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

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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode

of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all

different disciplines to tease out the habits, routines, lessons learned, and so on that you

can apply to your own lives. My guest today was a blast. We cover a lot that can be applied to

life, business, thinking, game design, and 100 other things, a lot of tactical advice,

a lot of specifics. My guest is Justin Gary. Justin is an award-winning designer, author,

speaker, and entrepreneur. He is CEO of Stoneblade Entertainment and creator of the

innovative and award-winning Ascension Deckbuilding Game Series. Prior to designing games, Justin was

the youngest ever Magic the Gathering US National Champion. He has studied creativity and applied

the principles of design to create dozens of products over his 20 years in the industry for

brands that include Marvel, World of Warcraft, and the 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, we 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. Thinklikeagamedesigner.com is one such place, and I highly recommend the

podcast by the same name. On Twitter at Justin underscore Gary, and we will link to everything

else linked in Stoneblade and much more in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast.

And without further ado, please enjoy this extremely, extremely tactical, and I found

very, very entertaining conversation with Justin Gary.

Justin, it is nice to see you. Very nice to see you again.

Yeah, Tim, great to see you again as well.

And you are at maybe undisclosed, or you could disclose, but you are overseas at the moment.

So we are across the pond, or many ponds, as it were. I'm glad we were able to make the

timing work. And I thought we could begin with magic. So magic, Magic the Gathering,

is a game that I never really became familiar with, because I was older guard at that point,

Dungeons & Dragons, a lot of the very first editions. But my younger brother, on the other hand,

really became immersed in magic and actually competed on some level. And his friends were

just obsessed with Magic the Gathering. So could you please, for people who don't have the context,

explain what magic is and I suppose how you became involved and what that trajectory looked like?

Magic is 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 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. 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 have a very competitive person by nature.

I've been involved in pretty much whatever I do, I'll find some way to compete with it. And in

between games of laser tag, people were playing this card game that looked really cool. I'd never

heard of before. And I watched them play and I was like, okay, what is that? And so, okay,

so I go to the store and I just buy a pack of cards. And as I 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 play a

little better and a little better. And eventually at one point, all the guys from my group were all

going to go to a state championship tournament. And how old were you at this point? I was 16 years

old. Okay. Yeah. So I was the young kid. So I was like, oh, hey, come along, right? Come on the car

ride. And, you know, those are some of my best memories in general, just like, you know, a bunch

of guys hanging out jumping in the car, just talking about games, riding up. And as it turns

out, I won that tournament. And so I ended up becoming the state champion. And that got me an

invitation to the national championships. And again, I was not ever taking this sort of seriously.

I wasn't even intending to go. In fact, I was supposed to go to debate camp that summer. Yet

another thing I was arbitrarily competitive in. And it ended up being my parents couldn't afford

to send me that year. It's a debate camp. So last minute, I again, my friends were all super

supportive here. I ran a tournament at my local game store. They let me run the event. I collected

the entry fees from that tournament. I use that to pay for a plane ticket to fly to Columbus,

where the US national championships was happening. I slept on a friend's floor and I was now 17 at

this time. And I ended up winning the US national championships. And that ends up taking me on a

career of traveling around the world playing magic for a living. So let's dive into a bunch

of things that you mentioned. And I was not aware of the debate camp component, the debating piece.

And I have watched debates. I've never been part of a debate team. Could you just explain

for folks what a debate competition looks like or a debate as a game, per se? What does that

look like? And why were you good or at least competent at it? There's a few different categories.

I'll just talk about my favorite one, which was called Lincoln Douglas debate at the time. And

that basically means that you have a topic that you're debating. Say, the US should have closer

relationships with China, or it's better to sacrifice 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 rebuttal. And they have some time for rebuttal. And at the end, the judge or judges would then

decide who won. And there's a coin toss to decide who goes first, because that seems like a major

advantage. It varies, right? So from round to round, you'll go first or second. And this was

sort of how we did it in high school. 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 something I really spent quite a

bit of time on and really enjoyed. And then it ended up being very useful for quite a few things

later in life. Turns out being able to speak good has value. So if we look at, say, the Lincoln

Douglas format or the parliamentary, I suppose the former is maybe a better example to use here

knowing nothing about it. But how much time do you have to prepare once you are assigned or have

chosen one side of, let's just say, the US should have closer ties with China and you're

either pro or con. How much time do you have to prepare that? And are you just basically

making it up, but you're using the strength of your logic that you construct, even if your

assumptions are off to defeat your opponent? How does that work? So for those formats, the same

topic will hold for a while for like months, like a season. And so you can prepare very much ahead

of time. So those formats, then there's other ones like the parliamentary one,

where you have no idea what you're going to talk about till you start going up there a lot of the

times. That was more fun because it was a little bit more extemporaneous. There's varying degrees.

When you have the same topic over and over again, you'd start to notice common threads about how

people will present it. And then you try crazy things. So maybe the US should have closer ties

with China and you would take a position, actually the US should not exist anymore,

should dissolve. And you start making arguments around that and you just kind of have to take

the argument seriously, in a sense, because the job of the judge is to sort of

leave outside their preconceived notions and just hear what you have to say. And so having to think

on your feet and react and be able to kind of come up with unique answers and change the flow of

things was really quite a bit of fun. Okay, so Eden, I will move on to everybody listening. I

will move on in a moment, but I really want to understand this because I suspect, as you mentioned,

that these are threads that tie into other things later, at least some of them, like these are not

isolated skills. And if you're practicing, say the parliamentary style, and you are developing this

approach to structured thinking and presenting, 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 sort of

freestyle rap battle. When you get up, and then you give your spiel, how do the judges

judge? What does that look like? Because presumably they might not know anything about the topic that

you're discussing. So they can't really fact check a lot of what you're saying, I would assume.

Yeah, that's right. There's no live fact checking in these formats. So you kind of just have to,

it's about your persuasive ability. 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 competitors,

anytime my opponent is saying something, I'm writing down their points. So I'm breaking

them down into kind of concrete notes. And I want to make sure that for each point that's brought

up, I am addressing it in some key way. And not a lot of times I can make some broader point that

will maybe take out a few of their points. And because you only have a certain amount of time,

how efficiently you're able to use that time to both refute the points that they're saying,

as well as bring up your own points that are hopefully harder to refute. So it becomes a kind

of process of being very good at listening and taking notes, then being able to structure,

how do you want to set up your replies so that you're gaining time advantage, if you will,

with your persuasive ability to give you more time to make your own row of arguments,

so that hopefully they don't have time in their thing to properly address and attack everything.

Okay, great. So as promised, I'm going to move forward.

This is great. I've never been asked about this before. So this is fun.

Yeah. Trying to do my job. This is best I can. And returning to magic. So you mentioned that

led to all these adventures traveling around the world competing. What does that mean? Could you

explain what that looks like in terms of incentive 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 and compete? We're taking this back now, date myself a little bit, but this is 97 when I

won the US National Championships and the core of my career was about the six years from 97 to

about 2003. And that time there was what was called the Magic Pro Tour, which was put on by the company

that made the game as a way to promote it. And they would have millions of dollars of prizes

available. So at any given tournament, you could win. So my biggest tournament winnings would

typically be in the $30,000 range. So a pro tour in Houston where I won that or these different

tournaments. So to give you a sense, the first place in one of those tournaments was $30,000-ish

all the way down till top 32, maybe you'd get $1,000. And then you'd have to get invited to

these tournaments. There'd be maybe 300 people-ish that would get invited. And so I would do a

tournament in Prague, then there'd be another one in Sydney, then there'd be another one in

Seattle, there'd be another one in Tokyo. And so we got to literally just meet up. And again,

I'm in high school. I'm a teenager. So this is just like crazy.

That's a lot of money.

Oh my God, it's crazy money. So it was just such a fun thing. But when you think about it as an

adult, it wasn't a crazy, crazy amount of money, but it was great at the time. You can't win every

tournament. But when I was playing at my peak, it was maybe $80,000 a year I was making. So it's

still not. That's no joke.

No joke. At that time, it was great. I mean, it's how I paid my way through college.

Better than flippin' burgers, I'll put it that way.

What was your major in college?

I was a philosophy major.

How did you choose the philosophy?

Well, as you might guess, I love debating. I mean, I've always been very interested in just

sort of talking about the deep questions, right? Trying to get down to the fundamentals of what

is interesting and what matters. And I tried a few different majors, history, and I was on my

path to be a lawyer because my parents are lawyers and that's what I was supposed to do.

But I found most classes, when I went to them, the job as a student in the class was to regurgitate

whatever it was that the professor told you back to them. And that bored the hell out of me.

Whereas in philosophy, the job was to make a reasonable argument. Didn't matter just like

in debate, right? It 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

strength and a weakness. I loved debating with people and I loved it. When someone told me something

I didn't know or convinced me I was wrong, I was like, that's amazing. That's great.

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 learned to be a little bit more

cautious and compassionate in my conversations with people. But 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.

I want to mention for people who may not notice this pattern that on this podcast, there is

disproportionate representation of former philosophy majors.

However, that could be severe survivorship bias. I'm sure there are many, many philosophy majors

who do not end up on large podcasts. However, it is notable to me, right? You have people who are

deeply interested in philosophy who also end up in these conversations with me. 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. 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?

Yes, I think there's two factors here. I think one, you're absolutely right. My parents were

wonderful in the sense that as a kid, I could argue my way to a later bedtime or I could argue my

way to, hey, if I finish my homework, I can get an extra setting of dessert or whatever. They

encouraged if I could kind of debate my way to something, then I could get it. And so it trained

me very young. And similarly, you know, 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've tried to apply that

everywhere else in my life is that when you lose, which you inevitably are going to lose in life,

right? Doesn't matter what it is that you look first 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 somebody, your opponent draws a lucky card,

you know, it's a one out of 60 that they draw that card and they beat you because of it. And

you'd hear in the hallways, other people would be complaining about what's called bad beats,

right? I got unlucky. Oh my God. But the best players wouldn't do that. The best players would

say, actually, you know what, if five turns earlier, I had made this different play, it wouldn't

have mattered what card they drew at that turn. And that skill set was something that was drilled

into me. And it's something I definitely credit quite a bit of success across a variety of

fields. This might seem like a strange question, but do magic competitors, or did they study

games in the way that chess players study historic games of chess, where those moves

and decisions are recorded in some way? I'm not sure if it lends itself to that.

