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

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5:32 Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then also does some questions. No sean. A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscellar. No

5:56 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct World class performers from all different disciplines to tease out the habits. Routines, lessons learned, and so on that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today was a blast. We cover a lot that can be applied to Life

6:18 Business Thinking game design and a hundred other things. A lot of tactical advice, a lot of specifics. My guest is Justin Gary.

6:29 Justin is an award winning designer, author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is CEO of Stonebl Entertainment and creator of the innovative and award winning Ascension Deck Building Game Series. Prior to design in games, Justin was the youngest ever Magic the Gathering US national champion. He has studied creativity and applied the principles of design to create dozens of products Over his 20 years in the industry for brands that include Marvel, World of Warcraft, and the Wharton School of Business. Today he designs, consults, and teaches creativity around the world as a digital nomad, and there is a lot in between. We get into the weeds. in the best way possible in this interview cover a lot of ground, a lot of varied ground. So I hope and think you will enjoy it. You can find Justin online in many places. Think like a game designer dot com is one such place, and I highly recommend the podcast by the same name on Twitter at Justin underscore Gary.

7:22 And we will link to everything else, LinkedIn, Stone Blade. And much more in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. And without further ado, please enjoy. This extremely, extremely tactical And I found very, very entertaining conversation with

7:39 Justin. Gary. Justin. It is nice to see you. Very nice to see you again. Yeah, Tip, great to see you as again as well. And

7:50 You are at maybe undisclosed, oh you could disclose, but you are overseas at the moment. So we are across the pond, or many ponds, as it were. Glad we were able to make the timing work. And I thought we could begin With Magic. So magic, magic the gathering.

8:08 Is a game that I never really became familiar with because I was Older guard at that point, Dungeons and Dragons. a lot of the very first editions, but my younger brother, on the other hand. really became immersed in magic and actually competed

8:27 On Some level. And his friends were Just obsessed. with Magic the Gathering. So could you please for people who don't have the context

8:36 Explain what magic is and I suppose how you became involved and what that Trajectory look like. Magic's a trading card game invented by Richard Garfield. What trading card game means is that you can buy it, not just like a normal game like Monopoly you'd buy in a store, it'd be a single box. Here you buy packs of cards like you would baseball cards, and each one has different gameplay elements. And the way I like to describe it for people who don't know is it's sort of like a cross between chess and poker where you get to decide what deck of cards you're going to play and what pieces you get to play with. So there's the poker element of I'm drawing a hand of cards and I maybe I can bluff what I have and you don't know. And there's the chess element of there's tactically once I play those cards, there's tactically ways I use them and kind of battle back and forth.

9:19 And then of course it has fantasy characters and so it appeals to people who like Dungeons and Dragons. So you'll be playing wizards and dragons and warriors and stuff like that. And so I first got involved with magic. In a pretty funny way, actually. So I used to be on a competitive laser tag league. So I'm a very competitive person by nature. I've been uh involved in pretty much whatever I do. I'll find some way to compete with it. And in between games of laser tag people were playing this card game that looked really cool. I'd never heard of before. And I watched them play and I was like, okay, what is that? And so okay, so I go to the store and I just buy a pack of cards. And as I mentioned, the cards are totally random. So I just took all the random cards I bought and just went to go play and I got my butt kicked. And of course, okay, you actually have to construct and Build your deck and build your strategy and that helps it come to life. So I came back the next week and okay, now I've I played a little better and a little better and

10:09 Eventually at one point all the guys from my group were all gonna go to a state championship tournament. And how old were you at this point? I was sixteen years old. Okay. Yeah. So I was I was a young kid. So I was like, Oh, hey, come along, right? Come on the car ride and you know, those are some of my best memories in general. Just like, you know, a bunch of guys hanging out, jumping in the car, just Talking about games, riding up. And as it turns out, I won that tournament.

10:31 And so I ended up becoming the state champion and that got me an invitation to The national championships. And Again, I was not ever taking this sort of seriously, I wasn't even intending to go. In fact, I was supposed to go to debate camp that summer. Yet another thing I was Arbitrarily competitive in the

10:49 And it ended up being my parents couldn't afford to send me that year to debate camp. So Last minute. I again my friends were all super supportive here. I ran a Tournament. At my local game store.

11:01 They let me run the event. I collected the entry fees from that tournament. I used that to pay for a plane ticket. To fly to Columbus where the US national championships was happening. I slept on a friend's floor and I was now 17 at this time. And then I end up winning the US national championships. And that ends up Taking me on a career of

11:20 Traveling around the world playing magic for a living. So let's dive into a bunch of things that you mentioned. And I was not aware of the debate camp component, the debating piece. And I have watched Debates. I've never been part of a debate team. Could you just explain

11:39 For folks, what a debate. Competition. Looks like or a a debate as a game, per se. Yeah. What does that look like and why were you good or at least competent at it. There's a few different categories. I'll just talk about my favorite one, which was called Lincoln Douglas debate at the time. And the basically means that you have a topic that you're debating.

12:01 Say. The US should have closer relationships with China. Or it's better to sacrifice the good of the A few for the good of the many or something like that, some topic. And then you would have to pick one side of the argument, and there's a judge in the room, and you have a certain amount of time to make your case, then the other person has a certain amount of time to make their case, and then you have some time for rebut, then they have some time for rebut. And at the end the judge or judges would then decide who won.

12:26 And there's a coin toss to decide who goes first because that seems like a major advantage. It varies, right? So from round to round, you'll you'll go first or second. And this was sort of how we did it in high school. My favorite version of debate was what I did in college, which was called parliamentary debate, where you could literally make up Any topic you wanted. And just start talking about it and the other side would have to defend the other side. And you would just play and have fun and try to figure out and convince people that this was the way to go. And it was just it was such a fun exercise and just persuasion and kind of tactically how you wanted to frame everything. And it became a

13:01 Yeah, something I really spent quite a bit of time on and really enjoyed and then ended up being very useful for quite a few things later in life. Turns out being able to speak good has value. So if we look at say the the Lincoln Douglas format. Or the parliamentary. I suppose the the former is maybe a better example to use here, knowing nothing about it, but how much time do you have to prepare once you are assigned or have chosen one side of let's just say the US should have closer ties with China and you're either pro or con. How much time do you have to

13:31 Hear that. And are you just basically making it up, but you're using the strength of your logic that you construct, even if your assumptions are off to Defeat your opponent. How does that work? So for those formats the same topic will hold for a while for like

13:47 months like a season. And so you can prepare very much ahead of time. I see. And you know, there's that so those formats then there's other ones that like the parliamentary one where you have no idea what you're gonna talk about till you start going up there a lot of the times. That was more fun because it's a little bit more extemporaneous. There's varying degrees. When you have the same topic over and over again, you'd start to notice common threads about how people will Present it. And then

14:08 you know, you try crazy things. So maybe that the US should have closer ties with China and you would take a position, actually the US should not exist anymore. It should dissolve and you you start making arguments around that. And you just kind of have to Take The argument seriously, in a sense, because the job of the judge is to sort of Leave outside their preconceived notions and just hear what you have to say. And so having to think on your feet and react and be able to kind of come up with

14:31 unique answers and change the flow of things was really quite a bit of fun. Okay, so in uh I will move on to everybody listening. I will move on in a moment, but I really want to understand this because I suspect, as you mentioned, that These are threads that tie into other things later, at least some of them. Like these are not Isolated.

14:52 Skills. And if you're practicing, say, the parliamentary style. And you are developing this approach to structured Thinking and presenting.

15:03 And you don't know what you're going to be speaking about until you really sort of get on the stage. And somebody hands you the mic, it's like a fr sort of freestyle rap battle. When you get up. And then you give your spiel. How do the judges Judge.

15:19 What does that look like? Because presumably they might not know anything about the topic that you're discussing. So they can't really fact check A lot of what you're saying, I would assume. Yeah, that's right. There's no live fact checking in these formats. So you kind of just have to, it's about your persuasive ability. So if I were going to break this down into kind of core skill sets and what the judges are doing, which is also what I'm doing as a competitor, is anytime my opponent is saying something, right, I'm writing down their points, right? So I'm breaking them down. into kind of concrete notes, and I want to make sure that for each point that's brought up.

15:49 I am addressing it in some key way. And now a lot of times I can make some broader point that will maybe take out a few of their points. And because you only have a certain amount of time. how efficiently you're able to use that time to both refute the points that they're saying, as well as bring up your own points that or hopeful to refute. So it becomes a kind of

16:07 process of being very good at listening and taking notes. Then being able to structure. How do you want to set up your replies so that you're gaining time advantage, if you will, with your persuasive ability to give you more time to make your own row of arguments so that hopefully they

16:23 don't have time in their thing to properly address and attack everything. Mm-hmm. Okay, great. So as promised, I'm gonna move move forward. This is great. I've never been asked about this before, so this is fun. Yeah. Trying to do my job as best I can. And Returning to magic. So you mentioned that led to all these adventures, traveling around the world, competing.

16:44 What does that mean? Кадін вот. that looks like in terms of incentives, stakes How profitable is it for someone to be a full time magic player. I imagine it depends on the person, but What does it mean to travel around the world?

17:02 And compete. We're again we're taking this back now, date myself a little bit, but this is ninety seven when I won the US National Championships and my the core of my career was about the six years from ninety seven to about two thousand three. And that time there was what was called the Magic Pro Tour, which was put on by the company that made the game as a way to promote it. And they would have millions of dollars of prizes available.

17:24 So at any given tournament you could win. So my biggest tournament winnings would typically be in the thirty thousand dollar range. So a pro tour in Houston, where I won that or you know, these different tournaments. So to give you a sense, a first place in one of those tournaments was thirty thousand dollars ish. All the way down till you're going to be able to do Top thirty two, maybe you'd get a thousand dollars. And then you'd have to get invited to these tournaments there'd be maybe three hundred people ish that would get invited. And so I would do a tournament. in Prague, then there'd be another one in Sydney, then there'd be another one in

17:51 Seattle, there'd be another one, you know, in Tokyo. And so we got to Literally just meet up and again I'm a I'm in high school. I'm a teenager, right? So this is just like crazy. It's a lot of money. Oh my God. It's crazy money, right? So I was just like such a fun thing. But When you think about it as a as an adult, it wasn't

18:07 crazy, crazy amount of money, but it was great at the time. You can't win every tournament, but you know, when I was playing at my peak, it was maybe eighty thousand dollars a year. I was making. So it's still not That's no joke. No joke at that time. It was great. I mean it's how I paid my way through college. Better than flipping burgers, I'll put it that way. What was your major in college?

18:26 I was a philosophy major. How did you choose a philosophy? Well, as you might guess, I love debating. And I love I I I mean, I've I've always been very interested in just sort of talking about the deep questions, right? Trying to get down to the fundamentals of what is interesting and what matters. And I tried a few different majors, you know, uh history and I was on my path to be a lawyer because my parents are lawyers and that's what I was thought I was supposed to do. But I found most classes when I went to them

18:52 The job as a student in the class was to regurgitate whatever it was that the Professor Told you. Back to them. And that Mm-hmm. Bore the hell out of me. Whereas in philosophy.

19:01 The job was to make a Reasonable argument. Didn't matter, just like in debate, right? It was didn't matter what your position was, is can you defend it? Do you have good logic for it? I loved being proven wrong. I loved when I would have This was a kind of

19:13 Strength and weakness. I I had I love debating with people and I love it when someone told me something I didn't know or told me convinced me I was wrong. I was like, that's amazing. That's great. And it took me a very long time to realize most people are not like that. in high school I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say. So I I learned to be uh a little bit more uh uh cautious and compassionate in my conversations with people, but I I really enjoyed it. And so philosophy let me explore that space of really what matters in the world and what matters to me and really refine my thinking and get challenged on my thinking when I was unclear or fuzzy.

19:45 I wanna Mentioned for people who may not notice this pattern. that on this podcast there is disproportionate representation of former philosophy majors. However, that could be severe survivorship bias. I'm sure there are many, many philosophy majors who do not end up on

20:06 large podcasts. However, it it is notable to me, right? You have people who are deeply interested in philosophy who also End up. In these conversations with me, Reed Hoffman would be another example. who I'm not sure if he majored in philosophy, but he has taught philosophy. And takes it very, very seriously.

20:23 Why were you comfortable and maybe even invigorated by being proven wrong or converted in that way. Did that come from being raised in a Family of lawyers. Did it come from something else? What contributed to that?

20:39 Yes, I think there's two factors here. I think one, you're absolutely right. My parents were wonderful in the sense that as a kid I could argue my way to a later bedtime or I could argue my way to, hey, I finish my homework, I can get an extra setting of dessert or whatever. I they encouraged if I could kind of debate my way to something, then I could get it. And so it trained me very young. And similarly, you know, we would you know, my my dad and I, we would be playing cutthroat games of Monopoly around the kitchen table quite a bit. And I found they did they reinforced that. After the game, you know, you Like, what did you learn? If you lost, what did you learn from it? And that's the biggest thing that I credit for my certainly my success in magic, and I and I've tried to apply that.

21:20 Everywhere is that When you lose which you inevitably are gonna lose in life, right? Doesn't matter what it is that you look first to like, okay, what could I have done differently? How could I have set this up differently so that I wouldn't even be in this position, right? It's easy when you're playing a game like Magic. Where some your opponent draws a lucky card. You know, it's a one out of sixty that they draw that card and they beat you because of it. And you'd hear in the hallways. other people would be complaining about what's called bad beats, right? I got unlucky. Oh my God.

21:45 But the best players wouldn't do that. The best players would say, Actually, you know what, if five turns earlier I had made this different play, it wouldn't have mattered what card they drew. At that turn. And that skill set.

21:56 drilled into me and it's something I definitely credit quite a bit of success across a variety of fields. This might seem like a strange question, but Do magic competitors or did they study games in the way that chess players study

22:13 historic games of chess where those Moves. And decisions are recorded in some way. I'm not sure if it lends itself to that. Oh, it absolutely does. And people would break these things down. So again, let's we're gonna take ourselves in the way back machine, right? Ninety seven, ninety eight, this era, the internet is still relatively new, right? Still relatively light. And so people would go to what with the time was called the magic dojo, which you can now find in like the internet archives.

