Cal Newport (3:17)

All right, Tim, thank you for joining me. Always a pleasure to talk with you, of course.

Tim Ferriss (3:22)

Yeah, yeah, lovely to be have the band back together.

Cal Newport (3:26)

That's. That's the way to think about it. So, I mean, I want to open with the reason why we originally thought about talking, which is. You made a game.

Tim Ferriss (3:34)

Yeah. Wtf?

Cal Newport (3:35)

What's up? I'm holding this up to the camera. Coyote, walk us through. Just to set the foundation, just give us the basics here, what type of game it is, who you did this with and where is it. Just so we know we're on the same page.

Tim Ferriss (3:47)

Sure. So the basics are. And 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.

Cal Newport (4:10)

As.

Tim Ferriss (4:10)

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 Elan 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 plays about plays. Three to eight folks. Typically kids can play, I'd say 10 plus. So very, very simple to learn, but different.

Cal Newport (5:15)

Every game, it seems like it's physical memory, how do you describe this game? It's like you have to do motions and the ones and the cards, as.

Cal Newport (5:25)

The cards come down, it changes what.

Cal Newport (5:26)

People have to do and trying to keep track of where everything is totally. And it gets kind of frenetic.

Tim Ferriss (5:31)

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 US 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. But the competitive mod 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. And the reason it's called Coyote is because I want people to find their inner trickster. If you think of the mythologies around Coyote in many of the indigenous cultures in North America, also in Mexico, I suppose that includes Mexico on some level. But this Coyote character pops up again and again. In every culture, whether it's Loki, Iktomi or others, there is some type of trickster. And the reason that's part of the game is you can sabotage other players. So if you have somebody who's really good at, say, math or music, those folks tend to be very good at this game. You can handicap them by slapping them with attack cards and things like that. So that's the game and you can learn to play in a few minutes. But as someone who spent 20 years in Silicon Valley, still also to this day investing in tech startups and everything else, I think we're wading into some very risky waters with a lot of the technological saturation and everything else which we could talk about. So getting offline, giving people a light lift, that provides sort of a little bit of vitamin P. Vitamin play, I think, is. Is really, really, really important. So I've been playing a lot more games versus just staring at a screen 18 inches away all day, every day. And that's why I made it.

Cal Newport (8:13)

I'm curious about this world because I think about this type of game that you called it Casual or fast casual.

Tim Ferriss (8:20)

Is that. What was the term? Yeah, yeah. And there are lots. One thing I realized, and part of the reason this took two years to make is there's so many different. If you say, I want to make a game, it's kind of like saying, I want to start a business. It's like, okay, well, we need to drill down a little bit. So you could call this. I would describe it as fast casual. There are other ways to describe it, but meaning after dinner, you've got an hour, maybe a few people have had some drinks. What do you play? If you try to play some of these other games, which are fine games, wonderful games, terraforming Mars, you're never going to get it done right. And furthermore, if people are tired or a little fatigued after a long workday, it's going to be hard to recruit people, at least my friends, to play it. So this is along the lines of an Uno or the Monopoly Go card game, something like that. It's closer to that side, so.

Cal Newport (9:15)

Because what fascinates me is it reminds me of screenwriting. And here's the connection I want to make there is that I'm excited about this. When you talk to screenwriters, they say, look, people think this is easy because when a script is on the screen and it works, you're like, I could think up a similar idea for a movie. And I know how to talk, but I'm not watching someone drill Steph Curry, drill a three pointer from six feet behind the line, like, oh, I could do this.

Cal Newport (9:42)

This is a great.

Cal Newport (9:42)

The alien attacks or whatever. A good, fast, casual game, if constructed right. You're like, oh, this is just fun. You have some rules, you have some ideas. It kind of goes back and forth. But when I talk to screenwriters, they say the issue with the screenplay is everything has to be right. It's a watch mechanism, like everything.

Cal Newport (9:58)

And you don't realize.

Tim Ferriss (9:59)

It's a very good way to put it.

Cal Newport (10:01)

If you introduce, like, you know, Chekhov's gun, like you mentioned this here, it better pay off there. No, dialogue cannot have a purpose like this has to connect to this. And Even a bad screenplay. You have to be a professional screenwriter to have written the bad screenplay. Because there's a technical complexity that just making a script that everything connects together. I assume this is similar for making a game like this. You said two years. So I'm curious about that world, the world you met with Elon Lee, what you learned from him. What is it like in the world of trying to make a card based game that is easy to learn and fun to play? What goes on in that world to actually make a game like that?

Tim Ferriss (10:37)

Yeah, let's talk about it. 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. 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 gains that have not existed in the world before.

Cal Newport (11:47)

But he comes out of video games.

Tim Ferriss (11:49)

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, 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 also. 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, right? You can have magic type games where you're building decks, where you're collecting cards. You could have a D and 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.

Cal Newport (13:42)

What does a prototype look like for a game like this?

Tim Ferriss (13:45)

I'll tell you. For a game like this, we applied a bunch of constraints. So I started with and in conversations we did a number of sprints, Alon and I, friends of mine, just as testers, right, as players. And we were trying all sorts of different original games. Then we were looking at potentially taking an easier path, which would be taking, say, the game that led me to elan poetry for Neanderthals, creating a variation of that with new rules or a twist on the rules. And ultimately wanted a few things to be true because I played, for instance, chess with my brother. My brother is very mathematically inclined, I'll leave it at that. But he always will beat me at chess and that's annoying, number one. Number two, he also wants me to suffer through going all the way to the end to get knocked off, even if I see very quickly, oh, I just painted myself into a corner. I'm doomed. This is checkmate. So I wanted it to be closer, meaning the game that I would make closer to backgammon or poker than chess in the sense that there is a chance for a weaker player to win if they have some good luck. And that also came from playing magic with a couple of friends of mine. And I was like, this sucks. Not because magic sucks, but because they would always beat me, always. And I was like, well, this isn't fun. I don't want to play this game again. So it was a constraint. And then thinking of other constraints, like, well, what can we prototype quickly? Cards. We could also use chits, meaning something you use to keep track of lives. And we played around with a bunch of other accessories. But here's what the first prototype looked like. We were doing a sprint, the last sprint, because we had tried sprints over the course of nine to 12 months and we hadn't found something yet. Because for me, if I'm going to put my name on something, man, I need to be willing to live with this forever. Which means it's got to be something I'm excited to talk about, which is a high bar half 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, we're just grasping in the dark here and it's probably better for us to focus on other things.

Cal Newport (16:13)

And what's physically like what, what are you physically using in a sprint?

