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

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Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers from all different disciplines to tease out the habits, routines, lessons learned and so on that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today was a blast. We cover a lot that can be applied to life, business, thinking, game design and a hundred other things.

A lot of tactical advice, a lot of specifics. My guest is Justin Gary. Justin is an award-winning designer, author, speaker and entrepreneur. He is CEO of Stoneblade Entertainment and creator of the Innovative and award-winning Ascension Deck Building Game Series. Prior to designing games, Justin was the youngest ever magic the gathering US national champion.

He has studied creativity and applied the principles of design to create dozens of products over his 20 years in the industry for brands that include Marvel, World of Warcraft and the Wharton School of Business. Today, he designs consults and teaches creativity around the world as a digital nomad and there is a lot in between. We get into the weeds in the best way possible. In this interview, cover a lot of ground, a lot of varied ground. So, I hope and think you will enjoy it.

You can find Justin online in many places. Think like a gamedesigner.com is one such place and I highly recommend the podcast by the same name on Twitter at Justin underscore Gary. We will link to everything else linked in Stoneblade and much more in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast and without further ado, please enjoy this extremely, extremely tactical and I found very, very entertaining conversation with Justin Gary.

Justin, it is nice to see you. Very nice to see you again. Yeah, Tim, great to see you again as well. And you are at maybe undisclosed or you could disclose, but you are overseas at the moment. So, we are across the pond or many ponds as it were.

I'm glad we were able to make the timing work and I thought we could begin with magic. So, magic, magic the gathering is a game that I never really became familiar with because I was older guard at that point, Dungeons & Dragons, a lot of the very first editions. But my younger brother on the other hand really became immersed in magic and actually competed on some level and his friends were just obsessed with magic the gathering.

So, could you please for people who don't have the context explain what magic is and I suppose how you became involved and what that trajectory looked like. Magic is a trading card game invented by Richard Garfield. What trading card game means is that you can buy it not just like a normal game like monopoly buy a store, be a single box here you buy packs of cards like you would baseball cards and each one has different gameplay elements.

And the way I like to describe it for people who don't know is it's sort of like a cross between chess and poker where you get to decide what deck of cards you're going to play and what pieces you get to play with. So, there's the poker element of I'm drawing a hand of cards and I maybe I can bluff what I have and you don't know and there's the chess element of there's tactically once I play those cards there's tactically ways I use them in kind of battle back and forth.

And then of course it has fantasy characters and so it appeals to people who like Dungeons & Dragons so you'll be playing wizards and dragons and warriors and stuff like that. And so, I first got involved with magic in a pretty funny way actually so I used to be on a competitive laser tag league.

So, I have a very competitive person by nature I've been involved in pretty much whatever I do find some way to compete with it and in between games of laser tag people were playing this card game that looked really cool I never heard of before and I watched some play and I was like okay what is that.

So, okay so I go to the store and I just buy a pack of cards and as I mentioned the cards are totally random so I just took all the random cards I bought and just went to go play and I got my butt kicked and of course okay you actually have to construct and build your deck and build your strategy and that helps it come to you.

So, I came back the next week and okay now I played a little better and a little better and eventually at one point all the guys from my group were all going to go to a state championship tournament. And how old were you at this point? I was 16 years old.

Okay. Yeah so I was the young kid so I was like oh hey come along right come on the car ride and you know those are some of my best memories in general just like you know a bunch of guys hanging out jumping in the car just talking about games riding up and as turns out I won that tournament.

And so I ended up becoming the state champion and that got me an invitation to the national championships and again I was not ever taking this sort of seriously I wasn't even intending to go in fact I was supposed to go to debate camp that summer yet another thing I was arbitrarily competitive in.

And it ended up being my parents couldn't afford to send me that year to debate camp so last minute I again my friends were all super supportive here I ran a tournament at my local game store they let me run the event I collected the entry fees from that tournament I use that to pay for a plane ticket to fly to Columbus where the US national championships is happening I slept on a friends floor and I was now 17 at this time and I end up winning the US national championships.

And that ends up taking me on a career of traveling around the world playing magic for a living. So let's dive into a bunch of things that you mentioned and I was not aware of the debate camp component the debating piece. And I have watched debates I've never been part of a debate team could you just explain for folks what a debate competition looks like or a debate as a game per se. Yeah, does that look like and why were you good or at least confident at it.

There's a few different categories I'll just talk about my favorite one was called Lincoln Douglas debate at the time and it basically means that you have a topic that you're debating say the US should have closer relationships with China or it's better to sacrifice the good of the a few for the good of the many or something like that some topic and then you would have to pick one side of the argument. And there's a judge in the room and you have a certain amount of time to make your case.

Then the other person a certain amount of time to make their case and then you have some time for rebuttal and they have some time for rebuttal and at the end the judge or judges would then decide who won. And there's a coin toss to decide who goes first because that seems like a major advantage. It varies right so from round to round you'll you'll go first or second and this was sort of how we did it in high school.

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

It turns out being able to speak good has value. So if we look at say the Lincoln Douglas format or the parliamentary. I suppose the the former is maybe a better example to use here knowing nothing about it but how much time do you have to prepare once you are assigned or have chosen one side of let's just say the US should have closer ties with China and you're either pro or con how much time do you have to prepare that.

And are you just basically making it up but you're using the strength of your logic that you construct even if your assumptions are off to defeat your opponent how does that work. So for those formats the same topic will hold for a while for like months like a season and so you can prepare very much ahead of I say and you know there's got so those formats then there's other ones that like the parliamentary one where you have no idea what you're going to talk about

until you start going up there a lot of the times that was more fun because it was a little bit more extemporaneous there's varying degrees when you have the same topic over and over again you start to notice common threads about how people will present it and then you try crazy things so maybe that the US should have closer ties with China and you take a position actually the US should not exist anymore should dissolve and you start making arguments around that and you just kind of have to take the argument seriously in a sense because the job of the judges to sort of leave outside their preconceived notions and just here.

What you have to say and so having to think on your feet and react and be able to kind of come up with unique answers and change the flow of things was really quite a bit of fun. Okay so I will move on to everybody listening I will move on in a moment but I really want to understand this because I suspect as you mentioned that these are threads that tie into other things later at least some of them like these are not isolated skills and if you're practicing say the part of the game

you're practicing say the parliamentary style and you are developing this approach to structured thinking and presenting and you don't know what you're going to be speaking about until you really sort of get on the stage and somebody hands you the mic it's like free style rap battle when you get up and then you give your spiel how do the judges judge what does that look like because presumably they might not know anything about the topic that you're discussing so they can't

really fact check a lot of what you're saying I would assume yeah that's right there's no live fact checking in these formats so you kind of just have to it's about your persuasive ability so if I were going to break this down into kind of core skill sets and what the judges are doing which is also I'm doing as competitors anytime my opponent is saying something right I'm writing down their points right so I'm breaking them down into kind of concrete notes and I want to make sure that for each point that's brought up I am addressing it in some key way and not a lot of times I can make a lot of

some broader point that will maybe take out a few of their points and because you only have a certain amount of time how efficiently you're able to use that time to both refute the points that they're saying as well as bring up your own points that are hopefully harder to refute so it becomes a kind of process of being very good at listening and taking notes

and being able to structure how do you want to set up your replies so that you're gaining time advantage if you will with your persuasive ability to give you more time to make your own row of arguments so that hopefully they don't have time in their thing to properly address and attack everything. Okay great so as promised I'm going to move forward. This is great I've never been asked about this before so this is fun.

Yeah try to do my job as best I can and returning to magic so you mentioned that led to all these adventures traveling around the world competing. What does that mean could you explain what that looks like in terms of incentive stakes how profitable is it for someone to be a full time magic player I imagine it depends on the person but what does it mean to travel around the world and compete.

Okay we're taking this back now date myself a little bit but this is 97 when I won the US championships and my the core of my career was about the six years from 97 to about 2003. And that time there was what was called the magic pro tour which was put on by the company that made the game as a way to promote it and they would have millions of dollars of prices available so at any given tournament you could win so my biggest tournament winnings would typically be in the $30,000 range so a pro

tour in Houston where I won that or you know these different tournaments so to give you a sense a first place in one of those tournaments was $30,000ish all the way down till top 32 maybe get a thousand dollars and then you have to get invited to these tournaments there be maybe 300 people

that we get invited and so I would do a tournament in Prague then there'd be another one in Sydney then there'd be another one in Seattle there'd be another one in Tokyo and so we've got to literally just meet up and again I'm in high school I'm a teenager right so this is just like crazy

it's a lot of money oh my god it's crazy money right so I was just like such a fun thing but when you think about it as an adult it wasn't a crazy crazy about money but it was great at the time you can't win every tournament but you know when I was playing at my peak it was maybe 80

thousand dollars a year I was making so it's still not that's no joke no joke at that time it was great I mean it's how I paid my way through college you know better than flippin burgers I'll put it that way what was your major in college I was a philosophy major how did you choose a philosophy

well as you might guess I love debating I'm and I love I mean I've always been very interested in just sort of talking about the deep questions right time to get down to the fundamentals of what is interesting and what matters and I tried a few different majors you know a history

and I was on my path to be a lawyer because my parents are lawyers and that's what I was supposed to do but I found most classes when I went to them the job as a student in the class was to regurgitate whatever it was that the professor told you back to them and that board the hell out

whereas in philosophy the job was to make a reasonable argument didn't matter just like in debate right it was didn't matter what your position was is can you defend it do you have good logic for it I loved being proven wrong I loved when I would have this was a kind of

strength and weakness I had I love debating with people I love when someone told me something I didn't know or told me convince me I was wrong I was like that's amazing that's great I took me a very long time to realize most people are not like that in high school I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say so I learned to be a little bit more cautious and compassionate in my conversations with people but I really enjoyed it so philosophy let me explore that space of really what matters in the world and what matters to me and really refine my thinking and get changed

and I was challenged on my thinking when I was unclear or fuzzy I want to mention for people who may not notice this pattern that on this podcast there is disproportionate representation of former philosophy majors however that could be severe survivorship bias I'm sure there are many many philosophy majors who do not end up on large podcasts however it is notable to me right you have people who are deeply interested in philosophy

also end up in these conversations with me read Hoffman would be another example who I'm not sure if he majored in philosophy but he is taught philosophy and takes it very very seriously why were you comfortable and maybe even invigorated by being proven wrong or converted in that way did that come from being raised in a family of lawyers did it come from something else what contributed to that yes I think there's two factors here I think one

you're absolutely right my parents were wonderful in the sense that as a kid I could argue my way to a later bedtime or I could argue my way to hey I finished my homework I can get an extra setting of dessert or whatever they encouraged if I could kind of debate my way to something that I could get it and so it trained me very young and similarly you know we would you know my dad and I we would be play cut throat games of monopoly around the kitchen table quite a bit and I found they did they reinforced that after the game you know you

like what did you learn if you lost what did you learn from it and that's the biggest thing that I credit for my certainly my success in magic and I and I've tried to apply that everywhere else in my life is that when you lose would you inevitably going to lose in life right doesn't matter what is that you look first like okay what could I have done

differently how could I have set this up differently so that I wouldn't even be in this position right it's easy when you're playing a game like magic where some your opponent draws a lucky card you know it's a one out of 60 that they draw that card and they beat you because of it and you'd hear in the hallways other people would be complaining about what's called bad beats right I got lucky oh my God but the best players wouldn't do that the best

players would say actually you know what if five turns earlier I had made this different play it wouldn't matter what card they drew at that turn and that skill set was something that was drilled into me and it's something I definitely credit quite a bit of success across a variety of fields.

This might seem like a strange question but do magic competitors or did they study games in the way that chess players study historic games of chess where those moves and decisions are recorded in some way I'm not sure if it lends itself to that.

I would absolutely does and people would break these things down so again let's we're going to take a selves in the way back machine right 97 98 this will era the internet is still relatively new right so relatively light and so people would go super to to what what the times called the magic dojo which you can now find like the internet archives and it was where everybody would post tournament reports of okay here's what I played here's what happened and people would comment on them in breakdown you know kind of more classic bulletin board style and that's what.

