IN-DEPTH: The Game of Life (w/ Tim Ferriss)

27:05So similarly, with playtesting a game,

27:07Tim Ferriss:you don't want to just ask somebody, what did you think? And have a list of seven questions. You want video of them playing. Like how long does it take certain parts of the game to transpire? Are there huge pauses where people get gummed up? Where do they laugh versus where do they report they laugh? These are often things that have huge discrepancies. So suffice to say, to figure out a simple game is not so simple. and it has given me so much more appreciation. It's kind of like if you, for instance, I'll give people a recommendation. Like I love drawing. I've done, I was very involved with all the artwork for every aspect of this game and did a lot of hand sketching and so on.

27:54Tim Ferriss:But if you have somebody take you, let's just say a nature guide, take you on a tour somewhere around your house and introduce you to all the tree species, usually easier to start with trees versus general plants, right? So you get maybe like in most places in North America, half a dozen trees, maybe. And now when you walk through the forest on your usual hike, you're just going to see things completely differently. Yeah, you're seeing games. It's like, boom, suddenly it's 3D instead of green trees. Your labels change. And with your labeling change, your reality changes. And the same thing happens to me now if I see other games.

28:36Tim Ferriss:I'm like, oh my God, this is so smooth and so simple for me as the user, right? It's like if you open any product, let's just say a really well-designed Apple product, because most people have that experience. And you're like, oh my God, to get the AirPods paired to my phone and to do this and this is so easy. And then you compare that with like, I'm going to throw them under the bus, but buying like a brother printer. and you're just like an hour and a half year later, you're like, what does it take in God's name to get this thing on Wi-Fi? What is this Wi-Fi button about? Like there's a feature that no one has ever used, this like auto-connect protocol that, yeah.

29:17Tim Ferriss:So you can have the same experience with the game where you read the instructions, you're like, I have no idea what this means.

29:26Tim Ferriss:So to answer your question, I suppose, yes. There's a lot that goes into it. And then also there are things that you can do that translate or can transfer from other places. So for instance, I used a bunch of websites and there are a million of them, but I think Intellivy is one, pickfoo.com is another where, you know, I created like, I don't know, we created six to eight variations of this box in terms of the cover art. and then split tested it by serving it to different demographics and having them select their favorites, meaning one out of two at a time, and then the winner would proceed to be compared against the next variation.

30:08Tim Ferriss:And we did a ton of split testing. And just like I did the Google AdWords way back in the day to test the four-hour work week and the subtitle, you can, where possible, test. With a few hundred bucks, you can get great signal. Not always, but often you can. With this, it was really clear, because the winner was like 10x, right? The standard deviations out was so significant. I was like, yeah, this is very clearly the winner. Did you predict that or are you surprised? In this case, I did predict it. I have whatever it is. I don't know what it is. But from a visual perspective, I think I'm just maybe a little more acute than a lot of folks.

30:51Tim Ferriss:I don't know what that is. but certainly my OCD probably feeds into it. I mean, I have been diagnosed with that, which was no surprise. I had to do it as like a formality and the therapist was like, or the, I guess he was a psychiatrist, was like, I know this could be a lot to take in. If you need to like pause the Zoom and come back tomorrow, I'm like, this is not news to anybody. Let's just keep going. I need this for the insurance, come on. Yeah, I need this for the insurance. Let's keep going. But I can draw almost any layout of any restaurant I've ever been in. like the just like my my mind just works that way visually so in this case i was able to i was able to predict and i should say also it's not just data data data it's like can you if your name is on this goes for book covers too can you live with this forever which is why i sometimes i guess no longer because the publishers can make pretty good money reliably so they won't say this but i was a problem author.

31:45Tim Ferriss:I was a problem author because I would fight. I was like, you guys don't have to live with this. Your name is not on this. I understand the incentives are slightly different, but I'm going to see this so many times. I need to be happy with it. If that ends up being the second choice instead of the first choice based on the data, so be it. I was wondering if there's a drug dealing for fun and profit box that you tested. Equivalent. referring for the listener back to your original title for four hour work week maybe a title a coyote with a bloody ma or something that it just did not test well well figuring out just the name took a long time i tested so many different names and it can become just like with book titles sort of a emotional not necessarily heated but it can become a conversation based on opinion and you want to test that.

32:46Tim Ferriss:You want to test. So for instance, one of the counter arguments against the name of this game was that coyote is very much sort of an animal of the Americas. You know, like let's just call it maybe down into some of Central America, but mostly, you know, Canada, US and Mexico. And will people actually, will this mean anything to people in other places? And so I had to do a bunch of polling, which I'll very often do with very short social posts at very odd hours that hit particular time zones, just to see, and also texting friends and so on about this. But then there are so many different variables to land on something that finally works, including box design, box size, pricing.

33:43Tim Ferriss:negotiating and handling the politics of very, very large retailers. Like these are all independent arts in the decathlon of creating a game. And Alon is just an excellent decathlete. He's good at all of it. So what's that? This is my, I'm curious about new worlds. What's that industry like? Is there big players? It's a lot of independent players. Is anyone making money? Like what is the game? What is the game world? Yeah, this might be a good one where we have the Wayne's World like, we cut to Elan Lee giving an answer. Listen to that podcast episode with you and Elan. It's probably the best answer.

34:26Tim Ferriss:I would say it's a lot like other industries in the sense that you have a few 800-pound gorillas who are gigantic, Hasbros, Mattels, etc. etc. They have internal divisions that are doing what Exploding Kittens is doing, just working on game variations. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And you'll have these giant, within the scope of games, you'll have these gigantic companies that do a lot of things, including something like the fast casual category. and then you have a ton of then you have the the very successful and exploding kittens would be one of the very most successful let's call it more independent game studios that make tabletop games and exploding kids is definitely one of the most successful i mean they had one of the most if not the most successful kickstarter of all time initially with exploding kittens and then parlayed that into creating a real amazing company with many many best sellers and then you have a super long tail of, let's say, independent game designers and people who are taking a stab at making a game.

35:37Tim Ferriss:And those folks almost always will license their game to a publisher, it's just like books in a sense, and take a royalty. Because they're not capable of and or they do not want to contend with all the logistics of supply chain management, dealing with retailers and all that stuff. And if you only have, say, one SKU and you're relatively new to the game, it could be the best game on the planet, but just as with book publishing, if you try to approach big retailers by yourself, they are not going to carry your game. It does not matter how good it is. They do not have the infrastructure to handle thousands upon thousands of independent contacts.

36:26Tim Ferriss:So you'll have brokers, which would be the equivalent of, say, book agents. It's the same thing. Yeah, it's the same, same. And that's also part of why I like stepping into these realms that seem completely unrelated, but you start to spot things that you can conceptually at least copy and paste. The brokers are negotiating licensing deals on your behalf if you're an independent? Those would probably be, this is probably a lot, I'm getting into the deep end of my ignorance pool here, but the brokers would help you potentially place, even for the larger game companies, they would be your interface to someone like a buyer, category buyer at a Walmart or a Target, for instance.

37:09Tim Ferriss:And you would probably need to find representation of some type to submit games to larger game companies if you want a little bit of leverage. That could also be an attorney, potentially. I mean, that's how I lean with any new industry. So for instance, like screenwriting, right? You mentioned screenwriting. I have had it for like a decade, but I have a screenplay that's like 80 % done. You're the only one. You're the only one. Yeah, right, exactly. So at some point, lawyers are very neglected. They get a bad rep in some senses, but they are the ultimate connective tissue that holds a lot of any industry together.

37:53Tim Ferriss:So I suppose what I would say is that there are these intermediate parties and very often you will need the assistance of one or more to get any type of deal done if you were part of that long tail. Which is another reason why it wouldn't have made sense for me to try to do this solo. My learning would have been much flatter. I would have made many more mistakes. and I wouldn't have possibly had the distribution. Would have been, I would say, impossible. It's probably a fair word to use. What's the best case scenario for, like someone's dream, I mean, you're independent and you just stumble across, you're playtesting with your friends and it's just like a brilliant game, like a tabletop game or something like this.

38:40And you have someone approach and you license it and it hits, right? When we're talking about like the blue sky scenarios for someone who's thinking about that, What are we talking about? Are we talking about someone getting rich?

