Tim Ferriss Wants You to Have More Fun. You Should Listen.

00:00:00.000 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is In Depth, a semi-regular series in which I talk to

00:00:06.460 | interesting people about the quest to cultivate deep life. Today's episode is brought to you by

00:00:12.880 | our presenting sponsor, Reclaim.ai. This is a product I'm actually really excited about. I mean,

00:00:18.320 | they use the word deep work when they describe it. So I'll come back a little later to tell you more

00:00:24.460 | about that. But what I want to tell you about right now is today's guest, the one and only

00:00:31.000 | Mr. Tim Ferriss. Tim, of course, rocketed to prominence with his 2007 book, The Four-Hour

00:00:38.560 | Workweek, which basically redefined my generation's relationship with work and meaning and the

00:00:44.660 | possibilities for building an interesting life, a major influence on my work for sure. He followed

00:00:49.980 | that up with a series of other massive bestsellers, including The Four-Hour Body, The Four-Hour

00:00:54.660 | Chef, Tools of Titans, and Tribes of Mentors. Most people probably know him today for the podcast

00:01:00.460 | he started right around the time he was wrapping up the four-hour series. It's called The Tim Ferriss

00:01:06.100 | Show, and it was one of the first big business interview sort of self-development podcast out

00:01:11.280 | there. Some people have called him The Oprah Podcast, and I see why. This show has been wildly

00:01:16.700 | successful. It's surpassed more than a billion downloads. Tim has interviewed countless major

00:01:22.880 | figures from Jane Goodall to Jerry Seinfeld to LeBron James, and his biggest get of all, of course,

00:01:29.240 | myself. More recently, Tim put out a card game. It's called Coyote, and he created it with one of the

00:01:36.340 | top designers in the game business, the same company that invented exploding kittens. The game is a blast.

00:01:43.180 | Okay, so given all of these things, what did Tim and I talk about in this discussion you're about

00:01:49.820 | to hear? Well, we started with Coyote. I wanted to know why did he build a card game, and more

00:01:55.060 | importantly, how does that world work? How do you become the top designer in the card game business?

00:02:02.100 | What does it take to really strike it big in game designing, and how is that different than what

00:02:07.820 | other people who try to strike it big in game designing don't succeed? What's the difference

00:02:12.360 | there? I'm just curious about that world, so we start there, but then we go deeper. Tim and I talk

00:02:18.500 | about his path to stardom. We talk about the autonomy and depth he had in his life circa the time when he

00:02:26.120 | was writing The 4-Hour Workweek, and then how his own success stripped some of that away, and his effort

00:02:31.300 | since then to get it back. We talk about his future plans for his podcast and for writing where he wants

00:02:38.320 | to go from here. We really get into some really interesting territory about one of the masters of

00:02:44.920 | this topic, how he feels, what he's thinking about, and what he wants to do. This is a must-listen

00:02:51.360 | episode if you have any interest in the deep life. Tim really is sort of the OG of the deep life as a

00:02:57.300 | concept, and he obviously has a lot of interesting things to say. He speaks from a place of deep

00:03:01.880 | deep experience. So anyways, let's get right into it. Without further ado, here is my conversation

00:03:09.200 | with Tim Ferriss. All right, Tim, thank you for joining me. Always a pleasure to talk with you.

00:03:16.080 | Yeah, yeah. Lovely to have the band back together.

00:03:19.840 | That's the way to think about it. So, I mean, I want to open with the reason why we originally

00:03:24.980 | thought about talking, which is you made a game. Yeah, WTF. What's happening here? I'm holding this

00:03:30.740 | up to the camera. Yeah. Coyote. Walk us through, just to set the foundation, just give us the basics

00:03:36.860 | here, what type of game it is, who you did this with, and where is it, just so we know where we're

00:03:41.320 | on the same page. Sure. So the basics are, and there's a lot of backstory, but I grew up kind of saved

00:03:47.160 | by games, mostly very complex games like Dungeons and Dragons. I still have all of my materials

00:03:52.160 | downstairs from when I was a kid. And I, for a host of reasons, felt like games, analog, social

00:04:00.360 | is just every year. As kind of digital goes vertical, the counterbalance of analog and social is becoming

00:04:09.880 | more and more important. So I thought, you know what? Maybe I should make a game. And it is a fast,

00:04:16.360 | casual, social game. Made it with exploding kittens because I became close friends with Elan Lee,

00:04:21.780 | used my podcast to sort of test the waters. And they've made a whole host of great games and

00:04:29.860 | tested a few dozen games with my friends and came across Poetry for Neanderthals, which is an

00:04:35.160 | exceptional game. Maybe it's just by me and my dumb friends, but that's the one they wanted to play over

00:04:40.520 | and over again. And I was like, well, who made this game? Oh, Exploding Kittens. Who's behind Exploding

00:04:44.140 | Kittens? And that's how I kind of pulled on the thread. And right now, Coyote is,

00:04:51.400 | it's doing very well. It's got like 300 million plus social views of gameplay online. And you can

00:04:58.780 | find it everywhere. Just launched. And it plays three to eight folks, typically. Kids can play,

00:05:05.500 | I'd say, 10 plus. So very, very simple to learn, but different every game.

00:05:10.760 | It seems like it's physical memory. How do you describe this game plan? It's like, okay, so if you

00:05:16.140 | have to do motions and the ones and the cards, as the cards come down, it changes what people have to

00:05:21.340 | do and trying to keep track of where everything is. And it gets kind of frenetic. So under the hood,

00:05:26.760 | and all of my books are designed this way as well. There is a Trojan horse with this game. So it has

00:05:34.140 | to be fun. And people need to want to tell their friends about it and play again, right? That's

00:05:38.980 | table stakes. But under the hood, it is also a workout for your brain. And I've spent a lot of

00:05:47.840 | time thinking about this kind of thing. But by and large, people are not interested in buying things

00:05:52.400 | to make them smarter. I know it sounds crazy, but I've tried this multiple times in the US,

00:05:56.060 | at least it does not work. So this has to be a side effect. But yes, it's basically a gesture rhythm

00:06:04.680 | and verbal game where it's almost like rock, paper, scissors on steroids for a group where you try to

00:06:14.200 | match all these things as you go around the table. And if anyone makes a mistake, they lose a life and

00:06:19.600 | then last person standing wins. You can also play cooperatively. If you have someone in your family

00:06:24.640 | who's a really sore loser or a friend who's just complaints too much. But the competitive mode is

00:06:31.000 | really kind of where the smack talking and I think the adrenaline and a lot of the fun is. So it is a

00:06:35.880 | rhythm and gesture game where people have to perform an action, say what's on the card, and go around in

00:06:42.400 | a circle keeping a certain rhythm. And the reason it's called Coyote is because I want people to find

00:06:50.200 | their inner trickster if you think of the mythologies around Coyote in many of the indigenous cultures in

00:06:57.920 | North America, also in Mexico. I suppose that includes Mexico on some level. But this Coyote

00:07:04.960 | character pops up again and again. In every culture, whether it's Loki, Ictomi, or others, there is some

00:07:11.040 | type of trickster. And the reason that's part of the game is you can sabotage other players.

00:07:16.340 | So if you have somebody who's really good at, say, math or music, those folks tend to be very good at this

00:07:20.660 | game, you can handicap them by slapping them with attack cards and things like that. So that's the game. And

00:07:27.180 | you can learn to play in a few minutes. But as someone who spent 20 years in Silicon Valley, still also to this

00:07:35.300 | day, investing in tech startups and everything else, I think we're wading into some very risky waters with a lot of the

00:07:44.500 | technological saturation and everything else, which we could talk about. So getting offline, giving people a light

00:07:49.940 | lift, that provides sort of a little bit of vitamin P vitamin play, I think is, is really, really, really

00:07:57.860 | important. So I've been playing a lot more games versus just staring at a screen 18 inches away, all day, every

00:08:04.660 | day. And that's why I made it.

00:08:06.340 | I'm curious about this world. Because I think about this type of game that you called it casual or fast

00:08:14.580 | casual. Is that what?

00:08:15.340 | Yeah, yeah. And there are there are lots. One thing I realized and part of the reason this took two years to

00:08:20.180 | make is there's so many different. If you say I want to make a game, it's kind of like saying I want to

00:08:25.220 | start a business. It's like, okay, well, we need to drill down a little bit. So you could call this, I would I would describe it as fast,

00:08:33.940 | casual, there are other ways to describe it. But meaning, after dinner, you've got an hour,

00:08:38.980 | maybe a few people have had some drinks, what do you play? If you try to play some of these other

00:08:44.740 | games, which are fine games, wonderful games, terraforming Mars, you're never going to get it done,

00:08:48.900 | right? Yeah. And furthermore, if people are tired, or a little fatigued after a long work day,

00:08:55.700 | it's going to be hard to recruit people, at least my friends to play it. So so this is along the lines

00:09:01.620 | of an Uno, or the Monopoly Go card game, something like that. It's closer to that side.

00:09:09.300 | So because what fascinates me is it reminds me of screenwriting. And here's the connection I want to

00:09:14.820 | make there is that when you talk to screenwriters, they say, look, people think this is easy.

00:09:21.700 | Because when a when a script is on the screen, and it works, you're like, I could think up a

00:09:26.740 | similar idea for a movie, and I know how to talk. I'm not watching someone drill, you know,

00:09:32.100 | Steph Curry drill a three pointer from six feet behind the line like, oh, I can do this. This is

00:09:36.500 | a great the alien attacks or whatever. Yeah, a good fast casual game if constructed, right? You're like,

00:09:41.940 | oh, this is just fun. Like you have some rules, you have some ideas, it kind of goes back and forth.

00:09:45.620 | But when I talk to screenwriters, they say the issue with the screenplays, everything has to be

00:09:50.180 | right. It's a watch mechanism, like everything. And you don't realize a very good way to put it.

00:09:55.140 | If you introduce like, you know, Chekhov's gun, like you mentioned this here, it better pay off there.

00:10:00.420 | No dialogue cannot have a purpose like this has to connect to this and even a bad screenplay.

00:10:05.380 | You have to be a professional screenwriter to have written the bad screenplay because there's a

00:10:11.060 | there's a technical complexity that just making a script that everything connects together.

00:10:15.540 | I assume this is similar for making a game like this. You said two years. So I'm curious about

00:10:19.780 | that world, what the world you met with Elon Lee, what you learned from him. What is it like in the

00:10:24.340 | world of trying to make a card based game that is easy to learn and fun to play? What goes on in that

00:10:29.860 | world to actually make a game like that? Yeah, let's talk about it. And what we're about to talk about,

00:10:34.260 | right? How that watch is built is part of the reason why I decided to do something completely off menu,

00:10:42.420 | completely different from what I am accustomed to doing because

00:10:45.700 | I choose and maybe we'll get more into this later, but I choose projects based on the density of

00:10:51.620 | learning, skill acquisition and relationship development, all of which should transcend that

00:10:58.420 | project even if it fails. And so the question of how do I win even if this fails is always present in

00:11:04.020 | my mind? So with this, let's dive into it. How do you build this watch? And rest assured, whether you

00:11:11.780 | make a very obviously sophisticated game or a very, very simple game, there's a lot of complexity or there

00:11:20.260 | can be in the process if you want it to work consistently. So I've learned so many things from

00:11:25.300 | Milan. And he's such a sweetheart of a guy and such a polymath. I mean, he'd worked on the original,

00:11:31.380 | on the Xbox, on Halo, on entirely new genres of games. He's just, I've seen him make entirely new

00:11:38.740 | types of games that have not existed in the world before. I mean, but he comes out of video games.

00:11:42.900 | He comes out, well, let's see, what does he come out of? I mean, he comes out of so many different

00:11:46.740 | places. It's hard to slap a clean label on him, which I like. I remember I asked him to send me his

00:11:53.700 | bio and I was like, I don't even know what to do with this. And I was like, okay, I like this guy.

00:11:59.540 | And he cannot help himself but create games. And also, and I'll get into the kind of the process in a

00:12:08.500 | second, but games are fundamental to human life past a certain rung on Maslow's hierarchy of needs,

00:12:15.860 | right? I think we, I'm sure you and I could talk about this forever. So it's like you are,

00:12:20.980 | if you're listening to this podcast, there are many games you are playing in life with rules,

00:12:26.420 | with stakes, maybe with a quitting time, whether you're aware of them or not. So studying games helps

00:12:33.620 | you kind of peer behind the curtain to see the games everywhere around you and to choose better

00:12:41.140 | games also. Okay. Process wise, what did I learn? Well, number one, there are a hell of a lot of

00:12:47.540 | different types of games, right? You can have magic type games where you're building decks, where you're

00:12:52.020 | collecting cards. You could have a D and D role playing game, very, very, very, very complicated and

00:12:58.340 | involved. Then you have all the way over on the other side, you have some very seemingly, at least when it's

00:13:04.180 | done right, simple to learn games. And what I realized, at least for me, was number one, just

00:13:12.900 | deciding on the direction was the most challenging part as a first time game designer, because I was

00:13:18.500 | involved in every single step of the process, which I'm sure slowed things down for them. And then

00:13:27.860 | 10 minutes of trying to prototype is worth 10 hours of talking. That's something you learn very, very

00:13:35.460 | quickly. And what does a prototype look like for a game like this? Yeah, I'll tell you for a game like

00:13:40.340 | this. Yeah. We applied a bunch of constraints. So I started with and in conversations, we did a number of

00:13:48.100 | sprints, Elan and I, friends of mine, just as testers, right, as players. And we're trying all sorts of

00:13:56.500 | different original games, then we're looking at potentially taking an easier path, which would be

00:14:01.940 | taking, say, the game that led me to Elan Poetry for Neanderthals, creating a variation of that with new

00:14:08.660 | rules or a twist on the rules. And ultimately wanted a few things to be true. Because I played,

00:14:19.300 | for instance, chess with my brother, my brother is very mathematically inclined. I'll leave it at that.

