Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Finite players play to beat the others around them. Infinite players play to be better than themselves. Simon Sinek wrote that in his book, the Infinite Game.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: So there I was, sitting in my office in the bowels of the Pentagon when Simon Sinek walked in unannounced. And that day changed the way that I viewed strategy.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Welcome to the Duster Mud podcast. Welcome back. We're so glad to have you guys here. Today. We're going to discuss the infinite game that Simon talked about in his book as it relates to our health and the way we view health and the strategy that we have taken with our health.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So there I was in the Air Force current operations strategy cell, and at that point in time, tensions were really rising with a certain country in Asia, and my life was to make sure that the Air Force was ready for any potential conflicts. So the stress was high, and our boss, the three star, had been given swipe card and keycode access to our top secret vault. And sitting at my desk one day, the door swings open and I hear the three star boisterously bellow, hello, checkmate.
That was our first indication that something was going on, which meant put everything away. Yeah, he was allowed to see it, but following closely behind him was a gentleman that I did not recognize. And so it was an immediate turn on the blue lights. What's going on? And it turns out that Simon Sinek had come to talk to the three star boss, and he said, I really like this idea that you're talking about. I've got to get you to talk to my strategy guys. And so, in checkmate at the time, we all either had been to the US Air Force weapons school or had a master's degree in strategy, or both. And so the general wanted Simon to come down and chat with us, his strategy guys. So we got to spend about 2 hours sitting in our small conference room with Simon Sinek and a whiteboard as he discussed the concept in his brain. He had not yet written the book, but he chatted with us about the concept of the book, the infinite game. And what that did was it took the strategy that I had learned as I was getting my master's of philosophy in military strategy, one of my favorite instructors talked about strategy as a continuing advantage. It's a quest for a continuing advantage, and that really resonated with me when it comes to military strategy. What Simon was able to do, though, was to take the concept of the finite and the infinite game, and the infinite game is like the concept of continuing advantage. And what Simon was able to do then was make it understandable in such a way that you could apply it just to life.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: So let me interrupt you there for just a second. So the way I remember the story was this guy came in and we got holed up for an hour and a half when you were very busy and 2 hours talking to this guy about all of this stuff, which turned out to be really great information and was formidable in changing your strategic. Yeah, but you didn't know who he.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: I had. I had no idea.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: So we were sitting there, I remember we were sitting there watching television, and I think it was on NBC or some news program, and he goes, oh, my God, that's a guy. And I'm like, what guy? He goes, that's Simon.
Simon. This was weeks later. Simon.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Remember the guy that came and talked to me and the checkmate guys that day when he was talking about the infinite game and the book he was writing? Yes, I remember that. That's him.
Oh, that guy. So we had to have this whole, like, wait a minute, who's Simon Sinek for? Now, this was back, what, 2016? And he had written a couple of.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Books, but we were unaware was the one that really took off for him. And he had written it. So there were a couple of guys in checkmate that knew who he was. I was not one of those.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: But the point is, you didn't know who the guy was. Therefore, you weren't fangirling, if you will, over this guy. You weren't, oh, my gosh, Simon. Simon. Like, it would be, maybe today, it would be a bit of a different feel of, oh, I've read his books. I kind of have been inside his head in that I. But you just listened to him. You guys just really absorbed it.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: Wasn't even listening. We were interacting because we really didn't know who he was. I didn't know that I was supposed to just be listening. Right. And so we were actually interacting with him.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: So you were like, inputting military strategy, thinking into what he was thinking about as he was formulating the idea for his book. Yeah, you guys were part of the inputs that he was kind of researching.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: I can't promise that he listened at all. But we certainly.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: You were there for long enough.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah, we had a conversation. It was not just him making a presentation.
[00:05:36] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
Because that's cool.
Because there was the back and forth. Everyone was able to grow from the scenario.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Especially listening on your side.
