Tee Barnett Coaching

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Yeah, so Magic the Gathering, some of the people listening to this miraculously won't know what that is or won't know much about it. I think that some people may distantly know that it is some kind of...

hard game or something. Sometimes they confuse it with Dungeons and Dragons, perhaps. I've heard this before. So I'm curious to just throw this pretty large question at you. What is Magic the Gather?

Zac Hill (01:35)
Magic the Gathering is the card game that JD Vance plays in Hillbilly Elegy. No, it's a, the way that you describe magic very much kind of depends on who you're talking to, right? So the, for a long time people liked describing the strategy game in magic is like a combination of poker and chess, right? You have the strategy of chess.

Tee (01:41)
Okay.

Zac Hill (01:58)
with sort of the variance and interpersonal dynamics of poker. But imagine instead of chess kind of coming with a bunch of assigned pieces, you got to build your army on the chessboard out of like tens of thousands of potential combinations of game pieces, right? And you got to arrange them any way you choose. what's cool about Magic is that you don't only just play the game, but you build your deck before you start playing. So everybody comes

to the arena as it were with just a slightly different take on what it is they're trying to do. So that's very much kind of the game -sy explanation of magic. think that if you're coming at somebody more familiar with the fantasy space, know, like Dungeons and Dragons, A, they're both made by the same company, Wizards of the Coast. B, they both kind of have a fantasy skin of, you know, there's wizards with armies kind of trying to win a battle. But while D &D is much more about the sort

Tee (02:47)
huh.

Zac Hill (02:58)
of narrative co -creative storytelling, Magic is much more firmly entrenched in the strategy gaming space. Also, you can play a game of Magic in five, ten, fifteen minutes, not five hours like it takes to play D &D. So, you know, and then there's the narrative space of Magic where, you know, each set is staged in its own world within a multiverse. And there's these characters called Planeswalkers who are sort of the superheroes of the IP.

that are able to travel between worlds. And so each release, you get exposure to a whole new universe inside of which the same core mechanics can play. That makes for really fun and accessible and exciting IP that's lasted now over 30 years, which is kind of wild to think about. People all the time say, magic. I remember when that came out around the time Pokemon did in the 90s as it's still around.

Tee (03:50)
Mm

Zac Hill (03:58)
still around, it's bigger than it's ever before. It's one of the few IPs to gross over a billion dollars a year the last several years. I think the last time I checked the player stat, we've got over 40 million players. And some of the folks at Wizards can probably give me updated information now. But it's truly become kind of a phenomenon. And I worked on it way before it was operating at that magnitude. So it's been really amazing seeing the course that it's taken over the last several decades.

Tee (04:28)
Wow, that's so cool. Okay, and just one follow -up for the people who don't know what it is at all. So you sit down and you have a deck of, what, 60 cards, right?

Zac Hill (04:31)
Yeah, of course.

depends on what you're playing. The most popular format has 100 cards. The easiest to get into format has 40 cards, and kind of the most common formats have 60. So what that illustrates is the cool thing about a customizable card game is that you can really just kind of make up ways to play depending on the cards in front of you. And what's popular now wasn't necessarily what was most popular 10 years ago and won't necessarily be what

Tee (04:38)
depends on what you're

Okay.

Okay.

Zac Hill (05:06)
most popular 10 years from now, right? And when you have a community of 40 million players, players are constantly coming up with new and different ways to play, which is one of the reasons that the game has lasted as long as it has.

Tee (05:21)
So the only difference, or you mentioned the chessboard and then having like thousands of potential different players. But a thing that could be very different is that the chessboard isn't just a neutral board when it comes to magic, right? There's different lands, right? Okay, from which these characters can derive power. I'm gonna butcher this. Is mana the power? That's what you would call it?

Zac Hill (05:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

That's right. It's quite literally, that's right. Yes.

Is mana the power? Actually, you didn't butcher it at all. That's exactly right. So the idea is, in magic, you have lands, which sort of in a very like ancestral, you know...

Tee (05:49)
Okay, okay.

Zac Hill (05:57)
British mythology way, you're drawing on the power of the lands to cast your spells. Game mechanically, that means you have some things that are resources and some things that are what you do with those resources, and each land kind of gives you access to different kinds of things to do.

Tee (06:17)
Right, okay, okay. So what are some examples of different lands and the powers you might have access to from lands, if you can recall?

Zac Hill (06:25)
That's right. So one of the cool things about magic, or one of the certainly defining things about magic, is that it's got this thing called the color pie. So there's five colors in magic, and each of the colors do slightly different things, and they draw on different lands to do those things. So white is plains, blue is islands, black is swamps, red is mountains, and green is forests.

And the important thing about that is not necessarily like which tree in the forest you use to cast your spells, but unlike many other games where there's, you know, in StarCraft, you have the Protoss, the Terran, and the Zerg, right? Different races that do kind of different things. In D &D, you might have Dwarves, Elves, Humans.

tieflings, whatever your different thing is, in magic the definition of kind of what you're doing and what your path to victory is, is embodied not only by these different colors which represent, you know, different kinds of magic you can use, but also very different philosophies and approaches to

how they're gonna go about trying to win the game, right? And those philosophies don't just relate to game play, they relate to characters and their worldviews and their ideologies and their mythologies and all the different things that animate the conflict that drives the game. And I think another reason that the game's been able to last so long is that this color pie is a very rich

nuanced kind of backdrop for all different sorts of conflict in all kinds of different contexts.

Tee (08:15)
Yeah, and the color pie is what we will probably be staking a lot of this discussion to today, which is how could I use something like Magic the Gathering to develop myself personally.

Zac Hill (08:21)
Sick.

Tee (08:32)
And some of the reason why this has come up is because we have a mutual friend who brought us together who has said that she is actively doing coaching where she has identified herself as some mixture of colors on the color pie. And we can talk a bit more about what each of those are and how they can express. then different colors that she often finds friction with. And there's some lens of interpretation that can be helpful there.

Zac Hill (08:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Tee (09:00)
And so, you know, before her even, I stumbled into this coaching a lot of people who happened to mention that they were either into this as a hobby, you know, they kind of, were just really, really into it and it was a thing for them to let off steam. But one in particular, and he wouldn't mind me talking about this because it's a public part of a podcast we already did, Damon Saucy, who I already had on the program.

Zac Hill (09:26)
awesome.

Tee (09:26)
is a family and marriage therapist who was using the color pie and in particular like trying to peg himself as a certain blend of colors. He was interested in growing in a different direction. I think it was trying to become more red or something like that. And what that yielded for him was, how can I, I guess, you know, red, we can talk about this, but might be the source of more like passion, right?

Zac Hill (09:45)
Yeah, yeah.

Totally.

Tee (09:55)
In the moment living, there's probably a lot of other things associated with it. this was a way for him to conceive not only of like a different direction to grow for himself, but also through the game, you know, it may express in different ways in the context of the game. That can be helpful for imagining how it might express in real life, where you to inhabit, embody and channel some of the energy. Yeah.

Zac Hill (10:16)
That's right.

That's right. So I think for a lot of people, it's really helpful to have these sort of frameworks for understanding not just yourself, but your approach to making decisions and solving problems, right? And a lot of the frameworks that get used in coaching spaces, development spaces, et cetera, come out of organizational psychology, right? The Myers -Briggs personality inventory, a lot of Rays principles, all kinds of different things. Originally, we're used to think about the formulation of teams in organizational management.

context and how to compose your teams based on different strengths and weaknesses. Gallup did a lot of research there, StrengthsFinder, etc. And all of that is, nothing's wrong with that. There's a lot of fruitful analysis that can come out of that. I think something that can be really exciting using a framework like the ColorPy.

is that games are designed to essentially systemize the way that people make decisions, right? And are actually tailored to individual expression and understanding. So every game has a ton of complexity that has to be managed. And games try to help players manage that complexity by packaging it into sets of more intuitive concepts, right? That allow you to not just like look at every decision and have to derive it, you know,

Asiomatically from you know a bunch of chits in front of you, but to give you kind of heuristics and approaches to say What is gonna be my path to navigate this complex situation, so I don't think it's accidental that a framework like the color pie designed for a game like magic can sort of be Transposed in some ways on to our lives because we're trying to do the same thing right we're trying to navigate a ton of complexity and

it into heuristics and usable models that we don't have to, you know, that we can respond in the moment to and deploy easily, right? And it's not the traditional pathway to coming up with sort of developmental and coaching models, but I think it's actually a really effective one.

And it was exciting to me to hear from you that different folks were increasingly thinking about this model in a coaching and personal development context. Because I actually think in some ways it's a lot easier to use. You certainly don't need to have a formal background in it. And it can be a little bit more fun too.

Tee (12:54)
Yeah, mean, some of the ones you mentioned, MBTI, Ocean, the big five, and even one of my favorites, which is Keegan's stages of cognitive development based off of Piaget. These are all cool and informative. It's fun to take the test. It's nice to know where you're at. But in some sense, they are less good on a more granular level, yielding potential ways to navigate your life.

Zac Hill (12:58)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

Tee (13:24)
at like a closer texture. And I think that's a thing that people have kind of complained to me about when they've investigated these things. And they're like, what's a, you know, a quote unquote, like empirically robust and rock solid, you know, system for this. And I was sort of like, well, the ones that are more empirically backed are least like least useful in a weird way. Because because some it is writing that like

Zac Hill (13:47)
All the way.

Tee (13:54)
refining of subjectivity for yourself at a closer grain that ends up being more useful for people, but you have to develop that for yourself in a sense. And some of the ways that they try to run studies on this in this abstracted objective way is going to strip away a ton of the context and expression that's important for you as a person and also for how things yield in context.