00:14:25.780 | But he always will beat me at chess. And that's annoying, number one. Number two,

00:14:31.700 | he also wants me to suffer through going all the way to the end to get knocked off,

00:14:38.260 | even if I see very quickly, oh, I just painted myself into a corner. I'm doomed. This is checkmate.

00:14:42.820 | So I wanted to be closer, meaning the game that I would make closer to backgammon or poker than

00:14:50.660 | chess in the sense that there is a chance for a weaker player to win if they have some good luck.

00:14:57.700 | And that also came from playing magic with a couple of friends of mine. And I was like,

00:15:03.300 | this sucks, not because magic sucks, but because they would always beat me, always.

00:15:07.860 | And I was like, well, this isn't fun. I don't want to play this game again.

00:15:10.900 | So it was a constraint. And then thinking of other constraints, like, well, what can be

00:15:15.940 | prototype quickly? Cards. We could also use chits, meaning something you use to keep track of lives.

00:15:21.460 | And we played around with a bunch of other accessories. But here's what the first prototype

00:15:25.860 | looked like. We were doing a sprint, the last sprint, because we had tried sprints over the course of

00:15:34.420 | nine to 12 months. And we hadn't found something yet. Because for me, if I'm going to put my name

00:15:39.540 | on something, man, I need to be willing to live with this forever, which means it's got to be something

00:15:43.780 | I'm excited to talk about, which is a high bar for me. And then we decided, look, we're both very busy.

00:15:52.100 | We haven't found something yet. Let's make this the last sprint. We either commit, well, we do commit to

00:15:59.140 | either finding something and running with it, or calling a spade a spade. And we're just grasping

00:16:04.740 | in the dark here. And it's probably better for us to focus on other things.

00:16:07.220 | And what are you physically using in a sprint?

00:16:10.100 | I'll tell you.

00:16:10.980 | Yeah, I'll tell you. So the sprint, first of all, just looks like us walking around.

00:16:14.740 | Well, this happened to be in Toronto. So walking along the waterfront, drinking copious amounts

00:16:22.500 | of coffee, talking about games. What if this? What if this? What if this? What if this? And the

00:16:28.500 | breakthrough moment came when I think prompted by either Alon or Ken Gruhl, who is one of the employees

00:16:36.820 | at Exploiting Kittens, an amazing game designer. I think it might've been Alon. I think he brought in

00:16:42.100 | the question and we ended up with a better question. So the question was no longer, what tabletop games

00:16:48.420 | have you really liked? He's like, let's broaden that. It could be kickball. What are the games you've liked?

00:16:54.740 | Any kind of game. And I was very, a little shy because I've got professionals here who can,

00:17:01.460 | who have done also very, very, very, very complicated games, sophisticated, I should say. And I said,

00:17:08.100 | you know what, this is embarrassing to say, but if my friends and I have had a few drinks, even if we

00:17:12.740 | haven't playing rock, paper, scissors, we really enjoy it. These are smart friends. And I was expecting

00:17:21.060 | an eye roll, but instead they're like, okay, let's roll with it. Like what, what, what does that look

00:17:25.780 | like? And I was like, well, what could it look like in a group of say four or five people? And let's say

00:17:31.300 | we're only using cards, but we could add in some dice because I wanted that chance opportunity for a

00:17:36.100 | weaker player to win. So I was attached to dice because I love like the 20 sided die out of D and D. I just

00:17:42.580 | really wanted to use the D 20. So D 20, I really want to use the D 20. Now in retrospect, I'm glad

00:17:48.660 | that we applied more constraints to use only cards because for instance, exhibit a tariffs. Oh,

00:17:54.500 | adding, adding these components, that's a lot of cost. And we had this kernel of an idea and we basically

00:18:04.020 | raced back to the kitchen table and had a bunch of blank decks of cards could just be index cards.

00:18:13.140 | Doesn't matter markers and a bunch of accessories kind of looks like a craft shop in a launch house.

00:18:20.340 | You can imagine he's got every possible little knickknack you can use for making games.

00:18:24.980 | And Ken and Alana and I just sat down and started making cards and tried a bunch of things and

00:18:32.980 | literally had a V1 for like version one ready to play test in 15 minutes and then tried it.

00:18:42.100 | Barely worked, but there was like something. So we're like, okay, let's double down on that piece.

00:18:46.900 | Let's take this other thing out, throw away a bunch of cards or just cross them out and put something

00:18:52.580 | different on the card. Try again, try again. So we were able to iterate sitting at a table

00:18:57.220 | with blank cards over and over and over again for a few hours. And by the end of that weekend,

00:19:06.020 | I had to rely on Alon in, in, in the sense of pattern recognition and his taste sensors,

00:19:13.540 | his kind of water feel for games, because I felt like there was something there,

00:19:17.780 | but Alon has seen hundreds and thousands of games, right? As has Ken. And I was like, what,

00:19:24.260 | what do you think here? Right? Like zero to 10 question. I like to ask, right? Zero to 10,

00:19:29.700 | no seven allowed. I buy, I learned this from Kyle Maynard who learned it from somebody else, but like

00:19:33.700 | zero to 10, no seven allowed. Where do you rate the potential of this game? And don't blow smoke up my

00:19:38.980 | ass. And I think it was like a, an eight or a nine with the possibility of getting it higher. And I was

00:19:46.660 | like, okay, if that's true, let's pause for now. Cause we were wiped out, you know, after play testing

00:19:54.020 | and especially this game also, if you want to, if you have trouble getting to sleep and you want to

00:19:59.060 | get to sleep, like play a couple of rounds of this before bed and it might just be easier to sleep.

00:20:05.540 | I say that as a lifelong insomniac. Um, so we were wiped out and we, but, but there was enough proof

00:20:10.900 | of concept there to say, okay, let's expand this, make a very, very rough deck and play test it with

00:20:17.700 | other people to see what happens. Was the motions in the beginning, like the initial play testing,

00:20:23.300 | was it closer to rock, paper, scissors? Like at first, was it just, Hey, we have different hand motions,

00:20:28.420 | the details. Didn't matter. Uh, the details didn't, the details do matter, but in the beginning

00:20:35.380 | and this is again, keep in mind, I'm like this, the, the skier who's been on the, like a couple of

00:20:42.740 | slopes six times. So I'm like, tell you, let me tell you all about skiing. Right. Here's what you got

00:20:46.900 | to know when you're jumping off a cornice. It's like, what have you, you know, but, but keeping all that in

00:20:51.140 | mind, big grain of salt. I have learned a lot. I've taken a lot of notes. I've documented everything. So

00:20:55.060 | here's what I would say. The details do matter, but in the beginning, you don't know which

00:20:57.780 | details matter. So you just throw a lot against the wall. So we tried tons of stuff. And what Alana

00:21:03.860 | is very good at doing is, and I'm, I would say I'm not terribly good at this is brainstorming and

00:21:11.140 | testing without too much judgment, right? So leave the editor aside, right? And no matter how harebrained,

00:21:18.340 | how boring, try everything. Cause it's so fast to prototype, the turnaround time is so fast with this

00:21:26.180 | type of game construction that you should just try it and you'd never really know. So in the beginning,

00:21:34.660 | there were a lot of gestures, for instance, that we ended up pulling out later. Example,

00:21:41.540 | anything that's kind of not suitable for work, which we're very reliable at getting laughs.

00:21:45.780 | If you're going to distribute at Walmart and target where you want to, chances are you're

00:21:51.620 | going to have to yank some of those out. And similarly, some of the cards had people standing

00:21:57.380 | up from a table to do something. Well, if you have somebody at the table who can't do that,

00:22:01.700 | you've just run into a big problem, right? So yanking those out. Now later you can have

00:22:06.260 | expansion packs and you can have print to play PDFs and all that stuff, which I plan on doing.

00:22:10.500 | But there was a lot of vetting. Now, once it goes back to Exploding Kittens headquarters and they're

00:22:16.900 | playing it internally with employees, then they have an entire system for play testing. They have an entire,

00:22:23.140 | very refined system for play testing. And at that point, we also were creating spreadsheets with

00:22:30.580 | multiple tabs of different gestures, which have corresponding words. So you can change the

00:22:35.940 | gesture, you can change the word, you can change both. And we had a ranking system for everyone.

00:22:40.740 | So we just had hundreds of these things. And what's the data to rank them?

00:22:45.700 | Yeah. So there was a, there was a, as I remember it, there was a one to three ranking system.

00:22:53.300 | And one was, this isn't interesting at all. Two is it's sometimes interesting. Three was it, it,

00:23:00.100 | it seems to hit most of the time and get a laugh, right? There were a lot of questions around like,

00:23:05.380 | how many kind of laugh out loud cards should you have? And if you only aim for those laugh out loud

00:23:10.820 | cards, does that actually handicap the game? Because it makes you kind of deaf to it after a while,

00:23:17.700 | do you want to preserve it for like variable reward? And in addition to that, there are some decisions to

00:23:24.980 | be made about just, hopefully this doesn't sound boring, but deck construction, like there are 66

00:23:32.260 | cards. Why on earth 66 versus 86 versus 36? All of that revolves around a combination of

00:23:42.980 | variety. Things are color coded because you can play with people's brains in weird ways once you add

00:23:47.940 | colors. So a certain amount of repetition with colors, deciding which cards to replicate. And it,

00:23:55.300 | and it comes down to a lot of probability, right? Like how often do you want certain cards to show up

00:24:01.220 | and over many, many games, what do you observe and mathematically, what should you see? Which then feeds

00:24:07.540 | into questions like, for instance, initially we had the game produced where you do what you do with every

00:24:16.900 | game. You shuffle the deck, right? Yeah. But if you have the gesture cards or action cards, they have

00:24:22.500 | salamanders on them. You can explain why they're salamanders on them. There's a good reason for that.

00:24:27.140 | But the, then you have the action cards, then the coyote cards are all grouped together initially. And when

00:24:33.300 | you would shuffle, you wouldn't get, most people don't shuffle very well. If you just do a riffle

00:24:37.940 | shuffle, it doesn't actually mix the deck that well. So they would end up with these solid groups of

00:24:43.460 | identical cards that doesn't work very well. So they're seeing this in play testing, like the people

00:24:47.860 | are shuffling not well and they're getting like six salamanders in a row. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

00:24:51.780 | Or six coyote cards or whatever. So then you go back to the manufacturing and manufacturing cards is

00:24:57.940 | surprisingly challenging. Like the, the actual manufacturing facilities are gigantic.

00:25:03.860 | They are huge. And there are very, they're relative to many other types of games or things

00:25:10.820 | you could produce. A few, relatively few of these manufacturers.

00:25:16.580 | They're in China at high volume. Yeah. A lot, a lot. Most of them are in China.

00:25:19.860 | And same as book printing, basically the same as book printing. And what you can do is off the line,

00:25:27.300 | you can manufacture a shuffled deck. So you can indicate what type of composition you want the deck to

00:25:33.540 | have as a quote unquote shuffled deck. So then when people pull it out of the box, they have a really

00:25:39.620 | good first time out of box experience. It's so important. It's like if the first two rounds

00:25:44.020 | whiff, or they're just meh, that is going to crush you. And particularly since it's like,

00:25:53.780 | this thing's cheap, right? It's half the price of a movie ticket, basically in the US, right? It's 9.99

00:25:58.580 | in or around, around $10, right? So if they play twice and doesn't totally work, it doesn't make

00:26:05.620 | them laugh. Are they going to play again? Maybe, maybe not. So you need the out of box experience

00:26:10.020 | to be really good. So the amount of time that you spend on the instructions also play testing the hell

00:26:15.780 | out of that, because once you do the internal testing, then you can go out to families and other

00:26:23.060 | people you've recruited to play test. And this is also, there's so many parallel parallels with tech

00:26:30.580 | and any type of product really, I think direct to consumer, but it could be applied anywhere.

00:26:37.460 | Where if, if for instance, I think usertesting.com might still be around. I'm sure there are better

00:26:42.500 | tools now. But back in the day, it's like, if you want somebody to try signing up for your

00:26:47.220 | software as a service on a website, you could ask them, what did you find confusing? How was it? Or you

00:26:53.220 | could just do a screen capture with a video and watch the facial expressions and see where they pause and

00:26:57.540 | take too much time. Yeah. So similarly with play testing a game, you don't want to just ask somebody,

00:27:02.660 | what did you think? And have a list of seven questions. Do you want video of them playing?

00:27:06.660 | Like, how long does it take certain parts of the game to transpire? Are there, are there huge pauses

00:27:15.780 | where people get gummed up? Where do they laugh versus where do they report they laugh? Right? Like,

00:27:20.020 | these are, these are often things that have huge discrepancies. So suffice to say, to figure out

00:27:28.180 | a simple game is not so simple. And it has given me so much more appreciation. It's kind of like if you,

00:27:38.500 | for instance, I'll give people a recommendation. Like I love drawing. I've done, I was very involved

00:27:42.500 | with all the artwork for every aspect of this game and did a lot of hand sketching and, and so on.

00:27:46.900 | But if you have somebody take you, let's just say a nature guide, take you on a tour somewhere around

00:27:55.860 | your house and introduce you to all the tree species, usually easier to start with trees versus

00:28:02.020 | general plants. Right? So you get maybe like in most places in North America, half dozen trees, maybe.