Right. Okay, so the infinite game and strategy, he got that from a book in 1986 written by James P. Cars. Published a book, finite and infinite games, a vision of life as play and possibility. And one of the things I remember you when you came home and started describing some of the concepts that we. This was all new to us. You described Dolman, maybe one of your professors, talking about playing chess and the fact that he wanted to play chess with his daughter. And he could do it one of two ways. He could either play chess with her and beat her every time as he.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: Was teaching her how to play, as.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: He was teaching her how to play, because she didn't know, or he could teach her how to play, allow her to win, get better through that, and then he forever has someone to play chess with.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Versus discouraging her through beating her every time while she's trying to learn how to play. And then he doesn't get to play chess with his daughter anymore.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: And he used that as a story to describe continuing advantage.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:07:13] Speaker B: So even in military strategy, it's not necessarily about winning each specific thing. It's about setting up the conditions such that at the end, or as the game continues, you have a continuing advantage. So he could have looked at it as each individual game was its own event, and the goal was to win that event. That would be a finite game. He looked at it as in Simon's terminology, or in the previous author's terminology, looked at it as an infinite game in that he wanted a chess partner for life. So he did not win the game, but he assured himself a continuing advantage by making a chess partner for life.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: So I can see where this concept could come. Let's pull away from military, and we can apply this concept to a lot of different aspects of life to include life itself.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Marriage is a great example.
Marriage is not a game that you win.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: No.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: Right.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: You may win the argument.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: Right.
And if you view that argument as a finite game, then it's over.
Right. But marriage is an infinite game. It's ongoing. The whole goal is to continue the.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: Game, to keep playing the game.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Okay, so an infinite game. The goal of an infinite game is continue playing the game.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: So if you look at it from an international politics perspective, the countries are still out there. You don't necessarily know who the players are. There are no set defined rules. There is no referee. There's no boundaries for the game. The international politics is just an ongoing game.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: Okay, so you just described the finite game. There's a referee. There are rules. There are boundaries.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: There are known players.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: There are known players. If you're playing baseball, we all know who's out on the field, we know who's coming up to bat next, everything we know, right.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: There's a set time limit.
There's a defined way to have a winner and a loser. That is a finite game.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Okay. And then you were describing the infinite game, being it is ongoing and you want to be able to keep playing. Business is very much that way.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: Can I continue to play or do I need to close business and bankrupt or just.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: That's where Simon took this perspective into the business world. I mean, his whole book is business focused, the infinite game. His book is business focused. And he took the idea of finite and infinite games and then applied them to a business setting with the assertion that the way to look at business is as an infinite game. It's not a finite game that you win or lose. You could be competing with someone or some other company. But even if that company goes out of business, you haven't won.
You still have a business. You still want to be in business. Right?
[00:10:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: The game isn't over. So his concept was look at business even as an infinite game.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Okay, so I want to take this, and let's flip it around just a little bit and apply this infinite game, finite game concept to my health. I used to play a game.
I played a game a lot. There was a referee. There were rules, very clear to rules, and the referee was the scales.
And I dieted to no end earlier on in life, and I lived by a certain set of rules.
How many calories in, how many calories out? So at the gym, I could play the game and burn more calories, or I could eat less calories. But it was all part of a defined game.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: That's right.
And then most typically, you had picked a number and you had given that number to your referee, the scales. Right?
[00:11:48] Speaker A: So, like my goal weight.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: And as soon as the referee tells you, you have achieved, the game's over.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: And I won.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: You won.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: Okay, cool.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: The game is over. You have won the game called diet.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: And so I won the game called diet.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Diet.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: And I reached that.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Woohoo.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Number on the referee's little screen.
[00:12:19] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: And when that happened, though, the game was over.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Right. You won.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: Yay. And so now I can just go back to not playing that game anymore.
[00:12:31] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Because I was not very fun.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: Because that game's over.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Because that game is over. And that's really not all that fun.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: Okay.
So having played that game a lot, I got pretty good at it.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: I could win.
I swear I could win, like, almost every.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Time.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Give it enough time. I was a big winner and got quite masterful at it, but every single time I would win the game, and then I didn't want to play anymore. I would always have to go back and play the game again.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: And that gets just so demoralizing over time.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Because you thought in your mind, well, I already won that game.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Right. I don't want to play again.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: I don't want to play again. But if you're not playing the game, if you're not actively playing the game, if you're not actively dieting, following the rules of the game, right, then you're not playing that game anymore.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Okay. So enter into our lives ketogenic life, and the game changed.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it did. As we learned about the ketogenic lifestyle, I think it started really with ketogenic diet.
It was a diet, we were going to try it. All of the things that we were seeing was using a ketogenic way of eating as a method of playing the diet game. So it was just a different set of rules, but you're still playing that finite game. There's still a defined number, there's still a referee called scales, and you either do or don't win the game. And the way to get there is just a little bit different. Instead of a calories in, calories out, count your calories, weigh your.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Okay. I submit to you then, the part of the game for me early on was the Carb manager app, which we highly recommend. The Carb manager app was one of my referees at that time before we changed our thinking.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: Yeah, okay, I can see that. Yeah.