22:40 And it was where everybody would post tournament reports. Of okay, here's what I played, here's what happened, and people would comment on them and break down on, you know, kind of more classic bulletin board style. And that's where. the core of magic strategy and discussion started to form. And now there's dozens of sites and dozens of places where you can find this. But it was a, you know, unlike with chess where people've been doing this strategy and breaking down games for hundreds of years, magic's thirty years old or whatever. And at the time it was very new. And so you got to see the origins of these strategies come together and break down individual games and individual moves and it became obsessive. I mean if if you look at my old college notebooks They are covered in magic deck ideas and scribbles and like at least as much as there are notes about philosophy or whatever it was I was supposed to be studying.

23:28 What were the main Innovations if you had to try to Identify some Game design. elements that led to or contributed to magic becoming such a global phenomenon.

23:44 What would you say were the innovations? I mean, there's definitely the slot machine like Dopamine. potential of buying these packs, just like buying baseball cards, right? But What else is there?

23:59 In the game. that made it at least have the possibility of exploding in the way that it did. There's A lot of factors there's kind of a deep answer, but we have a long form podcast. So if you don't mind, deep answers. Yeah. So take all the time you want. I teach game design and when there's sort of five major categories of like what people are looking for out of games.

24:20 And magic hits all of them in in ways. So I'll talk about the categories first and then I'll talk about why magic succeed in such an incredible way. So the first is immersion. You're looking for certain experiences or you're looking to tell Craft a story.

24:32 The second is connection. Right. You're looking to socialize, you you wanna help other people, you wanna kinda connect with others. The third is aspiration. This is can be in competition, this can be like achievements, you wanna win, you wanna Prove you're better than prove you can achieve something.

24:46 Then the fourth is growth. You want to learn. You want to? continue to kind of move up. And improve your skills. And the last is expression.

24:55 This idea that you want to customize or role playing works this way because we express different parts of ourselves through role playing. And so those are the kind of the major categories. And I think magic. Allowed people to Both. Not only have these competitions like I was doing, but it allowed people to customize and grow in a world where it's infinitely deep. At a certain point with chess, it's a deep game, but there's only so many pieces. I can learn them all. I can know kind of the frame I'm playing in. With magic, there's constantly new cards coming. There's constantly new things to do. And I get to own

25:27 I get to customize and own my experience. So relate it to something like you've more familiar with, right? Dungeons and Dragons, the idea that you get to tell the story, that you get to create the character is so powerful and so immersive. And magic is very similar. If you want to build a deck with all Elf cards. You could do that. If you want to build a deck that has Every card that you could imagine and is 300 cards deep, you can do that. If you want to be the hyper competitive, hyper focused guy, you could do that. There are so many experiences that you get to.

25:55 in a sense, design your own game. And it's one of the things that I've learned, much like you talked about a lot of philosophy majors end up on your podcast, a lot of the game designers started from a game like Magic or Dungeons and Dragons. And because the as you play, you're crafting your own experience. And I think that was such a unique and powerful thing. And Dungeon and Dragons could be a little intimidating for people because it's so open ended. So intimidate. Right. So complex. Or at least it can be. It can be. It can be real commitment. Exactly. Whereas magic, like you're playing inside of

26:27 But once you start exploring it, then this whole world opens up. And I think that was really the magic of it. quote unquote. And uh it really made it feel like a something that was very new and spawned an entire genre of games. Mm-hmm. And I remember one point I think it was

26:43 Certainly at the time, I think T S R I was reading. This book called, I believe it's Arten Arcana or Arcana. I'm not sure how you pronounce that word properly, even though I've read it a thousand times, which is a visual history of Dungeons and Dragons. And at some point they realized one of the major stumbling blocks was people having to develop from scratch their own. Characters.

27:07 And they provided out of the box templates, which was one of the ways they Jump started. wider adoption it's giving people an easy place to start. With some type of Positive constraints, let's just say, in a sense.

27:21 And that makes me think About Magic. Now can you remind me and listeners of who developed Magic? So Richard Garfield was the lead designer. He created the game, along with, of course, a lot of other people that support it, but he was the lead, the creator.

27:37 I remember listening to and you're gonna have to fact check me on this, but I think I'm recalling this correctly, listening to At least one, maybe two interviews with Richard. On your podcast, think like a game designer and He was talking about game development and I guess folks who are auditing the cards and the decks and

27:59 the idea that some cards would get retired or removed from circulation or banned because they were too powerful, but if there were no cards that were too powerful, that they were also erring on the side of caution, something along those lines. Could you expand on what I'm very clumsily trying to recall from an interview I listened to a year ago. So there's this idea in games of balance, which is it's a term that people throw around a lot, but gets very confused. And the principle of it is that you don't want

28:27 some part of your game to be so unfair. that nobody can beat you. If it's uh in tic tac toe, if you get to make three moves at once. That would be pretty unfair, right? The game is already over. You got your three in a row. That doesn't make any sense. So the game's no fun. So so the idea is you wanna you wanna make sure that everything You know, there's no one strategy that's too good. But there's also

28:48 Some people think that that means everything needs to be exactly the same. And that's also not true. Because the idea if every card is just as equally good as every other card, then that you deny people Yeah.

28:59 discovery. You deny people that ability to learn and say, oh, wait, hold on. As a new player, you don't know anything. And then you can learn, oh actually, you know what, this card's better than this card. Or the excitement of chasing and finding something that's very exciting that now you can combine with something else that you have and suddenly that gets better. And so the way I define balance is not Everything has to be equal. It's that There's no one strategy that should be unbeatable. Yeah, the best analogy is if you think rock, paper, scissors. Perfectly balanced game.

29:25 Rock is great, but if I know you're gonna throw rock, I've got a plan. I can throw paper and I'm gonna be okay. So there's a lot of ways that you can approach balance, but that can give you a sense of like what it should look like. And so for Richard, he wanted to make things that were exciting and chase and you're really hoping you open up in a pack. Of course, he didn't have any idea that the game was gonna be as popular as it was when he talked about in the podcast episode that he thought you would just never even see all the cards. That some people would have a couple of packs and other people would have a couple of packs and you just

29:53 discover it as you went. And That is actually It's an exciting prospect, but very quickly people would buy all the cards and now There's spoilers on the internet and everybody sees everything immediately. And so it it's changed a lot since his initial concept.

30:06 Is the next lily pad? I want to explore One of two things. We're gonna get to both. So you can choose which you think makes sense to talk about first. So The first option. Is your path to where you are now as a senior partner at a law firm. Just kidding. So the so law school. Yeah. The other

30:27 Is What happened? In your magic life. After winning the Nationals. And that

30:36 Story. So which of those do you think makes sense to tackle first? Or you could talk about both in tandem. Either or. We'll go in kind of chronology order. So the the magic career kind of has its arc before my my law career has its much shorter arc. I'm you know, seventeen years old. I win the US national championships. This is like a huge, awesome, cool thing for me. But then I go to the world championships. And at that point in Magic's life cycle, the US was dominant. The US had never lost a world championships ever.

31:04 And I was not just me, but a team of people that were representing the US and Unfortunately, we did not win. We did not do very well. And so that world championships I was then

31:14 I had this albatross around my neck of being the first Loser US national champion. At least is the story I was telling myself. So I was like, okay, this is Not great. And I, you know, my career was good. I was doing good, but it was something that always stuck with me. And so I kept wanting to try to get back on the national team to like redeem myself. So

31:32 Fast forward. Five years later. Finally. The US loses again. loses to the Germans. So it's now I'm not the only loser.

31:40 Not that I was rooting against the US but It was nice to not be the only loser. And then the very next year I make it back on the US national team. And so This is my chance.

31:52 Like my chance at redemption after six years. And I've with two other people on the team. And the two people that are on the team with me, there were like pretty new to the game. They were you know, kind of had come out of nowhere just like I did when I first started. And I was so committed to making sure we did well. I paid to fly both of them.

32:09 to Boston, where I was living at the time, to like stay at my place and work and we trained for like month, month and a half together with my team who is uh your move games was the local store and group we would play test with. We trained, we slept on my couch, we worked together to be able to make it back. to that year, the world championships were in Berlin. So we're going into enemy territory. And it comes down to Literally we make it to the final table. to the final game. It comes down to me playing this match. And you know, this is we've got

32:41 Stage lights, we're covering it. This is like everything I have worked for. And there are some all night records of the experience, but I am like I remember just sort of feeling in that moment that You know, I'd been in tournaments, I'd won tournaments, I'd lost tournaments. There's a certain amount of excitement and pressure, but for this one, it was so much of a personal story, a personal kind of drama that I was playing out for me. And I drew

33:03 my hand the first time for this final match where everything's on the line, people are watching. And there's a rule in magic where if you don't like your hand, if you don't like the starting cards you have, you can take a mulligan. And what that means is you You throw the cards away, but you get one less card. And it's a big deal. Like less cards is a huge disadvantage in the game, but I draw my hand and I'm trying to make this like this decision. And I'm just like, all right, do I deal with what I have or do I just take a shot?

33:26 And I didn't like the hand. I wasn't gonna let the world championships be decided on that hand. So I Mulligan Throw the cards away, my teammates are groaning in the background. It's like, all right, here we go. Shuffle up. Draw the hand. And it becomes one of those moments where you kinda like see it come together, like the hand was good enough.

33:43 We start playing it out. I get some board advantage. My opponent's kind of on his back foot and he's got a couple tricks. I there's some cards I have to play around. I'm not really sure. And then finally, you know, I'm able to kind of get to the point and win. This Fight after However long.

33:58 People rush the stage, like able to finally like Take that. Off of my back. And it was a very exciting moment for me. It was a very fun Journey.

34:07 And it was a result of a lot of hard work, right? It was like a a lot of dedication that got there. But it kinda felt for me It was like the end of my magic career. It was like the thing that had like I had been striving to do that I kind of like checked those boxes and that was kind of like What let me move to this next stage. So before we get to

34:25 Your short arc in the world of law. Was there something coming back to your previous comment that you learned after losing on the world championship stage first. Was there something you learned or decided to change about your approach? After that. I think that

34:42 Now we're talking about s years of gap in between, right? And so what I what I did learn and the major thing that I I realized in that, like magic is generally a Single. person game. I'm playing a match against somebody else in the competition. But in this case it's a team game. And I think the biggest shift in focus was I didn't just think about myself. Like I had to think about how do I Lift everybody else up.

35:05 And all thrive together to be able to make it through. And it really it changed the way I focused there, changed the way I focused with other teams I've worked with. It made a huge impact. And then you know, just Being willing to Again.

35:18 Come back from a loss and not let it discourage you that you can't. overcome it. But I think that being able to work Typically most of the games I played have been single player, you know, whether it was debate or wrestling or most of magic, it was all about like I'm here to win. And I think my shift in mindset was no, I'm here for us to win. And That was a really huge

35:36 Turn around for me. Yeah, it's a big Shift in terms of looking through the prism. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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36:43 So law school. Yes. Tell us about law school. Just to frame this, right? So I've already mentioned both my parents are lawyers. My mom's a lawyer, my dad's a lawyer, my stepdad's a lawyer. I was Debate.

36:54 Captain, I was doing the I was supposed to be a lawyer. That was just like my path from as l early as I can remember, that's what I was supposed to do. And even though I had been making a living and traveling around the world playing magic, at no point did it ever occur to me that that I would make a living in games. None. It was just, Oh, this is a fun thing to do while I'm in college. I had this mental block.

37:15 And so Graduate, go Get into NYU law. I Teach the L sat for a while, I go to law school.

37:22 And I'm lucky I'm I'm a pretty happy guy by default, but this was the first time I was really depressed. Like I was very unhappy for an extended period of time. And I will remember very

37:34 specifically, there's one day I'm getting up. I'm living in Brooklyn. Snowing outside. Covered in ice on the floor. And I have to Get trudged up and put on all these Ridiculous clothes and go get on the A train and pretend like I'm not staring at anybody else. And everybody has to studiously avoid looking at anybody else in New York. That's just the rule.

37:54 And make it all the way in. Have my Boston cream donut for breakfast, because that's just how I lived back then. And I go into this NYU law library, which is like You know, you can picture this, you know, just cavernous giant library with old oak and

38:08 Powers of books. This is back when you had to use books to learn things. It was a it was a wild time. Yeah. And I checked out, you know, the blog books I had to read before class and I'm you know, stack'em up, it's just towers around me and I'm just there. And I'm there for hours, just like reading case law.

38:24 Yeah, just Not very happy, but then I a couple hours later I realized I gotta get to class. And so I sit up. And I have this jolt of pain through my spine. Jolt of pain. I can't, I can barely move. I'm hobbling to get out of there. And I realized I threw my back out from reading. From reading. That is how

38:42 unhealthy I was, how over I was over about forty pounds heavier than I am now, how just like miserable I was and I like This was my first clue that I'm on the wrong path. And I think this is something I just it's a really important lesson, I think for I imagine there's a lot of overachievers in your audience. And

38:58 That this path of trying to win whatever game's in front of you. It can be way worse. To win the wrong game than even to lose. one that you actually enjoy playing. And

39:08 That was a big shift for me. And fortunately that summer I had an opportunity to go instead of interning at a law firm, I got to go work on a Marvel Comics card game, a Marvel versus DC comics card game for a company called Upper Deck in San Diego. So summer internship working on comic book games, that sounded great. And so I flew across country to go and work there for the summer. And again, even though I knew I was miserable.

39:33 Even though I'd had this terrible experience, even though I now had a Opportunity in front of me. It's still My assumption at this point was I'm gonna go back to law school. I'm gonna go back and that's just I gotta finish that path. But I

39:44 Come out. to start working on games and I I'm in love with it. I'm super passionate about it. I'm enjoying it. Again, we're debating these really interesting ideas about design and definitely happy to dig into what that looks like. But then. when they offer me a full time job.

39:58 I'm still stressing about this. You know, and it's still finally when I make the decision, I tell my mom she She literally cries when I tell her I'm leaving law school to go become a game designer, right? Like it was so hard. And I look back and it's so silly to me. This is one of the things you've taught me I didn't have these words at the time, but I learned it through you, like this idea of like fear setting. Where in fact I wasn't really giving up anything.

40:19 I could always go back to law school, but it just didn't feel like that at the time. And so being able to break out of that spell And then go follow a path that was really passionate for me that I was really excited about. One of the best decisions I ever made. Mm how did you find the Internship. This was fortunate because of my magic career.