Tim Ferriss (16:17)

Yeah, I'll tell you. So the sprint first of all just looks like us walking around. I, 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 Gruel, 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 very, 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, we really enjoy it. These are smart friends. And I was expecting an eye roll, but instead they're like, okay, let's roll with it. Like, what, what, 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 like a 20 sided die out of D and D. I just really wanted to use a D20. So D20. I really want 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. Oh, Adding. 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 Alain's house. You can imagine he's got every possible little knickknack you can use for making games. And Ken and Alain and I just sat down, started making cards and tried a bunch of things and literally had a V1 like version one ready to play, test 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. And by the end of that weekend, I had to rely on Alon in the sense of pattern recognition and his taste sensors, his kind of water feel for games, because I felt like there was something there. But Alain has seen hundreds and thousands of games, as has Ken. And I was like, what do you think here? Zero to ten question I like to ask. Zero to ten, no seven allowed. I learned this from Kyle Maynard, who learned it from somebody else. But 0 to 10, no 7 allowed. Where do you rate the potential of this game? And don't blow smoke up my ass. And I think it was like an 8 or a 9 with the possibility of getting it higher. And I was like, okay, if that's true, let's pause for now because we were wiped out, you know, after play testing and especially this game. Also, if you want to. If you have trouble getting to sleep and you want to get to sleep, like, play a couple rounds of this before bed, and it might just be easier to sleep. I say that as a lifelong insomniac. So we were wiped out. And we.

Cal Newport (20:15)

But.

Tim Ferriss (20:15)

But there was enough proof of concept there to say, okay, let's expand this, make a very, very rough deck, and play test it with other people to see what happens.

Cal Newport (20:25)

Was the motions in the beginning, like the initial play testing? Was it closer to rock, paper, scissors? Like, at first? Was it just, hey, we have different hand motions. The details didn't matter.

Tim Ferriss (20:36)

The details didn't the details do matter. But in the beginning, and this is again, keep in mind, I'm like this.

Cal Newport (20:46)

The.

Tim Ferriss (20:46)

The skier who's been on the, like a couple of slopes six times. So I'm like, tell you. Let me tell you all about skiing, right? Here's what you got to know. When you're jumping off a cornice, it's like, what have you, you know?

Cal Newport (20:55)

But.

Tim Ferriss (20:56)

But keeping all that in mind, big grain of salt. I have learned a lot. I've taken a lot of notes, I've documented everything. So here's what I would say. The details do matter, but in the beginning, you don't know which details matter, so you just throw a lot against the wall. So we tried tons of stuff. And what Alana is very good at doing is, and I would say I'm not terribly good at this is brainstorming and testing without too much judgment. Right. So leave the editor aside and no matter how harebrained, how boring, try everything. Because it's so fast to prototype, the turnaround time is so fast with this type of game construction that you should just try it and you'd never really know. So in the beginning, there were a lot of gestures, for instance, that we ended up pulling out later. Example, anything that's kind of not suitable for work, which were very reliable at getting laughs. If you're going to distribute at Walmart and Target or you want to, chances are you're going to have to yank some of those out. And similarly, some of the cards had people standing up from a table to do something. Well, if you have somebody at the table who can't do that, you've just run into a big problem. Yeah, right. So yanking those out now, later you can have expansion packs and you can have print to play PDFs and all that stuff, which I plan on doing. But there was a lot of vetting. Now, once it goes back to Exploding 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.

Cal Newport (22:48)

Things and what's the data to rank them.

Tim Ferriss (22:52)

Yeah. So 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 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. And it comes down to a lot of probability. Right. Like 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. Can explain why there's 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, of identical cards. That doesn't work very well.

Cal Newport (24:51)

You're seeing this in play testing. Like the people are shuffling not well and they're getting like six salamanders in a row or something.

Tim Ferriss (24:56)

Exactly, exactly. Or six coyote cards or whatever. So then you go back to the manufacturing and manufacturing cards is surprisingly challenging. The actual manufacturing facilities are gigantic. They are huge and they're very relative to many other types of games or things you could produce. Few, relatively few of these manufacturers, they're.

Cal Newport (25:22)

In China or at high volume Canada.

Tim Ferriss (25:25)

Most of them are in China.

Cal Newport (25:26)

And same as book printing.

Tim Ferriss (25:28)

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 that 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.

Cal Newport (25:51)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (25:52)

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 U.S. right. It's 9.99 in or around. Around $10. Right. So if they play twice and doesn't totally work, doesn't make them laugh, are they going to play again? Maybe, maybe not. So you need the out of box experience to be really good. So the amount of time that you spend on the instructions, also play testing 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 play test. And this is also. There's so many parallels with tech and any type of product really. I think direct to consumer. But it could be applied anywhere. Where, if, if, for instance, I think usertesting.com might still be around. I'm sure there are better tools now, but back in the day, it's like 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 the facial expressions and see where they pause and take too much time.

Cal Newport (27:04)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (27:05)

So similarly with playtesting, a game, you don't want to just ask somebody what did you think? And have a list of 7 questions you want video of them playing. Like, how long does it take certain parts of the game to transpire? Are there, are there huge pauses where people get gummed up? Where do they laugh versus where do they report? They laugh. Right. Like these are, 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. 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 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.

Cal Newport (28:21)

So you're seeing Games, fidelity.

Tim Ferriss (28:23)

It's like boom. Things. 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, 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 had that experience and they're like, oh my God. To get, 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 gonna throw them under the bus, but buying like a brother printer.

Cal Newport (29:02)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (29:02)

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?

Cal Newport (29:10)

What is this WI fi button about? Like, there's a feature that no one has ever used. This like auto connect protocol that.

Tim Ferriss (29:16)

Yeah. You can have the same experience with a game where you read the instructions. You're like, I have no idea what this means. So to answer your question, I suppose yes, there's, 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, pickfu.com is another where, you know, I created like, I don't know, we created six to eight variations of this box.

Cal Newport (29:54)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (29:54)

In terms of the COVID art.

Cal Newport (29:56)

Right.

Tim Ferriss (29:56)

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. 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 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 number like the standard deviations out was so significant. I was like, yeah, this is very clearly.

Cal Newport (30:34)

Did you predict that or are you surprised?

Tim Ferriss (30:37)

In this case? I did predict it.

Cal Newport (30:39)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (30:40)

I have. Whatever it is, I don't know what it is, but from a visual perspective, I think I'm, I'm just maybe a little more acute than a lot of folks. 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 psycho.

Cal Newport (31:02)

The.

Tim Ferriss (31:02)

I guess he was psych psychiatrist was like, I know this could be a lot to take in.

Cal Newport (31:05)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (31:06)

If you need to like, pause the zoom and come back tomorrow, I'm like, this is not news to Eddie. But, buddy, let's just keep going.

Cal Newport (31:11)

I need this for the insurance. Come on.