Zac Hill (14:05)
Exactly.

That's right.

Tee (14:24)
I love this because it feels like a thing that's really useful.

Zac Hill (14:27)
And just thinking about the mechanics of literally how that happens, right? And again, my background from this comes from having started, founded, ran, and grown a youth development organization that was very grounded in not only sort of the Marty Seligman positive psychology space, but also in the youth development psychology space that tried to help.

via coaching what we like to call dream directing, help kind of people take action upon their passion, their purpose, and form a sense of belonging with their community. So a lot of the time there is empirical research, as you well know, on a given model, but the research is used, for example, to help managers understand where there's like a...

a deficit in the kind of topography of their team in terms of what that team's orientation to solving problems is. That's a very different context than you as an individual trying to come up with an in the moment decision that you're gonna make in like five, 10, 15 seconds, right? What's cool about a model derived from a game like Magic is that in Magic, you are literally sitting playing a game, making decisions on a five, 10, 15 second basis.

using heuristics and using models that are tailored to help you to do that, right? And so obviously the big downside is there's not exactly an empirical corpus of research going back decades proving that this is useful for developmental outcomes A, B, and C, but it has the great advantage, I think, of being easy to deploy in the moment, intuitively accessible, and kind of viscerally appealing. And so it's exciting to explore

how that can prove helpful to the extent that it can. Because I think a ton of other games likely have tools like this that are just now starting to be explored.

Tee (16:26)
Yeah, and I would love to keep talking about how awesome it is. We should talk about the color pie and the things itself. But one quick thing on how awesome it is is I think it seems similar to something like the Enneagram, which is another sort of typing system. But the Enneagram, think, more than any of the other ones that I've heard people talk about it. And this is all very anecdotal firsthand, but also I find that to be

Zac Hill (16:33)
Yeah, let's do that. Yeah.

Mm -hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Tee (16:53)
over the course of many, many people, quite rich source of information. People saying, the Enneagram actually helps me conceive of how other people are fundamentally different than me. They have nine points or whatever, fundamental desires, fundamental fears, upon which your entire character is built and constructed around that. So you say to someone like, this person has a basic core fear. That's this. And then you're like, I don't have that.

Zac Hill (17:03)
Mmm. Mmm.

Tee (17:23)
Imagine building the rest of your character out to like defend against that and they're like, that's weird That's not at all what I would do, you know, because I'm not actually afraid of that thing. It's like well Yes, that's why you are in fact way different than so many other different kinds of people and and that that expanse is pretty vast in some cases and so, you know, there's that and then there's also

ways that it describes healthy degenerative and kind of neutral forms of each of those, which I also would love to talk about in the color pie as well, because I was wondering if a similar thing applies, but people saying, here are different character constructions that I can sense. Like, why is it that this character construction feels good to me? Like, this person has good vibes. I want to follow them.

Zac Hill (17:56)
Yeah.

Yes.

Tee (18:14)
I want to be persuaded by them in some sense. And why is it that a person who I would type is exactly the same kind feels bad to me and is ineffective and like I'm bouncing, they bounce off of other people, they cause issues. And that's because it's likely they're a similar type within the system. One is much healthier, embodying a much better thing, getting you on board because you want to be on board with them and so on. And the other person is trying to do something darker, more manipulative, whatever.

Zac Hill (18:30)
Right.

Tee (18:42)
even though they kind of like register as a very similar type of skill, for example.

Zac Hill (18:47)
Right. So a really great thing about a game that is competitive is that everybody wins and everybody loses. Right. And why that's important for an inventory like this. Over the course of many iterations, right. If you play a hundred games with somebody.

Tee (19:01)
Hmm. You mean over the course of many games,

Right, right.

Zac Hill (19:09)
even if you're much better than them, you're probably not gonna win 100 % of them, because there's some variance in the game and everything else. But why that matters is, to your point about this person's animated by a fear or a desire that's just very different from me, I think in life, a lot of the time, it's hard to empathize with that, and it's hard to understand how that can be adaptive, how that can be helpful, and how that can actually help them solve problems, even if it's very foreign.

In a game like Magic, if I'm playing, for example, a blue deck, which has a very different philosophy of winning than a red deck, I think in life, we can go through and know somebody who is quote unquote red, right? Let's say they're of a different religion than we are, or of a different political background than we are, or whatever it is. We can go through life knowing them for 40 years and just thinking all the time that that's like maladaptive, weird, dumb, stupid.

inaccessible or whatever. It's a very different feeling when you go up against somebody in a one -on -one match and their approach is very different from yours. In fact, it's often maybe something that you've never thought of and then they just beat your ass, right? Because that forces you to say, maybe there's a there there. Like, I definitely was missing something. I definitely failed to understand something.

Tee (20:25)
Yes.

Zac Hill (20:30)
And there's something that I can look for in that difference that reveals to me things not only about myself, but about the nature of the world, right? And I think that's a very fruitful avenue for exploration that's hard to access other ways. And that's one of the reasons that people call games like engines for empathy, right? Because you have to get into the mindset and the experience of the other player.

in order to understand what's going on. And I think that's a strength of models like this.

Tee (21:02)
Yeah, there's gotta be, I mean, maybe not the turn this discussion should go into, but modern political analogs where a politician will do a thing and they'll be like, you know, aghast by that, someone will be. And other people will think that that is a positive.

Zac Hill (21:09)
totally.

Tee (21:20)
instantiation of something and they like it and they want more of it or it didn't bother them at all, was fine. And it's just really interesting how that can be, especially if you have media outlets kind of like amplifying how bothered we should be by this thing and then just like a whole group of people being like, yeah, that's fine. It's interesting.

Zac Hill (21:21)
Right?

And like in games, oftentimes there is kind of a most effective approach, right? In magic, in every environment, there usually is...

Tee (21:46)
Yes.

Zac Hill (21:50)
a deck that winds up being better, strategy that winds up being more effective. But it's often contextually or non -deterministically effective, right? Even in the most warped environments, you have a deck that's winning 65, 70 % of the time, those are colossal numbers. And even they aren't undefeated, right? So it's not paradoxical at all to say, have strong values, I have strong beliefs, I have...

Tee (22:00)
Mm.

Zac Hill (22:18)
derived and I believe that I am correct about the most effective way to do things, that can be true. And yet there still can be a very wide distribution beyond that of viable approaches or approaches that have

upsides that maybe in net aren't worth the downsides, but they still have upsides and can be effective in the context that they're designed for, right? So I think it's highly analogous to the situation you described.

Tee (22:45)
Yeah.

Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. OK. So I think if we return to the basics of the color pi, and it's interesting. It's not called a color wheel. It's a color pi. Is there a reason why it's a pi and not a wheel, or is that just incidental terminology? Yeah. OK. All right.

Zac Hill (22:55)
Yes. Yes.

Or pie. Yeah, right.

Because pies are more delicious. I don't know. I don't know where it came from. I think the not to dive too deep into the metaphor. really quick to just explain what in the world we're talking about. There's five colors, right? White, blue, black, red, green, like we talked about. And each one of them is kind of animated by a desired outcome and a desired approach, right? So not to like listen, but like broadly speaking, white is about kind of collective.

Tee (23:22)
Five colors.

Zac Hill (23:36)
achievement and the good of the collective above the good of the individual and all the things that are derived from that. Blue is very intellectual, very analytical, very systemic and says like you empirically derive your way to the right way of doing things. Black is driven by selfishness and ambition, but also by determination, by sacrifice. In a weird way, if white's about duty, black is about almost like

self -actualization. In other words, none of the colors are good or bad. They just have very different approaches to things. Red is about, some people say passion, but every color can be passionate. It's about kind of in the moment awareness and responsiveness to what the body is telling you, responsiveness to where your inspiration is going at a given time. And green is about kind of...

essentially harmony in a natural set or destiny or alignment with the design of things, if that makes any sense. We can go into what each of those are. What's that? Acceptance is very important to green. Yes. Very, very, very much so. So I think one of the reasons that the pie metaphor, it's not like

Tee (24:47)
heard acceptance was a word mentioned a lot for acceptance was the thing mentioned a lot in terms of green. Yep.

Zac Hill (25:02)
one can imagine in a wheel construction where there's just kind of one space to occupy along each axis and then the wheel kind of turns and in the Pi metaphor that there's tons of dimensions and specificities.

within the kind of area that each of the colors occupies. In other words, a red approach can manifest in a ton of different ways. And there's also gradations between the colors. And the game, this quite literally expresses itself as multicolored spells and effects, but also as you get closer to one approach, there's allied colors and enemy colors for a variety of different reasons.

Tee (25:32)
Right.

I was going ask about that, just to kind of drive home the intuitions of people for each of the colors. Maybe we could talk about allied and rival colors, potentially.

Zac Hill (25:48)
That's right.

Yeah, totally. basically, there's not a concise, easy way to explain what all that alliances and oppositions are without listing them. But the color order is white, blue, black, red, green. And every color's allies are the colors next to it. And every color's enemies are the colors not next to it in that order. This is where a nice, helpful graphic would make that more digestible.

Tee (26:04)
Sure,

Yes, think maybe in the thumbnail of this episode I'll have a graphic or something. If that's allowed.

Zac Hill (26:25)
That's exactly right. But the operative thing to understand is the allied colors have complementary approaches and complementary goals. So white, for example, is allied with blue and with green. So one can understand how acceptance, destiny, harmony with the natural order, integrate with

Tee (26:48)
in the case of green.

Zac Hill (26:50)
collective ambition, institutionalism, the subsuming of the individual for the common good of white, right? That's the white -green connection, right? Conversely, one can intuit how an enemy connection between white and black, the difference between kind of collective good and individual good, the need to put the whole above the self versus the need to the self above the whole, the sort of long -termism

Tee (26:58)
That's why, yep.

huh.