40:36 They had reached out to me to kind of just like vet their game and you know, try to check it out and stuff. So some of the other people on the Magic Pro Tour who had people who had other who I'd known had already kind of been hired there. So they were like, hey, and they knew I was miserable. I'd you know would chat with them. They're like, hey, come out for the summer. Come work on this thing. You got nothing to lose kinda deal. Has your mom come around or is she still that day when you returned to law school. My mom has come around. I'm sure she'll listen to this episode. Hi, Mom. Uh she she did. She's and and this is the thing, the people in our lives, there's a lot of pressure that we all feel, right? Whether it's from parents, from friends, from like they want the best for us.

41:11 Right. She just wants me to be happy and safe and comfortable and You know, you've got to realize that you in order to find the path that you actually want for yourself, the path that you will be fulfilled by. You gotta be uncomfortable. You gotta be unsafe, right? Parents I think try to protect their kids so much. And reality you can't. You've got to be able to like push past that. And and she knows that now and she was very happy it all worked out.

41:34 Yeah. All right. Well we're gonna fill in the gaps for those people who Who aren't your mom listening. Hi mom. Since we have a lot to fill in and Uh look, now I feel like I should defend your mom also. Certain paths are more predictable than others. There is the Perception and maybe even the reality of

41:51 safety, consistency, stability. With certain choices. But as you said. Choosing the right game is more important than winning the game that just happens to be in front of you. And at least certainly in my experience and the experience of a lot of people on this podcast.

42:09 And just because something is unpredictable does not automatically make it unsafe. It just makes it less certain. And as you put it, many of these things, for instance, I'll give you another example, and this is very analogous when people invoke the names of, say, Zuckerberg or someone else who dropped out. As this throwing caution to the wind, burning the boats behind them to take the risk of entrepreneurship. Whenever possible I try to point out. That's actually not the case for most people who say take a leave of absence from a Harvard or Stanford. They can go back anytime they want to go back.

42:46 Yes, one hundred percent. And again, you've said this better than honestly anybody. Like this idea that most of the fears that we have, this resistance to uncertainty is just made up in our head. There's so many ways that you can recover and go back and If you can just remember that, I could have gone back to law school later on when I quit my game design job to start a company. I could always get another job. Those illusions of uncertainty and fear, if you can push past that, it changes everything. I mean, most of the times we take risks, we're not jumping off cliffs or into burning buildings. It's just Okay. Yeah, your career takes a different path or you're you're behind in school or whatever. It's a very low cost. Most often.

43:22 recoverable. So I'll link to fear setting and people can just search fear setting like goal setting with a hyphen in it and all sorts of things will pop up if you just search that or go to Tim.blog slash TED, because that was the topic of my TED talk, I suppose quite a few years ago now. But Moving on from fear setting for a moment. It might come back into the conversation. Who knows? But what did that first Year.

43:49 Or six months, month could be the first week, however you wanna frame it. Of Designing games. Look like. What was that experience like?

43:58 It's a really fun question because people just make this assumption that because I was good at playing games, then that means I would be good at making games. And they are One hundred percent different skills. I did not Think of myself as a creative person. I thought there was just this some kind of like magic special secret sauce that other people had, and I was just gonna. Fake it and go out there and see what happened. So when I go there I'm

44:20 having serious imposter syndrome. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to make this come to life. And I researched a ton, I've read some great books on creativity. A whack on the side of the head is one I'd recommend. And I started to talk to other people who I did respect as designers and kind of break it down. And over time I realized that there is no There's nothing that's differentiates like

44:43 a creative person from a not creative person other than process. And so as an analytically minded person, I was able to break it down into what I call the core design loop, which is a six step process of How do you Create. Not just games, but I think every

44:58 create a field it applies to. And so learning that. And I was very lucky. I'll talk about the the details of it. I won't leave you hanging on that piece, but Oh I w I won't let you leave me hanging. You're good at that. You know, I went to go work at a company where I had a lot of friends that were already there and I had immediate deadlines. This game is going to release. You have to turn over the file with the cards and the things like

45:25 Within two months. And so there was no choice but to act. What I say is the deadlines are magic. Like it doesn't matter if you have no idea what you're doing, you have a deadline. Yeah, I was literally going to just say the exact same thing verbatim. It's like what a beautiful constraint. It's just remarkable what you get done. So that was I think a real powerful tool about why. Like so one Really short deadlines and my job was on the line. So I had stakes, right? And I didn't want to go back to law school. And two, that I had other people that I could ask and talk to who were smarter than I was, who had done it before and I could get some insight into, right? So being able to kind of find either books or mentors or other people that you can talk to has also helped accelerate it. that eventually turned into this kind of step by step process. So if you'd like, I I'll I can go into that now or

46:09 Can jump to other stuff. Let's actually before we get into the process. Could you Explain why a whack on the side of the head was impactful for you or what you took from that that was valuable because in the course of doing

46:25 homework for this conversation. I noticed that you had mentioned this book before, and I actually have a deck of cards designed by the same author. But could you speak to I have not read the book. However, could you speak to why that had an impact or why you recommend it? So it's nice. In that it helps to In a sense, demystify creativity and just bring it down to like a very

46:48 I'll give some examples. So, I'm going to go to the first You know, one of the principles in it is that I've used all the time is basically And I forget how they word in the book, but basically like Turn the object around in your mind, right? If you take something that you normally think of one way, how many different ways can you look at that same thing? So if you have a pen, You can say, All right, well what do you do with a pen? Well you can write with it. Okay, well no, all right, I could use it to help

47:11 force me to smile by biting it. I could use it to prop up my microphone. I could use it right, you could trying exercises that give you different frames were very powerful and ways to like Break you out of your thinking. The idea of using random constraints. So one of the exercises that I encourage anybody to do if they want to is like if you're having a problem, some creative

47:30 Challenge them blocked. Go to A random book on your shelf. Open it to a random page and point to a random word, right? Some substantive word. Now figure out how that word

47:39 relates to whatever your problem is and journal on that for like Five minutes, ten minutes. And you'll be amazed at how all of a sudden it can crack open something because we get so linearly focused on the problem in front of us and even A completely random constraint. can open up the door for you.

47:53 I will give one more to just move past the quote unquote right answer. You may have an answer and say, Okay, that's fine. And you stop. Most people stop. Instead say, Okay, I'm gonna look for the third right answer, the fourth right answer, the fifth right, I'm gonna look beyond that to go deeper and find more things. So just these little exercises, and you could just do those exercises. would suddenly see like oh wow, okay, I'm already seeing myself be more creative. I'm already seeing myself do more than I was. The book was impactful because it could just like by the time I was done reading it, I had already seen myself do creative things I didn't think I could do in ways that sound pretty stupid, I'm sure to me saying it. Like pick a random page of a book, be more creative. Trust me, try it. You know, it works.

48:30 Without having read that book, I've used this approach in actually writing teachers that I had long ago back when I had hair and was in school. Also would offer these types of random constraints. It's almost like the e ching approach to creativity. Right. Like, okay, you just like throw a bunch of scrabble tiles on the floor and you pick the three that are closest to you and like that's your constraint. Or that's the filter. in a sense or what directs the exercise.

48:56 Very, very powerful. And I wanted to mention since You uh the right answer and finding the third right answer actually reminded me of something a former guest's uh Derek Sivers, who's uh one of my favorite people, he's been on a few times and

49:14 When I asked him who he thought of when he heard the word successful, he said, Well, my first answer might be say Richard Branson, but That really ultimately depends on his goals in life. And if his goal was to have a quiet life undisturbed by entrepreneurship, then that wouldn't be successful. So let me skip the first answer, get to the second answer, get to the third answer. And he said, what you should ask people is who is the third person who comes to mind? when you hear the word successful. And it's really a powerful

49:43 heuristic that you can use in in all sorts of ways. Alright, so that's a snapshot. On uh A whack on the side of the head. Let's talk about the the core loop.

49:53 Before we jump into the core design loop, I'm gonna give one more thing. It's not from a whack on the side of the head, but it's something I've actually developed more recently as a process that I think super valuable and One of the things that we try to do in our company is always surface our assumptions. There's a lot of things where you're assuming a game is going to be fun because of this. We assume people are looking for that. We assume we're making this category of game, et cetera. And a really great exercise to do that's in this spirit is once a quarter, we'll do an assumptions challenging exercise. And what that means is you surface every assumption you can. You can do this by yourself, or if you're on a team, everybody writes down on their own all their assumptions. You put them all up on a shared or a shared Google Doc if you're doing remote like we are. And then you

50:34 One by one. Okay, what if that weren't true? Or to use your terminology, what if I did the opposite? And it's so powerful because sometimes it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes it's like, okay, that doesn't make any sense. You move on. But without fail, by the time we finish that exercise, we find some core assumption. That all of a sudden changes everything. And that ability to just

50:52 Take what you assume to be true. One, making it explicit in the first place is super powerful, just so you know really what you're doing. And then two, is this inversion process is incredibly powerful. Could you give any examples just to make it a little Concrete in the minds of folks listening. Yeah, of what those assumptions might be.

51:10 I made this game called Soulforge with Richard Garfield, the guy that created magic, and we did this over a decade ago. And we made it as a digital Trading card game. And so purely you play it on your phone, no physical objects at all. The game was successful. We ran it for a few years and eventually we we took it down and we were talking about we wanted to bring it back because we loved the game, we wanted to bring it back. And one of the exercises which is okay, SoulForge is a digital game. And then we're like

51:37 Wait, what if it's not? Like what would that look like? And we had built it to be a digital game, but then all of a sudden we're like, Well now It's seven years later. digital printing technology is way better than it was. You can actually algorithmically create one of a kind cards and brilliant things. And that started us down this road of investigating this new technology. And so the new version of SoulForge called SoulForge Fusion is now a physical card game. that has this new technology built into it, which never would have happened if we had just gone with our assumptions of, oh, okay, we're gonna remake the same game again. So that's like one example of this was recently impactful for me in this.

52:07 Yeah, I love that. I have um Well, I can't tip my hand too hard here publicly, but I've been very much focused on possibly working on my first book in Five or six years. It's been a long time. I wasn't sure I would do another one, but I've been very strongly considering it and

52:24 I've been not in written form, which would be more helpful, I think, but in a sort of meandering mental form, which is sort of a mix of like reverie, skepticism, and daydreaming. Yeah.

52:41 Looking at some of the basic assumptions like Is it a book? Right, I think of it as a book, but does it even need to be a book, period. Or I should say question mark. And if it is a book, for instance.

52:51 Generally if you're going through the publishing process, or you have been through the publishing process, your thinking has been shaped in a certain way over and over again. You're like, okay, I I have to do print audio. Ebook. And you sell all of those to one person. Well

53:08 What if we split though? What if There was no print whatsoever. What would that look like? And just

53:14 Testing. These very basic assumptions, right? And and I'll give you one example also. Which people might not realize or if you're outside of publishing, why would you realize this, but none of my books in the US have ever gone to paperback.

53:29 And if you were to ask most authors like Why have you gone to paperback? The answer would generally be something along the lines of, well, the publishers always do that. A year and a half after the hardcover. They lower the price to make the market

53:44 Larger for the book. And you come out in paperback. And I was like But If you look at the math, does that make any sense for you? And then they think about it and they're like, Well

53:55 Let me think about that. Okay, I was making fifteen percent on each hardcover book. Which is already discounted on Amazon to something very affordable. And now when I got a paperback, wait a second. My royalties just got cut to seven and a half or six and a half. Now I have to sell twice as many books to make the same amount in royalties. Oh shit. That makes no sense whatsoever. It's also not really relevant in a world where ebook is an option. If that makes any sense. If somebody is looking for a lower price, they can buy it on eBooks. So

54:25 Hence From the beginning, none of my books have ever gone. Two Paperback. Okay, so let's if you're open to it, we can certainly, I mean, I love, as you know, you know this very well. I love digging into testing assumptions because your assumptions are the operating system that governs your life in a way. And you want to make sure those rules can be justified on some level. But maybe it makes sense to hop into the

54:50 Core design loop. Talk about that a bit. I think it's a perfect segue because exactly what we're talking about with assumptions is going to come into play in the core design loop. So the core design loop is how Games are made, it's how creative projects are done, but we're gonna focus on games. That's the kind of main topic I teach it in. So the core design loop is six steps.

55:08 It's inspiring. Framing. Brainstorming. Prototyping. Testing.

55:14 And iterating. So Step one is inspiring. What is it that's driving you? What's the core of what you're excited about? So it could be you want to make a game for This IP, this world that you love. Could be you want to make a cockpunch game. Could be want to make a game about fantasy warriors, right? Hypothetically speaking. Or miniatures, right? If you love miniatures.

55:32 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You love miniatures. You know you want to make a miniatures game, right? Could be a component, could be a theme, could be a mechanic, could be you want to make a game about dog walking, whatever it is, right? You're excited. What is at the heart of what you're doing? And in general, that heart is going to be an experience you want to create for your audience. But you start at something, whatever high level thing, it gets you excited. Then framing. It's a lot what we talked about, right? We want to put a box around it. We want to put constraints around it. And so that constraint should always include a deadline, ideally a short deadline to whatever your next step is. So I'm gonna have a prototype to test in two weeks. It could be one of the most common mistakes I see game designers make. They come to me, okay, I want to make a game that's like Halo and World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto, but like all rolled into one with like a bunch of cool stuff happening, right? And these are

56:14 massive games that take millions and millions of dollars and teams of people. It's like, well you've never made a game before. Maybe let's start with like a simple card game, right? So you know, constraints with your components, constraints with time, what's the space I'm playing in? Step three is brainstorming. And brainstorming is where you ideate and come up with your ideas. And I'm very particular about how I recommend people brainstorm, and this comes from research from the Wharton School of Business and work I've done with them. But the basics are three phases and to get 'Cause I know the

56:44 Your audience that I break it into three steps, twenty minutes each. First is where you're open exploring. You write as many things as you can, as many ideas as you can. And don't stop. There's always this like critic part of our brain that's like, No, that's stupid. No, that won't work. Turn that off. Just write down as many things as you can. If your pen stops moving for more than ten seconds, you're doing it wrong.