Oh, it absolutely does. And people would break these things down. So again, we're going to

take a selves-in-the-way-back machine, right? 97, 98. This era, the Internet is still relatively

new, right? Still relatively light. And so people would go to what the time was called the Magic

Dojo, which you can now find in like the Internet archives. And it was where everybody would post

tournament reports of, okay, here's what I played, here's what happened. And people would comment

on them and break down 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 dunces of places where you can find this. But it was a, you know, unlike with chess,

where people have been doing this strategy and breaking down games for hundreds of years,

magic's 30 years old or whatever, and at the time it was very new. And so you got to see

the origins of these strategies come together and break down individual games and individual

moves. And it became obsessive. I mean, 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. What were the main

innovations? If you had to try to identify some game design elements that led to or contributed to

magic becoming such a global phenomenon, what would you say were the innovations? I mean,

there's definitely the slot machine like dopamine potential of buying these packs,

just like buying baseball cards, right? But what else is there in the game that made it at least

have the possibility of exploding in the way that it did? There's a lot of factors. There's

kind of a deep answer, but we have a long form podcast. So if you don't mind. Love deep answers.

Yeah. So take all the time you want. I teach game design. And when there's sort of five major

categories of what people are looking for out of games and magic hits all of them in ways. So

I'll talk about the categories first and then I'll talk about why magic succeeded in such an

incredible way. So the first is immersion. You're looking for certain experiences or you're looking

to tell craft a story. The second is connection, right? You're looking to socialize. You want to

help other people. You want to kind of connect with others. The third is aspiration. This can be

in competition. This can be like achievements. You want to win. You want to prove you're better

than prove you can achieve something. Then the fourth is growth. You want to learn. You want to

continue to kind of move up and improve your skills. And the last is expression,

this idea that you want to customize or role playing works this way because we express different

parts of ourselves through role playing. And so those are the kind of the major categories.

And I think magic allowed people to both not only have these competitions like I was doing,

but it allowed people to customize and grow in a world where it's infinitely deep. At a certain

point with chess, it's a deep game, but there's only so many pieces. I can learn them all. I can

know kind of the frame I'm playing it. With magic, there's constantly new cards coming.

There's constantly new things to do. And I get to own. I get to customize and own my experience.

So to relate it to something like you've more familiar with 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 there's 300 cards

deep, you can do that. If you want to be the hyper competitive, hyper focused guy, you could do that.

There are so many experiences that you get to, in a sense, design your own game. And it's one of

the things that I've learned, much like you talked about a lot of philosophy majors end up on your

podcast. A lot of the game designers started from a game like magic or Dungeons and Dragons. And

because the, as you play, you're crafting your own experience. And I think that was such a

unique and powerful thing. And Dungeons and Dragons could be a little intimidating for people

because it's so open. And it's so intimate. It's so complex, or at least it can be. It can be.

It can be. It's a real commitment. Exactly. Whereas magic, like you're playing inside of

these box and these rules. But once you start exploring it, then this whole world opens up.

And I think that was really the magic of it, quote unquote. And it really made it feel like

something that was very new and spawned an entire genre of games.

And I remember one point, I think it was certainly at the time, I think TSR, I was reading

this book called, I believe it's Art in Arcana or Arcana. I'm not sure how you pronounce that word

properly, even though I've read it a thousand times, which is a visual history of Dungeons and

Dragons. And at some point, they realized one of the major stumbling blocks was people having to

develop from scratch their own characters. And they provided out of the box templates,

which was one of the ways they jumpstarted wider adoption. It's giving people an easy place to

start with some type of positive constraints, let's just say, in a sense. And that makes me think

about magic. Now, can you remind me and listeners of who developed magic?

So Richard Garfield was the lead designer he created the game, along with, of course,

a lot of other people that support it, but he was the lead, the creator.

I remember listening to and you're going to have to fact check me on this, but I think

I'm recalling this correctly, listening to at least one, maybe two interviews with Richard

on your podcast, think like a game designer. And he was talking about game development and,

I guess, folks who are auditing the cards and the decks and the idea that some cards would get

retired or removed from circulation or banned because they were too powerful. But if there were

no cards that were too powerful, that they were also airing 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

some part of your game to be so unfair that nobody can beat you. If it's in tic-tac-toe,

if you get to make three moves at once, that would be pretty unfair, right? The game is already over.

You've got your three in a row and that doesn't make any sense. So the game's no fun. So the idea is

you want to make sure that everything, you know, there's no one strategy that's too good.

But there's also some people think that that means everything needs to be exactly the same.

And that's also not true because the idea, if every card is just as equally good as every other

card, then that you deny people that discovery, you deny people that ability to learn and say,

oh, wait, hold on. As a new player, you don't know anything. And then you can learn, oh,

actually, you know what? This card's better than this card. Or the excitement of chasing and finding

something that's very exciting that now you can combine with something else that you have and

suddenly that gets better. And so the way I define balance is not everything has to be equal.

It's that there's no one strategy that should be unbeatable. You know, the best analogy is if

you think rock, paper, scissors, perfectly balanced game. Rock is great. But if I know

you're going to throw rock, I've got a plan. I could throw paper and I'm going to be okay.

So there's a lot of ways that you can approach balance. But that can give you a sense of 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 is going to be as popular as it was when he talked about in the podcast episode that

he thought you would just never even see all the cards that some people would have a couple

packs and other people have a couple packs and you just discover it as you went. And that is

actually an exciting prospect. But very quickly, people would buy all the cards and now there's

spoilers on the internet and everybody sees everything immediately. And so it's changed

a lot since his initial concept. As the next lily pad, I want to explore one of two things.

We're going to get to both so you can choose which you think makes sense to talk about first.

So the first option is your path to where you are now as a senior partner at a law firm. Just

kidding. So law school, the other is what happened in your magic life after winning the nationals

in that story. So which of those do you think makes sense to tackle first? Or you could talk

about both in tandem, either or. We'll go in kind of chronology order. So the magic career kind of

has its arc before my law career has its much shorter arc. I'm 17 years old. 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. 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, I had this albatross around my neck of being the first

loser US national champion. This 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 fast forward, five years later, finally, the US loses again loses to the Germans. So

this now I'm not the only loser, not that I was running 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, like my chance at redemption after six years. And I have with two other people

on the team. And the two people that are on the team with me, they were like, pretty new to the

game. They were, you know, kind of had come out of nowhere, just like I did when I first started.

And I was so committed to making sure we did well. I paid to fly both of them to Boston,

where I was living at the time, to like stay at my place and work. And we trained for like

month, month and a half together with my team, who is 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 stage lights, we're covering it. This is

like everything I have worked for. And there's some online records of the experience, but I am

like, I remember just sort of feeling in that moment that, you know, I'd been in tournaments,

I'd won tournaments, I'd lost tournaments, there's a certain amount of excitement and pressure. But

for this one, it was so much of a personal whole story, a personal kind of drama that I was playing

out for me. And I drew my hand the first time for this final match where everything's on the

line people 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? And I didn't like the hand, I

wasn't going to let the world championships be decided on that hand. So I mulligan,

throw the cards away, my teammates are groaning in the background.

Just like, all right, here we go. Shuffle up, draw the hand, and it becomes one of those moments

where you kind of like see it come together. Like the hand was good enough, we start playing it out,

I get some board advantage, my opponent's kind of on his back foot, and he's got a couple tricks.

There's some cards I have to play around, I'm not really sure. And then finally, you know,

I'm able to kind of get to the point and win this fight after however long people 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. And it was a result of a lot of hard work, right? It was like a lot of

dedication that got there. But it kind of felt for me, it was like the end of my magic career.

It was like the thing that I 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 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, now we're talking about years of gap in between, right? And so what I did learn

and the major thing that I realized in that like magic is generally a single person game. I'm playing

a match against somebody else in 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 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,

and made a huge impact. And then, you know, just being willing to, again, come back from a loss and

not let it discourage you that you can't overcome it. But I think that being able to work, typically

most of the games I've played have been single player, 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 turnaround for me.

Yeah, it's a big shift in terms of looking through the prism.

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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 lawyer, my dad's lawyer, my stepdad's lawyer.

I was debate captain. I was doing, I was supposed to be a lawyer. That was just like my path from

as early as I can remember. That's what I was supposed to do. And even though I had been making

a living 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. And so graduate, go get into NYU law. I teach the LSAT for a while.

I go to law school. And I'm lucky. I'm a pretty happy guy by default. But this was the first time

I was really depressed. Like I was very unhappy for an extended period of time. And I will remember

very specifically, there was one day I'm getting up, I'm living in Brooklyn, snowing outside,

just like 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.

So everybody has to studiously avoid looking at anybody else in New York. That's just the rule.

And make it all the way in, have my Boston cream doughnut for breakfast, because that's just how

I lived back then. And I go into this NYU law library, which is like, you could picture this,

you know, just cavernous giant library with old oak and towers of books. It was back when you had

to use books to learn things. It was a wild time. And I checked out, you know, the blog books I had

to read before class. And I'm, you know, stack them up. There's just towers around me. And I'm

just there. And I'm there for hours, just like reading case law. And just not very happy. But

a couple hours later, I realized I got to get to class. And so I sit up, and I have this jolt

of pain through my spine, jolt of pain, I can't, I can barely move. I'm hobbling to get out of there.

And I realized I threw my back out from reading, from reading, that is how unhealthy I was, how

I was over about 40 pounds heavier than I am now, how just like miserable I was. And I like,

this is my first clue that I'm on the wrong path. And I think this is something I just,

it's a really important lesson, I think for, I imagine there's a lot of overachievers in your

audience. And that this path of trying to win whatever games in front of you, it can be way

worse to win the wrong game than even to lose one that you actually enjoy playing. And that was a

big shift for me. And fortunately, that summer, I had an opportunity to go instead of interning

in 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, even though I'd had this terrible

experience, even though I now had a opportunity in front of me, it's still my assumption at this

point was I'm going to go back to law school, I'm going to go back and that's just I got to finish

that path. But I come out to start working on games and I am in love with it. I'm super passionate

about it. I'm enjoying it again, we're debating these really interesting ideas about design,

and definitely happy to dig into what that looks like. But then when they offer me a full time

job, I'm still stressing about this, you know, and it's still finally when I make the decision,

I tell my mom, she she literally cries when I tell her I'm leaving law school to go become a

game designer, right? Like, it was so hard. And I look back and it's so silly to me. This is one

of the things you've taught me, I didn't have these words at the time, but I learned it through

you like this idea of like fear setting, where in fact, I wasn't really giving up anything,

I could always go back to law school, but it just didn't feel like that at the time. And so being

able to break out of that spell, 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. How did you find the

internship? This was fortunate because of my magic career. They had reached out to me to kind of

just like, vet their game and, you know, kind of check it out and stuff. So some of the other

people on the magic pro tour, who people who had known had already kind of been hired there.