38:54Tim Ferriss:That's a great question. I can't contractually get into the details of my deal, but I would say it's very similar to books. It's similar to books. I would say that if you have a mega, mega, mega hit, then you can do well. Is there an atomic habit of tabletop games? Something about what you're doing takes off for years and generation. Those games definitely exist. I will say that I know for a fact a lot of the game designers who have done deals with publishers who later have those games go parabolic and just insane for many years in terms of incredible sales seem to DIY their lawyering or otherwise a lot of game designers, and this is true for anyone who's new to anything, it's easy to be pennywise and pound foolish.

39:56Tim Ferriss:So I've seen a lot of, let's just call them inventors. Because this is also true in pretty much any product category. And there's a great book on just inventing in general and licensing versus venturing called, I think it's One Simple Idea by Stephen Key, Stephen with a PH, who's just, he's created stuff for all these gigantic brands. He does almost all of his prototyping with like construction paper and really basic stuff around the house. And he's been massively successful. But pay a lawyer to review contracts. Pay a good lawyer. Like really invest in that, even if you're going to put yourself, obviously not dangerously in the red, but that is where you want, one of the places where you want to spend money.

40:42Tim Ferriss:Right. If you do that correctly, then yes, there are people who can make a good living doing this. If your goal is to make billions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars, I would not bank on trying to be in Atomic Habits, right? Like that may be, I hope it's not for James. I hope he has 10 more of those. But the magnitude of sales of that book might just be a non-recurring phenomenon, right? It's kind of like I was talking to an entrepreneur recently and Taylor Swift wore one of her rings to an NFL game. And I'm like, okay, you saw this huge bump in sales. You cannot in any universe depend on that happening again.

41:24Yeah, that is you stumbled across a bag of money. That's exciting. But don't make your business plan stumbling across bags of money. Yeah, exactly. Business plan, step one, pick up bags of money. It's like, ah, that might be hard. But if you just keep getting Taylor Swift

41:38Tim Ferriss:to wear your stuff, it's a great business plan. What's the problem? Yeah, but I will say that it is possible to make money in games, but you're not dealing with, say, the margins of software. Yeah. Right? And that's just the reality of a physical product. It's like books, it sounds like. It's very similar. Yeah, you can make money. Even the price point is similar. Interesting. There are much more expensive games. so if you get into the realm of involved strategy games there are games that definitely you walk into a game shop there are games that sell for 50, 75 bucks you can find those games yeah but they don't sell very many exactly so you're going to be looking at I mean they can sell but you're going to be looking at there are always trade-offs and my goal with this was and I'm fortunate to be in this position but the business can work.

42:36Tim Ferriss:Exploding Kittens has done a really amazing job of building a business. It's not a not-for-profit. So you can make money in this world but my advice to someone who is thinking they might want to make a game would be the same advice that I would give to someone who's thinking about writing a book. Be slightly different. I would say in the case of a book, if this can't be your top priority for the next year from a time perspective, don't do it because you're going to have to live with it forever. And if it can, then consider it. Similarly, I would say, if you assume that you do not make any money, you don't lose money, but you don't make any, is this still worth doing for you?

43:21Tim Ferriss:And if the answer is no, I would not suggest doing it. Just like if someone said, I'm thinking about becoming a country musician to make my riches, I would say, but if you said, I think I'm going to make an album because I've always loved music. My friends love my music. And I just, I can't rest knowing I never gave it a shot. Okay, that's a good reason. Then give it a shot. And maybe lightning will strike and you'll capture it in a bottle. Maybe. A fascinating world. Well, let me, okay. So let me zoom out on this a little bit then. Oh, can I say one more thing? Sure. That I have tried more and more to immerse myself in worlds where the people are friendly.

44:00Tim Ferriss:This sounds so maybe, I don't know, like Mr. Rogers, but some worlds are friendlier than others. Yes. Right? It's just true. So if you go to any of these big trade shows related to games, or you go to even like Comic-Con, right, to expand it a little bit. But if you go to Gen Con, for instance, I have not yet been, but from everything I've heard. And in tandem, I'll give another example of archery, specifically barebow archery, which we don't have to spend a lot of time on. But there are many different disciplines within archery and the people in barebow are the friendliest. They're happy to help.

44:39Tim Ferriss:They don't have any cutthroat competitive mentality, generally speaking. Everybody helps everybody. That makes a difference. It makes a huge difference. That's like the neighborhood where you choose to raise your kids. It's like, where do you want to be? Who do you want to be around? Because you are going to be influenced by all of that. and the gaming world, the tabletop gaming world, to be clear. I think when the stakes get higher, it gets weird, like video games, then there's a lot, the dynamics could be very, very, very different. Just like all the prize money for archery or a lot of the prize money is in compound archery and it's like things change when you start to add in that incentive as a primary driver.

45:23Tim Ferriss:Right, the people matter. Yeah, yeah. And the incentives matter. It's like if you added the same amount of money into Bearbow, I'm sure people would stop sharing their secrets. It's the money. Yeah. But you probably have the same experience I've had because we both obviously had a lot of exposure to the publishing world, but also some exposure to Hollywood and like that world. And the difference, both of them, people are meaning in a different way. In Hollywood, it's like they're satirical how nice they are to you. And then behind the doors, it's so brutal. So like in Hollywood, it's always like, you know, I got to tell you, this idea is so good.

45:56I would give one of my kids away for adoption just to work with it. You have, I could die tomorrow. You have given me a reason to live. And then, you know, you never hear from them again. It's so bad. And then you go to the publishing world, dealing with Hollywood some, I was like, ah, New York based agents. They're like almost, they're brutal, right? But at least like they're honest. They're also just as mean, but they're more honest. Like that's a dumb idea and that's not going to work and we're not going to publish it. But at least they're clear about it. So you have different flavors of meanness.

46:26It's nice to get out of those worlds. I can see that.

46:29Tim Ferriss:Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'll actually speak to that too. Because games have a huge benefit that is similar to maybe stand-up comedy. And here's the benefit. if you have you have a passion project that's music or art or whatever for a lot of different types of projects people can lie to you to be nice yeah right if you get up in front of an audience and try to do a 30 minute set comedy you might get one or two courtesy laughs but then it's going to be dead silent you're going to bomb and you are going to know that your material doesn't work. With a game, if your game doesn't work, your game does not work.

47:18It really doesn't work. You can tell on those game testing videos.

47:21Tim Ferriss:You can tell. Even if somebody's trying to be nice, they have that kind of plastered fake smile on. You're like, ooh, that's not good. Or if they're like, yeah, that's fun. Like the damning with faint praise. I mean, you can tell watching the testing videos. The colors were great, Tim. The colors were great. Yeah, I really like the size of these cards. It's laminated, like really smooth. Like you have a really good job. Yeah. I want to take a quick break from our conversation to talk about the presenting sponsor for today's episode, Reclaim.ai. Now, those of you who have heard me talk about AI know that my big interest with this technology is not these massive, vague promises about super intelligent Jetson-style robots.

48:05What I care about is targeted applications, places where AI can solve specific pain points. Now, when it comes to knowledge work, there are a few pain points worse than a calendar that's so haphazardly filled with meetings and calls and appointments that deep work or recovery or even just sanity becomes impossible. This is where Reclaim enters the scene. They use AI to solve this specific problem. Now, how does it do this? I want to run over to their website real quick to actually show you for those who are watching instead of just listening, because I think it's really cool. Jesse, can we load the reclaim.ai website?

48:43So here we go. Here's their website, their tagline, get your time back with AI. You're talking my language already, but I want to scroll down to the three specific use cases they discuss here. All right, here's the first one. Jesse, this is going to be music to my ears. You're going to see why I like this. Defend focus time. Protect time for uninterrupted deep work. They're using my language. I love it. They're literally speaking my language in the sense that they're using a term I invented. Protect time for uninterrupted deep works. You can achieve peak concentration and be up to 500 % more productive.

49:16You can see on the screen here that you set a focus weekly time goal and it helps you change your calendar to meet it. All right, here's another use case on here. Optimize your meetings. Use AI to find the best time for your regular meetings and book new meetings faster with AI-powered scheduling links, man, there's a great graphic that came up where there's like a grid of available time. You can see it on here now and you click little sections where you're available. Other people do the same thing. The AI can help find a group meeting that's gonna work for you and the other people. The final thing to say here is improve your work-life balance.