00:28:09.140 | And now when you walk through the forest on your usual hike, you're just going to see things

00:28:14.260 | completely differently. Yeah. Like the fidelity, it's like, boom, things suddenly it's 3d instead of

00:28:20.820 | green trees, your labels change. And with your labeling change, your reality changes. And the same thing

00:28:28.420 | happens to me now. If I see other games, I'm like, Oh my God, this is so smooth. And so

00:28:35.780 | simple for me as the user, right? It's like, if you open any product, let's just say a really

00:28:42.740 | well-designed Apple product, cause most people had that experience and you're like, Oh my God,

00:28:45.860 | to get the, to get the AirPods paired to my phone and to do this and this is so easy. And then you compare

00:28:51.620 | that with like, I'm going to throw them under the bus, but buying like a brother printer and you're just

00:28:57.140 | like an hour and a half year later, you're like, what does it take in God's name to get this thing

00:29:03.300 | on wifi? So I can, what is this wifi button about? Like there's a feature that no one has ever used

00:29:08.740 | this like auto connect protocol that yeah. So you can have this, you can have the same experience of the

00:29:12.900 | game where you read the instructions. You're like, I have no idea what this means. Um, so

00:29:20.420 | to answer your question, I suppose, yes, there's, there's a lot that goes into it. And then also

00:29:25.780 | there are things that you can do that translate or can transfer from other places. So for instance,

00:29:32.100 | I used a bunch of websites and there are a million of them, but I think in Tel Aviv is one pick food.com

00:29:39.220 | is another where, you know, I created like, I don't know, we created six to eight variations

00:29:46.260 | of this box in terms of the cover art, right. And then split tested it by serving it to different

00:29:53.780 | demographics and having them select their favorites, meaning one out of two at a time. And then the

00:29:59.620 | winner would proceed to be compared against the next variation. And we did a ton of split testing.

00:30:04.580 | And just like I did the Google AdWords way back in the day to test for our work and the subtitle,

00:30:09.620 | you can where possible test with a few hundred bucks, you can get great signal. Not always,

00:30:16.580 | but often you can with this. It was really clear because the winner was like 10 X, right? The number,

00:30:24.660 | like the standard deviations out was so significant. I was like, yeah, this is very clearly. Did you

00:30:28.820 | predict that or are you surprised? In this case, I did predict it. I have whatever it is. I don't

00:30:35.780 | know what it is, but from a visual perspective, I think I'm, I'm just maybe a little more acute than

00:30:44.420 | a lot of folks. I don't know what that is, but certainly my OCD probably feeds into it. I mean,

00:30:50.100 | I have been diagnosed with that, which was no surprise. I had to do it as like a formality.

00:30:54.420 | And the therapist was like, or the psych, the, I guess he was psych, a psychiatrist was like,

00:30:58.020 | I know this could be a lot to take in if you need to like pause the zoom and come back tomorrow. I'm

00:31:03.140 | like, this is not news to anybody. Let's just keep going. I need this for the insurance. Come on.

00:31:06.500 | Yeah. I need this for the insurance. Let's keep going. But I can draw almost any layout of any

00:31:12.100 | restaurant I've ever been in. All right. Like the, just like my, my mind just works that way visually.

00:31:17.060 | So in this case, I was able to, I was able to predict. And I should say also, it's not just data,

00:31:22.740 | data, data. It's like, can you, if your name is on this goes for book covers too. Can you live with

00:31:28.740 | this forever? Which is why I sometimes, I guess no longer because the publishers can make pretty good

00:31:36.420 | money reliably. So they won't say this, but I was a problem author. Like I was a problem author

00:31:40.980 | author because I would fight. I was like, you guys don't have to live with this. Your name is

00:31:45.700 | not on this. And I understand the incentives are slightly different, but like, I am going to see

00:31:50.020 | this so many times. I need to be happy with it. Yeah. And if that ends up being the second choice

00:31:57.540 | instead of the first choice based on the data, so be it. Yeah. Yeah. I was wondering if there's a, uh,

00:32:03.300 | drug dealing for fun and profit box that you tested equivalent, referring for the lister back to your

00:32:09.860 | original title before our work, maybe a coyote with a bloody ma or something that just did not test well,

00:32:17.060 | well, figuring out just the name took a long time. Uh, I tested so many different names and it can become

00:32:28.660 | just like with book titles, sort of a emotional, not necessarily heated, but it can become a conversation

00:32:36.340 | based on opinion and you want to test that you want to test. So for instance, one of the counter

00:32:44.420 | arguments against the name of this game was that coyote is very much sort of an animal of the Americas.

00:32:55.060 | You know, it's like, let's just call it maybe down into some of Central America, but mostly,

00:32:59.140 | you know, Canada, us and Mexico. And will people actually, will this mean anything to people in

00:33:07.300 | other places? And so I had to do a bunch of polling, which I'll very often do with very short social posts

00:33:15.140 | at very odd hours that hit particular time zones just to see, uh, and also texting friends and so on,

00:33:21.380 | uh, about this. But then there are, there's so many different variables to land on something

00:33:29.460 | that finally works, uh, including box design, box size, pricing, uh, negotiating and handling the

00:33:39.220 | politics of very, very large retailers. Like these are all independent arts in the decathlon of creating a

00:33:45.220 | game. Yeah. And Alon is just an excellent decathlete. He's good at all of it.

00:33:51.220 | So what's that? This is my, I'm curious about new worlds. What's that industry like? Is there big

00:33:58.580 | players? It's a lot of independent players. Is anyone making money? Like what is the game?

00:34:02.180 | Yeah. What is the game world? Yeah. This does take to a lot of people. Yeah. This might be a good one

00:34:08.100 | where we have the Wayne's world. Like do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. And we cut to Alon Lee

00:34:13.620 | giving an answer. Listen to that podcast episode with you and Alon is probably the, the best answer,

00:34:20.180 | right? I would say it's, it's a lot like other industries in the sense that you have a few 800

00:34:25.700 | pound gorillas who are gigantic, you know, the Hasbros, Mattels, et cetera. And they have internal

00:34:32.340 | divisions that are doing what like exploding kittens is doing. Like just, just working on game

00:34:37.380 | variations. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you'll absolutely. And you'll, you'll have these giant

00:34:42.020 | within the scope of games. You'll have these gigantic companies that do a lot of things, including

00:34:50.180 | something like a, you know, the fast casual category. And then you have a ton of, then you have

00:34:58.340 | the, the very successful and exploding kittens would be one of the very most successful, let's call it

00:35:02.900 | more independent game studios that make tabletop games and exploding kids is definitely one of the

00:35:09.220 | most successful. I mean, they had one of the most, if not the most successful Kickstarter of all time

00:35:13.380 | initially with exploding kittens and then parlayed that into creating a real amazing company with many,

00:35:20.900 | many, many best sellers. And then you have a super long tail of let's say independent game designers and

00:35:29.380 | people who are taking a stab at making a game and those folks almost always will license their game

00:35:39.780 | to a publisher. It's just like books in a sense and take a royalty because they don't, they're not capable

00:35:47.460 | of, uh, and, or they do not want to contend with all the logistics of like supply chain management,

00:35:54.980 | dealing with retailers and all of that stuff. And if you only have say one skew and you're relatively new

00:36:01.860 | to the game, it could be the best game on the planet, but just as with book publishing,

00:36:06.820 | if you try to approach big retailers by yourself, they are not going to carry your game. It does not

00:36:12.900 | matter how good it is. They do not have the infrastructure to handle thousands upon thousands

00:36:18.100 | of independent contacts. So you'll have brokers, which would be the equivalent of say book agents,

00:36:24.180 | right? It's the same, it's the same thing. Yeah, it's the same, same. And that's also part of why I

00:36:29.540 | like stepping into these realms that seem completely unrelated, but you start to spot things that you

00:36:36.180 | can conceptually at least copy and paste. The brokers are negotiating licensing deals on your behalf if

00:36:42.580 | you're an independent, the bro, those would probably be, this is probably a lot. I'm getting into the deep

00:36:47.140 | end of my ignorance pool here, but the brokers would help you potentially place even for the larger game

00:36:53.780 | companies. They would be your interface to someone like a buyer, category buyer at a Walmart or a Target

00:36:59.860 | for instance. And you would probably need to find representation of some type to submit games to

00:37:10.740 | larger game companies if you want a little bit of leverage. That could also be an attorney potentially.

00:37:15.140 | I mean, that's how I lean with any new industry. So for instance, like screenwriting, right? You mentioned

00:37:19.300 | screenwriting, like I, that I have, I've had it for like a decade, but I have a screenplay that's like

00:37:25.140 | 80% done. And at some point. You're the only one. You're the only one. Yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. So

00:37:32.900 | at some point lawyers are very neglected, right? They get a bad rep in some senses, right? But they are the

00:37:43.300 | ultimate connective tissue that holds a lot of any industry together. So I suppose what I would say is

00:37:51.540 | that there are these intermediate parties and very often you will need the assistance of one or more

00:38:00.420 | to get any type of deal done. If you were a part of that long tail, which is another reason why it

00:38:07.060 | wouldn't have made sense for me, for me to try to do this solo, my learning would have been much

00:38:12.340 | flatter. I would have made many more mistakes and I wouldn't have possibly had the distribution would

00:38:20.500 | have been, I would say impossible. It's probably a fair word to use. What's the best case scenario for

00:38:25.700 | someone's dream? I mean, you're independent and you just stumble across your, your, your play testing

00:38:30.340 | with your friends and it's just like a brilliant game, like a tabletop game or something like this.

00:38:34.100 | Yes. And you have someone approach and it, it, you license it and it hits, right? What,

00:38:41.220 | when we're talking about like the, the blue sky scenarios for someone who's thinking about that,

00:38:44.900 | what, what are we talking about? Are we talking about someone getting rich or are we talking about?

00:38:48.180 | That's a great question. And I, I, I can't contractually get into like the details of my deal,

00:38:55.300 | but I would say it's very similar to books. I mean, yeah, it's similar to books. I would say that

00:39:01.540 | if you have a mega mega mega hit, then you can do well, but they're like an atomic habits of

00:39:08.900 | tabletop games. Like you could just something about what you're doing takes off for years.

00:39:14.100 | I mean, those games definitely exist. I will say that I know for a fact, a lot of the game designers

00:39:23.540 | who have done deals with publishers who later have those games go parabolic and just insane for many

00:39:32.020 | years in terms of incredible sales seem to like a DIY their lawyering or otherwise a lot of game

00:39:43.860 | designers. And this, this is true for anyone who's new to anything, right? It's easy to be

00:39:48.980 | penny wise and pound foolish. So I've seen a lot of, let's just call them inventors, right? Yeah.

00:39:53.540 | Cause this is also true in pretty much any product category. And there's a, there's a great book on

00:39:59.860 | just inventing in general and sort of licensing versus venturing called, I think it's one simple idea by

00:40:05.940 | Steven key, Steven with a pH. Who's just, he's created stuff for all these gigantic brands. He does

00:40:11.940 | almost all of his prototyping with like construction paper and really basic stuff around the house. And he's

00:40:17.220 | been massively successful, but pay a lawyer to review contracts, pay a good lawyer, like really invest in

00:40:26.020 | that. Even if you're going to put yourself obviously not dangerously in the red, but that is where you

00:40:33.700 | want one of the places where you want to spend money, right? If you do that correctly, then yes, there are

00:40:39.460 | people who can make a, a good living doing this. If your goal is to make billions of dollars or tens

00:40:48.260 | of millions of dollars, I would not bank on trying to be an atomic habits, right? Like that may be,

00:40:54.740 | I hope it's not for James. I hope it's, I hope he has 10 more of those, but the magnitude of sales of

00:41:00.340 | that book might just be a non-recurring phenomenon, right? It's kind of like, I was talking to an

00:41:06.100 | entrepreneur recently and Taylor Swift wore one of her rings to an NFL game. And I'm like, okay,

00:41:12.500 | you saw this huge bump in sales. You cannot in any universe depend on that happening again.

00:41:18.340 | Yeah. That is, you stumbled across a bag of money. That's exciting, but don't make your

00:41:23.060 | business plan stumbling across a bag of money. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Business plan. Step one,

00:41:27.860 | pick up bags of money. It's like, ah, that might be hard.

00:41:30.660 | But if you just keep getting Taylor Swift to wear your stuff, it's a great business plan. What's the

00:41:34.580 | problem? But I will say that it is possible to make money in games, but you're not dealing with,

00:41:42.420 | say the margins of software. Yeah. Right. And that's just the reality of a physical product.

00:41:49.300 | It's like books. It sounds like it's very similar. Yeah. You can even even, even the price point is

00:41:54.500 | similar. Interesting. There are very, there are much more expensive games. So if you get into the

00:42:01.780 | realm of involved strategy games, like there are games that definitely you walk into a game shop,

00:42:08.340 | there are games that sell for 50, 75 bucks. I mean, you can find those games, right? But they don't

00:42:12.180 | sell very many. Exactly. So you're going to be looking at, I mean, they can sell,

00:42:17.140 | but you're going to be looking at, there are always trade-offs. There are always trade-offs.

00:42:21.460 | And my, my goal with this was, and I'm fortunate to be in this position, but it, it, the business can

00:42:29.860 | work like exploding kittens has done a really amazing job of building a business. It's not a not-for-profit.

00:42:35.220 | So you, so you can, you, you can make money in this world, but the advice, my advice to someone who

00:42:43.620 | is thinking they might want to make a game would be the same that advice that I would give to someone

00:42:48.820 | who's thinking about writing a book, right? Uh, be slightly different. I would say in a, in the case

00:42:53.460 | of a book, I'm like, if this can't be your top priority for the next year, from a time perspective,

00:42:58.500 | don't do it because you're going to have to live with it forever. And if it can, then consider it.

00:43:04.740 | Similarly, I would say, if you assume that you do not make any money, you don't lose money, but you

00:43:11.620 | don't make any, is this still worth doing for you? And if the answer is no, I would not suggest doing

00:43:17.700 | it. Just like if, if someone said, I'm thinking about becoming a country musician to make my riches,

00:43:23.140 | I would say, Oh, but if you said, I think I'm going to make an album because I've always loved music.

00:43:29.060 | My friends love my music. And I just, I can't rest knowing I never gave it a shot. Okay. That's a good

00:43:36.500 | reason. Then give it a shot and maybe lightning will strike and you'll capture it in a bottle. Maybe.