So they were like, Hey, and they knew I was miserable. I, 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 kind

of deal. Has your mom come around or is she still hoping for that day when you returned to law school?

My mom has come around. I'm sure she'll listen to this episode. Hi, mom.

She did. And this is the thing, the people in our lives, there's a lot of pressure that we all

feel, right? Whether it's from parents, from friends, from like, they want the best for us,

right? 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 got to be uncomfortable. You got to 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 she knows that now and she was very happy it all worked out. Yeah. All right. Well,

we're going to fill in the gaps for those people who aren't your mom listening. Hi, mom. Since we

have a lot to fill in it, look, now I feel like I should defend your mom also. Certain paths are

more predictable than others. There is the perception and maybe even the reality of safety,

consistency, stability with certain choices. But as you said, choosing the right game is

more important than winning the game that just happens to be in front of you. And at least

certainly in my experience and the experience of a lot of people on this podcast. And just because

something is unpredictable does not automatically make it unsafe. It just makes it less certain.

And as you put it, many of these things, for instance, I'll give you another example. And

this is very analogous. When people invoke the names of say Zuckerberg or someone else who dropped

out as this throwing caution to the wind, burning the boats behind them to take the risk of

entrepreneurship, whenever possible, I try to point out that's actually not the case for most

people who say take a leave of absence from a Harvard or Stanford, they can go back anytime

they want to go back. Yes, 100%. And again, you've said this better than honestly anybody like

this idea that most of the fears that we have this resistance to uncertainty is just made up in

our head. There are so many ways 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 behind in school or whatever. It's a very low cost. Most often, recoverable. So,

I'll link to fear setting and people can just search fear setting like goal setting with a

hyphen in it and all sorts of things will pop up if you just search that or go to tim.logs-ted

because that was the topic of my TED talk, I suppose quite a few years ago now. But

moving on from fear setting for a moment, it might come back into the conversation, who knows. But

what did that first year or six months, month, could be the first week, however you want to

frame it, of designing games look like? What was that experience like?

It's a really fun question because people just make this assumption that because

I was good at playing games, then that means I would be good at making games.

They are 100% different skills. I did not think of myself as a creative person. I thought there

was just some kind of like magic special secret sauce that other people had and I was just going

to fake it and go out there and see what happened. So, when I go there, I'm having serious imposter

syndrome. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to make this come to life. And I researched

a ton. I've read some great books on creativity, a whack on the side of the head is one I'd recommend.

And I started to talk to other people who I did respect as designers and kind of break it down.

And over time, I realized that there is no, there's no thing that differentiates like

a creative person from a not creative person other than process. And so, as an analytically

minded person, I was able to break it down into what I call the core design loop, which is a

six step process of how do you create not just games, but I think every creative field it applies

to. And so, learning that and I was very lucky. I'll talk about the details of it. I won't leave

you hanging on that piece, but I won't let you leave me hanging. Just to immerse the experience

of it, right? I was lucky in a sense in 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 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 like, I can go

into that now or can jump to other stuff. Let's actually, before we get into the process,

could you explain why a whack on the side of the head was impactful for you or what you

took from that that was valuable? Because in the course of doing homework for this conversation,

I noticed that you had mentioned this book before and I actually have a deck of cards

designed by the same author. But could you speak to, I have not read the book, however, could you

speak to why that had an impact or why you recommend it? So, it's nice in that it helps to,

in a sense, demystify creativity and just bring it down to like a very simple granular level.

I'll give some examples. So, you know, one of the principles in it is that I've used all the

time is basically, and I forget how they word 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

force me to smile by biting it. I could use it to prop up my microphone. I could use it, right? You

trying exercises that give you different frames were very powerful and ways to like

break you out of your thinking. The idea of using random constraints. So, one of the exercises that

I encourage anybody to do if they want to is like, if you're having a problem, some creative challenge,

some block, go to a random book on your shelf, open it to a random page and point to a random

word, right? Some substantive word. Now, figure out how that word relates to whatever your problem

is and journal on that for like five minutes, 10 minutes. And you'll be amazed at how all of a

sudden it can crack open something because we get so linearly focused on the problem in front of us

and even a completely random constraint can open up the door for you. And we'll 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 going to look for the third right answer,

the fourth right answer, the fifth, right? I'm going to look beyond that to go deeper and find

more things. So, just these little exercises and you could just do those exercises would suddenly

say 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 in a book, be more creative, trust me, try it,

you know, it works. Without having read that book, I've used this approach and 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 eaching approach to creativity. Like, okay, you just like

throw a bunch of scrabble towels 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. Very,

very powerful. And I wanted to mention since you were talking about going past the right answer

and finding the third right answer actually reminded me of something a former guest said,

Derek Sivers, who's one of my favorite people who's been on a few times. And when I asked him

who he thought of when he heard the word successfully 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, churistic that you can use in all sorts of ways. All right,

so that's a snapshot on a whack on the side of the head. Let's talk about the core loop.

Before we jump into the core design loop, I'm going to give one more thing. It's not from a

whack on the side of the head, but it's something I've actually developed more recently as a process

that I think is 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,

etc. 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 board or a shared Google doc if you're

doing remote like we are. And then you one by one, okay, what if that weren't true? Or to use your

terminology, what if I did the opposite? And it's so powerful because sometimes it doesn't mean

anything. Sometimes it's like, okay, that doesn't make any sense, you move on. But without fail,

by the time we finish that exercise, we find some core assumption that all of a sudden changes

everything. And that ability to just take what you assume to be true, one, making it explicit in

the first place is super powerful, just so you know really what you're doing. And then two is

this inversion process is incredibly powerful. Could you give any examples just to make it a

little concrete in the minds of folks listening? Yeah, of what those assumptions might be.

I made this game called Soul Forge with Richard Garfield, the guy that created magic, and we

did this over a decade ago. And we made it as a digital trading card game. And so purely you

played on your phone, no physical objects at all. The game was successful, we ran it for a few years,

and eventually we took it down. And we were talking about we wanted to bring it back,

because we loved the game, we wanted to bring it back. And one of the exercises we did is,

okay, Soul Forge is a digital game. And then we're like, wait, what if it's not? Like, what would

that look like? And we had built it to be a digital game. But then all of a sudden we're like, well,

now it's seven years later, digital printing technology is way better than it was, you can

actually algorithmically create one of a kind cards and bring things. And that started us down

this road of investigating this new technology. And so the new version of Soul Forge called Soul

Forge Fusion is now a physical card game that has this new technology built into it, which never

would have happened if we had just gone with our assumptions of, oh, okay, we're going to remake the

same game again. So that's like one example of this is recently impactful for me in this.

Yeah, I love that. I have, 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 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,

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, generally, if you're going through the publishing process, or you have been through

the publishing process, your thinking has been shaped in a certain way over and over again,

you're like, okay, I have to do print audio ebook. And you sell all of those to one person.

Well, what if we split those up? What if there was no print whatsoever? What would that look like?

And just testing these very basic assumptions, right? And I'll give you one example also,

which people might not realize, or if you're outside of publishing, why would you

realize this? But none of my books in the US have ever gone to paperback.

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 larger for the book. And you come out

in paperback. And I was like, but if you look at the math, does that make any sense for you?

And then they think about it. And they're like, well, let me think about that. Okay,

I was making 15% on each hardcover book, which is already discounted on Amazon to

something very affordable. And now when I go to paperback, wait a second,

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 ebook. So hence, from the beginning,

none of my books have ever gone to paperback. Okay, so let's, if you're open to it, we can

certainly, I mean, I love, as you know, you know this very well. I love digging into testing

assumptions because your assumptions of the operating system that governs your life in a way.

And you want to make sure those rules can be justified on some level. But maybe it makes

sense to hop into the core design loop and talk about that a bit. I think it's a perfect segue

because exactly what we're talking about with assumptions is going to come into play in the

core design. So the core design loop is how games are made, how creative projects are done,

but we're going to focus on games. So it's the kind of main topic I teach it. So the core design

loop is six steps. It's inspiring, framing, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, 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 you want to make a game about fantasy

warriors. Hypothetically speaking. Or miniatures, right? If you love miniatures.

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 it 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 we talked about, right? We want to put a box around it. We want to put constraints

around it. And so that constraint should always include a deadline, ideally a short deadline

to whatever your next step is. So I'm going to have a prototype to test in two weeks.

It could be one of the most common mistakes I see game designers make. They come to me,

okay, I want to make a game. It'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

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 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 brainstorming. This comes

from research from the Wharton School of Business and work I've done with them. But the basics are

three phases. And to get really granular, because I know that your audience likes that,

I break it into three steps, 20 minutes each. First is where you're open exploring. You write

as many things as you can, as many ideas as you can, and don't stop. There's always this 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 10 seconds,

you're doing it wrong. As many ideas as you can on the paper. Then the second stage,

also recommend 20 minutes is organizing, where you take this massive ridiculous,

some cool ideas, some ridiculous ideas, and you start to try to find patterns between them.

And if you're trying to make something specific, you start to kind of think through, okay, if I'm

trying to make a game, what's the victory condition? How do people figure out what are their moves?

How do they interact? You start trying to kind of put some structure around it. Or if it's a book,

okay, what's the opening of the book? How is it going to help people? Who's my audience? Whatever

it is, right? As you start making these connections, you're naturally going to see gaps and you're

going to fill those gaps in. And then the last step, which is also 20 minutes, is elimination.

And that's where you went from starting with as many ideas as you can. And now you want to get to

as few ideas as possible, so that you can start moving to testing them. And so that's where you

go and you'll try to like, okay, what's the minimum amount that I can prototype, which is the next

step, to test my idea, to test my assumption, to test the core of what I'm doing. And so prototyping

is exactly what it sounds like. What's, you know, talk about an MVP or, you know, this minimum

viable product, what's the smallest thing I can do to test my idea? What's the easiest way I can do

this? And then step five is testing, where you actually show it to somebody, you get some feedback,

you actually figure out what's going on there. And then step six is iterating where you take what

you've learned, and then you cycle back through the process. And what I've learned is that the

skill of creativity, specifically with game design, but really with anything is how well you can kind

of flow through that process and get the most out of each loop and go through as many loops as

possible. Alright, we're going to come back to brainstorming in a second. But what I want to

do for people listening is highlight. And you said this already, but I want to just make a few

notes and give a few examples. This process can apply to almost anything. And for instance,

you want to start a podcast, I'll use that as an example. Inspiration, thematically, where are you

going? What is the format that you're excited about? What is driving you to be considering

starting a podcast, right? Setting parameters, thinking about the constraints. What are the

constraints? How do you keep it interesting enough that you continue to do it, but simple

enough that you don't quit after three episodes? And the example you gave of like, I want it to be

like Halo plus World of Warcraft plus Warhammer. And you're like, whoa, easy. The reason there is

an elephant graveyard of a million dead podcasts that stopped after episode three is they're like,

I love this American life. And I think it's going to be like this American life meets Serial meets

Joe Rogan. And I'm like, whoa, slow down, Tex. There's a reason the credits are five minutes long

at the end of this American life. 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, etc.,

prototyping, giving it a go. Maybe you record as I did five or six episodes before publishing

your first so that you have a chance to kick the tires and try to figure out what's working.

