YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Gary

lines on the record: 141
first: 2023-08-16
most recent: 2023-08-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, 100%. And again, you've said this better than honestly anybody like this idea that most of the fears that we have, this resistance to uncertainty is just made up in our head. There are so many ways that you can recover and go back. And if you can just remember that, I could have gone back to law school later on when I quit my game design job to start a company. I could always get another job. Those illusions of uncertainty and fear, if you can push past that, it changes everything. I mean, most of the times we take risks, we're not jumping off cliffs or into burning buildings. It's just, okay, yeah, your career takes a different path or you're behind in school or whatever. It's a very low cost.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mom has come around. I'm sure she'll listen to this episode. Hi, mom. She did. And this is the thing. The people in our lives, there's a lot of pressure that we all feel, right? Whether it's from parents, from friends, they want the best for us, right? So you just want us me to be happy and safe and comfortable. And you've got to realize that you in order to find the path that you actually want for yourself, the path that you will be fulfilled by, you've got to be uncomfortable. You got to be unsafe. Parents, I think, try to protect their kids so much. In reality, you can't. You've got to be able to like push past that. And she knows that now. And she was very happy it all worked out.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was fortunate because of my magic career. They had reached out to me to kind of just vet their game and, you know, kind of check it out and stuff. So some of the other people on the magic pro tour, people who I'd known had already kind of been hired there. So they were like, hey, and they knew I was miserable. I would chat with them. They're like, hey, come out for the summer. Come work on this thing. You got nothing to lose kind of deal.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opportunity in front of me, it's still my assumption at this point was I'm going to go back to law school. I'm going to go back. That's just I got to finish that path. But I come out to start working on games and I am in love with it. I'm super passionate about it. I'm enjoying it. Again, we're debating these really interesting ideas about design and definitely happy to dig into what that looks like. But then when they offer me a full-time job, I'm still stressing about this, you know, and it's still finally when I make the decision, I tell my mom, she literally cries when I tell her I'm leaving law school to go become a game designer, right? Like it was so hard. And I look back and it's so silly to me. This is one of the things you've taught me. I didn't have these words at the time, but I learned it through you. In fact, I wasn't really giving up anything. I could always go back to law school, but it just didn't feel like that at the time. And so being able to break out of that spell and then go follow a path that was really passionate for me and that I was really excited about one of the best decisions I ever made.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From reading. That is how unhealthy I was, how I was about 40 pounds heavier than I am now, how just like miserable I was. And I like, this is my first clue that I'm on the wrong path. And I think this is something I just, it's a really important lesson, I think, for I imagine there's a lot of overachievers in your audience. And that this path of trying to win whatever games in front of you, it can be way worse to win the wrong game than even to lose one that you actually enjoy playing. That was a big shift for me. And fortunately, that summer I had an opportunity to go instead of interning at a law firm, I got to go work on a Marvel Comics card game, a Marvel versus DC Comics card game for a company called Upper Deck in San Diego. So a summer internship working on comic book games, that sounded great. And so I flew across the country to go and work there for the summer. And again, even though I knew I was miserable, even though I'd had this terrible experience, even though I now had a”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that's just how I lived back. Towers of books. This was back when you had to use books to learn things. It was wild time And I checked out the blog books I had to read before class and I'm stack them up just towers around me and I'm just there and I'm there for hours just like reading case law and just not very happy but a couple hours later I realized I got to get to class and so I sit up and I have this jolt of pain through my spine jolt of pain. I can't I can barely move. I'm hobbling to get out of there and I realized I threw my back out from reading.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even though I had been making a living and traveling around the world playing magic, at no point did it ever occur to me that I would make a living in games. None. It was just, oh, this is a fun thing to do while I'm in college. I had this mental block. And so graduate, go get into NYU law. I teach the LSAT for a while. I go to law school. And I'm lucky. I'm a pretty happy guy by default. But this was the first time I was really depressed. Like I was very unhappy for an extended period of time. And I will remember very specifically this one day I'm getting up. I'm living in Brooklyn snowing outside, just like covered in ice on the floor. And I have to get trudged up and put on all of these ridiculous clothes and go get on the A-train and pretend like I'm not staring at anybody else and everybody has to studiously avoid looking at anybody else in New York. That's just the rule and make it all the way in, have my Boston cream donut for breakfast.