57:05 As many ideas as you can on the paper. Then The second stage also recommend 20 minutes is organizing, where you take this massive ridiculous some cool ideas, some ridiculous ideas, and you start to try to find patterns between them. And if you're trying to make something specific, you start to kind of think through okay, if I'm trying to make a game. What's the victory condition? How do people figure out what are their moves, how do they

57:27 To interact, you know, you start trying to kind of put some structure around it. Or if it's a book, okay, what's the opening of the book? How's it gonna help people? Who's my audience, whatever it is, right? as you start making these connections, you're naturally gonna see gaps and you're gonna fill those gaps in. And then the last step, which is also twenty minutes, is elimination. And that's where you You went from starting with as many ideas as you can, and now you want to get to as few ideas as possible so that you can start moving to testing them. And so that's where you go and you'll try to like, okay, what's the minimum amount that I can prototype, which is the next step, to test my idea. Right, to test my assumption, to test the core of what I'm doing.

58:03 And so Prototyping. is exactly what it sounds like. What's you know, talk about an MVP or you know this minimum viable product, what's the smallest thing I can do to test my idea? What's the easiest way I can do this? And then Step five is testing where you actually

58:17 Show it to somebody, you get some feedback, you actually figure out what's going on there. And then step six is iterating where you take what you've learned and then you cycle back through the process. And what I've learned is that the skill of creativity specifically with game design, but really with anything is how well you can kind of flow through that process and get the most out of each loop and go through as many loops as possible. Alright, we're gonna come back to brainstorming in a second, but uh what I want to do for people listening is highlight And you said this.

58:45 Already but I wanna just Make a few notes and give a few examples. This process can apply to almost anything. And for instance. You want to start a podcast. I'll use that as an example.

59:00 Inspiration. Thematically, where are you going? What is the format that you're excited about? What is driving you to be Considering starting podcast, right? Setting parameters, thinking about the constraints. What are the constraints? How do you keep it? Interesting enough that you continue to do it, but simple enough that you don't quit after three episodes. And the example you gave of like, I want it to be like Halo plus World of Warcraft plus Warhammer, and you're like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, easy. The reason there is an elephant graveyard of a million

59:29 Dead podcasts that stopped after episode three is they're like, I love this American life, and I think it's gonna be like this American meets Joe Rogan, and I'm like, Whoa, slow down, Tex. There's a reason the credits are five minutes long at the end of this American Life. Yeah, I'm not sure you realize how much goes into making that. And then brainstorming. Right, coming up with whether it's Guests, ideas for questions, et cetera. Prototyping.

59:56 giving it a go. Maybe you record as I did five or six episodes before publishing your first so that you have a chance to kick the tires and try to figure out what's working. The testing you're going to get in this case, right? Testing with your guests, but also with Test listeners, let's just say, and then iterating. This also applies to books. This also applies to really any creative project that I can

1:00:18 That I can think about. And to come back to The brainstorming. For a moment. When you are brainstorming, what is your personal preferred method of doing this. Whiteboard versus pen and paper versus typing on a keyboard versus a tablet.

1:00:36 Of some type. How do you like to do it? I am a huge fan of, in particular, an app called Workflowy. And it's a totally free app. And it's basically a Series of nested lists.

1:00:48 And the nice thing about it is it's infinite. So I can continue to make lists in you know sublists and sublists and sublists, and I can link pieces to pieces. And so I find over the years, now I've been using that for seven or eight years, that is like my personal favorite tool. The important advice for people is not to copy the tool, but the whatever works for you, whatever's the easiest flow, like the least resistance. Right. So there a lot of people like Notion is a similar type of tool, but it's like bulkier and a little bit slower in my experience. And that speed is everything. I don't want anything that's gonna slow me down. So that's where pen and paper's great, but I don't like Unless I have a giant sheet of paper, which I do enjoy. If it's a big, big like poster board and like markers and bigger things, especially if I'm working with a team. So either a giant whiteboard or a a large poster board on the table, because you can all share the same

1:01:34 space and see ideas form. That I think is great, but a small sheet of paper for me like My brain. When it sees a page start to get full, my brain just subconsciously thinks, Okay, well, you don't need any more ideas, your page is full, you're good. It's like the goldfish in the fishbowl, right? And it's like all right, I'm not gonna grow anymore. This space is getting a little constrained. Yeah, so I like workflow because it's got that infinite kind of growth and I can like shrink or grow nodes or like, okay, I want to dive deeper into this idea and link ideas together. It's been my favorite. And

1:02:03 What are some of the ways that you like to prototype? I'd love to know where you think people most often get stuck, like in between Or after which step do people get stuck? And as someone who's been, as you know, because we've had conversations about this and you've been incredibly helpful, thinking about Prototyping and games and design. I've been very excited about this for a while now. I tended to get stuck at the prototyping phase because uh well, it's also my first sort of rodeo with this.

1:02:33 But the inclination is to try to make something that's really good and kinda polished. I know I'm not trying to make a finished product. But The more I have studied what you've done, listened to the podcast, talked to people like Elon Lee Or others.

1:02:50 The uh more I appreciate how quick and dirty It is. Yes. Yes. And uh and also just as a reference, Think I have a blog post about Steven Key. who's an inventor, product developer.

1:03:06 who's based in California, at least he was at the time, who has done extremely well developing toys for major companies. And the toys are ultimately some finished that look great, but he will use construction paper and like newspaper. Two Prototype and based on that and a description and maybe a video of how it functions, he successfully licensed products all the time to huge companies. So could you speak to maybe the prototyping phase?

1:03:35 Yes, and you you've already hit on the core of this, but I'll just leave it. Keep it simple, stupid. The KISS principle. It is The tendency to overdevelop And make your prototype super nice or not feel like you can show it to somebody or test it without being super nice is the graveyard of the most games.

1:03:51 Probably of anything. On the planet. And the most ideas, frankly, in general. So Let's make this very concrete.

1:03:57 Probably one of the games I'm most well known for is a deck building galled Ascension. I First prototype that game. There was another deck building game. And a deck building game, for those that don't know, is like it's unlike Magic, which is a trading card game where you're buying packs of cards and trying to build a deck. In a deck building game, you you have a fixed box of cards. You buy it like a box, like you would Monopoly, but like during the game, you're acquiring cards for your deck. So it's like you get to play the game of building a deck. Deck building game. So There was another deck building game called Dominion, which was released. It was the first of its category, and I

1:04:27 fell in love with that game. I started playing it a bunch, but then as I played it like a hundred times, I was like, ah, you know, there's some really some things I I would like to see differently. I want to see the cards are too static. There's too many rules and resources. I wish I could change it. And so my first prototype of Ascension was literally just Instead of having Dominion cards, which are all kind of laid out at the beginning of the game, takes like twenty minutes to set up. I just shuffle them all together and dealt them out. And said what would a game look like if it was randomized? And I played that way. And

1:04:54 The game was not good. But it gave me enough of a proof of concept that like, oh, you know what, there's something fun here. And if I spend the time. To do this, I can now move forward. And just for clarity, you were using the Dominion cards, but changing the rules to see how it impacted gameplay. Exactly right. So if you can prototype using something like

1:05:14 A deck of cards around the house or take a monopoly set. I I know I keep Using monopolies and whatever, most people know it. So you know, say, oh hey, what would this look like if instead of going around go, you actually had like dinosaurs that would like try to eat each other as you're moving around the board. What would that be like? Okay, that sounds kind of fun. Let's see what happens. So it's literally that simple. So what for my prototyping tools, my first round of prototyping is just I have a bunch of stuff. I have a bunch of dice and you know, my Dice with all the random signs. I've got a dex of cards. I've got random pen and paper. I will draw things. In fact, yeah, like when when you and I work together a little bit or I showed you some things you I showed you what like my early sketch Prototypes look like and they are They are ugly.

1:05:50 I talk about like the phases of design and and so every time you go through the core design loop. Your questions are go from bigger to smaller and smaller. And as you go through it, you're going to care about polish more. So if you're just trying to figure out like where is the fun, what is the idea? What's the theme? What what am I doing here? You don't want to think about Imagine you're building a house, right? And before you've even laid the foundation, you're worrying about the paint color on the walls and where the furniture goes. You're not gonna get very far. You're wasting a lot of time. Make sure you got a solid foundation first. Worry about the paint color later.

1:06:20 And so I think a lot of designers start by worrying about the paint color being wrong and they're never gonna finish a house that way. Okay. I'm gonna stand in. I mean this is a this is a lazy uh sort of rhetorical trick here, but so I'm gonna defend the newbies, including myself, for a second. And Ask a question which I think is actually really Important. at the very least helpful in all sorts of disciplines, not just game design.

1:06:46 One of the reasons a lot of writers get stuck or aspiring writers is that they kick out a first draft. It's rough. It's Ugly. It's really, really rough on all the edges.

1:07:00 And they compare their rough draft to the final draft of Incredible writers. And the rough draft of those writers is invisible. They never see that rough draft. So

1:07:14 What has been helpful to me, for instance, when thinking about Potentially writing comics is seeing the original scripts and how they were tweaked and how the concept art was modified over time to ultimately land. On what we see in the finished product because then I can see The ugly babies in the beginning. I'm like, Oh yeah.

1:07:35 Okay, that's very reassuring and it gives me more confidence to work with my Ugly baby. to try to shape it into something that ultimately is good. Because if I'm comparing everyone's finished product to my rough product, it can be really demoralizing. So the question is Is there a way for

1:07:53 folks to see the rough drafts of games, the prototyping, and so on. If they wanted to explore this as an example. It's one of the reasons why I started my podcast is to sort of unlock a lot of that stuff for other designers, right? Talk about their origin stories, talk about where they're You know.

1:08:12 The things that inevitably fail. You can also go there are a variety of places where people will have prototype Testing. So let's say you have a favorite game company or game designers. We do this at Stoneblade at my company. You can join our Discord and then we will periodically put play test requests out because we want to get feedback, right? We want to get feedback from people so and they could see how terrible those games are. Now we've already gone through a few iteration loops before we put it out into the public. So to see the most raw forms, I think there's not enough of it out there. I think it's something I really want to encourage more of because it's really helpful. Like

1:08:43 I've been doing this for twenty years and my first prototypes are hideous. So if you want, I can share some. I'll put some up on the like gameshare.com slash tin or to the show notes. Yeah, whatever. Because I want to demystify that process. It is Okay. In fact, it's better. In fact, I'll go even further, right? Because not only is it faster. You know you don't get hung up on making

1:09:03 it really pretty. It's faster to prototype. It's actually better to change. It's easy because you need to iterate, right? So if you've put a lot of time into making a beautiful board and beautiful cards, and then you realize you've got to change a card. you're gonna feel weird about it. Yeah, your sunk cost fallacy is gonna come to latch onto your back. I have a card that I've messed up. I'm just gonna cross out something on it with a marker and write something else. And then okay, now it's this. Go. And I'm making the note, right? The resistance to change is so much lower. So it's actually net negative for you to invest in making something pretty. early on in the process.

1:09:37 Makes perfect sense. So you've mentioned your company a couple of times, but last time We left Young Justin. In our chronology. He was working at a

1:09:47 Game design company. So Could you fill in the gaps? for us and tell us how you went from working for somebody else to working for yourself. This is a fun story and uh this is you actually come into this story, too. So I'll share it. So I moved from working on pure card games to I had an opportunity to lead a project that was the World of Warcraft miniatures game.

1:10:09 And you know, this is a very exciting project for me. I get to build something that's super cool with an IP everybody knows. And I had worked on it for About Eighteen months. And we had the company

1:10:22 that I worked for was called Upper Deck. They had made trading cards forever, most known for baseball cards, and they made Yu-Gi-Oh in this Marvel game I had been working on, but they didn't know how to make miniatures games. And so they Eventually. If we're gonna kill the project. The executives come and they tell us after eighteen months of working on it. And I this is pretty common in games, but I had never had a project I had worked on. And I was like devastated, right? With my dream project. I'm gonna change the world with this game. It's gonna be incredible. Now all of a sudden.

1:10:48 Ashes. And so I didn't want to let it happen. And so I said, Listen. I don't know what I'm doing here either, but in if you're gonna kill the project, give me six months.

1:10:56 Let me see if I can figure it out. You got nothing to lose. And I was able to convince them to let me become a project manager. And Try to figure out how to make games. how to make a miniature game specifically. And so

1:11:08 Same kind of process like I did when I first started to design. I was like, All right, let me Talk to people who know what they're doing. I've already got a very clear deadline. You know, I talked to Jeremy Cramford, who's an incredible art director, and I talked to the guy that made the Dungeons and Dragons miniature lines. I figured I just work months and months and months try to figure out how to make this work. Fly to China, fly to the factory, figure out how the plastics and paints and all this crazy stuff. And making it work, just for my clarity, is making it financially work for the company. That's exactly right. Financially, how do you make it work, right? Because Blizzard, who makes World of Warcraft, had very exacting standards about their miniatures. They have to have spiky pauldrons this high and these amounts of colors. And nobody had ever done anything quite like that before. And it needs to be financially viable to make this product for for the company I was working for. So there's a partnership. And so

1:11:52 I have to go figure out all these logistics. Set all the stuff up. Finally. And this is where I had first read the four hour work week. So this is actually super impactful for me in being very efficient using 8020 principles and I've learned to set up auto email reply so people didn't bother me. So I've already getting my efficiencies in it, but I'm in this.

1:12:12 zone of just I'm gonna finish this mission. And then I have the opportunity to speak to the executive team. I'm gonna make my presentation and make my case. Is this project gonna live or is this project gonna die? And I'm just some kid who wants to make a game and I've got to convince. So I'm there and I will never forget. I mean I'm they had this like ugly green carpet. I'm sitting waiting for my turn to get called in. It just I don't the details are super stuck in my mind. And I'm like, you know, go down this long corridor and my palms are sweating. You know, you open these huge like oak doors and this is, you know, it's a huge sports memorial company. So there's like a Babe Bruce sign bat on the wall and a Michael Jordan jersey and like a Tiger Woods golf club and the rich mahogany conference table. I mean this is boardroom cliche, right? But it's like

1:12:55 Very intimidating for me at this time. So I get up there. The owner is like sitting in his leather chair and like staring me down. And I'm like, okay, I give my presentation and I'm stammering through it, but I've I've done my research, I've done my homework. And I go through the presentation and, you know, heart's beaten. Finally I stop and there's this like pause at the end. I'm looking around, like what do they think? Right? It's like CO, CFO, all the big wigs, right?