The testing you're going to get in this case, right, testing with your guests, but also with

test listeners, let's just say, and then iterating. This also applies to books. This also applies to

really any creative project that I can think about. And to come back to

the brainstorming for a moment, when you are brainstorming, what is your personal preferred

method of doing this? Whiteboard versus pen and paper versus typing on a keyboard versus

a tablet of some type. How do you like to do it? I am a huge fan of, in particular, an app called

Workflowy, and it's a totally free app. And it's basically a series of nested lists. And the nice

thing about it is it's infinite, so I can continue to make lists in sublists and sublists and sublists,

and I can link pieces to pieces. And so I find, over the years now, I've been using that for

seven or eight years, that is my personal favorite tool. The important advice for people is not to

copy the tool, but whatever works for you, whatever is the easiest flow, the least resistance.

A lot of people like Notion is a similar type of tool, but it's bulkier and a little bit slower

in my experience. And that speed is everything. I don't want anything that's going to slow me down.

So that's where pen and paper is great. But I don't like, unless I have a giant sheet of paper,

which I do enjoy, if it's a big, big poster board and give markers and bigger things,

especially if I'm working with a team, so either a giant whiteboard or a large poster board on the

table, because you can all share the same space and see ideas form. That I think is great, but

a small sheet of paper, for me, my brain, 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 and the fishbowl, right? It's like, I'm not going to grow anymore. This

space is getting a little constrained. Yeah. So I like workflow because it's got that infinite

kind of growth, and I can shrink or grow nodes or like, okay, I want to dive deeper into this idea

and link ideas together. It's been my favorite. And what are some of the ways that you like to

prototype? I'd love to know where you think people most often get stuck, like in between

or after which step do people get stuck. And as someone who's been, as you know,

because we've had conversations about this and you've been incredibly helpful,

thinking about prototyping and games and design, I've been very excited about this for a while now.

I tended to get stuck at the prototyping phase because, well, it's also my first sort of rodeo

with this, but the inclination is to try to make something that's really good and kind of polished.

I know I'm not trying to make a finished product, but the more I have studied what you've done,

listened to the podcast, talked to people like Elon Lee or others, the more I appreciate how

quick and dirty it is. And also, just as a reference, I think I have a blog post about

Stephen Key, who is an inventor, product developer who's based in California, at least he was at

the time, who has done extremely well developing toys for major companies. And the toys are

ultimately some finished product that looked great, but he will use construction paper and like

newspaper to prototype. And based on that and a description and maybe a video of how it functions,

he successfully licensed products all the time to huge companies. So could you speak to maybe the

prototyping phase? Yes, and you've already hit on the core of this, but I'll just leave it.

Keep it simple, stupid, the kiss principle. It is the tendency to over develop and make your

prototype super nice or not feel like you can show it to somebody or test it without it being super

nice is the graveyard of the most games, probably of anything on the planet and the most ideas,

frankly, in general. So let's make this very concrete. Probably one of the games I'm most

well known for is a deck building game called Ascension. I first prototyped that game. There

was another deck building game and a deck building game for those that don't know is it's unlike

Magic, which is a trading card game where you're buying packs of cards and trying to build a deck.

In a deck building game, you have a fixed box of cards. You buy it like a box like you would

Monopoly, but 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. So there was another deck building

game called Dominion, which was released. It was the first of its category. And I fell in love with

that game. I started playing it a bunch. But then as I played it like 100 times, I was like, ah,

you know, there's some really some things I would like to see differently. I want to see

the cards are too static. There's too many rules and resources. I wish I could change it.

And so my first prototype of Ascension was literally just instead of having Dominion

cards, which are all kind of laid out at the beginning of the game, takes like 20 minutes

to set up. I just shuffle them all together and dealt them out and said, what would the game look

like if it was randomized? And I played that way. And the game was not good, but it gave me enough

of a proof of concept that like, oh, you know what, there's something fun here. And if I spend the time

to do this, I can now move forward. And just for clarity, you were using the Dominion cards,

but changing the rules to see how it impacted gameplay. Exactly right. So if you can prototype

using something like a deck of cards around the house or take a monopoly set, I don't know,

I keep using monopolies and whatever. Most people know it. So, you know, Jay, 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 for my prototyping tools, my first

round of prototyping is just I have a bunch of stuff. I have a bunch of dice and, you know,

my D&D dice with all the random signs. I've got decks of cards. I've got random pen and paper.

I will draw things. In fact, yeah, like when you and I worked together a little bit, I showed you

some things. I showed you what like my early sketch prototypes look like, and they are ugly.

I talk about like the phases of design. And so every time you go through the core design loop,

your questions go from bigger to smaller and smaller. And as you go through it, you're going

to care about polish more. So if you're just trying to figure out like, where is the fun?

What is the idea? What's the theme? What am I doing here? You don't want to think about,

imagine you're building a house, right? And before you've even laid the foundation,

you're worrying about the paint color on the walls and where the furniture goes.

You're not going to get very far. You're wasting a lot of time.

Make sure you've got a solid foundation first. Worry about the paint color later.

And so I think a lot of designers start by worrying about the paint color being wrong,

and they're never going to finish a house that way.

Okay. I'm going to stand in. I mean, this is a lazy sort of rhetorical trick here, but

so I'm going to defend the newbies, including myself for a second, and ask a question, which

I think is actually really important at the very least helpful in all sorts of disciplines,

not just game design. One of the reasons a lot of writers get stuck or aspiring writers

is that they kick out a first draft. It's rough. It's ugly. It's really, really rough on all the

edges. And they compare their rough draft to the final draft of incredible writers.

And the rough draft of those writers is invisible. They never see that rough draft.

So what has been helpful to me, for instance, when thinking about potentially writing comics,

is seeing the original scripts and how they were tweaked and how the concept art was modified

over time to ultimately land on what we see in the finished product, because then I can see

the ugly babies in the beginning. I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, that's very reassuring,

and it gives me more confidence to work with my ugly baby to try to shape it into something that

ultimately is good. Because if I'm comparing everyone's finished product to my rough product,

it can be really demoralizing. So the question is, is there a way for folks to see

the rough drafts of games, the prototyping, and so on, if they wanted to explore this as an example?

It's one of the reasons why I started my podcast is to sort of unlock a lot of that stuff for other

designers, right, talk about their origin stories, talk about where they're, you know,

the things that inevitably fail. You can also go, there are a variety of places where people will

have prototype testing. So let's say you have a favorite game company or game designers, we do

this at Stoneblade at my company, you can join our Discord, and then we will periodically put

playtest requests out, because we want to get feedback, right? We want to get feedback from

you also, 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 I've been doing this for 20 years, and my first prototypes are

hideous. So if you want, I can share some, I'll put some up on the thinklikegameshare.com

slash or 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 it really pretty, it's faster prototype,

it's actually better to change. It's easy because you need to iterate, right? So if you put a lot

of time into making a beautiful board and beautiful cards, and then you realize you've got to change

a card, you're going to feel weird about it. Yeah, your sunk cost fallacy is going to come to latch

onto your back. I have a card that I've messed up. I'm just going to cross out something on it with a

marker and write something else. And then, okay, now it's this, go. And I'll make a little note,

right? The resistance to change is so much lower. So it's actually net negative for you

to invest in making something pretty early on in the process. Makes perfect sense. So you've

mentioned your company a couple of times, but last time we left young Justin in our chronology,

he was working at a game design company. So could you fill in the gaps for us and tell us how you

went from working for somebody else to working for yourself? This is a fun story. And this is you

actually come into this story 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. 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 18 months. And we had the company that I

worked for was called Upper Deck. They had made trading cards forever, most known for baseball

cards, and they made Yu-Gi-Oh! in this Marvel game I had been working on. But they didn't know how to

make miniatures games. And so they eventually do if we're going to kill the project, the executives

come and they tell us after 18 months of working on it. And I, this is pretty common in games,

but I had never had a project I had worked on get killed like that. And I was like,

devastated, right? With my dream project, I'm going to change the world with this game. It's

going to be incredible. Now all of a sudden, ashes. And so I didn't want to let it happen. And so I

said, listen, I don't know what I'm doing here either. But if you're going to kill the project,

give me six months. Let me see if I can figure it out. You got nothing to lose. And I was able to

convince them to let me become a project manager and try to figure out how to make games, how to

make a miniatures game specifically. And so same kind of process like I did when I first started

to design. I was like, okay, 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 Cranford, who's an incredible art director. And

I talked to the guy that made the Dungeons and Dragons miniatures. I think 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 the company I

was working for. So that's a partnership. And so I have to go figure out all these logistics,

set all this stuff up finally. And this is where I first read the four hour work week. So this is

actually super impactful for me in being very efficient using 80, 20 principles. And I've

learned to set up auto email replies, so people didn't bother me. So I'm already getting my

efficiencies in it. But I'm in this zone of just I'm going to finish this mission. And then I have

the opportunity to speak to the executive team. I'm going to make my presentation or make my case.

Is this project going to live? Or is this project going to 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,

they had this like ugly green carpet and I'm sitting waiting for my turn to get called in.

It just, 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 memorabilia company. So there's like a Babebrew signed bat on the wall and Michael

Jordan Jersey and like Tiger Woods golf club and the rich mahogany coverage table. I mean,

this is boardroom cliche, right? But it's like very intimidating for me at this time.

So I get up there, the owners 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 done my research,

right? 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? Or it's like CEO, CFO, the bigwigs, right? And they start talking about the idea and they

start jogging around and I started to think, oh my God, I think, I think they like it. I think

this is really going to 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 it took me a minute

to realize this. But as they were talking, I realized that they had no idea what they were

talking about. I had finally done enough research that I knew they didn't know what they were doing.