Tim Ferriss (31:12)

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. Like, 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. And I understand the incentives are slightly different, but, like, I am going to see this so many times. I need to be happy with it. And if that ends up being the second choice instead of the first choice based on the data, so be it.

Cal Newport (32:08)

Yeah, I was wondering if there was 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? Yeah, a coyote with a bloody ma or something that it just did not test well.

Tim Ferriss (32:23)

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. 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. Let's just call it maybe down into some of Central America, but mostly, you know, Canada, U.S. 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. There's so many different variables. To land on something that finally works, including box design, box size, pricing, negotiating and handling the politics of very, very large retailers. Like these are all independent arts in the decathlon of creating a game. And Elan is just an excellent decathlete. He's good at all of it.

Cal Newport (33:58)

So what's that?

Cal Newport (33:59)

This is my.

Cal Newport (33:59)

I'm curious about new worlds.

Cal Newport (34:02)

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?

Cal Newport (34:09)

What is the game world?

Cal Newport (34:10)

Yeah, this is opaque to a lot of people.

Tim Ferriss (34:12)

Yeah, this might be a good one where we have the Wayne's World. Like we cut to Alon Lee giving an answer.

Cal Newport (34:22)

Listen to that podcast episode with you. And Alon is probably the best answer.

Tim Ferriss (34:26)

I would say it's a lot like other industries in the sense that you have a few 800 pound gorillas who are gigantic, you know, the Hasbro, Mattels, et cetera.

Cal Newport (34:37)

And they have internal divisions that are doing what like Exploding Kittens is doing, like just, just working on game variations.

Tim Ferriss (34:43)

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So you'll absolutely. And you'll, 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 kittens company with many, many bestsellers. 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 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 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. Does not matter how good it is. They do not have the infrastructure to handle thousands upon thousands of independent contacts. So you'll have brokers which would Be the equivalent of say, book agents. Right? It's the same. 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.

Cal Newport (36:45)

The brokers aren't negotiating licensing deals on your behalf. If you're an independent, the bro.

Tim Ferriss (36:50)

Those would probably be. This is probably a lot. I'm getting into the. 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. And you would have. You would probably need to find representation of some type to. 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. And you're the only one.

Cal Newport (37:34)

You're the only one. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (37:37)

Yeah, right, exactly. So at some point lawyers are very neglected. Right. They get a bad rep in some senses. Right. But they are the ultimate connective tissue that holds a lot of any industry together. So I suppose what I would say is that there are these intermediate. Intermediate parties and very often you will need the assistance of one or more to get any type of deal done if you are part of that long tail.

Cal Newport (38:10)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (38:11)

Which is another reason why it wouldn't have made sense for me, 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.

Cal Newport (38:29)

What's the best case scenario for like someone's dream? I mean, you're independent and you just stumble across. You're play testing with your friends and it's just like a brilliant game, like a tabletop game or something like this. And you have someone approach and you license it and it hits. Right. When we're talking about the blue sky scenarios for someone who's thinking about that, what are we talking about? Are we talking about someone getting rich or are we talking about.

Tim Ferriss (38:54)

That's a great question. And I can't contractually get into the details of my deal, but I would say it's very similar to books. Yeah, it's similar to books. I would say that if you have a mega mega mega hit, then you can do well.

Cal Newport (39:13)

Is there like an atomic habits of tabletop games like you could just. Something about what you're doing takes off for years and generates game.

Tim Ferriss (39:21)

I mean 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 like a diy, their lawyering or otherwise. A lot of game designers. And this, this is true for anyone who's new to anything. Right. It's easy to be Pennywise and pound foolish. 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 sort of 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.

Cal Newport (40:42)

Right.

Tim Ferriss (40:42)

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?

Cal Newport (40:59)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (40:59)

Like that may be. I hope it's not for James. I hope it's. I hope he has 10 more of those. But the magnitude of sales of 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.

Cal Newport (41:24)

Yeah, that is. You stumbled across a bag of money. That's exciting. But don't make your business plan stumbling across bags of money.

Tim Ferriss (41:30)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Business plan, step one, pick up bags of money. It's like, ah, that might be hard.

Cal Newport (41:36)

But if you just keep getting Taylor Swift to wear your stuff, it's a great business plan. What's the problem?

Tim Ferriss (41:40)

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.

Cal Newport (41:55)

It's like books.

Tim Ferriss (41:56)

It sounds like it's very similar. Yeah, you can make, even the price point is similar.

Cal Newport (42:01)

Interesting.

Tim Ferriss (42:02)

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. I mean, you can find those games.

Cal Newport (42:17)

Yeah, but they don't sell very many.

Tim Ferriss (42:19)

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. There are always trade offs. And my goal with this was, and I'm fortunate to be in this position, but like it, the business can work like exploding kittens has done a really amazing job of building a business. It's not a. Not for profit. So you can, you, 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, I'm like, 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? 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, ugh. 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.

Cal Newport (43:49)

What a fascinating world. Well, okay, so let me zoom out on this a little bit then.

Tim Ferriss (43:53)

Oh, can I say one more thing?

Cal Newport (43:54)

Sure.

Tim Ferriss (43:54)

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.

Cal Newport (44:09)

Yes, right.

Tim Ferriss (44:10)

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 bare bow archery, which we don't have to spend a lot of time on. But there are many different disciplines within archery. And the, the people in Barabeau are the friendliest. They're happy to help. They don't have any cutthroat competitive mentality. Generally speaking. Like everybody helps everybody.

Cal Newport (44:44)

That makes a difference.

Tim Ferriss (44:45)

It makes a huge difference. That's like the neighborhood where you choose to raise your kids. Yeah. 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 are very. 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.

Cal Newport (45:23)

Right.

Cal Newport (45:23)

The people matter. I mean. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Ferriss (45:25)

And the incentives matter. It's like if you added the same amount of money into Barebow, I'm sure people would stop sharing their secret.

Cal Newport (45:31)

It's the money.

Tim Ferriss (45:31)

Yeah.

Cal Newport (45:32)

But you probably had. I've had. Because we both obviously had a lot of exposure to the publishing world, but also some exposure to Hollywood and that world. And the difference, both of them people are meaning 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 in Hollywood it's always like, I gotta tell you, this idea is so good. I would give one of my kids away for adoption just to work with it. I could die tomorrow. You have given me a reason to live. And then you never hear from them again. It's so bad.

Tim Ferriss (46:06)

It's so bad.

Cal Newport (46:07)

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 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. It's nice to get out of those worlds. I can See that?

Tim Ferriss (46:29)

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the. And I'll, 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 in comedy, you might get one or two courtesy laughs, but then it's going to be dead silent and 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. It really does.