00:43:42.340 | What a fascinating world. Well, let me, okay. So let me zoom out on this a little bit then.

00:43:47.060 | Oh, can I say one more thing? Sure. That, uh, I have tried more and more

00:43:51.620 | to immerse myself in worlds where the people are friendly. This sounds so maybe, I don't know,

00:43:57.700 | like, uh, Mr. Rogers, but some worlds are friendlier than others. Yes. Right. It's just

00:44:06.260 | true. So if you go to any of these big trade shows related to games or you go to even like

00:44:10.900 | Comic-Con, right. To expand it a little bit. But if you go to Gen Con, for instance, I have not yet

00:44:16.740 | been, but from everything I've heard and in tandem, I'll give another example of archery, specifically

00:44:23.540 | bare bow archery, which we don't have to spend a lot of time on, but there are many different

00:44:26.980 | disciplines within archery and the, the people in bare bow are the friendliest. They're happy to help.

00:44:33.460 | They don't have any cutthroat competitive mentality. Generally speaking, like everybody helps

00:44:38.260 | everybody. That makes a difference. Uh, it makes a huge difference. That's like the neighborhood

00:44:43.220 | where you choose to raise your kids. Yeah. It's like, where do you want to be? Who do you want to be

00:44:48.340 | around? Because you are going to be influenced by all of that. And the gaming world, the tabletop gaming

00:44:55.060 | world, to be clear. I think when the stakes get higher, it gets weird, like video games, then

00:45:01.220 | there's a lot, uh, the dynamics are very, could be very, very, very different. Just like all the prize

00:45:07.780 | money for archery or a lot of the prize money is in compound archery. And it's like, things change

00:45:12.420 | when you start to add in that incentive as a primary driver, right? The people matter.

00:45:18.340 | Yeah. Yeah. And the incentives matter. It's like the, if you, if you added the same amount of money

00:45:22.900 | into bare bow, I'm sure people would stop sharing their secrets. It's the money. Yeah. But you probably

00:45:26.980 | have the same experience I've had because we both obviously had a lot of exposure to the publishing

00:45:31.780 | world, but also some exposure to Hollywood and like the, that world. And I read the difference,

00:45:36.660 | both of them there. It's people are meaning a different way in Hollywood.

00:45:40.340 | It's like, they're satirical, how nice they are to you. And then behind the doors, it's so brutal.

00:45:46.500 | So like in Hollywood, it's always like, I, you know, I gotta tell you, this idea is so good.

00:45:50.980 | I would give one of my kids away for adoption just to work with it. You have, I could die tomorrow.

00:45:56.260 | You have given me a reason to live. And then, you know, you never, it's so bad. It's so bad.

00:46:01.620 | And then you go to the publishing world, dealing with Hollywood. Some I was like, ah,

00:46:06.020 | New York based agents. They're like almost they're brutal. Right. But at least like they're honest,

00:46:13.300 | they're also just as mean, but they're more honest. Like that's a dumb idea and that's not going to work

00:46:16.500 | and we're not going to publish it, but at least they're clear about it. So you have different flavors

00:46:20.020 | of meanness. Yeah. It's nice to get out of those worlds. I can see that. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the

00:46:24.740 | and I'll, I'll actually speak to that too, because games have a huge benefit

00:46:32.900 | that is similar to maybe standup comedy and here's the benefit.

00:46:36.340 | If you have, you have a passion project, that's music or art or whatever

00:46:46.820 | for a lot of different types of projects, people can lie to you to be nice. Yeah. Right.

00:46:55.060 | If you get up in front of an audience and try to do a 30 minute set comedy, you might get one or two

00:47:00.900 | courtesy laughs, but then it's going to be dead silent and you're going to bomb and you're going

00:47:05.780 | to know that your material doesn't work with a game. If your game doesn't work, your game does not work.

00:47:11.620 | It really doesn't. You can tell on those big game tests. You can tell. And even if somebody's trying

00:47:17.060 | to be nice there, they have that kind of plastered fake smile on you're like, Ooh, that's not good.

00:47:23.620 | Right. Or if they're like, yeah, that's, yeah, that's fun. Like the damning with faint praise. I mean,

00:47:27.780 | like you can tell watching the, like the colors were great, Tim, the colors, really like the size

00:47:33.300 | of these cards are laminated, like really smooth. Like really good job. Yeah. So, so a huge benefit

00:47:39.620 | is you will know if your baby's ugly very quickly and you don't have to ask people for their opinion.

00:47:46.740 | You'll see it. And I would just to speak to the Hollywood piece also, the, and maybe I'm biased,

00:47:54.020 | having grown up in New York, uh, people can be brutal and the people who are brutal are not always

00:47:59.540 | going to be right. But if the idea is truly bad, they just saved you a lot of time by being honest.

00:48:07.460 | If you pay attention to it doesn't mean you should just follow it wrote, but separately,

00:48:13.620 | if someone's brutal to you and you fold, it means you didn't have the necessary enthusiasm or focus to

00:48:22.820 | have endurance pursuing that project. So even if it's a good idea, they saved you time because you

00:48:29.620 | wouldn't have been able to execute in the longterm on it. Does that make sense? Right. Yeah. If they,

00:48:33.780 | if they'd been too supportive of a bad idea, it would have been six months later, it would have,

00:48:38.820 | you would have folded when it got hard. Exactly. Yeah. Or if it was, even if it, even if it were a good

00:48:44.020 | idea, that's, I think the thing that I'm very inarticulately trying to convey is that even if it

00:48:49.780 | is a, the idea could have product market fit for say a book, but the book is going to take you a year

00:48:55.940 | and a half to write and underneath all of the surface enthusiasm, you don't actually have

00:49:02.500 | the juice to fuel that year and a half. Yeah. Great idea. But like execution risk, right? Like

00:49:11.060 | key man risk with, with endurance, the, the agent or whoever it is who insults that book or judges

00:49:19.060 | it really harshly, if that causes you to fold, you wouldn't have made it anyway. Yeah. And I mean that,

00:49:26.980 | that gets into some very smoky territory where, when do you listen? When do you not? And my, my very

00:49:34.340 | brief answer to that is you workshop the hell out of it in advance. You pay a lot of attention to your energy

00:49:39.540 | levels, if it recharges you or not and know what works before you even get to the agent, right?

00:49:47.460 | I mean, this is another divergence, but why do you think a nonfiction book publishing people don't

00:49:53.620 | like, not everyone, but I run into people who want to be writers who do not like the fact that the book

00:49:59.220 | is bought first before you write it. To me, I'm like, this is great. Like money is a neutral indicator of

00:50:05.140 | value. Derek Sivers. Uh, you, you, you don't have to put in a huge amount of effort before you get

00:50:10.980 | like a very definitive, okay, this could work. We're investing in it. And then, you know, and people,

00:50:16.020 | there's a lot of first time writers who just don't want that to be true. What do you think is going on

00:50:21.460 | there? Well, tell me, tell me more about that. So with the folks who have voiced that to you, is it that they

00:50:26.580 | want to sort of follow the romantic image of the writer, come out of a cave with this beautiful

00:50:34.660 | diamond and then get what they're worth? Is that, is that the, is that what they hope to do or is it

00:50:41.700 | something else? I think, well, here's what I'm trying to figure out. I think it might be,

00:50:45.460 | it makes the rejection proximate. Right. So it makes it too close when you say to them, oh, great. All you

00:50:52.420 | need to do is query an agent. You could do that tomorrow. It's maybe it's, I'm not ready for this

00:50:59.460 | to be rejected yet. I want to have a thousand words a day with, with the perfect, you know,

00:51:05.460 | urban matte tea that I Instagram and do this for two years. And I don't want this to be derailed. I

00:51:10.740 | don't know if that's, what's going on. And then there, but there's such, I have these conversations

00:51:14.340 | with the writers all the time where they invent the most elaborate ways that they're going to get around

00:51:17.860 | being judged first. And I was like, well, why not just see if the idea, maybe it's their mind knows,

00:51:23.460 | like it doubts them. I'm not, but it's always a fascinating thing. I was like, this is the huge

00:51:27.380 | advantage we have over novelist is we find out upfront. We don't have to wait till the box office numbers.

00:51:32.100 | Yeah. I would say, I think that now that you're explaining it and giving some examples, it's

00:51:39.140 | avoiding judgment, it's avoiding feedback. And this is where Seth Godin has so many great things to say.

00:51:47.860 | And I can't remember who first said this, but you know, no product survives first contact with customers.

00:51:53.700 | And what Seth would say, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he said, you know, changing the world and creating

00:52:01.620 | this and doing these giant things that you can hide behind the big. He's like, find your smallest

00:52:07.460 | viable audience and get in front of them as quickly as possible. And then you can't hide, right? If

00:52:15.300 | getting it, if having three of my friends play test, my, my shitty prototype is, is doable tomorrow.

00:52:22.660 | I it's, it's, it's almost impossible for me to come up with excuses why that isn't something I,

00:52:29.060 | I can do. Right. But if I'm like, I want to create the game, that's the combination of this,

00:52:34.660 | this, this, this, and this bestselling game, it's going to take me nine months. I have a plan and then

00:52:38.980 | I'll be ready to finally show it, to debut it on the stage at the world expo or whatever.

00:52:46.100 | I think underneath it all. And it's often, I would suspect subconscious people are just afraid

00:52:51.460 | of it being rejected. And for me, the problem is the label as is often the case, right? It's like the,

00:52:59.540 | the labels you use and the words you use matter, they form your thinking and your beliefs and your

00:53:05.220 | reality. So for me, it's just feedback. It's people who are helping me make something better. That's it.

00:53:12.820 | Right. That's it. And that's like having a very rough draft and having people who care about you,

00:53:21.140 | who have a good eye, giving you feedback on that rough draft. They are helping you make something

00:53:25.380 | better. Now, if you're dealing with strangers, of course, they may not do it in the most delicate

00:53:29.620 | fashion possible, but nonetheless, they're still helping you get closer to something better. So

00:53:37.700 | the, the first contact is tough. And a lot of people may not realize, I mean, if you get good,

00:53:44.100 | especially in the early days at selling nonfiction books, you're basically fundraising for a startup,

00:53:50.820 | right? It's like, you're putting, you're putting together a book proposal. What is that? It's a pitch

00:53:58.020 | deck slash fundraising presentation is what it is. And a lot of the stuff you would see for people

00:54:06.340 | raising money for Uber or anything else. It's going to be the same stuff. How big is the market?

00:54:11.860 | Yeah. Right. Do you have access to the market? What's the basic premise? Why doesn't this exist

00:54:17.300 | in the market? Or why does it echo something that's already working? Okay, let's see a sample,

00:54:22.420 | right? Which would be the equivalent of like a super rough mockup prototype. And

00:54:29.300 | they want to know that it is as close to a sure thing as humanly possible. And then you get this

00:54:36.900 | advance, AKA like seed funding, right, to get you to the next milestone. And they're like, well, if this

00:54:42.500 | goes well, we'll have more to pay you, right, which is paying you in installments. It's the same thing.

00:54:47.220 | Same idea. Whereas fiction, man, that's a tough game. I mean, having to write it first. I mean, that's,

00:54:54.500 | I would prefer to do it, honestly, because the prospect of selling a fiction book, which I could

00:55:00.900 | probably strong arm someone into doing if I wanted to, right, I could have some publisher cover their

00:55:06.100 | eyes and say, I hope you don't get me fired. Right. And like, yeah, I have channel, I wouldn't want to do

00:55:10.420 | it because the pie on the face would be so much more dramatic. Yeah. If it came, whatever it is,

00:55:18.100 | six months before this thing supposed to be published. Yeah, I'd rather just have a couple of

00:55:22.500 | sample chapters. And they're like, Tim, I love you. And this is terrible. But good news. There are steps

00:55:28.980 | you can take to make it not terrible. And here's like, we love you your book about bare bow archery.

00:55:34.580 | We get that you're passionate about it. 800 pages. I don't know. Yeah.

00:55:39.220 | Yeah. There's a lot in here about string density or tension or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:55:45.060 | So tell me if this is right or not. Like if I'm, this is like, I'm putting an arc from afar on your

00:55:52.180 | life. So you can tell me if this is, this is right or not, because I've been writing recently about this

00:55:56.660 | idea. I've been using the term engineered wonder. I had a recent newsletter post about this talking about

00:56:02.420 | Walt Disney. And there's a certain point in his, his career is post-World War II. The studio was

00:56:08.020 | struggling. He was in a malaise and he went all in on, he was building a one eighth scale model

00:56:13.780 | working steam train. He went all in on this for like a couple of years.

00:56:18.500 | And then he shut it down and like came out of that and built Disneyland. But there was like something

00:56:23.460 | about this activity. He was all in on something. It was like, it wasn't a core. This is the next

00:56:28.740 | movie we're doing as our studio or whatever. It like re re-energized him. They sort of got

00:56:33.460 | different parts of his brain and nervous system active again that weren't before.

00:56:37.220 | And it led to, you know, all sorts of other stuff as well. And I was making this argument like this is

00:56:42.260 | important, like engineered wonder, a project you do just because my, my, my two aspects where it's

00:56:47.620 | fascinating and then you tend, like you take it far. It can't just be, I took dance lessons. It has to be

00:56:54.020 | like, you know, I, I want to compete and win. It's not just, Hey, I built a game to play with my

00:56:58.500 | friends. It's like, I want it. And let's, let's try to go all the way and do it in Walmart.

00:57:01.780 | So it seems like if we're looking at your life pre four hour work week, because in four hour work

00:57:10.660 | week, you talk about your life, like right before four hour work week, like this period where brain

00:57:15.540 | quickened, you stepped away and made it like, I'm going to have a lot more time. You had a lot of that

00:57:19.860 | going on, right? A lot of the things you document in like your first book was just things that were

00:57:25.380 | interesting and you pushed it really far because like life is, I mean, that's, that was the thesis of

00:57:29.860 | that book. You're doing this now as well. I mean, it's, you know, there's cock punch before that

00:57:35.940 | and you have the game and just like things that are just interesting to you, right? Like that, right.