Zac Hill (27:20)
of white, know, the pursuit of transcendent values versus, you know, the in the moment exploitation of opportunism in black. So as you sort of spell out what each of the animating values of the colors are, you start to understand how the adjacent ones are more directionally aligned and the opposing ones are naturally directionally opposed. Now that being said,

there's levels to it. You know, so each opposing color also has complementary dimensions, but the way those arrived are usually where the opposing forces find kind of a triangulatory third aim that is a second order consequence of their sort of natural orientation, I guess.

Tee (27:54)
Yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay.

Zac Hill (28:19)
And in a way that's sort of like tarot, it's less about finding kind the correct answer for what each of those vertices are and more using the lens to talk through a given conflict or a given approach.

in a way that itself sort of reveals the texture usually of what is by default in alignment versus where some of the points of tension are.

Tee (28:50)
Okay, okay. Do you have an example maybe for the the third rail you were talking about or the you said it's layered and then then they're not necessarily yeah

Zac Hill (28:59)
Yeah, absolutely. So a really common conflict is between blue and green.

Right? Blue is about essentially analytics and about crucially a sort of separation from the natural order and it's about the ability to kind of shape your fate through the application of thought, the application of discipline, the application of all these things. It's a very liberal ideology, right? In the classical sense. You are you liberated from what has come before, figuring out what matters to

you in pursuing it, right? Green is like, not only rejects that, but just thinks that that's a dumb question. Like you're not going to be disintegrated from the roots of what have connected you to the entire system of the world, right? And by attempting to disentangle yourself, you're opting out of the natural order that is your place, right? That is where you fit. That is where you are part of an organism.

rather than an atomized, sort of rejected organ from the corpus of that which you belong, right? So there's a lot of natural tension there. But there's this group on one of the worlds called Ravnica, it's this big city world kind of styled in the Slavic.

Czech -ish skin, but they're called the Simich, and they're basically biomancers, and they're the big pharma of the magic universe.

And their whole thing is, yeah, to understand what your place in the broader organism is, you have to actually learn about that. You have to actually understand it. You have to have to plot it, diagram it, so you're not just going blind, right? And so the way that plays out in the game is that they're like biohackers, right? They're leveraging ecosystem design to accelerate evolution in a particular way. So that's just an instantiation of

how these many different conflicts can come about. But the point is there what happens when you say, okay, if blue and green occupy different starting positions in the race, where is the overlap of the Venn diagram that they both agree is important to getting right, right? And I think that that is a model for.

Tee (31:11)
Okay.

Mm

Zac Hill (31:32)
all kinds of stuff in coaching and personal development. Like if you're in a relationship where you know where your partner's default worldview is X, yours is Y, as many of us have probably experienced whether we want to or not, going and saying I'm right and you're wrong is not always gonna get you to where you wanna be versus saying, okay, given this is an orientation A, given this is an orientation B, what do we both agree is a really important pursuit that

can align where we're coming from and that we both believe is worth time and energy to focus on.

Tee (32:09)
So if I'm getting this right, it sounded a bit like in some sense the infusion of what could be an opposing color could actually lead to different expression or like heightened expression within the color that you care about. Right, okay, so like let's say you're green, you're using some blue.

Zac Hill (32:27)
Yes, very much.

Tee (32:32)
to understand and taxonomize and get a sense of where you are within the thing. Potentially biohack, I guess, is like one way you could take this. But there's a sense in which you need to pull from the other colors even if you do favor one and more contexts in order to have the expression of that color within yourself that you endorse or want. Is that roughly correct? OK.

Zac Hill (32:39)
Right, right, right.

That's right. And game mechanically, every color very intentionally can and can't do certain things. And that's by design. A, it makes for interesting gameplay. So if one strategy is dominant, you can't keep doing that because that color can't deal with it. As a really basic example, there's a card type called enchantments. Their magical, whatever, it doesn't.

Tee (33:04)
Mm

Zac Hill (33:22)
matter, but red can blow up artifacts but can't blow up enchantments. There's no effect in all of red, tens of thousands of cars, that can straight up kill an enchantment, right? It's just a vulnerability. And so that means that if red is really good in a given environment, one way that you know...

Tee (33:35)
Hmm.

Zac Hill (33:44)
20 years ago, 30 years ago, and now that you'll be able to get some edge against red is trying to attack it through some enchantments, right? So the reason that I, and it doesn't matter specifically what that means, the reason that I say that in response to your question is because every color has vulnerabilities.

Tee (33:52)
Hmm.

Zac Hill (34:06)
built into the way the color works, there's always a trade -off between the versatility that comes with branching out into other colors versus the stability and monomania and focus.

that comes with staying in your lane and doubling down on it, right? So you're always presented with a choice of, I do the one thing that I'm all about more effectively, more efficiently, with more obsessive dedication, or do I round myself out with connections to these other parts of the world?

Tee (34:27)
Right, right.

I love that. I love that in particularly because that's a perennial question facing a lot of people that I work with. Yeah, yeah. In terms of what it is that got them there, usually it has been doubling down and really pressing a certain set of buttons to get where they are, finding that they are now experiencing or now noticing so much more maybe because they're not as young as they used to be. Usually this will happen in your late 20s or something, the trade -offs associated with it, like...

Zac Hill (34:53)
totally. Yeah.

Yeah

Tee (35:18)
youth can do a lot to mask a lot of the inefficiency and energetic inefficiencies you may have or leakage from a system or like you can sort of just have relationships blow up and then you just go to another friend group and you're like okay you could like really not learn anything many times but once you become yeah once you hit a certain age and I wonder if if something like maturation and age is also

Zac Hill (35:21)
massively.

Right. Right.

Tee (35:45)
manifested within with an MTG. Once you hit this this older age, you start to see the the ways that that strategy is is not working for you as you might have thought and should I invest into other things if I invest into other things that takes away my ability to kind of like blitzkrieg this one color and strategy. yeah, so I think that's like a really anyone who's sort of trying to get a sense making grip.

on what's going on if they're finding that their life is transitioning, whether it's going well or not. It seems like that set of questions is going to be interesting for them to look at.

Zac Hill (36:24)
I think in some ways that's the traditional intelligence versus wisdom.

trade off, right? But one of the things about getting older is that you just have more priors. So what I find a lot is dealing with a founder who's maybe on their second, third initiative or whatever it is, they confront a challenge and immediately when we confront challenges, we don't want to be where we're weakest, we often want to be where we're strongest. So we double down on our most comfortable habits or the habits that worked previously. And it's especially dangerous when we don't understand that those habits are precisely

Tee (36:32)
Mm.

Zac Hill (37:01)
what's putting us in a bind, right? I think it's harder to do that when you're young because you have fewer priors, but that also means that it's harder to be aware of the temperature of the water that you're swimming in.

I think the connection with Magic in this case is maybe a bit more tenuous. But one of the things that has been true massively as the game's evolved is it actually is much easier to play multiple colors and to access multiple colors now than it was when the game first came out. Mechanically, in order to be able to play multiple colors, you were talking earlier about lands, lands let you cast your spells, you need lands that add

Tee (37:34)
Okay, interesting.

Zac Hill (37:45)
More than one color right in the very first set there was only one cycle of lands that let you tap into multiple colors Right so when the game was younger it was much better generally speaking to just kind of double and triple down not even on One color but on things card artifacts that are colorless That don't require any color at all and this might sound like youth, you know, there's not a lot of commitment You're not really picking a

you're kind of doing the most accessible thing, right? As the game evolved, there were more more more more more lands that allowed you to access other colors. And so now, I mean, there's hundreds of cycles, but the difference is each one of those lands has a slightly different trade off.

Right, so the very first set of dual lands they were called, they just made two colors of mana. So there was no downside, but there weren't a lot of them. Now there's tons of them, but each one is a slightly different trade off. And to the point of your metaphor, I think a lot of that is kind of like getting older and getting more wise. I think we have a wider aperture of the world in a lot of ways, but we're also more apprised of the different trade offs.

that are involved in trying to pick a direction, right? And trying to pick a lane. And I don't think when you're playing Magic, you're necessarily like walking through that metaphor as you decide which lands to tap. But at the same time, I think the more you're kind of swimming in that water, the more you internalize consciously or unconsciously what circumstances are gonna be worth making what trade -offs or not.

Right? Which, at least to me, feels like the course of getting older in life.

Tee (39:41)
Yeah, yeah. I've got potentially a fun one for you. So I'm going to list off a few of these combined lands. I'm wondering if you could tell me what would be the downsides of doubling down.

Zac Hill (39:46)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, please.

Tee (39:55)
with those with mana from those lands if you'd say it that way versus doing doing something else potentially and you know hopefully this isn't too decontextualized as to be too tough to answer but we have rocky desert coast and islands red blue you can correct me if i'm wrong city slums and civilized graveyards black white tropical jungle coast and islands blue green deserts and burnt plains white red

Zac Hill (39:56)
Yeah. Yep. Sure.

Hit me, hit me, let's do it.

Yep.

Tee (40:25)
corrupted or decaying forests, green, black. And if any one of those struck your fancy in terms of which you'd like to answer this question with, you can pick one and we'll see how it goes.

Zac Hill (40:37)
So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the bummer of the construction is that almost all of the dual lands that are printed come in cycles. So basically all the red -white lands are exactly like all of the blue -green lands, just for color balance reasons. I mean, the thrust of your question is very answerable.

Tee (40:54)
Okay.

Zac Hill (41:04)
Right? So I'll give you an example. So a lot of the time, red and white are more aggressive strategies. They want to get on the board earlier. They want to hit you hard and fast.