And 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

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 of terrified. I mean, we're literally

this project, you know, it's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to hopefully make millions

or could lose millions, who knows? And nobody knows what they're doing. And so I'm like,

oh my God, like, what do we do? And then I walk out of that room, my heart's beaten and I'm just

like, what's going to happen? How do we do this? And then all of a sudden, like a cold splash of

water in my face, nobody knows what they're doing. I cannot know what I'm doing, at least as well as

anybody else. This idea that 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. 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 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 transform is like, okay, I'm going

to get this game out the door. I'm going to save up enough money. So I have a year of savings,

and I quit. And that's exactly what I did. And it was a life changing moment for me because it was

exactly that taking ownership of my future. I'm so grateful for you as a key part of it. And I'm

so grateful for those executives because they really opened the door for me, 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 servicing our assumptions. And, you know, learning

as you go, it's been a powerful journey. Thank you for sharing that and for saying

all that you said. And I would love to know when you did the fear setting, and you're trying to

identify the worst case, how you can mitigate against the worst case, what you would do as sort

of a backup plan in case the entrepreneurship does not work out, or maybe doesn't work out at

least with the first inning. How are you thinking about that at the time? What gave you, in addition

to what you already described, which is the realization that, oh my god, almost all the

emperors have no clothing. So I think I can do that. At the very worst, I can also do that.

How are you thinking about sort of risk assessment and what you would do if things didn't

pan out perfectly as you went into entrepreneurship? So I got very concrete, right? So what is my

actual minimal living expenses? What do I need to be okay and have what I need? And I figured out

what that number was. And then I was like, okay, how much time am I willing to give myself to run

this experiment to see if I can figure it out and make entrepreneurship work? And I decided a year

of savings was what I wanted. And so I focused on saving up. So I have that cushion, right? Because

if you're in the red, if you're like, I don't know how to make my next paycheck, I don't know how to

make rent next month, you can't be creative and be free, you know, do the things you do. You're

making decisions for the short term and I wanted to be able to make decisions for the long term.

So step one was have enough of a cushion that I could feel comfortable. Now, other people can

do this as a side project or, 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 in another company. Like, it's not like I was going to go hungry on the streets or I have to

live on a friend's couch for a little while. That's not that big a deal either, right? So I really,

I went through all of those things. I go bankrupt, my house catches on fire like hilariously, like,

like you did in the book, right? So that's where like, it highlights the same kind of lesson

as before, which was when I quit law school, it sounds scary. Everybody thinks, oh my god,

you're such a risk taker. Like, I'm not, 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 out drawn on a game,

I'm just mitigating the number of ways my opponent could beat me over time. And in this one, I could

always go back to law school when I quit law school, I could always go back to a job when

I started as entrepreneurship. And same thing later on, when I became a digital nomad, sold all

my stuff, it's like, I can always buy more stuff, I can always get a house again. And so,

hey, I strongly encourage people to just go through that. Like, if you really,

really think about the worst case scenarios, 99 times out of 100, they're totally recoverable

within a year is often way less. And what was yours knowing how methodical you are? You were not

just 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 I'm going to try

things and prototype them and test them. So I would, during the day, I would work on some designs,

make up some prototypes, and then I would go find my friends who were still working at the company

or elsewhere to like try it out, give me some feedback and come back. And, you know, I didn't

have any ideas like I hadn't designed a game ahead of time. I didn't know what I was going to do ahead

of time. But I had enough space that I could figure that out. And then it worked out that

another person from another company contacted me to see if I could do some contract work for them.

And so I started working on some kids toy based games, which was great. And so here's another fun

story. So they knew me because they used to work at upper deck where I used to work. And then they

started working at this other company. And he's like, Hey, we need someone to help us design a

game. Can you do that? And I'm just like, again, no job, no plan. Like I'm just figuring it out as I

go at this point. And so I'm like, Yep, definitely, I can do that. Okay, well, give us a quote. I'm

like, Okay, quote, how do I quote? I don't have never quoted anything before. So I'm like, Okay,

I will let me just think about, All right, how many hours do I think this is going to be? And

then like, what's my minimum like hourly rate that I think I should be paid? And I'm like, Okay,

that's what I'll charge, you know, make it easy. And I send them the quote, and he literally laughs

in my face. She's like, Yeah, okay, sure. Sure, man, no problem. Wait a second. Yeah, I'm under

charging. Yeah, I'm under charging. So the next time, you know, I still try to over deliver, do a

great job. Next time I get another opportunities. Okay, what do you quote? I doubled my number.

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, I'm not sure. I'm like,

Okay, that's why I need to be charging. That's the number.

You know, I sort of there's one other story I'll just as a side note mention, which also just

underscores the fact that part of the frustration but also joy of entrepreneurship is you have to

figure out a lot on the fly, right? You cannot prepare for all the eventualities. You don't

know what you don't know. And I recall I might be misattributing. So my apologies to the founders

of Nantucket Nectars if this is misattribution. But when I took my first entrepreneurship class,

first and only actually high tech entrepreneurship with Professor Ed Schau, 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 on your own as a class,

then you read the outcome and the decision they made and so on. And there was part of this Nantucket

Nectar story where these guys are selling juices in Nantucket, and they end up with a tiger by the

tail because their drinks become really successful. And they decide to make the shift to retail,

and they meet with a distributor, and they're talking and talking and the distributor is like,

So do you have good plans for POS? And they're like, look at each other. They have no fucking idea

what he's talking about. And they're like, oh, we have great plans for POS. We have really,

we've thought it through and we think 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 sale,

right? Displays. So it makes for a lot of good stories. So you start to figure out your pricing

by doubling and doubling and doubling. And maybe you could flesh that out a little bit in terms of

you're doing this contract work for people who are giving you specs of some type or another.

That's right. But you have some money coming in the door.

Correct. With fewer and fewer laughs at your proposals along the way. What else is happening

in that first year? So I'm using my kind of spare cycles. And there's this really

interesting thing, right? The difference between an entrepreneur who has no employees or anything,

and some dude just sitting on his couch can be very subtle.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, until you start like really kind of getting income coming in and

start making things happen, right? So there's definitely a window of uncertainty.

I mean, even now in my life, the distinction is 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

it was actually with Ascension, where I didn't make Ascension specifically to think, oh, I'm going

to start a company with this game. I made it because I really wanted that game to exist.

I played enough of Dominion and I was missing something I really, really wanted. And then

I showed it to a friend of mine, Rob Doherty, and he has his own, he actually was the guy that owned

your move games, the store and where I used to play when I was younger. 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 going to be my project now. And I started

my early prototypes were 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 you know, just ridiculous because it's just for fun.

Rude pictures. How dare you? All right. I'm imagining that's code for lots of dicks everywhere.

I mean, I was like, yeah, I'm not the imagination of the listeners on this one.

Not appropriate for public consumption. Leave it at that.

You know what, just to defend my dicks comment, I will say there's a place called Hotel Barone

in San Francisco, great wine spot, excellent place. And I don't know if this is true, but

at one point, this is one of the first places with a console for digital signing way back in the

day. And the rumor was that of all the guys who went there and bought drinks, it's like 75% just

drew dicks. I thought it was actually pretty hilarious. Well, there's an important game design

principle I didn't talk about here, which is the TTP, which is time to penis.

Any opportunity that you give people to create their own thing, at some point,

someone's going to make a dick. That's going to happen.

TTP. All right, I'm going to add that to my metrics.

Key show notes. But I mean, so what it is, I mean, the broader point is like,

anytime you allow people to customize, you have to think, what are they going to do with it?

And how does that share and how does that build your community? But TTP is the the

shorthand for that. So it is it is an unfortunate reality of our society that that is just going

to happen. Okay, so you'll share. I did not say this interview going this way. I'll tell you

that I didn't need it. Thanks, coffee, coffee. So 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 were chatting with, if I'm remembering correctly, Rob,

and he's saying, you got this run with this, were you at that point at all thinking of how it fit

into the potentially competitive landscape and how it was differentiated? Or was it just enough

for it to be something that you use 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 going to be

attractive to more people. So three things, right? One, absolutely, it has to scratch my

own itch. And I have to love it. I loved it. I wanted to see it exist. All of my most successful

projects by far are the things that I make for me, and that I really want. And then I know they're

going to be great. So that's, I think, really important. Two, I do not chase trends. I hate

chasing trends. In fact, every time I've tried to chase a trend, it's been unsuccessful. The idea

of like, I'm trying to build something for some hypothetical, I think this is hot right now,

has never worked. However, there's a third point here, which is important, which is it can't be

just about you. And so the rule I like to use is I will show the game to people and I'll prototype

it and test it. And when people start asking me to play again, without me prompting them,

that's when I know I've got something. So it's not just me. That's why I 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 they're like, no, no, this

is great. So as you're going through, you're getting like a wider, wider sphere of feedback

that's helping you move forward. And if your game is targeted at a different target audience,

right? So I make a game called Bakugan, which is a toy based game for kids. Obviously, like,

how much fun I have playing it is not nearly as important as a five year old or an eight year

old, right? So you have to test with your target market in that sense. So I don't say that,

you know, target market and testing is not important, it is. But don't try to chase a trend,

make 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, I'm going to go and start putting some real art on it. And the

story behind the art is, I guess it's at this stage, I can tell. So back when I was living in

Boston, I met the guy that lived down the hall, and he comes and knocks on the door and says,

hello. And I have like, at this time, I just moved out of college. So I'm like, black light posters

on the wall, like, you know, kind of like, it's still basically a college door room. I just kind

of transported it to an apartment. And then the guy comes back over 20 minutes later, it was like

bag of weed, like, pretty sure you want to smoke this, right? It was like, okay, cool. So we hang

out, we become great friends. And he actually turns out as an incredible artist, his name is Eric

Sabie. 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 it's actually it's on my wall, my dad's place. I didn't

put that one storage. Anyway, so 10 years later, when I make a game, I'm like, oh man,

his art was really cool. I'm gonna call him up. And I called him up and said, hey, would you want

to make art for my game? And I built the IP and the story around his style, because I knew I could

get this batch of art without having to pay for 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 hooked it up. And so

now I start bringing art into the game and figuring out how you can use what's around and build a

lore and build a style around what's available. Okay, now we've made some art. Now we've got some

cool looking cards. So I'm investing a little bit more. And then I take it to a convention called

Gamma, which is a game manufacturers association event. It's like an industry insider tabletop

game thing. So publishers and retailers and distributors are all there. So I'm not a public

show. And I get a little booth. 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 is like victory points, basically. And I forgot to make anything that you track. How do

you track how many points you get? How many honor you get? And I was like, Oh, man, what do we do?