That's where the core of magic strategy and discussion started to form now there's dozens of sites and tons of places where you can find this but it was a you unlike with chess where people been doing this strategy and break it down games for hundreds of years magic 30 years old or whatever and at the time it was very new and so you got to see the origins of the strategies come together and break down individual games and individual moves and it became obsessed I mean if you look at my old college notebooks.

They are covered in magic deck ideas and scribbles and like at least as much as there are notes about philosophy or whatever it was supposed to be study what were the main. Innovations if you had to try to. Identify some. Game design elements that led to or contributed to magic becoming such a global phenomenon. What would you say were the innovations I mean there's definitely the slot machine like. Dove mean potential of buying these pastures like buying baseball cards right.

But what else is there in the game. That made it at least have the possibility of exploding the way that it did there's a lot of factors there's kind of a deep answer but we have a long form podcast so if you don't love to. The answers yeah so take all the time you want I teach game design and when there's sort of five major categories of like what people are looking for out of games and.

Magic hits all of them in in way so I'll talk about the categories first and I'll talk about why magic succeed in such incredible way. So the first is immersion you're looking for certain experiences are you looking to tell craft a story the second is connection right you're looking to socialize you want to help other people you want to kind of connect with others.

The third is aspiration this is can be in competition this can be like achievements you want to win you want to prove your better than prove you can achieve something then the fourth is growth you want to learn you want to continue to kind of move up and improve your skills and the last is expression this idea that you want to customize or role playing works this way because we express different parts of ourselves the role playing.

So those are the kind of the major categories and I think magic allowed people to both not only have these competitions like I was doing but it allowed people to customize and grow in a world where it's infinitely deep at a certain point with chess it's a deep game but there's only so many pieces I can learn them all I can know kind of the frame I'm playing with magic there's constantly new cards coming there's constantly new things to do and I get to own I get to customize and own my experience.

So to relate it to something like you've more familiar with right dungeon dragons that idea that you get to tell the story that you get to create the character is so powerful and so immersive and magic is very similar if you want to build a deck with all.

With all else cards you can do that if you want to build a deck that has every card that you can imagine is 300 cards you can do that if you want to be the hyper competitive hyper focus guy you could do that there's so many experiences that you get to in a sense design your own game and it's one of the things that I've learned much like you talked about a lot of philosophy majors and up on your podcast a lot of the game designers started from a game like magic or dungeon dragons and because the as you play you're crafting your own experience and I think that was so.

Such a unique and powerful thing and dungeon dragons could be a little intimidating for people because it's so open and it's so intimidated right so complex or at least it can be it can't be it can't welcome it. Exactly whereas magic like you're playing inside of these box and these rules but once you start exploring it then this whole world opens up and I think that was really the magic of it.

I want to quote and it really made it feel like something that was very new and spawned an entire genre of games and I remember one point I think it was certainly at the time I think T.S.R. I was reading this book called I believe it's art and arcana or our cana I'm not sure how you pronounce that word properly even though I've read it a thousand times which is a.

Visual history of dungeons and dragons and at some point they realized one of the major stumbling blocks was people having to develop from scratch their own characters and they provided out of the box templates which was one of the ways they jump started wider adoption giving people an easy place to start with some type of positive constraints let's just say in a sense and that makes me think about

magic now you remind me and listeners of who developed magic so Richard Garfield was the lead designer he created the game along with of course a lot of other people that supported but he was the lead the creator. I remember listening to and you're going to have to fact check me on this but I think I'm recalling this correctly listening to at least one maybe two interviews with Richard on your podcast think like game designer and.

He was talking about game development and I guess folks who are auditing the cards and the decks and the idea that some cards would get retired or removed from circulation or banned because they were too powerful but if there were no cards that were too powerful. That they were also airing on the side of caution something along those lines could you expand on what I'm very clumsily trying to recall from an interview I listen to a year ago.

So there's this idea games of balance which is it's a term that people throw around a lot but gets very confused and the principle of it is that you don't want some part of your game to be so unfair that nobody can beat you if it's a antique tecto if you get to make three moves at once that would be pretty unfair right the game is already over you got your three in a row that doesn't make any sense that the game so fun.

So the idea is you want to you want to make sure that everything you know there's no one strategy that's too good but there's also some people think that that means everything needs to be exactly the same and that's also not true because the idea if every card is just as equally good as every other card then that you deny people that discovery you deny people that ability to learn and say hold on as a new player you don't know anything and then you can learn oh actually know what this card is better than this card or the excitement of chasing and finding something that's very exciting.

That now you can combine with something else that you have and suddenly that gets better and so the way I define balance is not everything has to be equal it's that there's no one strategy that should be unbeatable you know the best analogy is if you think rock paper scissors perfectly balanced game rock is great but if I know you're going to throw rock I've got a plan I could throw paper it up but it'd be okay so there's a lot of ways that you can approach balance but that can give you a sense of like what it should look like and so for Richard he wanted to make things that were exciting.

I mean in Chase and you're really hoping you open up in a pack of course he didn't have any idea that the game is going to be as popular as it was when he talked about in the podcast episode that he thought you would just never even see all the cards that some people would have a couple packs and other people have a couple packs and you just discovered as you went and that is actually it's an exciting prospect but very quickly people would buy all the cards and now there's spoilers on the internet and everybody sees everything immediately and so it's changed a lot since his initial concept.

As the next Lily pad I want to explore one of two things we're going to get to both so you can choose which you think makes sense to talk about first so the first option is your path to where you are now as a senior partner at a law firm just kidding so the so law school yeah the other is what happened in your magic life. After winning the nationals in that story so which of those do you think makes sense to tackle first or you can talk about both in tandem either or.

We'll go and kind of chronology order so that the magic career kind of has arc before my my law career has it's much shorter arc I'm you know 17 years old I win the US National Championships this is like a huge awesome cool thing for me but then I go to the world championships.

And at that point in magic life cycle the US was dominant the US had never lost a world championships ever and I was not just me but a team people that represent the US and unfortunately we did not win we did not do very well and so that world championships I was then had this albatross around my neck of being the first loser US national champion this is the story I was telling myself so I was like okay this is not great and I you know my career was good I was doing good but it was something that always stuck with me and so I kept.

Wanting to try to get back on the national team to like redeem myself so fast forward five years later finally the US loses again loses to the Germans so it's now I'm not the only loser not that I was running against the US but it was nice to not be the only loser and then the very next year I make it back on the US national team and so this is my chance like my chance at redemption after six years and I have with the US.

And I have with two other people on the team and the two people that are on the team with me there were like pretty new to the game they were kind of come out of nowhere just like I did when I first started and I was so committed to making sure we did well I paid to fly both of them to Boston where I was living at the time to like stay at my place and work and we trained for like month month and a half together with my team was your move games was the local store and group we would play test with we trained we slept on my couch we work together.

To be able to make it back to that year the world championships were in Berlin so we're going into enemy territory and it comes down to literally we make it to the final table to the final game it comes down to me playing this match and you know this is we've got stage lights were covering it this is like everything I have worked for and there's a lot of records of the experience but I am like I remember just sort of feeling in that moment that you know I've been in tournaments like one tournaments I lost

there's a certain amount of excitement pressure but for this one it was so much of a personal story a personal kind of drama that I was playing out for me and I drew my hand the first time for this final match where everything's on the line people watching and there's a rule in magic where if you don't like your hand you don't like the starting cards you have you can take a Mulligan and what that means is you you throw the cards away but you get one less card and it's a big deal like less cards is a huge disadvantage in the game but I draw my hand that I'm trying to make this like this decision

and I'm just like all right do I deal with what I have or do I just take a shot and I didn't like the hand I wasn't going to let the world championship be decided on that hand so I Mulligan throw the cards away my teammates are groaning in the background.

Yeah, it's like all right here we go shuffle up draw the hand and it becomes one of those moments where you kind of like see it come together like the hand was good enough we start playing it out I get some board advantage my opponent's kind of on his back foot and he's got a couple tricks I there's some cards I have to play around not really sure

and then finally you know I'm able to kind of get to the point and win this fight after however long people rush the stage like able to finally like take that off of my back and it was a very exciting moment for me it was a very fun journey and it was a result of a lot of hard work right it was like a lot of dedication that got there

but it kind of felt for me it was like the end of my magic career it was like the thing that I had like I had been striving to do that I kind of like check those boxes and that was kind of like what let me move to this next stage. So before we get to your short arc in the world of law was there something coming back to your previous comment that you learned after losing on the world championship stage first was there something you learned or decided to change about your approach after that.

I think that we're talking about years of gap in between right and so what I what I did learn and the major thing that I realized in that like magic is generally a single person game I'm playing a magic and somebody else in the competition but in this case it's a team game

and I think the biggest shift in focus was I didn't just think about myself like I had to think about how do I lift everybody else up and all thrive together to be able to make it through and it really it changed the way I focused there changed the way I focused with other teams I've worked with it made a huge impact and then you know just being willing to again come back from a loss and not let it discourage you that you can't overcome it but I think that being able to work typically most of the games I played have been single player you know whether it was debate or

wrestling or most of magic it was all about like I'm here to win and I think my shift in mind that was no I'm here for us to win and that was a really huge turnaround for me. Yeah it's a big shift in terms of looking through the prison. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs these days every new potential hire can feel like a high sticks gamble for your small business.

So you want to be 100% certain that you have access to the most qualified candidates that's why you should check out LinkedIn jobs. LinkedIn jobs helps you find the right people for your team faster and for free at your job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring.

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LinkedIn jobs helps you find the quality candidates you want to talk to faster so post your job for free at LinkedIn dot com slash Tim that's LinkedIn dot com slash Tim to post your job for free terms and conditions apply. So law school. Yes, tell us about law school. Just to frame this right so I've already mentioned both my parents are lawyers my mom's lawyer my dad's a lawyer my stepdad's a lawyer.

I was debate captain I was doing I was supposed to be a lawyer that was just like my path from as early as I can remember that's what I was supposed to do. And even though I had been making a living and traveling around the world playing magic at no point did it ever occur to me that that I would make a living in games. Not it was just oh this is a fun thing to do while I'm in college I had this mental block and so graduate go get into and my you law.

I teach the LSAT for a while I go to law school and I'm lucky I'm a pretty happy guy by default but this was the first time I was really depressed like I was very unhappy for an extended period of time and I will remember very specifically.

There's one day I'm getting up I'm living in Brooklyn snowing outside covered in ice in the floor and I have to get trudged up put on all these ridiculous clothes and go get on the a train and pretend like I'm not staring at anybody else everybody has to studiously avoid looking at anybody else in New York that's just the rule.

And make it all the way in have my Boston cream donut for breakfast because that's just how I lived back then and I go into this NYU law library which is like you can picture this you just cavernous giant library with old oak and towers of books is back when you had to use books to learn things it was a wild time.

And I checked out you know the blog books I had to read before class and I'm you know stack them up just towers around me and I'm just there and I'm there for hours just like reading case law and just. Not very happy but I'm a couple hours later I realize I got to get to class and so I sit up and I have this jolt of pain through my spine jolt of pain I can't I can barely move I'm hobbling to get out of there I realize I threw my back out from reading.

That is how unhealthy I was how I was over about 40 pounds heavier than I am now how just like miserable I was and I like this is my first clue that I'm on the wrong path and I think this is something I just it's a really important lesson I think for I imagine there's a lot of overachievers in your audience and that this path of trying to win whatever games in front of you.

It can be way worse to win the wrong game than even to lose one that you actually enjoy playing and that was a big shift for me and fortunately that summer I had an opportunity to go instead of interning in a law firm I got to go work on a Marvel comics card game a Marvel versus DC comics card game for a company called upper deck and San Diego.

So summer internship working on comic book games that sounded great and so I flew across country to go and work there for the summer and again even though I knew I was miserable even though I had this terrible experience even though I now had a opportunity in front of me it's still my assumption at this point was I'm going to go back to law school I'm going to go back and that's just I got finished that path.

But I come out to start working on games and I am in love with it I'm super passionate about it I'm enjoying it again we're debating these really interesting ideas about design and definitely happy to dig into what that looks like but then when they offer me a full time job I'm still stressing about this you know and it's still finally when I make the decision I tell my mom she she literally cries when I tell her I'm leaving law school to go become a gay center right like it was so hard and I look back and it's so silly to me this is one of things you've taught me I didn't know what I was thinking about it.