1:13:19 And They start talking about the idea and they start Josh around and I start to think Oh my god, I think I think they like it. I think I think this is really gonna happen. And then they start like pontificating and they start talking, oh well, there may be this problem with this thing or this thing. And

1:13:32 It took me a minute to realize this. But As they were talking, I realized that they had no idea what they were talking about. Like

1:13:43 I had finally done enough research that I knew. They didn't know what they were doing. And like I just had up to that point in my life I feel like I had just assumed that the adults in the room knew what they were doing. This is a company that makes hundreds

1:13:57 Of millions of dollars a year. Of course they know what's happening. And now all of a sudden that illusion is shattered and I started out terrified. I'm terrified. I mean we're literally this project, you know, it's gonna cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to hopefully make millions or it could lose millions, who knows? And Nobody knows what they're doing. And so I'm like

1:14:13 Oh my God, like what do we do? And then I walk out of that room. My heart's beating and I'm just like, What's gonna happen? How do we do this? And then all of a sudden like a cold splash of water in my face. Nobody knows what they're doing. Aye.

1:14:25 Can not know what I'm doing, at least as well as anybody else. This idea that like the difference between a leader And somebody else is not like that they know something or that they have some special access. It's that you're just willing to make some assertions and own the consequences. That's it. That's the difference.

1:14:42 And so then. I finally clicked for me. The other parts of your book. Not just this, you know, efficiency and automation, right? But the

1:14:52 This idea of defining what you want and then creating the freedom for yourself to do it. And so that's where I suddenly started doing. The fear setting exercise and going through, okay, what's the worst case scenario for me if I quit and I do my own thing? And the dreamlining exercise, which is basically, you know, what is it that you really want? How do you define what you want? How do you make that very concrete? And so then that transformed is like, okay, I'm gonna get this game out the door. I'm gonna save up enough money so I have a year of savings and I quit. And that's exactly what I did. And it was a life changing moment for me because it was exactly that.

1:15:22 Taking ownership of my Future. I'm so grateful for you as a key part of it. And I'm so grateful for those executives because they really opened the door for me. You know, and I don't pretend to know what I'm doing all the time either, right? It's most of the time we're making stuff up, but it's being conscious about that, surfacing our assumptions and, you know, learning as you go. It's been a powerful journey. Thank you for sharing that and for saying

1:15:44 All that you said. And I would love to know when you did the fear setting and you're trying to identify the worst case, how you can mitigate against the worst case, what you would do. as sort of a backup plan in case the entrepreneurship does not work out or maybe doesn't work out, at least with the first inning. How were you thinking about that at the time?

1:16:04 What gave you In addition to what you already described, which is the realization that oh my God Almost all the emperors have no clothing, so I think I can do that. At the very wor at the very worst, I can also do that. Right. How are you thinking about sort of risk assessment and what you would do if things didn't pan out perfectly?

1:16:23 as you went into entrepreneurship. So I got very concrete, right? So What is my actual minimal living expenses? What do I need to be okay and have what I need? And I figured out what that number was. And then I was like, okay, how much time Am I willing to give myself to run this experiment to see if I can figure it out and make entrepreneurship work? And I decided a year Of savings was what I wanted. And so I focused on saving up. So I have that cushion, right? Because if you're in the red, if you're like, I don't know how to make my next paycheck, I don't know how to make rent next month, you can't

1:16:52 be creative and be free, you know, do the things you need to do you're just you're making decisions for the short term. And I want to be able to make decisions for the long term. So step one was have have enough of a cushion that I could feel comfortable. Now other people can do this as a side project or you know after hours, whatever, but for me I wanted space to just focus on this. And then The other piece was like, okay, well what let's assume it doesn't happen. And after a year I've got nothing and it's not working. I had done enough in my career at that point. I could just get another job. I could either be hired back at the same place or hired at another company. Like it's not like I was gonna go hungry on the streets or I have to live on a friend's couch for a little while. That's not that big a deal either. Right. So I really I went through all of those things. I could go bankrupt, my house catches on fire, like hilariously, like like you did in the book, right? So that's where like it it highlights the same kind of lesson as before, which was when I quit law school, it sounds scary. Everybody thinks, Oh my God, you're such a risk taker. Like I'm not. I mitigate risk at every turn. Like you know, when you're playing magic and you're trying to like set up so you can't get outdrawn on a game. I'm just mitigating the number of ways my opponent can beat me over time. And in this one, I could always go back to law school when I quit law school. I could always go back to

1:17:53 a job when I started as entrepreneurship. And same thing later on when I became a digital nomad, sold all my stuff. It's like I can always buy more stuff. I can always get a house again. And so I strongly encourage people to just go through that. Like if you really, really think about the worst case scenarios. Ninety nine times out of a hundred. They're totally recoverable within a year. It's often way less. And what was your knowing how methodical you are, you were not just

1:18:19 hopping out of this job with savings with no plan. So what was your plan? I'm sad to say that wasn't that much of a plan. Well, I guess with the core design loop, I guess you are going to be following some version. Of that probably. But did you have an inkling of what type of game or what types of games you wanted to make? You know, obviously card games were kind of my specialty. And so I knew that that was a space I wanted to be in, but I really wanted to create that open space to figure things out. And so as you mentioned, of course, the core design loop was part of it. I didn't have it as clearly defined as I do now, but this idea that like I'm gonna try things and prototype them and test them. And so I would during the day, I would

1:18:55 work on some designs, make up some prototypes, and then I would go find my friends who were still working at the company or elsewhere to like try it out and give me some feedback and come back. And you know, I didn't have any ideas. Like I didn't I hadn't designed a game ahead of time. I didn't know what I was going to do ahead of time, but I I had enough space that I could figure that out. And then it worked out that Another person from another company contacted me to see if I could do some contract work for them. And so I started working on some kids' toy based games, which was great. And so here's another fun story. So they knew me because they used to work at Upper Deck where I used to work and then they started working at this other company. And he's like, Hey, we need a someone to help us design a game. Can you do that? And I'm just like, Again, no job, no plan. Like I'm just figuring it out as I go at this point. And so I'm like, Yep. Definitely. I can do that.

1:19:37 Okay, well give us a quote. I'm like, okay, quote. How do I quote? I don't know if anything before. So I'm like, okay, I will let me just think about all right, how many hours do I think this is gonna be? And then like what's my minimum like hourly rate that I think I should be paid? And I'm like, okay, that's what I'll charge, you know, make it easy. And I send them the quote and he literally laughs in my face. Like, yeah, okay, sure, sure, man, no problem. You're like wow. Wait a second. I'm undercharging. Yeah, yeah. I'm undercharging. So the next time Yeah, I still try to overdeliver, do a great job. Next time I get another Opportunities. Okay, what do you quote? I doubled my number.

1:20:10 They still laughed at me. Okay, great. All right. Doubled it again. That my strategy was I kept doubling what I asked for until I met resistance. Until someone was like, Mm, I'm not sure. I'm like, Okay, that's what I need to be charging. That's the number. You know, I just want to there's one other story I'll just as a side note mention. Wh also just underscores the fact that part of the Frustration but also joy. of entrepreneurship is you have to figure out a lot on the fly, right? You cannot prepare for all the eventualities. You don't know what you don't know. And I recall I might be misattributing, so my apologies to the founders of Nantucket Nectars if this is misattribution, but when I took my first entrepreneurship class, first and only actually high tech entrepreneurship. with Professor Ed Shao.

1:20:55 Who changed my life in so many ways. He used What a lot of people refer to as the Harvard case study method, where you have sort of a business situation, then a problem, and then there's a break. And you have to try to figure it out and then only After you've had the chance to try to figure it out.

1:21:10 on your own as a class, then you read the outcome and the decision they made and so on. And there was part of this Nantucket nectar story where these guys are selling juices in Nantucket. And they end up with a tiger by the tail because their drin become really successful and they decide to make the shift to retail and they meet with a distributor. And they're talking and talking, and the distributor's like so Do you have good plans for POS?

1:21:33 And they're they like look at each other, they have no fucking idea what he's talking about. And they're like, Oh, we have great plans for POS. We have we have really we've thought it through and we think we have if We have an excellent strategy. And he's like, Okay, great. And then they leave the meeting and they're like, What the hell is POS a point of s point of sale, right? Displays. So it's uh it it makes for a lot of good stories. So you figure out you start to figure out your pricing, right, by doubling and doubling and doubling. And Maybe you could flesh that out a little bit in terms of you're doing this contract work. for people who are giving you specs. Of some type or another. That's right.

1:22:08 But you have some money coming in the door. Correct. With fewer and fewer laughs at your proposals along the way. What else is happening in that first year? So I'm using my kind of spare cycles. And there's this really interesting thing, right? The difference between an entrepreneur

1:22:21 who has no you know, no employees or anything and some dude just sitting on his couch can be very subtle. Yeah. Yeah. You know, until you start like really kind of getting income coming in and start making things happen, right? So there was a there's definitely a window of uncertainty. I mean, even now in my life the distinction's pretty blurry, but yeah. Right. It is, you know, it's you know, now I got a team and the people, it's like okay, I feel like I got a business, but it's not an easy distinction. And when you're trying to create something where you don't necessarily know what it is, it's even harder. So what I would do is I would in between doing this work for hire, I would work on just projects that I thought would be fun. And so I would just make Prototypes, try them out, try them out on friends. And I remember

1:23:01 It was actually with Ascension where I didn't make ascension specifically to think, oh, I'm gonna start a company with this game. I made it because I really wanted that game to exist. I'd played enough of Dominion and I like I was missing something I really, really wanted. And then I showed it to a friend of mine, Rob Doherty, and he has his own he actually was the guy that owned Jer Move Games, the the store and where we I used to play when I was when I was younger. And and I show him the game and he's like Dude, you have the ball. Like run with it. This is great. Make this a thing. And he had been, you know, an entrepreneur for a while. And so he helped me kind of like. Okay, no, let's do this. And that started down the road. And so this is gonna be my project now. And I started

1:23:39 My early prototypes are ugly and I will I'll find a way to share them with you. I mean, some of them are like horribly inappropriate. Like we had just really just Rude pictures and I won't share those, but they you know just ridiculous. Because it's just for fun. Rude pictures. How dare you. Yeah, I need to do it. I'm imagining that's code for lots of dicks everywhere. I mean, it's like yeah. I'm not only into the imagination of the listeners on this one. Not appropriate for public consumption. Leave it at that. You know what? Just to defend my dick's comment, I will say there's a place called Hotel Baron in San Francisco. Great wine spot.

1:24:14 Excellent place. And I don't know if this is true, but I heard at one point They this is one of the first places with a console for Digital signing. Way back in the day. And

1:24:26 The the rumor was that Of all the guys who went there and bought drinks, it's like seventy five percent just Drew Dix is their signature. Which I thought I thought was actually w it was pretty hilarious. Well, there's an important game design principle I didn't talk about here, which is the T T P Uh, which is time to penis. Uh

1:24:46 Any opportunity that you give people to create their own thing. At some point Someone's gonna make a deck. That's gonna happen.

1:24:56 T. All right, I'm gonna add that to my metrics. Yep. Key show notes. But I mean, so what it is is I mean, you know, the more broader point is like anytime you allow people to customize, you have to think what are they gonna do with it and how does that share and how does that build your community, but T T P is the uh the shorthand for that. So it is it is an unfortunate reality of our society that that is Just gotta happen. Yeah. Okay. So you'll share some of the things that we're going to do. I did not see this interview going this way, I'll tell you that.

1:25:29 Let me try to write the ship here for a second. So you're talking about roughs and the prototypes. You'll filter out some of the rude pictures. And we'll share some of that. When you We're chatting with, if I'm remembering correctly, Rob. And he's saying, You got this, run with this. Were you at that point at all thinking of how it fit into the potentially competitive landscape and how it was differentiated?

1:25:53 Or was it just enough for it to be something that you used to scratch your own itch and you assume hey if this is exciting for me as one person As someone who plays a lot of games, I assume it's gonna be attractive to more people. So

1:26:10 Three things, right? One, absolutely, it has to scratch my own itch. And I I have to love it. I loved it. I wanted to see it exist. All of my most successful projects by far are the things that I make for me and that I really want. And then I know they're gonna be great. So that's I think really important. Two. I do not chase trends. I hate chasing trends. In fact. Every time I've tried to chase a trend, it's been

1:26:31 Unsuccessful. The idea of like I'm trying to build something for some hypothetical I think this is hot right now has never worked. However, there's a third point here, which is important, which is it can't be just about you. And so the rule I like to use is I will show the game to people and I'll prototype it and test it. And when people start Asking me to play again. Without me prompting them. That's when I know I've got something.

1:26:53 So it's not just me. That's why like Rob, who I respect a lot, he was like No, no, no, this is great. Like play again. And I would show it to some other game designer friends and show it to some other people. And like, no, no, this is great. Keep so I so as you're going through, you're getting like a wider and wider sphere of feedback that's helping you move forward. And if your game is targeted at a different target audience, right? So I make a game called Bakugan, which is a toy based game for kids. Obviously, like how much fun I have playing it is not nearly as important as a five year old or an eight year old, right? So you have to test with your target market in that sense. So so I don't say that, you know

1:27:24 Target market and testing is not important. It is, but don't try to chase a trend. Make something that you know is fun and that you enjoy and then get the feedback and iterate as you go. And so as you get that positive feedback. Now I'm willing to invest more and more into the product. So now I'm I actually am gonna go and start putting some real art on it. And the story behind the art is I guess it's at this stage I can tell. So back when I was living in Boston. I met the guy that lived down the hall and he comes and knocks on the door and says hello. And I have like at this time I just moved out of college. So I'm like

1:27:55 Black light posters on the wall, like, you know, kinda like it's still basically a college door room. I just try to transport it to an apartment. And then the guy comes back over twenty minutes later with like bag of weed, like Uh, pretty sure you want to smoke this, right? It's like, okay, cool. So we hang out. We become great friends. And he actually as turns out is an incredible artist. His name's Eric Saby. And you know, whatever, we became friends. I have one of his art pieces on my Well, not on my wall anymore, but in storage now. But uh it's actually it's on my wall of my dad's place. I didn't put that one in storage. Anyway, so ten years later, when I'm making a game, I'm like, Oh man, his art was really cool. I'm gonna call him up.