And I went to a, like a Michael store, you know, like a, like a little craft store craft store.

Yes. Thank you. And 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 grab the 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.

They're 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 going to be in the game, right? I was like, Yes, yes, they are. This is like the POS

example you gave earlier. I have no idea how to get these things. I have no idea how to make them.

I don't know what to go, but they are definitely in the game. So that show, the response was so

overwhelming. 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 going to literally, I'm all in, right? I put my

entire life savings now, all the extra that I'd saved up to print at the time was 10,000 units

of the game, which is pretty crazy. Probably a little sounds like a lot of units. Yeah,

it sounds like a lot of units. Yeah, most times people are going to start a new game. It's like,

you print a thousand units, maybe a better hope to God, you don't have a manufacturing anomaly.

Oh, dude, I was a nightmare stories around that for sure. That's a whole different piece.

But again, and this is not like I had worked with manufacturers before, I had made games

working for another company. So this part wasn't totally new to me. And I wouldn't have put all

of that money into the thing. I used to joke, if this doesn't work, I'm going to have to build a

house out of Ascension boxes. That's pretty much all I got. But I wasn't, again, just to demystify

the risk, right? I had gotten so much positive feedback. I had stores and distributors already

waiting to order the thing. So now it's like, Okay, it's willing to put the money in and take

a risk. Yeah. And also, just for folks who are unaware, I mean, there are all sorts of ways to

potentially finance things if you have that demonstrated demand. I'm not suggesting this,

you got to do your own diligence on these things, but like invoice factoring, right? Like if you

have people 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.

And there are companies that independently do this as well. So Wastework ran it. My question

that I want to ask next is related to Gamma. How many exhibitors or people with games,

like yourself, game developers, were there at the 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 30. Now it's probably, it's not huge. Now it's bigger,

maybe two or three times that, but it's less than 100. No, no, no. That's one of the nice things.

This kind of game industry is still a little smaller than like a New York Toy Fair is the

more big one that's like, it happens and that's got thousands and thousands of booths and you're

spending millions of dollars to have a presence there. It's like a much bigger piece. This one

is a little smaller. So the reason I'm asking is that in fact, if somebody wants just a separate

collection of stories around these steps, trade shows, and I think it was the New York Toy Fair,

Todd McFarland, the legendary comic book artist has some stories around this from our conversations,

which are hilarious. What I was wondering, and maybe it doesn't apply because there were 30 tables

or 30 booths, 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.

You need to get people's attention. You need to find a way at these booths, even at GenCon,

which is the more public facing tabletop convention where I actually did launch

Ascension and there's a lot more people and a lot more vying for traffic at shows like Gamma,

anywhere, or even on a store shelf. Why is someone going to stop and pay attention to what you're

doing? The great thing about where we are in our modern world is it's easier than ever to make stuff.

You can print your own books, you can print your own games on demand, you can make anything you want.

The downside is we're flooded with stuff, not surprising. And so how do you separate from the

crowd? How do you draw people's attention? So at Gamma, I mean, I already told you by accident,

almost the shiny beads helped. Nobody had those shiny beads. That was a really attractive thing.

But I also invested in a video drop like I had a TV screen and I made like a little cool rotating

loop showing the things and people, most people there didn't do that. And so finding something

that draws people's eye and brings them in. So it can be a cool unique component. It can be a cool

giant visual. It can be, I had a game I launched years later called Bad Beats, B E E T S. It's

a kind of play on the poker term of bad beats, but with actual beats, I had someone dress in

a giant beat costume. I put one of my team members into a giant beat costume. Yeah, it's

gimmicky, but it worked, right? So if you have a great product, it doesn't matter if nobody ever

looks at it. And also all the gimmicks in the world won't help you if you don't have a great

product. So step one, have something great. Step two, have a reason for people to pay attention to

you. The workshopping attention grabbing in real life, I think is really undervalued in today's

increasingly digital world. And this applies to, for instance, workshopping book material by giving

speaking engagements, even to a very small group, you'll figure out very quickly what works and

what doesn't, what's confusing and what isn't, what people will remember versus what they immediately

forget or didn't even pay attention to in the first place. And the trade show stories are bringing

back memories because I recall when I back in my former life, had my sports nutrition company,

and I would go to these trade shows. And as you know, 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 to share, it's

like, oh, yeah, you can rent a chair for 300 bucks for a day. And I was just going in somewhat naïve

because I paid the exhibitor fee. And I was like, oh, great, I'll figure out the rest shouldn't be

too bad. But it was pretty bad. So I remember trying to figure out how to draw attention.

And at one particular trade show, 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 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 highlight reels of Muay Thai kickboxing, right, because it's

definitely going to grab some attention. But to provide a little context, this was at a,

it was a strongman slash sports event. It was kind of like the Arnold Classic in Columbus,

for people who might know that it's a huge event. This was much smaller. But there were a lot of

athletes and competitors and so on milling about. And I also brought, I think it was four

or five of these hand grippers called the captains of crush, which are incredibly

and increasingly difficult to close, depending on the poundage to the extent that some of them are

so difficult that there are maybe five or six people or 12 people in the world who at that time

could close whatever the highest rated captains of crush was. So I laid those out for people to test

with all these athletes milling about and then put this video up, ended up getting the couch and

chairs at a good will. And I had to like bribe a guy to help me with this 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

taking a step back for a second, and then I want to come back to Ascension and all the

adventures there, what have you learned about good play testing versus not terribly effective

play testing? And what I mean by that is, when you're providing your game to people,

certainly one pass fail is do they want to play it past the point that you need them to play it?

That's sort of like the Viagra test, right? Like they send it out to test patients for whatever

it was, hypotension, hypertension, something like that. And then lo and behold, all of these guys over

the age of X didn't want to send back their medication. And it's like, huh, interesting.

Let's look at that. And that's how Viagra came to be in its current iteration. But there's that.

And the reason I'm asking this, and this is going to be a very long paragraph question,

is that when I am doing the equivalent with my books and chapters, there are definitely better

and worse ways to elicit feedback. If you're like, what do you think of this chapter? It's a

crapshoot. And if people are trying to be nice, which comes down to who you select also to be your

playtesters, in my case, proofreaders, you're going to get a bit of a scattershot of responses.

And it might not be actionable. But if I ask, read this chapter, tell me the 20% that I should

absolutely keep no matter what, then tell me the 20% if you had to cut 20% that you would cut,

you're going to get very, very different type of kind of surgical feedback. Similarly with

to someone who's maybe less experienced as a reader, you could just say,

note any place that is confusing or where you find your mind wandering. And then that gets you

to also stuff that you might cut. What have you learned about eliciting feedback or evaluating

feedback when you're letting people test a game? It's going to depend upon the phase that you're

in. Every time I go through the core design loop, I like to think of myself like a scientist. I have

some hypothesis that I'm trying to test. And that's what I'm focused on in that testing session.

So when you're early on, you're like, okay, is this even fun? Is this idea of like rolling dice

to try to punch somebody and making combos fun, right? Or whatever it is, right? You want to

just see, is it fun? I'm not asking, is it balanced? I'm not asking, is it pretty? I'm not asking,

does the game last too long? I'm asking, is this part fun? And that's what I'm focused on. And so

I know when I'm testing that if I start getting feedback on these other parts, I'm not worried

about that. I can set that aside because that's not what I'm looking for here. And the 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. 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.

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 going to write down

and tell you. If you say, give me the three things you like the most, three things you like the

least, what would you change, whatever, people will say something to you just because they feel

like they have to say something to you. It doesn't always mean that that's really what they feel,

right? You're prompting them to it. So you have to use your intuition to say, okay, where A is

this relevant to the hypothesis I'm trying to test in the stage that I'm in? B, does this align

with what I see visually of what they're doing? My mom tells me she loves all my games, even when

she really has no idea what's going on in some of them, right? She's very nice. But if I see that

somebody's getting lost or leaning back or checking their phone, like watching for those

nonverbal cues is so important. And you sort of train yourself over time to get better at that.

But yeah, so asking questions to prompt for the specifics, being focused on what's important

to me right now, looking for nonverbal cues. And then in best case scenario, just like you

mentioned, right, you have some more sophisticated readers, and you have less sophisticated

readers, you have more sophisticated game players and less sophisticated game players. So if you

can test with other game designers, they're going to be better at zeroing in. And okay, yeah, I don't

care that the card doesn't have pictures on it, or that the numbers aren't balanced. I know what

you're looking for and I can give you feedback assigned to it. If you just take it to somebody,

you know, just a regular person, they're going to get hung up on a lot of little things. And so

you have their feedbacks a little bit harder, 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 final product, somebody

that's in your target audience, their feedback matters a lot. And then the last thing I'll say

is a quote that'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 100%

true in games too, right? If you get your testing with multiple people in your target audience that

are consistently saying that something's not good, you as a designer have to fix it. They

definitely do not have the right answer for how to fix it. That's your job. But

that's another key part when I'm testing is that, okay, I'm looking for themes, looking for patterns.

One person telling me they don't like something, maybe I can dismiss it. But if

20 people that are all in my target audience say that, that's something I got to focus on.

Yeah, no matter how pretty the paragraph, no matter how shiny the fishbowl pebble you might have,

if a bunch of people are saying, I don't get it, it's confusing, you got to cut it.

Not always the easiest thing. So what happened with ascension? So you have

enough ascension kits to build a house, or at least you put in the order, and what unfolds?

So then I go and I get a booth at GenCon, as mentioned, and this was where I'm going to have

the unveiling. And now, again, I'm very poor at this point. Now, GenCon, for folks who don't know,

can you just maybe paint a picture or an analogy for what GenCon is and the significance of GenCon?

So GenCon is the tabletop and role playing game mecca of the United States, possibly you could

say the world, right? Gen from Lake Geneva is where it started. It's why it's called GenCon.

It's not there anymore, but that's where it came from, where the original Dungeons and Dragons

people got together and played. It was like the first place where people started gathered and it

kind of built this core of what gaming became today. And so now it happens in Indianapolis.

It's like 60,000 people every year, somewhere in that neighborhood, and every type of game

you can imagine, people are playing all hours of the night. They call it the best four days in

gaming, but it's got anything you can dream of is there and many things you can't dream of.

So it's like kind of the place to be, if you will, for tabletop and role playing game nerds

like myself. All right. So you show up at GenCon. You've gone from 30 booths to God knows how many,

right? Yeah. Can't count how many. And I'm just a little guy, right? I don't have any...

You're at a Taylor Swift concert now, right? Yeah, exactly. And so what I had was I bought

a 10 by 10 booth, which is the smallest booth you can, 10 foot by 10 foot booth.