00:57:39.860 | Folks. Yeah. That's what it was called. Everyone knows what I'm talking about. Uh, and there's a lot

00:57:46.100 | of this going on and it seems like from afar, this is where I want you to tell me if I'm right or wrong,

00:57:50.100 | is that there was like a period in between where things seemed maybe a little more grinding.

00:57:53.140 | Yeah. I'm thinking about like when Ryan was working for you, it was like, this book was successful

00:57:58.980 | and there's these events we're doing and the books, the new books were taking like forever

00:58:02.580 | to write or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

00:58:04.180 | Is there an arc there where like you're returning the engineered wonder or am I simplifying things?

00:58:09.460 | I want to take a quick break from our conversation to talk about the presenting sponsor for today's episode,

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00:59:05.380 | it's really cool. Jesse, can we load the reclaim.ai website? So here we go. Here's their website. The tagline,

00:59:12.340 | get your time back with AI. You're talking my language already, but I want to scroll down to the

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01:00:34.260 | but instead of just scheduling you whatever random time is available, it actually knows about deep work

01:00:39.140 | and focus time and recovery. This is AI I can get behind. So here's the thing. Reclaim doesn't

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01:01:05.380 | Cuts overtime nearly in half and sees major drops in burnout and context switching. That is the third

01:01:11.140 | term I love that they're using. Here's what I think, Jesse. I think I have one of those like split

01:01:17.540 | personality Jekyll and Hyde things. And what I didn't realize is that like at night when I thought I was

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01:02:27.540 | that discount code CAL20. That's reclaim.ai/cal. All right, that's cool. But now let's get back to my

01:02:35.860 | conversation with Tim Ferriss. I don't think you're simplifying things. I would say you are simplifying

01:02:41.700 | things, but you're simplifying correctly. It's the right direction. Yeah. So here's what I would add to

01:02:48.980 | that because I think you're right. I've always, well, let me rewind. I think we can mine a lot of very

01:03:00.180 | valuable stuff from our childhood and younger lives. Like the obsessions that we never got tired of.

01:03:09.060 | I think there's a lot there, which doesn't mean, oh, I liked My Little Pony. So I'm going to go

01:03:16.020 | strike a licensing deal with My Little Pony. But it's like, what is that? What about it?

01:03:20.020 | Like dig in. And surprisingly often, I've tried this a number of times in the last

01:03:26.900 | handful of years, that stuff still works. There's like this little genie in a bottle

01:03:33.140 | that you can tap if you figure out why those things did what they did.

01:03:37.460 | Things when you were young. Yeah. Like really captured you. Really captured you.

01:03:42.740 | Feelings of locked in fascination. Yeah. Fascination dragons when you're

01:03:46.660 | 12. Obsession, losing track of time. Yeah. Those things still work. So for instance,

01:03:51.780 | the last few years, I wanted to be a comic book penciler forever. Meaning I wanted to draw comic books,

01:03:56.820 | like Marvel stuff. And I used to get lost in art for decades. And then when I graduated from college

01:04:06.340 | and I got, you know, serious job and I was like, okay, that stuff's for kids. Let's move on. Like

01:04:10.660 | focus on the real stuff, read books by Richard Branson and this and that, the other thing. And like, yeah,

01:04:15.540 | put on some blinders and what I realized over time is that those activities, those, those like time

01:04:26.420 | passing without you realizing it kind of loss of the self, like the fixation on the self dissolving away,

01:04:33.700 | those aren't optional frivolous things. And I would maybe compare them to like the,

01:04:43.940 | I don't know the coal, like furnace room in a gigantic ship. It's like the energy that is produced

01:04:51.620 | from that preserved and produced, right? Just like the recharging and everything that that room provides

01:04:57.540 | is necessary for the entire ship. It's not compartmentalized in that one area.

01:05:02.420 | So when you find something like this, which doesn't need to take a long time, honestly,

01:05:09.460 | for me, it could just be screwing around with the tutorial on YouTube with Procreate on an iPad and

01:05:15.140 | doing, you know, 20 minutes of drawing at some point after work, just to bookend work, right? The,

01:05:21.700 | like the shutdown complete, right? Uh, now typically if I do 10 or 15 minutes, it's going to turn into an

01:05:29.380 | hour and I'm gonna be like, Oh my God, I'm hungry. I totally forgot that I was doing this. And that is

01:05:35.460 | like an extra four hours of sleep. It's incredible how much energy you can derive from that. And so I

01:05:41.940 | would say like four hour work week, another way to chart the course would be like four hour work week,

01:05:46.340 | which was about, let's just call it like per hour productivity. How do you maximize that? Right. And then

01:05:52.740 | for our body, once again about performance, but everything physical

01:05:57.700 | for our chef confusingly to a lot of people, actually a book about accelerated learning,

01:06:02.100 | right? So, but once again, it's like, how do I do more with each minute? Basically

01:06:05.780 | then started extending into tools of Titans and tribe of mentors where we get a little more philosophical.

01:06:14.900 | Maybe that's me getting older. I think it's me also realizing how much with every passing year, like

01:06:20.420 | how few things really matter. Again, any possible way you could assess it, but certainly just in terms

01:06:28.500 | of quality of life, relationship quality, the things that make humans human. And so I had the philosophical

01:06:35.940 | kind of stoicism angle, right? It was writing about stoicism and, and other schools of philosophy

01:06:41.700 | starting maybe let's call it 10 years ago. And the missing piece was just this engineered wonder that

01:06:52.420 | you're describing, right? I touched on edges of it. This, this engineered wonder awe in the last few years,

01:07:00.500 | like really paying attention to awe and what it does to people. There are some very interesting

01:07:06.500 | discussions of this in the scientific literature and achieving that in a number of different ways,

01:07:14.020 | right? Immersive nature with very close friends, which I'm doing next week, literally taking a week

01:07:19.220 | completely off the grid up in the mountains of Montana with a few friends, learning wilderness survival

01:07:25.380 | skills, carrying stuff around all day. And then also play. And I think play, play sounds frivolous to a

01:07:37.700 | lot of folks who are like, I still have places to go things to do. And I guess my point would be like,

01:07:42.100 | play feeds into productivity. If I, if I need to present it in a way that is palatable to type A people like

01:07:51.700 | myself. Right. It's it's that engine room in the ship, like a former right-hand man wrote a book

01:07:57.620 | about that. Yeah. Charlie's book. I remember exactly that to me. It's an influential book.

01:08:01.780 | Play, play it away. Yeah. Charlie on. Yeah. So, and, uh, it doesn't need to, it doesn't need to distract.

01:08:09.460 | It honestly preserves and fuels you so that you can be actually better at discerning what matters. I think,

01:08:18.980 | like if you don't have time to meditate for 10 minutes, if you don't have time to play a game

01:08:22.340 | for 10 minutes, like you need to take a full week and sit down and do some hard thinking and journaling.

01:08:29.300 | Right. Yeah. Uh, because that is basically a preview of burnout and implosion, I would say,

01:08:38.020 | based on my, my lived experience and the lived experience of a lot of people in my audience.

01:08:42.580 | Uh, and we, we could certainly talk about a lot of other elements, but I do think the,

01:08:46.980 | the, the engineered wonder, the play, the joy, the awe, which are kind of, I would say

01:08:56.260 | kind of the ends of the spokes feeding back to something central that is, is kind of the same

01:09:02.340 | thing. It's like a constellation of all of those is incredibly valuable. And if you get a little,

01:09:10.980 | this is going to be a big word folks, sorry if this sounds overstated, but like transcendence. And all I

01:09:15.780 | mean by that is you stop the me, me, me, I, I, I song for 10 or 15 minutes. Oh my God. Can that be

01:09:25.220 | like just a revelatory experience that you can build into your life. And with all of the powers that be

01:09:36.020 | and teams that exist every time you open your phone to exploit the me, me, me, I, I, I song to make you

01:09:45.780 | use these things incessantly. Yeah. I, I really think you need these moments where you are not fixated on

01:09:52.740 | the self just for, for S for self-preservation, but also just to enjoy this. As far as we know,

01:09:58.340 | one way ticket ride that we all have. I mean, is there, it seems like there's an irony

01:10:03.380 | that like you, you, you wrote a book trying to explain to people, because you're talking about

01:10:07.620 | many retirements. It was to go have these moments. Yeah. Like, hey, get the helicopter ride up to the,

01:10:13.380 | the wine country and, you know, Argentina, Argentina, right? Like go to do the, the tango dancing, you

01:10:20.260 | know, there's like, right. But write a book to tell people about this, right? Like you said, yes, it was

01:10:25.060 | about getting more out of each minute, but on behalf of reducing the footprint of work. Um, right. But then

01:10:31.780 | this seems ironic, but maybe I'm just misreading. It's a little bit ironic that writing a book,

01:10:35.940 | explaining to other people, Hey, here's what I'm doing. I'm getting all these moments. My life is

01:10:40.100 | built around these moments of like transcendence and like engineered wonder the success of that book,

01:10:44.820 | then like took a lot of that out of your life because now it's like, I have to write the next

01:10:48.660 | one and I want to try TV and let me try this, but let me try this instead. Like, it seems like,

01:10:52.660 | I don't know if that's quite right, but like the ironies of the professional world

01:10:56.660 | is you're so successful telling people about the joys of it that they took away your time to

01:11:04.580 | keep doing that. I think that's true for anyone who is successful in anything

01:11:13.700 | to the extent that they get noticed in any way. It could be, it could be as a chef,

01:11:21.860 | it could be as a writer, it could be as a coder, as a programmer, like a really good UX designer.

01:11:28.500 | The thing that you love doing, right. To come back to that endurance, right. You're not only good at it,

01:11:35.540 | but you really enjoy doing it, which gives you all the fuel, the endurance to outlast other people who

01:11:41.860 | might have hypothetically the chops, but they don't have the, like, so you've got the, you've got the

01:11:46.660 | love, you've got the ability, you're really good at doing something before you know it, you're going to

01:11:53.940 | get more attention and you will almost inevitably get pulled away from that thing. Right. So if you,

01:12:01.460 | if you're the, this is just an example, it's really common in startups, but it's like, if you're really

01:12:05.460 | good at that thing, boom, before you know it, you're a manager. Yep. And then a few years later, you're

01:12:10.340 | gonna be like, how did this happen? My whole week is meetings. Yeah. I'm not doing the thing I want to

01:12:16.420 | do, but if I wanted to be an independent contributor, like I'm going to have to take this big cut in my pay

01:12:22.340 | and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then you have golden handcuffs in a way with authors very frequently.

01:12:28.740 | I'm sure you've seen this before. It was like, you, you, you've create this thing while nobody's

01:12:34.740 | really paying attention to you. And then all of a sudden the floodgates open. And we chatted about

01:12:40.900 | this before recording a little bit, but this is why I have this 800 page draft, please shoot me now,

01:12:45.780 | but of a book about all the ways that you can say no. And the strategies I've used for the last,

01:12:51.380 | whatever, almost 20 years, I didn't have that toolkit because I didn't have the problem of

01:12:57.380 | this huge paradox of choice in the same way. So what did I do? Just like many authors, I was like,

01:13:04.260 | you're going to pay me to talk for 60 minutes. Hell yeah, I'll do that. And just said yes to everything.

01:13:10.740 | And then you end up this like traveling salesman, like George Clooney. And what is it

01:13:15.380 | up in the air or whatever that movie is? And you realize this sucks. The thing that I, that I,

01:13:22.740 | that I was good at, they got me here. I no longer have the space to do because as I mean, you're kind

01:13:29.300 | of the, the archdeacon of deep work, right? You can't cobble together half hour here, 45 minutes there

01:13:36.340 | to get what you would get after out of a half day or a full day of writing. You just cannot

01:13:40.340 | do it. At least I haven't met anybody who can do it. And so then becomes right. The great divestiture,

01:13:49.300 | figuring out how to get back to these things that got you there in the first place without getting

01:13:55.540 | distracted by, and you're going to get distracted. So it's, it's kind of like meditation. Like your

01:13:59.220 | monkey mind is going to be like, yeah, email porn. Here's calendar. Like the, the argument you had

01:14:04.180 | with your ex 20 years ago, whatever, like your mind is going to do that. Well,

01:14:07.780 | if you could combine email calendar and porn though, I think you have a startup.

01:14:10.900 | I think you got a unicorn email hub premium. So

01:14:16.260 | that stuff's going to come up. But the point that I think it was Sharon

01:14:21.460 | Salzberg who made this point to me, she said, maybe it was Tara Brock. I can't remember, but she said,

01:14:25.540 | it's, you're not trying to eliminate thought. Every time you take the fishing rod and reel yourself back

01:14:32.660 | from those thoughts to your breath or whatever, that's a rep. That's like doing a bicep curl.

01:14:38.260 | It's like, you're going, you're going to get distracted by shiny things, everything.

01:14:42.660 | At least once you set foot in this like attention UFC, that is digital, anything

01:14:51.300 | you're going to get distracted. So the question is, how do you reel yourself back in? How do you create

01:14:57.380 | scaffolding and systems? And, and you're right. So I have, I have at various points been pulled away.

01:15:06.260 | That's going to happen. So it's just a question of how you get things in your calendar

01:15:12.740 | that actually matter. Right. So for me, it's like one group dinner a night with, it seems to be like

01:15:20.660 | three plus friends, but not too many, like, let's call it like three to six people total, huge quality

01:15:28.100 | of life. Yeah, huge, huge. Like I can't even put any kind of number on it and get the, if they're not in

01:15:35.860 | the calendar, they are not real, like get them, get them booked, get the people committed. And so you

01:15:41.860 | can't back out with some lame ass excuse. Cause you're like watching an extra Ted talk that you

01:15:46.020 | don't need to watch or whatever. Right. Yeah. You're on your calendar, porn, email, calendar porn.

