In-DEPTH: The Game of Life  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: In-DEPTH: The Game of Life - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/34d1171a-4534-4fa9-9051-a93c648c0750 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Why Tim Made A Card Game** - Tim built Coyote because he missed analog, social games and wanted a counterbalance to screen time. - He prototyped with Exploding Kittens and tested with friends until a simple, fast, repeatable game emerged. Transcript: Tim Ferriss There's a lot of backstory but i grew up kind of saved by games mostly very complex games like dungeons and dragons i still have all of my materials downstairs from when i was a kid and i For a host of reasons felt like games analog social is just every year as kind of digital goes vertical, the counterbalance of analog and social is becoming more and more important. So I thought, you know what, maybe I should make a game. And it is a fast, casual social game, made it with exploding kittens, because I became close friends with Alon Lee, used my podcast to sort of test the waters. And they've made a whole host of great games and tested a few dozen games with my friends and came across Poetry for Neanderthals, which is an exceptional game. Maybe it's just by me and my dumb friends, but that's the one they wanted to play over and over again. And I was like, well, who made this game? Oh, Exploding Kittens. Who's behind Exploding Kittens? And that's how I kind of pulled on the thread. And right now, Coyote is doing very well. It's got like 300 million plus social views of gameplay online. And you can find it everywhere. Just launched. And it plays three to eight folks, typically. Kids can play, I'd say 10 plus. So very, very simple to learn, but different every game. ([Time 0:03:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bc19b7b2-0cb2-47f5-a72a-55afb8373ba2)) - **Fun As A Trojan Horse** - A great casual game must be fun first but can also deliver cognitive benefits as a side effect. - Tim calls this a Trojan horse: entertainment sells while training the brain quietly. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Kind of frenetic. So under the hood, and all of my books are designed this way as well, there is a Trojan horse with this game. So it has to be fun and people need to want to tell their friends about it and play again, right? That's table stakes. But under the hood, it is also a workout for your brain and i've spent a lot of time thinking about this kind of thing but by and large people are not interested in buying things to make them Smarter i know it sounds crazy but i've tried this multiple times in the u.s at least it does not work so this has to be a side effect but yes it's basically a gesture, rhythm, and verbal Game where it's almost like rock, paper, scissors on steroids for a group where you try to match all these things as you go around the table. And if anyone makes a mistake, they lose a life. And then last person standing wins. You can also play cooperatively if you have someone in your family who's a really sore loser or a friend who just complains too much. But the competitive mode is really kind of where the smack talking and I think the adrenaline and a lot of the fun is. So it is a rhythm and gesture game where people have to perform an action, say what's on the card, and go around in a circle keeping a certain rhythm. ([Time 0:05:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1cfca8dd-97b1-4d2a-b828-4e78d71d2b04)) - **Prototype Quickly With Constraints** - Prototype fast and iterate often; 10 minutes of prototyping beats 10 hours of talking. - Apply constraints early to decide direction and speed up discovery. Transcript: Tim Ferriss And what we're about to talk about, right, how that watch is built is part of the reason why I decided to do something completely off menu, completely different from what I am accustomed To doing because I choose, and maybe we'll get more into this later, but I choose projects based on the density of learning, skill acquisition, and relationship development, all of Which should transcend that project even if it fails. And so the question of how do I win even if this fails is always present in my mind. So with this, let's dive into it. How do you build this watch? And rest assured, whether you make a very obviously sophisticated game or a very, very simple game, there's a lot of complexity or there can be in the process if you want it to work consistently. So I've learned so many things from Milan. And he's such a sweetheart of a guy and such a polymath. I mean, he'd worked on the original, on the Xbox, on Halo, on entirely new genres of games. I've seen him make entirely new types of games that have not existed in the world before. But he comes out of video games. He comes out, well, let's see, what does he come out of? I mean he comes out of so many different places, it's hard to slap a clean label on him, which I like. I remember I asked him to send me his bio, and I was like, I don't even know what to do with this. And I was like, okay, I like this guy. And he cannot help himself but create games. And and i'll get into the kind of the process in a second but games are fundamental to human life past a certain rung on maslow's hierarchy of needs right i think i'm sure you and i could Talk about this forever so it's like you are if you're listening to this podcast there are many games you are playing in life with rules, with stakes, maybe with a quitting time, whether You're aware of them or not. So studying games helps you kind of peer behind the curtain to see the games everywhere around you and to choose better games also. Okay, process-wise, what did I learn? Well, number one, there are a hell of a lot of different types of games. You can have magic-type games where you're building decks, where you're collecting cards. You could have a D&D role-playing game. Very, very, very, very complicated and involved. Then you have all the way over on the other side, you have some very seemingly, at least when it's done right, simple to learn games. And what I realized, at least for me, was number one, just deciding on the direction was the most challenging part as a first time game designer. Because I was involved in every single step of the process, which I'm sure slowed things down for them. And then 10 minutes of trying to prototype is worth 10 hours of talking. That's something you learn very, very quickly. What does a prototype look like for a game? ([Time 0:10:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3563ba1b-bd68-468c-93f4-833ef04045c2)) - **A Weekend Prototype Breakthrough** - Tim and Exploding Kittens sprinted with blank cards, iterating a V1 prototype in minutes and refining by playtesting all weekend. - They used rapid cycles: throw ideas, test, keep the hits, discard the rest. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Which means it's got to be something I'm excited to talk about, which is a high bar for me. And then we decided, look, we're both very busy. We haven't found something yet. Let's make this the last sprint. We either commit, well, we do commit to either finding something and running with it or calling a spade a spade. And we're just grasping in the dark here. And it's probably better for us to focus on other things. Cal Newport And what are you physically using in a sprint? I'll tell you. Tim Ferriss So the sprint, first of all, just looks like us walking around. Well, this happened to be in Toronto. So walking along the waterfront, drinking copious amounts of coffee, talking about games. What if this? What if this? What if this? What if this? And the breakthrough moment came when I think prompted by either Alon or Ken Gruhl, who is one of the employees at Exploiting Kittens, an amazing game designer. I think it might have been Alon. I think he brought in the question, and we ended up with a better question. So the question was no longer, what tabletop games have you really liked? He's like, let's broaden that. It could be kickball. What are the games you've liked? Any kind of game. And I was a little shy because I've got professionals here who have done also very, very, very, very complicated games. Sophisticated, I should say. And I said, you know what, this is embarrassing to say, but if my friends and I have had a few drinks, even if we haven't playing rock, paper, scissors, we really enjoy it. These are smart friends. And, uh, I was expecting an eye roll, but instead they're like, okay, let's roll with it. What does that look like? And I was like, well, what could it look like in a group of, say, four or five people? And let's say we're only using cards, but we could add in some dice, because I wanted that chance opportunity for a weaker player to win. So I was attached to dice, because I love a 20-sided die out of D&D. I just really wanted to use... A D20. So D20, really wanted to use a D20. Now, in retrospect, I'm glad that we applied more constraints to use only cards, because, for instance, Exhibit A, tariffs, uh-oh. Adding these components adds a lot of cost. And we had this kernel of an idea, and we basically raced back to the kitchen table and had a bunch of blank decks of cards. Could just be index cards, doesn't matter. Markers and a bunch of accessories. Kind of looks like a craft shop in Alon's house. You can imagine. He's got every possible little knick-knack you can use for making games. And Ken and Alon and I just sat down and started making cards and tried a bunch of things and literally had a V1, like version one, ready to playtest in 15 minutes and then tried it. Barely worked, but there was like something. So we're like, okay, let's double down on that piece. Let's take this other thing out, throw away a bunch of cards or just cross them out and put something different on the card. Try again, try again. So we were able to iterate sitting at a table with blank cards over and over and over again for a few hours. ([Time 0:15:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0caaebfd-d83e-4c98-af8f-f482f0bbb3ad)) - **Watch Players, Don't Just Ask Them** - Record videos of playtests and observe play patterns instead of only asking players for feedback. - Track laughs, pauses, and stumbling points to identify real usability issues. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Now once it goes back to Explodent Kittens headquarters and they're playing it internally with employees, then they have an entire system for playtesting. They have an entire very refined system for playtesting. And at that point, we also were creating spreadsheets with multiple tabs of different gestures, which have corresponding words. So you can change the gesture, you can change the word, you can change both. And we had a ranking system for everyone. So we just had hundreds of these things. Cal Newport And what's the data to rank them? Tim Ferriss Yeah. So there was a, there was a, as I remember it, there was a one to three ranking system. And one was, this isn't interesting at all. Two is it sometimes interesting. Three was it, it, it seems to hit most of the time and get a laugh, right? There were a lot of questions around like, how many kind of laugh out loud cards should you have? And if you only aim for those laugh out loud cards, does that actually handicap the game? Because it makes you kind of deaf to it after a while? Do you want to preserve it for like the variable reward? And in addition to that, there are some decisions to be made about just, hopefully this doesn't sound boring, but deck construction, like there are 66 cards. Why on earth 66 versus 86 versus 36? All of that revolves around a combination of variety. Things are color-coded because you can play with people's brains in weird ways once you add colors. So a certain amount of repetition with colors, deciding which cards to replicate, and it comes down to a lot of probability. How often do you want certain cards to show up? And over many, many games, what do you observe? And mathematically, what should you see which then feeds into questions like for instance initially we had the game produced where you do what you do with every game you shuffle the Deck right yeah but if you have the gesture cards or action cards they have salamanders on them i explain why there are salamanders on them. There's a good reason for that. But then you have the action cards, then the coyote cards. They're all grouped together initially. And when you would shuffle, you wouldn't get, most people don't shuffle very well. If you just do a riffle