You've taught me I didn't have these words at the time but I learned it from you like this idea of like fear setting where in fact I wasn't really giving up anything I could always go back to law school but it just didn't feel like that at the time and so being able to break out of that spell and then go follow a path that was really passionate for me that I was really excited about one of the best decisions I ever made. How did you find the internship?

This was fortunate because of my magic career they had reached out to me to kind of just like that their game and you know check it out and stuff so some of the other people in the magic pro tour who people who I know had already kind of been hired there so they were like hey and they knew I was miserable I you know chat with them that I came out for the summer come work on this thing you got nothing to lose kind of deal.

Has your mom come around or she still my mom has come around day when you return to law school my mom has come around I'm sure she'll listen to this episode hi mom.

She did she just and this is the thing the people in our lives there's a lot of pressure that we all feel right whether it's from parents from friends from like they want the best for us right so you just want to be happy and safe and comfortable and you know you've got to realize that you in order to find the path that you actually want for yourself the path that you will be fulfilled by you got to be uncomfortable you got to be uncomfortable.

You got to be unsafe parents I think try to protect their kids so much and reality you can't you've got to be able to like push past that and she knows that now and she was very happy it all worked out. Yeah all right well we're going to fill in the gaps for those people who are your mom listening. Since we have a lot to fill in it look now I feel like I should defend your mom also certain paths are more predictable than others.

There is the perception and maybe even the reality of safety consistency stability with certain choices but as you said choosing the right game is more important than winning the game that just happens to be in front of you.

And at least certainly in my experience and the experience of a lot of people in this podcast and just because something is unpredictable does not automatically make it unsafe it just makes it less certain and as you put it many of these things for instance I'll give you another example and this is very analogous when people invoke the names of say Zuckerberg or someone else who dropped out as this throwing caution to the wind burning the boats behind them to take the risk of entrepreneurship.

Whenever possible I try to point out that's actually not the case for most people who say take a leave of absence from a Harvard or Stanford they can go back anytime they want to go back.

Yes 100% and again you've said this better than honestly anybody like this idea that most of the fears that we have this resistance uncertainty is just made up in our head there's so many ways you can recover and go back and if you can just remember that I could have gone back to law school later on when I was in the

game design job started company I could always get another job those illusions of uncertainty and fear if you can push past that it changes everything I mean most of the time we take risks we're not jumping off cliffs or in the burning buildings it's just OK yeah your career takes a different path or you're behind the school or whatever it's a very low cost most often recoverable so I'll link to fear setting and people can just search fear setting like goal setting with a hyphen in it and all sorts of things will pop up if you just search that or go to Tim dot block.

Slash Ted because that was the topic of my Ted talk I suppose quite a few years ago now but moving on from fear setting for a moment it might come back into the conversation who knows but what did that first year or six months month could be the first week.

Every one of the frame it. Of designing games look like what was that experience like it's a really fun question because people just make this assumption that because I was good at playing games then that means I would be good at making games and they are 100% different skills I did not think of myself as a creative person I thought there was just some kind of like magic special

secret sauce that other people had and I was just going to fake it and go out there and see what happened so when I go there I'm having serious imposter syndrome I don't know what I'm doing I don't know how to make this come to life and I researched a ton I read some great books on creativity a back on the side of the head is one I'd recommend and I started to talk to other people who I did respect as designers and kind of break it down and over time I realized that there is no there's no thing that's differentiates like that.

Differentiates like a creative person from a not creative person other than process and so I was an analytically minded person I was able to break it down into what I call the core design loop which is a six step process of how do you create not just games but I think every creative field that applies to and so learning that and I was very lucky I'll talk about the details of it I won't leave you hanging on that piece but I won't let you leave me hanging.

I think you're going to go ahead. Just to a mercy experience of it right I was lucky in a sense in that you know I went to go work at a company where I had a lot of friends that were already there and I had immediate deadlines this game is going to release you have to turn over the file with the cards and the things like within two months and so there was no choice but to act what I say is a deadlines or magic like doesn't matter if you have no idea what you're doing you have a deadline yeah I was literally going to just say the exact same thing for batom and I was going to say I was going to do that.

I was the same thing for batom it's like what a beautiful constraint it's just remarkable what you get so that was I think a real powerful tool about why like so one really short deadlines and my job was on the line so I had stakes right and I didn't want to go back to law school and two that I had other people that I could ask and talk to who are smarter than I was who had done it before and I could get some insight into right so being able to find either books or mentors or other people that you can talk to is also helped accelerate that that eventually turned into this kind of step by step process.

So if you like I can go into that now or can jump to other stuff. Let's actually before we get into the process could you explain why a whack on the side of the head was impactful for you or what you took from that that was valuable because in the course of doing homework for this conversation I noticed that you had mentioned this book before and I actually have a deck of cards designed by the same author but could you speak to I have not read the book.

However, could you speak to why that had an impact or why you recommend it so it's nice in that it helps to in a sense demystify creativity and just bring it down to like a very simple granular level I'll give some examples so you know one of the principles in it is that I've used all the time is basically and I forget how they were in the book but basically like turn the object around in your mind right if you take something that you normally think of one way how many different things you can do.

So if you have a pen you can say all right well what do you do with a pen well you can write with it OK well no I could use it to help force me to smile by biting it I could use it to prop up my microphone I could use it right you trying exercises that give you different frames were very powerful and ways to like break you out of your thinking the idea of using random constraints so one of the exercises that I encourage anybody to do if they want to say if you having a problem some creative challenge some block go to a random.

Book on yourself open it to a random page and point to a random word right some substantive word now figure out how that word relates to whatever your promise and journal on that for like five minutes 10 minutes and you'll be amazed at how all of a sudden it can crack open something because we get so

linearly focused on the problem in front of us and even a completely random constraint can open up the door for you will give one more to just move past the quote unquote right answer you may have an answer and say OK that's fine and you stop. Most people stop instead say OK I'm going to look for the third right answer the fourth right answer the fifth right I'm going to look beyond that to go deeper and find more things so this is little exercises and you can just do those exercises.

Would suddenly see like oh wow OK I'm already seeing myself be more creative Marty seeing myself do more than I was the book was impactful because it could just like by the time I was done reading it I had already seen myself do creative things I didn't think I could do in ways that sound pretty stupid I'm sure to me saying it like you pick a random page of the book be more creative trust me try it you know it works.

Without having read that book I've used this approach and actually writing teachers that I had long ago back when I had hair and was in school. Also would offer these types of random constraints almost like the eaching approach to creativity I like OK you just like throw a bunch of scrap of tiles on the floor and you pick the three that are closest to you and like that's your constraint or that's the filter in a sense or what directs the exercise very very powerful and

I wanted to mention since you were talking about going past the right answer and finding the third right answer actually reminded me of something a former guest's Derek Sivers who's one of my favorite people he's been on a few times and when I asked him who he thought of when he heard the words

successfully said well my first answer might be say Richard Branson but that really ultimately depends on his goals in life and if his goal was to have a quiet life undisturbed by entrepreneurship then that wouldn't be successful so let me skip the first answer get to the second answer get to the third answer

and he said what you should ask people is who is the third person who comes to mind when you hear the words successful and it's really a powerful sure stick that you can use in in all sorts of ways all right so that's a snapshot on a whack on the side of the head let's talk about the core loop before we jump into the core design loop I'm going to give one more thing it's not from a whack on the side of the head but it's something I've actually developed more recently as a process that I

right super valuable and one of the things that we try to do in our company is always surface our assumptions there's a lot of things where you're assuming a game is going to be fun because of this we assume people are looking for that we assume we're

making this category of game etc and if really great exercise to do that's in this spirit is once a quarter will do an assumptions challenging exercise and what that means is you surface every assumption you can you can do this by yourself or if you're on a team

everybody writes down on their own all their assumptions you put them all up on a shared board or a shared Google Doc if you're doing remote like we are and then you one by one okay what if that weren't true or to use your terminology what if I did the opposite and it's so powerful because sometimes it doesn't mean anything sometimes is like okay that doesn't make any sense you move on but

without fail by the time we finish that exercise we find some core assumption that all of a sudden changes everything and that ability to just take what you assume to be true one making it explicit in the first place is super powerful just so you know really what you're doing and then to is this inversion process is incredibly powerful.

Could you give any examples just to make it a little concrete in the minds of folks listening yeah of what those assumptions might be i made this game called soul for with Richard Garfield the guy that created magic and we did this over a decade ago and we made it as a digital trading card game and so purely play on your phone no physical objects at all the game was successful

we ran it for a few years and eventually we we took it down and we were talking about we wanted to bring it back and we loved the game we wanted to bring it back and one of the exercise which is okay so for sure the digital game.

And then we're like wait what if it's not like what would that look like and we had built it to be a digital game but then all of a sudden we're like well now it's seven years later digital printing technology is way better than it was you can actually algorithmically create one of a kind cards and free and things and that started us down this road of investigating

new technology and so the new version of so for called so for fusion is now a physical card game that has this new technology built into which never would have happened if we had just gone with our some sense of okay we're going to remake the same game again so it's like one example of that this recently impactful for me in this. Yeah I love that I have well I can't tip my hand too hard here publicly but I've been very much focused on possibly working on my first book in five or six years.

A long time I was sure I would do another one but I've been very strongly considering it and I've been not in written form which would be more helpful I think but in a sort of meandering mental form which is sort of a mix of like reverie skepticism and day dreaming.

Looking at some of the basic assumptions like is it a book right I think of it as a book but does it even need to be a book period or I should say question mark and if it is a book for instance generally if you're going through the publishing process or you have been through the publishing process your thinking has been shaped in a certain way over and over again you're like okay I have to do print audio ebook and you sell all of those to one person well what if we say what you're going to do is you're going to do that.

Well what if we split those up what if there was no print whatsoever what would that look like and just testing these very basic assumptions right and I'll give you one example also which people might not realize or if you're outside publishing why would you realize this but none of my books in the US if ever going to paperback.

And if you were to ask most authors like why have you gone to paperback the answer would generally be something along the lines of well the publishers always do that a year and a half after the hardcover they lower the price to make the market. Larger for the book and you come out in paperback and I was like but if you look at the math does that make any sense for you and then they think about it and they're like well let me think about that okay I was making 15% on each hardcover book.

Which is already discounted on Amazon to something very affordable. And now when I go to paperback wait a second my role he's just got cut to seven and a half or six and a half now I have to sell twice as many books to make the same amount in royalties oh shit that makes no sense whatsoever it's also not really relevant in a world where ebook is an option if that makes any sense if somebody is looking for a lower price they can buy it on ebook so.

Hence from the beginning none of my books have ever gone to paperback okay so let's if you're open to it we can certainly I love as you know you know this very well I love digging into testing assumptions because yeah your assumptions of the operating system the governs your life in a way and you want to make sure those rules can be justified on some level but maybe it makes sense to hop into the core design loop talk about that a bit.

I think it's a perfect segue because exactly what we're talking about with assumptions is going to come into play in the core design so the core design loop is how games are made tell creative projects are done but we're going to focus on games that's the kind of main topic I teach it so the core design loop is six steps it's inspiring framing brainstorming prototyping testing and iterating so step one is inspiring what is it that's driving you what's the core of what you're excited about so it could be you want to do it.

So it could be you want to make a game for this IP this world that you love could be you want to make a cock punch game could be want to make a game about fantasy warriors right hypothetically speaking or miniatures right if you love miniatures yeah exactly yeah you love miniatures you know you want to make a miniatures game right could be a component could be a theme could be a mechanic could be you want to make a game about dog walking whatever it is right you're excited what is it the heart of what you're doing and in general the heart is going to be an experience you want to create for your audience but you start at something whatever high level thing it gets you excited then framing is a lot we talked about.

Is a lot we talked about right we want to put a box around it want to put constraints around it and so that constraint should always include a deadline ideally short deadline to whatever your next step is so I'm going to have a prototype to test in two weeks it could be one of the most common mistakes I see game designers make the economy okay I want to make a game it's like halo and world of work craft and grand theft auto but like all rolled into one with like a bunch of cool stuff happening right and these are massive games take millions of dollars in teams people it's like well you never made a game before maybe let's start with like.