White because it's about the collective and the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, white usually is about smaller creatures that tend to have synergies that work together and combine together rather than, you know, big, larger individual effects, right? So that leads to wanting to get a bunch of little guys on the ground shorter. Red is often about responding to what you're doing in the moment, like not planning and galaxy braining for the next 15 years.

but like getting what you want now. And a lot of the time that means, again, getting on the board earlier, doing stuff faster, prioritizing this turn, right? Take that in contrast with...

something like blue -white, where the white in this case is not like the getting on the ground early, whatever. It's more like building a lasting institution, right? Something that's gonna last 100 years, right? So you're thinking about the edifice of that and what it's gonna take to do that. The blue part is the design part, the planning part, whatever. So take those two contrast, right? Why that matters is you'll have the same land design in blue -white and white.

but the version of the effect is usually often gonna be better in blue -white, of one effect is gonna be better in blue -white, and one effect's gonna be in white -red. So there's some lands that let you play them now in exchange for taking damage, or in exchange for sacrificing them. So I play it, I get both my colors, and it deals me two damage, right? But I get it now, right? That's gonna be really good in the red -white deck.

Whereas in the blue -white deck, the last thing you want to be doing is taking damage. That damage early. You're playing into your opponent's strategy. And you don't need the mana early, because you're not focused on right now. Whereas there's other lands that, for example, come into play what's called tapped. You can't use them right away. But they gain you life, or they let you manipulate your library.

Tee (43:07)
taking damage early.

Zac Hill (43:30)
The white -red deck has no use for that because deciding what card I draw next turn is way less important than getting something on the board now. Whereas in the blue -white deck, that's going to set you up for the long game significantly more effectively, right? So the same land essentially exists in blue -white and in red -white, but it's much better and more effective

Tee (43:41)
Mmm.

Zac Hill (43:57)
in one of those strategies, right? Because each one of them is solving for a different use case. And like, one of the ways that advanced players get edge is understanding...

these nuances, right? Because the novice player is gonna just say, I'm gonna play whatever lands I need to cast my spells, and we'll see whether I can cast them or not. And the more sophisticated players are really highly optimizing along the axis of, okay, these are specifically the lands that are gonna give me what I need the greatest percentage of the time possible, right?

Tee (44:34)
Yeah, it sounds like edge is understanding those nuances, one. And two, it sounds like understanding the arc of how these things will likely play out is also a source of edge. I also think this holds in the coaching world and like people developing themselves personally and strategizing about it and sort of being like over the arc, like how might I evolve?

Zac Hill (44:45)
Yes.

Totally.

Yeah.

Tee (45:02)
and how do I want to adjust my strategy in order to anticipate how I might evolve.

Zac Hill (45:08)
I'm sure you see this in coaching all the time where it's like, like, the successful outcome and let's work back from there to see how we're gonna get in. What habits do we need to change now or what habits do we need to double down on that are gonna get us to the destination we want? A Hall of Fame Magic player, a very good friend of mine, often says that the key to getting really good at Magic is being able to visualize your win state and avoid all of the things that are gonna

you there starting from turn one so the game might not end 10 -15 turns from now but you've got to start thinking from this turn how you're going to create the situation that results in your ability to win especially in a given matchup in a given context because if all you're focused on is the turn right in front of you you're not going to be able to to make those long -term decisions so I actually think that's very similar to coaching right

because so often what's loudest to us are metaphorically the cards that are currently in our hand, right? And what our opponent is currently doing right now. But if all we're doing is solving for that problem, we are literally ignoring the longer game, right? And just like in coaching in Magic,

There's hidden information, right? I don't know what's in my opponent's hand. I don't know what's in my opponent's deck. I don't know what the order of my own cards are. But I can set myself up to deal with that uncertainty in better or worse ways, right?

Tee (46:48)
Yeah, there's a really interesting element of self -trust here, sounds like, as well. Hmm. Too, too... Hmm.

Zac Hill (46:51)
Totally. And in fact, a really easy way to lose is to lack self -trust and not actually, like an idiom in the game is like a bad plan is much better than no plan, right? Because at least a bad plan, you're trying to do something. Whereas no plan, you're just kind of flailing, right? And so sometimes, like if you pick a lane, drive in it, you can always pick another lane later.

Tee (47:07)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Zac Hill (47:20)
Whereas if you're just swerving mindlessly, you're much more likely to get in a wreck.

Tee (47:27)
And I imagine the meta of becoming a better player over the course of many games is picking a lane, picking a dumb strategy or bad strategy, learning that it is in fact bad and why, and then next game adjusting for that potentially instead of just flailing and losing, not really learning anything from, except like I shouldn't flail. I guess that would be like step zero potentially.

Zac Hill (47:48)
Yeah. It's funny you mentioned that I'm literally doing that right now for a format my team and I are playing. There's this is a boring detail, but there's a there's a format called timeless on MTG arena and I've never played it before and I have no idea what's good. And but what we're doing is just designing stuff we think is good, whether it is or not, and just like seeing where we lose.

because the problem with doing what the traditional approach is, which is just look at what other people are playing, play those decks, see what you like, is that you have no idea whether what other people are doing is good or not. At the same time, if you're inventing things from whole cloth in your head, the most likely result is that they're gonna just be terrible.

But the key is if you're afraid of it being terrible, you're just never gonna learn anything. right before I got on with you, I was in a chat just spamming bad ideas to my teammate because the key is not whether they're good or bad. The key is something that seems good. How are we losing? What are we running into that's causing that to not be effective? And then that's how you can understand where the poles of a format are, where the factors

that govern its nature more than anything else are. And there's just no way to learn that other than lean into a strategy, double down on it, know that that's gonna be limited, and make sure you're paying attention when you invariably run into a wall so that you learn the right lesson for the second go -around.

Tee (49:24)
Yeah, it's so interesting. think as it could relate to coaching and trying things, it's so many people have unexplicated strategies. They go through life and they feel friction or pain. And then it's sort of like a muted.

Zac Hill (49:35)
Yes.

Mmm.

Tee (49:43)
you're like muted and stifled and you sort of like feel the pain you deal, you know, probably reflexively to like what it is, maybe you blame others for how it feels and so on and so forth. And you kind of you kind of bounce around a lot of what the coaching and therapy can do is you explicate what the unconscious mostly unconscious semi conscious strategies are. So at least you get it on the board. You then can talk a bit about how

Zac Hill (49:53)
Totally.

Tee (50:10)
you know, sensible it seems or whether you endorse that or whether you want to actually try it, then try it as you're saying in a lot of what you're doing in that arena and then getting feedback on it and then trying again, I think that's like the beginning of that whole process.

Zac Hill (50:24)
I think that's exactly right. And I think another parallel with coaching is that you're talking about trying things. It's also really important to notice, to learn the circumstances where you're trying things. So like in magic, I really want to try my bad ideas, not like at the tournament for $100 ,000, right?

Tee (50:36)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So because I had a fundraising background a lot of times the several times this came up very recently, but it will be try out fundraising or try getting investors with, you know, classes of like steadily increasing stakes, right?

Zac Hill (51:03)
Yes. Exactly.

Tee (51:05)
And you're sort of like, OK, well, what would happen if this just completely exploded? Don't do your first time B at Sequoia or something when you haven't really talked about your project. You haven't really explained very much. And I like that, just sort of like calibrating for stakes, having an understanding also, as you've done so many of those reps.

Zac Hill (51:13)
Yeah

Tee (51:28)
whether you're able to make the kind of like micro decisions, the intuitive decisions in the moment to run a strategy, to tweak a strategy slightly, and so on and so forth as in one.

Zac Hill (51:38)
And to even be able to design your playtesting environment, right? Like lot of the time it's not clear how you might even prototype, right? So like a mentee of mine, very talented writer, wants to kind of double down into that full time. But it's like, you know, I was like, do you journal? She's like, no. It's like.

Tee (51:42)
Right.

That's a good point. Yeah.

Zac Hill (52:01)
That's a really easy way to playtest non -fiction writing, right? In a way that doesn't require a giant career pivot, right? And that's not to say don't career pivot. It's to say, do your playtesting to know how this is going to go.

Tee (52:05)
For sure. For sure. Absolutely.

Zac Hill (52:17)
And similarly, if you're going for a big raise, a lot of the time there's ways of practicing the skills involved and kind of that coalition building and that strategy that are not necessarily like have my startup hang, live and die by whether or not I'm gonna get this founder fund check or not, right? And a lot of the time we don't.

Tee (52:39)
Yeah, yeah.

Zac Hill (52:41)
it's not obvious to us how to do that because we haven't asked the question of how do I play test metaphorically before my metaphorical tournament, right? And I think that's often a useful question.

Tee (52:52)
Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. And to be very clear for anyone listening, I'm very much team Moonlight. What do you want to do before you quit what you're doing so that you can play test it and see whether you're actually good. And this applies to people who want to be like freelance coach practitioners who often to listen to this. They're like, well, would it wouldn't it be better to just like throw everything at this? And I'm like, what indicators do you have that this could work?

Zac Hill (53:01)
Yes.

Totally.

Tee (53:22)
Because we need to examine each of those and stack them together and in turn and decide whether a transition makes sense. That's usually the way I like to approach it or the way I've seen it be successful for people, not like I'm gonna quit and just try it. Yeah.

Zac Hill (53:38)
And I think a lot of the time, like A, it allows us to kind of dip our toe into the pool.

But B, I think sometimes there's almost the opposite effect, which is like in game design, say restrictions breed creativity. Like also a lot of the time, if we know that we can only afford 10 hours a week for our side thing, we're gonna hustle a lot harder and be a lot more entrepreneurial on that than if it's like, okay, this is my, know, I've got 50 hours a week to do this. I just think that that leads to conventionality very easily. I mean, and to use an example, you were mentioning earlier, I'm working on this

Tee (53:52)
yeah.

Zac Hill (54:14)
I've never done comics before. And I knew that I'd have one day a week to write, right? So I basically had to give myself a crash course on the discipline, enroll everybody I've ever met who's produced, like Brian David Marshall, a good friend of mine, has been in comics for 30 years. And I was talking him about, how do you milk...

every one of these 10 hours, right? And it was hugely illuminating. know, it's basically like, here's how to get your story treatment, here's how to brief artist, here's how to get sketches, delegate as much of the work as possible, QI it on intervals that are super manageable. You know, and all of that, if I were just doing it as my day job, I would be so much more precious about everything.

Tee (54:42)
Wow, yeah, that's a great question.

Mm.

Zac Hill (55:03)
Right? And paradoxically, it would move so much slower because I would just be wanting to massage every dimension of every variable rather than focus on being able to see how we're moving forward, right? And so I think for, like you're talking about with coaches, happens a lot of the time with artists, it happens a lot of the time with entrepreneurs, having to put it in a

Tee (55:29)
Sure.

Zac Hill (55:32)
box and assign yourself constraints for how that's going to work, I think often allows us to be just way more efficient than we would be otherwise.

Tee (55:45)
Well, and there's the layered pressure of security. So usually when I say that, mean financial, but it can also be people will have expectations that because I quit this thing, it should be going a certain way. And so you can get like weird emotional tangles, as you say, ironically from having way more of an expanse to work with.

Zac Hill (55:49)
Holy

obviously.

Right. Right.

Tee (56:07)
Because there's pressures like, I should be doing so much more. It's full time. I should be making this much. Or I should have already decided what my coaching technique or set of techniques will be. There's just a lot of times, and I'm not saying this would happen with everybody, some people are.

Zac Hill (56:11)
Yep.

Tee (56:22)
quite good at calibrating and pacing themselves with a freeform space, but that's very rare. And those are usually people who have worked through emotional tangles in other walks of life in order to be so composed in the freeform space, which it sounds like it's similar to your position. But yeah, it just seemed like you probably have, you have these other things going on, as you mentioned earlier in the recording. And so you have this one day a week, but it's not like...

Zac Hill (56:27)
Right.

Tee (56:51)
You can't eat, you're burning through your savings, your whatever, because you're taking this on full time now or something.

Zac Hill (57:00)
Absolutely. And that also to your point allows you to kind of calibrate what success is, right? You know, if you're creating a coaching practice that, you know, it's not just that like, and I'll use dream directing and coaching because we've done that before. But like, if you're saying, I need to be earning 200 grand a year coaching, it's not just that that's going to affect how much work you're doing and how much anxiety you have over that work. It's also going to encourage

Tee (57:05)
Yeah.

Zac Hill (57:30)
like boomer bust swings

that may or may not be what your practice wants in the first place, right? That's gonna preclude you from diving deep with two to four clients, developing a rapport and a relationship and understanding not only where you're adding the most value, but what kind of person you work best with that then is often a foundation that you can lay for a more expansive practice, right? But if you've gotta be from the jump,

Tee (57:54)
Yeah, yes.

Yes.

Zac Hill (58:03)
you know, pulling in haul, you're going to be incentivized to look for breadth rather than depth. And ironically, that might make you worse in the long term for having the foundation upon which to build something that can achieve the scale that you want, right? I think that is very blue -white.

Tee (58:19)
sounds very blue -white if I may.

-huh, -huh. Well, I'm curious about, so you mentioned doing coaching with the Future Project and you've obviously mentor some entrepreneurs or people that you work with at the Office for American Possibilities. I've never, you hadn't said in our discussions before this that you do MTG coaching or something, but like, I'm curious if it's played into your work with other people, whether you've actually brought it up explicitly, anything like that.

Zac Hill (58:32)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very much so. it plays out, I think, in a few ways. The first is, I think game design, the process of it, leads you to some very, I think, fruitful creative habits. Because you're having to do creative work kind of in a, not only a corporate context, but in like a collective context. So making a game like many other disciplines, but certainly unlike...

Tee (59:07)
Hmm.

Zac Hill (59:18)
what I was familiar with in the literary fiction world, for example, a given magic set that we worked on was probably touched by 350 people, maybe more than that. So much of what you're doing as a creative is actually facilitating contributions from other people, synthesizing that and guiding it to a place where they're producing the information that you as a designer need to make final calls.

And I'll give you a very direct example of how that plays out in our current work.

Susan Rice from the White House was spearheading a project called Dignity .Us in the hate -fueled violence space and asked us to kind of do a design sprint to figure out, where is there some leverage that we can get to prevent what at the time was a very disturbing uptick in instances not just of anti -Semitism, of racist violence direct against Black folks and Asian people, but...

also attacks on people for their political beliefs. For example, the shooting of Steve Scalise. And so, there was so much within that field to mine, right? Everything from insights into gang violence prevention to public health methodologies for deterrence.

And so what we ended up doing is basically we had like a core team of five people. We had like an expansive team, five more folks than that. And we then called and got on the phone like 450 -ish experts, communities affected by...

hate -filled violence, individuals affected by hate -filled violence, practitioners, all kinds of different people. And the entire process was basically mining all that information and percolating it up into a few different things. The first was a diagnosis of the actual problem, which we shorthanded as normative extremism. Then a set of interventions that had been attacking different dimensions of that problem. And then a creative process to kind of integrate those

interventions into actionable project and product launches. So I say all of that, and we ended up putting together a slate of about 25 ideas that we're really excited about and this, that, and the other thing. But I say all of that to say, I don't think that it would be intuitive to think about that process as a game design exercise, but the methodology of what you're trying to do is elicit the information that lets you make

Tee (1:01:46)
Hmm.

Zac Hill (1:02:05)
the creative design decisions that ultimately influence the shape of the system in the direction you want it to go is like almost exactly a game design process, right?

Tee (1:02:20)
Hmm.

Zac Hill (1:02:21)
And that was not intuitive to me when I started doing this kind of work. But actually, like I was involved in policy long before I was involved in game design, right? So the similarities, you who knows? For all I know, I could have taken a policy approach to learning how to design games, right? I don't know which direction the causality flows.

Tee (1:02:39)
Hehe.

Zac Hill (1:02:45)
But they're much more similar processes than I would have ever envisaged.

Tee (1:02:51)
Hmm. Yeah, I think there's a really good lesson there also in terms of bringing people early, bringing people in early while you're trying to, yeah, even, even, I mean, you said normative, was it normative extremism? Okay. Was it that you already had that problem defined or was it that you spoke to? Yeah, okay. That makes sense. So, so in some sense, speaking to all those people can help you define what's even going on. Right.

Zac Hill (1:03:00)
massively.

Normative extremism. Yes indeed.

Not at all. So for example, like the fundamental

Exactly. Like the fundamental thing, and this is actually super related to like solving a Magic the Gathering metagame, right? So the fundamental thing that you have to explain when you're trying to figure this challenge out is like all kinds of different things have skyrocketed in the last like seven or eight years. This is all true as of 2021, 2022. The direction's changed a little bit now, but as of 2022, you have massive increases in overt hate crimes

Tee (1:03:21)
Okay, that's cool.

Zac Hill (1:03:50)
mass shootings, such as school shootings, essentially organized, identitarian violence. And that plays out in a bunch of ways. Gang violence is an example of that. And political extremist attacks, right? So those four things are not the same things.

They're not perpetrated by the same individuals, although they're often perpetrated by the same profiles of people. They don't occur in the same contexts. They often are literally different buckets of people who are involved in these things. Anti -Semitism is very different than anti -Asian violence, for example.

But all of those things are being driven and are accelerating at roughly the same proportion over the same period of time, right? So the operative question is like, why, right? And a superficial, an accurate, but not robust answer.

is, well, like social media leads to stronger identitarian signifiers, which leads to like a more perfect, so that's not false, but it also provokes the question, why, right? What is going on in social media to determine that, right? Similarly, like, shooters post manifestos on 4chan. That's also true, but the question is, why, right? So you've got to get at

Tee (1:05:17)
Mm -hmm.

Zac Hill (1:05:23)
the underlying cause that is percolating up through each of those branches to lead to the phenomenon that you're describing, right? And I say all of that to say very much in a game environment, you may have five different decks, all of which are killing you by attacking with creatures on the fourth turn.

And like, an obvious question is like, okay, this white deck does this, this green deck does this, they're all killing you. But like, the root answer to why that's happening is there might not be a way of killing a bunch of creatures for under three mana, let's say. And so no matter what you do, the aggressive strategies are gonna be disproportionately dominant until you solve that problem. And then as a game designer, that tells you, okay, I need

to print a way of killing a bunch of creatures for three mana to stabilize that environment, right? So I think the discipline is very conducive to like, not just root cause analysis, but understanding what, I guess, to use really wonky language, what perturbations of the system are caused by root causes that are like out of alignment.

and being able to visualize all that in a way that makes sense. So I've never thought about any of that before, by the way, so I really appreciate the opportunity to reflect on it. But all of which is to say it's a much more similar principle than it is. Yeah.

Tee (1:06:52)
Mm -hmm.

before.

before you just said this now? wow, okay, okay. That's great, that's great. Love to hear that.

Zac Hill (1:07:07)
Way to provoke insights,

Tee (1:07:09)
Yeah, absolutely. We're 15 minutes away from the hour. I want to check in and see how you're doing. Is there any... I mean, we can edit this out. Are there any things that you really wanted to talk about that I should definitely steer the conversation toward? Anything like that. You're jamming. You're good.