49:50Say goodbye to burnout with AI calendar controls that prevent overtime, back-to-back meeting days and interruptions. Can you imagine that? A calendar that knows a busy meeting day probably shouldn't be followed by another busy meeting day, a calendar that can help you schedule so it's not just you sending all these emails back and forth, but instead of just scheduling you whatever random time is available, it actually knows about deep work and focus time and recovery. This is AI I can get behind. So here's the thing. Reclaim doesn't lock you into rigid schedules. It's AI dynamically adjust your time blocks.

50:24Again, they're using my language, yes. I love it. I love it. Around conflicts and shifting priorities. So you stay protected without sacrificing flex ability. The average Reclaim user, get this, gains seven extra productive hours every week, cuts overtime nearly in half, and sees major drops in burnout and context switching. That is the third term I love that they're using. Here's what I think, Jesse. I think I have one of those split personality Jekyll and Hyde things. And what I didn't realize is that at night when I thought I was sleeping, my other personality came out and I started Reclaim.ai.

50:59because they're speaking my language. This is all the stuff I would care about. I don't want to hear about your super intelligent AGI that's going to automate half the economy. I want a calendar that's not going to overbook me, that cares about deep work, that knows that context switching matters. Finally, a company speaks the right language. Reclaim it, if you use it, will be the one thing on your computer that's actually trying to help you do work that matters as opposed to actively trying to make it impossible. Like basically every other app I feel like I deal with on my computer sometimes.

51:30So if you're a knowledge worker, you have to check this out. So how do you do it? You can sign up 100 % free with Google or Outlook calendars if you go to reclaim.ai slash cal. Reclaim is also offering my listeners an exclusive 20 % off 12 months if you use the discount code cal20. My name and the number 20. So visit reclaim.ai slash Cal to sign up for free and use that discount code Cal20. That's reclaim.ai slash Cal. All right, that's cool. But now let's get back to my conversation with Tim Ferriss.

52:13Tim Ferriss:A huge benefit is you will know if your baby's ugly very quickly. And you don't have to ask people for their opinion. You'll see it. And I would, just to speak to the Hollywood piece also, And maybe I'm biased having grown up in New York. People can be brutal. And the people who are brutal are not always going to be right. But if the idea is truly bad, they just saved you a lot of time by being honest. If you pay attention to it. It doesn't mean you should just follow it rote. But separately, if someone's brutal to you and you fold, it means you didn't have the necessary enthusiasm or focus to have endurance pursuing that project.

53:00So even if it's a good idea, they saved you time

53:04Tim Ferriss:because you wouldn't have been able to execute in the long term on it. Does that make sense? Yeah, if they've been too supportive of a bad idea, it would have been six months later, you would have folded when it got hard. Exactly. Or if it was, even if it were a good idea, that's I think the thing that I'm very inarticulately trying to convey is that even if it is a, the idea could have product market fit for say a book, but the book is going to take you a year and a half to write and underneath all of the surface enthusiasm, you don't actually have the juice to fuel that year and a half. Yeah.

53:42Tim Ferriss:Great idea, but like execution risk, right? like key man risk with endurance. The agent or whoever it is who insults that book or judges it really harshly, if that causes you to fold, you wouldn't have made it anyway. And I mean, that gets into some very smoky territory where when do you listen, when do you not? And my very brief answer to that is you workshop the hell out of it in advance. You pay a lot of attention to your energy levels if it recharges you or not, and know what works before you even get to the agent. I mean, this is another divergence, but why do you think in nonfiction book publishing, people don't like, not everyone, but I run into people who want to be writers who do not like the fact that the book is bought first before you write it.

54:36To me, I'm like, this is great. Like money is a neutral indicator of value, Derek Sivers. you don't have to put in a huge amount of effort before you get like a very definitive okay this could work we're investing in it and then you know there's a lot of first time writers who just don't want that to be true what do you think is going on there?

54:56Tim Ferriss:well tell me more about that so with the folks who have voiced that to you is it that they want to to Follow the romantic image of the writer, come out of a cave with this beautiful diamond, and then get what they're worth? Is that what they hope to do or is it something else? I think, well, here's what I'm trying to figure out. I think it might be, it makes the rejection proximate. Right. So it makes it too close. When you say to them, oh, great, all you need to do is query an agent. You could do that tomorrow. It's maybe it's, I'm not ready for this to be rejected yet. I want to have a thousand words a day with the perfect, you know, Urban Mate Tea that I Instagram and do this for two years.

55:43And I don't want this to be derailed. I don't know if that's what's going on. And then, but there's such, I have these conversations with the writers all the time where they invent the most elaborate ways that they're going to get around selling the book first. And I was like, well, why not just see if the idea, maybe it's their mind knows, like it doubts them. But it's always a fascinating thing. This is the huge advantage we have over novelist. We find out up front. We don't have to wait until the box office numbers come back.

56:07Tim Ferriss:Yeah. I think that now that you're explaining it and giving some examples, it's avoiding judgment. It's avoiding feedback. And this is where Seth Godin has so many great things to say. And I can't remember who first said this, but no product survives first contact with customers. and what Seth would say and I'm paraphrasing here but he said you know changing the world and creating this and da da da and doing these giant things like you can hide behind the big yeah he's like find your smallest viable audience and get in front of them as quickly as possible yes and then you can't hide right if getting if having three of my friends playtest my shitty prototype is doable tomorrow bro, it's almost impossible for me to come up with excuses why that isn't something I can do, right?

57:06Tim Ferriss:But if I'm like, I want to create the game that's the combination of this, this, this, and this best-selling game, it's going to take me nine months, I have a plan, and then I'll be ready to finally show it, to debut it on the stage at the World Expo or whatever. I think underneath it all, and it's often, I would suspect, subconscious, people are just afraid of it being rejected. And for me, the problem is the label as is often the case, right? It's like the labels you use and the words you use matter. They form your thinking and your beliefs and your reality. So for me, it's just feedback. It's people who are helping me make something better.

57:46Tim Ferriss:That's it. Yeah. Right. That's it. And that's like having a very rough draft and having people who care about you, who have a good eye, giving you feedback on that rough draft. They are helping you make something better. Now, if you're dealing with strangers, of course, they may not do it in the most delicate fashion possible, but nonetheless, they're still helping you get closer to something better. So the first contact is tough. And a lot of people may not realize i mean if you get good especially in the early days at selling non-fiction books you're basically fundraising for a startup right yeah it's like i mean they build business models there's a you're putting together a book proposal what is that it's a pitch deck slash like fundraising presentation is what it is and a lot of the stuff you would see for people raising money for or Uber or anything else.

58:44Tim Ferriss:It's going to be the same stuff. How big is the market? Do you have access to the market? What's the basic premise? Why doesn't this exist in the market or why does it echo something that's already working? Okay, let's see a sample, right? Which would be the equivalent of a super rough mock-up prototype. And they want to know that it is as close to a sure thing as humanly possible. and then you get this advance aka like seed funding right to get you to the next milestone and they're like well if this goes well we'll have more to pay you right which is paying you in installments it's the same thing same idea uh whereas fiction man that's a tough game i mean having to write it first i mean that's i i would prefer to do it honestly because the the prospect of selling a fiction book, which I could probably strong arm someone into doing if I wanted to, right?

59:38Tim Ferriss:I could have some publisher cover their eyes and say, I hope you don't get me fired, right? Yeah, because you have channels. I wouldn't want to do it because the pie on the face would be so much more dramatic if it came, whatever it is, six months before this thing's supposed to be published. I'd rather just have a couple of sample chapters and they're like, Tim, I love you. And this is terrible. but good news there are steps you can take to make it not terrible yeah but here's like we love you your book about barebow archery we get that you're passionate about it 800 pages i don't know yeah a lot in here about string density or tension or whatever yeah yeah yeah um so tell me if this is right or not like if i'm this is like i'm putting an arc from afar on your life so you can tell me if this is right or not.

1:00:29Because I've been writing recently about this idea. I've been using the term engineered wonder. I had a recent newsletter post about this talking about Walt Disney. And there's a certain point in his career, his post-World War II, the studio was struggling. He was in a malaise. And he went all in on, he was building a one-eighth scale model, working steam train. He went all in on this for like a couple of years. And then he shut it down and like came out of that and built Disneyland. But there was like something about this activity. He was all in on something. It was like, it wasn't a core. This is the next movie we're doing as our studio or whatever.

1:01:05It like re-energized him. It sort of got different parts of his brain and nervous system active again that weren't before. And it led to, you know, all sorts of other stuff as well. And I was making this argument like this is important. Like engineered wonder. A project you do just because my two aspects were it's fascinating. And then you tend, like you take it far. It can't just be, I took dance lessons. It has to be like, you know, I want to compete and win. It's not just, hey, I built a game to play with my friends. It's like, I want it and let's try to go all the way and do it in Walmart.