Simple card game right. So you know constraints with your components constraints with time what's the space I'm playing in step three is brainstorming and brainstorming is where you ideate and come up with your ideas and I'm very particular about how I recommend people brainstorming this comes from research from the

school of business and work I've done with them but the basics are three phases and to get really granular because I know that your audience likes that I break it into three steps 20 minutes each first is where you're open exploring you write as many things as you can as many ideas as you can and don't stop there's always this like critic part of our brain

is like no that stupid know that won't work turn that off just write down as many things you can if you're pen stops moving for more than 10 seconds you're doing it wrong as many ideas you can on the paper then the second stage also recommend 20 minutes is organizing

where you take this massive ridiculous some cool ideas some ridiculous ideas and you start to try to find patterns between them and if you're trying to make something specific you start to kind of think through okay if I'm trying to make a game what's the victory condition how do people figure out what

their moves how do they interact you know you start try to kind of put some structure around it or if it's a book okay what's the opening of the book how is it going to help people who's my audience whatever

this right as you start making these connections you're naturally going to see gaps and you're going to fill those gaps and then the last step which is also 20 minutes is elimination and that's where you you went from starting with as many ideas as you can and now you want to get to as few ideas as

possible so that you can start moving to testing them and so that's where you go and you'll try to like okay what's the minimum amount that I can prototype which is the next step to test my idea to test my assumption to test the core of what I'm doing

and so prototyping is exactly what it sounds like what's you talk about an MVP or you know this minimum viable product what's the smallest thing I can do to test my idea what's the easiest way I can do this and then step five is testing where you actually

go to somebody you get some feedback you actually figure out what's going on there and then step six is iterating where you take what you've learned and then you cycle back through the process and what I've learned is that the skill of creativity specifically with game design but really with anything is how well you can kind of flow through that process and get the most out of each loop and go through as many loops as possible.

We're going to come back to brainstorm a second but what I want to do for people listening is highlight and you said this already but I want to just make a few notes and give a few examples this process can apply to almost anything and for instance you want to start a podcast I'll use that as an example inspiration the matically where you going what is the format that you're excited about what is driving you to be.

Considering starting podcast setting parameters thinking about the constraints what are the constraints how do you keep it. Interesting enough that you continue to do it simple enough that you don't quit after three episodes and the example you gave of like I want to be like halo plus world of work craft plus war hammering you're like whoa whoa whoa easy.

The reason there is an elephant graveyard of a million dead podcasts that stopped after episode three is they're like I love this American life and I think it's going to be like this American life meets cereal meets Joe Rogan and I'm like whoa slow down text there's a reason the credits are five minutes long at the end of this American life yeah I'm not sure you realize how much goes into making that.

And then brainstorming right coming up with whether it's guests ideas for questions etc prototyping giving it ago maybe you record as I did five or six episodes before publishing your first so you have a chance to kick the tires and try to figure out what's working the testing you're going to get in this case right testing with your guests but also with test listeners let's just say and then iterating this also applies to books this also applies to really any creative.

Project that I can that I can think about and to come back to the brainstorming from moment when you are brainstorming what is your personal preferred method of doing this whiteboard versus pen and paper versus typing on a keyboard versus a tablet of some type how do you like to do it.

I am a huge fan of in particular an app called work flowy and it's a totally free app and it's basically a series of nested lists and the nice thing about is is it's infinite so I can continue to make list and you know some listen some list and I can link pieces to pieces and so I find over the years now I've been using that for seven or eight years that is like my personal favorite tool the important advice for people is not to copy the tool but the whatever works for you whatever is easiest flow like the least resistance right so there a lot.

People like notion is a similar type of tool but it's like bulkier and a little bit slower in my experience and that speed is everything I don't want anything that's going to slow me down so that's where pen and paper is great but I don't like unless I have a giant sheet of paper which I do enjoy if it's a big big like poster board and like you markers and bigger things especially if I'm working with a team so either a giant whiteboard or a large poster board on the table because you can all share the same space and see ideas form that I think is great but a small sheet of paper.

For me like my brain when it sees a page start to get full my brain just subconsciously thinks okay well you don't need any more ideas your page like the goldfish and the fish ball right and say all right I'm not going to grow anymore this space is getting a little

constrained yeah so I like work flow because it's got that infinite kind of growth and I can like shrink or grow nodes or like okay I want to dive deeper into this idea and link ideas together it's been my favorite and what are some of the ways that you like to prototype I'd love to know where you think people most often get stuck like in between or after which step do people get stuck and as someone who's been as you know because we've had

conversations about this and you've been incredibly helpful thinking about prototyping and games and design I've been very excited about this for a while now I tend to get stuck the prototyping phase because it's also my first sort of rodeo with this but the inclination is to try to make something that's really good and kind of polished I know I'm not trying to make a

finished product but the more I have studied what you've done listen to the podcast talk to people like a lot of Lee or others the more I appreciate how quick and dirty it is yes yes yes and and also just as a reference I think I have a blog post about Stephen Key who is an inventor product developer who's based in California at least he was at the

time who has done extremely well developing toys for major companies and the toys are ultimately some finished product that look great but he will use construction paper and like newspaper to prototype and based on that and a description and maybe a video of how it functions he successfully licensed products all the time to huge companies so could you speak to maybe the prototyping phase

yes and you you've already hit on the core of this but I'll just leave it keep it simple stupid the kiss principle it is the tendency to over develop and make your prototype super nice or not feel like you can show it to somebody or test it without being too nice is the graveyard of the most games probably of anything on the planet and the most ideas frankly in general so let's make this very concrete probably one of the games I most well known for is a deck building game called

ascension I first prototype that game there was another deck building game and a deck building game for those that don't know is it's unlike magic which is a trading card game where you're buying packs of cards and trying to build a deck in a deck building game you you have a fixed box of cards you buy it like a box like you would monopoly but like during the game you're acquiring cards for your deck so it's like you get to play the game of building a deck

deck building so there was another deck building game called dominion which was released it was the first of its category and I fell in love with that game start playing a bunch but then as I played it like a hundred times I was like you know there's some really some things I would like to see differently I want to see the

cards are too static there's too many rules and resources I wish I could change it and so my first prototype of ascension was literally just instead of having dominion cards which are all kind of laid out at the beginning of the game takes like 20 minutes to set up I just shuffle them all together

and dealt them out and said what would a game look like if it was randomized and I played that way and the game was not good but it gave me enough of a proof of concept that like oh you know what there's something fun here and if I spend the time to do this I can

now move out and just for clarity you were using the dominion cards but changing the rules to see how it impacted gameplay exactly right so if you can prototype using something like a deck of cards around the house or take up a not believe set I know I keep using

monopolies and they have whatever most people know it so you know J. Oh hey what would this look like if instead of going around go you actually had like dinosaurs that would like try to eat each other as you're moving around the board what would you do that's not okay that sounds kind of fun let's see what happens so it's literally that simple so what for my prototyping tools my first round of prototyping is just I have a bunch of stuff I have a bunch of dyson you know my D&D dice

with all the random signs I've got a decks of cards I've got random pen and paper I will draw things in fact yeah like when you and I work together a little bit I showed you some things you I showed you what like my early sketch prototypes look like and they are they are ugly I talk about like the phases of design and and so every time you go through the your questions are go from bigger to smaller and smaller and as you go through it you're going to care about

polish more so if you're just trying to figure out like where is the fun what is the idea what's the theme what what am I doing here you don't want to think about imagine you're building a house right and before you even laid the foundation you're

worrying about the paint color on the walls and where the furniture goes you're not going to get very far you're wasting a lot of time make sure you got a solid foundation first worry about the paint color later and so I think a lot of designers start by worrying about the paint color being wrong and they're never going to finish a house that way okay I'm going to stand in I mean this is a lazy sort of rhetorical trick here but so I'm going to defend the newbies including myself for a second

and ask a question which I think is actually really important at the very least helpful in all sorts of disciplines not just game one of the reasons a lot of writers get stuck or aspiring writers is that they kick out a first draft it's rough it's ugly

it's really really rough on all the edges and they compare their rough draft to the final draft of incredible writers and the rough draft of those writers is invisible they never see that rough draft so what has been helpful to me for instance when thinking about potentially writing comics is seeing the original scripts and how they were tweaked and how the concept art was modified over time to

ultimately land on what we see in the finished product because then I can see the ugly babies in the beginning I'm like oh yeah okay that's very reassuring and it gives me more confidence to work with my ugly baby to try to shape it into something that ultimately is good because if I'm comparing everyone's finished product to my

rough product it can be really demoralizing so the question is is there a way for folks to see the rough drafts of games the prototyping and so on if they wanted to explore this as an example it's one of the reasons why I started my podcast is to sort of unlock a lot of that stuff for other designers I talk about their origin stories talk about where they're

you know the things that inevitably fail you can also go there are a variety of places where people will have prototype testing so let's say you have a favorite game company or games as we do this at stone blade at my company you can join our discord and then we will periodically put play test requests out because we want

to get feedback right we want to get few different people so and they can see how terrible those games are now we've already gone through a few iteration loops before we put it out into the public so to see the most raw forms I think there's not enough of it out there I think it's something I really want to encourage more of because it's really helpful like I've been doing this for 20 years and my first prototypes are hideous so if you want I can share some I'll

put some up on the think like game show comes last year or the show notes yeah I would have because I want to demystify that process it is OK in fact it's better in fact I'll go even further right because not only is it faster you know you don't get hung up on making it really pretty it's faster actually better to change it's easy because you need to iterate right so if you put a lot of time into making a beautiful board and beautiful cards and then you

realize you got to change a card you're going to feel weird about it yeah your sunk cost fallacy is going to come to latch on your back I have a card that I messed up I'm just going to cross out something on it with a marker and write something else and then OK now it's this go and I'm making a

right the resistance to change is so much lower so it's actually net negative for you to invest in making something pretty early on in the process makes perfect sense so you have mentioned your company a couple times but last time we left young Justin in our chronology

he was working at a game design company so yes could you fill in the gap for us and tell us how you went from working for somebody else to working for yourself this is a fun story and this is you actually come into this story too so I'll share it so I moved from working on

pure card games to I had an opportunity to lead a project that was the world of warcraft miniatures game and you know this is a very exciting project for me I get to build something super cool with an IP everybody knows and I had worked on it for about 18 months

and we had the company that I worked for was called upper deck they had made trading cards forever most known for baseball cards and they made you go in this marble game I've been working on but they didn't know how to make miniatures games and so they eventually do if we're going to kill the

project the executives come and they tell us after 18 months of work and I this is pretty common in games but I had never had a project I had worked on get killed like that I was like devastated right when my dream project I'm going to change the world with this game it's going to be

terrible now of a sudden ashes and so I didn't want to let it happen and so I said listen I don't know what I'm doing here either but if you're going to kill the project give me six months let me see if I could figure it out you got nothing to lose and I was able to

convince them to let me become a project manager and try to figure out how to make games how to make a miniature games specifically and so same kind of process like I did when I first started to design I was like OK let me talk to people who know what they're doing I've already got a very clear deadline you know I talked to Jeremy Kramford who's an incredible art director and I talked to the guy that made the Diner of Dragons Mineralines I think I just work months and months and

months try to figure out how to make this work fly to China fly to the factory figure out how the plastics and paints and all this crazy stuff and making it work just for my clarity is making it financially work for the company that's exactly right financially how do you make it work right because Blizzard who makes world of work have to very exacting standards about the miniatures they have to have spiky Paul Drins this high and these amounts of colors and nobody had ever done

anything quite like that before and it needs to be financially viable to make this product for for the company I was working for so there's a partnership and so I have to go figure out all these logistics set all the stuff up finally and this is where I first read the four hour work week so this is actually the super impactful for me and being very efficient using 80 20 principles and I've learned to set up auto email replies of people didn't bother me so I've already getting my

efficiencies in it but I'm in this zone of just I'm going to finish this mission and then I have the opportunity to speak to the executive team I'm going to make my presentation or make my case is this project going to live or is this project going to die and I'm just some

kid who wants to make a game and I've got a convince so I'm there and I will never forget I mean they had this like ugly green carpet waiting to my turn to get called in it just I the details are super stuck in my mind and I'm like you know go down this long corridor and my palms are sweating you know you open these huge like oak doors and this is you know so huge sports memory company so it's like a Babe of sign bad on the wall and Michael Jordan Jersey and like Tiger Woods golf club and the

rich mahogany conference table I mean this is boardroom cliche right but it's like very intimidating for me at this time.

