Talking to Tim Ferriss about how to live a dope life

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
We have a bunch of friends, not going to name names, but they've already earned the last dollar they will ever spend in their life. And so now they're trading great hours for useless dollars, which is like such a wake up call of a bad trade to make. Once you have the power to get whatever it is that you want, then the priority shifts to wanting the right shit.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
Shaan, you want to kick things off?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:28)
Yeah, where to start? It's so funny. I did a pod with Tim, I don't know, last year or something like that. And I hyper prepared for it because I was like, oh my god, it's Tim Ferriss. This is the guy. This is the reason I did a podcast in the first place. I wanted to be a Tim Ferriss.
That was part of the North Star. This time I had the exact opposite opinion. I was like, I don't have any agenda coming into this. Meaning like, I just want to know what's up. I want to know what's new, what's exciting. What are you nerding out about? I just kind of want to hear what's going on. Like, what is Tim Ferriss up to nowadays? And I have your game here. And actually, you told me about this even when we were doing that last podcast. You said, I just spent a few days with one of the world's best game designers. I didn't realize that was our mutual friend, Elon. And he's the man. He came on this podcast too recently. He's the man. So you went and made a game with him. Maybe just, I don't know, let's start there. Why'd you make a game?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:20)
Yeah, two years in the making, believe it or not. So, I grew up with D&D. I still have all my original modules, Dungeons and Dragons, and played a lot of video games. And as I was looking at what to potentially experiment with next, because every few years, I try something that's very much off-menu, or unrelated to what I'm currently doing, right? So there was the first book, and then the angel investing was sort of a wading into identity diversification, so I wouldn't get pigeonholed in one place as a business author, for instance, and then the podcast after Four Hour Chef, and there have been a number of other examples. Some work out, some don't. In the case of the game, this came about, I think, pretty naturally, because I was kind of late to therapy in life, but better late than never, I guess, and when people do a lot of therapy or they do psychedelic experiences or when they've just had a couple of glasses of wine with friends, at a certain point, what comes up a lot is, yeah, you know, I just take stuff so seriously and it's so heavy and I'm constantly doing A, B, or C, I just need to have more play, more play, more play, and if I look back at the books I've written, it's like, yeah, okay, productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, learning. There is a serious tinge to it, if that makes sense, but I feel like analog, getting off of screens and play, is more important than ever, and trying to find something that's a lighter lift than Dungeons & Dragons seemed like a fun challenge, and I love Alain Le. The guy is such a polymath of epic proportions. He worked on the first Xbox, Halo is created, entire genres of gaming, has not just one hit, but it has a track record of creating hit after hit after hit with tabletop games, and love the guy. He's just a sweet, soulful, awesome, hilarious guy. So to be able to develop a friendship with him, I was like, all right, if I'm choosing projects, as I usually do based on skills I'll develop, knowledge I'll learn and relationships I'll build that could translate outside of that project, because a lot of projects are going to fail. So if it's setting it up in a how do you win even if you lose? I was like, this seems like a very good bet. It's something that's kind of near and dear to me, something I want more of in my life. So if you're going to make a game, what do you have to do? You have to play a lot of games. So it's also a way of just forcing myself to get off of laptops and phones, spend time with my friends. And here we are.
It's landing in like 8,000 retail locations, Walmart, Target, everywhere. It's been exclusive to Walmart for a few months, has been a bestseller, 300 million plus social views of gameplay, which is nuts. And we'll see.