1:01:37So it seems like if we're looking at your life, pre-4-Hour Workweek, because in 4-Hour Workweek, you talk about your life, like right before 4-Hour Workweek, like this period where brain quickened, you stepped away and made it like, I'm going to have a lot more time. you had a lot of that going on, right? A lot of the things you document in like your first book was just things that were interesting and you pushed it really far because like life is, I mean, that was the thesis of that book. You're doing this now as well. I mean, there's cock punch before that and you have the game and just like things that are just interesting to you, right?

1:02:13You heard that right, folks. Yeah, that's what it was called. Everyone knows what I'm talking about. And there's a lot of this going on and it seems like from afar, This is why you tell me if I'm right or wrong is that there was like a period in between where things seemed maybe a little more grinding. Yeah. I'm thinking about like when Ryan was working for you, it was like this book was successful and there's these events we're doing and the books, the new books were taking like forever to write or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Is there an arc there where like you're returning the engineered wonder or am I simplifying things?

1:02:44Tim Ferriss:I don't think you're simplifying things. I would say you are simplifying things, but you're simplifying correctly. That's the right direction. Yeah. Yeah, so here's what I would add to that because I think you're right.

1:03:00I've always, well, let me rewind.

1:03:04Tim Ferriss:I think we can mine a lot of very valuable stuff from our childhood and younger lives. The obsessions that we never got tired of. I think there's a lot there, which doesn't mean, oh, I liked My Little Pony, so I'm going to go strike a licensing deal with My Little Pony. But it's like, what is that? What about it? Dig in. And surprisingly often, I've tried this a number of times in the last handful of years, that stuff still works. There's like this little genie in a bottle that you can tap if you figure out why those things did what they did. Things that when you were young really captured you.

1:03:48Tim Ferriss:Gave you those feelings of locked in fascination. Like you playing Dungeons and Dragons when you're 12. Obsession, losing track of time. Those things still work. So for instance, the last few years, I wanted to be a comic book penciler forever. Meaning I wanted to draw comic books, like Marvel stuff. And I used to get lost in art for decades. And then when I graduated from college and I got a serious job and I was like, okay, that stuff's for kids. Let's move on. like focus on the real stuff, read books by Richard Branson and this and that, the other thing and like put on some blinders. And what I realized over time is that those activities, those, those like time passing without you realizing it, kind of loss of the self, like the fixation on the self dissolving away, those aren't optional frivolous things.

1:04:45Tim Ferriss:and I would maybe compare them to like the, I don't know, the coal like furnace room in a gigantic ship. It's like the energy that is produced from that, preserved and produced, right? Just like the recharging and everything that that room provides is necessary for the entire ship. It's not compartmentalized in that one area. So when you find something like this, which doesn't need to take a long time, honestly. For me, it could just be screwing around with a tutorial on YouTube with Procreate on an iPad and doing 20 minutes of drawing at some point after work, just to bookend work, right? Like the shutdown complete, right?

1:05:33Tim Ferriss:Now, typically if I do 10 or 15 minutes, it's going to turn into an hour and I'm going to be like, oh my God, I'm hungry. I totally forgot that I was doing this. and that is like an extra four hours of sleep it's incredible how much energy you can derive from that and so i would say like four-hour work week another way to chart the course would be like four-hour work week which was about let's just call it like per hour productivity how do you maximize that right and then for our body once again about performance but everything physical for our chef confusingly to a lot of people actually a book about accelerated learning right so but once again it's like how do i do more with each minute basically then started extending into tools of titans and tribe of mentors where we get a little more philosophical maybe that's me getting older i think it's me also realizing how much with every passing year like how few things really matter again any possible way you could assess it but certainly just in terms of quality of life relationship quality, the things that make humans human.

1:06:40Tim Ferriss:And so I had the philosophical kind of stoicism angle, right? I was writing about stoicism and other schools of philosophy starting maybe, let's call it 10 years ago. And the missing piece was just this engineered wonder that you're describing, right? I touched on edges of it. This engineered wonder, awe in the last few years, like really paying attention to awe and what it does to people. There are some very interesting discussions of this in the scientific literature. And achieving that in a number of different ways, right? Immersive nature with very close friends, which I'm doing next week, literally taking a week completely off the grid up in the mountains of Montana with a few friends, learning wilderness survival skills, carrying stuff around all day.

1:07:36Tim Ferriss:And then also play. And I think play sounds frivolous to a lot of folks who are like, I still have places to go, things to do. And I guess my point would be like, play feeds into productivity. If I need to present it in a way that is palatable to type A people like myself, right? It's that engine room in the ship. Your former right-hand man wrote a book about that. Charlie's book. I remember that. It's an influential book. Play it away. Yeah, Charlie Hohn. And it doesn't need to distract. It honestly preserves and fuels you so that you can be actually better at discerning what matters, I think.

1:08:25Tim Ferriss:like if you don't have time to meditate for 10 minutes if you don't have time to play a game for 10 minutes you need to take a full week and sit down and do some hard thinking and journaling because that is basically a preview of burnout and implosion I would say based on my lived experience and the lived experience of a lot of people in my audience and we could certainly talk about a lot of other elements But I do think the engineered wonder, the play, the joy, the awe, which are kind of, I would say, kind of the ends of the spokes feeding back to something central that is kind of the same thing.

1:09:09Tim Ferriss:It's like a constellation of all of those. Is incredibly valuable. And if you get a little, this is going to be a big word, folks. Sorry if this sounds overstated, but transcendence. And all I mean by that is you stop the me, me, me, I, I, I song for 10 or 15 minutes. Oh my God, can that be just a revelatory experience that you can build into your life. and with all of the powers that be and teams that exist every time you open your phone to exploit the me, me, me, I, I, I song to make you use these things incessantly, I really think you need these moments where you are not fixated on the self just for self-preservation but also just to enjoy this, as far as we know, one-way ticket ride that we all have.

1:10:06I mean, it seems like there's an irony that like you wrote a book trying to explain to people. Because you're talking about mini retirements. It was to go have these moments. Like, hey, get the helicopter ride up to the wine country in Argentina. Right? Like go to do the tango dancing. You know, there's like, right? Write a book to tell people about this, right? Like you said, yes, it was about getting more out of each minute. but on behalf of reducing the footprint of work. But then this seems ironic, but maybe I'm just misreading. It's a little bit ironic that writing a book, explaining to other people, hey, here's what I'm doing.

1:10:44And I'm getting all these moments. My life is built around these moments of like transcendence and like engineered wonder. The success of that book then like took a lot of that out of your life because now it's like, I have to write the next one and I want to try TV and let me try this. Let me try this instead. Like, it seems like, I don't know if that's quite right, but like the ironies of the professional world is you're so successful telling people about the joys of it that they took away your time to keep doing that.

1:11:13Tim Ferriss:I think that's true for anyone who is successful in anything to the extent that they get noticed in any way. It could be as a chef. It could be as a writer. It could be as a coder, as a programmer, or a really good UX designer. The thing that you love doing, to come back to that endurance, you're not only good at it, but you really enjoy doing it, which gives you all the fuel, the endurance, to outlast other people who might have, hypothetically, the chops, but they don't have the... So you've got the love, you've got the ability, you're really good at doing something before you know it you're going to get more attention and you will almost inevitably get pulled away from that thing.

1:12:09Tim Ferriss:This is just an example that's really common in startups but if you're really good at that thing, boom, before you know it you're a manager. And then a few years later you're going to be like, how did this happen? My whole week is meetings. I'm not doing the thing I want to do but if I wanted to be an independent contributor I'm going to have to take this big cut in my pay and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And then you have golden handcuffs in a way. With authors, very frequently, I'm sure you've seen this before, you create this thing while nobody's really paying attention to you. And then all of a sudden the floodgates open.

1:12:46Tim Ferriss:And we chatted about this before recording a little bit, but this is why I have this 800-page draft. Please shoot me now. but of a book about all the ways that you can say no and the strategies I've used for the last, whatever, almost 20 years. I didn't have that toolkit because I didn't have the problem of this huge paradox of choice in the same way. So what did I do? Just like many authors, I was like, you're going to pay me to talk for 60 minutes? Hell yeah, I'll do that. And just said yes to everything. And then you end up this like traveling salesman, like George Clooney and what is it? up in the air or whatever that movie is.