01:15:52.340 | Yeah. Well, can I, I kind of want to get your help on this. This is, this is when I would probably at

01:15:57.300 | three of the, probably at two in the morning, you know, like in the middle of the night tonight,

01:16:02.020 | I'm going to buy yet another useless domain. It's going to be huge just in case before this

01:16:09.460 | podcast comes out. One of the most popular things out there. Well, I feel like you're ahead of me on

01:16:14.260 | the divestiture, right? Like you, you got more serious about this. I don't know when you would

01:16:19.060 | say you got more serious about it. It's why I liked that you were, you were working on this concept.

01:16:22.740 | I feel like right now in my life, I call it the, I'm the great disappointer. And I feel like you,

01:16:27.780 | you went through this, there's your next book title because the way people, which is natural.

01:16:33.940 | The problem is it's, it's asymmetric for like an individual who's asking you for something.

01:16:39.220 | They're simulating just the time commitment of the thing they're asking you about. And when seen in

01:16:44.100 | isolation, it's like often reasonable, or as you was speaking, the reward is really high. And in

01:16:48.740 | isolation, they're like, I don't understand why you want it. It's 60 minutes and it's some absurd amount

01:16:53.620 | of money. Or it's like, can't you just come by our company and just like talk about deep work for a

01:16:59.540 | while? Or let's just meet up and have a coffee. Yeah. We have a coffee. Yeah. You know, in isolation,

01:17:03.620 | it's nothing, but then it's asymmetric because there's 30 of those coming in and then that's all

01:17:08.740 | you're doing. And so I feel like my speaking agent thinks I'm clinically insane because like, I just,

01:17:14.420 | I'm like, I don't want to speak. I have like the worst speaking client. I was like, I'll do three

01:17:17.620 | times a year. Right? Like I, I just, I just say no to everything. Uh, all of our like extended circle,

01:17:23.220 | it's like all friends of friends are always like, why can't you just come talk about deep work? You

01:17:27.220 | know? And I'm always like, I just, I can't, or like, I'm just saying no to everything, but it feels,

01:17:31.380 | it feels sort of, uh, haphazard. When did you're like, when did you switch to the great divestiture?

01:17:36.100 | Like at some point, I S yeah, I started, I, it, it took different forms. So I'd say the,

01:17:42.900 | the great divestiture in terms of figuring out strategies and tools and systems for saying no,

01:17:53.540 | or simply not seeing categories of things that I have decided I need to say no to even for a limited

01:18:01.060 | period of time. And you do full categories. It's just easier. It's just easier.

01:18:05.060 | I have a policy, right? No speaking for six months, zero. And if you break your own rules,

01:18:09.940 | all is lost, right? Like you can't, because here's the beers. And this is going to get into some woo,

01:18:15.940 | like a Venice slash Topanga hand wavy stuff. But my experience is as soon as you set a policy,

01:18:23.140 | like no speaking for six months, the best offer you have ever seen is going to come through the doors

01:18:28.660 | in two weeks. So you can almost like trick the universe. Like, yeah, you just have to be,

01:18:33.540 | and you just have to say, not today, say not today. And you gotta say no.

01:18:38.020 | Yeah. I mean, and this is literally true. Like I literally, it just makes me think about it,

01:18:42.420 | getting, you know, an offer from a Sultan. Yeah. And that sounds like a made up thing,

01:18:46.900 | but actually I was talking to a couple of someone else who had the same offer come across. That's

01:18:50.500 | the type of thing that comes across. We like your book. We're bringing you out. You can like dance for

01:18:55.540 | us and you know, whatever. And I just keep saying, well, keep adding zeros till you say no,

01:18:59.620 | like that type of stuff. So I said no to that. I say, but this is why my speaking agent thinks

01:19:02.580 | I'm crazy, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not moved by money. Okay. Yeah. So whole categories.

01:19:07.140 | You should write a book called tactically insane. Maybe that's the next one.

01:19:11.700 | And, uh, I mean, it just brings up the G to Krishnamurti quote, like it is, it is,

01:19:17.220 | is not the indicator of health to be profoundly adjusted to a sick society, something like that.

01:19:21.700 | Right. Uh, and so in the beginning it was figuring out systems for saying no, because it was, it was,

01:19:28.820 | it was literally just like, how do I stop drinking from this fire hydrant or like, how, how do I just

01:19:36.020 | get out of this flow? Because currently the inbound is so overwhelming. That was, that had to start

01:19:42.980 | around 2008. Now, given the, the book came out April 20 2007, it took a while to get to, I mean,

01:19:52.820 | it hit the New York times right away, but tickets number one took until August. And then as soon as,

01:19:59.140 | is that happened, then all the offers start coming in and then you pay the piper like six months later,

01:20:04.260 | six to nine months later. And then I was like, oh my God, is this my life now? Wait a second. It's

01:20:10.260 | like, it's a quality problem, but this is also in some ways like a very, it's a creative, it's a

01:20:15.940 | creatively terminal problem, right? Like if I keep doing this, my creativity, my flexibility,

01:20:22.580 | my identity becomes fixed if I keep doing this. And that's, so it wasn't until later,

01:20:31.140 | I tried to find ways around it, tried to find ways to massage what I would say yes or no to.

01:20:36.420 | Okay. I'm going to add, I'll keep adding zeros until people start saying no, all those things can help,

01:20:42.660 | but they don't, they don't provide the psychological reprieve and the energy benefits of just categorically

01:20:50.740 | saying this is a no, which I also did for other things that have been like the most lucrative

01:20:55.060 | thing in my life, angel investing. In 2005, I was like, why I'm taking a long startup vacation or in

01:21:00.260 | parentheses, why does it know, how does it know when it matters most? And I stepped out kind of at the

01:21:04.980 | peak of my powers in Silicon Valley to stop completely for three to five years, probably.

01:21:12.100 | Yeah. And that's what allowed me to really focus on the podcast.

01:21:16.580 | Did you get a reprieve when you said break from books?

01:21:19.380 | Oh, huge, huge, huge, huge. Yeah. Huge reprieve.

01:21:22.980 | If you could just like not pitch a new book, was there something psychologically different by actually

01:21:27.140 | like saying to yourself, I'm not working on, I'm not just waiting to pitch something next. Like,

01:21:31.940 | I'm not writing right now. I'm doing the podcast. And frankly, for that, that was, I may not ever

01:21:36.820 | write a book again at that point. I was so burned out from, and this is partially my fault, certainly,

01:21:42.500 | but committing to do what should have been a three or four year book in a year, a year and a half. I

01:21:48.340 | mean, it was an insane deadline for this book. I'm so proud of that book. But if people look at it,

01:21:54.180 | I was, I was thumbing through it. I still use the four hour shelf because it's got a lot of,

01:21:57.620 | a lot of great recipes in addition to all the accelerated learning stuff. And I was flipping

01:22:01.300 | through it and I was like, what was I thinking? Yeah. This like four color hundreds and hundreds

01:22:07.620 | of photographs, maybe a thousand plus with a brand new publishing house. Yeah. Brand new publishing

01:22:11.780 | house upsetting the entire world of publishing, going through Amazon publishing a boycotted by everybody.

01:22:16.340 | And I decided what was in BitTorrent involved for some reason for some of the promotion. Well,

01:22:22.420 | every time I do promotion, I try to learn something new using a brand new channel or something.

01:22:27.460 | So we did a BitTorrent bundle, which was actually super successful with a

01:22:31.140 | free audio version of the four hour chef and all this other stuff. And this is something like

01:22:35.780 | my kids generation would like those words mean nothing to us. Yeah. Yeah. Torrent a BitTorrent bundle.

01:22:41.380 | Yeah. They're like with, you know, launching the game, I'm going to have one or two kind of

01:22:44.980 | just, uh, completely off menu, new technologies I'll play with to learn about them and saying no to

01:22:57.460 | doing another book, just saying, you know what, I don't know how long this pause is. Maybe it's

01:23:01.060 | indefinitely was incredibly important also to not to address the isolation and loneliness that I felt

01:23:10.020 | because even in producing that book, a lot of it, as you know, is very solitary. It's very, very,

01:23:16.740 | very, very, very solitary. And I spent so much time alone working on that book. It wasn't good for

01:23:22.820 | me. And I don't think it's good for most people to be alone all the time. Very few people have,

01:23:27.940 | I would say the mutation. It's not an evolved capacity. It's like Robert Caro, like some of the

01:23:33.700 | great like historians who just want to be David Grant at the New Yorker. He wants to be in archives.

01:23:39.300 | Yeah. Just like turning pain, but it's, it's a very specific thing.

01:23:42.500 | I mean, that is, I, I, I really feel like, and sure there are people who are like, I've been reading so

01:23:48.100 | much Buddhism. Like it's, you just need to be at peace with yourself and talk about your childhood and

01:23:52.820 | forgive your parents. And then you can be alone and be happy anytime with yourself. I'm like, maybe,

01:23:58.500 | but if you talk to evolutionary biologists, like I think evolution drives a lot and genetics drives a lot.

01:24:04.020 | We are evolved to be social period, full stop. And if like Robert Caro by any measure is a complete

01:24:12.740 | mutant, right? It's kind of like, if you're like, well, LeBron James can jump that high. Like, yeah,

01:24:17.620 | yeah. I mean, I should be able to jump that high. And you're like, let's hold, hold on for a second here.

01:24:21.940 | I mean, you are not the same, barely the same species. So similarly, after that, the biggest

01:24:30.020 | psychological reprieve was spending time with more people and the podcast was intrinsically social.

01:24:37.460 | Yeah. It was having conversations with people I deeply cared about in the beginning. It was close

01:24:42.580 | friends and then people I was, uh, whose, whose work or lives I was deeply interested in. Yeah. It was,

01:24:49.140 | it had a social piece built into it and it doesn't have the footprint on the rest of your life.

01:24:53.940 | Yeah. Book writing. I'm writing a book now. It, it, you know, I, I'm never not writing a book,

01:24:59.300 | but man, it gets brutal because it wants it. You want every moment of your life that you're not

01:25:04.420 | writing. You're a little bit worried. I probably should be writing. Cause that's, that's the thing

01:25:09.380 | about writing, which is it's, it's so for instance, right. With, with coyote, with this game, it's like,

01:25:16.020 | yes, because of the way my mind works, I thought about it a lot while doing other things, but books

01:25:23.060 | are a different level of preoccupation and not preoccupation necessarily in a negative way. But

01:25:30.180 | when you are not writing, if you're taking a book really seriously, you are consciously or subconsciously

01:25:36.900 | thinking about the book. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it is kind of an all consuming thing,

01:25:44.420 | at least in my experience. And it sounds like it to, to, to, to a greater or lesser extent your

01:25:50.260 | experience as well. But it has to be, it's like, you can do the math. It needs about X number of

01:25:55.380 | thousands of hours of concentrated attention to generate enough words for the book. So like you just,

01:26:00.740 | you're, you're in the red massively when you start writing a book and like, I have to,

01:26:05.380 | this needs 10,000 hours of attention or whatever the actual time is. And so it's a, it's not just,

01:26:10.900 | oh, it's, um, in a degenerate way occupying my mind. It really shouldn't, it's distracting me by showing

01:26:16.100 | it. It's like, no, it like needs, if I don't get another 50 hours in this week on this, I'm kind of

01:26:21.540 | falling behind, like how it has to have making my cortisol go up, just listening to you. You can

01:26:27.060 | tell I'm, yeah, you're, I'm on, I'm on a New Yorker deadline right now. So like I had to take a step

01:26:32.740 | away from my book and it's stressful every day. I'm like, these are days I could be writing

01:26:37.220 | glutton for punishment. Yeah. You should get your Opus day whips out and just do that while you're

01:26:42.340 | sitting. I've got the thing wrapped around my leg right now. Yeah. I was asked to do a speaking thing

01:26:47.380 | for Opus day once that this is the, I mean, back in the early days in Cambridge. Yeah. Wild. Okay.

01:26:53.380 | Interesting. Uh, if you haven't seen the Da Vinci code movie, you can get a preview. It was exactly

01:26:57.860 | like that. Yeah. It was exactly what I was very much like Tom Hanks in that movie.

01:27:02.020 | It was an albino who was whipping himself. It was an odd, it was an odd, it was just him. It was a weird

01:27:06.660 | speaking of it. It was just two of us in a room, just in a room hitting each other with whips, but uh,

01:27:11.460 | good money though. So, you know, yeah, you know, but the money was so good. Yeah. Yeah. Uh,

01:27:15.300 | I remember BJ Novak, who's famous from the office, writer, director, actor, extraordinary.

01:27:20.500 | And one of his tips, this helped me to say no to a lot of stuff actually was

01:27:26.420 | effectively, I'm paraphrasing, right? This podcast was a long time ago, but whenever you say

01:27:31.380 | blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the money's so good. Whenever there's a,

01:27:35.540 | but the money's so good or some variation of that, that is a clear red light. Stop and take a really close

01:27:42.740 | look about whatever it is that you're considering doing. Yeah. If there's an and it's different.

01:27:48.660 | Yeah. And the money is also really good. And the money happens to be great. That's a different thing.

01:27:53.060 | The money is so good. Podcasting seems like the, at least it was, and then I'm going to ask you if this

01:27:58.580 | is changing, but like, it seems like the, the perfect refuge from that, right? Because for whatever reason,

01:28:04.180 | unlike these other industries, you could just podcast and be good at it and successful at it. And people are

01:28:10.660 | happy to listen to your show and there was no one, no one, not, there's no scaffolding of people

01:28:15.940 | knocking on the door and be like, great. Now come do this time consuming thing or that time. It could

01:28:19.700 | just exist as a creative skilled thing where people were just happy for you to do this creative skill

01:28:26.660 | thing. There's just not that many people, you know, you have to deal with like ads or something like

01:28:30.500 | that. I mean, so did you find, I've loved it about podcasting is that no one else bothers you.

01:28:36.420 | Do you think it's still that, is it going to stay there? I mean, I'm curious about your trajectory

01:28:40.500 | because you were there early. Like, are you stick, are you sticking around in podcasting? Are you

01:28:44.260 | changing? Like, well, how do you, what's your read? You got to help me here. What's your read on what's

01:28:47.940 | happening in this industry? What's your relationship to it? Like, is it still going to be this great refuge for

01:28:52.740 | people like semi-introverted creative people like us? I think, I think, I think it will be, uh,

01:28:57.700 | it can, it can continue to be a refuge, but I think it requires setting rules and policies that you've

01:29:08.420 | thought through very carefully, at least in my case. So I found myself getting pulled into the floats and

01:29:14.420 | jets of all sorts of things and then put out, and this is one of the benefits of having a blog, by the way,

01:29:22.100 | anyone can have a blog, but you put out a public policy, which depersonalizes saying no to a lot

01:29:27.620 | of people. Cause you can just say, Hey, I put this up six months ago. I got to follow my advice.

01:29:31.700 | Cause you have an interview show. So everyone is probably saying, yeah, can I come on that?

01:29:36.500 | Exactly. And so I put up, you know, some new rules for podcasting to keep it interesting,

01:29:41.540 | something like that and explain, it's like, okay, here are the rules I'm going to follow.

01:29:44.900 | And I was actually literally just having a conversation with one of my, uh, employees who's like the,

01:29:51.780 | the COO producer of editorial handles a lot of the podcast logistics and we had a possible guest,

01:29:58.260 | great guest,

01:29:59.140 | but a list celebrity and has been on before amazing conversation.

01:30:08.260 | but the rule that I set in that new blog post was I'm not doing book launches anymore. I won't be one

01:30:13.940 | of 20 podcasts that come out the same week and because it's, it seems redundant. And what I will do

01:30:22.980 | though, like if I'm going to consider any book I need to, I need to record and publish three months ahead of

01:30:30.740 | publication. And that rules out a million people because they don't have the necessarily the forethought

01:30:38.660 | to do that or they missed the post or whatever, but I can still point to it. And in this particular case,

01:30:43.380 | this is, this is an amazing guest who is incredibly good in conversation and at telling stories on

01:30:51.620 | podcasts. I mean, a plus plus plus, but they were definitely not going to do me any favors. So it would

01:30:57.300 | have been at the same time as everybody else. And I said to my producer, I just said, look,

01:31:00.580 | if I show people that I am not following my own rules, no one's going to respect my rules.

01:31:07.300 | Yeah. And rightly so.

01:31:08.660 | They're like, look, you had, you had Brad Pitt on during the F1 launch, like everyone else.

01:31:13.380 | So like now you can have me on the talk about my ebook, whatever it is. And which is not to

01:31:20.420 | cast aspersions on anyone or what they're doing. But for me, it really comes back to like, for me to

01:31:27.620 | continue to have the energy and the love of the game to do this long term, I just for myself realized I

01:31:36.900 | need to change a bunch of different rules. So another one was, for instance, I want to have

01:31:42.660 | a barbell approach to most guests on the show, most guests on the show, which is sort of everybody knows

01:31:49.620 | them or almost no one knows them. Right. You're trying to stay away from like the, the very highest point

01:31:55.300 | of the, of the bell curve distribution there. And these are kind of arbitrary in a sense, but

01:32:04.340 | that's rules. And sometimes there is no perfect line that you can point to. So you have to pick a line.

01:32:12.260 | This is true with moral judgments also and ethics, right? Like sometimes it seems arbitrary, but often

01:32:19.220 | it's always going to be arbitrary. So you must pick a line so that you can make decisions. And

01:32:24.660 | it's, it's, it's a hell of a thing. Podcasting, I think will continue to be a refuge. If you want

01:32:32.420 | to play in the major leagues using video as a growth engine, then there are a lot of compromises compared

01:32:40.500 | to what you are, you and I are accustomed to doing. And many of those compromises would require doing

01:32:48.180 | things that are completely antithetical to my reasons for starting and enjoying a podcast in the first

01:32:52.980 | place. So I have accepted that I'm going to make, this has been true for probably a number of years,

01:32:59.460 | significant economic compromises and growth compromises in order to continue doing this,

01:33:07.860 | the way that I enjoy doing it. And what that means is I think for a lot of podcasts

01:33:16.100 | that are not fixed location, TV shows, right? If it's like to call them podcasts now, it's even kind

01:33:21.460 | of silly. There is an audio component. Yeah. They're TV shows that have an audio feed

01:33:25.620 | for people who want to just do the audio.

01:33:30.180 | uh, I think it will return to some of the early days, right? It'll be, it'll be more like

01:33:36.660 | 20 17, maybe 2016 for a lot of folks. And I'm totally, I'm totally fine with that. I'm totally fine with

01:33:48.180 | that because I love having these conversations. And I, I, the only thing that grows without restraint is a

01:33:56.100 | cancer. So you gotta be careful which like professional cancers you choose. And, uh, that,

01:34:01.380 | that isn't to say you can't have something very big that is very good. You can, but in my particular

01:34:06.420 | case, I need to be very personally interested in whatever we're talking about. Yeah. At least that's my

01:34:14.260 | bar because I have all these other things. I don't need to do the podcast. You know, it's like,

01:34:18.420 | I've got the angel investing and the book writing and the game and I'm going to try all sorts of other

01:34:22.260 | harebrained stuff. I mean, you're about to become a billionaire. You're going to get that card game

01:34:27.220 | money to get that bank. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Scrooge McDuck backs backstroking through my, my pool of gold

01:34:34.740 | coins. Um, and it's, it's this, this is also the, my assumption with any of these projects, whether it's

01:34:43.860 | the podcast, right, which I gave myself a graceful exit from if needed. When I started, I just told

01:34:49.220 | my audience, all right, I'm going to try like six to 10 episodes and see how this goes. And I expect

01:34:52.980 | I'll learn these following things, even if I shut it down. Same thing goes with the game. It's like,

01:34:57.620 | I have no idea what kind of doors are going to open, what type of email are going to come over the transom,

01:35:03.300 | what type of opportunities might kind of present themselves in one way or another. So if you were to ask me,

01:35:10.980 | what are you doing after the game? I have no idea. I have no idea. I mean, I'll continue doing the podcast

01:35:15.060 | because having these conversations, right, seeing your face, having this conversation,

01:35:20.100 | just again, coming back to evolved what we have evolved for. It's like, it's very nourishing for me, right?

01:35:28.180 | Like I'm in a good mood. And that's why you care so much about making it sustainable for you. So you can keep

01:35:34.260 | doing it. Like that's the plan is like, you're continually looking for some kudzu has grown in.

01:35:38.500 | Let's trim that off because I want this to be able to keep going. What is a kudzu?

01:35:42.980 | It's an invasive plant that has like native to the like American South that has sort of taken

01:35:49.300 | over a lot of places, maybe like barnacle on the side of the sailing ship. Like you're like,

01:35:54.100 | I got to get those off so this can keep moving. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I really think about

01:36:02.020 | pruning as much as adding, I love Japan. I, my first time ever outside of the United States was

01:36:07.380 | as an exchange student when I was 15, going from Long Island to Tokyo, which completely shattered my

01:36:13.220 | mind in a great way for, for, it took a long time for me to get used to being in Tokyo, but

01:36:19.460 | shoot the Japanese aesthetic, uh, to paint with a broad brush of some of these gardens where you'll visit

01:36:28.020 | some of these gardens and you'll see someone on the ground with toenail clippers basically

01:36:32.340 | pruning away at moss, which is not to say that's what I want to do, but what you remove mattering as

01:36:39.300 | much as what you add. I like that. It appeals to me, the, the, the, the, not because it's minimal, but because

01:36:49.220 | it's elegant, like I love elegance in every possible form, whether it's calligraphy, whether it's art,

01:36:57.780 | like a Frank Miller, for instance, legendary comic book writer and artist, one of the

01:37:02.660 | few people in the w yeah, actually. So yeah.

01:37:06.580 | Yeah, that was Alan Moore. He, so Frank, he had like a dark Batman or something at some point.

01:37:12.180 | Yeah. The, the dark night he did since city 300 since city is what I was thinking. He's got tons and

01:37:17.780 | tons, but one of the few people to be a top five writer of all time, let's just say, and a top five

01:37:23.460 | artist. That's unheard of. And his style has gotten more and more economical, but economical sounds like

01:37:31.540 | you're selling widgets. It's become more and more elegant. Like what he can transmit with fewer lines

01:37:36.980 | has become more and more powerful. Do you think this is possible with podcasts?

01:37:40.900 | You're saying you want to get like, what is the core like for you? It's like, is it, if it's the

01:37:45.220 | conversation, there's the, some platonic ideal of like the interesting conversation, like, let me carve

01:37:50.340 | everything else out of it. Like we don't need a camera on a boon. Yeah, totally. Which I've been on

01:37:55.220 | those shows before. Yeah. And frankly, um, I, you can just, uh, the, listen to your inner animal too.

01:38:05.300 | It's like, what pleases you? It seems maybe primitive, but I mean, our biology has millions of years of

01:38:15.940 | fine tuning pre language. So, so just paying attention to that, like, this is super fun for me.

01:38:24.100 | So if, if I'm, I'll probably sit down and have some tea after this, maybe do some journal and be like,

01:38:29.140 | okay, why was that fun? What was it? Right. It was cause Cal's a sweet, swell, smart guy. Like that's,

01:38:35.540 | that's definitely part of it. Not to, not to, you know, buddy you up too hard, but it's like, that's a part of

01:38:40.580 | it. And we have some, we have quite a bit of kind of shared history. So that's a piece of it for sure.

01:38:46.340 | Uh, you also see things, observe things that other people often don't, right? So the trajectory that you

01:38:53.540 | pointed to like that discussion I haven't had before and the list could go on and on. Like maybe it's time

01:39:00.340 | of day. Okay. Like before getting reactive with any kind of inbox or anything, I did this. I happen to

01:39:08.660 | think that's really important. I'm also creating something before I do any management, right? So

01:39:13.780 | making before you manage for me psychologically, psycho emotionally, huge, huge thing. I don't feel

01:39:22.740 | like I'm just slapping duct tape on holes in a ship or putting out fires, right? This is something else

01:39:28.500 | entirely like this. And so paying attention to that and then testing, okay, let's follow these rules.

01:39:36.100 | Right. And I put in the blog posts of my new rules. I was like, yeah, I could revise these at

01:39:39.540 | any point. If these are dumb, if they don't work, yeah, I'll change them. It's your life.

01:39:44.100 | I'm going to do something similar with the podcast where we're just in our talking about timing and I'm

01:39:50.500 | time of day is very relevant because I'm realizing, I think the best time for me to record my show where

01:39:55.700 | it's just monologue, it's like, I think it needs to be at the end of the day because I was finding

01:40:00.340 | like, okay, you have a show. It's like midday. I'm prepping. We record. I can't do anything else

01:40:07.060 | after that. I don't want to do anything else. I can't go into my email inbox after that or whatever.

01:40:12.580 | And so it was like crushing days. I was like, actually, this should be like the end of the day.

01:40:15.860 | Like we record above a restaurant. There's kind of like an energy to it. And then you can just be like

01:40:20.900 | done with work. And I was thinking like, yeah, that's the whole point is like with this medium,

01:40:26.180 | make it the way you want it to be. Yeah. How should it be? It should be like one day a week. It should be,

01:40:30.900 | do it in the evening. It should be, we decompress at the bar downstairs, whatever it needs to be like,

01:40:35.300 | why not? It's something we can still own. Yeah. And, and also just interrogating what rules you are

01:40:44.020 | playing by that are, that you can completely alter. Like what rules are you currently following? Let's

01:40:51.460 | start there. And how can you play with them? Do a two week experiment. And, and you and I have landed

01:40:57.300 | in the same place, by the way, with in your case, kind of the monologue, but in my case,

01:41:02.100 | it's like, there's a reason why, you know, we're doing this conversation morning, like my time and

01:41:09.860 | your time. And then I'm recording my own show later as a bookend at the end of the day, because I know

01:41:19.220 | like this is my show and doing my show can be energizing, but there's a lot of heavy lifting

01:41:25.700 | also. And particularly if it's very technical, this is going to be a researcher and a, and a professor and,

01:41:33.540 | and ophthalmology, it's going to be very technical, uh, practical, but technical. So I know that after

01:41:40.180 | that I'm going to be, that's like after doing a VO two max workout or something, I'm going to be

01:41:44.580 | spent and that'll be a great place to just like wipe the sweat off my brow and have a snack and

01:41:50.420 | jump in the pool or something like that at the end of the day. So let's take the order matters.

01:41:54.820 | And, uh, over time you can just pay attention to like how your body feels. Are you excited to hop on?

01:42:01.620 | Like I was excited to hop on and see and catch up and just riff because I knew that it would be also

01:42:07.780 | unexpected in terms of direction, which is fun for me.

01:42:10.980 | Not as excited as you'll be for the ophthalmologist though, because that's going to, that's going to bang

01:42:15.300 | right there.

01:42:15.940 | Well, do you know, not to be an ophthalmologist. So I guess I should, I should eat my words.