Zac Hill (1:07:25)
No, no, no, I'm, I'm jamming. Whatever you think is going to produce some good content. I really appreciate the opportunity to think about all this stuff.

Tee (1:07:33)
I'm enjoying listening to you quite a bit. It's been quite a ride. cool. Okay, well I'll just fire away then.

Zac Hill (1:07:39)
Sick. Yeah. Let's keep ripping.

Tee (1:07:43)
I was going to drill it down a bit and say, so you mentioned a very process oriented answer to bringing your gaming background or well, it's unclear what the direction of causality was, But like gaming background to policy work or policy work to gaming and so on and so forth. Maybe they bled into each other, but also for the people listening who are curious more about color pie things, bringing like the lenses of the color pie to some of your mentorship or coaching.

Zac Hill (1:07:46)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Tee (1:08:14)
Anything, any examples like that you could point to?

Zac Hill (1:08:16)
Massively. So the first thing is like just talking about process. I'm actually working on an article for a social innovation review called toward a creative paradigm for social value, which is a ridiculous title, but it's a very article esque title. But it's because I think a big thing missing in the space is actually a creative autorial paradigm. I think that we have inherited like a lot of consulting background, a lot of, I'm going to say a corporate background, but I don't

Tee (1:08:31)
Yes it is.

Zac Hill (1:08:46)
mean that in a pejorative way. mean literally like an institutional entity management paradigm.

that has a lot of upsides, but has a lot of implicit assumptions, right? Whereas a creative paradigm that one would use to make games, to make movies, to make films, right? Also has a lot of upsides and a lot of downsides, but is a mechanism of understanding and expressing true things whose methodology is very different. So the reason that I say all of that is that I think that often there's, it's easy to,

to construct kind of a process -oriented approach to a vibes -oriented, creative, or artistic approach. And I actually think that's exactly wrong. I think that all creative activities involve lots of implicit or explicit processes.

And I think that knowing not only what those are, but how to manage them effectively or poorly will cause almost everybody to be a much more effective creative, right? Even if what you're doing is sitting in a room and typing up a manuscript, the process via which you and your editor iterate on that and how you incorporate that feedback and what you do, you know, not the process of like, do you wake up at 9 a and eat a cookie and drink coffee, but the process of like, how do you cascade edits at the right level of resolution to be able to act

upon is just endemic to building anything. And that's something I could talk about for hours. And so I think that's important because when I talk about process, the nature of all these processes that I've talked about is to fundamentally unlock and unleash the muscle memory of your intuitive creative insight. So that's operative to answering your question because talking to people about

Tee (1:10:25)
Mm.

Hmm.

Zac Hill (1:10:50)
using the color pie in a developmental way.

I think the color pie activates that process but in reverse. Right? So having the shorthand of saying like, that's a really green way of approaching the challenge, have you actually tried a really black way of approaching the challenge? Right? which then in turn can make someone say like, okay am I capitalizing on the opportunities in front of me? Am I actually prioritizing what I want and what I need and leaning into what I know I'm gonna be motivated by?

Do I know why I'm inheriting a lot of the kind of cultural or background driven assumptions that are endemic to my framing of the problem, right? So in other words, just as the rant that I went on showcases how process can unlock creativity, I think the color pie can sometimes show how a creative lens can unpack and unlock a number of different process level strategies, a lot of different framework

level strategies by being able to have something in your back pocket that lets you check in on some top line things, right? if you're hearing something I am, many years ago, I was more involved in kind of like the EA or EA adjacent community than I am now, but a great group of people, dope.

Tee (1:12:01)
Hmm.

Zac Hill (1:12:15)
really blue community, right? Really blue approach to problem solving, right? Very effective, often, approach to problem solving. But like, it's very, very much a space that, and secondarily, a white institutional approach, very much a space that can deal with some infusions of like red, right? Like very much a space that can benefit from that, right? Not because...

Tee (1:12:17)
Yes.

Zac Hill (1:12:44)
intuitive thinking, responsive thinking, passion -driven thinking.

is opposed to analytic thinking. But because you get a different kind of analytic thinking when you're in the arena, right? When you are embodied, when you are in the moment, right? That can cause you to precipitate insights about a challenge. There's often a construction that, okay, someone's telling you a story about, and I'll use the hate -filled violence example again, how their husband was killed by a white supremacist.

Tee (1:13:03)
Hmm.

Zac Hill (1:13:19)
And it's like mega tempting to say, okay, but that doesn't factor into my analysis because that's anecdotal evidence and anecdotes are not data. where that errs is that it's not just anecdotes. There's actual presence of high texture information that it's analogous to what focus groups can tell you about political polling.

You're if you're not parsing it for the raw materials of inductive and extrapolatory

explanation creation, you're missing out on a kind of data that is extremely operative to your problem. And I don't mean that in a... I do mean it in that like lived experience matters but I don't just mean that in kind of a hand wavy way. Like getting very epistemological about it. Like the Karl Popper David Deutsch model of how to understand truth is that all truth involves like the conjecture to arrive at a creative explanation, right? And so

what you're always looking for when you're understanding a world is not some sort of inductive or deductive pattern because that's not the way that knowledge creation works. You're looking for fertilizer that will lead to a more exact, more fruitful explanation that you can then falsify, right? Which very much can come from

a quote unquote analytical data point or not an anecdotal data point. Right. And so that's a great example of how like, instead of saying all that and having to derive it, someone can just say to someone else, like, I think you need a little bit more read in your approach. And like they can get there instantly. Right. And that's a really useful dimension of this mode of analysis, I think.

Tee (1:14:53)
Several streams of data. Yeah.

Mm. Mm.

Interesting, interesting. Okay. Is there, there, when you speak with people and you help them along their journeys, and I'm sure you help people with different journeys, and obviously the rapport between you two is idiosyncratic and so on, but do you have a color or set of colors that you, that you're more at home with? You kind of lean into more and that...

Zac Hill (1:15:34)
Of course.

Yeah.

Tee (1:15:45)
I guess there's an interesting question of like your personal, the way that you live and what you're steeped in and how you pursue your life. And then there's a question of like what colors you can inhabit temporarily as a person helping someone else. Which I think it could be the same, but I think likely going to be different and I'm curious if those are the same for you and if they're different and what they are.

Zac Hill (1:15:59)
Yeah.

So I think something that I learned a lot about myself is that I, the colors that I embody I think are very adaptive to the circumstances that I'm in and I think probably most people are that way. But very specifically I find myself.

Adopting, like the colors I adopt sort of fill in the bricks of the mortars of the environment that I'm in. like when I was at Magic R &D, I identified as very black red, right? It was in a very like blue white space, right? I think now at OAP, like my business partner, Andrew and I have been working together for 12 years. He's very, very, very red green.

Tee (1:16:38)
How would you explain that?

Zac Hill (1:16:54)
with a little bit of blue in there. What's that?

Tee (1:16:54)
So what are some hallmark words that you would associate with what you were saying in terms of those color pairings for yourself in the past and maybe now?

Zac Hill (1:17:03)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So red, black, like impulsive, creative, passionate, responsive, ambitious, opportunistic, cunning.

A lot of those things talking about Andrew being red -green Very kind of like cosmic very kind of destiny oriented very kind of animated by what gets him excited I'm extraordinarily powerful thinker

extraordinarily powerful thinker, but not in a axiomatically derive the nine step outcomes sort of way, but more like John Bridgeland, one of my co -founders, also very much like this. Like, in the moment makes a million things happen. All of those things are the right things. Incredibly good judgment, mobilizing power. And so the red that I leaned into in magic

From my experience, it becomes very redundant in an environment like that. Whereas the blue of, OK, are we latticing up?

the white of like, okay, are we gonna be able to sustain this in an institutional context where the whole is more than the sum of like the individual components involved? A little bit of black of like, are we looking out to make sure that we are capturing the upside of what we're doing and what we're generating? I think fills in the gaps of a

of those things. Now that being said, I've noticed about myself like I'm very not green. It's like very hard for me to accommodate like a green orientation or even to understand what not even what they're saying but like why that would be good, right? I have no... yeah.

Tee (1:18:51)
Hmm.

It's so interesting. I'm curious why that is and also one in particular, but I think at least a couple of my coaches who were into MTG said that I had a very green presence and that they needed that infusion as we were working through certain things. So I'm curious what's hard in that regard.

Zac Hill (1:19:17)
How interesting.

Mmm!

First of all, it doesn't surprise me that very good coaches have important green dimensions. And I think because a lot of the time very good coaches remind people or help people, help reflect back to people what their nature is, right? Which is a very difficult thing I think often to do as an individual about ourselves, right? So, and just knowing you comparatively briefly, I think that's something you're very good at.

Tee (1:19:33)
Why is that?

Yeah.

Zac Hill (1:19:55)
I think from my perspective, I'm not, I think a lot of nature can be, I think nature is often very malleable. I think that the extent to which nature is malleable is often a function of,

Tee (1:19:55)
Thank

Zac Hill (1:20:13)
deliberate work of like self -knowledge and self -understanding in a very blue way. mean part of that's like hand -weighty quote -unquote stoicism type things, but I think that that gets misapplied a lot such that I don't even really like to talk about it. I think that I think of deep animating force in human affairs is insecurity and the fear that insecurity presents.

And I think that the blindness that insecurity can instill toward relevant things. And I think a lot of the utility of like a green approach is it's very good at kind of sidestepping.

the insecurity question by returning people to a root and a core that they're quite literally rooted in and can draw strength from in a way that mitigates the power of some of those insecurities. I think a better approach, and I say better,

very subjectively, but my opinion is to deal with the insecurities and to like stop what you're doing until the insecurities are dealt with and like not try to embark upon a transatlantic journey with like the insecurity passenger black hole in the co -pilot seat constantly warping all reality

around what it's unwilling to acknowledge or entertain, right? And I think that what I often see in what I consider to be misapplied green approaches is to insist that the insecurity

Tee (1:22:01)
Yes.