1:13:25Tim Ferriss:And you realize, this sucks. The thing that I was good at that got me here, I no longer have the space to do. Because as, I mean, you're kind of the archdeacon of deep work, right? You can't cobble together half hour here and 45 minutes there to get what you would get out of a half day or a full day of writing. You just cannot do it. At least I haven't met anybody who can do it. and this then becomes the great divestiture figuring out how to get back to these things that got you there in the first place without getting distracted by and you're going to get distracted so it's kind of like meditation like your monkey mind is going to be like yeah email porn here's calendar like the argument you had with your ex 20 years ago whatever like your mind is going to do that well if you could combine email calendar and porn though I think you have a startup I think you got a unicorn.

1:14:20Email hub.

1:14:24Tim Ferriss:So that stuff's going to come up. But the point that I think it was Sharon Salzberg who made this point to me, she said, maybe it was Tara Brock, I can't remember, but she said, you're not trying to eliminate thought. Every time you take the fishing rod and reel yourself back from those thoughts to your breath or whatever, that's a rep. That's like doing a bicep curl. So it's like you're going to get distracted by shiny things. Everything, at least once you set foot in this attention UFC that is digital anything, you're going to get distracted. So the question is how do you reel yourself back in?

1:15:03Tim Ferriss:How do you create scaffolding and systems? And you're right. So I have at various points been pulled away. That's going to happen. So it's just a question of how you get things in your calendar that actually matter, right? So for me, it's like one group dinner a night with, it seems to be like three plus friends, but not too many, like, let's call it like three to six people total. Huge quality of life. Yeah. Improver. Huge, huge. Like I can't even put any kind of number on it. And get the, if they're not in the calendar, they are not real. Get them booked, get the people committed so you can't back out with some lame-ass excuse because you're watching an extra TED Talk that you don't need to watch or whatever.

1:15:56You're on your calendar porn email. Calendar porn. I kind of want to get your help on this.

1:16:02Tim Ferriss:This is when I would probably at 2 in the morning, in the middle of the night tonight, I'm going to buy yet another useless domain. You feel like I got to have a certain few errors. It's going to be huge just in case before this podcast comes out. One of the most popular things out there. Well, I feel like you're ahead of me on the divestiture, right? Like you got more serious about this. I don't know when you would say you got more serious about it. It's why I like that you were working on this concept. I feel like right now in my life, I call it I'm the great disappointer. And I feel like you went through this.

1:16:36There's your next book title. Because the way people, which is natural, the problem is it's asymmetric. for like an individual who's asking you for something. They're simulating just the time commitment of the thing they're asking you about. And when seen in isolation, it's like often reasonable or as you were speaking, the reward is really high. And in isolation, they're like, I don't understand why you want it. It's 60 minutes and it's some absurd amount of money. Or it's like, can't you just come by our company and just like talk about deep work for a while, right?

1:17:06Tim Ferriss:Or let's just meet up and have a coffee. Yeah, meet up and have a coffee, yeah. And they're like, in isolation, it's nothing. But then it's asymmetric because there's 30 of those coming in and then that's all you're doing. And so I feel like my speaking agent thinks I'm clinically insane because like I just – I'm like I don't want to speak. I'm like the worst speaking client. I was like I'll do three times a year, right? Like I just say no to everything. All of our like extended circle, it's like all friends of friends are always like, why can't you just come talk about deep work? And I'm always like I just – I can't.

1:17:36Like I'm just saying no to everything but it feels sort of haphazard. When did you switch to the great divestiture? Like at some point?

1:17:44Tim Ferriss:Yeah, I started, it took different forms. So I'd say the great divestiture in terms of figuring out strategies and tools and systems for saying no or simply not seeing categories of things that I have decided I need to say no to, even for a limited period of time. And you do full categories. it's just easier it's just easier no speaking for six months have a policy right no speaking for six months zero and if you break your own rules all is lost yeah like you can't yeah because here's the beers and this is going to get into some woo-woo like venice slash topanga hand wavy stuff but my experience is as soon as you set a policy like no speaking for six months yeah the best offer you have ever seen is going to come through the doors in two weeks so you can almost like trick the universe.

1:18:39Tim Ferriss:Like I need to, you just have to be, and you just have to say, not today, say not today. And you gotta say no. Yeah. I mean, and this is literally true. Like I literally, it just makes me think about it. Getting, you know, an offer from a sultan and that sounds like a made up thing, but actually I was talking to a couple of someone else who had the same offer come across. That's the type of thing that comes across. We like your book. We're bringing you out. You can like dance for us and you know, whatever. And I just keep saying, well, I'll keep adding zeros till you say no. Like that type of stuff.

1:19:07I said no to that. I say, this is why my speaking agent thinks I'm crazy,

1:19:09Tim Ferriss:by the way, is I'm not moved by money. But okay, yeah. So whole categories. You should write a book called Tactically Insane. Maybe that's the next one. I like this, yeah. And he just brings up the Jiddu Krishnamurti quote. It is not the indicator of health to be profoundly adjusted to a sick society. Something like that, right? I like this, yeah. And so in the beginning, it was figuring out systems for saying no, because it was literally just like, how do I stop drinking from this fire hydrant? How do I just get out of this flow? Because currently the inbound is so overwhelming. That had to start around 2008.

1:19:52Tim Ferriss:Now, given the book came out April 2007, it took a while to get to, I mean, it hit the New York Times right away, but to get to number one took until August. and then as soon as that happened, then all the offers start coming in. And then you pay the piper like six months later, six to nine months later. And then I was like, oh my God, is this my life now? Wait a second. It's like, it's a quality problem, but this is also in some ways like a very, it's a creatively terminal problem, right? Like if I keep doing this, my creativity, my flexibility, my identity becomes fixed. if I keep doing this.

1:20:35Tim Ferriss:And that's, so it wasn't until later, I tried to find ways around it, tried to find ways to massage what I would say yes or no to. Okay, I'm going to add, I'll keep adding zeros until people start saying no. All those things can help, but they don't provide the psychological reprieve and the energy benefits of just categorically saying, this is a no, which I also did for other things that have been like the most lucrative thing in my life, angel investing. In 2005, I was like, why I'm taking a long startup vacation or in parentheses, why does they know? How does they know when it matters most?

1:21:10Tim Ferriss:And I stepped out kind of at the peak of my powers in Silicon Valley to stop completely for three to five years probably. And that's what allowed me to really focus on the podcast. Did you get a reprieve when you said break from books? Oh, huge, huge, huge, huge. Yeah, huge reprieve. You know, you could just like not pitch a new book. Was there something psychologically different by actually like saying to yourself, I'm not working on, I'm not just waiting to pitch something next. Like I'm not writing right now. I'm doing the podcast. Yeah. And frankly, for that, that was, I may not ever write a book again at that point.

1:21:45Tim Ferriss:I was so burned out from, and this is partially my fault, certainly, but committing to do what should have been a three or four year book in a year, a year and a half. I mean, it was an insane deadline for this book. I'm just so proud of that book. But if people look at it, I was, I was thumbing through it. I still use the four hour chef because it's got a lot of, a lot of great recipes in addition to all the accelerated learning stuff. And I was flipping through it and I was like, what was eye thinking. This like four color, hundreds and hundreds of photographs, maybe a thousand plus. With a brand new publishing house.

1:22:17Yeah, brand new publishing house.

1:22:19Tim Ferriss:It was upsetting the entire world of publishing. Going through Amazon publishing, got boycotted by everybody and I decided Wasn't BitTorrent involved for some reason? Yeah, for some of the promotion. Well, every time I do promotion, I try to learn something new using a brand new channel or something. So we did a BitTorrent bundle which was actually super successful with a free audio version of The 4-Hour Chef and all this other stuff. This is something like my kid's generation. Those words mean nothing to us. A bit torrent bundle. With launching the game, I'm going to have one or two kind of just completely off menu new technologies I'll play with to learn about them.

1:23:02Tim Ferriss:And saying no to doing another book, just saying, you know what, I don't know how long this pauses. Maybe it's indefinitely. was incredibly important also to not, to address the isolation and loneliness that I felt. Because even in producing that book, a lot of it, as you know, is very solitary. It's very, very, very, very solitary. And I spent so much time alone working on that book. It wasn't good for me. And I don't think it's good for most people to be alone all the time. Very few people have, I would say, the mutation. It's not an evolved capacity. Like Robert Caro, like some of the great like historians who just want to be, David Grant at the New Yorker, he wants to be in archives.