So I get up there the owners like sitting in his leather chair and like staring me down and I'm like OK I give my presentation and I'm stammering through it but I've done my research I've done my homework and I go to the presentation and you know hard beaten finally I stop and this is like pause at the end I'm looking around like what do they think right like to see you see if I was the other big weeks right and they start talking about the idea

and they start just around and I start think oh my God I think I think they like it I think this is really going to happen. And then they start like pontificating and start talking oh well there may be this problem with this thing or this thing and it took me a minute to realize this but I as they were talking I realize that they had no idea what they were talking about.

I had finally done enough research that I knew they didn't know what they were doing and like I just had up to that I feel like I had just assumed that the adults in the room knew what they were doing these to say company that makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year of course they know what's happening and now all of a sudden that illusion is shattered and I started out terrified of terrified I mean we're literally this project you know it's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars

don't make millions or could lose millions who knows and nobody knows what they're doing and so I'm like oh my God like what do we do walk out of that room my heart's beaten and I'm just like what's going to happen how do we do this and then all of a sudden like a cold

splash of water in my face nobody knows what they're doing I cannot know what I'm doing at least as well as anybody else this idea that like the difference between a leader and somebody else is not like that they know something or that they have some special access it said you're just willing to make some assertions and own the consequences that's it that's the difference and so then I finally clicked for me the other parts of your book not just this you know efficiency and automation right but

this idea of defining what you want and then creating the freedom for yourself to do it and so that's where I suddenly started doing the fear setting exercise and going okay what's the worst case scenario for me if I quit and I do my own thing and the dreamlining exercise which is basically you know what is it that you really want how do you define what you want how do you make that very concrete and so then that transform is like okay I'm going to get this game out the door

I'm going to save up enough money so I have a year of savings and I quit and that's exactly what I did and it was a life changing moment for me because it was exactly that taking ownership of my future I'm so grateful for you as a key part of it

and I'm so grateful for those executives because they really open the door for me you know and I don't pretend to know what I'm doing all the time either right it's most of the time we're making stuff up but it's being conscious about that surfacing heart assumptions and you know

learning as you go it's been a powerful journey thank you for sharing that and for saying all that you said and I would love to know when you did the fear setting and you're trying to identify the worst case how you can mitigate against the worst case what you

would do as sort of a backup plan in case the entrepreneurship does not work out or maybe doesn't work out at least with the first ining how are you thinking about that at the time what gave you in addition to what you already described which is the realization that oh my god almost all the emperors have no clothing so I think I can do that at the very worst I can also do that right how are you thinking about sort of risk assessment and what you would do if things didn't pan out perfectly

as you went into entrepreneurship so I got very concrete right so what is my actual minimal living expenses what do I need to be okay and have what I need and I figured out what that number was and then I said okay how much time am I willing to give myself to run this experiment to see if I can figure it out and make entrepreneurship work and I decided a year of savings was what I wanted and so I focused on saving up so I have that cushion right because if you're in

the red if you're like I don't know how to make my next paycheck I don't know how to make rent next month you can't be creative and be free you know do the things you're you're just you're making decisions for the short term and I wanted to be able to make decisions for the long so step one was have have enough of a cushion that I could feel comfortable now other people can do this as a side project or you know after hours whatever but for me I wanted space to just

focus on this and then the other piece was like okay well what let's assume it doesn't happen and after a year I've got nothing it's not working I had done enough in my career at that point I could just get another job I could either be hired back at the same place or hired in another company like it's not like I was going to go hungry on the streets or I've to live on a friend's couch for a little while that's not

that big a deal either right so I really I went through all of those things I could go bankrupt my house catches on fire like it's hilariously like like you did in the book right so that's where like it highlights the same kind of lesson as before which was when I quit law school it sounds scary everybody thinks oh my god you're such a risk taker like I'm not I mitigate risk at every turn like you know when you're playing magic and

you're trying to like set up so you can't get out drawn on a game I'm just mitigating the number of ways my opponent can beat me over time and in this one I could always go back to law school when I quit law school I could always go back to a job when I started as entrepreneurship and same thing later on when I became a digital nomad sold all my stuff I could always buy more stuff I could always get a house again and so I strongly encourage people to just go

through that like if you really really think about the worst case scenarios 99 times out of 100 they're totally recoverable within a year it's often way less and what was yours knowing how methodical you were not just hopping out of this job with savings with no plan so what was your plan I'm sad to say that wasn't that much of a plan well I guess with the core design loop I guess you are going to be following

some version of that probably but did you have an inkling of what type of game or what types of games you want to make you know obviously card games were kind of my specialty and so I knew that that was a space I wanted to be in but I really wanted to create that open space to figure things out and so as you mentioned of course the core design was part of it I didn't have it as clearly defined as I do now but this

idea that I'm going to try things and prototype them and test them so I would during the day I would work on some designs make up some prototypes and then I would go find my friends who were still working at the company or elsewhere to like try it out give me some feedback and come back and you know I didn't have any ideas like I hadn't designed a game ahead of time I didn't know what I was going to do ahead of time but I had enough space

so I could figure that out and then it worked out that another person from another company contacted me to see if I could do some contract work for them and so I started working on some kids toy based games which was great and so here's another fun story so they knew me because they used to work at a brother deck where I used to work and then they started working at this other company and he's like hey we need

to someone to help us design a game can you do that and I'm just like again no job no plan like I'm just figuring it out as I go at this point and so I'm like yep definitely I can do that okay we'll give us a quote okay quote how do I quote I don't know quote anything before so I'm like okay I will let me just think about it how many hours I think this is going to be and then like what's my minimum like hourly rate

that I think I should be paid and I'm like okay that's what I'll charge you know make it easy and I send them the quote and he laughs at my face yeah okay sure sure man no problem I'm under charging yeah yeah I'm under charging so the next time you know I still try to over deliver do a great job next time I get another opportunities okay what do you quote I doubled my number they still laugh to me okay great all

right double did again that my strategy was I kept doubling what I asked for until I met resistance until someone was like I'm not sure I'm like okay that's why need to be charging you know I sort of there's one other story I'll just as a side don't mention which also just underscores the fact that part of the frustration but also joy of entrepreneurship is you have to figure out a lot on the fly right you

cannot prepare for all the eventualities you don't know what you don't know and I recall I might be mistributing so my apologies to the founders of nantucket nectar if this is misattribution but when I took my first entrepreneurship class first and only actually high tech entrepreneurship with professor Ed now who changed my life in so many ways he used what a lot of people refer to as the Harvard case

study method where you have a business situation and a problem and then there's a break and you have to try to figure it out and then only after you've had the chance to try to figure it out on your own as a class then you read the outcome in the decision they made and so on and there is part of this nantucket nectar story where these guys are selling juices and then tuck it and they end up with a tiger by the

way they're drinks become really successful and they decide to make the shift to retail and they meet with a distributor and they're talking and talking and the distributors like so do you have good plans for POS and they're like look at each other they have no fucking idea what he's talking

about they're like oh we have great plans for POS we have we have really we've thought it through and we think we have we have an excellent strategy and he's like okay great and then they leave the meeting they're like what the hell is POS a point of point of sale right displays so it's

it makes for a lot of good stories so you figure out you start to figure out your pricing right by doubling and doubling and doubling and maybe you could flesh that out a little bit in terms of you're doing this contract work for people who are giving you specs of some type or another that's right

but you have some money coming in the door correct with fewer and fewer laughs at your proposals long away what else is happening in that first year so I'm using my kind of spare cycles and there's this really interesting thing right the difference between an entrepreneur

who has no you know no employees or anything and some dude just sitting on his couch can be very subtle yeah yeah you know until you start like really kind of getting income coming in and start making things happen right so there was definitely a window of uncertainty I mean even now in my

life the distinction is pretty blurry but yeah right it is you know it's you know now I got a team of people it's like okay I feel like I got a business but it's not an easy distinction and when you're trying to create something where you don't necessarily know what it is it's even harder so

what I would do is I would in between doing this work for higher I would work on just projects that I thought would be fun so I would just make prototypes try them out try them on on friends and I remember it was actually with ascension where I didn't make ascension specifically to think I'm going to start a company I made it because I really wanted that game to exist I played enough of dominion and I like I was

missing something I really really wanted and then I showed it to a friend of mine Rob Dordy and he has his own he actually was the guy that owned your move games the the store and where we I used to play when I was when I was younger and I show him the game and he's like dude you have the ball like run with it this is great make this a thing and he had been you know an entrepreneur for a while and so he helped me kind of

like okay now let's do this and that started down the road and so this is going to be my project now and I started my early prototypes for ugly and I will I'll find a way to share them with you I mean some of them are like horribly inappropriate like we had just really just rude pictures

and I won't share those but you know just ridiculous because it's still for fun rude pictures how dare you right I'm imagining that's code for lots of decks everywhere I mean I was like yeah I'm not are you the imagination of the listeners on this one not appropriate

for public consumption leave it at that you know just to defend my Dixcom it I will say there's a place called Hotel Berone in San Francisco great wine spot excellent place and I don't know if this is true but I heard at one point they this is one of the first places with a console

for digital signing way back in the day and the rumor was that of all the guys who went there and bought drinks it's like 75% just drew Dix is it sure Jack I thought I thought it was actually it was pretty hilarious well there's an important game design principle I didn't talk about

here which is the TTP which is time to penis any opportunity that you give people to create their own thing at some point someone's going to make a dick that's going to happen TTP all right I'm going to add that to my metrics yeah key show notes but I mean so what it is

I mean the broader point is like anytime you allow people to customize you have to think what are they going to do with it and how does that share and how does that build your community but TTP is the the short hand for that so it is it is a unfortunate reality of our society that that is just going to happen okay so you'll share some I did not say this interview

going this way I'll tell you that I didn't need it. Thanks a lot of coffee so let me try to write the ship here for a second so you're talking about ruffs and the prototypes you'll filter out some of the root pictures and we'll share some of that when you were chatting with

if I'm remembering correctly Rob and he's saying you got this run with this were you at that point at all thinking of how it fit into the potentially competitive landscape and how it was differentiated or was it just enough for it to be something that you used scratch your own

itch and you assume hey if this is exciting for me as one person as someone who plays a lot of games I assume it's going to be attractive to more people so three things right one absolutely it has to scratch my own itch and I have to love it I loved it I wanted to see

it exist all of my most successful projects by far are the things that I make for me and that I really want and then I know they're going to be great so that's I think really important to I do not chase trends I hate chasing trends in fact every time I've tried to chase

a trend it's been unsuccessful the idea of like I'm trying to build something for some hypothetical thing this is hot right now has never worked however there's a third point here which is important which is it can't be just about you and so the rule I like to use is I will show

the game to people and I'll prototype it and test it and when people start asking me to play again without me prompting them that's when I know I've got something so it's not just me that's why like Rob who I respect a lot he was like no no no this is great like

play again and I would show it to some other game designer friends and show it to some other people like no no this is great keep so I so as you're going through you're getting like a wider wider sphere of feedback that's helping you move forward and if your game is targeted

to a different target audience right so I make a game called Bakugan which is a toy based game for kids obviously like how much fun I have playing it is not nearly as important as a five year old or an eight year old right so you have to test with your target market in

that sense so so I don't say that you know target market and testing is not important it is but don't try to chase a trend make something that you know is fun and that you enjoy and then get the feedback and iterate as you go and so as you get that positive feedback now I'm

willing to invest more and more into the product so now I'm actually I'm going to go and start putting some real art on it and the story behind the art is I guess it's at this stage I can tell so back when I was living in Boston I met the guy that lived down the

hall and he comes in the door and says low and I have like at this time I just moved out like black like posters on the wall like you know kind of like it's still basically a college door room I just try to transported to a department and then the guy comes back over 20 minutes

later with like bagweed like pretty sure you want to smoke this right it's like okay cool so we hang out we become great friends and he actually turns out as an incredible artist his name is Eric Sabie and you know whatever we became friends I have one of his art pieces on my

well not on my wall anymore but in storage now but it's actually it's on my wall my dad's I didn't put that one storage anyway so 10 years later when I'm making a game I'm like oh man his art was really cool I'm going to call him up and I called him up and said hey would

you want to make art for my game and I built the IP and the story around his style because I knew I could get this batch of art without having to pay for like a whole new artist new things as he'd already made it so I could pay him less and he was a good friend and he

hooked it up and so now I start bringing art into the game and figuring out how you can use around and build the lore and build a style around what's available okay now we've made some art now we've got some cool looking cards so I'm investing a little bit more and then I

take it to a convention called gamma which is a game manufacturers association event it's like an industry insider tabletop game thing so publishers and retailers and distributors are all there so not a public show and I get a little booth and I bring my little fake prototype

and I realized actually as I was going to the show that I didn't have in the game you get what's called on her which like victory points basically and I forgot to make anything that you track how do you track how many points you get how many on you get and I was like oh

man what do we do and I went to a like a Michael store you know like a like a little craft store craft store yes thank you and they had these little beads these little plastic fish bowl beads you know and they're all the oddly shaped it's like all right whatever let's try

to use these for the prototype so grab the bunch of those put them in and we start downwind the game and people get drawn to these beads and like oh my god this is awesome like grows spawning a shiny button yes exactly the super shiny and they come over and

like are these you know they play the game they like the games like oh this is awesome these are going to be in the game right I was like yes yes they are just like the POS example you gave earlier I have no idea how to get these things I have no idea how

to make though I don't know what to go but they are definitely in the game so that show us what's so overwhelming like the people loved it stores wanted to order it orders so now all of a sudden it's like okay now I'm going to literally I'm all in right