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to frame this, right? So I've already mentioned both my parents are lawyers, my mom's a lawyer, my dad's a lawyer, my stepdad's a lawyer. I was debate captain. I was doing, I was supposed to be a lawyer. That was just like my path from as early as I can remember. That's what I was supposed to do.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that now we're talking about years of gap in between, right? And so what I did learn and the major thing that I realized in that magic is generally a single person game. I'm playing a match against somebody else in competition. But in this case, it's a team game. And I think the biggest shift in focus was I didn't just think about myself. I had to think about how do I lift everybody else up and all thrive together to be able to make it through. And it really changed the way I focused there, changed the way I focused with other teams I've worked with. It made a huge impact. And then, you know, just being willing to, again, come back from a loss and not let it discourage you that you can't overcome it. But I think that being able to work typically most of the games I've played have been single player, you know, whether it was debate or wrestling or most of magic. It was all about like, I'm here to win. And I think my shift and mindset was.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People rush the stage, like able to finally take that off of my back. It was a very exciting moment for me. It was a very fun journey. And it was a result of a lot of hard work, right? It was like a lot of dedication that got there. But it kind of felt for me, it was like the end of my magic career. It was like the thing that I had like, I had been striving to do that I kind of like checked those boxes. And that was kind of like what let me move to this next stage.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Throw the cards away. My teammates are groaning in the background. I was like, all right, here we go. Shuffle up, draw the hand. And it becomes one of those moments where you kind of like see it come together. Like the hand was good enough. We start playing it out. I get some board advantage. My opponent's kind of on his back foot and he's got a couple tricks. There's some cards I have to play around. I'm not really sure. And then finally, you know, I'm able to kind of get to the point and win this fight after however long.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It comes down to me playing this match, and we've got stage lights, we're covering it. This is like everything I have worked for. And there are some online records of the experience, but I am like, I remember just sort of feeling in that moment that I'd been in tournaments. I'd won tournaments. I'd lost tournaments. There's a certain amount of excitement and pressure. But for this one, it was so much of a personal story, a personal kind of drama that I was playing out for me. I drew my hand the first time for this final match where everything's on the line people are watching. And there's a rule in magic where if you don't like your hand, if you don't like the starting cards you have, you can take a mulligan. And what that means is you throw the cards away, but you get one less card. And it's a big deal. Like less cards is a huge disadvantage in the game. But I draw my hand and I'm trying to make this like this decision. And I'm just like, all right, do I deal with what I have or do I just take a shot? And I didn't like the hand. I wasn't going to let the world championships be decided on that hand. So I mulligan.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was nice to not be the only loser. And then the very next year I make it back on the U.S. national team. And so this is my chance, like my chance at redemption after six years. And I've been with two other people on the team. And the two people that are on the team with me, they were like pretty new to the game. They were kind of had come out of nowhere just like I did when I first started. And I was so committed to making sure we did well. I paid to fly both of them to Boston where I was living at the time to stay at my place and work and we trained for like month, month and a half together with my team who is a your move games was the local store and group we would playtest with. We trained, we slipped on my couch, we worked together to be able to make it back to that year. The world championships were in Berlin. So we're going into enemy territory. And it comes down to literally we make it to the final table, to the final game.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go and kind of chronology order so that the magic career kind of has arc before my law career has its much shorter arc. I'm 17 years old. I win the U.S. National Championships. This was like a huge, awesome, cool thing for me. But then I go to the world championships. And at that point in Magic's life cycle, the US was dominant. The US had never lost a world championships ever. And I was not just me, but a team of people that were representing the US. Unfortunately, we did not win. We did not do very well. And so that world championships, I was then had this albatross around my neck of being the first loser U.S. national champion, at least the story I was telling myself. So I was like, okay, this is not great. And I, you know, my career was good. I was doing good. But it was something that always stuck with me. And so I kept wanting to try to get back on the national team to like redeem myself. So fast forward, five years later, finally, the US loses again, loses to the journey.