1:28:28 And I called him up and said, Hey, would you want to make art for my game? And I built the IP and the story around his style because I knew I could get this batch of art without having to pay for like a whole new artist and new things because he'd already made it. So I could pay him less and he was a good friend and he fucked it up. And so now I start bringing art into the game and figuring out how you can use what's around and build the lore and build a a style around What's available. Okay, now we've made some art. Now we've got some cool looking cards. So I'm investing a little bit more and then I take it to

1:28:58 a convention called Gamma, which is a game Manufacturers Association. event. It's like a industry insider tabletop game thing. So the publishers and retailers and distributors are all there. So not a public show. And I get a little booth.

1:29:12 And I bring my little fake prototype there. And I realized Actually as I was going to the show that I didn't have in the game you get what's called honor, which like victory points basically. And I forgot to make anything that you track how do you track How many points you get, how many honor you get. And I was like, Oh man, what do we do? And I went.

1:29:30 to a like a Michael store, you know, like a like a little craft store. Craft store, yes, thank you. And uh they had these little beads, these little plastic fishbowl beads, you know, and they're all the oddly shaped. It's like all right, whatever, let's try these. I'll just use these for the prototype. So grabbed a bunch of those, put them in. And we start demoing the game and people get drawn to these beads and like, Oh my God, this is awesome. Like Crows finding a shiny button. Yes, exactly. They're super shiny. And they come over and like are these you know, they play the game, they like the games like, Oh, this is awesome. These are gonna be in the game, right? I was like Yes, yes they are.

1:30:02 This is like the POS example you gave earlier, right? I have no idea how to get these things. I have no idea how to make them. I don't know what to go, but they are definitely in the game. So that show, the response was so overwhelming. Like the people loved it, stores wanted to order it, distributors wanted to order. So now all of a sudden it's like, okay, now I'm gonna Literally I'm all in, right? I I put my entire life savings now, all the extra that I'd saved up to print at the time was ten thousand units of the game, which is pretty crazy. Probably a little bit sounds like a lot of units. Yeah. It was a lot of units.

1:30:32 Yeah, most times people are gonna start a new game. It's like you print a thousand units, maybe you better hope to God you don't have a manufacturing anomaly. Oh, dude, I was uh nightmare stories around that for sure. That's uh that's a whole different beast. But again, and and I this is not like I had worked with manufacturers before. I had made games working for another company, so this part wasn't totally new to me. And I wouldn't have put all of that money into the thing. You know, I used to joke, if this doesn't work, I'm gonna have to build a house out of ascension boxes, you know, that's pretty much all I got. But I wasn't, again, just a demystify the risk, right? At this I had gotten so much positive feedback. I had stores and distributors already waiting to order the thing. So now it's like okay, I it's willing to put the money in and take a risk. Yeah. And also just for folks who are unaware, I mean there are all sorts of ways to

1:31:18 potentially finance things if you have that demonstrate demand. I'm not suggesting this. You got to do your own diligence on these things, but like invoice factoring, right? Like if you have people who are Pledging and signing. whatever it is, letters of intent or something more binding to purchase a certain quantity, you can use that with manufacturers to then Get finance terms.

1:31:40 And there are companies that independently do this as well. So ways to work around it. My question That I wanna ask next is related to gamma. How many Exhibitors or People with games like yourself, game developers.

1:31:54 were there at this show. Actually it's not we don't even need to be specific to game developers. Like how many booths or exhibits were at the show. At the time, I think it was like about thirty. Okay. Uh Probably it's not it's not huge, you know, and now it's it's bigger, maybe two or three times that. But it's not like you know, it's less than a hundred.

1:32:13 Okay, no, no, no. That's one of the nice things. The game, the table, you know, this kind of game industry is still a little smaller than like a A New York Toy Fair is the more big one that's like it's a it happens and that's got thousands and thousands of booths and you're spending millions of dollars to have a presence there. It's like a much bigger species. This is this one was a little smaller. So the reason I'm asking is that in fact, if somebody wants just a separate collection of stories around These types of trade shows, and I think it was the New York Toy Fair.

1:32:38 Todd McFarlane. The legendary comic book artist has some stories around This from our conversations, which are hilarious. What I was wondering and maybe it Doesn't apply because there were

1:32:49 thirty tables or thirty booths. But did you do anything to draw attention to yourself or the game? at this event, or was it simply enough to pay for a booth and then assume that there would be enough foot traffic to bring the right people to you. So the principle you're driving at is critical, right? You need to get people's attention. You need to find a way at these booths, even at you know, at Gen Con uh, which is the tabletop more public facing tabletop convention where I actually did launch Ascension and there's a lot more people and a lot more vying for traffic at shows like Gamma, anywhere.

1:33:22 Or even on a store shelf, right? Why is someone gonna stop and pay attention? to what you're doing. The great thing about where we are in our modern world is it's easier than ever to make stuff. You can print your own books, you can print your own games on demand, you can make anything you want. The downside is we're flooded with stuff. Not surprising. And so how do you separate from the crowd? How do you draw people's attention? So at Gamma, I mean already told you by accident almost the shiny beads. helps. Nobody had those shiny beads. That was a really attractive thing. But I also invested in a a video drop. Like I had a a TV screen and I made like a little cool rotating loop showing the things and people, most people there didn't do that. And so finding something that draws people's I and brings them in. So it can be a cool unique component. It can be a cool giant visual. It can be

1:34:07 I had a game I launched years later called Bad Beats. B E E T S is a kind of play on the poker term of bad beats, but with actual beats. I had someone dress in a giant beat costume. I put one of my team members into a giant beat costume. Yeah, it's gimmicky, but it worked, right? So if you have a great product. Yeah. doesn't matter if nobody ever looks at it. And also all the gimmicks of the world won't help you if you don't have a great product. So step one, have something great. Step two, have a reason for people to pay attention to you. The workshopping attention grabbing

1:34:34 in real life, I think is really undervalued in today's increasingly digital world. And This applies to, for instance, work shopping Book material by giving speaking engagements. even to a very small group, you'll figure out very quickly. what works and what doesn't, what's confusing and what isn't, what people will remember versus what they immediately forget.

1:34:56 Or didn't even pay attention to in the first place. And the trade show stories are bringing back memories because I recall what I back in my former life. had my sports nutrition company and I would go to these trade shows and as you know I have to imagine this is true for these other trade shows. Once you get there, you are a captive audience. And if you want a chair, it's like oh yeah, you can rent a chair for three hundred bucks for you know a day. And I was just going in somewhat naive because I paid the exhibitor fee and I was like, Oh, great, I'll like I'll figure out the rest shouldn't be too bad.

1:35:29 But it was pretty bad. So I remember trying to figure out how to draw attention. And at one particular trade show I next to no budget because there were a couple of things that were mandatory that you had to rent, which struck me as a little bizarre, but it exhausted my My budget, so What I ended up doing was also getting I bought a TV at Best Buy. a big screen that I could return and I put on

1:35:53 highlight reels of Muay Thai kickboxing, right? Because it's like it's definitely going to grab some attention, but to provide a little context, this was at a It was a strongman slash sports event. It was kind of like the Arnold Classic in Columbus, for people who might know that. It's a huge event. This was much smaller. But there were a lot of athletes and competitors and so on milling about. And I also brought I think it was four or five of these hand grippers called the Captains of Crus, which are incredibly

1:36:24 and increasingly difficult to close depending on the poundage, to the extent that some of them are So difficult that there are maybe five or six people or twelve people in the world who at that time could close. whatever the highest rated Captains of Crush was. So I laid those out for people to test with all these athletes milling about, and then put this video up. Ended up getting

1:36:44 The couch and chairs at a good will and I had to like bribe a guy to help me with his truck to get it over there. Oh yeah. And it ended up being a really hilarious experience. But it taught me a lot about what worked and what didn't. And I was able to iterate because it was a multi day event. And

1:37:03 Taking a step back for a second and then uh I want to come back to ascension. And all the adventures there. Have you learned about Good playtesting versus not terribly effective playtesting. And what I mean by that is When you're providing your game to people.

1:37:19 Certainly one pass fail is do they want to play it? past the point that you need them to play it. That's sort of like the Viagra test, right? Like they put it send send it out to test patients for whatever it was, hypotension, hypertension, something like that. And then lo and behold, all of these guys over the age of X didn't want to send back their medication. And it's like, huh, interesting. Let's look at that. And that's how Viagra came to be in its current iteration. But there's that. And the the reason I'm asking this, and this is gonna be a very long paragraph of a question, is that when I am doing the equivalent with

1:37:52 My books and chapters. There are definitely better and worse ways to elicit feedback. If you're like, what do you think of this chapter? It's a crapshoot. And if people are trying to be nice, which comes down to who you select also to be your Playtesters in my case, proofreaders. You're gonna get

1:38:08 A bit of a scatter shot. of responses and it might not be actionable. But if I ask Read this chapter. Tell me. The twenty percent.

1:38:17 That I should absolutely keep no matter what. Then tell me the twenty percent if you had to cut twenty percent that you would cut. You're going to get very, very Different.

1:38:26 type of kind of surgical feedback. Similarly with to someone who's maybe less experienced as a as a reader, you could just say note any place that is confusing or where you find your mind wandering. And then that gets you to also stuff that you might cut.

1:38:40 What have you learned about Eliciting feedback or evaluating feedback when you're letting people test a game. It's gonna depend upon the phase that you're in. Every time I go through the core design loop, I like to think of myself like a scientist. I have some hypothesis that I'm trying to test and that's what I'm focused on.

1:38:57 in that testing session. So when you're early on, you're like, okay, is this even fun? Is this idea of like rolling dice to try to punch somebody and making combos of fun, right? Or whatever it is, right? And you want to just see is it fun. I'm not asking, is it balanced? I'm not asking, is it pretty? I'm not asking, does the game last too long? I'm asking, is this part fun? And that's what I'm focused on. And so I know when I'm testing that if I start getting feedback on these other parts, I'm not worried about that. I can set that aside because that's not what I'm looking for here. And the whole I want to keep playing, I want to play again test, the Viagra test, as you put it, that's not going to come true until later on in the cycle, right? Your early prototypes are most likely not going to meet that. So you're looking for other things. So I do like you. So I have a questionnaire that I'll use. I have it. It's up for free on think like a game designer.com slash media, or we can link it in the show notes, which has a bunch of specific questions. You can just print it out and use it.

1:39:45 So I will ask, all right, what are the three things you like the most about the game? What are the three things you like the least about the game? Where did you get confused? And much like your book question, right? You really want to pay attention to where people get lost and confused. And nonverbal communication is at least as important as anything they're gonna write down and tell you if you say, give me the three things you like the most, three things you like the least, what would you change? Whatever, people will say something to you just because they feel like they have to say something to you. Doesn't always mean that that's really what they feel, right? You're prompting them to it. So you have to use your intuition to say, okay, where A, is this relevant to the hypothesis I'm trying to test in the stage that I'm in? B, does this align with what I see?

1:40:20 visually of what they're doing. My mom tells me she loves all my games, even when she really has no idea what's going on in some of them, right? She's very nice. But if if I see that somebody's getting lost or leaning back or checking their phone, like watching for those nonverbal cues is so important. And you sort of train yourself over time. To get better at that. But yeah, so asking questions to prompt for the specifics. being s focused on what's important to me right now. looking for nonverbal cues and then in best case scenario

1:40:46 Just like you mentioned, right? You have some more sophisticated readers and you have less sophisticated readers. You have more sophisticated game players and less sophisticated game players. So if you can test with Other game designers. They're gonna be better at zeroing in or okay, yeah, I don't care that the card doesn't have pictures on it or that the numbers aren't balanced. I I know what you're looking for and I can give you feedback assigned to it. If you just take it to somebody you know, just a regular person, they're gonna get hung up on a lot of little things. And so you have their feedback's a little bit harder.

1:41:11 you know, you have to parse out a little bit more of what's important. Of course, as you get more and more focused on the The final product. somebody that's in your target audience, their feedback matters a lot. And then The last thing I'll say.

1:41:23 is a quote that's I think is also one of your favorites. It's definitely one of mine from Neil Gaiman. When your reader says that something is wrong, they're almost always right. And when they say how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. I don't know if I'm butchering it, but that is one hundred percent true in games too, right? If you get You're testing with multiple people in your target audience that are consistently saying that something's not good. You as a designer have to fix it. They definitely do not have the right answer for how to fix it. That's your job. But

1:41:48 That's another key part when I'm testing is that okay, I'm looking for themes, looking for patterns. One person telling me they don't like something, maybe I can dismiss it. But if twenty people that are all in my target audience say that, that's something I got to focus on. Yeah. No matter how pretty the paragraph, no matter how shiny the fishbowl pebble you might have. If a if a bunch of people are saying I don't get it, it's confusing. You gotta cut it. Not always the easiest thing. So what happened with Ascension? So you have enough Ascension kits to build a house. Or at least you put in the you put in the order. And what unfolds.

1:42:23 So then I go and I get a booth at Gen Con, as mentioned, and this was the where I'm gonna have the unveiling. And now again, I'm very poor at this point. Now Gen Con for folks who don't know. Can you just uh maybe paint a picture or an analogy for what Gen Con is and the significance of Gen Con? Gen Con is the Tabletop and role playing game mecha.

1:42:44 Of The United States, possibly you could say the world. Right. Gen if from uh Lake Geneva is where it started. It's why it's called Gen Con. It's not there anymore, but that's what it came from. Where the original Dungeons and Dragons people got together and played. It was like the first place where people sort of gathered and it kind of built this core of what gaming became today. And so now it happens in Indianapolis. It's like sixty thousand people every year, somewhere in that neighborhood, and every type of game you can imagine, people are playing all hours of the night. You know, they call it the best four days in gaming, but it's got anything you can dream of is there and many things you can't dream of. So it's like kind of the place

1:43:19 to be, if you will, for tabletop and role playing game nerds like myself. All right. So you show up at Gen Con. You've gone from thirty booths to God knows how many, right? You're can't can't count how many. And I'm just I'm just a little guy, right? I don't have any You're at a Taylor Swift concert now. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And so what I had was I I bought a ten by ten booth, which is the smallest booth you can, ten foot by ten foot booth. And then they were they had like a a newbie competition, like a little submit your marketing plan and we can give you a ten by twenty booth for the price of a ten by ten. And I won that contest. So fortunately got a ten by twenty booth, which is still like Very small in the scheme of what's there.