As we recommended the card manager app, it was not as a referee or as a way of keeping score on your path to an end goal of winning the game.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Really, Carb manager, as we have in the past couple of videos, recommended the Carb manager app. It really is as a tool to help you understand a change of lifestyle, because the ketogenic lifestyle or way of eating is so very different from everything that we've been taught throughout our entire life.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: That is simply a tool that says, I really don't have a frame of reference for what a 70, 75% fat diet looks like.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: And so that carb manager was a way for us as you input the stuff in, and it was just a visual way of watching the wrap as it closed. Okay. I need a lot more fat, not so that I can win, but just as I'm learning how to eat a different way, this is a tool, a visual tool that will help me learn that. And so, as we continued to learn more and more about the ketogenic lifestyle, it really led us to question things that we thought that we knew basically writ large across the medical community and nutrition community. And at that moment, I submit, is where we made the change from. I don't think this is actually a finite game called diet. I think this is really an infinite game called health.
And so at that point, really, and we were probably two months in, maybe ten weeks into this.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: In the rabbit hole.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: We went YouTube, reading books, podcasts, listening, learning everything that we could down the way down the rabbit hole. Yeah.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: But I think at that point, learning.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: Learning is where we absorbing.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: We made that transition then, from this is a diet to a lifestyle. And at that point is when it changed from a finite game that you can win to an infinite game whose goal is to continue playing. And so if you look at it as health, health is not something that you win.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: No, you don't.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Health is an ongoing thing. I want to continue to be healthy as I age.
The goal is continued health, a continuing advantage to continue to play the game.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: So it transitioned from finite to infinite.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: And then us thinking and realizing that as we took on that lifestyle and it became a lifestyle. I'm not going back to the standard american diet. I'm going to manage my health through what I eat long term.
It became not extreme to us. It became very eye opening, very liberating.
Very liberating. I was so liberated by the fact that I no longer had to play the game.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: The scales. I haven't been on a set of scales unless you go to the doctor, so they know how much medicine to give you.
I don't get on scales anymore. That referee isn't in my life anymore.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: The game of burning off calories, how many calories did I eat?
That's not a thing in my life anymore. I've been liberated from the game. I don't play that anymore.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Now we manage our. This is how we eat, and we don't have to. Pants always fit.
It's the most bizarre thing, right.
There's nothing to quit playing.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: We just keep moving.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: The other thing is, there's nothing to cheat on.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: No.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: There's no cheating in a diet in that finite game with the established rules, if you step outside those established rules, there's cheating.
And so with a lifestyle, with a goal of health in mind, there aren't these defined rules.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: And so even if you eat a meal that is not ketogenic, sure. You haven't cheated. You have simply affected whether or not you're going to continue this path of health.
And so you can eat something that's not ketogenic.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: And, okay, you can eat, and then you go back to eating a ketogenic lifestyle. Right.
It's a path, and a meal that's not ketogenic would be a bump or a curve in a path.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: But you're still going down this path of health.
So it's not the. I cheat.
I have broken the rules. I got to get back on it.
It's not this thing where you're departing outside the game, breaking the rules, cheating.
It is merely one of many meals that you have eaten on your path to continued health, and it either helped you or didn't help you. And if it didn't help, keep going. It's a continuous path that's really different. It's a really different way of looking at it. It's such a different know. Having that conversation with Simon really did help me to see that there are a lot of things in life like that. And so with Dr. Dolman, even though he used the analogy of playing chess with his daughter, because I was in a military school getting a degree in military strategy, I really applied that to military operations. And so the conversation with Simon really opened my mind up, and I understand that Dolman understands it.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:46] Speaker B: But it opened my mind up to say, I think that this idea of a continuing advantage or an infinite game, this strategy, really can apply outside of the office or the Pentagon.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: Yeah. To almost do the bigger concepts in life.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: So we really embraced that game, the infinite game, and sort of gave ourselves a constant continuing advantage by.
We built a farm.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Right. Yeah.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: That changed the game for us pretty significantly.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
The whole idea behind building the farm was we really like good food, and because we're on this continuous journey to.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Health.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: How can you continue playing that journey? How can you get better health?