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look like. And so for Richard, he wanted to make things that were exciting, and Chase, and you're really hoping you open up in a pack. Of course, he didn't have any idea that the game was going to be as popular as it was. He talked about in the podcast episode that he thought you would just never even see all the cards, that some people would have a couple packs and other people would have a couple packs and you just discovered as you went. That is actually, it's an exciting prospect, but very quickly people would buy all the cards and now they're spoilers on the internet and everybody sees everything immediately. And so it's changed a lot since his initial concept.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the idea is you want to make sure that everything, you know, there's no one strategy that's too good. But there's also some people think that that means everything needs to be exactly the same. And that's also not true because the idea, if every card is just as equally good as every other card, then that you deny people that discovery. You deny people that ability to learn and say, oh, wait, hold on. As a new player, you don't know anything. And then you can learn, oh, actually, you know what? This card's better than this card or the excitement of chasing and finding something that's very exciting that now you can combine with something else that you have and suddenly that gets better. And so the way I define balance is not everything has to be equal. It's that there's no one strategy that should be unbeatable. The best analogy is if you think rock, paper, scissors, perfectly balanced game. Rock is great. But if I know you're going to throw rock, I've got a plan. I could throw paper at. I'm going to be okay. So there's a lot of ways that you can approach balance, but that can give you a sense of what it should.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this idea in games of balance, which is a term that people throw around a lot but gets very confused. And the principle of it is that you don't want some part of your game to be so unfair that nobody can beat you. If it's in tic-tac-toe, if you get to make three moves at once, that would be pretty unfair, right? The game is already over. You've got your three in a row. That doesn't make any sense. So the game's no fun.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Richard Garfield was the lead designer. He created the game, along with, of course, a lot of other people that supported, but he was the lead creator.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can be a real commitment. Exactly. Whereas magic, like you're playing inside of these box and these rules, but once you start exploring it, then this whole world opens up. And I think that was really the magic of it, quote unquote. And it really made it feel like something that was very new and spawned an entire genre of games.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From a game like Magic or Dungeons Dragons. And because as you play, you're crafting your own experience. And I think that was such a unique and powerful thing. And Dungeons& Dragons could be a little intimidating for people because it's so open-ended.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was doing, but it allowed people to customize and grow in a world where it's infinitely deep at a certain point with chess, it's a deep game, but there's only so many pieces. I can learn them all. I can know kind of the frame I'm playing in. With magic, there's constantly new cards coming. There's constantly new things to do. And I get to own, I get to customize and own my experience. So to relate it to something like you've more familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, the idea that you get to tell the story, that you get to create the character is so powerful and so immersive. And magic is very similar. If you want to build a deck with all elf cards, you could do that. If you want to build a deck that has every card that you can imagine and is 300 cards deep, you can do that. If you want to be the hyper competitive, hyper-focused guy, you could do that. There are so many experiences that you get to, in a sense, design your own game. And it's one of the things that I've learned, much like you talked about a lot of philosophy majors end up on your podcast. A lot of the game designers start.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I teach game design, and when there's sort of five major categories of what people are looking for out of games and magic hits all of them in ways. So I'll talk about the categories first, and then I'll talk about why magic succeeds in such an incredible way. So the first is immersion. You're looking for certain experiences or you're looking to tell craft a story. The second is connection, right? You're looking to socialize. We want to help other people. You want to kind of connect with others. The third is aspiration. This can be in competition. This can be like achievements. You want to win. You want to prove your better then, prove you can achieve something. Then the fourth is growth. You want to learn. You want to continue to kind of move up and improve your skills. And the last is expression, this idea that you want to customize or role-playing works this way because we express different parts of ourselves through role-playing. And so those are kind of the major categories. And I think magic allowed people to both not only have these competitions.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the time was called the magic dojo, which you can now find like the internet archives. And it was where everybody would post tournament reports of, okay, here's what I played, here's what happened, and people would comment on them and break down on kind of more classic bulletin board style. And that's where the core of magic strategy and discussion started to form. And now there's dozens of sites and dozens of places where you can.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it absolutely does. And people would break these things down. So, again, we're going to take ourselves in the Wayback machine, right? 