1:43:56 And I set up my stuff. And This was people had started to hear about my game because I showed it off at gamma before and I start, you know, I'm kind of putting it out there in whatever way I can, but this is just posting online and sharing with friends. I don't have any marketing budget or anything like that. And then I get there.

1:44:13 And Not only do we have like we have some of the early adopters who had heard about it run to the booth, but then they play the game. And they loved it so much they would then take it open up, buy it, open it up, and then start showing it to their friends. They would like set up. And so we ended up this is not allowed at Gen Con anymore, by the way, but they would just take over like nearby tables like at the seated area. And just start demoing the game for me, like totally for f you know, didn't ask them to, didn't pay them.

1:44:41 The ascension splinter cells activated. It did. And I would start seeing people play it in the halls. And then I would see people carrying boxes around. And so it became this kind of like viral before, you know, we don't I don't know. This sort of viral sensation in a way that was very it was very exciting. It was like a very uh Incredible moment. And so we sold out of everything we brought. Yeah, so this is this is a very rewarding, very cool experience. My team, every you know, it's not just me now. I've got other people there like working really hard to make this come to life. You know, it's team is like four of us. And then I got an offer. That was very

1:45:12 difficult offer to refuse. So I at this point I had early product that was shipped for Gen Con, but the rest of the stuff was still on the way. So I still haven't sold these 10,000 units with all my life savings tied up into it. And I get a call from another Very big gaming company. And I don't think I'll say the name just 'Cause I don't know. Anyway. They and they say Hey, we like your game. We want to buy it out.

1:45:33 All of it. We'll take it over. It'll be our game. We'll pay you a royalty. You don't have to worry about anything. It'll be all that.

1:45:39 Now this is a very tough moment for me. In a sense, it's a dream come true. They buy all the stock, so my money's off the table. They are a big company, they can push it, they can sell it, and then I can just go back to making games and I'll have some amount of royalty and I'll be Good to go. And I sat with it. And

1:45:56 At the end of the day, I was like, You know what? This is my baby. I've worked so hard to get it here. And I just I wanna see it through. I wanna see it through. I want it to stay mine. I didn't want to sell it.

1:46:06 Off. And I said no. And it was like one of those I might regret this one later, right? And then Thirty days later.

1:46:14 Product shows up finally after delays. Funnily enough, the product launch delay was launched Such that it actually launched while I was at Burning Man. Which is not uh not supposed to be. But

1:46:26 There it was. When I come back. From Burning Man. So I have a little release party like out in the middle of the desert on the ply. And When I come back, we'd sold out. Everything was sold out. The entire run.

1:46:37 And we had to make a reorder and it was like, Okay, now I can actually The company is It's working. I can reorder, start making expansion, start and like the rest of the company's history kind of Evolve from that. In a way that uh

1:46:49 Well, I'm glad I made the decision I did. All right. Many questions. So At Gen Con, how many Games did you sell? Roughly.

1:46:58 Oh man I don't remember exactly, but it's a hundreds of hundreds. Some number of hundreds, yeah. I want to Bookmark this. This is not gonna be my first question, but just how you sell ten thousand after selling a few hundred. Was it word of mouth online? Was it something else? Just what factors you think contributed to that because it's not an immediate Obvious outcome. At least not for me listening to the story. But before we get to that.

1:47:23 Because this all sort of undergirds a lot of what you're talking about. How do the economics of say tabletop games or card games Work. What's the kind of traditional model? How do people get paid? Who's getting paid like what? What are the percentages terms of royalties?

1:47:39 What is that a percentage of? Could you just give us an overview of What the economics Of that world. kinda look like as a template. When you're producing games, you typically

1:47:51 most of the time you're gonna produce them overseas. Some now with cardboard stuff, it's starting to become a little bit more economical to do it stateside. We do some of our games stateside, but mostly you don't do it overseas. Whatever the retail price of the game is, the cost of the game Has to be About a fifth of that. And the reason is that

1:48:07 as a manufacturer, you are gonna sell the game to a distributor. At about sixty percent off the price of retail. They're gonna sell it to A retailer. At fifty percent off the price of retail. So they've got like a ten percent margin for distribution. And then the retailer has that fifty percent margin for the rest of it. So if you are a game designer and manufacturer, then

1:48:25 It sounds like Twenty percent margins generally on games? Something like that. Yeah. Now if you're a game designer, typically if you have an external game designer, you pay a royalty to that designer off whatever you're selling, right? So if you're selling it to distribution, you sell a percentage off the distribution price. If you sell it direct to consumer, you sell off the consumer price. And that can vary depending upon the designer. So And tabletop games.

1:48:46 Typically it's gonna be anywhere between six and twelve percent at the high end. For more mass market games, big scale games, it can go as low as Two percent or three percent. Okay, got it. This is important because it highlights how

1:48:59 Challenging. Your decision to say no. was right because we're not talking about like I'm keeping ninety percent. Well, I mean maybe with direct consumer you are, but it's not like ninety percent margins versus six. It's like there's actually a narrower gap. Right, which is also true, for instance, in books for self publishing and traditional deals. People think they're miles and miles apart. In some cases, maybe they are, but when you start to factor in all of the costs. The delta between the percentage that you take.

1:49:30 say self publishing versus traditional is not as wide as people might think. So thank you for giving that. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that? Yeah, well, you know, it comes down to it was a little bit more than just you know, the money and the dollars and the sense of it. It was just it was a matter of like this was my Baby, this is my IP, right? If you you've worked with publishers where they now take

1:49:50 over the rights of stuff and you can't just do what you want with the book anymore. Yeah. Right. I would imagine if you want to do like Ascension Expansion Packs or Ascension A, B, C, D, and E, you want to do a whole derivative line. If the publisher owns those rights or effectively owns those rights. You're in a tight spot. Think about where we are now, thirteen years later, there's over sixteen standalone expansions for ascension.

1:50:12 We made Ascension Tactics, which is an Ascension Miniatures game, which we did another expansion to that. Ascension's been featured in a major motion picture. We are, you know, working on trying to take the IP and make cartoons and make other things, comic books out of it. There's all of these things that are fun, right? Like you know, we've had conversations about this sort of stuff. Like it's fun to create and grow and expand your storylines. You know, when I first made Ascension, I had sketched out a three year story arc of like what the world of Ascension would be if I, you know, got the whole thing done. And now, of course thirteen years later, so I've had to make some more stories since then. But that's the part I love. Like just like when you know growing up playing Dungeons and Dragons, like the the process of coming up with the stories and making it and bringing that world to life is just I love it. And so I didn't want to to lose that. And I don't, you know, for people that are listening that are trying to make these decisions, like it's not obvious, even though I I've been fortunately

1:51:00 successful with. It's not obvious that it's the right decision for everybody. Like I spend way less of my time just designing games because I'm running a company. I have to manage logistics, I have to manage people, I have to plan out the marketing strategies. I have to there's all these things that come with running a company. And so I think a lot of people would actually be better off in what if all you want to do is make games. then you know selling to a publisher is a great strategy. I wanted to kind of build worlds and build Build something bigger and so Here I am.

1:51:26 Mm-hmm. And I'll just repeater name I mentioned earlier, Stephen Key, I don't think he does what some people would refer to as venturing, which is basically building the business to do it mostly yourself or a lot of it yourself. He loves. Developing New toys and new products. And he's really good at the licensing game. And that, as far as I know, maybe things have changed, but that's the game he plays. And I would say just on the do something bigger side.

1:51:50 There are different ways of doing something bigger, right? So if you want to have the freedom to do the extensions and so on, like you have. on some level you almost certainly have to retain rights. But for product developer doesn't have the business know how or doesn't want to develop it, doesn't want to spend time that way. licensing to a gigantic company that has a global footprint and distribution.

1:52:11 Could be the perfect path or the best available path for making a large impact in terms of distribution and Putting a spin on the ball of culture. Speaking of putting a spin on the ball, the game Bakugan I mentioned earlier is a game that I work on that's Spin Master is a company that owns it. They have toy plastic balls and there's a game that I designed the game, but they own the rights, they own the game, they own the distribution, they do everything. And that is by far the biggest quote unquote game I've I've ever worked on. I mean it's all over the world. It's in toy stores, anywhere you go. There's a cartoon, multiple cartoons, like it's

1:52:42 Enormous. And so that is also fun and also a really cool exciting thing. And so that path is totally viable. So you can do work for hire, you can create projects and sell them and make a royalty. You can launch and publish your own things. There's an enormous number of ways to go forward and a lot of it comes down to just getting clear. defining what it is that you want, what's important to you. It's like how do I make a living as a game designer? That's like the surface level question, the how questions are a trap, right? You need to get below that. It's like okay, what does it mean for me? Like what is it I actually want? What does success look like for me? And then even deeper than that, why am I doing this? Because I want to make super cool worlds and I want to grow into a universe, or because I want to collaborate with people, or because I want to reach

1:53:21 millions of people are because I just want to have something to play with my friends and do something on the side. Right. There's no wrong answer to any of those questions. But if you don't dive deep enough for yourself, you're going to end up chasing down a path like I did many times where I'm just going to compete or move on a path for the sake of it,'cause I want the most dollars. The most dollars is the wrong game to play, I'll tell you that. Yeah. It can lead you astray really quickly. Important to keep

1:53:44 Your eyes on the cash flow, but also. Can be a trap. Don't run out of dollars. But but don't don't just optimize for dollars. All right. So Maybe this ties in. You've mentioned a number of successes.

1:53:58 Do you have a in your entrepreneurial journey after starting your company, any favorite failures or near death experiences or anything like that that you can describe? Oh yes I can. The life of an entrepreneur is definitely uh one that has a lot of ups and downs, as of many

1:54:16 of your guests can attest to or you can attest, I'm sure. And so when I mentioned earlier the game Soulforge. We've since relaunched it, but at the time it was a purely digital trading card game. And I partnered with Richard Garfield. This is the guy that created Magic the Gathering. This is a dream. Come true for me. And I'll tell you the brief story of like so we meet, we're at a game conference, you know, like I'd seen him around. before, but we hadn't really met. We're at a game conference called Pax Dev, which is like a developer conference. And he's giving a talk on

1:54:45 Design. So of course I'm in the audience listening because I want to learn from the master. And he says at the end, there's a Q and A, and then somebody asks him, Hey, what's your favorite game right now? And he says, Ascension. And I literally like jump. Up out of my seat from the back of the audience and go, woohoo like a stupid kid, right? But everybody laugh. But it gives me the opening. And so I go and I start a conversation with him after the talk. we start talking and we get excited. It's clear we're both excited about the same project. And so SoulForge is born.

1:55:11 Yeah. Now. This was a project that was my first digital game I'd ever done. And I Was

1:55:18 A little cocky at this point, I won't lie. I succeeded. My first project essentially was a huge success. Everything I Everything I touch turns to gold. It's all gonna be great. We're doubling in size every year. And we do a crowdfund. And I thought it was gonna cost like two hundred fifty thousand dollars to make that game. We crowdfund with that target.

1:55:33 And we end up crowdfunding Double that gold, near almost double that gold, like$500,000. It's like, oh, this is amazing. We're gonna crush it. We're so good. And as it turns out, making digital games is very expensive. That costs.

1:55:45 Three million dollars to me. Oh man. And so I had to go and try to raise funds again and you know we have to launch the game before we're ready. And you know, again, we have Followers we have

1:55:56 Cash but the cash burn is you know, over time I can see the cash burn is higher than the income and it's not working. And I overextend. I start borrowing more money. I know I can make this work. I'm not gonna let it go. Like this is my baby. I'm gonna keep it going. How are you raising and borrowing money? Just if you if you don't mind adding a little more detail.

1:56:13 So it starts off with um, you know, we just do like a kind of friends and family Convertible notes round. So that means like they give me a loan and then in theory it turns into a into equity. Yeah. And then after that, then I start taking some of those refactoring loans like you talked about, right? So I'm getting loans against my future income on Ascension to pay for Solforge and then starting to run up credit cards and like all the things you're really are not supposed to do. Yep. And I get to a point where I have to like finally

1:56:41 Realize like wow, I'm I'm gonna go bankrupt. Like I can't do this anymore. Like I'm gonna lose Everything. And this was just one of the hardest things that I have ever faced because not only is it like I feel like I owe it to my team who I'm gonna have to lay off these people whose livelihoods depend on it. We have fans and people who love the game and like in a traditional tabletop game.

1:57:01 If I stop making ascension, let's say, right, you still have your copy of Ascension at home. And you can play it for as long as you want. It doesn't matter if I don't make any more. But when I stop making SoulForge, a digital game, that means the servers turn off. That means your entire collection is gone. That means you can't play it anymore. Everything you spent it's all gone. So I'm like failing. Myself, I'm failing. My team I'm failing. the fans, like everything. And I have to

1:57:20 Make some very, very hard decisions. Not to mention the friends and family. Of course. Yeah. People I mean, my I I literally had my parents had taken a loan against their house to help me Like I mean this is I am so overextended. I am so like In Thick of it.

1:57:35 Shame and difficult. You know, like it's it is tough. And I have to come to a realization and come to the other side of it where I had to like Go through this process. Of accepting. I had to get to the other place like okay. It happened.

1:57:50 I've lost everything. I failed. Now what? Right now this is a different kind of fear setting exercise because now I'm on the other side of my worst nightmare. And Took me a little while, but I was like, Okay, you know what? I will still be alive.