shuffle, it doesn't actually mix the deck that well. So they would end up with these solid groups of identical cards. Cal Newport That doesn't work very well you're seeing this in play testing like the people are shuffling not well and they're getting like six alamanders in a row or something exactly exactly or Tim Ferriss Six coyote cards or whatever so then you go back to the manufacturing and manufacturing cards is surprisingly challenging the the actual manufacturing facilities are gigantic. They are huge. And they're relative to many other types of games or things you could produce. A few, relatively few of these manufacturers. Are they in China? At high volume. Canada? Most of them are in China. Same as book printing, basically. Same as book printing. And what you can do is off the line, you can manufacture a shuffled deck. So you can indicate what type of composition you want the deck to have as a quote unquote shuffled deck. So then when people pull it out of the box, they have a really good first time out of box experience. It's so important. It's like if the first two rounds whiff or they're just meh, that is going to crush you. And particularly since it's like, this thing's cheap, right? It's half the price of a movie ticket basically in the US, right? It's $9.99 or around $10, right? So if they play twice and it doesn't totally work, it doesn't make them laugh, are they going to play again? Maybe, maybe not. So you need the out-of experience to be really good. It's the amount of time that you spend on the instructions, also playtesting the hell out of that. Because once you do the internal testing, then you can go out to families and other people you've recruited to playtest. And there's so many parallels with tech and any type of product, really, that I think direct-to but it could be applied anywhere. If, for instance, I think usertesting.com might still be around. I'm sure there are better tools now. But back in the day, if you want somebody to try signing up for your software as a service on a website, you could ask them, what did you find confusing? How was it? Or you could just do a screen capture with a video and watch their facial expressions and see where they pause and take too much time. So similarly with playtesting a game, 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? ([Time 0:22:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/08cd0557-2e05-4e59-9d72-e70ba42b91d7)) - **Out-Of-Box Experience Matters** - First-time out-of-box experience dictates whether buyers keep playing a cheap party game. - Manufacturing can pre-shuffle decks to ensure a strong first impression. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Then you go back to the manufacturing and manufacturing cards is surprisingly challenging the the actual manufacturing facilities are gigantic. They are huge. And they're relative to many other types of games or things you could produce. A few, relatively few of these manufacturers. Are they in China? At high volume. Canada? Most of them are in China. Same as book printing, basically. Same as book printing. And what you can do is off the line, you can manufacture a shuffled deck. So you can indicate what type of composition you want the deck to have as a quote unquote shuffled deck. So then when people pull it out of the box, they have a really good first time out of box experience. It's so important. It's like if the first two rounds whiff or they're just meh, that is going to crush you. And particularly since it's like, this thing's cheap, right? It's half the price of a movie ticket basically in the US, right? It's $9.99 or around $10, right? ([Time 0:25:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/10ebd25d-8ef7-486a-9474-8c2dfd28fc63)) - **How The Game Industry Is Structured** - The tabletop market has a few giants, a handful of indie powerhouses, and a long tail of designers. - Most indie creators license to publishers because retail logistics and buyer access are barriers. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Yeah. So paid to a lot of people. Yeah. This might be a good one where we have the Wayne's world, like we cut to Alon Lee giving an answer. Listen to that podcast episode with you and Alon is probably the best answer. I would say it's, it's a lot like other industries in the sense that you have a few 800-pound gorillas who are gigantic. Hasbros, Mattels, etc. Cal Newport They have internal divisions that are doing what Exploding Kittens is doing, just working on game variations. Tim Ferriss Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. 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 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 Kittens 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. 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 uh and or they do not want to contend with all the logistics of like supply chain management dealing with retailers and all that stuff and if you only have Say one skew 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're not Going to carry your game. ([Time 0:34:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b6c30305-14ef-4339-b724-e740f30e9d3f)) - **Invest In Legal Help Early** - Pay good lawyers and don't be pennywise when licensing or selling product rights. - Treat contracts like core infrastructure to protect future upside. Transcript: Tim 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. He's created stuff for all these gigantic brands. He does almost all of his prototyping with 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. Really invest in that, even if you're going to put yourself, obviously not dangerously in the red, but that is one of the places where you want to spend money. ([Time 0:39:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fedd04c7-452b-44f3-af71-90e1be410941)) - **People And Incentives Shape Creative Worlds** - Choose creative worlds where people are friendly; community culture shapes experience more than mechanics. - Incentives change behavior: add big money and cooperation often disappears. Transcript: Tim Ferriss That I have tried more and more to immerse myself in worlds where the people are friendly. 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 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. The people in barebow are the friendliest. They're happy to help. 