Well, I think we could do this ourselves. We could make our own food and make it just as healthy as we possibly can.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: So we extended that our life and the health lifestyle, not just to what we put on our plates.
We affected our. Well, heck, we exercise just by going outside and farming every day. Right. So that's part of our lifestyle. That's one of our strategies. We get outside, we stay fit, because we're farmer fit. We don't have to have a gym membership anymore. Right. Don't have time to go there anyways.
And by knowing where our food comes from, creating that food, getting out there, working with the animals and in the dirt and doing all of the things, another thing that we're able to do is maybe add that stuff to somebody else's plate also to help their lifestyle.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: That's true.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: So we have added to the strategy even of someone else.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
When we first had the concept of doing this, it was as a homestead in order to create food, healthy food for ourselves.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: And the more we learned about it, the more we realized that without significantly more effort or significantly more infrastructure, we could potentially increase our production slightly, a little bit, and maybe be able to share that with our friends and family.
And then from there, it went to, I think we can produce more even than what our friends and family could have, and maybe we could offer to our local community as well. And so it sort of morphed in our thinking. And that was all before we even got here. That was about six months of we're trying to figure out what we're doing as we're finishing up a military career. Right.
So by the time we got here, we had already decided we're going to try this out on.
I think you would still consider us a very small, very farm farm. But we're going to try it out on a scale such that we could potentially offer some really healthy food to others as well.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: So that's what we did. We started thinking, let's grow this food ourselves because we want to significantly add to the continuing advantage over time.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: Okay. We're going to play this game for a long time because we want to live for a long time.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: And nobody's getting out alive.
So, at any rate, the farm which started as let's grow our own food, homestead, other people, local community, and it's been fairly successful so far. We figured out how to grow some food for other people.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I sat down and figured out.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: So, as tiny as we are, we're two and a half people, plus some parents that come and help occasionally. But we're just a very small number of people growing the maximum amount of food that we can in two years, what have we done?
[00:26:25] Speaker B: Yeah, in two years?
Well, we are currently two years from when we really got our first production animals on the farm. And in two years. These are approximate.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Yeah, these are approximate numbers. We just want to share this with you guys so that you know where we are with what we're doing.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: We've been able to produce two. And this is freezer weights, not live weight meat.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: That's gone into our freezers or someone else's? Yeah.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: 2000 pounds of beef, 8500 pounds of pork, 400 pounds of lamb, 1500 pounds of chicken, somewhere in the range of 750 dozen eggs and somewhere in the range of 1200 gallons of milk.
[00:27:13] Speaker A: So for just a couple of people, that's a lot of really good, non gmo, pastured, grass fed, nonindustrialized food for ourselves, our friends, our family and our local community. And we want to continue that, maybe even grow more. We're finding getting traction as far as it is a business and continuing now playing that infinite game in the business side of it. Can we keep playing?
[00:27:44] Speaker B: That's right. And we're looking at the business in the same manner as an infinite game.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: The goal is to continue, can we keep playing game, continue the business? So in order to continue the business next year, our plan is we will expand lamb and make more lamb and we will expand the poultry and make more chicken.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Right. Yeah.
Growing food for other people is honestly becoming a passion.
And I would love in the future if you're enjoying these videos and hearing us talk about what we're doing. First of all, hit like and subscribe if you haven't already, and comment what you think about the infinite game and the finite game of diet and health and how it's affecting you. Also, we've been talking about getting outside with these cameras and starting to share with you guys our farm. We made a few videos early on, but we think that we're going to get back out there here soon and maybe do a farm tour and start talking about how we raise our animals, how we get them processed, how we organize our freezers. We do go to local farmers markets, how we set that up and stuff like that. So we're pretty sure that's what's going to be coming in the future. If that interests you, leave a comment what you'd like to see, let us know. Let us know how you feel about that and we'll start sharing with you guys more of our outside life as we play this game.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Infinite game.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: Infinite game. Yeah, I don't want to play the finite game anymore. I'm done with that. I'm not going back. Yeah, me and the scales, we divorced.
I highly encourage anyone who's listening or watching to think about your new year as you kind of come up and are starting to decide on what challenges and changes you want to make. Totally encourage you to just give this concept a thought and see if you might could swing your thinking into an infinite thinking. That's right on how you approach food and health.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: Health instead of diet.
[00:30:08] Speaker A: Health instead of diet. Good stuff.