1:58:02 I will be able to pay off some of these debts over time with some other things. I can recover from this. It's gonna be okay. The people who got laid off, they're gonna get another job. It was not easy. Once I accepted that worst case outcome. And then I was able to say okay, now How do I make this less likely? And so I

1:58:18 I had to lay people off, but I also renegotiated debts and negotiated payment plans and reduced our overhead and took on more contract work and like slowly but surely I was able to dig myself out of the hole. And I don't think there's any chance I would have been able to do that if not for being mentally ready with, okay, I've lost it all. I mean I'm talking to bankruptcy attorneys, right? And that gives you a different kind of attitude and approach when you're trying to, you know, you're negotiating with a lender that you owe money to. They're like, you owe me money, you should collect. I'm like, I know, but either I'm gonna go bankrupt, you're not gonna get anything, or we're gonna work something out and I'm gonna do my best to pay you off. And so fortunately I was able to turn that around and

1:58:56 Not only did I learn You know, the important lessons like you can go through a lot and you can recover from it, but also to not put myself in that position again, right? Not to overextend to that degree and learn to Make smaller bets and grow as you can. It was a very important and powerful thing, which then, of course, I've now able to been able to come back to with reinvigorating that very same game. So

1:59:18 To ask a question related to that. You have This dream come true. partnering with Richard to create this game. How did you two communicate or what led

1:59:30 Two The ability to maintain that relationship. And now work together. Again, right? Because there are

1:59:39 I suppose. as I'm imagining different ways this could have played out. I'm sure there are ways with many different collaborators where things could have exploded and it would have damaged the relationship and that would have been the end of that. So why didn't that happen?

1:59:52 You gotta be honest with people, right? I mean, like that's that's really what it comes down to. Like act in integrity when you work with partners. You sometimes you have bad news, you tell them bad news. If you Have some humility around when you're ideas are not working, or when you're trying things and say, here's what we're gonna do. And when I talk about like nobody knows what they're doing, and I realize the other executives do it, I don't hide the fact. that I don't know what I'm doing. I've learned a lot. I've got good ideas. I've tried things that work, but I I whenever you're pushing the boundary and trying something new. Sometimes it's not going to work. And so when you're working with somebody, and you know, again, fortunately, Richard is he's a professional. He's not only has he made games that were uber successful, but he's also made

2:00:27 How many? weren't uber successful too, right? So he knows this, anybody that's done this for long enough, any creative field, you just you cannot predict, you know, everything is not going to be a hit. And so when it's my first major failure for me, it felt like the end of the world. But the more you work with professionals, the more you realize that that's Just part of the process.

2:00:45 Amazing. What if you learned or what decisions have you made related to your company or Entrepreneurship, how you run things. That you think

2:00:58 It could be after that experience. It could just be in general, maybe ways that you have Simplified things or Challenged assumptions turned things upside down, anything at all that comes to mind. One of the things that I've realized is that The same way you design games, right? Designing a great game and designing a great company are not all that different.

2:01:17 In a great game. You Have clear goals. You know what you're trying to do. It's very clearly defined what you're trying to do. You're getting a lot of feedback.

2:01:25 And rewards, either that be from points or achievements or to interest rate, you're getting constant feedback loops. The challenge level is appropriate, right? You're focused on learning one thing at a time. The skill level is appropriate where you want to be. And probably the most important thing about games, right? When we play games, we take a certain kind of mindset. If I'm playing a game, I expect to lose. I expect to have challenges. In fact, that's the whole point, right? If you play a game and there's never a challenge, why are we even doing it? And so I have tried to cultivate all four of those things in my company. We set.

2:01:54 clear goals where it's like, okay, it's not we're gonna try to have this specific metric, like our email subscriber list, we're gonna try to increase it by this amount. And here's how we're gonna do it over this quarter. Or we're gonna try to get A new game in this category that we're gonna have a prototype ready to go in two weeks, right? Clear goals. We have Something that is Allows us to have daily Focus and feedback. What I love is the rule of three.

2:02:15 I think I first learned this from Chris Bailey, then the his book, The Product Creativity Project, but I've applied it at every level of my company. So What it is is you have Everybody posts their three daily goals. What are the top three things that I want to focus on? And three is really important because we all have an infinite laundry list of stuff to do. We're never going to finish our to do list. But if you can finish your most important three things, you could make an enormous amount of progress. And we scale that to every level of the company. So Every team we have three weekly goals, we have monthly goals, we have

2:02:43 quarterly goals and so everything kind of scales down. And I even built this into my own like personal life. Like I have a thing, the level up journal, which I've made, which I've got. It just has a journal that just is fits in your pocket and has Three goals, three habits, and then a little gratitude practice. And so Every piece of it by focusing on very few things and making those the priority, it makes a big difference. And then

2:03:05 Lastly with the mindset, we set very aggressive goals. And It's okay not to hit them. Like a game when you you wanna win. Right? Ever you take winning seriously, but you don't

2:03:16 cry and when you lose a game, right? You say, Okay, what can we learn from this? How do we get better? And started to take that attitude and approach it. Sometimes easier than others, for sure, but like cultivating that mindset and focusing on what's important and making sure that the goals are clear and everybody knows what they are and you're moving day to day. That's how I structure the company. And it's again, it came from just the principles of design, applying them to what we do. And I found it to be really powerful. Where do people if people in the company are posting, for instance, the the rule of three, their three priorities for the day, where are they posting? Please. So we have a company Discord. We have a channel in our company Discord that everybody posts their three goals for the day. There's a separate one for weekly goals, separate one for monthly goals.

2:03:56 And a separate one for quarterly goals. And so you could always look back and see what everybody is doing at any given point if you care to at the main focus. It helps also helps us stay connected, right? Because we're a hundred percent remote team now. So Even though I may not talk to a given person or see a given person, I can quickly glance and see what's most important to them right now. So it keeps us all connected and accountable. Two questions. The first is is there any

2:04:18 follow up on those three, or is it just the act of someone publicly stating Their priorities that makes everyone feel connected and hopefully gives them some felt sense of accountability that you think leads to Better.

2:04:33 Output transcript: Let's start there. So the daily, there's not much follow up on the daily. It's about staying connected. And I think it just forces you to plan, right? It forces you to assess for yourself. Okay, what actually is important to me. A lot of people will just start. checking emails and going down rabbit holes and they're working. They are working, but They're not doing what's important.

2:04:51 And they're just doing whatever's in front of them. And so this forces just as a habit, it forces you to think things. Then for the weeklies, we do have that. So we have our weekly goals. There's we have a check in at the end of the week where people will post, hey Here were my goals for last week. Here's how they went. Here are now my goals for the next week. Or well, you know, what can I do? You know, if I didn't meet a goal, what am I doing to fix it? So there is some accountability and I read through those every week for the team. And that's on Friday.

2:05:17 So people are setting their priorities for the following week on Friday. Correct. And why Discord versus other tools? How did you choose that? So we tried a lot of them. I'm obsessed with productivity tools, sometimes to a fault. But so we tried Slack, we tried a couple of other custom ones, uh, we tried Asana, we tried uh

2:05:34 Monday, we tried a bunch of them. But the nice thing about Discord is one, it's very easy to use. Very you could just start up a a channel for free. You can have voice chat and Text chat. You can also upload bigger files than you can with like Slack restrict that unless you have a paid program that's much easier to like load files and share things. And honestly, Discord started as like a gamer focused thing. And so we actually built our fan community in Discord. So you can go to the Stone Blade Discord. It's kind of funny because it's sort of like a front of the shop, back of the shop kind of vibe. Right. So it's like the front of the shop. It's like all the fans are there. They're all chatting about the games. We can jump in and chat with them. And then we're in the sort of private channels that are you can't see, but we're talking about and making the next things that

2:06:16 You're gonna be talking about six months from now. And so it's like automatically gives us a sense of like connection to our fans because the same place where we're Doing our work. One click away you can see and interact with fans, so it has a nice bonus effect. of making us feel a little bit more connected to the community.

2:06:32 How much of your work do you do on laptop versus phone? Oh a ninety plus percent laptop for sure. My phone is I'll occasionally check emails to make sure I'm not missing anything, but I hate working on my phone. Yeah. I figured it was probably something like that on the on the same way. What is the mobile experience? with Discord like I've never used it on mobile.

2:06:50 It's fine. I mean it you know, I again so f mostly when I'm there, I can check messages. I turn off all notifications for everything. I don't want my phone bothering me or pinging me or distracting me like I am using my phone. Consciously because I want to look at something specific. So it means I have a meeting and I'm not at my desk, I'll go to Discord, go to the meeting thing, check it, or I have something I want to post at a public channel. This is another key thing about it that's great because you have so many different channels and you can make threaded discussions. One of the things I try to encourage is that we have As much as possible make communications public. A lot of times people will have side chats and side conversations and come up with some great idea and then it will get lost because people are just in a private channel somewhere. And so we'll make sure that people have public discussions as much as possible. So people can add comments and can get involved and stay connected if they want to. But

2:07:34 To continue with your question, the mobile experience, it's mostly Just for some I will only use it if it's like there's some specific communication or meeting or connection I need to do. That's when I'll use my phone. If I'm gonna work, it's because I'm set up. And a laptop. Designating time to work in and connect. All right.

2:07:50 We could keep going for hours and and maybe we will do more rounds, but there's a prompt here. That's I would love to explore Which is

2:08:02 How a trip to Thailand. helped you to escape your need for control. All right. So as someone who focuses on systems predictability, control ability, et cetera. This might be therapeutic for me to hear. So could you unpack this for us? I think we're very similar in this sense, Tim, right? It's not uh I wouldn't call myself a control freak just because I don't want to say mean things about myself, but I very much want things to be good and I believe I know how to make them good and I wanna make sure that they are good. So uh that's what control freaks say. So the point being like I know I'm good at my job, and for the most part, with the most of the jobs that people are doing, I know how to do them.

2:08:37 As well as they do, that's how I know if they're doing a good job or not, right? This is the story I'm telling myself. And I hired a lot of very smart Very capable people. And

2:08:47 I ended up every extra person I hired suddenly became more work for me because I had to keep checking to make sure that they were on track or setting up more systems to, you know, have this and and if they weren't doing something the way I thought they should be, coming in, or they would come to me with questions. And At some point I'm like, listen, this is too much. This has gone kinda crazy. I need to step away. And so I said, Look, I'm gonna take a three week trip to Thailand.

2:09:07 I'm not bringing my laptop, you know, I'm not reachable. I'm gonna do that in six months. So I gave the team plenty of time. What do you need from me? How do we set this up so that you don't need to talk to me. And They

2:09:19 Okay, we need access to these things that only you have access to. We need to know this, blah, blah, blah. It was very little, as it turned out. And then I go to Thailand. Now I am still too much of a control freak, so I really did bring at least my iPad with me so I could check it. But I didn't respond. I didn't do anything. And what magically happened

2:09:37 Is everybody just stepped up? And They answered the questions that they would have asked me themselves because they were perfectly capable of doing that. And they started Taking initiative and building new things and doing stuff that I didn't even think to do.

2:09:51 And I realized With some. Embarrassment that I had been holding them back. that I had by not allowing them to fail or do things that would be different than I would, I had been constraining them from becoming leaders and doing the things that they should be doing. And I had built work for myself, I had made them less effective at their job, and I had made my life less

2:10:12 Good. Like I so that was one of the best vacations I ever took because it actually really changed the entire way that I managed, changed the entire way I viewed leadership. And I love Thailand. Amazing. Just to like building the systems that then persist after you get back. What a liberating experience that must have been.

2:10:31 On so many levels. The gift that keeps on giving. No, it's something you talk about a lot and uh it it it cannot be underestimated, right? What is it so you ask the question, why what would it take For me. to let go.

2:10:41 What would have to be true for you to be willing to not Get out of this. It could be some key metric that you care about that they have to report. It could be that they have to stay within a certain budget. It could be that they're In reality you're just making up stories of oh well I just feel like I need it. Let let those things go. Let people grow and it's really in my experience, it's just been incredible. I now have, you know, a team that

2:11:03 Can literally run itself. I get in and I focus on the key new projects. I focus on the most important things I think are wrong, but I for the most part, I have stepped away from a lot of the day to day and I have watched my team get better and better, better. And again, it's part of that mindset, right? They make mistakes, just like I make mistakes. And sometimes the question is, do what do we learn from it? And don't make the same mistake twice. And We've learned a lot along the way and it's been pretty amazing. So Justin. We're coming up on almost two and a half hours, two hours and seventeen minutes or eighteen minutes. I'll ask just a few more questions and then we can slowly land this plane. So the

2:11:35 Next question is One that many long term listeners will be familiar with. The billboard question. If you could put A quote a question, a phrase, a word, anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get it in front of millions or billions of people. What might you put on such a billboard?

2:11:53 I'm Excited to get this one. I had uh anticipated it might come up. I've listened to a lot of the podcasts. So I'm gonna use one as a a mantra for myself. Which I say to myself every day, which is cultivate comfort. With uncertainty and impermanence. Cultivate comfort with uncertainty and impermanence. It sounds a little, you know.

2:12:11 But in reality it's So much of what we do, we talked about this a little bit earlier, is because we're afraid That we don't know what's gonna happen. We're afraid we're gonna lose something. And the truth is

2:12:22 You never know what's gonna happen. And you're gonna lose everything. We're all gonna die. Right. And if you can just Be okay in that space of not knowing. control freak piece of it, the staying as a lawyer or safer path, uh and be okay with the fact that things are not gonna stay the same all the time.

2:12:38 Then life gets so much easier. And whether it be your creative path or your relationships or anything like that has been one of the most powerful things for me personally. So I'd hope to share that message. Yeah. Is a perfect place.

2:12:53 And that is exactly what we're gonna do. So Justin people can find Think like a game designer at thinkligadgame designer dot com. You mentioned the slash media for various things. They can find you on Twitter at Justin underscore Gary. Any other websites that you would like to mention or places you'd like to point people to? Yeah, sure. You can come to uh stoneblade.com is for my games if you want to pick up any of my games or join our Discord. There's a link there. And we myself and my team are all there chatting, so you can chat with me on Twitter and on the Discord. I love it.

2:13:23 You know, I've talked with people that have design and creativity questions. So always happy to help. This has been so much fun, Tim. Such a blast. People take'em up on it. I highly, highly encourage you to engage and thank you. Justin for taking so much time. I'm glad we were able to finally make this happen. Really took so many notes, so lots to follow up on personally, and to everybody listening. Thank you for tuning in. And as always, we will link to everything we discussed and probably much more in the show notes. Tim.blog slash podcast. You can just search Justin and I'm sure that this will be one episode of very few, maybe the only, that pops up. So you'll be able to find everything there. And until next time. Please be just a bit kinder than is necessary.

2:14:06 Both to others and to yourself. And with that, Tim Ferris signing off. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast. guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about.

2:15:11 If you'd like to try out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010

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