Cal Newport (47:19)

You can tell on those game testing videos.

Tim Ferriss (47:22)

Tell. Even if somebody's trying to be nice, they're. They have that kind of plastered fake smile on. You're like, ooh, that's not good, right? Or if they're like, yeah, that's. Yeah, that's fun. Like the damning with faint praise. I mean, like, you can tell watching.

Cal Newport (47:35)

The, like, colors were great, Tim, the colors were great.

Tim Ferriss (47:38)

I really like the size of these.

Cal Newport (47:39)

Cards are laminated, like really smooth.

Cal Newport (47:41)

Like. Yeah, really good job.

Tim Ferriss (47:42)

Yeah.

Cal Newport (47:43)

Want to take a quick break from.

Cal Newport (47:45)

Our conversation to talk about the presenting.

Cal Newport (47:48)

Sponsor for today's episode, Reclaim AI.

Cal Newport (47:53)

Now, those of you who have heard.

Cal Newport (47:55)

Me talk about AI know that my big interest with this technology is not these massive vague promises about super intelligent Jetson style robots. What I care about is targeted applications, places where AI can solve specific pain points. Now, when it comes to knowledge work, there are few pain points worse than a calendar that's so haphazardly filled with meetings and calls and appointments. 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? So 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. You 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 going to work for you and the other people. The final thing to say here is improve your work life balance. Say 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. Again, they're using my language, Jesse. I love it. I love it around conflicts and shifting priorities so you stay protected without sacrificing flexibility. The average Reclaim user get this gains 7 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. Did I? Here's what I think, Jesse. I think I have one of those like split personality, Jekyll and Hyde things. And what I didn't realize is that like at night when I thought I was sleeping, my other personality came out and I started Reclaim AI because they're speaking my language.

Cal Newport (51:01)

This is all the stuff I would care about.

Cal Newport (51:03)

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 as 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.

Cal Newport (51:28)

Every other app I feel like I.

Cal Newport (51:29)

Deal with on my computer sometimes. So 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 Cal. Reclaim is also offering my listeners an exclusive 20% off 12 months if you use the discount code CAL20. So my name and the number 20. So visit Reclaim AI Cal to sign up for free and use that discount code CAL20. That's Reclaim AI CAL. All right, that's cool. But now let's get back to my conversation with Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss (52:13)

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, 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? Yeah.

Cal Newport (53:08)

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 (53:15)

Exactly. Or if it was. Even if it, 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. Great idea. But like execution risk, right? Like key man risk, with. With endurance. The. 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. Yeah. And I mean that. That gets into some very smoky territory where. When do you listen? When do you not? And my, 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.

Cal Newport (54:22)

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. To me, I'm like, this is great. 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 people, there's a lot of first time writers who just don't want that to be true. What do you think's going on there?

Tim Ferriss (54:56)

Well, tell me more about that. So with the folks who have voiced that to you, is it that they want to sort of 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, Is that the. Is that what they hope to do or is it something else?

Cal Newport (55:17)

I think.

Cal Newport (55:18)

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.

Tim Ferriss (55:35)

I think that's a big one.

Cal Newport (55:36)

A thousand words a day with the perfect, you know, urban moth at that.

Cal Newport (55:41)

I Instagram and do this for two.

Cal Newport (55:43)

Years and I don't want this to be derailed. I don't know if that's what's going.

Cal Newport (55:46)

On, but there's such.

Cal Newport (55:48)

I have these conversations with writers all the time where they invent the most elaborate ways that they're going to get.

Cal Newport (55:52)

Around selling the book first.

Cal Newport (55:54)

And I was like, well, why not.

Cal Newport (55:55)

Just see if the idea.

Cal Newport (55:56)

Maybe it's their mind knows, like, doubts them. I'm not, but it's always a fascinating thing.

Cal Newport (56:01)

I was like, this is the huge advantage we have over novelists, is we.

Cal Newport (56:04)

Find out up front we don't have to wait till the box office numbers come back.

Tim Ferriss (56:07)

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 you know, no product survives first contact with customers. And what Seth would say, and I'm paraphrasing here, buddy 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.

Cal Newport (56:40)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (56:40)

He's like, find your smallest viable audience and get in front of them as quickly as possible.

Cal Newport (56:45)

Yes.

Tim Ferriss (56:46)

And then you can't hide. Right. If getting it, if having three of my friends play test my shitty prototype is doable tomorrow, it's almost impossible for me to come up with excuses why that isn't something I can do. But if I'm like, I want to create the game that's the combination of this and this best selling game. And 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. Yep, 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, 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 nonfiction books, you're basically fundraising for a startup, right? Yeah, it's like, I mean, they build business models.

Cal Newport (58:28)

There's a business.

Tim Ferriss (58:29)

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 Uber or anything else, it's going to be the same stuff. How big is the market?

Cal Newport (58:46)

Yeah, right.

Tim Ferriss (58:47)

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 like 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.

Cal Newport (59:14)

Right.

Tim Ferriss (59:15)

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. Whereas fiction, man, that's a tough game. I mean, having to write it first, I mean, that's. I would prefer to do it honestly, because the prospect of selling a fiction book, which I could probably strong arm someone into doing if I wanted to. Right. I could have some publisher cover their eyes and say, I hope you don't get me fired. Right.

Cal Newport (59:42)

And yeah, because you have channels.

Tim Ferriss (59:44)

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.

Cal Newport (59:55)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (59:55)

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, but here's some.

Cal Newport (60:06)

We love you. Your book about bare bow archery, we get that you're passionate about it. 800 pages. I don't know a lot in here about string density or tension or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So tell me if this is right or not. This is like I'm putting an arc from afar on your life. So you can tell me if this is right or not. Because 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 as Post World War II, the studio was struggling, he was in a malaise and he went all in on. He was building a 1:8 scale model, working steam train. He went all in on this for a couple years and then he shut it down and came out of that and built Disneyland. But there was something about this activity. He was all in on something.

Cal Newport (61:01)

It wasn't a core.

Cal Newport (61:02)

This is the next movie we're doing as our studio or whatever. It re energized him. It got different parts of his brain and nervous system active again that weren't before. And it led to all sorts of other stuff as well.

Cal Newport (61:15)

And I was making this argument, this is important.

Cal Newport (61:17)

Like engineered Wonder, a project you do just because my two aspects were. It's fascinating. And then you take it far. It can't just be. I took dance lessons. It has to be like, 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.

Cal Newport (61:37)

So it seems like if we're looking at your life pre four hour work.

Cal Newport (61:44)

Week, because in four hour work week, you talk about your life, like right before four hour work week, 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.

Cal Newport (61:56)

In your first book was just things.