I put my entire life savings now all the extra I saved up to print at the time was 10,000 units of the game which is pretty crazy probably a little sounds like a lot of units yeah this is like a lot yeah most times people are going to start a new game it's like

you print a thousand units me better hope to God you don't have a manufacturing company yeah oh dude I was nightmare stories around that for sure that's a whole different piece but again and I this is not like I had worked with manufacturers before I had made

games working for another company so this part wasn't totally new to me and I wouldn't have put all of that money into the you know I used to joke if this doesn't work I'm going to have to build a house out of essentially boxes you know it's that's pretty what's all I got

but I wasn't again just to demystify the risk right at this I had gotten so much positive feedback I had stores and distributors are already waiting to order the thing so now it's like okay I it's willing to put the money in and take a risk yeah and also just for folks

who are unaware I mean there are all sorts of ways to potentially finance things if you have that demonstrated demand I'm not suggesting this you got to do your own diligence on these things but like invoice factoring right like if you have people are pledging and signing whatever

it is letters of intent or something more binding to purchase a certain quantity you can use that with manufacturers to then get finance terms and there are companies that independently do this as well so waste work around it my question that I want to ask next is related to

gamma how many exhibitors or people with games like yourself game developers were there at this show actually it's not we don't even need to be specific to game developers like how many booths or exhibits were at this show at the time I think it was like about 30 okay

okay now it's probably it's not it's not huge you know now it's it's bigger maybe two or three times that but it's not like you know it's less than a hundred okay no no no so that's one of the nice things the game the table you know this kind of game industry is

still a little smaller than like a a New York toy fair is the more big one that's like it's a happens and that's got thousands and thousands of booths and you're spending millions of dollars to have a presence there it's like a much bigger species this one is a little smaller

so the reason I'm asking is that in fact if somebody wants just a separate collection of stories around these types of trade shows and I think it was the New York toy fair Todd McFarland the legendary comic art assess some stories around this from our conversations

which are hilarious what I was wondering and maybe it doesn't apply because there were 30 tables or 30 booths but did you do anything to draw attention to yourself or the game at this event or was it simply enough to pay for a booth and then assume that there

would be enough foot traffic to bring the right people to you so the principle you're driving at is critical right you need to get people's attention you need to find a way at these booths even at you know a gen con which is the tabletop more public facing

tabletop convention where I actually did launch a session and there's a lot more people a lot more vying for traffic at shows like gamma anywhere or even on a store shelf right why is someone going to stop and pay attention to what you're doing the great thing about

where we are in our modern world is it's easier than ever to make stuff you can print your own books you can print your own games on demand you can make anything you want the downside is we're flooded with stuff not surprising and so how do you separate from the crowd how

do you draw people's attention so at gamma I mean I already told you by accident almost the shiny beads helps nobody had those shiny beads that was a really attractive thing but I also invested in a video drop like I had a TV screen and I made like a little cool

rotating loop showing the things and people most people there didn't do that and so finding something that draws people's eye and brings them in so it can be a cool unique component it can be a cool giant visual it can be I had a game I launched years later

called bad beats be ETS is that kind of play on the poker term of bad beats but with actual beats I had someone dress in a giant beat costume I put one of my team members into a giant beat costume yeah it's gimmicky but it worked right so if you have a great product it doesn't

matter if nobody ever looks at it and also all the gimmicks of the world won't help you if you don't have a great product so step one have something great step two have a reason for people to pay attention to you the workshoping attention grabbing in real life I think is

really undervalued in today's increasingly digital world and this applies to for instance workshoping book material by giving speaking engagements even to a very small group you'll figure out very quickly what works and what doesn't what's confusing and what isn't what

people remember versus what they immediately forget or didn't even pay attention to in the first place and the trade show stories are bringing back memories because I recall what I back in my former life had my sports nutrition company and I would go to these trade shows and as you know

I have to imagine this is true for these other trade shows once you get there you are a captive audience and if you want to share it's like oh yeah you can rent a chair for 300 bucks for you know a day and I was just going in somewhat naive because I paid the exhibitor fee and I was like

oh great I'll like I'll figure out the rest shouldn't be too bad but it was pretty bad so I remember trying to figure out how to draw attention and at one particular trade show I next to no budget because there were a couple of things that were mandatory that you had to rent which struck me as a little bizarre but it exhausted my my budget so what I ended up doing was also getting I bought a TV at Best Buy a big screen that I could return and I put on highlight reels of Moe tie kickboxing

right because it's like it's definitely going to grab some attention but to provide a little context this was at a it was a strong man slash sports event it was kind of like the Arnold classic in Columbus for people who might know that it's a huge event this was much smaller but there were

a lot of athletes and competitors and so on milling about and I also brought I think it was four or five of these handgrippers called the captains of crush which are incredibly and increasingly difficult to close depending on the poundage to the extent that some of them are so difficult that

there are maybe five or six people or 12 people in the world who at that time could close whatever the highest rated captains of crush was so I laid those out for people to test with all these athletes milling about and then put this video up ended up getting the couch and chairs at

a good will and I had to like bribe a guy to help me with struck to get it over there oh yeah and ended up being a really hilarious experience but it taught me a lot about what worked and what didn't and I was able to iterate because it was a multi-day event and taking a step back for second

and then I want to come back to ascension and all the adventures there what have you learned about good playtesting versus not terribly effective playtesting what I mean by that is when you're providing your game to people certainly one pass fail is do they want to play it pass the point that you

need them to play it that's sort of like the viagra test right like they put it send it out to test patients for whatever it was hypotension hypertension something like that and then lo and behold all these guys over the age of X didn't want to send back their medication and it's like

huh interesting let's look at that and that's how viagra came to be in its current iteration but there's that and the reason I'm asking this and this is going to be a very long paragraph of question is that when I am doing the equivalent with my books and chapters there are definitely

better and worse ways to elicit feedback if you're like what do you think of this chapter it's a crapshoot and if people are trying to be nice which comes down to who you select also to be your playtesters in my case proofreaders you're going to get a bit of a scatter shot of responses and it

might not be actionable but if I ask read this chapter tell me the 20% that I should absolutely keep no matter what then tell me the 20% if you had to cut 20% that you would cut you're going to get very very different type of kind of surgical feedback similarly with to someone who's maybe

less experienced as a reader you could just say note any place that is confusing or where you find your mind wandering and then that gets you to also stuff that you might cut what if you learned about eliciting feedback or evaluating feedback when you're letting people test again it's going to

depend upon the phase that you're in every time I go through the core design loop I like to think of myself like a scientist I have some hypothesis that I'm trying to test and that's what I'm focused on in that testing session so when you're early on you're like okay is this even fun is this idea of

like rolling dice to try to punch somebody and making combos fought right or whatever it is right you want to just see is it fun I'm not asking is it balanced I'm not asking is it pretty I'm not asking does the game last too long I'm asking is this part fun and that's what I'm focused on and

so I know when I'm testing that if I start getting feedback on these other parts I'm not worried about that I can set that aside because that's not what I'm looking for here and the whole I want to keep playing I want to play again test the viagra test as you put it that's not going to come true until later on in the cycle right your early prototypes are most likely not going to meet that so you're looking for other things so I do like you I so I have a questionnaire that I'll use I have it it's

up for free I'm think like a game designer dot com slash media or we can link it in the show notes which has a bunch of specific questions you can just print it out and use it so I will ask all right what are the three things you like the most about the game what are the three things you like the

least about the game where did you get confused and much like your book question right you really want to pay attention to where people get lost and confused and nonverbal communication is at least as important as anything they're going to write down and tell you if you say give me the three

things you like the most three things you like the least what would you change whatever people will say something to you just because they feel like they have to say something to you doesn't always mean that that's really what they feel right you're prompting them to it so you have to use your

intuition to say okay where a is this relevant to the hypothesis I'm trying to test in the states that I'm in b does this align with what I see visually of what they're doing my mom tells me she loves all my games even when she really has no idea what's going on in some of them right she's

very nice but if if I see that somebody's getting lost or leaning back or checking their phone like watching for those nonverbal cues is so important and you sort of train yourself over time to get better at that but yeah so asking questions to prompt for the specifics being focused on what's

important to me right now looking for nonverbal cues and then in best case scenario just like you mentioned right you have some more sophisticated readers and you have less sophisticated readers you have more sophisticated game players and less sophisticated game players so if you can test with

other game designers they're going to be better at zeroing in and okay yeah I don't care that the card doesn't have pictures on it or that the numbers aren't balanced I know what you're looking for and I can give you feedback assigned to it if you just take it to somebody you know just a regular

person they're going to get hung up on a lot of little things and so you have their feedbacks a little bit harder you know you have to parse out a little bit more what's important of course as you get more and more focused on the the final product somebody that's in your target audience their

feedback matters a lot and then the last thing I'll say is a quote that's I think is also one of your favorites it's definitely one of mine from Neil Gaiman when your reader says that something is wrong they're almost always right and when they say how to fix it they're almost always wrong I don't

if I'm butchering it but that is 100% true in games too right if you get you're testing with multiple people in your target audience that are consistently saying that something's not good you as a designer have to fix it they definitely do not have the right answer for how to fix it that's your job but that's another key part when I'm testing is it okay I'm looking for themes looking for patterns one person telling me they don't like something maybe I can dismiss it but if 20 people

that are all in my target audience say that that's something I got to focus on yeah no matter how pretty the paragraph no matter how shiny the fish bowl pebble you might have if a bunch of people are saying I don't get it it's confusing you got to cut it not always the easiest thing so what

happened with ascension so you have enough ascension kits to build a house or at least you put in the order and what unfolds so then I go and I get a booth at Jencon as mentioned and this was the where I'm going to have the unveiling and now again I'm very poor at this point now Jencon for

folks who don't know can you just maybe paint a picture or an analogy for what Jencon is in the significance of Jencon so Jencon is the tabletop and enrolling a mecca of the United States possibly you could say the world right Jen if from Lake Geneva's where it started it's why it's

called Jencon it's not there anymore but that's what it came from where the original Dungeons and Dragons people got together and played it was like the first place where people started gathered and it kind of built this core of what gaming became today and so now it happens in Indianapolis

it's like 60,000 people every year somewhere in that neighborhood and every type of gaming can imagine people are playing all hours of the night you know they call it the best four days in gaming but it's got anything you can dream of is there and many things you can't dream of so it's like

kind of the place to be if you will for tabletop and role-playing game nerds like myself all right so you show up at Jencon you've gone from 30 booths to God knows how many right your yeah can't count how many and I'm just I'm just a little guy right I don't have any you're at a

Taylor Swift concert now right yeah exactly exactly and so what I had was I bought a 10 by 10 booth which is the smallest booth you can 10 foot by 10 foot booth and then they would they had like a a newbie competition like a little submit your marketing plan and we can give you a 10 by 20 booth

for the price of a 10 by 10 and I won that contest so fortunately got a 10 by 20 booth which is still like very small in the scheme of what's there and I set up my stuff and this was people had started to hear about my game because I showed it off again before and I start you know I'm just

kind of putting it out there in whatever way I can but this is just posting online and sharing with friends I don't have any marketing budget or anything like that and then I get there and not only do we have like we have some of the early adopters who had heard about it run to the booth

but then they play the game and they loved it so much they would then take it open up buy it open it up and then start showing it to their friends they would like set up and so we ended up this is not allowed a gen con anymore by the way but they would just take over like nearby tables like

at the seated area and just start demoing the game for me like totally for you know didn't ask them to didn't pay them the ascension splinter cells activate it did and I would start seeing people play it in the halls and then I would see people carrying boxes around and so it became this kind of

like viral before you know we you know this sort of viral sensation in a way that was very it was very exciting it was like a very incredible moment and so we sold out of everything we brought you know so this is this is a very rewarding very cool experience my team every you know it's not

just me now we've got other people there like working really hard to make this come to life you know it's teams like four of us and then I got an offer that was very difficult offer to refuse so I at this point I had early product that was shipped for gen con but the rest of the stuff was

still on the way so I still haven't sold these 10,000 units with all my life savings that up into it and I get a call from another very big gaming company and I don't think I'll say the name just because I don't know anyway they and they say hey we like your game we want to buy it out

all of it we'll take it over it'll be our game we'll pay you a royalty you don't have to worry about anything it'll be all done now this is a very tough moment for me in a sense it's a dream come true they buy all the stocks so my money's off the table they are a big company they can push it they

can sell it and then I can just go back to making games and I'll have some amount of royalty and that'll be good to go and I sat with it and at the end of the day I was like you know what this is my baby I've worked so hard to get it here and I just I want to see it through I want to

see it through I wanted to stay mine I didn't want to sell it off and I said no and it was like one of those I might regret this one later right and then 30 days later product shows up finally after delays finally enough the product launch delay was launched such that it actually launched while I

was at Burning Man which was not not supposed to be but there was when I come back from Burning Man so I have a little release party like out on the middle of the desert on the ploy and when I come back we'd sold out everything was sold out the entire run and we had to make a reorder and it was

like okay now I can actually the company is it's working I can reorder start making expansion and start and like the rest of the company's history kind of evolved from that in a way that well I'm glad I made the decision I did all right many questions so at GenCon how many games

did you sell roughly oh man I don't remember exactly but it's hundreds hundreds some number of hundreds yeah I want to bookmark this this is not going to be my first question but just how you sell 10,000 after selling a few hundred was it word of mouth online was it something else just what

factors you think contributed to that because it's not an immediate obvious outcome at least not for me listening to the story but before we get to that because this all sort of undergirds a lot of what you're talking about how do the economics of say tabletop games or card games work what's the

kind of traditional model how do people get paid who's getting paid like what what are the percentages as terms of royalties what is that a percentage of could you just give us an overview of what the economics of that world kind of look like as a template when you're producing games we typically

most of the time you're going to produce them overseas something now with cardboard stuff it's starting to become a little bit more economical to do it stateside we do some of our game stateside but mostly you do it overseas whatever the retail price of the game is the cost of the game

has to be about a fifth of that and the reason is that as a manufacturer you are going to sell the game to a distributor at about 60 percent off the price of retail they're going to sell it to a retailer at 50 percent off the price of retail so they've got like a 10 percent margin for distribution

and then the retailer has that 50 percent margin for the rest of it so if you are a game designer and manufacturer then it sounds like 20 percent margins generally on games something like that yeah now if you're a game designer typically if you're an external game designer you pay a royalty to

that designer off whatever you're selling right so if you're selling it to distribution you sell percentage off the distribution price if you sell it direct to consumer you sell it to consumer price and that can vary depending upon the designer so in tabletop games typically it's going to be

anywhere between six and 12 percent at the high end for more mass market games big scale games it can go as low as 2 percent or 3 percent okay got it this is important because it highlights how challenging your decision to say no was right because we're not talking about like I'm keeping

90 percent well I mean maybe with direct consumer you are but it's not like 90 percent margins versus six it's like there's actually a narrower gap right which is also true for instance in books for self publishing and traditional deals people think they're miles and miles apart in some cases maybe

they are but when you start to factor in all of the costs the delta between the percentage that you take say self publishing versus traditional is not as wide as people might think so thank you for giving that is there anything else you'd like that to that yeah well you know it comes down to it was a little bit more than just you know the money and the dollars and the sense of it it was just it was a matter of like this was my baby this is my IP right if you you've worked with publishers where

they now take over the rights and stuff and you can't just do what you want with the book anymore yeah right I would imagine if you want to do like ascension expansion packs or ascension a bc d and e you want to do a whole derivative line if the publisher owns those rights or effectively owns those

rights you're in a tight spot think about where we are now 13 years later there's over 16 standalone expansions for ascension we made ascension tactics which is an ascension miniatures game which we did another expansion to that ascension has been featured in a major motion picture we're you know working on trying to take the IP and make cartoons and make other things comic books out of it right all there's all of these things that are fun right like you know we've had conversations about this

first of like it's fun to create and grow and expand your story lines you know when I first made ascension I had sketched out a three year story arc of like what the world of ascension would be if I you know got the whole thing done and now of course 13 years later so I've had to make some more

stories since then but that's the part I love like just like when you know growing up playing dungeons and dragons like the the process of coming up with the stories and making it and bringing that world to life is just I love it and so I didn't want to to lose that and I don't you know

for people that are listening that are trying to make these decisions like it's not obvious even though I've been fortunately successful with it's not obvious that it's the right decision for I remember like I spend way less of my time just designing games because I'm running a company

I have to manage logistics I have to manage people I have to plan out the marketing strategies I have to there's all these things that come with running a company and so I think a lot of people would actually be better off and then what all you want to do is make games then you know selling

to a publisher is a great strategy I wanted to kind of build worlds and build build something bigger and so here I am and I'll just repeat a name I mentioned earlier Stephen Key I don't think he does what some people would refer to as venturing which is basically building the business to do it

mostly yourself or a lot of it yourself he loves developing new toys new products and he's really good at the licensing game and that as far as I know maybe things have changed but that's the game he plays and I would say just on the do something bigger side there are different ways of

doing something bigger right so if you want to have the freedom to do the extensions and so on like you have on some level you almost certainly have to retain rights but for product developer doesn't have the business know how or doesn't want to develop it doesn't want to spend time that way

the licensing to a gigantic company that has a global footprint and distribution could be the perfect path or the best available path for making a large impact in terms of distribution and putting a spin on the ball of culture speaking and putting a spin on the ball the game Bakugan I

mentioned earlier is a game that I work on that's spin masters a company owns it they have toy plastic balls and there's a game that I designed the game but they own the rights they own the game they own the distribution they do everything and that is by far the biggest quote unquote game I've

ever worked on I mean it's all over the world it's in toy stores anywhere you go there's a cartoon multiple cartoons like it's enormous and so that is also fun and also a really cool exciting thing and so that path is totally viable so you can do work for hire you can create projects and sell them

and make a royalty you can launch and publish your own things there's an enormous number of ways to go forward and a lot of it comes down to just getting clear defining what it is that you want what's important to you it's like how do I make a living as a game designer you know that's like

the surface level question the how questions are a trap right you need to get below that's like wait what does it mean for me like what is it I actually want what does success look like for me and then even deeper than that why am I doing this because I want to make super cool worlds and I want to

grow into a universe or because I want to collaborate with people or because I want to reach millions of people are because I just want to have something to play with my friends and do something on the side right there's no wrong answer to any of those questions but if you don't

dive deep enough for yourself you're going to end up chasing down a path like I did many times where I'm just going to compete or move on a path for the sake of it because I want the most dollars the most dollars is the wrong game to play I'll tell you that yeah he can lead you a stray

really quickly important to keep your eyes on the cash flow but also oh yes can be a trap don't run out of dollars but don't just optimize for dollars all right so maybe this ties in you've mentioned a number of successes do you have a in your entrepreneurial journey after starting

your company any favorite failures or near death experiences or anything like that that you can describe oh yes I can the life of an entrepreneur is definitely one that has a lot of ups and downs as many of your guests can attest to it you can attest I'm sure and so what I mentioned earlier the

game soul forge we've since relaunched it but at the time it was a purely digital trading card game and I partnered with Richard Garfield this is the guy that created Magic the Gathering this is a dream come true for me and I'll tell you the brief story of like so we meet we're at a game conference

you know like I'd seen him around before but we hadn't really met we're at a game conference called packstaff it's like a developer conference and he's giving a talk on design so of course I'm in the audience listening because I want to learn from the master and he says at the end there's

a Q&A and then somebody asks him hey what's your favorite game right now and he says ascension and I literally like jump up out of my seat from the back of the audience and woo woo woo because stupid kid right but everybody laughs but it gives me the opening and so I go and I start a conversation

with him after the talk we start talking and we get excited it's clear we're both excited about the same project and so so forages born now this was a project that was my first digital game I'd ever done and I was a little cocky at this point I won't lie I succeeded my first project

essentially was a huge success everything I everything I touched turns to gold it's all gonna be great the doubling in size every year and we do a crowd fund and I thought it was gonna cost like $250,000 to make that game we crowdfund with that target and we end up crowdfunding double

that gold near almost double that goal like $500,000 it's like oh this is amazing we're gonna crush it we're so good and as it turns out making digital games is very expensive that cost $3 million to me oh man and so I had to go and try to raise funds again and you know we have to

launch the game before we're ready and you know again we have followers we have cash but the cash burn is you know over time I can see the cash burn is higher than the income and it's not working and I overextend I start borrowing more money I know I can make this work I'm not gonna let it go

like this is my baby I'm gonna keep it going how are you raising in borrowing money just if you don't mind adding a little more detail so it starts off with you know which do like a kind of friends and family convertible notes round so that means like they give me a loan and then in theory it turns

into a into equity as we get yeah and then after that then I start taking some of those refactoring loans like you talked about right so I'm getting loans against my future income on ascension to pay for soul forage and then starting to run up credit cards and like all the things

are really are not supposed to do yeah and I get to a point where I have to like finally realize like wow I'm I'm gonna go bankrupt like I can't do this anymore like I'm gonna lose everything and this was just one of the hardest things that I have ever faced because not only is it like

I feel like I owe it to my team who I'm gonna have to lay off these people whose livelihoods depend on it we have fans and people who love the game and like in a traditional tabletop game if I stop making ascension let's say right you still have your copy of ascension at home

and you can play it for as long as you want doesn't matter if I don't make anymore but when I stop making soul forage the digital game that means the service turn off that means your entire collection is gone that means you can't play it anymore everything you spent it's all got so I'm like failing myself I'm failing my team I'm failing the fans like everything and I have to make some very very hard decisions not to mention the friends and family of course yeah people I mean my I literally

had my parents had taken a loan against their house to help me like I mean this is I am so overextended I am so like in the thick of it and shame and difficult you know like it's it is tough and I have to

come to a realization and come to the other side of it where I had to like go through this process of accepting I had to get to the other place like okay it happened I've lost everything I failed now what right now is a different kind of fear setting exercise because now I'm on the other side of

my worst nightmare and took me a little while but it's like okay you know what I will still be alive I will be able to pay off some of these debts over time with some other things I can recover from this it's gonna be okay the people who got laid off they're gonna get another job it was not easy

once I accepted that worst case outcome and then I was able to say okay now how do I make this less likely and so I had to lay people off but I also renegotiated debts and negotiated payment plans and reduced our overhead and took on more contract work and like slowly but surely I was

able to dig myself out of the hole and I don't think there's any chance I would have been able to do that if not for being mentally ready with okay I've lost it all I mean I had talking to bankruptcy attorneys right and that gives you a different kind of attitude and approach when

you're trying to you know you're negotiating with a lender that you owe money to they're like you owe me money you should collect I'm like I know but either I'm gonna go bankrupt you're not gonna get anything or we're gonna work something out and I'm gonna do my best to pay off and so fortunately