1:23:46Yeah, just like turning, but it's a very specific thing.

1:23:49Tim Ferriss:I mean, that is, I really feel like, and sure there are people who are like, I've been reading so much Buddhism. Like it's, you just need to be at peace with yourself and talk about your childhood and forgive your parents. And then you can be alone and be happy at any time with yourself. I'm like, maybe, but if you talk to evolutionary biologists, I think evolution drives a lot and genetics drives a lot. We are evolved to be social, period, full stop. And if Robert Caro, by any measure, is a complete mutant, right? It's kind of like if you're like, well, LeBron James can jump that high. I'm like, yeah, I mean, I should be able to jump that high.

1:24:26Tim Ferriss:And you're like, let's hold on for a second here. I mean, you are not the same, barely the same species. so similarly after that the biggest psychological reprieve was spending time with more people and the podcast was intrinsically social yeah it was having conversations with people i deeply cared about in the beginning it was close friends and then people i was uh whose work or lives i was deeply interested in yeah it was it had a social piece built into it and it doesn't have the footprint on the rest of your life the book i mean book writing i'm writing a book now it you know i'm never not writing a book but man it gets brutal because it wants it you want every moment of your life that you're not writing you're a little bit worried i probably should be writing because you're thinking about deadlines that's the thing about writing which is it's it's for instance right with with coyote with this game it's like yes because of the way my mind works.

1:25:24Tim Ferriss:I thought about it a lot while doing other things, but books are a different level of preoccupation and not preoccupation necessarily in a negative way. But when you are not writing, if you're taking a book really seriously, you are consciously or subconsciously thinking about the book. It's, it's, it's, it is kind of an all consuming thing, at least in my experience and it sounds like it to to a greater or lesser extent your experience as well but and it has to be it's like you can do the math it needs about x number of thousands of hours of concentrated attention to generate enough words for the book so like you just you're you're in the red massively when you start writing a book and like i have to this needs 10 000 hours of attention or whatever the actual time is and so it's a it's not just oh it's um in a degenerate way, occupying my mind.

1:26:21It really shouldn't. It's distracting me by showing it. It's like, no, it like needs, if I don't get another 50 hours in this week on this, I'm kind of falling behind.

1:26:29Tim Ferriss:Like how it has to have - Making my cortisol go up just listening to you. You can tell I'm, yeah. I'm on a New Yorker deadline right now. So like I had to take a step away from my book and it's stressful every day. I'm like, these are days I could be writing. Glutton for punishment. Yeah. You should get your Opus Dei whips out. and just do that while you're sitting. I've got the thing wrapped around my leg right now, yeah. I was asked to do a speaking thing for Opus Dei once. Back in the early days in Cambridge. Wild, okay, interesting. If you haven't seen the Da Vinci Code movie, you can get previewed.

1:27:04Tim Ferriss:It was exactly like that, yeah. It was exactly like, I was very much like Tom Hanks in that movie. It was an albino who was whipping himself. It was an odd, it was just him. It was a weird speaking event. It was me and an albino. Great speaking event. It was just two of us in a room. Just in a room hitting each other with whips. But good money though. So, you know. Yeah, you know, but the money was so good. Yeah. Yeah. I remember BJ Novak, who's famous from The Office, writer, director, actor, extraordinaire. And one of his tips, this helped me to say no to a lot of stuff, actually, was effectively, I'm paraphrasing, right?

1:27:35Tim Ferriss:This podcast was a long time ago. But whenever you say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but the money is so good. whenever there's a but the money's so good or some variation of that, that is a clear red light. Stop and take a really close look about whatever it is that you're considering doing. Yeah, if there's an and, it's different. And the money is also really good. And the money happens to be great. That's a different thing. But the money is so good. Podcasting seems like, at least it was, and then I'm going to ask you if this is changing, but it seems like the perfect refuge from that.

1:28:09Because for whatever reason, And unlike these other industries, you could just podcast and be good at it and successful at it. And people are happy to listen to your show. And there was no scaffolding of people knocking on the door and be like, great, now come do this time-consuming thing or that time-consuming. It could just exist as a creative, skilled thing where people were just happy for you to do this creative, skilled thing. There's just not that many people. You have to deal with ads or something like that. I mean, so did you, I've loved it about podcasting is that no one else bothers you.

1:28:43Do you think it's still that, is it going to stay there? I mean, I'm curious about your trajectory because you were there early. Like, are you stick, are you sticking around in podcasting? Are you changing? Like, well, how do you, what's your read? You got to help me here. What's your read on what's happening in this industry? What's your relationship to it? Like, is it still going to be this great refuge for people like semi-introverted creative people like us? Or is this changing?

1:29:03Tim Ferriss:I think, I think it will be. it can continue to be a refuge but I think it requires setting rules and policies that you've thought through very carefully at least in my case so I found myself getting pulled into the floats and jetsam of all sorts of things and this is one of the benefits of having a blog by the way anyone can have a blog but you put out a public policy which depersonalizes saying no to a lot of people. Because you can just say, hey, I put this up six months ago. I've got to follow my own advice. Because you have an interview show. So everyone is probably saying, can I come on?

1:29:43Tim Ferriss:Exactly. And so I put up some new rules for podcasting to keep it interesting, something like that, and explained. It's like, okay, here are the rules I'm going to follow. And I was actually literally just having a conversation with one of my employees, who's like the COO producer of editorial, handles a lot of the podcast logistics. And we had a possible guest, great guest, but A-list celebrity and has been on before. Amazing conversation. But the rule that I set in that new blog post was, I'm not doing book launches anymore. I won't be one of 20 podcasts that come out the same week because it seems redundant.

1:30:27And what I will do though,

1:30:30Tim Ferriss:If I'm going to consider any book, I need to record and publish three months ahead of publication. And that rules out a million people because they don't have necessarily the forethought to do that or they miss the post or whatever. But I can still point to it. And in this particular case, this is an amazing guest who is incredibly good in conversation and at telling stories on podcasts. I mean, A+++. But they were definitely not going to do me any favors. So it would have been at the same time as everybody else. And I said to my producer, I just said, look, if I show people that I am not following my own rules, no one's going to respect my rules.

1:31:14Tim Ferriss:Yeah. And rightly so. They're like, look, you had Brad Pitt on during the F1 launch, like everyone else. So like now you can have me on the talk about my ebook. Whatever it is. and which is not to cast aspersions on anyone or what they're doing but for me it really comes back to like for me to continue to have the energy and the love of the game to do this long term i just for myself realized i needed to change a bunch of different rules so another one was for instance, I want to have a barbell approach to most guests on the show, most guests on the show, which is sort of everybody knows them or almost no one knows them, right?

1:31:59Tim Ferriss:But trying to stay away from like the very highest point of the bell curve distribution there. And these are kind of arbitrary in a sense, but that's rules. And sometimes there is no perfect line that you can point to so you have to pick a line this is true with moral judgments also and ethics right like sometimes it seems arbitrary but often it's always going to be arbitrary so you must pick a line yeah so that you can make decisions and uh it's it's a hell of a thing podcasting i think will continue to be a refuge if you want to play in the major leagues using video as a growth engine then there are a lot of compromises compared to what you and I are accustomed to doing.

1:32:51Tim Ferriss:And many of those compromises would require doing things that are completely antithetical to my reasons for starting and enjoying a podcast in the first place. So I have accepted that I'm going to make, this has been true for probably a number of years, significant economic compromises and growth compromises in order to continue doing this the way that I enjoy doing it. And what that means is, I think for a lot of podcasts that are not fixed location TV shows, it's like to call them podcasts now is even kind of silly. There is an audio component, but... Yeah, they're TV shows that have an audio feed for people who want to just do the audio.

1:33:37Tim Ferriss:I think it'll return to some of the early days, right? It'll be more like 2017, maybe, 2016 for a lot of folks. And I'm totally fine with that. I'm totally fine with that because I love having these conversations. And the only thing that grows without restraint is a cancer. So you got to be careful which like professional cancers you choose. and that isn't to say you can't have something very big that is very good. You can. But in my particular case, I need to be very personally interested in whatever we're talking about. At least that's my bar. Because I have all these other things. I don't need to do the podcast.