Zac Hill (1:22:07)
is ingrained and intertwined with a person's self and is immobile and is unchanging and is almost a partner in the journey. And I just don't believe that. Everybody I know that's been able to kick the worm at the core, as it were, of their identity threat, existential dread, is just dramatically

Tee (1:22:20)
Yes.

Zac Hill (1:22:37)
improve their life, right? And I don't believe that green intrinsically is doing that. I just think that's the way it happens a lot of the time. And I think it requires often a certain distance and remove to be able to look at the system from the top down, the system being oneself, and see

the insecurity demon on the shoulder and really devote time and energy to massaging that knot out. How resonant is that with you? I've never thought about that before.

Tee (1:23:11)
Yeah, yes.

No, very much. got really animated while you were talking because I would consider myself probably a blue -green oriented coach with some black and white and red at different times. Like I was saying, I kind of occupy the space that I think will catalyze progress in the person I'm working with better. And so sometimes if I detect a lack of something or a sense in which like, as you say, an inspiration which is

Zac Hill (1:23:23)
Boom! Mmm!

Yep.

Tee (1:23:45)
colored in that way could generate process and scaffolding that would be nice for them to scale or something, then I will do that. yeah, I mean, what you're saying about addressing those things, the insecurities, we called deep emotional cruxes. So we ran a coaching training program last year, which had a cohort of nine coaches. And one of the takeaway things that we wrote up in our report at the end was,

Zac Hill (1:23:53)
Yes.

mmmm

Tee (1:24:15)
this matters a ton and we took very special care to work with people on their idiosyncratic emotional cruxes like things that were tripping them up on the road to becoming a coach to help other people and like going after that aggressively

but also having some green acceptance that you cannot resolve them immediately in the way that like a naive blue would say, okay, I am on board for resolving emotional cruxes. Let's like do 10 hours of circling right now. Let's go super hard at this and like clear it so that I can not have the warping effect and all that stuff you were talking about. There's some green in saying.

Zac Hill (1:24:41)
Yes.

Tee (1:24:58)
Yeah, you'll likely get a lot of mileage out of identifying them and going after them, but you have to have this like holding capacity, so to speak, to kind of like hold them and choose your targets and choose your time when you go after those things. And also like notice if you can't resolve them the way they are skewing and and and like do counter strategies for a while until you can fully resolve the thing. You know, there's a lot there that we tried to outline in the write up. So all the things

Zac Hill (1:25:01)
Hmm.

Hmm

Yes.

Tee (1:25:28)
that you're saying, think make a lot of sense also because I have objections to the way a lot of coaches present themselves and go about their business out there in an industry that I have to.

associate with, you know, like quote -unquote life coaching and I've branded myself a personal strategist, but you know, you can't really get away from being in a conversation and saying I'm a personal strategist and they're like, what? You're like life coach and they're like, I usually go with executive coach because it's just like easier, right? But I don't just work with executives. So it's not quite accurate. but yeah, like I like the concepts of misapplied, as you say, certain colors.

Zac Hill (1:25:42)
Right.

I love that.

HAHAHAHA

Right. Right.

Mmm.

Tee (1:26:10)
And actually that led me to an interesting question that a mutual friend had for you, which would be misunderstood colors. So what is misunderstood black, for example, because black is thought of as bad in a lot of cases and a lot of games and that's how people would probably explain it if they're just sort of talking about it off the cuff. So I'm curious.

Zac Hill (1:26:15)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hmm

Totally. So yeah, every color is misunderstood in important ways. I think to your point, white and black are the easiest ones to misconstrue. mean, white is often good -coated, bad -coated, you know, in a lot of different axes in society. white is also the color of fascism, right? White is also the color of totalitarianism, of...

of dogmatism, of theocracy, And black, again, yeah, like you said, like death, right? And also wanton selfishness, but black is also the color of personal sacrifice, right? Black is also the color of potential, right? The fulfillment of what's that?

Tee (1:27:20)
You actualization in some ways, right? You said actualization as well in some ways.

Zac Hill (1:27:26)
Actualization, yep, exactly. Self -actualization, sometimes self -transcendence, although that leads black, green. And in many ways of self -knowledge, right? Of understanding where you actually are in kind of a ruthless way. Of self -improvement is a very black idea, right? And of getting rid of naivete and stuff like that. I also think...

A big challenge of getting through life for a lot of people, myself very much included, is what I call the fundamental problem of maturity, which is that the ratio of unrealized possibilities to realized possibilities

is massive, right? And in fact, to realize any given possibility, including the act of sitting in this room being on this podcast, you have to obliterate literally millions more. Like I'm not in my living room, but I'm also not in Italy right now, right? And like black is the color that is by far the most comfortable with owning all of those trade -offs, right?

Tee (1:28:42)
I love that. I love that.

Zac Hill (1:28:44)
Which I think is vital to being a functional person in life. I think that said, all the other colors, blue is often misunderstood as a color of being smart. That's not true. Every color can be smart. I think red is often misconstrued as the color of passion. That's not true. Every color can be passionate. What are you about to say? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, please.

Tee (1:28:46)
Yes.

Can I just go back real quick? Sorry, I can't help myself. So lot of my clients are very blue and coded. And they struggle with this obliteration of all the other possibilities. yeah, it's just this analysis, paralysis is another way to say it, you know, and it's a simplified way. But they really struggle with like, I've seen people struggle down to minute to minute like, my God.

Zac Hill (1:29:14)
Mm.

Totally.

Yeah. Yeah.

Tee (1:29:35)
I cannot handle how much I'm conceiving of all of the things I'm obliterating as I'm choosing this thing to do. And this current thing I'm doing right now is worrying about things. just like, they just like, just can get so, so wrapped up in that. when you mentioned it, I just thought, yes, this is huh.

Zac Hill (1:29:40)
future.

Yeah!

Yes. No, that's huge because blue is the color of possibility. It's the color of Walt Disney World Tomorrowland, right? And the challenge is like...

Tee (1:29:57)
Right.

Zac Hill (1:30:03)
at some point, and blue is also the color of being like feckless academic writing papers that no one reads, right? For the exact same reason, right? That there's always so much more possibility that the act of actualizing something feels like a sacrifice, right? And that's where green has a lot of wisdom. mean, wisdom would say, or green would say,

Tee (1:30:10)
Right.

huh. huh.

Zac Hill (1:30:27)
Where you're at right now is exactly where you're supposed to be. Whatever it is you're doing is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And of course, that can in turn lead to complacency and all these other downsides. But it's very important to have a dose of that. Because it can often seem like the way to live life is like you have to derive axiomatically exactly what you should be doing and exactly how many units of exercise and metformin you should be

consuming in order to be maximally productive. And the problem with all of that is that it doesn't pay attention to the second order downside you're incurring by undergoing that process, right? So Black basically would tell you that if you're doing all that, there's any number of moments that you're not seizing by taking action.

while sitting in your chair scratching your chin and red would say like, and by the way, it's also fun to just like put yourself out there and you're gonna get a ton of knowledge that you're not gonna have sitting in your chair by like going to the party and like seeing how it rolls, right? Knowledge that you think you're factoring into your analysis right now, but you're not, right? And like you, my experience is very much that

Tee (1:31:30)
Yeah.

Zac Hill (1:31:53)
Around a lot of environments, there's a lot of really blue people. And like, I would say the thing that I see the most in the real world that is like a very blue thing that people will insist up and down to you that is not a problem, is like a very blue thing to do is say like, have identified 14 parameters that govern this system, ignoring parameters 15 through

290 and then just extrapolate those 14 parameters odd infinitum slash odd nauseam wind up with a world model that is insane right but insist that that's the truth because they've hyper optimized those 14 parameters and like is often very hard to challenge in an argument

Tee (1:32:22)
Mm.

Hmm.

Zac Hill (1:32:45)
because those people have thought about those 14 parameters more than whoever is arguing with them has. And so they win a debate about how great the 14 parameters are and think that they're more right rather than less right because it's almost impossible. Like parameters 15 through X may matter less, right? But there's a lot of them. And so that's where the common sense of red, the

Tee (1:32:50)
Yeah.

Zac Hill (1:33:18)
presence of being of green the

I guess, ideology of white in terms of like a

You know having a backdrop to be able to drop into to be like actually okay I may have thought about all this but like am I being good? Right all of those are I think really important and then the opportunism and the self Sacra of black like we talked about her are all really good Hedges to put in place of that tendency within blue because otherwise it's not That kind of error is unique and that it's not just an error you can make it's an error

you can make while being absolutely certain that you're right. And that's the most dangerous kind of error of all, right? Because that's the error that prevents you from error correction. And that's a really good way to wind up in a really deep hole that's really hard to get out of.

Tee (1:34:13)
Yeah.

And it seems more potent in some ways than the errors that you can run away with in some of the other colors because the ability to be analytical and debate with people and be able to just like parry all the time or really twist people in circles and convince them of certain things. It's a way that I don't feel like a lot of the other colors.

Zac Hill (1:34:40)
Yeah.

Tee (1:34:48)
They have less of that ability to do that or you could look at it you can just say like that fascism doesn't really vibe with me or this like this creeping sense of this person just I should accept everything and I am exactly where I'm supposed to be and I don't know that doesn't like feel right but with blue You know, there's so many things that can so many ways that a person could get

Gas lit would be like shorthand for that, but like so many ways that they could become convinced that they are astray and that they should just believe that the 14 parameters and the extrapolated scenarios there from are truth. And I worry about that. I worry about the gravity of that.