Cal Newport (61:59)

That were interesting and you pushed it really far because life is. I mean, that was the thesis of that book.

Cal Newport (62:05)

You're doing this now as well.

Cal Newport (62:08)

I mean, there's cockpunch before that and.

Cal Newport (62:10)

You have the game and just like things that are just interesting to you. Right?

Tim Ferriss (62:14)

You heard that, folks.

Cal Newport (62:18)

Everyone knows what I'm talking about. And there's a lot of this going on.

Cal Newport (62:21)

And it seems like from afar, this is where I want you to tell.

Cal Newport (62:23)

Me if I'm right or wrong is that there was like a period in between where things seemed maybe a little more grinding. 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.

Cal Newport (62:35)

The books, the new books were taking.

Cal Newport (62:36)

Like forever to write or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

Cal Newport (62:39)

Is there an arc there where, like.

Cal Newport (62:40)

You'Re returning the engineered wonder or am I simplifying things?

Tim Ferriss (62:45)

I don't think you're simplifying things. I would say you are simplifying things, but you're simplifying correctly.

Cal Newport (62:51)

That's the right direction.

Tim Ferriss (62:52)

Yeah, yeah. So here's what I would add to that because I think you're right. 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? And like, 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.

Cal Newport (63:44)

Things that when you were young, like, really captured. You gave me those feelings of locked in fascination. Like you've played Dungeons and dragons when.

Tim Ferriss (63:53)

You'Re 12 session losing track of time. Those things still work. So for instance, in 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 serious job and I was like, okay, that stuff's for kids. Let's move on, focus on the real stuff. Read books by Richard Branson and this and that, the other thing and put on some blinders. And what I realized over time is that those activities, 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. 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? The like the shutdown complete right.

Cal Newport (65:33)

Now.

Tim Ferriss (65:33)

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 of 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, 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. 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. I touched on edges of it, this engineered wonder, awe. In the last few years, 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. 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. 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.

Cal Newport (67:52)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (67:53)

If I, if I need to present it in a way that is palatable to type a people like myself. Right. It's, it's that engine room in the ship.

Cal Newport (68:02)

Your former right hand man wrote a book about that.

Tim Ferriss (68:04)

Yeah, Charlie book.

Cal Newport (68:06)

I remember that exactly. It's an influential book. Play, Play it away.

Tim Ferriss (68:10)

Yeah. Charlie Hahn. Yeah. So. And it doesn't need to, 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.

Cal Newport (68:25)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (68:25)

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, like you need to take a full week and sit down and do some hard thinking and journaling. Yeah, right.

Cal Newport (68:36)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (68:37)

Because that is basically a preview of burnout and implosion, I would say, based on my, 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, the, 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, is kind of the same thing. 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 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, I mean, is there.

Cal Newport (70:08)

It seems like there's an irony that like you, you wrote a book trying to explain to people because you're talking about many retirements. It was to go have these moments like, hey, get the helicopter ride up to the wine country in, you know, Argentina. Argentina, right. Like go to do the tango dancing, you know this, like, yeah, 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 and I'm getting all these moments. My life is built around these moments of transcendence and engineered wonder. The success of that book then 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 of. It seems like. I don't know if that's quite right, but the ironies of the professional world is you are so successful telling people about the joys of it that they took away your time to keep doing that.

Tim Ferriss (71:13)

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, like a really good UX designer. The thing that you love doing to come back to that endurance, right? 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, you 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 it's like if you're really good at that thing, boom. Before you know it, you're A manager.

Cal Newport (72:14)

Yep.

Tim Ferriss (72:15)

And then a few years later, you're gonna be like, how did this happen? My whole week is meetings. Yeah, I'm not doing the thing I want to do. But if I wanted to be an independent contributor, like, 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's like you create 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 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 gonna 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 traveling salesman like George Clooney and what is it up in the air that movie is. And you realize this sucks. The thing that I, that I. 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. 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 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.

Cal Newport (74:12)

Whatever.

Tim Ferriss (74:13)

Like your mind is going to do that.

Cal Newport (74:14)

Well, if you could combine email, calendar and porn, though, I think you have a startup. I think you got a unicorn email hub.

Tim Ferriss (74:23)

So that stuff's going to come up. But the point that I think it was Sharon Salzberger 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 and everything. At least once you set foot in this like attention UFC that is digital anything, you're going to get distracted. So the question is, how do you reel yourself back in? How do you create scaffolding and systems? And you're right. So I have, 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 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. Like get them, get them booked, get the people committed and that. So you can't back out with some lame ass excuse because you're like watching an extra TED Talk that you don't need to watch or whatever. Right? Yeah.

Cal Newport (75:56)

You're on your calendar porn, email calendar porn. Yeah. Well, can I. I kind of want to get your help on this.

Tim Ferriss (76:02)

This is, this is when I would. Probably at three.

Cal Newport (76:04)

The.

Tim Ferriss (76:04)

Probably at two in the morning. You know, like in the middle of the night. Tonight I'm going to buy yet another useless domain like I got to have. It's going to be huge. Just in case, before this podcast comes.

Cal Newport (76:16)

Out, what are the most popular things out there? Well, I feel like you're ahead of me on the divestiture. Right. Like you, 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 the I'm the great disappointer. And I feel like you went through this.

Tim Ferriss (76:35)

There's your next book title.

Cal Newport (76:37)

Because the way people, which is natural.

Cal Newport (76:40)

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 he was 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, just come by our company and just like talk about deep work for a while? Right.

Tim Ferriss (77:06)

Or let's just meet up and have a coffee.

Cal Newport (77:08)

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.

Cal Newport (77:16)

So I feel like my speaking agent.

Cal Newport (77:17)

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, I just, I just say no to everything. All of our 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 can't or I'm just saying no to everything. But it feels sort of haphazard. When did you switch to the great divestiture? At some point.

Tim Ferriss (77:45)

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.

Cal Newport (78:04)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (78:04)

That I have decided I need to say no to. Even for a limited period of time.

Cal Newport (78:08)

When you do full categories, it's just easier.

Tim Ferriss (78:11)

It's just easier.

Cal Newport (78:11)

No speaking for six months.

Tim Ferriss (78:13)

Have a policy. Right. No speaking for six months. Zero. And if you break your own rules, all is lost.

Cal Newport (78:17)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (78:17)

Right. Like you can't that. Because here's 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.

Cal Newport (78:37)

So you can almost like trick the universe. Like I need.

Tim Ferriss (78:39)

You just have to. You and you just have to say not today, Satan, not today. You've got to say no.

Cal Newport (78:45)

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.

Cal Newport (78:59)

We're bringing you out.