01:42:20.980 | Yeah. And this also not to turn this into a, Oh, woe is me. You know, I remember back when we were

01:42:26.260 | youngsters, but, uh, very personal interest, right. For the last year, for the first time I've had presbyopia,

01:42:33.300 | which is age related visual decline. Um, also interestingly, cause I looked it up cause I was

01:42:39.460 | like, is that the same as Presbyterian, like the etymology? And it is Presbyterian is something like

01:42:44.900 | governed by the old governed by elders. So the actual word origins are related, but, uh, presbyopia,

01:42:52.980 | it's like, okay. Like looking at my phone, looking at supplement bottle, the looking at a menu and dim

01:42:57.940 | light, all of that has started to go. And I'm like, I don't like it. I don't like it. I do have some glasses,

01:43:02.180 | but I. Welcome to my life. Yeah. I don't want to immediately hop to that. So. Oh, super. You're,

01:43:10.260 | you're swimming against the current here. I was just complaining to my wife before I got on the air here.

01:43:15.700 | I literally said I was at a cop, my, my coffee shop down the block trying to read a book. And I was like,

01:43:21.220 | it's too dim in there. I was like, I can't read that. It's too dim. I laugh because it's sad and it's

01:43:26.740 | true. And it's also has been my experience. Well, I'll tell you something crazy, which it could be

01:43:31.300 | placebo effect. So I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but I've been, I've been experimenting with

01:43:38.500 | software from this tiny startup and it is intended to train simplifying it here. But instead of doing

01:43:46.420 | anything to your eye structurally, it's training your visual cortex to, to reinterpret information

01:43:54.500 | and to improve your reaction speed in ways that actually change your near vision and have only been

01:44:02.100 | doing it for 26 days. It's like eight minutes a day. It seems to be helping. It seems to be helping,

01:44:11.540 | which is, and it's different from visual education where you're training the muscles in the eye.

01:44:15.780 | This is what I've heard about. This is, this is training your brain. So super interesting. I tell

01:44:22.500 | you what, I realize I'm swimming against the current, but this is also kind of what I do.

01:44:28.100 | Right. I get my Tim, this is like Tim Ferriss. Yeah, this is peak Tim Ferriss. I get my kicks out of like,

01:44:32.500 | okay, I am going to go all in and then I'm going to find all this stuff. And I need someone to tell me if

01:44:41.860 | I am being a crazy person. So this interview is actually happening. Okay. So I, so I get,

01:44:46.980 | so I get somebody on who can be like, that's interesting. That's nonsense. Further studies

01:44:52.660 | needed, but like trial data, actually pretty interesting. Don't do this. That's a terrible

01:44:57.140 | idea. You're actually going to blind yourself if you look into whatever, whatever for 20 minutes a day,

01:45:00.580 | don't do that. And that's great. So, okay. All right. Well, now I will look forward to that.

01:45:05.540 | Yeah. I'm bringing the adults into the room.

01:45:06.980 | All right. Fine. Final question. What's your, have you found this because you've been

01:45:11.700 | at this longer than me, have you found the sweet spot for staff size? What does it take to run?

01:45:16.500 | I know it's confusing because you don't just podcast, but what does it take to run,

01:45:19.940 | you know, um, Tim Ferriss allied conglomerate? Yeah. Tim Ferriss, uh, international allied media,

01:45:28.020 | HQ. Yeah, exactly. Uh, I think that I am excessive in my fixation on leanness and elegance. I think,

01:45:38.420 | I think sometimes I overdo it actually often I overdo it, but what I can, what I can say is what

01:45:46.500 | currently works for me after a lot of testing. Uh, and I will also preface that by saying,

01:45:52.900 | I think I am,

01:45:54.500 | and, uh, maybe this for another call, but I think I'm a very good leader, but a very mediocre or average

01:46:02.180 | manager. Right. So I really require people who are incredibly self-sufficient and self-driven and who

01:46:11.780 | have a lot of self-inquiry, which often requires a lot of self-awareness. And those people are just

01:46:15.860 | very, very, very hard to find. Uh, but you can build them, uh, from starting with simpler tasks and then

01:46:24.020 | cultivating that if they have the raw characteristics, you break them down psychologically.

01:46:28.340 | No, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tim Ferriss. The training center you have, the

01:46:33.940 | reeducation center. Yeah. Please relinquish your phone. Uh, so currently I have three full-time employees,

01:46:42.900 | uh, and a lot of contractors and I have tried to contract out as much as humanly possible.

01:46:52.660 | So this will certainly have echoes of four hour work week, right? So my staff size compared to my

01:47:00.180 | business has not scaled proportionally. Uh, what I will say is contractors have, and people might say,

01:47:10.980 | well, what's the difference? Well, if you live in the U S there are a lot of differences here.

01:47:15.460 | Yeah. There are a lot of differences and you have to be very careful with this. You can't get cute and

01:47:19.220 | have full timers who are classified as contractors. You don't have to be doing. Yeah. You don't want to do

01:47:25.060 | a specific thing. It is clearly hourly. It's yeah, but I am, I am willing to, and I'll put this in quotation

01:47:33.220 | marks, overpay hourly for contractors. I am especially willing to overpay for

01:47:40.500 | for let's just say companies where you don't have any, uh, single point of failure. Let me give an

01:47:49.780 | example. So there's, um, I use an outsourced sort of fractional family office, which handles all of my,

01:48:00.180 | right? So there's, there's an annual various annual fees and so on, but they handle all of my bill pay.

01:48:04.900 | They handle all of my effectively bookkeeping. They handle, uh, they can give feedback on

01:48:13.540 | investments. Some considering I can just float tons of stuff to them that they have a first pass on.

01:48:20.500 | And what's nice about that, as opposed to having a single contractor,

01:48:25.140 | I, you know, before we started recording, I was like, let me put on some backup audio.

01:48:29.780 | Right. And I'm recording on QuickTime just in case. So I am excessively hyper vigilant

01:48:36.900 | and the military has this expression, or I mean the military, but you'll get the idea. Two is one and

01:48:42.980 | one is none. It's like, if you have, if you have two, you're going to lose one. If you have one,

01:48:46.340 | you're going to have none. So always have redundancy. And I've been in a position before where

01:48:53.060 | do you have a key function? Let's just say it's for the podcast could be sound editing,

01:48:59.460 | could be video editing, and you have a fast turnaround for whatever reason, and somebody gets sick.

01:49:03.860 | If you don't have a backup, you're in a scramble and in a bad situation. So particularly with something

01:49:11.380 | that is mission critical, like bill pay, if somebody gets sick, I want to know that my

01:49:16.260 | profile my information is within a system and a company such that there's a backup person.

01:49:21.940 | Yeah, someone can pick it up and do it.

01:49:23.140 | Who can swap in and handle it. So I'm particularly willing to overpay for that.

01:49:28.020 | And I think part of that is that I've seen the employee tail wag the dog in some cases, to borrow

01:49:38.340 | from the tax expression, where people hire, hire and hire, maybe it's during like a 2020 boom cycle,

01:49:46.420 | because there's a company that benefited from that, or who knows, they start adding folks. But then they

01:49:54.820 | run into the discomfort and possible complications of firing. So they don't want to fire. So they start

01:50:00.340 | inventing lots of things to keep people busy so they can, in their mind, justify the salaries they're

01:50:06.580 | paying. Yep. And I try to avoid putting myself in a position where even subconsciously I can be

01:50:15.620 | influenced by those types of incentives. Yep.

01:50:17.940 | So on the payroll you're going to invent work and then suddenly you have, you know, you're doing live

01:50:24.660 | shows and you've got, you're selling t-shirts and.

01:50:27.620 | Exactly. Exactly. So to try to avoid that, I really apply constraints, right? The beauty of constraints,

01:50:35.060 | whether you're writing a book, creating a game or building a company, guess what? Like Derek Sivert

01:50:40.980 | speaks on this really well with respect to CDBA, but it's like, this is your chance to try to create

01:50:45.620 | your version of a utopia. It sounds maybe ridiculous, but it is, right? Like there's, you have to do

01:50:51.540 | certain things, checks and balances and dot your I's across your T's from a legal perspective, from a health

01:50:56.740 | insurance perspective, et cetera. But there's a lot of room to do things in an interesting way. I think,

01:51:01.620 | you know, Jason Freed and DHH at 37 Signals do a great job with this. Maybe they renamed it Basecamp.

01:51:07.860 | Yeah. So they, they have some incredibly innovative ways of approaching things. Then you see like a

01:51:14.900 | Coinbase and like what they did and public pronouncements and kind of excluding discussions

01:51:20.980 | of politics from the workplace. Like you can do a lot within your company. So for me, just like my house,

01:51:27.860 | just like hopefully my books or podcasts, it's like my company is a reflection of my personality

01:51:34.340 | with its strengths and almost certainly with its, you know, with the, with its weaknesses,

01:51:38.580 | I try to cover for them. Uh, I, I think I try to make it perhaps too aggressively like a bonsai tree.

01:51:44.500 | Maybe I would benefit from having an extra person or two. Uh, but I have recognized my, my hyper aversion

01:51:52.580 | to waste means that I will also try to invent things for people to do if I feel like they have too much idle

01:51:58.580 | That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So contractors won't make you do that. Yeah. Three employees. Okay.

01:52:03.540 | Yeah. And that determines what, um, what I can do or not do. Yeah. But, but also

01:52:08.420 | that leads me to more productive solutions. Like if I had 10 people who, uh,

01:52:16.340 | let's just say a number of them were kind of off cycle and had a lot of time,

01:52:20.980 | I might have tried to do a game internally. That would have been, I don't want to say a disaster,

01:52:24.740 | but it would, I would have wasted so much time. Everybody would have been learning from square one.

01:52:29.060 | And instead, because I've applied the constraint of keeping the company small,

01:52:32.660 | it was like, no, let's go collaborate. Let somebody else who does this every day,

01:52:37.220 | who's a plus at it, do that stuff. Yeah. Otherwise you would not that this,

01:52:40.980 | he loves this, but it wouldn't be good for you. And I, you'll end up with like Brandon Sanderson's

01:52:44.900 | warehouse. And Brandon Sanderson loves having that business. I find it insane. I've talked to,

01:52:50.980 | I don't know him, but I know some of his people, but it's, he loves it. And I'm like, oh my God,

01:52:54.740 | it's my nightmare. Yeah. He loves it. Like that's, that's part of his art. Yeah. And I recognize that

01:53:01.860 | I, uh, he also has in his wife and other people, folks to run a lot of the logistics and other aspects.

01:53:08.980 | Yeah. One thing I recognize about myself also is I have a tendency to metal. This comes

01:53:14.740 | back to being an average manager. Yeah. You're not gonna be happy with that. I get my hands,

01:53:19.940 | I get my hands dirty often when I probably should just leave everything alone. I'm like maybe an

01:53:26.020 | executive chef who's like running from station to station, like, ah, come on, come on. I'll let me

01:53:30.980 | cut those terms. That's the right place to put the sauce. Come on. Yeah. It's just like, you know,

01:53:34.180 | I got to recognize that this, uh, this OCD thing is, is sometimes very helpful, but also leads me to make

01:53:41.780 | some pretty dumb decisions. So I try to, uh, Charlie Munger would often say, and Warren Buffett too,

01:53:49.700 | right? It's not about being super smart. It's just trying not to be stupid, not to be dumb.

01:53:54.660 | Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. Well, Tim, maybe that's a great place. That's a great piece of advice to,

01:53:59.940 | to leave it on. Don't worry about being smart. Just try not to be stupid too often. Yeah. I always

01:54:05.060 | appreciate you take, I always appreciate our conversations. I feel like we do them both places.

01:54:09.300 | It's, it's, uh, it's always, it's always a pleasure and I'm, uh, enjoyed it and coyote coyote. Yeah,

01:54:15.700 | it's everywhere folks. Amazon target, Walmart, wherever. So hope you hope you try it. It's, uh,

01:54:21.940 | it's, it works. People laugh. It's, uh, it's a, it's a dumb game for smart people.

01:54:29.860 | So check it out. And, uh, always nice to spend time together, Cal. All right. Thank you, Tim.

01:54:33.780 | Thanks man. All right. So there you go. That was my conversation with Tim Ferris. We started talking

01:54:38.660 | about his game. I actually have it right here. Here's coyote. And we went from how do you build a

01:54:43.780 | game that is really good to playing the game of life in a way that's going to give you real meaning and

01:54:49.860 | depth. I have, have you tried this yet, Jesse? I did. You brought it to the beach. Yeah. You took one

01:54:54.820 | of the copies. Yeah. Fun, right? Yeah. It's fun. I like it. It was really cool to hear from Tim.

01:54:59.140 | How hard it is to get one of these games perfectly calibrated. That was the cool part where you have

01:55:04.420 | like the, the prototyping and it's just you tweaking this. What if we change this card to this card to

01:55:09.380 | that card? It's one of those things you think it's like, oh, I could invent the card game. You realize

01:55:12.500 | like, oh my God, it's so hard to make one. That's fun. Um, this is a good one. Tim is always fantastic to

01:55:17.540 | talk to. He's a team thinker. He sits and he thinks, and he cares about living deeply in a shallow world.

01:55:23.220 | To me, that is what the four hour work week is about before our work week, as much as any book

01:55:27.780 | probably helped set those seeds in my thinking about crafting a life that matters and it's enjoyable

01:55:33.380 | and that you enjoy as opposed to just pursuing a particular goal or a single grand accomplishment

01:55:38.580 | that you think is going to solve everything. So I always enjoy going on Tim show and it's been a

01:55:42.500 | pleasure to have him on mine. So thank you, Tim. Check out his podcast, the Tim Ferriss show,

01:55:47.700 | which I'm sure you already know by coyote. This is everywhere, isn't it?

01:55:51.220 | Yeah. You can get an all store show. That guy's got it dialed in. This is not some,

01:55:54.900 | you know, Patreon product or whatever. Like it's a Walmart. Yeah. Good for him. All right. Thanks,

01:56:02.020 | Tim. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week on Monday with a normal episode of the show.

01:56:05.540 | Uh, but until then, as always stay deep. Hey, if you liked this video,

01:56:08.900 | I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.

Tim Ferriss Wants You to Have More Fun. You Should Listen. | Cal Newport

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