Zac Hill (1:35:11)
Yeah, totally.

totally.

Have you ever played? Yeah No, this is a huge problem so I did a ton of and I got to get going but I did a ton of mock trial in college and I coached mock trial and I've been very involved in the debate space the the fundamental thing about debate that is the fundamental limitation of debate is that all things that

enter into the aperture of debate are things that you have chosen to occupy your attention, right? So that's really bad at understanding systems where there's 508 variables, all of which affect and parameterize the situation, right? Because there's no way to have 508.

Tee (1:36:06)
Hmm.

Zac Hill (1:36:10)
within the zone of analysis of attention. And so invariably, what's going to happen is that you focus on the five, 10, 15, 20 most relevant. And that works and will get you to the right answer in system designs where there's 20 things matter more than the other 480 things. But they will always lead you to the wrong answer when the 480 things matter more than the 20 things. And that just is an element

of system design. And so a lot of the time people believe that like debate is the only intellectual way to approach a problem space, but in fact debate is specifically good at resolving problem spaces where overt variables matter a lot.

and it's really bad at resolving other problem spaces. And the example I always use is, have you ever heard of the game called QWOP?

Tee (1:37:11)
I haven't.

Zac Hill (1:37:13)
QWOP is a profound game. It's called QWOP because you have four keys, Q -W -O -P, and the goal is to walk in a straight line and eventually jump over a hurdle while controlling manually all of the tendons and muscles in a human being that allow you to walk. And it's unbelievable how hard this is, right? It's profoundly hard.

Tee (1:37:35)
You

Zac Hill (1:37:43)
And it's the perfect metaphor for systems where overt reasoning about the nature of the system makes you actively much worse at doing the thing. Right? My good friend Kyle Bodie is a baseball coach.

One of the professional baseball coach and runs driveline baseball the biomechanics facility He was named one of the 50 most important people in baseball in the last 50 years He's genius tier guy and he says one of the big errors that coaches often make is it someone's making a mistake and naturally they want to talk about the mistake and cause pitchers to adjust the mistake and Invariably that just makes people worse at what they're doing because they're now in their head about

they're pitching motion, they're trying to manually correct for it and they're not only over correcting, they're losing what makes their default form powerful, right? And so there's all kinds of situations, not just involving...

autonomic reasoning and implicit process and intuition and all that, but also collective systems where the informational or systemic version of this is what can be called common sense, where you really don't want overt focus areas to get you away from the default setting of your phone, where most of the options are by and large pretty good. And I see that happening in

spaces that I imagine you and I often inhabit, like a lot. And then the folks who are very blue often double down because the counter arguments they're receiving don't feel like well -reasoned counter arguments because someone's operating in a red space or a green space. But they actually are intellectually robust, right? They're just not using the grammar.

Tee (1:39:24)
Hmm.

Mm

Zac Hill (1:39:46)
that blue often responds to, right? And so I find myself trying to do that to be able to speak to the blue folks, that there really is a there there. Well, I hope so.

Tee (1:39:46)
Translated into blue idiolect. Yeah.

That sounds very valuable. That sounds very valuable. I know you've got to run. I wonder if I could throw one more question at you before you run. Final question. You've been very gracious with your time thus far, though. Thank you. Well, this question is going to violate some of the things that we established regarding how things express in context and

Zac Hill (1:40:04)
All right, let's take a final question and then we'll be good to go. no, you've been awesome. Thank you so much for this.

All right.

Tee (1:40:21)
how things can be useful or more useful. There's gradients of whatever related to what is called for and what context and what environment. But I am curious just to simplify it a bit for whoever might be listening. What are some virtuous and unvirtuous examples of each color in the pie? So you mentioned fascism for white. It might be one.

Zac Hill (1:40:26)
word.

Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah, Fascism for white, pretty bad. Totalitarianism for white, pretty bad. Common purpose for white, pretty good. Duty, I think, for white, very good and a very underrated virtue in our contemporary existence. The understanding of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, very white. Bureaucracy, bad, very white.

Tee (1:40:51)
Mm

Zac Hill (1:41:09)
and specifically very white blue. So those are some quick ones. Blue, science, great. Personal improvement, great. Possibility, great. Removeness from the real world, probably very bad. Naivete about how malleable systems really are, probably pretty bad.

Tee (1:41:14)
Nice.

Zac Hill (1:41:41)
self... I'm trying to say like patting yourself on the back too much. It's very easy for Blue to think... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very easy for Blue to think that Blue is the only way of doing things because it's explicated all of its reasoning and thinks that that's the only way that things are.

Tee (1:41:49)
Self aggrandizing.

Yes.

I can tell we run in similar circles because we have a lot to unpack about Blue as we have encountered it.

Zac Hill (1:42:06)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, harder to say in simple terminology, but that a lack of simplicity is a big downside to blue. A lack of adaptability is a big downside of blue. A lack of responsiveness is a big downside of blue. Myopia is a huge downside of blue. Neuroticism might be the biggest downside.

Tee (1:42:11)
Sure.

For sure, for sure.

Zac Hill (1:42:34)
So a lot of downsides. Black, upsides are self -knowledge, self -fulfillment, opportunism, which can be a downside too, but seizing the moment. They great, very much so. Self -expression and single -mindedness itself. Downsides include...

Tee (1:42:46)
I think your great artists could be an instantiation. Like great, yeah, like single -minded artists, yes, yes. Might be very black and coded. Yeah. I think of Kanye West for some reason.

Zac Hill (1:43:01)
Kanye West is an extremely, in this context, black -colored pie artist. It's not my beautiful dark twisted fantasy. Like, what could be more perfect than that? and it's an extraordinary album, right? Kanye also a little bit red. And I think like at the macro societal context, authoritarianism is very black.

Tee (1:43:05)
Yes.

greatest album for me. Yeah.

Mm

Zac Hill (1:43:30)
As distinct from fascism, right? Which involves a nationalism dimension that's very white, right? But the personality -driven, I alone can solve every problem very black, right? Yes, exactly. Red, you know, love, presence, dancing is very red, right? In a counterintuitive way. But also like...

Tee (1:43:42)
It's like capricious personal power type of... Okay.

Zac Hill (1:44:00)
Getting in a bar fight is very red. Short -sightedness, very red. Inability to build stuff. ADHD is very red, depending on whether you view that as a down -sider, an up -sider, somewhere in between. mean, war is white red, right? Small -scale skirmishes, very red.

Tee (1:44:16)
Hmm.

Zac Hill (1:44:29)
And then green, think the downside of green is like big league conservatism. talking about like, you know, the fact that humanity didn't progress for like a hundred thousand years in a spot. You know, that's like very green, right? We have a way of doing things this that conversely.

One might say the fact that humanity sustained itself for 100 ,000 years is a big virtue of green. Sustainability in generally is a very green thing. think integration is a very green virtue. think one would put eco -terrorism as a very green downside, right? And very specifically the dimension that once you're, like the worst thing you can do is disrupt

Tee (1:44:59)
Sure.

Zac Hill (1:45:23)
harmony, right? I think like the the the

Tee (1:45:26)
Is that like green black or green red ecoterrorism?

Zac Hill (1:45:31)
What's eco terrorism is probably green, black, red. Yeah, could could be green, white, depending on the nature of how it works. I think the the thing that a lot of folks talk about about like you can only be an engineer or a doctor or you're a failure is like a very green thing to say. Right. You know, there is a way there is a within that the

Tee (1:45:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hmm.

Zac Hill (1:46:00)
The past system is very green.

Bad arguments for segregation and phrenology are very green, right? Where you're just saying there is a way, and that way is natural, and there is no other way, right? So yeah, so those are some... Ooh, cults. Some cults I think are very black, personality -driven cults.

Tee (1:46:16)
How about...

Right. Right, right.

I was going to ask about Colts real quick. Is that green -white?

Zac Hill (1:46:37)
I think some cults are very white. David Koresh very white. Some cults can be kind of green, blue. I would argue that like Scientology for example is like a very green blue with streaks of black cult. I think actually the cult question is interesting because I think all five colors can be very culty.

It just depends like you know the the some of the the weird Let's let's have 900 you know 900 that the goal of my cult is to marry everyone in the cult is probably very red ultimately Very yeah cults cults can span the spectrum

Tee (1:47:30)
Yeah, yeah, interesting. Well, look, you've sat with me for nearly two and a half hours. I really, really appreciate your just taking a chunk out of your Sunday to appear on a podcast you hadn't heard much of. And it just means a lot to me. It was really fun to listen to what you have to say. mean, I just I feel like I feel like this is going to be a compelling listen. I really enjoyed I really enjoyed having you on for sure.

Zac Hill (1:47:35)
Hahaha

Thank you so much for the opportunity. I look forward to seeing how comes out.

Tee (1:48:03)
Awesome, point of procedure. I'll always send you a draft of what I plan to publish. And I may actually just send you the raw ones too. And then if you ever want to listen to those, have an objection about what you've said, or want to edit something out, just like, please feel free to let me know and I will do that. I want people to, I should said that before we started, but I wanted people to...

Zac Hill (1:48:08)
Yes.

Awesome.

Yeah, perfect.

Tee (1:48:28)
feel very comfortable because it's like whatever you don't want put out there just won't do that and you'll have that option

Zac Hill (1:48:33)
Cool. All right. Thank you so, much. I appreciate you. This is fun.

Tee (1:48:37)
Of course. Yeah, thank you, Zach. It was nice to see you today. Bye.

Zac Hill (1:48:40)
Cheers. Bye bye.