Cal Newport (79:01)

You can like dance for us and you know, whatever. And I just keep saying I'll keep adding zeros till you say like that type of stuff. I said no to That I say, this is why my speaking agent thinks I'm crazy, by the way, is.

Cal Newport (79:10)

Yeah, yeah.

Cal Newport (79:11)

I'm not moved by money, but okay. Yeah. So whole categories.

Tim Ferriss (79:14)

You should write a book called Tactically Insane. Maybe that's the next one.

Cal Newport (79:16)

I like this. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (79:18)

And I mean, it 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.

Cal Newport (79:28)

I like this.

Tim Ferriss (79:31)

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. Now, given the book came out April 20, 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 creative. 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. 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 a. I'll keep adding zeros until people start saying no. All those things can help, but they don't. 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 Invest. Investing. In 2005, I was like, why? I'm taking a long startup vacation. Or in parentheses, why? To say no. How to say no when it matters most. 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.

Cal Newport (81:23)

Did you get a reprieve when you said break from books?

Tim Ferriss (81:26)

Oh, huge. Huge, Huge, huge. Yeah. Huge reprieve.

Cal Newport (81:30)

Even though 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 (81:40)

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 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? Yeah, this like four color, hundreds and hundreds of photographs, maybe a thousand plus.

Cal Newport (82:16)

With a brand new publishing house.

Tim Ferriss (82:17)

Yeah, brand new.

Cal Newport (82:18)

Upsetting the entire world of publishing going.

Tim Ferriss (82:20)

Through Amazon Publishing got boycotted by everybody and BitTorrent.

Cal Newport (82:26)

Wasn't BitTorrent involved for some reason?

Tim Ferriss (82:27)

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 Four Hour Chef and all this other stuff.

Cal Newport (82:41)

This is something like my kids generation would like. Those words mean nothing to us. Yeah, a BitTorrent bundle. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (82:48)

Like with, you know, launching the game, I'm gonna have one or two kind of just 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. Yeah, 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.

Cal Newport (83:39)

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. Yeah. Just like turning page. But it's a very specific thing.

Tim Ferriss (83:49)

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 anytime with yourself. And I'm like, maybe. But if you talk to evolutionary biologists, like, I think evolution drives a lot and genetics drives a lot that 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, just jump higher. 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, Whose work or lives I was deeply interested in. Yeah, it was, it had a social piece built into it and it doesn't.

Cal Newport (84:58)

Have the footprint on the rest of your life. I mean, book writing. I'm writing a book now. I'm never not writing a book, but, man, it gets brutal because it wants, you want every moment of your life that you're not writing. You're a little bit worried. I probably should be writing.

Tim Ferriss (85:14)

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. 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 is kind of an all consuming thing, at least in my experience. And it sounds like to a greater or lesser extent, your experience as well.

Cal Newport (85:58)

And it has to be. It's like, you can do the math. It needs about X number of thousands of hours of concentrated tension 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 not just, oh, it's in a degenerate way occupying my mind. It really shouldn't. It's distracting me, but I shouldn't. 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. Like how it has to have.

Tim Ferriss (86:31)

Making my cortisol go up.

Cal Newport (86:32)

Just listening to you, you can tell I'm. Yeah, I'm on. 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.

Tim Ferriss (86:44)

Glutton for punishment. Yeah, you should get your Opus Day whips out. Just do that while you're.

Cal Newport (86:49)

I've got the thing wrapped around my leg right now. Yeah. I was asked to do a speaking thing for Opus Day once. This is this Iban back in the early days in Cambridge.

Tim Ferriss (86:59)

Wild. Okay, interesting. If you haven't seen the DaVinci Code movie, you can get a preview.

Cal Newport (87:04)

It was exactly like that. Yeah, it was exactly what. I was very much like Tom Hanks in that movie. It was an albino who was whipping him. It was an odd. It was an odd. It was just him. It was a weird. Speaking of it.

Tim Ferriss (87:13)

It was me speaking of it. It was just two of us in.

Cal Newport (87:15)

A room, just in a room hitting each other with lips.

Cal Newport (87:17)

But good money, though.

Cal Newport (87:18)

So you know.

Tim Ferriss (87:19)

Yeah, you know, but the money was so good.

Cal Newport (87:21)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (87:21)

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. Stuff actually was effectively. I'm paraphrasing. Right. This podcast was a long time ago, but whenever you say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but the money's so good. Whenever there's a but the money's so good, or some variation of that. That is a clear, interesting red light. Stop and take a really close look about whatever it is that you're considering doing.

Cal Newport (87:53)

Yeah. If there's an. And it's different.

Tim Ferriss (87:55)

Yeah.

Cal Newport (87:56)

And the money is also really good.

Tim Ferriss (87:57)

And the money happens to be great, that's a different thing. So do you think the money is so good?

Cal Newport (88:01)

Hey, podcasting seems like the.

Cal Newport (88:03)

At least it was.

Cal Newport (88:04)

And then I'm gonna ask you if this is changing, but like, it seems like the perfect refuge from that. Right. Because for whatever reason, 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.

Cal Newport (88:18)

And there was no one. No one. Not.

Cal Newport (88:20)

There was no scaffolding of people knocking on the door. Be like, great, now come do this time consuming thing. Or that time consuming.

Cal Newport (88:26)

It could just exist as a creative skilled thing where people were just Happy.

Cal Newport (88:31)

For you to do this creative skilled thing. There's just not that many people, you know, you have to deal with like ads or something like that. I mean, so did you. I've loved it about podcasting.

Cal Newport (88:40)

Is that.

Tim Ferriss (88:41)

Oh, me too.

Cal Newport (88:41)

Yeah. No one else bothers you? Do you think it's still that?

Tim Ferriss (88:44)

Yeah.

Cal Newport (88:44)

Is it gonna stay there? I mean, I'm curious about your trajectory.

Cal Newport (88:47)

Because you were there early. Like, are you sticking around in podcasting? Are you changing? Like, well, how do you. What's your read? You gotta help me here. What's your read on what's happening in this industry? What's your relationship to it? Is it still going to be this great refuge for people like semi introverted creative people like us, or is this.

Tim Ferriss (89:03)

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 flotsam, 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 because you can just say, hey, I put this up six months ago.

Cal Newport (89:37)

I got.

Tim Ferriss (89:37)

Followed my own advice because you have.

Cal Newport (89:38)

An interview show, so everyone is probably saying, can I come on?

Tim Ferriss (89:43)

Exactly. And so I put up 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 CEO, 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. And because it seems redundant. And what I will do, though, 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, everyone will. No one's going to respect my rules, and rightly so.

Cal Newport (91:15)

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.

Tim Ferriss (91:23)

Yeah, 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. But trying to stay away from the very highest point of the bell curve distribution there. And these are kind of arbitrary in a sense, but that's rules. 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. 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.