97, 98, this era, the internet is still relatively new, right? Still relatively light. And so people would go.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And similarly, my dad and I, we would be like cutthroat games of monopoly around the kitchen table quite a bit. And I found. Did they reinforced that after the game? What did you learn if you lost? What did you learn from it? And that's the biggest thing that I credit for my, certainly my success in magic. And I've tried to apply that everywhere else in my life is that when you lose, which you inevitably are going to lose in life, right? It doesn't matter what it is, that you look first to like, okay, what could I have done differently? How could I have set this up differently so that I wouldn't even be in this position? It's easy when you're playing a game like magic where your opponent draws a lucky card. You know, it's a one out of 60 that they draw that card and they beat you because of it. And you'd hear in the hallways, other people would be complaining about what's called bad beats, right? I got unlucky. Oh my God. But the best players wouldn't do that. The best players would say, actually, you know what? If five turns earlier, I had made this different play, it wouldn't have mattered what card they drew at that turn. And that skill set was something that was...”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think there's two factors here. I think one, you're absolutely right. My parents were wonderful in the sense that as a kid, I could argue my way to a later bedtime or I could argue my way to, hey, if I finish my homework, I can get an extra setting of dessert or whatever. They encouraged if I could kind of debate my way to something, then I could get it. And so it trained me very young.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The job was to make a reasonable argument. It didn't matter just like in debate, right? It didn't matter what your position was can you defend it? Do you have good logic for it? I loved being proven wrong. I loved when I would have, this was a kind of strength and a weakness. I love debating with people and I loved it when someone told me something I didn't know or convinced me I was wrong. I was like, that's amazing. That's great. It took me a very long time to realize most people are not like that. In high school, I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say. So I learned to be a little bit more cautious and compassionate in my conversations with people. But I really enjoyed it. And so philosophy let me explore that space of really what matters in the world and what matters to me and really refine my thinking and get challenged on my thinking when I was unclear or fuzzy.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, as you might guess, I love debating and I love, I mean, I've always been very interested in just sort of talking about the deep questions, right? Trying to get down to the fundamentals of what is interesting and what matters. And I tried a few different majors history and I was on my path to be a lawyer because my parents are lawyers and that's what I thought I was supposed to do. But I found most classes when I went to them, the job as a student in the class was to regurgitate whatever it was that the professor told you back to them. The hell out of me. Whereas in philosophy”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No joke. No joke. At that time, it was great. I mean, it's how I paid my way through college. You know, better than flipping burgers, I'll put it that way.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crazy, crazy amount of money, but it was great at the time. You can't win every tournament. But when I was playing at my peak, it was maybe $80,000 a year I was making. So it's still not.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just like crazy, it's a lot of money. Oh my god, it's crazy money, right? So I was just like such a fun thing. But when you think about it as an adult, it wasn't.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, we're taking this back now. Date myself a little bit, but this is 97 when I won the U.S. National Championships. And the core of my career was about the six years from 97 to about 2003. And that time there was what was called the Magic Pro Tour, which was put on by the company that made the game as a way to promote it. And they would have millions of dollars of prizes available. So at any given tournament, you could win. So my biggest tournament winnings would typically be in the $30,000 range. So a pro tour in Houston, where I won that, or these different tournaments. So to give you a sense, a first place in one of those tournaments was $30,000-ish all the way down till top 32, maybe you'd get $1,000. And you'd have to get invited to these tournaments. There'd be maybe 300 people-ish that would get invited. And so I would do a tournament in Prague. Then there'd be another one in Sydney. Then there'd be another one in Seattle. Then there'd be another one in Tokyo. And so we've got to literally just meet up. And again, I'm in high school. I'm a teenager, right? So this is.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. There's no live fact checking in these formats. Points that they're saying, as well as bring up your own points that are hopefully harder to refute. So it becomes a kind of process of being very good at listening and taking notes than being able to structure how do you want to set up your replies so that you're gaining time advantage, if you will, with your persuasive ability to give you more time to make your own row of arguments so that hopefully they don't have time in their thing to properly address and attack everything.