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, 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. ([Time 0:43:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c14b50e0-d582-4bee-ba9a-bc13a28b84e9)) - **Use Early Feedback As A Filter** - Workshop your idea publicly and get harsh feedback early to reveal execution risk. - Use early rejection as a filter for endurance and real commitment. Transcript: Tim Ferriss 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. So even if it's a good idea, they saved you time because you wouldn't have been able to execute in the long term on it. Does that make sense? Cal Newport 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. Tim Ferriss Exactly. 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 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. 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 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. ([Time 0:52:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/86907085-122c-4796-8320-454d9e565c63)) - **Tap Childhood Fascinations For Energy** - Childhood obsessions often point to durable interests you can revisit for energy and creativity. - These long-standing fascinations can fuel 'engine room' activities that recharge you. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Cause I think you're right. The I've always, well, let me rewind. 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 when you were young like really captured you gave you those like of locked in, fascination. You playing Dungeons and Dragons when you're 12. Obsession, losing track of time. Those things still work. 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. I used to get lost in art for decades. And then when I graduated from college and I got, you know, 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. Yeah. Put on some blinders. What I realized over time is that those activities, those 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. 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? Now, typically, if I do 10 or 15 minutes, it's going to turn into an hour and I'm gonna 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 workweek, which was about, let's just call it like per-hour productivity. How do you maximize that, right? And then four-hour body, once again, about performance, but everything physical. For our chef, confusingly to a lot of people, actually a book about accelerated learning, right? 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. 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? ([Time 1:02:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/948bba97-bb27-40d4-8b6b-a568682e1e45)) - **Schedule Play To Sustain Productivity** - Build deliberate 'play' and awe into your life to preserve productivity and avoid burnout. - Treat play as an engine room that fuels focus and judgment rather than frivolous time off. Transcript: Tim 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. It's like a constellation of all of those. Yeah. Is incredibly valuable. And if you get a little, this is going to be a big word, folks. Sorry if this sounds overstated, but like 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 like 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, for, for self-preservation, but also just to enjoy this. As far as we know, one way ticket ride that we all have. ([Time 1:08:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d29f8656-8e95-4932-abe1-688705006346)) - **Success Pulled Him Away From His Craft** - After success, Tim found attention pulled him away from the craft that made him successful. - He became a traveling speaker and had to learn to say no to regain creative space. Transcript: Tim Ferriss To keep doing that 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 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, like, so you've got the, 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, right? So if you're the, this is just an example, it'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 then you have golden handcuffs in a way. With authors, very frequently, I'm sure you've seen this before. It was like you, you, you've created this thing while nobody's really paying attention to you. And then all of a sudden the floodgates open 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 I have 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. And you realize this sucks. The thing that I was good at that got me here, I no longer have the space to do. ([Time 1:11:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dc7ff227-8b41-431b-887c-21d35702bb59)) - **Use Hard Rules To Say No** - Set categorical, pre-defined rules for saying no (e.g., no speaking for six months). - Public policies and hard lines make refusals easier and preserve focus. Transcript: Tim 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. When you do full categories, it's just easier. It's just easier. No speaking for six months. To 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, 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, 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. Cal Newport Like I need to- Yeah, you just have to be, and you just have to say, not today, say not today. 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, 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. I said no to that. ([Time 1:17:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a8e2e748-4f7e-4460-bfe1-0a4d2eaea877)) - **Podcasting As Social Reprieve** - Tim paused book writing to avoid burnout and rediscovered social work via podcasting. - The podcast gave him social connection after solitary book projects. Transcript: Cal Newport Did you get a reprieve when you said break from books? Tim Ferriss Oh, huge, huge, huge, huge. Yeah. Huge reprieve. Cal Newport 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. Tim Ferriss And frankly for that, that was, I may not ever write a book again at that point. 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 I thinking? This like four color, hundreds and hundreds of photographs, maybe a thousand plus. With a brand new publishing house. Yeah, brand new publishing house. 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. Cal Newport This is something like my kid's generation. Those words mean nothing to us. A BitTorrent bundle. Tim Ferriss Yeah, with launching the game, I'm going to have one or two completely off-menu new technologies I'll play with to learn about them. 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. Cal Newport Like Robert Caro, like some of the great historians who just want to be, David Grant at The New Yorker, he wants to be in archives. Yeah, just like turning, but it's a very specific thing. Tim Ferriss I mean, that is i i 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 like 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. Like, yeah, I mean, I should be able to jump that high. 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 whose work or lives I was deeply interested in. ([Time 1:21:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6f5c8d5a-6aff-4b31-bdb2-42ddd87078c3)) - **Make Public Rules To Protect Your Craft** - Publish clear public policies for your creative work to depersonalize refusals and enforce boundaries. - Use rules (timing, guest type, lead time) to keep work aligned with your values. Transcript: Tim Ferriss 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 then put out, 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. Cause you can just say, Hey, I put this up six months ago. Cal Newport I got to follow my own advice. Cause you have an interview show. So everyone is probably saying, yeah, can I come on? Tim Ferriss Exactly. And so I put up, you know, some new rules for podcasting to keep it interesting, something like that and explain 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 to come out the same week and because it's it seems redundant and what i do though, like if I'm going to consider any book, I need to record and publish Three months ahead of publication. Yeah. And that rules out a million people because they don't have necessarily the forethought to do that or they missed the post or whatever, but I can still point to it. Yeah. 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. ([Time 1:29:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a8b5a292-2f07-4cfe-b461-d05950a8c404)) - **Barbell Your Podcast Guests** - Use a barbell guest strategy: mix well-known guests with obscure deep-dive guests. - Accept economic trade-offs if they preserve how you want to create. Transcript: Tim 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, uh, 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 so that you can make decisions. And 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. 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, right? It's like to call them podcasts now is even kind of silly. There is an audio component, but yeah. TV shows that have an audio feed for people who want to just do the audio. I think it'll return to some of the early days. It'll be more like 2017 maybe, 2016, for a lot of folks. And'm totally i'm totally fine with that totally fine with that because i love having these conversations and i the only thing that grows without restraint is a cancer so you got to be Careful which like professional cancers you choose and uh that 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. ([Time 1:31:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/71c7c79e-0ca8-4f36-96dd-6604e04785e7)) - **Run Lean And Buy Redundancy** - Keep teams lean and hire contractors for specialized, redundant functions to avoid single points of failure. - Overpay contractors when you need reliable redundancy for mission-critical tasks. Transcript: Tim Ferriss Yeah. Tim Ferriss, International, Global HQ. Yeah, exactly. I think that I am excessive in my fixation on leanness and elegance. I think sometimes I overdo it. Actually, often I overdo it. But what can what I can say is what currently works for me after a lot of testing 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 yeah which often Requires a lot of self-awareness and those people are just very very very hard to find but you can build them uh starting with simpler tasks and then cultivating that. If they have the raw characteristics. Cal Newport You break them down psychologically. Tim Ferriss Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tim Ferriss. The training center you have, the re-education center. Please relinquish your phone. 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 US, 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. Cal Newport Contractors have to be doing a specific thing. Tim Ferriss It is clearly hourly. But I am willing to, and I'll put this in quotation marks, overpay hourly for contractors. 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. So I use an outsourced sort of 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. 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. 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, 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. ([Time 1:45:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/baf4669a-994f-4088-b112-0fa5cc4d05a9)) - **Constraints Encourage Elegance** - Constraints force elegant solutions and prevent wasting headcount on invented work. - Tim treats his small company like a bonsai: pruning matters as much as adding. Transcript: Tim Ferriss The beauty of constraints, whether you're writing a book, creating a game, or building a company, guess what? Like Derek Sivert 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. Maybe they renamed it Basecamp. I can't remember. They renamed it Basecamp, yeah. 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, 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. 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. Cal Newport Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So contractors won't make you do that. Yeah, three employees. Tim Ferriss Okay, that's good. Yeah, and that determines what I can do or not do. Yeah. But, 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 cycle 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. 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. Cal Newport Let somebody else who does this every day, who's A plus at it, do that stuff. ([Time 1:50:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/050b1c7b-e9fa-47bf-aa80-7e8c675aad84))