Cal Newport (93:28)

There is an audio component, but yeah.

Tim Ferriss (93:30)

They'Re 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. Right. It'll be more like 2017, maybe 2016 for a lot of folks. And I'm totally fine with that. 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 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. 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 hair brained stuff.

Cal Newport (94:29)

I mean, you're about to become a billionaire with Coyotes. You're going to get that card game money. Get that card game bank.

Tim Ferriss (94:35)

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Scrooge McDuck backstroking through my pool 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 10 episodes and see how this goes. And I expect I'll learn these following things even if I shut it down. The same thing goes with the game. It's like 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 kind of 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 have no idea. I mean, I'll continue doing the podcast because having these conversations, right? Seeing your face, having this conversation just again, coming back to evolved, what we have evolved for, it's like, it's very nourishing for me.

Cal Newport (95:34)

Right?

Tim Ferriss (95:35)

Like I'm in a good mood and.

Cal Newport (95:37)

That'S why you care so much about making it sustainable for you. So you keep doing it like that's the plan. It's 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.

Tim Ferriss (95:48)

Let's get the barnacle kudzu.

Cal Newport (95:50)

It's an invasive plant that has like, native to the like American south that is sort of taken over a lot of places. Maybe like barnacle on the side of the, of the, of the sailing ship. Like, you're like, I got to get this off so this can keep moving.

Tim Ferriss (96:03)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if I, I really think about pruning as much as adding, I love Japan. I. 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 for.

Cal Newport (96:23)

For.

Tim Ferriss (96:23)

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 the. Not because it's minimal, but because it's elegant. 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.

Cal Newport (97:09)

One of the Watchmen.

Tim Ferriss (97:10)

Few people in the. Yeah, actually. Yeah.

Cal Newport (97:14)

I'm making his names up.

Tim Ferriss (97:15)

Yeah. That was Alan Moore. He.

Cal Newport (97:16)

So he had like a dark Batman or something at some point.

Tim Ferriss (97:19)

Yeah, the Dark Knight. He did Sin City 300.

Cal Newport (97:22)

Sin City is what I was thinking. Thinking about.

Tim Ferriss (97:23)

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, 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.

Cal Newport (97:46)

Do you think this is possible with podcasts? You're saying you want to get, like, what is the core like for you? It's like.

Tim Ferriss (97:50)

Like, is it.

Cal Newport (97:51)

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 to swing in. Which. I've been on those shows before.

Tim Ferriss (98:03)

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.

Cal Newport (98:25)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (98:26)

So. So just paying attention to that, like, this is super fun for me. So if. If I'm. I'll probably sit down, have some tea after this, maybe do some journaling, be like, okay, why was that fun? What was it right? Was it because Cal's a sweet, swell, smart guy?

Cal Newport (98:42)

Like, that's.

Tim Ferriss (98:42)

That's definitely part of it. Not to. Not to, you know, butter you up too hard, but it's like, that's a part of it. And we have some. 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. Right. So the trajectory that you pointed to, like that discussion, I haven't had before. And the list could go on and on. Like, maybe it's time of day. Okay. Like before getting reactive with any kind of inbox or anything. I did this. I happen to think that's really important.

Cal Newport (99:16)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (99:17)

I'm also creating something before I do any management. Right. So making. Before you manage for me, psychologically psycho, emotionally. Huge, huge thing. Yeah. 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. This is. And so paying attention to that and then testing. Okay, let's follow these rules. Right. 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. If they don't work. Yeah, I'll change them.

Cal Newport (99:50)

I'm going through life, I'm going through.

Cal Newport (99:51)

Something similar with the podcast where we're. Jesse 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.

Cal Newport (100:03)

It's like, I think it needs to.

Cal Newport (100:04)

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.

Cal Newport (100:14)

Right.

Cal Newport (100:14)

Like, I don't want to do anything else. I can't go into my email inbox after that or whatever.

Cal Newport (100:19)

And so it was like crushing days. I was like, actually this should be like the end of the day.

Cal Newport (100:22)

Like where we record above a restaurant. There's kind of like an energy to it.

Tim Ferriss (100:26)

Like, why don't.

Cal Newport (100:26)

And then you can just be like done with work.

Cal Newport (100:29)

And.

Tim Ferriss (100:29)

Yeah.

Cal Newport (100:30)

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.

Cal Newport (100:34)

Like, how should it be? It should be like one day a week.

Cal Newport (100:37)

It should be. Do it in the evening. It should be. We decompress at the bar, downs, whatever.

Cal Newport (100:41)

It needs to be. Like, why not?

Cal Newport (100:43)

It's something we can still own.

Cal Newport (100:45)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (100:46)

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. With in your case, kind of the monologue. But in my case, it's like there's a reason why we're doing this conversation. Morning, 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, and particularly if it's very technical. This is going to be a researcher and a professor and 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 like 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 that's like the order matters. And over time you can just pay attention to like how your body feels. Are you excited to hop on? Like, I was excited to hop on and see and catch up and just riff because I knew that it would be also unexpected in terms of direction, which is fun for me.

Cal Newport (102:18)

Not as excited as you'll be for the ophthalmologist though, because that's gonna, that's gonna bang right there.

Tim Ferriss (102:23)

Well, you know, actually Andrew Huberman's an.

Cal Newport (102:25)

Ophthalmologist, so I guess I should even by words.

Tim Ferriss (102:28)

And this 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, the looking at a menu in dim light, all of that has started to go and I'm like, I don't like it. I don't like it. I do have some glasses.

Cal Newport (103:09)

Welcome to my life.

Tim Ferriss (103:10)

Yeah, I don't want to immediately hop to that.

Cal Newport (103:14)

So.

Cal Newport (103:15)

Oh, you're. 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 a cop my coffee shop down the block trying to read a book.

Cal Newport (103:27)

And I was like, it's too dim in there.

Cal Newport (103:28)

I was Like, I can't read that. Too dim. They need more lights.

Tim Ferriss (103:32)

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, but I've been experimenting with software from this tiny startup. And. 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 this, and it's different from visual education, where you're training the muscles in the eyes.

Cal Newport (104:22)

That's what I've heard about. Okay, this is different. It's your brain.

Tim Ferriss (104:24)

Yeah, this. This is training your brain. So super interesting. I tell you what, I realize I'm swimming against the current, but this is also kind of what I do.

Cal Newport (104:36)

This is peak Tim Ferris.

Tim Ferriss (104:37)

Yeah, this is peak Tim Ferris. I get my kicks out of like, okay, I am going to go all in and then I'm gonna find all this stuff and I need someone to tell me if I am being a crazy person. I see.