1:34:25Tim Ferriss:It's like I've got the angel investing and the book writing and the game, and I'm going to try all sorts of other harebrained stuff. I mean, you're about to become a billionaire. You're going to get that card game money. Get that card game bank. Yeah, exactly. Scrooge McDuck backstroking through my pool of gold coins. And this is also my assumption with any of these projects, whether it's the podcast, which I gave myself a graceful exit from, if needed, when I started. I just told my audience, I'm going to try like six to ten episodes and see how this goes. And I expect I'll learn these following things, even if I shut it down.

1:35:03Tim Ferriss:The same thing goes with the game. I have no idea what kind of doors are going to open, what type of email are going to come over the transom, what type of opportunities might present themselves in one way or another. So if you were to ask me, what are you doing after the game? I have no idea. I'll continue doing the podcast because having these conversations, seeing your face, having this conversation, just, again, coming back to what we have evolved for, it's like it's very nourishing for me yeah right like i'm in a good mood and that's why you care so much about making it sustainable for you so you keep doing it like that's the plan is like you're continually looking for some kudzu has grown in let's trim that off because i want this to be able to keep going let's get the kudzu it's an invasive plant that has like native to the like american south that has sort of taken over a lot of places maybe like barnacle on the side of the of the sailing ship.

1:36:00Like, you're like, I got to get those off so this can keep moving.

1:36:03Tim Ferriss:Yeah, yeah. I mean, I really think about pruning as much as adding. I love Japan. My first time ever outside of the United States was as an exchange student when I was 15, going from Long Island to Tokyo, which completely shattered my mind in a great way. It took a long time for me to get used to being in Tokyo. but should the Japanese aesthetic to paint with a broad brush of some of these gardens where you'll visit some of these gardens and you'll see someone on the ground with toenail clippers basically pruning away at moss which is not to say that's what I want to do but what you remove mattering as much as what you add I like that it appeals to me not because it's minimal but because it's elegant.

1:36:57Tim Ferriss:Like I love elegance in every possible form, whether it's calligraphy, whether it's art, like a Frank Miller, for instance, legendary comic book writer and artist. One of the - Watchmen. Few people in the, actually - No, he's a, yeah. I'm making these names up. Yeah, that was Alan Moore. He had like a dark Batman or something at some point. Yeah, the Dark Knight, he did Sin City 300. Sin City is what I was thinking about. He's got tons and tons. But one of the few people to be a top five writer of all time, let's just say, and a top five artist. That's unheard of. And his style has gotten more and more economical.

1:37:36Tim Ferriss:But economical sounds like you're selling widgets. It's become more and more elegant. Like what he can transmit with fewer lines has become more and more powerful. Do you think this is possible with podcasts? You're saying you want to get like, what is the core for you? If it's the conversation, There's some platonic ideal of like the interesting conversation. Like, let me carve everything else out of it. Like we don't need a camera on a boon. Yeah, totally. Which I've been on those shows before. Yeah, and frankly, you can just listen to your inner animal too. It's like, what pleases you? It seems maybe primitive, but I mean, our biology has millions of years of fine tuning pre-language.

1:38:26Tim Ferriss:So just paying attention to that, like this is super fun for me. So if I'm, I'll probably sit down, have some tea after this, maybe do some journaling. Okay, why was that fun? What was it, right? Was it because Cal's a sweet, swell, smart guy? Like that's definitely part of it. Not to, you know, buddy you up too hard, but it's like, that's a part of it. And we have quite a bit of kind of shared history. So that's a piece of it for sure. You also see things, observe things that other people often don't. So the trajectory that you pointed to, like that discussion I haven't had before. And the list could go on and on.

1:39:06Tim Ferriss:Like maybe it's time of day. Before getting reactive with any kind of inbox or anything, I did this. I happen to think that's really important. I'm also creating something before I do any management. Making before you manage for me. Psychologically, psycho-emotionally, huge, huge thing. I don't feel like I'm just slapping duct tape on holes in a ship or putting out fires. This is something else entirely. And so paying attention to that and then testing. Okay, let's follow these rules. And I put in the blog post of my new rules. I was like, yeah, I could revise these at any point. These are dumb.

1:39:48If they don't work, yeah, I'll change them. I'm going through something similar with the podcast where Justin and I are talking about timing. And time of day is very relevant because I'm realizing, I think the best time for me to record my show where it's just monologue, it's like, I think it needs to be at the end of the day. Because I was finding, like, okay, you have a show, it's like midday, I'm prepping, we record. I can't do anything else after that, right? Like I don't want to do anything else. I can't go into my email inbox after that or whatever. And so it was like crushing days. I was like, actually, this should be like the end of the day.

1:40:22Like where we record above a restaurant. There's kind of like an energy to it. Like, well, and then you can just be like done with work. And I was thinking like, yeah, that's the whole point is like with this medium, make it the way you want it to be. Like, yeah, how should it be? It should be like one day a week. It should be do it in the evening. It should be we decompress at the bar down. Whatever it needs to be like, why not? But it's something we can still own.

1:40:46Tim Ferriss:Yeah. And also just interrogating what rules you are playing by that you can completely alter. Like what rules are you currently following? Let's start there. And how can you play with them? Do a two-week experiment. And you and I have landed in the same place, by the way, with, in your case, kind of the monologue. But in my case, it's like there's a reason why, you know, we're doing this conversation morning, like my time and your time. And then I'm recording my own show later as a bookend at the end of the day. Because I know like this is my show and doing my show can be energizing, but there's a lot of heavy lifting also.

1:41:33Tim Ferriss:And particularly if it's very technical, This is going to be a researcher and a professor in ophthalmology. It's going to be very technical. Practical but technical. So I know that after that, I'm going to be, that's like after doing a VO2 max workout or something, I'm going to be spent. And that'll be a great place to just wipe the sweat off my brow and have a snack and jump in the pool or something like that at the end of the day. So the order matters. And over time, you can just pay attention to how your body feels. are you excited to hop on? I was excited to hop on and see you and catch up and just riff because I knew that it would be also unexpected in terms of direction, which is fun for me.

1:42:18Not as excited as you'll be for the ophthalmologist, though, because that's going to bang right there.

1:42:23Tim Ferriss:Well, you know. Actually, Andrew Huberman's an ophthalmologist, so I guess I should eat my words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also not to turn this into a, oh, woe is me. You know, I remember back when we were youngsters, but very personal interest, right? For the last year, for the first time, I've had presbyopia, which is age-related visual decline. Also, interestingly, because I looked it up, because I was like, is that the same as Presbyterian, like the etymology? And it is. Presbyterian is something like governed by the old, governed by elders. So the actual word origins are related. But presbyopia, it's like, okay, like looking at my phone, looking at supplement bottle, looking at a menu in dim light, all of that has started to go.

1:43:06Tim Ferriss:And I'm like, I don't like it. I don't like it. I do have some glasses. Welcome to my life. Yeah, I don't want to immediately hop to that. Oh, you're swimming against the current here, Tim. I was just complaining to my wife before I got on the air here. I literally said, I was at my coffee shop down the block trying to read a book. And I was like, it's too dim in there. I was like, I can't read that. Too dim. I'm sorry. They need more lights. Because it's sad and it's true and it's also has been my experience. Well, I'll tell you something crazy, which it could be placebo effect. So I don't want to get too ahead of myself.

1:43:42Tim Ferriss:But I've been experimenting with software from this tiny startup. And it is intended to train simplifying it here. But instead of doing anything to your eye structurally, it's training your visual cortex to reinterpret information and to improve your reaction speed in ways that actually change your near vision. And I've only been doing it for 26 days. It's like eight minutes a day. It seems to be helping. I've heard about something like this. And it's different from visual education where you're training the muscles in the eyes. That's what I've heard about. Okay, this is different. It's your brain.

1:44:24Tim Ferriss:This is training your brain. So super interesting. I tell you what. So I realize I'm swimming against the current, but this is also kind of what I do. This is peak Tim Ferriss. Yeah, this is peak Tim Ferriss. I get my kicks out of like, okay, I am going to go all in. And then I'm going to find all this stuff and I need someone to tell me if I am being a crazy person. I see. So this interview is actually happening. Okay, I see. So I get somebody on who can be like, that's interesting. That's nonsense. further studies needed but like trial data actually pretty interesting don't do this that's a terrible idea you're actually going to blind yourself if you look into whatever whatever for 20 minutes a day don't do that and that's great that's okay all right well now i will look forward to that yeah i'm bringing the adults into the room all right final question what's your uh have you found this because you've been at this longer than me have you found the sweet spot for staff size what does it take to run i know it's confusing because you don't just podcast but what does it take the run you know um tim ferris allied conglomerate yeah yeah tim ferris uh international allied media global hq yeah exactly uh i think that i am excessive in my fixation on leanness and elegance i think i think sometimes i overdo it actually often i overdo it but But what I can say is what currently works for me after a lot of testing.

1:45:56Tim Ferriss:And I will also preface that by saying, I think I am, and maybe this is for another call, but I think I'm a very good leader, but a very mediocre or average manager. Right. So I really require people who are incredibly self-sufficient and self-driven and who have a lot of self-inquiry, which often requires a lot of self-awareness and those people are just very, very, very hard to find. But you can build them from starting with simpler tasks and then cultivating that. If they have the raw characteristics. You break them down psychologically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The training center you have, the re-education center.

1:46:42Tim Ferriss:Please relinquish your phone. so currently I have three full-time employees and a lot of contractors and I have tried to contract out as much as humanly possible so this will certainly have echoes of four-hour workweek so my staff size compared to my business has not scaled proportionally what i will say is contractors have and people might say well what's the difference well if you live in the u.s there are a lot of differences here yeah there are a lot of differences and you have to be very careful with this you can't get cute and have full-timers who are classified as contractors have to be doing yeah you don't want a specific thing it is clearly hourly it's But I am willing to, and I'll put this in quotation marks, overpay hourly for contractors.

1:47:44Tim Ferriss:I am especially willing to overpay for, let's just say, companies where you don't have any single point of failure. Let me give an example. I use an outsourced fractional family office, which handles all of my, so there's various annual fees and so on, but they handle all of my bill pay. They handle all of my effectively bookkeeping.

1:48:18Tim Ferriss:They can give feedback on investments, some considering I can just float tons of stuff to them that they have a first pass on. And what's nice about that, as opposed to having a single contractor, before we started recording, I was like, let me put on some backup audio, right? And I'm recording on QuickTime just in case. So I am excessively hypervigilant. And the military has this expression, or I mean the military, but you'll get the idea. Two is one and one is none. It's like if you have two, you're going to lose one. If you have one, you're going to have none. So always have redundancy. And I've been in a position before where you have a key function.

1:49:02Tim Ferriss:Let's just say it's for the podcast, could be sound editing, could be video editing. And you have a fast turnaround for whatever reason and somebody gets sick. Uh-oh. If you don't have a backup, you're in a scramble and in a bad situation. So particularly with something that is mission critical like bill pay, if somebody gets sick, I want to know that my profile, all my information is within a system and a company such that there's a backup person. Yeah, someone can pick it up and do it. Who can swap in and handle it. So I'm particularly willing to overpay for that. And I think part of that is that I've seen the employee tail wag the dog in some cases to borrow from the tax expression where people hire, hire, and hire.

1:49:50Tim Ferriss:Maybe it's during a 2020 boom cycle because there's a company that benefited from that. Or who knows? They start adding folks. But then they run into the discomfort and possible complications of firing. So they don't want to fire. So they start inventing lots of things to keep people busy so they can, in their mind, justify the salaries they're paying. And I try to avoid putting myself in a position where even subconsciously I can be influenced by those types of incentives. Yep. You're on the payroll, you're going to be at work, and then suddenly you're doing live shows and you're selling t-shirts.

1:50:34Tim Ferriss:Exactly. Exactly. So to try to avoid that, I really apply constraints, right? the beauty of constraints, whether you're writing a book, creating a game, or building a company, guess what? Derek Sivers speaks on this really well with respect to CDBA. It's like, this is your chance to try to create your version of a utopia. It sounds maybe ridiculous, but it is. You have to do certain things, checks and balances, and dot your I's, cross your T's from a legal perspective, from a health insurance perspective, et cetera. But there's a lot of room to do things in an interesting way. I think Jason Fried and DHH and 37 Signals do a great job with this.

1:51:12Maybe they renamed it Basecamp.

1:51:15Tim Ferriss:I can't remember. They renamed it Basecamp, yeah. Yeah. So they have some incredibly innovative ways of approaching things. Then you see a Coinbase and what they did and public pronouncements and excluding discussions of politics from the workplace. You can do a lot within your company. So for me, just like my house, just like hopefully my books or podcasts, It's like my company is a reflection of my personality with its strengths and almost certainly with its weaknesses. I try to cover for them. I think I try to make it perhaps too aggressively like a bonsai tree. Maybe I would benefit from having an extra person or two.

1:51:56Tim Ferriss:But I have recognized my hyper aversion to waste means that I will also try to invent things for people to do if I feel like they have too much idle time. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So contractors won't make you do that. Yeah, three employees. Okay, that's good. Yeah, and that determines what I can do or not do. Yeah. But also, that leads me to more productive solutions. Like if I had 10 people who, let's just say, a number of them were kind of off-cycling and had a lot of time, I might have tried to do a game internally. That would have been, I don't want to say a disaster, but I would have wasted so much time.

1:52:34Tim Ferriss:Everybody would have been learning from square one. And instead, because I've applied the constraint of keeping the company small, it's like, no, let's go collaborate. Let somebody else who does this every day, who's A plus at it, do that stuff. Yeah. Otherwise, not that he loves this, but it wouldn't be good for you and I. You'll end up with like Brandon Sanderson's warehouse. And Brandon Sanderson loves having that business. I find it insane. I've talked to, I don't know him, but I know some of his people, but he loves it. And I'm like, oh my God, it's my nightmare. Yeah, he loves it. Like that's part of his art.

1:53:05Tim Ferriss:Yeah. And I recognize that he also has, in his wife and other people, folks to run a lot of the logistics and other aspects. One thing I recognize about myself also is I have a tendency to meddle. This comes back to being an average manager. Yeah, you're not going to be happy with happy house. I get my hands dirty often when I probably should just leave everything alone. I'm like maybe an executive chef who's like running from station to station. Like, come on, come on. I'll let me cut those terms. That's not the right place to put the sauce. Come on. Yeah, it's just like, you know, I got to recognize that this OCD thing is sometimes very helpful, but also leads me to make some pretty dumb decisions.

1:53:50So I try to, you know,

1:53:54Tim Ferriss:Charlie Munger would often say, and Warren Buffett too, right? It's not about being super smart. It's just trying not to be stupid. Not to be dumb. yeah yeah i hear you well timmy that's a great place that's a great piece of advice to leave it on don't worry about being smart just try not to be stupid too often i always appreciate you take i always appreciate our conversations i feel like we do in both places it's it's uh it's always it's always a pleasure and i'm uh enjoyed it and coyote coyote yeah it's it's everywhere folks amazon target walmart wherever so hope you hope you try it it's uh it's it works Yeah.

1:54:30Tim Ferriss:People laugh. Yeah. It's a dumb game for smart people. So check it out. And always nice to spend time together, Cal. All right. Thank you, Tim. Thanks, man. All right. So there you go. That was my conversation with Tim Ferriss. We started talking about his game. I actually have it right here. Here's Coyote. And we went from how do you build a game that is really good to playing the game of life in a way that's going to give you real meaning and depth. Have you tried this yet, Jesse? I did. I brought it to the beach. Yeah, you took one of the copies. Yeah. It's fun, right? Yeah, it's fun. I like it.

1:55:04It was really cool to hear from Tim how hard it is to get one of these games perfectly calibrated. That was the cool part where you have like the prototyping and it's just you tweaking this. What if we change this card to this card to that card? It's one of those things you think it's like, oh, I could invent the card game. You realize like, oh my God, it's so hard to make one that's fun. This is a good one. Tim is always fantastic to talk to. He's a team thinker. He sits and he thinks and he cares about living deeply in a shallow world. To me, that is what the 4-Hour Workweek is about. The 4-Hour Workweek, as much as any book, probably helped set those seeds in my thinking about crafting a life that matters and that it's enjoyable and that you enjoy as opposed to just pursuing a particular goal or a single grand accomplishment that you think is going to solve everything.

1:55:46So I always enjoy going on Tim's show and it's been a pleasure to have him on mine. So thank you, Tim. Check out his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which I'm sure you already know. buy Coyote. This is everywhere, isn't it?

1:55:58Tim Ferriss:Yeah, you can get it in all stores. That guy's got it dialed in. This is not some Patreon product or whatever. It's a Walmart. Good for him. Alright, thanks Tim. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week on Monday with a normal episode of the show. But until then, as always, stay deep.

1:56:18Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.