I was able to turn that around and not only did I learn you know the important lessons like you can go through a lot and you can recover from it but also to not put myself in that position again right not to overextend to that degree and learn to make smaller bets and grow as you can it was

a very important and powerful thing which then of course I'm now able to be able to come back to it with reinvigorating that very same game so to ask a question related to that you have this dream come through partnering with Richard to create this game how did you to communicate or what led to

the ability to maintain that relationship and now work together again right because there are I suppose as I'm imagining different ways this could have played out I'm sure there are ways with many different collaborators where things could have exploded and it would have damaged the

relationship and that would have been the end of that so why didn't that happen you got to be honest with people right I mean like that's that's really what it comes down to like act in integrity when you work with partners you sometimes you have bad news you can tell them bad news if you

have some humility around when your ideas are not working or when you're trying things and say here's what we're gonna do and I talk about like nobody knows what they're doing I realize the other executives do it I don't hide the fact that I don't know what I'm doing I've learned a lot I've

got good ideas I've tried things that work but I whenever you're pushing the boundary and trying something new sometimes it's not gonna work and so when you're working with somebody and you know again fortunately Richard is he's professional he's not only as he made games that were

over successful but he's also made many games that weren't over successful too right so he knows this anybody that's done this for long enough any creative field you just you cannot predict you know everything is not gonna be a hit and so when it's my first major failure for me it felt like the end

of the world but the more you work with professionals the more you realize that that's just part of the process amazing what if you learned or what decisions have you made related to your company or entrepreneurship how you run things that you think are worth mentioning it could be after

that experience it could just be in general maybe ways that you have simplified things or challenged assumptions turned things upside down anything at all that comes to mind one of the things that I've realized is that the same way you design games right does any great game

and does any great company are not all that different in a great game you have clear goals you know what you're trying to do it's very clearly defined what you're trying to do you're getting a lot of feedback and rewards either that be from points or achievements or you're getting constant feedback

loops the challenge level is appropriate right you're focused on learning one thing at a time the skill level is appropriate where you want to be and probably the most important thing about games right when we play games we take a certain kind of mindset if I'm playing a game I expect to lose

I expect to have challenges in fact that's the whole point right if you play a game and there's never a challenge why are we even doing it and so I have tried to cultivate all four of those things in my company we set clear goals where it's like okay it's not we're going to try to have this

specific metric like our email subscriber list we're going to try to increase it by this amount and here's how we're going to do it over this quarter or we're going to try to get a new game in this category that we're going to have a prototype ready to go in two weeks right clear goals we have

something that is allows us to have daily focus and feedback what I love is the rule of three I think I first learned this from Chris Bailey then the his book the Product Productivity Project but I've applied it at every level of my company so what it is is you have everybody posts their

three daily goals one of the top three things that I want to focus on and three is really important because we all have an infinite laundry list of stuff to do we're never going to finish our to do list but if you can finish your most important three things you can make an enormous amount of

progress and we scale that to every level of the company so every team we have three weekly goals we have monthly goals we have quarterly goals and so everything kind of scales down and I even built this into my own like personal life like I have a thing the level up journal which I've made

which I've got it just has a journal that just is fits in your pocket and has three goals three habits and then a little gratitude practice and so every piece of it by focusing on very few things and making those the priority it makes a big difference and then lastly with the mindset we set

very aggressive goals and it's okay not to hit them like a game when you you want to win right ever you take winning seriously but you don't cry and when you lose a game right you say okay what can we learn from this how do we get better and start and take that attitude and approach it sometimes

easier than others for sure but like cultivating that mindset and focusing on what's important and making sure that the goals are clear and everybody knows what they are and you're moving day to day that's how I structure the company and it's again it came from just the principles of

design applying them to what we do and I found it to be really powerful where do people if people in the company are posting for instance the rule of three there's three priorities for the day where are they posting these so we have a company discord we have a channel in our company discord

that everybody posts their three goals for the day is a separate one for weekly goals separate one for monthly goals and a separate one for quarterly goals and so you could always look back and see what everybody is doing at any given point if you care to at the main focus it helps also helps

us stay connected right because we're a hundred percent remote team now so even though I may not talk to a given person or see a given person I can quickly glance and see what's most important to them right now so it keeps us all connected and accountable two questions the first is is there any

follow up on those three or is it just the act of someone publicly stating their priorities that makes everyone feel connected and hopefully gives them some felt sense of accountability that you think leads to better output let's start there so the daily there's not much fall up on the daily

it's about staying connected and I think it just forces you to plan right it forces you to assess for yourself okay what actually is important to me a lot of people will just start checking emails and going down rabbit holes and they're working they are working but they're not doing what's important

and they're just doing whatever's in front of them and so this forces just as a habit it forces you to think things great point then for the weeklies we do have that so we have our weekly goals there's we have a check-in at the end of the week where people will post hey here were my goals for last week here is how they went here and now my goals for the next week or well you know what can I do you know

if I didn't make a goal what am I doing to fix it so there is some accountability and I read through those every week for the team and that's on Friday so people are setting their priorities for the following week on Friday correct and why discord versus other tools how did you choose it so we tried a lot of them I'm obsessed with productivity tools sometimes to a fault but so we tried Slack we tried a couple of other custom ones we tried a sauna we tried a Monday we tried a bunch of but

the nice thing about discord is one it's very easy to use very you can just start up a channel for free you can have voice chat and text chat you can also upload bigger files and you can with like slack restricts that unless you have a paid program that's much easier to like load files and share things and honestly discord started as like a gamer focused thing and so we actually built our fan community in discord so you can go to the stone blade discord it's kind of funny because it's

sort of like a front of the shop back of the shop kind of vibe right says like the front of the shop is like all the fans are there they're all chat about the games we can jump in and chat with them and then we're in the sort of private channels that are you can't see but we're talking about

and making the next things that you're gonna be talking about six months from now and so it's like automatically gives us a sense of like connection to our fans because of the same place where we're doing our work one click away you can see and interact with fans so it has a nice bonus

effect of making us feel a little bit more connected to the community how much of your work do you do on laptop versus phone oh 90 plus percent laptop for sure my phone is I'll occasionally check emails to make sure I'm not missing anything I hate working on my phone yeah I figured it was

probably something like that I'm the same way what is the mobile experience with discord like I've never used it on mobile it's fine I mean it you know again so mostly when I'm there I can check messages I turn off all notifications for everything I don't want my phone bothering me or

ping me or distracting me like I am using my phone consciously because I want to look at something specific so it means I have a meeting and I'm not at my desk I'll go to discord go to the meeting thing check it or I have something I want to post in a public channel this is another key thing about

it that's great because you have so many different channels and you can make threaded discussions one of the things I try to encourage is that we have as much as possible make communications public a lot of times people will have side chats inside conversations and come up with some great idea

and then it will get lost because people are just in a private channel somewhere and so we'll make sure that people have public discussions as much as possible so people can add comments and can get involved and stay connected if they want to but to continue with your question the mobile experience

it's mostly just for some I will only use it if it's like there's some specific communication or meeting or connection I need to do that's when I'll use my phone if I'm going to work it's because I'm set up at a laptop designated time to work and connect all right we could keep going for hours

and maybe we will do more rounds but there's a prompt here that I would love to explore which is how a trip to Thailand helped you to escape your need for control all right so as someone who focuses on systems predictability controlability etc this might be therapeutic for me to hear so could

you unpack this for us I think we're very similar in the sense to him right it's not I wouldn't call myself a control freak just because I don't want to say mean things about myself but I very much want things to be good and I believe I know how to make them good and I want to make sure that they are good so that's what control freak say so the point being like I know I'm good at my job and for the most part with the most of the jobs that people are doing I know how to do them as well as they do

that's how I know if they're doing a job or not right this is the story I'm telling myself and I hired a lot of very smart very capable people and I ended up every extra person I hired suddenly became more work for me because I had to keep checking to make sure that they were on track or setting up

more systems to you know have this and if they weren't doing something the way I thought they should be coming in or they would come to me with questions and at some point I'm like listen this is too much this is gone kind of crazy I need to step away and so I said look I'm going to take a

three week trip to Thailand I'm not bringing my laptop you know I'm not reachable I'm going to do that in six months so I gave the team plenty of time what do you need for me how do we set this up so that you don't need to talk to me and they okay we need access to these things the only

you have access to we need to know this well whatever it was very little as it turned out and then I go to Thailand now I am still too much of a control freak so I really did bring this my iPad with me so I could check it but I didn't respond I didn't do anything and what magically happened

is everybody just stepped up and they answered the questions that they would have asked me themselves because they were perfectly capable of doing that and they started taking initiative and building new things and doing stuff that I didn't even think to do and I realized with some

embarrassment that I had been holding them back that I had by not allowing them to fail or do things that would be different than I would I had been constraining them from becoming leaders and doing the things they should be doing and I had built work for myself I had made them less

effective at their job and I made my life less good like so so that was one of the best vacations I ever took because it actually really changed the entire way that I managed change the entire way I viewed leadership and I love Thailand amazing just to like building the systems that then persist

after you get back what a liberating experience that must have been on some levels the gifts that keep saying giving now it's something you talk about a lot and it cannot be underestimated right what is it so you ask the question white what would it take for me to let go what would have to be true

for you to be willing to not get it so it could be some key metric that you care about that they have to report it could be that they have to stay within a certain budget it could be that they are in reality you're just making up stories of oh well I just feel like I need it let those things go

let people grow and it's really in my experience it's just been incredible I know of you know a team that can literally run itself I get in and I focus on the key new projects I focus on the most important things I think are wrong but I for the most part I have stepped away from a lot of the day

today and I have watched my team get better and better better and again it's part of that mindset right they make mistakes just like I make mistakes and sometimes the question is what do we learn from it and don't make the same mistake twice and we've learned a lot along the way and it's been pretty

amazing it's just in we're coming up on almost two and a half hours two hours and 17 minutes or 18 minutes I'll ask just a few more questions so that we can slowly land this plane so the next question is one that many long-term listeners will be familiar with the billboard question if you

could put a quote a question phrase a word anything on a billboard metaphorically speaking to get it in front of millions or billions of people what might you put on such a billboard I'm excited to get this one I had anticipated my come up I've listened to a lot of the podcast so I'm going to use one as a mantra for myself which I say to myself every day which is cultivate comfort with uncertainty and impermanence cultivate comfort with uncertainty and impermanence it sounds a little you know

maybe a little woo woo to people but in reality it's so much of what we do we talked about this a little bit earlier is because we're afraid that we don't know what's going to happen we're afraid we're going to lose something and the truth is you never know what's going to happen and you're going to lose everything we're all going to die right and if you can just be okay in that space of not knowing

the control freak piece of it the staying is a lawyer or a safer path and be okay with the fact that things are not going to stay the same all the time then life gets so much easier and whether be your creative path or your relationships or anything like that has been one of the most powerful things

for me personally so I'd hope to share that passage that is a perfect place to begin to wrap up and that is exactly what we're going to do so just and people can find think like a game designer at thinklikeagamesigner.com you mentioned the slash media for various things they can find you on

Twitter at Justin and the Square Gary any other websites that you would like to mention or places you'd like to point people to yeah sure you can come to stomelade.com is for my games you want to pick up any of my games or join our discord is a link there and we myself and my team are all there chatting so you can chat with me on Twitter and on the discord I love you know I'm talking with people that have design and creativity questions so I'm always happy to help this has been so much

fun Tim. It's such a blast people take them up on it I highly highly encourage you to engage and thank you Justin for taking so much time I'm glad we were able to finally make this happen really took so many notes so lots to follow up on personally and to everybody listening thank

you for tuning in and as always we will link to everything we discussed and probably much more in the show notes Timed up log slash podcast so you can just search Justin and I'm sure that this will be one episode of very few maybe the only that pops up so you'll be able to find everything there and until next time please be just a bit kinder than is necessary both to others and to

yourself and with that Tim Ferriss signing off. Hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people

subscribe to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week it's kind of like my diary

of cool things it often includes articles on reading book some reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then

I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you'd like to try it out just go to tim.blog slash Friday type that into your browser tim.blog slash Friday drop in your email

and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought to you by AG1 the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health IV AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothing new I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller

more than decade ago the four-hour body and I did not get paid to do so I simply love the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on run which is for me a lot of the time I have been using it a very very long time indeed

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is using AG1 daily if I'm on the road on the run it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes so each morning AG1 that's just like brushing my teeth part of the routine it's also NSF certified for sports

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