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have the same topic over and over again, you'd start to notice common threads about how people will present it. And then you could try crazy things. So maybe that the U.S. should have closer ties with China and you would take a position. Actually, the US should not exist anymore. It should dissolve. And you start making arguments around that. And you just kind of have to take the argument seriously in a sense because the job of the judge is to sort of leave outside their preconceived notions and just hear what you have to say. And so having to think on your feet and react and be able to kind of come up with unique answers and change the flow of things was really quite a bit of fun.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for those formats, the same topic will hold for a while, for like months, like a season. And so you can prepare very much ahead of time. I see. And, you know, those formats, then there's other ones that like the parliamentary one where you have no idea what you're going to talk about until you start going up there a lot of the times. That was more fun because it was a little bit more extemporaneous. There's varying degrees.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It varies, right? So from round to round, you'll go first or second. And this was sort of how we did it in high school. My favorite version of debate was what I did in college, which was called parliamentary debate, where you could literally make up any topic you wanted and just start talking about it. And the other side would have to defend the other side and you would just play and have fun and try to figure out and convince people that this was the way to go. And it was just, it was such a fun exercise and just persuasion and kind of tactically how you wanted to frame everything. And it became I really spent quite a bit of time on and really enjoyed and it ended up being very useful for quite a few things later in life. Turns out being able to speak good has value.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a few different categories. I'll just talk about my favorite one, which was called Lincoln Douglas Debate at the time. And it basically means that you have a topic that you're debating. Say the US should have closer relationships with China, or it's better to sacrifice the good of a few for the good of the many, or something like that, some topic. And then you would have to pick one side of the argument and there's a judge in the room and you have a certain amount of time to make your case, then the other person has a certain amount of time to make their case, and then you have some time for rebuttal, and they have some time for rebuttal. And at the end, the judge or judges would then decide who won.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as it turns out, I won that tournament. And so I ended up becoming the state champion. And that got me an invitation to the national championships. And again, I was not ever taking this sort of seriously. I wasn't even intending to go. In fact, I was supposed to go to debate camp that summer. Yet another thing I was arbitrarily competitive in. And it ended up being my parents couldn't afford to send me that year to debate camp. Last minute, again, my friends were all super supportive here. I ran a tournament at my local game store. They let me run the event. I collected the entry fees from that tournament. I used that to pay for a plane ticket to fly to Columbus where the U.S. National Championships was happening. I slept on a friend's floor and I was now 17 at this time. And I end up winning the U.S. National Championships. And that ends up taking me on a career of traveling around the world playing magic for a living.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was 16 years old. Yeah, so I was a young kid, so I was like, oh, hey, come along, right? Come on the car ride. And, you know, those were some of my best memories in general, just like, you know, a bunch of guys hanging out, jumping in the car, just talking about games, riding up.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I first got involved with magic in a pretty funny way, actually. So I used to be on a competitive laser tag league. So, I have a very competitive person by nature. I've been involved in pretty much whatever I do. I'll find some way to compete with it. And in between games of laser tag, people were playing this card game that looked really cool. I'd never heard of before. And I watched them play and I was like, okay, what is that? And so, okay, so I go to the store and I just buy a pack of cards. And as I mentioned, the cards are totally random. So I just took all the random cards I bought and just went to go play and I got my butt kicked. And of course, okay, you actually have to construct and build your deck and build your strategy. And that helps it come life. So I came back the next week. And, okay, now I played a little better and a little better. And eventually at one point, all the guys from my group were all going to go to a state championship tournament.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Magic's a trading card game invented by Richard Garfield. What trading card game means is that you can buy it not just like a normal game like Monopoly you'd buy in a store, be a single box. Here you buy packs of cards like you would baseball cards and each one has different gameplay elements. And the way I like to describe it for people who don't know is it's sort of like a cross between chess and poker where you get to decide what deck of cards you're going to play and what pieces you get to play with. So there's the poker element of I'm drawing a hand of cards and maybe I can bluff what I have and you don't know. And there's the chess element of there's tactically once I play those cards there's tactically ways I use them and kind of battle back and forth. And then of course it has fantasy characters and so it appeals to people who like Dungeons& Dragons so you'll be playing wizards and dragons and warriors and stuff like that.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT