are going to be this. Here's some sample instruments. Here's some initial settings for the audio processing. So I can record vocals and I'm not thinking about EQ. and compression and things to beef up the vocal. Like those decisions, that decision budget has been reduced. Yeah. Leanor process.

So there's that prep. And then you have all these stages of composing. These are kind of the categories that tips fall into, but composing, arranging, mixing. And then at the very end, after performing the music and bringing it to a live setting, which you learn a lot, playing the music live for the first time. It's almost never right the first time when you play it live is maintenance. And then I think that is, that's greasing the gears for the process, the creativity, removing any obstructions and taking out the debris in the process, you know, I think that's broken. And then you start over again and then begin prepping for sessions. So it's this, it's this cycle that just happens over and over and over again.

And if you are a professional, it's not about having one hit song. It's about repeating this process so it's sustainable. So that's why I made the cards. It was like, you can't just get into a flow estate once and be like, How did that happen? Like, I don't know. It just felt like the right day or I was wearing my lucky socks. You know, it's like, no, no, no.

If you're a professional, you go write a swimming pool. You know, like get, you have to create it. You don't have to be in the mood for it. You need to just get in the studio and take that first step, play one chord, sing one note. And then it usually picks it momentum. Yep. Okay, that's fantastic.

I think there's, let me, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to try to overlay kind of some of the principles that I work with because it sounded like a lot of similarities here. So I talk often about the core design loop and sort of inspiring framing, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and iterating. And this idea that once you have a kind of core idea of what you want, setting boundaries around your work is super powerful, right? That you're talking, you know, I've already set the arrangement. I've already set this frame.

I've already kind of got my environment. I've got my tools. Everything's ready to go so that I know when I'm trying to be creative, especially for that brainstorming phase where we're going to try different things we're going to try to get ideas and get to something as quickly as I can that is I think it's a counterintuitive truth that's really important right that's most people when they think about being creative they think about being as unrestrained as possible and in fact I think that's the worst thing to be like if you just have a blank page or an open you know kind of workstation that you're like I don't know I don't know I could be I could do anything it's it's overwhelming and that having something that's sort of framing you to start I think is really powerful and And then when you're doing your composing and kind of arranging and mixing, how quickly do you go from, you know, that initial design process into, I'm going to test this with either your kids or your, or a live audience or something like that? How fast do you typically try to get things out there? You said, you know, can take from a couple days to a couple weeks to get a piece ready. Is it you're just eager to get it out there as soon as possible after that?

Do you sit on it? What's that part of the process look like? Sort of the incubation process can be five days to months. And what I'll do with drafted days, those are just loose instrumental ideas. So it's sort of like beat, chord progression, lead, baseline, additional percussion, maybe sing a scratch vocal on it, like a guide vocal, just whatever comes to my head, maybe the mumble track. And then I'll listen to those. I won't listen to those for months. And then I come back and review them.

I put them all in a folder on disco, which I love. And that's a service that a lot of music supervisors use, but I use it for music organization. More record levels are using it. It just sounds better than SoundCloud. But I have it, I have all the drafts on there. Everything is a number.

So I'm not thinking of names for all these projects. So I have probably 760 concepts right now. And I've just kept the number. I've screwed it up a few times for sure and mess the numbers up. But I go back and I review them and then I can hear like, oh, I've made too many that sound like this. I've repeated myself. And the weirdest thing happened recently.

I went back and I did the exact same chord progression and same melody on two different concepts within a week of each other. And I have no idea. Like that idea must have really wanted to be heard. Because you really are like, you're channeling this stuff. Woo-woo's that sounds like you get in the studio and you never know what's going to come through. If you're open to it and I don't know where these ideas come from that come deep from the subconscious. So I'm trying to find a way to tap into that stuff faster. It doesn't work every day.

But if you can tap into that process, it's so powerful. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you set up the tools, you set up the space. You can't control when inspiration comes. But I do think, yeah, again, to de-woo it, I do think that there is not just, you know, as you process in new information and you hear new sounds, you hear what's out there and you see and you play with new technologies,

you're building up your subconscious with these kinds of connections that are ready to go. And at some point, there's going to be a version of that that shows up. Like, we don't, we don't, if you really think about where your ideas come from, you have no idea, right? Like, they just show up. Even as I'm saying these words, I don't necessarily know the next sentence I'm going to say before I start saying. And I just start talking. And at some point, the next thing pops up. And so you have to appreciate the, if not, you're not going to use a mysticism word.

You have to appreciate that sort of uncertainty and unknowability that comes from where, where these ideas bubble up. And so you, you look for patterns where I can create consistent space for this to happen. I can consume a lot of positive material that helps me, right? I find that to be like knowing where your information diet is and your, your consumption of, of things is so,

so important, right? I try to make sure I'm getting new ideas, not just for me for games, but from all different genres, from all different areas that I'm seeing like kind of where, you know, where is the cultural norms now? What is the new technologies that are available now?

And you can sort of see this when you see a lot of different ideas in technology, in art, and whatever. They pop up independently within very short windows of each other in multiple different places. And what that tells me is that there's just a, you know, again, not to use the woo of like a collective unconscious, but there's a set of precursors that are in place that are creating the opportunity for certain ideas to step up.

and you want to be the one that's channeling that, you know, zeitgeist, whatever, to be able to bring it to life. And if you don't, I feel like if it doesn't come from a pure place, then you're more imitating. I mean, you're all going to have these, you're going to have these subconscious influences, which can be really hard with copyright law,

where you, there's been songs where I'm like, oh, that sounds really familiar. And I totally just copied something, not maliciously, not with intent. But if you combine, like I always say, if you steal from enough sources, it's original. But if you steal from a narrow list of it, it's plagiarism.

So you just got to be, yeah, you have to cultivate your sources, your data sets. It would be like AI just searching, you know, Getty images and building everything off that instead of multiple sources. So. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting space. You know, I was in law school before becoming a game designer. And I studied copyright law. And it's a very fascinating thing because your industry is very different than Your industry is very is pretty strict in terms of like if you use a chord progression or sound that sounds just like somebody else not a corporate version, but like you know, use clips and things.

And there's a whole lot of legal consequences to come from that, even though remixing and is such a huge part of the industry. In games, it's actually very loose. Right. You can if the when it comes to game design specifically, you know, small changes will are totally fair game in terms of most legal things. This is by the way, for everybody listening, I'm not a lawyer. This is not actual legal advice. Do your own research. But I do find it's a, it changes the nature of creativity in the space,

depending upon what levels of protections you can have and which ones, what counts as original. I find that really, really interesting. And I think, you know, whatever, copyright law should serve the creative greater good. If you've created some original, you should get rewarded for it. But also it shouldn't handcuff future generations from building things that are building on top of it. Yeah, you can have the chilling effect on new original works. the copyrights are supposed to inspire that.

And I think the weirdest loophole I've ever seen is that if you do a cover of a song, note for note, you can put it out. You're supposed to get permission, but you can put it out and you can get royalties on it. But if you sample two seconds of a snare drum, you'll get sued. If it's the actual parts of the master recording, which is insane. I mean, that's absolutely insane. You don't even have to put the original artist name in the cover. You know, you can have your name.

they're going to get the writing credit, but it's absolutely nuts. Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. I have some other kind of producer friends that have talked about that and they've done, okay, yeah, I'll just, you know, re-record this as a cover and then it's fine, and I can do this. And it's like, yeah, it's very strange, very strange. So I'm curious, since you brought it up, you know, AI is obviously the hot button topic these days. It's affecting every industry. There's a lot of this exact kind of discussion. in some ways it empowers us and lets us be more creative. I mean, I've found just from a pure ideation tool, it's been quite remarkable.

But in terms of it taking places of people's jobs or pulling from copyrighted works to create what it does, it's created a lot of quite a bit of tension and concern. I know certainly in my industry, in traditional art and digital art especially, how do you feel about it in terms of your industry or just in general, have you played with it? Where do you come down on that tool right now? I've used it for single art. So we did the last couple of singles ago, we used it for new artwork, and it was just

absolutely mind-blowing. Because it's usually, to me, it's a very frustrating conversation with a graphic designer. They either get it or like, this one was way off. And I'm like, I can't spoon feed you what I'm thinking. Like, you can't just say, I know it when I see it. But I think this is a good solution to the I know when I see it dilemma people have with their creative teams of you can iterate and someone's ego isn't getting bruised and it's not getting expensive.

You know, for Mid Journey, it's just incredible, absolutely incredible. I think it smokes everything else. I'm excited to see the new chat GPT modalities that are coming out in the next few weeks. That's going to be interesting because some of them weren't. I wasn't blown away by Dolly. Maybe it's better now. Photoshop generative Phil is pretty cool, but not amazing yet. But I think it's all getting there.

But Mid Journey is there. It's been there. It's absolutely insane. I use Mid Journey and ChatGyPT, and I think it's fun. I think there's going to be a lot of flux with jobs. I think there'll be a net positive. There'll be a lot of jobs lost, a lot of jobs created. A lot of people are going to be prompt engineers.

But also once Mid Journey goes 3D and you can do 3D models, that's supposedly on the way. That's going to be insane, especially for game design. I think when you say build this environment in Unreal with this setting and then we're going to build these objects, game development is going to rapidly. I mean, cost is going to go way down. Yeah. What do you think? Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's where, that's where for me, it's like, it's one of those, like every other tool that has existed. And there's, there's a, there's a future world, right? We're recording this in September, 2023 and the technology moves very rapidly. And, you know, so, so who knows where this is going to be if somebody's listening to this even six months from now.

But the, every time there's new technology, it empowers another layer of creativity. Right. So when I teach game design, I always tell people, look, you should, you got to start with something very simple. Start with a simple card game, a simple board game, something that you can like do yourself and iterate on because people come in, they want to make, they want to make World War Clash Plus Halo plus, you know, whatever, GrantDust Auto, right? And it's like, all right, bro, slow down. But as the tools reduce the cost to produce, then it creates that no, okay, actually now a small team can potentially make things like that. They can create a way higher scale, right? Even, you know, things as simple as trading card games, the art budgets for those, having made several of them, is

enormous. You need hundreds of pieces of art, thousands of pieces of art over time. And they are very expensive. It's very tough. So we spend hundreds of thousand dollars on art every year. We're not planning to stop doing that. But man, the scale of what we can do, if we do choose to use AI art is way bigger. And yet, for digital games, I think it's huge. The potential is incredible. So even though it has downstream effects that can be very harmful to people who are at a certain part of the creative process, it's going to empower other people in different parts the creative process. So I don't know where it's all going to fall out. And I do think it's something we have to be conscious, just like with disruption, right? When, you know, when cars showed up and people

stopped, you know, riding horses, a lot of people lost jobs and, you know, or when we have the, you know, the internet and technology moved forward and people, you know, lost other, you know, some retail businesses took hits or I think you, as a society, we have a responsibility to try to help people, well, that get stuck by, you know, by progress to make them able to transition. but I think it's overall very exciting. I mean, what is possible today is light years ahead of what was possible a year ago. I mean, just a year ago, chat GPT was not out from where we are now. Like, it was like somewhere in this, that ballpark, it became publicly available.

I think it was almost exactly a year ago, if I remember. And I haven't caught up with the latest version of the, I used music LM. I tried some of the music AI stuff. It was okay. But I think it's, I mean, maybe I'm safe for another year. I don't know. Now, maybe it's five years. But it's, I wasn't blown away.

I think it's pretty promising. but I wonder, I guess the question is like what is unique? What human made things are we best at? Like probably humor and things like that will be harder to replicate. But I think now it's going to be, there's going to be an increased focus on, you know, real human design and real authentic authorship and proving that something's human as well. So I think the first thing to go will be disposable jobs. jobs that are generic and can be easily replicated, but it's not, obviously, it's not just

going to be those. It's going to go after true creatives. It's already happening with art, digital art. But I think the big, tricky part to me with mid-jurneing things is you don't have the fine control over the objects. So I think, like, yeah, you get this, you can keep the seed number and you can kind of build your ideas off this initial seed, but, but you know, you're not getting like the full model where you can, and I have that same problem sometimes with, in three printing where I'm making a 3D printed case for the deck where if I don't if I just have an STLFA if I have an original I don't have the original graphics file and I can scale it and I can cut it and skew it but I can't go in and change the individual points like I could with the original

program and that's what it feels like with mid journey yeah yeah we've avoided using it in our in our process for final pieces we do use it for like you know for kind of mockups and storyboards and concepts but not for any final pieces because in part because of that like I need my game brand to look consistent across hundreds of cards or across the board, and it just doesn't do that right now. I think that's likely to change, but as of today, it's not that use. Maybe the 3D mid-jury. Then you have the mesh for it.

You can manipulate, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I know I can talk about this sort of topic forever, but I try to speak towards the more timeless principles because these are ones that are going to change rapidly. And I want to dig into your cards because I've spent a good amount of time looking through them. We've, we've, we've, we've, we've already covered a decent chunk of the, the decent chunk of this that I, I, you know, is kind of system structure, workflow, reducing friction in your process. And we've kind of already covered some of that stuff, um, here. Um, you know, better workflow, better art, develop systems, avoid routines. Uh, first order retrievability bottlenecks. Like those, those kinds of cards are and we won't, you know, people can, can get the cards if they want to see the full details. But, um, is there things around that process that, uh, you want to, uh, you want to

highlight in general that we haven't already talked on because I think it's so underappreciated in general how much having stuff in place, having your tools ready to go, having a system that's set up and that you know what that rhythm is, is just such a powerful thing to allow creativity? Is there anything that jumps out to you is like kind of key points to highlight that we didn't already kind of go through? I mean, I love the first order retrievability. And I learned that from Adam Savage, Mythbusters guy, designed a toolbox for that.

where you had things vertically positioned so that the tools, and this isn't revolutionary stuff. Like people have pegboards and they have outlines of shapes of tools on their pegboard. But it's so easy to lose sight of these basics. There's sort of these lost basics. And if your tools, if you have to move something out of the way to get to your tools, to power it up to unplug it,

you're losing precious seconds and your idea is going to float away. So I think that's a big part of the preparation side of it. You know, little cues that can kind of nudge you in that way, just drawing the outline of a screwdriver, you know, on your peg board versus just one peg in there. Like little things like that can make a huge difference to your process. And then, you know, even visually in the studio, if I have too much stuff, I mean, it's pretty, it's busy enough as it isn't here, but this is all cognitive bandwidth that has been taken up. So if I have tons of stuff in my desk, that is taking away,

subconsciously is taking away some focus. So even changing the lighting in the studio changes how I here. If I make it really dim, I can focus better. Even certain colors, supposedly purple and blue are better creative colors. I don't know. But if I have fluorescent lights on, or if I have these main lights on in my studio, it's not the same. It takes me longer to get in the process and time of day. So I think there's, I think that it's almost like there's a physics to creativity and a physics to art in terms of like, you don't want to fight gravity, you know, respect these natural rules. So circadian rhythm is a good example. I thought it was something woo-woo that was, or just some medical jargon, BS, but it's so true.

It's like people say, oh, I'm a night owl, a morning person. It's the same thing. It doesn't matter. Your logic brain is weak in the morning and at night because it's in a circadian flow where it's not thinking logical thoughts. Your brain's waking up or it's powering down at those times of the morning and the night. So middle of the day kind of becomes better for administrative tasks. It's like a black hole. You know, there's no excuse for not working in the middle of the day or the early afternoon,

but you're going to get way more done. I don't care what your personality type is or if you're a night owl or a morning person. I don't think anyone says, I'm a middayer. I'm a middayer. I've never heard that. I thrive at noon, you know. 2 p.m. is when I shine. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I don't people get tired at 4 p.m. But it's like, no, I think all people think there are special snowflake and it's like, this is the way I work. And I'm like, no, no, there's these universals that if you, if you just embrace some of these universal tactics, you'll remove a lot of suffering from the creative process. And there has to be some suffering to be happy. I know that's part of the process, but we can reduce some of the suffering so you're not,

so you're enjoying your art and you're enjoying your process. And let's take away some of the misery of it. And, you know, but it's not going to be, it wouldn't be enjoyable if there was no struggle. But there's a lot of unnecessary friction we can take out of the system. Yeah. So is there, how would you, because this is, again, one of those points I totally agree with super counterintuitive for most people. It wouldn't be enjoyable if there was no struggle.

Can you elaborate on that? What's the, what's the, how do you define the good struggle from the bad struggle? Which struggle should you be removing from your life versus you should be making sure you create space for? Well, I think, right, like achievement without, there's no satisfaction if you have achievement with no struggle. There was a recent podcast Tim did with this Arthur Clark who did a book with Oprah of all people.

And I was just like, oh, that's so genius. Like if everything is just easy, if it comes to you easy and the tools are making things easier, if there is no struggle, you won't appreciate the process at all. But I think, yeah, how much struggle? Who knows? How much friction is right? Oh, interesting story. Funny.

So a friend of mine designs these parties for Notch, the creative Minecraft. And he creates a nightclub from scratch almost every year. He does it in his house once he saw these parties, but he did one at the Coliseum in L.A. So there's 2,000 people there. And my friend was saying, oh, we actually create friction just to keep things interesting. And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, well, we hire actors to be bouncer and make things a little more difficult. And we actually intentionally add some friction to the process.

like that. I mean, it's a free party. So I guess, I guess you got to make some things hard in the process. So I don't know, I don't know if that's cruel or genius. But he made a nightclub from scratch. It was like a Berlin underground rave. And then they tear it down the next day. Yeah. I spend millions. That's, I mean, that sounds like a fun, a fun activity to be able to spend. I, yeah, there's a book I really enjoyed called The Power of Moments. And it talks about like how you intentionally try to craft meaningful moments. moments for whatever, right, could be at your work. It could be for a social gathering, could be with your family, could be with your loved ones. Because at the end of the day, like, that's what we have, right? It's not about how many hours you have in a day or years you have in your life. It's like how many of these like meaningful moments do you really have and thinking consciously about how you craft those meaningful moments, either in the micro scale and the art that we do in a game or a song or an experience at a show or in the macro scale in terms of like,

how do you make somebody's first day at work something that they'll remember and that really impactful. How do you make it that you celebrate your achievement when you've got a Grammy nomination or you've got Oprah book or whatever it is, right? That those things like, like depending upon your own psyche, a lot of times you'll default to skipping past certain things that could be really important to stay with. Right. So I know, you know, my my tendency is always to look at what's wrong. Like look at what is not going well and what needs to be fixed. And that's served me well, but I had to really consciously shift my focus and start practicing gratitude and start practicing celebrating wins in those moments. And that not only has made me way happier as he would be, but it's made me a

better leader. It's made my team more productive and happy because it's not always what's wrong, what needs to be fixed, what's going. And so crafting those experiences for all different types, knowing consciously what is I really want here? What is the experience I want? And then it's kind of working backwards from there. How do we do that for the people we care about? And even with failures, I think that those have been really memorable moments as well. I mean, I'll never forget some of them. I had a computer crash at Coachella, but that changed my approach for, I lost 15 minutes of my 45 minutes set.

But that led to me being more prepared, using better hard drives on computers, making sure equipment's locked down on stage. And then at Burning Man, I walked up to play and I pressed the cue button. Didn't work. Press the play button, didn't work. It was plywoodust,

had gotten in every button in the CDJ, and I had to play off the hot cues. But it led to me working with Pioneer to help redesign the CDJs. So they went to Burning Man and then recreated Burning Man in their lab in Tokyo. Amazing. So like this failure, this failure that could have been really bad and turned out to be amazing, thank God it was able to still play the set, turned into active involvement to helping build a product.

Yeah. This is your set at Root Society by chance? Yes. Yeah. Okay. I was there. I was at that time. Oh, wow.

And it came out great. Crazy. Crazy. So. I think that lesson is in many ways may be the most important one that people could take away here, right? This idea that you can embrace failure. I think that's even one of your card titles. It might be if it's, but this idea that you, so this is kind of my working definition of abundance, right?

Either you're doing things and everything's going great, which case is okay, people mostly, people would associate those, but it's or you're not and you're in struggle, at which point you have this opportunity to learn and grow. In fact, everything that I am today, and I think this sounds like from your stories, it's true, but every creative I've talked to is like, those hardships that you look back on are the building blocks of the next great thing about you, right? Or either you be gaining extra resilience or you being able to learn a new skill or move to another level. And that if that's true, which it so far has been true in my life and it's true in everybody that I talk to, then no matter what happens when you take a leap, if it goes

well or if it doesn't, you're going to, it's going to go great by definition because the the hardships will continue to carry you forward to the next plateau. And so if you can own that, which is easier said than done, don't get me wrong, when you're in the middle of it, when the decks are dead on you, or you've got a company failing or you've got whatever, it's much harder to remember that, yeah, I'm grateful for this. But I've gotten a lot better at it. I think it's a really a really powerful frame to bring to whatever work you're doing. It is sometimes exhausting, though, that I feel like you do have to go against the grain a lot in life and fight for everything that you want. and you can't just float along and see where the tide takes you. It just doesn't work that way.

Like I feel like I just realized that recently of you have to really, it's exhausting, but you have to fight for what you want to achieve and protect your creative process, protect your intention of what you want to do. Yeah. Otherwise you get taken for a ride, you know. Yeah, yeah. So the way I like to look at this is I like there's a, I view this as like the world through a variety of lenses, right?

there's a there's a there's a there's a, I agree with you 100% I mean I'm a driven person I believe like I have three year plans and five year plans and I'm driving towards okay what you know how do I get to to this even though my life is awesome today how do I get it to be even more awesome next year right and I want to take those goals seriously and I want to be in the struggle for it and I'm totally on board with that and that's one frame of like hey take these struggle seriously really try to make an impact in the world really try to do good by yourself by your family by everybody that you encounter that's important but on the flip side.

you can't define yourself by your external success or external valuation or whatever it is, that arbitrary goal that you made, right? And in reality, there's a, you know, your whole and complete the way you are. And you can kind of take that frame too. And sometimes being able to easily shift from one to the other, I think is, that's like what wisdom is to me. That's what skillful living is to be able to take a variety of these different lenses, much like your cards, right?

Which one do I need now? Which frame do I need now? Even if they're contradictory at times, right? In the sense, we're all connected. and we're all one. In other sense, hey, I'm like really trying to struggle to be the best version of me that you can take both of those frames and move between one another, I think is really helpful. I think one of them was, one of the tips was challenge the default state. I don't know if that's in there or still or not, but that's a big one for me where it's sort of like maybe the template for

someone else's life and their path is not best for you. And maybe it's a great template for somebody else, which I think is fascinating. Like, I have to build my own template. And I sort of like, And I use living templates that change over time. I don't stick with one for making music for 25 years. And the templates vary wildly and for different purposes. But challenge the default state. Maybe the default isn't the best path. And I think the funniest thing is if you look at other careers,

I look at other DJs and artists, you could copy someone's path and that worked for them. And that combination worked for them, but it won't work for you. And it's fascinating. You could have a hit song. You could have everything, all the box. are checked and hit song, but if it doesn't come out the right time, like one variable is off,

the climate, that's probably a third half of the success is just when does it come out? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you can't. Or game release, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, you can't control, you cannot control your success. I've had many projects that I thought for sure this is going to be a home run, flop. I've had other projects that I didn't think were for anybody but myself, rocketing to success. Like, you do not, and there's no, there's no single pattern. There's no, there's no answer. You could do things to make it more likely for you to succeed, but you cannot control the actual outcome of success. So you just have to focus on the things that you can control, right? My creative process, my mindset, my continuing to develop skills, my continuing to be exposed

to new ideas and continuing to put stuff out there, take feedback, train my instincts to what's working and what isn't. Like that, that I can control. But once I release it, I have to let it go and, you know, keep just move to the next thing, right? It is tough. I tell my managers, I say like, I think every song is going to be a hit. And if I didn't think it was going to be hit, I wouldn't let it leave the studio. So inevitably, you're going to be disappointed. Right.

But you're prepared for that because it'd be impossible for every song to be a hit. But you have to be confident enough in that to feel like it should be releaseworthy. So then this is one that I, this ties in, I think, pretty well to one of the cards I wanted to make sure to talk about here because I haven't talked about this term, I think, at all, in the podcast, embrace Wabi-Sabi. Can you explain what? that means and why it's important. To me, this Wabi-Sabi point is comforting because it's saying that not everything will last.

Nothing is perfect. And eventually everything breaks and falls apart. So that if you're trying to control everything for perfection, perfection is a myth and it's a false narrative. So I think you do your best and you move on. But with Wabi-Sabi, if you try to make it perfect, perfect is also subjective. So like if I'm recording vocals and there's a little bit of noise in the recording or if there's some imperfections, if the noise isn't there, does that mean it's a perfect recording? No.

I mean, it actually may be worse. A little bit of noise and a little bit of randomness in the recording ads does actually add some life in it. So I think you could start to work backwards by trying to be perfect. and how do we even know what perfect is anyways? So Wabi Saab, I'm missing one of the points in the Wabi Savi, but the main idea is that everything breaks down eventually and nothing lasts forever.

So you have to take comfort in knowing that that is, that gear is going to become obsolete. Equipment is going to break down over time. You're not going to, you just have to embrace these, some things will be sunk costs and you can move on and give yourself permission to get that new computer

or not be focused on the gear, but be aware that things serve their purpose and you move on. Yeah, yeah. I think it's as I've always interpreted it as this, you know, the perfect imperfection, right? The things are, you know, trying to make things into some ideal of perfect is not, in fact, the best way to do things. If there's going to be things that break, there's going to be things that are just artifacts of what you happen to be at the time. And that's okay.

That's great. I mean, I look back through my category, my catalog, rather, of designs. and I, there's not a single game I've made that I can't look back on it and be like, man, I would have done that very differently. Oh, I would do that differently today. I would change that. But it's who I was then. It's the time it was then.

And so I can be proud of those imperfections. And then they, you know, go into the flow of my next projects and I'll be able to make new mistakes. I'll be embarrassed about a few years from now. That's okay. If you listen back to those, those previous works and you weren't cringing at all, you wouldn't really have grown, right? So it's, I find it really hard to go back and listen to old stuff.

And then sometimes there's old songs where I'm like, oh, man, have I progressed enough since then? Like, it's a zigzag. It's a zigzag where there's a lot or a lot of them I cringe. And then some songs, I'm like, how did I get that going so? Like what works so well with that track? And that's another reason why I wrote down all these tips too. So I wouldn't forget in the moment what was working well in the studio. I'm going to circle back to another question of mine that's a little bit self-interested

because I found, you know, the last two and a half years, I've been a digital nomad. And so I've been really working on building up these routines and these habits in ways that are functional on the road. And not just, you know, when I have everything perfect and everything all set up like we've talked about, it's great to have your workstation, everything all set up. And I try to create portable versions of that. When you're touring and you're around, you know, it must be even way more disruptive than what I go through. I travel a new place every two months and I have plenty of time to get stable. How do you approach that in terms of a lot of these tools of creating systems and functioning so that you can be at your place. your best, you know, leaving aside the times when you're powering through sickness and whatnot.

Yeah. I find it very hard to work on music on the road. And if I have to be, if I'm over in China on tour and I, that's the only way I can stay sane is to work on some music in the hotel room. It's great. But every hotel, it's like the seat is way below the desk or the seat won't stick, you know, like you're just slowly getting lower down. I mean, that's just every hotel. Or there's noise or someone's interrupting you or on the plane, you run out of batteries or the power outlet isn't working. Like, I've seen everything. It drives me nuts. So what I do, I focus, I sort of go into either studio

rap or road dog. And two modes, where I'm greased for one task. And studio, it's like, okay, just pump out ideas. I have a big monitor, fast connection, you know, nice speakers. But on the road, it's, I

can't bring all that stuff with me. And I'm working with a much smaller screen. So I'll do edits. I'll do more DJ prep work for the set. Yeah. And doing special mash up special edits and listening to podcast, reading, catching up on sleep. In the studio, I'm focused on music. And I mean, now I feel like I'm juggling so many different jobs and wearing different hats and trying to learn new skills.

But all I have to really do is just do a good song each day. And we find ways to bog ourselves down. And it's just staying, trying to do tons of tiny little tasks. And you really just need to focus on one big task. Yes. Sounds so boring, but it's like it's so hard to learn this. No, no, this is the fundamentals, right? Another one of your cards I love is embrace the mundane, right?

Just chop wood, carry water. The mundane is like the micro is the macro. And this is why I made my level up journal. I think I've talked to you about it. With just a little journal, it's like, what are my top three priorities for the day? What are the three habits that are most important to me? And then a gratitude practice. And it's just I have a million things I need to do.

I have a million responsibilities. We have a dozen projects running simultaneously. But if I can focus and I keep right in front of me, What are the most important things I need to do? Every day I want to write and design and create. Every day I want to be able to, you know, and then I'll like focus on whatever the key things are. And then my personal health routines, right,

meditate, exercise, things that keep my body and minds like focused and dealing with all the stuff. Those things, if I can get all those things done, then it's a success. If I don't, then I'm going to head off the rails and I'm going to be let my priorities end up getting dictated by other people's incoming or just by whims of just, oh, hey, this looks like a cool thing. chasing rabbit holes and emails and, you know, whatever other random project kept is my attention. Or task switching. I get into sort of list mania where I get to ever know and I just start

building a list and then I switch back to some emails and then it's really disruptive. And I have to, I mean, lists are part of my process where I just sort of start with a massive ideas. Yes. But then like I use those big legal, yellow legal notebooks. But then you end up just making longer lists. Yep. So you almost end up trying to just fill a page. So it becomes it's its own problem. The format and the constraints of that become its own problem. Yep. So yeah, that's why I divide, I divide between the two. So I use, I use workflowy from my list. It's just infinite nested lists. You can write down as much as you want and I break it all down and I tag everything so I can reference ideas and reference different projects. And then that's why this little physical journal

is key because then when I'm working, I don't look at the lists as much as possible. I just look at the journal and there's not that much space for writing down what I want to work, what I want to do. So it keeps me focused. And I will use tools to block myself from the habit checking. So I have, I use a, I use a plug in called inbox when ready, which if I click on Gmail, it doesn't show me my inbox. I have to actually go through separate steps and it will block me and create a timer before

it lets me see my inbox. Because if it's, because my, the habit of just going over, but if it gives me 30 seconds of like, I have to stop and click an extra button and slow down. It's like, wait, I don't actually want to do this. This is my brain trying to escape the hard thing, which is right, probably working on a new design project or working on a difficult email or whatever, something, something that's hard that I need to do, that my mind wants to go to something easier. There's even more aggressive tools like the freedom plugin, which literally will shut down

like any, it blocks websites, it blocks any apps you want. And so that I will force myself to not be able to be distracted when my mind wants to run. So even though I've been training my brain as much as I have, I still sometimes will just lean on tools to help prevent me from the lesser parts of my psyche from taking over. You got to rewire it. Otherwise, it's easy to also just tinker and make small adjustments. Like here. I mean, literally, I've been designing this. This has been weeks to take this design.

I think someone's existing design and tweak the dimensions to fit the cards. And then you change one thing and then the lid doesn't fit on it. And then I'm like, oh, I want a way to do it so that the cards can sit on their own, just on the lid. So you have like little cards to remind you. But every little change you make, it only, and it takes so long, this is, you know, eight hours to print this thing. Yeah. So it's like, yeah. I know this is an audio podcast, but it's basically created a way to.

Yeah, go ahead. I've created a way to. So the card box is like this normally this tuck box thing. And I wanted something special for the last 20 of these decks. I only have 20 of them left. and I wanted a way to make it more actionable. So you're in the studio and the box can sit vertically and be appealing and be a creative part of your process. Because it's only as good as how actionable they are.

I have creativity books. There's some great Ableton ones. And I don't want to read chapters. I want to read quick tips that have a visual cue. That's the whole point with this. So if it's a book I got to reread and look at notes, then it's not going to be part of the creative process. Yeah. Yeah, that ease of access of, like what I believe is like I've reached a point in my life where even if I never learned anything new, but all I did was actually remember and implement all of the things I have already learned at some point. I would be, you know, rich, six pack. It's a genius, happy. Everything would be my life would be great, right? I would have because I think so much of the, you know, we feel like, oh, I've heard that already. I don't need to hear that. that again, right? And actually part of the point of this podcast is like the same messages are

repeated over and over and over again by designers across different now, different industries all over, artists, it doesn't matter because they're the fundamentals. And being reminded of the fundamentals and having them accessible at your fingertips is critical. I go through daily mantra reviews of all the things that are most important to me. Having the cards, like you said, at hand is very important. Having something that's just like easy access, I keep, you know, little, I actually will switch out different physical little cards of either some of like the Dale Carnegie tips or different, you know, reminders for myself of our, I have a relationship mantra with my fiance. I have my creative goals and my, like, I will switch those out because even

when you have them out there, they get, you get used to them and then you, you're blind to them. You acclimate. Yeah. Exactly. Well, it's like, what do they say, the cliche is truth worn smooth? So it's sort of like, just because you hear it a lot doesn't mean it's untrue. True. Although in songwriting cliches, they lose their meaning because they've lost their edge and they're not remarkable anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's that's a different. When you're trying to create artistic work, you're actually, I know. I think it's actually the same point now that I think about it. It's like if you're every one of the, you know, the new self-help books or the new things, right? They're repackaging the same messages. You know, like this, you know, Marcus Aurelius said this already or Aristotle said this. already. But you're saying it in a new way that gets people's attention, right? Maybe it says, the subtle art of not giving a fuck. Oh, well, he said fuck in a title. Oh, my goodness. And it's same message, but, you know, repackaged in a way that's helpful. And a lot of times the same, I think that you could

say the same is true for all these different art forms. You're trying to get this, these core, whether it be an emotional experiences or a lesson across. And our, you know, we're taking our own personality and channeling that into whatever this new, new way to present a lot of the same ideas. It's like the liver king. You know, you just inject some personality. and it's another steroid example. It's just a charismatic cult leader with a new mission. There you go. Oh, this time it's different, though.

This time is different. Yeah, this time is different. Oh, man. Okay, well, this is great. I actually realized we've run short of time. I could keep talking about this stuff forever. Clearly, I knew this was going to happen. So this has been great.

So let me, let's just give people a chance to, they want to find your cards. If they want to listen to your music, if they want to find out more about you, what are the best ways for people to do that? search for Morgan Page, P-A-G-E, and just on Spotify, wherever you listen, and M-P-Quicktips.com, like MorganPage Quicktips.com. And hopefully we'll do a new set. Maybe there'll be more series coming, but I would love to know from your listeners' ways people are thinking about gamifying the creative process.

Part of this, to me, was a way of gamifying it. But I think there's another way to do it. I've sort of come up with some ideas, like maybe you shuffle cards in terms of how you actively use these cards as cues. But I think there's a way, there's probably a way to do it. Maybe you could do an app version, a digital app version where you can, you can organize them and focus on a theme or focus on three cards per day on a task. But I would love to know. People have ideas. I'd love to hear from you on Instagram too. That's where I'm most active at working page. Okay. Great. Well, all right, I have some ideas. I'll be happy to share with you here

as well, I think we'll, well, I'll share, I'll share one or two here right on the, on the podcast, because I don't want to leave, leave the audience hanging either. You know, I think that the value of these cards, and I think you could do this again, for people that are, you know, game designers out there, there's, there's some of these that are very, feel very music specific, which I didn't, you know, it didn't resonate as much for me, but most of them are 100% applicable. I don't care what your creative field is. And I, what I, what I find is, since arbitrar, Trautory constraints are powerful. Literally just like, yeah, if it's shuffle that you're facing a new creative

problem, shuffle the deck, pull out a key card. How does that card apply to this current problem? And always force yourself to spend, you know, even five or ten minutes on that effect. And how does it relate to what I'm doing is very power. I think it would be a very powerful tool for people. And I think that the, um, the ways to sort of gamify and move through, you could have, um, you know, I think having shared versions of this could be really powerful where you and some friends all like, okay, how do we, how do we each want to apply this together today?

And how do we hold each other accountable for being better at this task for this week, right? A lot of the stuff where it's setting up. Oh, yeah. Like in the morning, share it like, like text it to somebody, text it to your group, to a group of WhatsApp or something. Yeah, exactly. And for you, you know, with your audience, you want to make this a thing, like create a, create a live shareable version of this where it's like, hey, everybody that buys these cards

or has these cards, we're going to do, or whatever, whether they buy it or not, You can say, okay, we're going to, we're going to pick, create a, you know, whatever, Instagram. I don't know what the groups are on Instagram. Some social group is like, all right, this is today's card. Send out an email, set out a thing. How are you using today's card and work? And let people all share their ideas and collaborate together and create like a communal experience for it. I think would be really fun.

People doing it, you know, could do it on their own. But, you know, you're bringing a lot of people together and making it live. Like one of the things I found from, and I'm going a little bit of attention, I hope you don't mind if we go a little bit over here. The one of things I found, you know, I put all the principles. for game design into my book, right? I didn't hold anything back. I didn't hide anything. You can learn them all there. But I teach a live course, like a mastery course, and the power of having a group of people that are all focused on the same things at the same time and all kind of holding each other

accountable and moving forward is enormous. There's not, not even close to comparable, like how much progress you can make in that situation. And so taking this concept, which I think is great of having these individual key moments and key cards that are very accessible that you can apply at any point and then creating a kind of a communal space and some time pressure and some accountability around it, I think would be a very powerful way to add some extra value to this and really move a lot of people forward in their creative work. It's interesting. And I noticed that with people that I mentor, they want some accountability. They want somebody saying, okay, so where's the draft? Did you make those changes we talked about? If it's completely on their own, it's hard to hold yourself accountable.

for me it's hard too to set deadlines with stuff like I have to have somebody at that advantage and be like all right I got to get this in and then the label because a lot of times the labels won't give you deadlines

surprisingly where I'm begging for deadlines yeah yeah they're just like just send hits I'm like well give me some dates or give me some constraints you know yeah well I always say deadlines are magic they force you to really focus on what matters they force you to get things done it's also part of

the value of having a podcast that has some time limits so even though we've run over. You and I can continue our conversation. I'm going to, I'm going to cut this off here. And I want to thank you so much for doing this. This has been super fun. I knew it would be. And yeah, I've gotten a lot of value out of this and I'm sure my audience did too. So thanks a lot. Great. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platform, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares have a huge difference and help us grow

this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or soul.