And then they had like a newbie competition, like a little submit your marketing plan,

and we can give you a 10 by 20 booth for the price of a 10 by 10. And I won that contest.

So fortunately it got a 10 by 20 booth, which is still like very small in the scheme of what's

there. And I set up my stuff. And this was, people had started to hear about my game because I

showed it off at Gamma before. And I start, you know, I'm just kind of putting it out there in

whatever way I can. But this is just posting online and sharing with friends. I don't have any

marketing budget or anything like that. And then I get there. And not only do we have like,

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

GenCon anymore, by the way, but they would just take over like nearby tables like at the seated area

and just start demoing the game for me, like totally for, you know, didn't ask them to,

didn't pay them. The Ascension Splinter Cells activate. It did. And I would start seeing people

play it in the halls. And then I would see people carrying boxes around. And so it became this

kind of like viral before, you know, we, you know, this sort of viral sensation in a way that was

very, it was very exciting. It was like a very incredible moment. And so we sold out of everything

we brought. You know, so this is, this is a very rewarding, very cool experience. My team, every,

you know, it's not just me now, we've got other people there like working really hard to make

this come to life. You know, team is like four of us. And then I got an offer that was very

difficult offer to refuse. So I, at this point, I had early product that was shipped for GenCon,

but the rest of the stuff was still on the way. So I still haven't sold these 10,000 units with

all my life savings tied up into it. And I get a call from another very big gaming company.

And I don't think I'll say the name just because I don't know. Anyway, they, and they say,

hey, we like your game. We want to buy it out. All of it. We'll take it over. It'll be our game.

We'll pay you a royalty. You don't have to worry about anything. It'll be all done. Now,

this is a very tough moment for me. In a sense, it's a dream come true. They buy all the stocks

on 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 that'll be

good to go. And I sat with it. And at the end of the day, I was like, you know what?

This is my baby. I've worked so hard to get it here. And I just, I want to see it through. I

want to see it through. I want it to stay mine. I didn't want to sell it off. And I said no. And

it was like one of those I might regret this one later, right? And then 30 days later,

product shows up finally after delays. Funnily enough, the product launch delay was launched

such that it actually launched while I was at Burning Man, which was not supposed to be.

But there was, when I come back from Burning Man, 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. And we had to make a reorder. And it was like, okay, now I can actually,

the company is, it's working, I can reorder, start making expansion and start and like the

rest of the company's history kind of evolved from that in a way that, well, I'm glad I made

the decision I did. All right. Many questions. So at GenCon, how many games did you sell roughly?

Oh, man, I don't remember exactly, but it's a hundreds. Hundreds. Some number of hundreds. Yeah.

I want to bookmark this. This is not going to be my first question, but just how you sell 10,000

after selling a few hundred. Was it word of mouth online? Was it something else? Just what

factors do you think contributed to that? Because it's not an immediate obvious outcome,

at least not for me listening to the story. But before we get to that, because this all

sort of undergirds a lot of what you're talking about. How did 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 in terms of royalties? What is that a percentage of?

Could you just give us an overview of what the economics of that world kind of look like as a

template? When you're producing games, you typically, most of the time, you're going to produce them

overseas. So now with cardboard stuff, it's starting to become a little bit more economical to do it

stateside. We do some of our game stateside, but mostly you 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

as a manufacturer, you're going to sell the game to a distributor at about 60% off the price of retail.

They're going to sell it to a retailer at 50% off the price of retail. So they've got like a 10%

margin for distribution. And then the retailer has that 50% margin for the rest of it. So if you

are a game designer and manufacturer, then it sounds like 20% margins generally on games,

something like that. Yeah. Now, if you're a game designer, typically, if you're an external game

designer, you pay a royalty to that designer off whatever you're selling, right? So if you're

selling it to distribution, you sell a percentage off the distribution price. If you sell it direct

to consumer, you sell it to consumer price. And that can vary depending upon the designer. So

in tabletop games, typically it's going to be anywhere between 6% and 12% at the high end.

For more mass market games, big scale games, it can go as low as 2% or 3%.

Okay, got it. This is important because it highlights how challenging

your decision to say no was, right? Because we're not talking about like, I'm keeping 90%. Well,

I mean, maybe with direct consumer, you are, but it's not like 90% margins versus 6%. It's like,

there's actually a narrower gap, right? Which is also true, for instance, in books for

self publishing and traditional deals. People think they're miles and miles apart. In some cases,

maybe they are. But when you start to factor in all of the costs, the delta between the percentage

that you take, say self publishing versus traditional, it's not as wide as people might think.

So thank you for giving that. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that?

Yeah, well, you know, it comes down to it was a little bit more than just, you know,

the money and the dollars in the sense of it. It was just, it was a matter of like, this was my

baby. This is my IP, right? If you've worked with publishers where they now take

over the rights to stuff and you can't just do what you want with the book anymore.

Yeah, right. I would imagine if you want to do like Ascension Expansion Packs or Ascension A,

B, C, D and E, you want to do a whole derivative line. If the publisher owns those rights or

effectively owns those rights, you're in a tight spot.

Think about where we are now 13 years later. There's over 16 standalone expansions for Ascension.

We made Ascension Tactics, which is an Ascension Miniatures game, which we did another expansion

to that. Ascension has been featured in a major motion picture. We're, 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, it's 13 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 process of coming up with the stories and

making it and bringing that world to life is just, I love it. And so, I didn't want to lose that.

And 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've been fortunately successful with it. 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 the

world. 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 something bigger. And so, here I am.

And I'll just repeat a name I mentioned earlier, Stephen Key. I don't think he does what some

people would refer to as venturing, which is basically building the business to do it mostly

yourself or a lot of it yourself. He loves developing new toys and new products. And

he's really good at the licensing game. And that, as far as I know, maybe things have changed,

but that's the game he plays. And I would say just on the do something bigger side,

there are different ways of doing something bigger, right? So, if you want to have the freedom to do

the extensions and so on, like you have, on some level, you almost certainly have to retain rights.

But for a product developer who doesn't have the business know how or doesn't want to develop it,

doesn't want to spend time that way, licensing to a gigantic company that has a global footprint

and distribution, could be the perfect path or the best available path for making a large impact

in terms of distribution and putting a spin on the ball of culture. Speaking of putting a spin on

the ball, the game Bakugan I mentioned earlier is a game that I work on that's Spinmasters,

a company that owns it. They have toy plastic balls and there's a game that I design 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 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 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, wait, what does it mean for me? What is it I actually want? What does success

look like for me? And then even deeper than that, why am I doing this? Because I want to make super

cool worlds and I want to grow into a universe or because I want to collaborate with people or

because I want to reach millions of people or because I just want to have something to play

with my friends and do something on the side, right? There's no wrong answer to any of those

questions. But if you don't dive deep enough for yourself, you're going to end up chasing down a

path like I did many times where I'm just going to compete or move on a path for the sake of it

because I want the most dollars. The most dollars is the wrong game to play. I'll tell you that.

Yeah, it can lead you astray really quickly. Important to keep your eyes on the cash flow,

but also can be a trap. Don't run out of dollars, but don't just optimize for dollars.

All right, so maybe this ties in. You've mentioned a number of successes. 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 one that has a lot of ups and downs. As many of your guests could

attest to it, you can attest, I'm sure. And so what 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. It's like a developer conference and he's giving a talk on 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&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

like a stupid kid, right? But everybody laughs. But it gives me the opening. And so I go and I

start a conversation with him after the talk. We start talking and we get excited. It's clear

we're both excited about the same project. And so Soulforge is born. Now, this was a project

that was my first digital game I'd ever done. And I was a little cocky at this point. I won't

lie. I succeeded. My first project, Ascension was a huge success. Everything I touched turns

to gold. It's all going to be great. We're doubling in size every year. And we do a crowd fund. And

I thought it was going to cost like $250,000 to make that game. We crowdfund with that target

and we end up crowdfunding double that gold near almost double that gold like $500,000.

It's like, oh, this is amazing. We're going to crush it. We're so good. And as it turns out,

making digital games is very expensive. That costs $3 million to make. Oh, man. And so I had to go

and try to raise funds again. And we have to launch the game before we're ready. And again,

we have followers, we have cash, but the cash burn is over time. I can see the cash burn is higher

than the income and it's not working. And I overextend. I start borrowing more money. I know I

can make this work. I'm not going to let it go. Like this is my baby. I'm going to keep it going.

How are you raising and borrowing money? Just if you don't mind adding a little more detail.

So it starts off with, 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 an equity as we get. And then after that, then I start taking some of those

refactoring loans like you talked about, right? So I'm getting loans against my future income on

Ascension to pay for Soul Forge and then starting to run up credit cards and like all the things

are really are not supposed to do. And I get to a point where I have to like finally realize like,

wow, I'm going to go bankrupt. Like I can't do this anymore. Like I'm going to lose everything.

And this was just one of the hardest things that I have ever faced because not only is it like,

I feel like I owe it to my team, who I'm going to have to lay off these people whose livelihoods

depend on it. We have fans and people who love the game. And like in a traditional tabletop game,

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 Soul Forge, the digital game, that means the servers turn off. That means your

entire collection is gone. That means you can't play it anymore. Everything you spent, it's all

gone. So I'm like failing myself. I'm failing my team. I'm failing the fans, like everything.

And I have to make some very, very hard decisions. Not to mention the friends and family.

Of course. Yeah. People, I mean, 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 and

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. 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 it's like, okay, you know what,

I will still be alive. I will be able to pay off some of these debts over time with some other

things I can recover from this. It's going to be okay. The people who got laid off,

they're going to get another job. It was not easy. Once I accepted that worst case outcome,

and then I was able to say, okay, now how do I make this less likely? And so I

had to lay people off, but I also renegotiated debts and negotiated payment plans and reduced

our overhead and took on more contract work. And 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 going to go bankrupt or you're not going to

get anything, or we're going to work something out and I'm going to do my best to pay you off.

And so fortunately, I was able to turn that around. And not only did I learn, 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 be able to come back to with reinvigorating that very same game.

So to ask a question related to that, you have this dream come true, partnering with Richard to

create this game. How did you to communicate or what led to the ability to maintain that relationship

and now work together again, right? Because there are, I suppose, as I'm imagining,

different ways this could have played out. I'm sure there are ways with many different

collaborators where things could have exploded, and it would have damaged the relationship,

and that would have been the end of that. So why didn't that happen?

You've got to be honest with people, right? I mean, that's really what it comes down to,

like, act in integrity when you work with partners. Sometimes you have bad news,

you tell them bad news. If you have some humility around when your ideas are not working or when

you're trying things and say, here's what we're going to do, and 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 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 again, fortunately, Richard is a professional,

he's not only has he made games that were uber successful, but he's also made

plenty of games that weren't uber successful too, right? So he knows this. Anybody that's done this

for long enough, any creative field, you cannot predict everything is not going to be a hit.

And so when it's my first major failure, for me, it felt like the end of the world,

but the more you work with professionals, the more you realize that that's just part of the process.

Amazing. What if you learned or what decisions have you made related to your company or

entrepreneurship, how you run things that you think are worth mentioning? It could be after

that experience, it could just be in general, maybe ways that you have simplified things or

challenged assumptions, turned things upside down, anything at all that comes to mind.

One of the things that I've realized is that the same way you design games,

right? Designing a great game and designing a great company are not all that different.

In a great game, you have clear goals. You know what you're trying to do. It's very clearly defined

what you're trying to do. You're getting a lot of feedback and rewards, either that be from points

or achievements, or 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 clear goals where it's like, okay, we're going to try to have this specific metric

like our email subscriber list. We're going to try to increase it by this amount. And here's how

we're going to do it over this quarter. Or we're going to try to get a new game in this category

that we're going to have a prototype ready to go in two weeks, right? Clear goals. We have

something that allows us to have daily focus and feedback. What I love is the rule of three.

I think I first learned this from Chris Bailey in his book, The Product Positivity Project,

but I've applied it at every level of my company. So what it is is you have everybody post their

three daily goals, one of 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 can make an enormous

amount of progress. And we scale that to every level of the company. So every team, we have three

weekly goals, we have monthly goals, we have quarterly goals. And so everything kind of scales

down. And I even built this into my own personal life. Like I have a thing, the Level Up Journal,

which I've made, which I've got. It just has a journal that just fits in your pocket and has

three goals, three habits, and then a little gratitude practice. And so every piece of it,

by focusing on very few things and making those the priority, it makes a big difference.

And then lastly, with the mindset, we set very aggressive goals. And it's okay not to hit them

like a game when you want to win, right? You take winning seriously, but you don't cry when you lose

a game, right? You say, okay, what can we learn from this? How do we get better? And started to

take that attitude and approach it, 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 rule of

three, there's three priorities for the day. Where are they posting these? So we have a company

Discord. We have a channel in our company Discord that everybody posts their three goals for the

day. There's a separate one for weekly goals, separate one for monthly goals, and a separate one

for quarterly goals. And so you can always look back and see what everybody is doing at any given

point if you care to at the main focus. It also helps us stay connected, right? Because we're a

100% remote team now. So even though I may not talk to a given person or see a given person,

I can quickly glance and see what's most important to them right now. So it keeps us all connected

and accountable. Two questions. The first is, is there any follow up on those three? Or is it just

the act of someone publicly stating their priorities that makes everyone feel connected and

hopefully gives them some felt sense of accountability that you think leads to better

output? Let's start there. So the daily, there's not much follow up on the daily. It's about

staying connected. And I think it just forces you to plan, right? It forces you to assess for

yourself. Okay, what actually is important to me? A lot of people will just start checking emails and

going down rabbit holes. And they're working, they are working, but they're not doing what's

important. And they're just doing whatever's in front of them. And so this forces just as a habit,

it forces you to think things through. Great point. Then for the weeklies, we do have that. So

we have our weekly goals. 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 is 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 make 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. So people are setting their priorities for the following week on Friday. Correct. And

why Discord versus other tools? How did you choose that? So we tried a lot of them. I'm obsessed

with productivity tools, sometimes to a fault. But so we tried Slack, we tried a couple of other

custom ones, we tried Asana, we tried Monday, 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 channel for free. You can

have voice chat and text chat. You can also upload bigger files and you can with like Slack

restricts that unless you have a paid program 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 Stoneblade 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 is 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 making the next things that you're going to be talking about

six months from now. And so it's like, automatically gives us a sense of like connection to our

fans because the same place where we're doing our work, one click away, you can see and interact

with fans. So it has a nice bonus effect of making us feel a little bit more connected to the community.

How much of your work do you do on laptop versus phone?

90 plus percent laptop, for sure. My phone is, I'll occasionally check emails to make

sure I'm not missing anything, but I hate working on my phone.

Yeah, I figured it was probably something like that. I'm the same way.

What is the mobile experience with Discord like? I've never used it on mobile.

It's fine. I mean, you know, again, so 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

in a public channel. This is another key thing about it. That's great because you have so many

different channels and you can make threaded discussions. One of the things I try to encourage

is that we have as much as possible, make communications public. A lot of times people

will have side chats and side conversations and come up with some great idea and then it will

get lost because people are just in a private channel somewhere. And so we'll make sure that

people have public discussions as much as possible so people can add comments and can get involved

and stay connected if they want to. But to continue with your question of the mobile experience,

it's mostly just for some, I will only use it if it's like there's some specific communication

or meeting or connection I need to do. That's when I'll use my phone. If I'm going to work,

it's because I'm set up at a laptop designating time to work and connect.

All right. We could keep going for hours and maybe we will do more rounds. But there's a prompt here

that I would love to explore, which is how a trip to Thailand helped you to escape your need for

control. All right. So as someone who focuses on systems, predictability, controllability, etc.,

this might be therapeutic for me to hear. So could you unpack this for us?

I think we're very similar in the sense to him. It's not, I wouldn't call myself a control freak

just because I don't want to say mean things about myself, but I very much want things to be

good. And I believe I know how to make them good and I want to make sure that they are good. So

that's what control freak 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 as well as they do.

That's how I know if they're doing a good job or not. This is the story I'm telling myself.

And I hired a lot of very smart, very capable people. And I ended up, every extra person I

hired suddenly became more work for me because I had to keep checking to make sure that they were on

track or setting up more systems to have this. And if they weren't doing something the way I

thought they should be coming in or they would come to me with questions. And at some point,

I'm like, listen, this is too much. This has gone kind of crazy. I need to step away. And so I said,

look, I'm going to take a three week trip to Thailand. I'm not bringing my laptop. You know,

I'm not reachable. I'm going to do that in six months. So I gave the team plenty of time. What

do you need from me? How do we set this up so that you don't need to talk to me? And they, okay,

we need access to these things that only you have access to. We need to know this, whatever. It was

very little as it turned out. And then I go to Thailand. Now, I am still too much of a control

freak. So I really did bring my iPad with me. So I could check in, but I didn't respond. I didn't do

anything. And what magically happened is everybody just stepped up and they answered the questions

that they would have asked me themselves because they were perfectly capable of doing that. And

they started taking initiative and building new things and doing stuff that I didn't even think

to do. And I realized with some embarrassment that I had been holding them back, that I had by

not allowing them to fail or do things that would be different than I would, I had been

constraining them from becoming leaders and doing the things that they should be doing. And I had

built work for myself. I had made them less effective at their job. And I had made my life

less good. So that was one of the best vacations I ever took because it actually really changed

the entire way that I managed, changed the entire way I viewed leadership. And I love Thailand.

Amazing. Just to like building the systems that then persist after you get back,

what a liberating experience that must have been on so many levels. The gift that keeps on giving.

No, it's something you talk about a lot and it cannot be underestimated, right? So you asked

the question, what would it take for me to let go? What would have to be true for you to be willing

to not get into this? It could be some key metric that you care about that they have to report.

It could be that they have to stay within a certain budget. It could be that they're,

in reality, you're just making up stories of, oh, well, I just feel like I need it.

But let those things go. Let people grow. And it's really, in my experience, it's just been

incredible. I now have a team that can literally run itself. I get in and I focus on the key new

projects. I focus on the most important things I think are wrong. But 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

and better. And again, it's part of that mindset, right? They make mistakes, just like I make mistakes.

And sometimes the question is, what do we learn from it? And don't make the same mistake twice.

And we've learned a lot along the way. And it's been pretty amazing.

So Justin, we're coming up on almost two and a half hours, two hours and 17 minutes or 18 minutes.

I'll ask just a few more questions and then we can slowly land this plane.

So the next question is one that many long-term listeners will be familiar with,

the billboard question. If you could put a quote, a question, a phrase, a word, anything on a billboard,

metaphorically speaking, to get it in front of millions or billions of people,

what might you put on such a billboard? I'm excited to get this one. I had anticipated it

might come up. I've listened to a lot of the podcasts. So I'm going to use one as a mantra

for myself, which I say to myself every day, which is cultivate comfort with uncertainty

and impermanence. Cultivate comfort with uncertainty and impermanence. It sounds a little,

you know, maybe a little woo-woo to people. But in reality, it's so much of what we do,

and we talked about this a little bit earlier, is because we're afraid that we don't know what's

going to happen. We're afraid we're going to lose something. And the truth is,

you never know what's going to happen, and you're going to lose everything. We're all going to die,

right? And if you can just be okay in that space of not knowing the control freak piece of it,

the staying as a lawyer or a safer path, and be okay with the fact that things are not going to

stay the same all the time, then life gets so much easier. And whether it be your creative path

or your relationships or anything like that has been one of the most powerful things

for me personally. So I'd hope to share that message.

That is a perfect place to begin to wrap up. And that is exactly what we're going to do.

So Justin, people can find Think Like a Game Designer at ThinkLikeAGameDesigner.com. You

mentioned the slash media for various things. They can find you on Twitter at Justin and

the score Gary. Any other websites that you would like to mention or places you'd like to

point people to? Yeah, sure. You can come to Stoneblade.com is for my games. If you want to

pick up any of my games or join our Discord, there's a link there. And myself and my team

are all there chatting. So you can chat with me on Twitter and on the Discord. I love,

you know, I'm talking with people that have design and creativity questions. So

always happy to help. This has been so much fun, Tim.

Such a blast. People taking up on it. I highly, highly encourage you to engage.

And thank you, Justin, for taking so much time. I'm glad we were able to finally make this happen.

Really took so many notes, so lots to follow up on personally. And to everybody listening,

thank you for tuning in. And as always, we will link to everything we discussed and probably

much more in the show notes. Tim. Blog slash podcast so you can just search Justin. And I'm

sure that this will be one episode of very few, maybe the only that pops up so you'll be able to

find everything there. And until next time, please be just a bit kinder than is necessary,

both to others and to yourself. And with that, Tim Ferriss signing off.

Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet

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before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribed 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

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all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast

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before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out,

just go to Tim dot blog slash Friday, type that into your browser Tim dot blog slash Friday,

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