Cal Newport (104:50)

So this interview is actually happening. Okay, I see.

Tim Ferriss (104:53)

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 gonna blind yourself if you look into whatever, whatever for 20 minutes a day. Don't do that. And that's great. That is.

Cal Newport (105:10)

Okay. All right, well, now I will look forward to that. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (105:13)

Bringing the adults into the room.

Cal Newport (105:14)

All right, final question. What's your. 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 to run Tim Ferriss Allied Conglomerate.

Tim Ferriss (105:30)

Yeah, Tim Ferriss International Allied Media Global HH hq.

Cal Newport (105:36)

Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss (105:37)

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 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 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.

Cal Newport (106:33)

Break them down psychologically until they're upbringing, then you rebuild them.

Tim Ferriss (106:37)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cal Newport (106:39)

Tim Ferriss, the training center. You have the re education center. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (106:42)

Please relinquish your phone. So currently I have three full time employees.

Cal Newport (106:51)

And.

Tim Ferriss (106:54)

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. Right. 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 have to be doing. Yeah.

Cal Newport (107:32)

Specific thing.

Cal Newport (107:32)

It is clearly hourly.

Cal Newport (107:34)

It's.

Tim Ferriss (107:35)

But I am, 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 there's, I use an outsourced sort of fractional family office which handles all of my. So there's, there's an annual, various annual fees and so on. But they handle all of my bill pay, they handle all of my. Effectively bookkeeping. They handle.

Cal Newport (108:16)

Interesting.

Tim Ferriss (108:18)

They can give feedback on investment 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 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. 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.

Cal Newport (109:11)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (109:11)

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.

Cal Newport (109:28)

Yeah. Someone can pick it up and do.

Tim Ferriss (109:29)

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 higher and higher. Maybe it's during, like a 2020 boom cycle because they're 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.

Cal Newport (110:24)

Yep, they're on the payroll. You're going to invent work, and then suddenly you have, you know, you're doing live shows and you've got your. You're selling T shirts and.

Tim Ferriss (110:34)

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, Like, Derek Sivers speaks on this really well with respect to CD baby, It's like, this is your chance to try to create your version of a utopia. Sounds maybe ridiculous, but it is. Right. Like, there's. You have to do certain things, checks and balances, and dot your I's across your T's, from illegal perspective, from a health insurance perspective, et cetera. But there's a lot of room to do things in an interesting way. I think. You know, Jason Fried and DHH37signals do a great job with this. Maybe they renamed it Basecamp. I can't remember.

Cal Newport (111:15)

They renamed it Basecamp. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (111:17)

So they. They have some incredibly innovative ways of approaching things. Then you see, like, a coinbase and, like, what they did and public pronouncements and kind of excluding discussions of politics from the workplace. Like, you can do a lot of.

Cal Newport (111:31)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (111:31)

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. You know, with the. 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. My hyper aversion to waste.

Cal Newport (112:00)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (112:00)

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 (112:06)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So contractors won't make you do that. Three employees.

Tim Ferriss (112:10)

Okay.

Cal Newport (112:10)

That's good.

Tim Ferriss (112:11)

Yeah. And that determines what I'm. What I can do or not do.

Cal Newport (112:13)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (112:13)

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 it would. 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 was like, no, let's go collaborate. Let somebody else who does this every day, who's a plus at it, do that stuff.

Cal Newport (112:46)

Yeah.

Cal Newport (112:46)

Otherwise you would. Not that.

Cal Newport (112:47)

This.

Cal Newport (112:47)

He loves this. But it wouldn't be good for you and I. You'll end up with, like, Brandon Sanderson's.

Tim Ferriss (112:51)

Warehouse, where you're like, brandon Sanderson loves having that business.

Cal Newport (112:56)

I find it insane. I've talked to. I don't know him. I know some of his people, but he loves it. And I'm like, oh, my God, it's my nightmare.

Cal Newport (113:02)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (113:02)

He loves it. That's part of his art. 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.

Cal Newport (113:24)

Yeah. You're not gonna be happy with that.

Tim Ferriss (113:25)

I get my hands. I get my hands dirty often when I probably should just leave everything alone.

Cal Newport (113:31)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (113:32)

I'm like, maybe an executive chef who's, like, running from station to station, like, come on, come on. Let me cut.

Cal Newport (113:38)

This is not the right place to put the sauce.

Cal Newport (113:39)

Come on.

Tim Ferriss (113:39)

Yeah, it's just like, you know, I gotta recognize that this. This OCD thing is. Is sometimes very helpful.

Cal Newport (113:47)

Yeah.

Tim Ferriss (113:47)

But also leads me to make some pretty dumb decisions. So I try to.

Cal Newport (113:51)

Because.

Tim Ferriss (113:54)

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.

Cal Newport (114:00)

Not to be dumb. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Well, Tim, maybe 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. I always appreciate our conversations.

Cal Newport (114:14)

I feel like we do them both places.

Cal Newport (114:17)

It's always a pleasure and I enjoyed it. And Coyote.

Tim Ferriss (114:21)

Coyote. It's. It's everywhere, folks. Amazon, Target, Walmart, wherever. So hope, you. Hope you try it. It's. It's. It works. Yeah, people laugh. Yeah, it's. It's a. It's a dumb game for smart people, so check it out. And always nice to spend time together, Cal.

Cal Newport (114:39)

All right. Thank you, Tim.

Tim Ferriss (114:40)

Thanks, man.

Cal Newport (114:41)

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 gonna give you real meaning and depth. Have you tried this yet, Jesse?

Cal Newport (114:59)

I did. I brought it to the beach.

Cal Newport (115:01)

Yeah. You took one of the copies? Yeah. It's fun, right?

Cal Newport (115:03)

Yeah, it's fun.

Cal Newport (115:04)

I like it. It 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're 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, 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 deep thinker. He sits and he thinks and he cares about living deeply in a shallow world. To me, that is what the four Hour Work week is about. The four Hour Workweek, as much as any book, probably helped set those seeds in my thinking about crafting a life that matters. And 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. So 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, by Coyote. This is everywhere, isn't it?

Cal Newport (115:58)

Yeah, you get in all stores.

Cal Newport (115:59)

That guy's got it dialed in. This is not some.

Cal Newport (116:02)

You know, Patreon product or whatever.

Cal Newport (116:05)

Like it's in Walmart.

Cal Newport (116:07)

Yeah.

Cal Newport (116:07)

Yeah, good for him. All right, thanks, Tim. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week on Monday with the normal episode of the show. But until then, as always.

Cal Newport (116:18)

Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast.

Cal Newport (116:25)

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Cal Newport (116:47)

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Cal Newport (116:50)

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Cal Newport (116:52)

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Cal Newport (116:58)

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