How to stop lending money to strangers and follow your dreams, with Gideon Griebenow

Stephen Hawking starts A Brief History of Time with an anecdote he attributes to Bertrand Russel who, having just finished a lecture on the heliocentric nature of the planets’ orbits, was challenged by a lady in the audience.

“What you have told us is rubbish.” She said, “The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle."

"If your theory is correct, madam," Russell replied, "then what does this turtle stand on?"

"You're a very clever man, and that's a very good question," she replied, "but the first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him."

"But what does this second turtle stand on?" persisted Russell patiently.

And I think we all know her answer to this, which was of course that “it's turtles all the way down."

The World Turtle is a mytheme of a giant turtle supporting the world. It occurs in Hindu mythology, Chinese mythology, the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and, of course, has nothing to do with lending. So why am I dedicating so much real estate to the idea?

Well, because the idea was reflected in Terry Pratchet’s incredibly popular Disc World Series of books, and those inspired today’s guest, Gideon Griebenow, to give up his credit risk career to become a game developer. World Turtles is a wholesome colony builder where you guide a tribe of creatures called Meeps on their mission to save themselves and the world they live on, and it’s gaining interest from players and publishers around the world - wishlist it now on Steam.

But you can also get involved in these final stages via many other routes - the Discord Server is here (https://discord.com/invite/2NEb4HxwhF), Youtube channel is here (https://www.youtube.com/c/RecOgMission) and there is a subreddit, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram account, too.

You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page (feel free to connect), my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this very show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24

If you have any feedback, questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.

Regards,

Brendan

The full written transcript, with timestamps, is below:

Gideon Griebenow 0:00

Given all the the ranges and variability and lack of data that is something that you get everywhere - is this, the nerdiest midlife crisis I'm aware of, actually worth my while? Something that can give me a year's salary?

There's a lot more freedom to be more creative. There are definitely wrong ways to do things, but there isn't as much regulation as there is in banking, forcing you to do certain things the way that basically everybody else does. So I am able to add some creative approaches here and there in how I make the calculations behind the scenes work. While I'm not applying enormously complex statistical models, there are still a multitude of things that need simple models to run in real time.

It's not always as complex as it may look on screen. And sometimes it's a lot more complex than

Brendan Le Grange 0:55

I've found myself swamped. Knowing I'd be in South Africa for all of August, I reached out to a few more guests than normal to build up a stack of episodes to tide me over.

And then almost everyone said, yes.

If I followed my normal schedule, that would mean episodes I recorded in early July, would only come out in October, which seems a bit rude. So rather than publishing fewer episodes while I'm away, I'm actually going to publish more: with a South African themed bonus episode every Tuesday of my holiday. This is the first one of those.

Gideon Griebenow finished school the year before I did, on the other side of the country, before doing his PhD in risk analysis, whereafter he joined the South African consumer lending industry - at times working within some of the big banks, and at times consulting to them, until a couple of years ago, when he made a pivot.

We've temporarily rebranded the show before Episode 9 was How to Lend Money to Friends and Family with Craig Smith. Episode 44 was How to Lend Money to Charities with Holger Westphely and episode 55 was How to Lend your Own Money to Strangers with Alex Breshears so, with that in mind, welcome to How to Stop Lending Money to Strangers, and follow your dreams with Brendan le Grange.

Gideon Griebenow, welcome to the show. You and I finished school just a year apart and then we've found ourselves unknowingly sharing a few employers in South Africa's consumer lending space. However, I fell into the industry by accident but I see from LinkedIn that you did your BSC, your MSc, and your PhD all in a row with a focus on risk analysis.

So how intentional was your route into credit risk strategy?

Gideon Griebenow 3:00

I actually started off my first year at university taking maths, computer science, statistics, and physics. I didn't really know what job exactly I want to do one day, but I was very interested in the subjects so I just combined them together. Now, even with a good high school results, the bursaries were quite difficult to come by. And I had to work as a waiter at Spur for about six months when I started out.

Then I managed, luckily to obtain a bursary from ABSA, which is one of the big four banks in South Africa - and that was for studying business mathematics and Informatics at the newly created Centre for BMI at North West University. And I had to catch up by completing two years worth of subjects from the economics side. But it meant that I didn't have to arrive home after midnight after waitering. And it also set me off on a good career with a very saught after skill set.

Other than the bursary, I had no financial support. I was also planning from quite early on, on doing a PhD, which would take another few years. So I realised that I really needed to try and earn some money, if I could. Lecturing at the university was a natural option, of course, and luckily there were a few classes that they offered me. At first, I was an assistant in some of the practical computer classes, running around helping whatever was stuck on something, but I soon handled everything from preparing materials, lecturing classes, setting and grading exams, the problems with the students even. I actually thought of staying at the university as a lecturer and maybe eventually professor as an option, although I think I would have been quite frustrated with pregraduate classes where the students were generally more prone to not really wanting to actually be there, if I can put it that way.

Brendan Le Grange 4:48

So I think in Cape Town, there were perhaps bigger temptations but I don't think we made a Friday math lecture all through summer. I think they were all spent on the beach!

Gideon Griebenow 4:57

But since I had to work back my bursary year for year at ABSA - and after the PhD, this was quite a few years -staying on at the university wasn't really an option.

Brendan Le Grange 5:08

So with your PhD in hand, you then went to ABSA and you jumped into credit risk analytics. This was a time in South Africa, where banks were just starting to test out the data, starting to understand what could be done with it. What was your early career, like? What sort of projects were you involved in?

Gideon Griebenow 5:26

I started off in a very nice, combined retail and wholesale quants team. After a few years, our boss resigned and the team was split into the separate retail and wholesale team. So I was in the wholesale side, and the boss was never really replaced. So I started taking over more and more of the role. Informally, I became the team leader of about four or five people. And they asked me to increase the team to 12 people.

Yes, as you mentioned, it was a crucial time, it was when ABSA had to comply to the advanced IRB regulations, there was a huge project with too many people to count involved. And I'm happy to say that my team played a very crucial role in the success of that IRB project. But it ended on a really disappointing note, actually, I don't want to talk too much about it but I'll give a short summary. Certain members of my team and I were treated fairly unfairly, and I wasn't happy with that. So I kept, kept bringing it up. And then all the while, while we were doing this project, my formal appointment to the team leader role was supposed to be imminent, it was always imminent, but it kept being dragged out for months and months.

And eventually, I was told that the new top brass decided I could not be promoted. He'd just come in, and he decided he wants to stop everything and start from scratch. A meeting was called to discuss the situation with the team. And after that, I can only say disastrous meeting, 11 of the 12 people were in different positions within six months. The last one actually left six months later, as well. I never found joy in that, but it did give me the reassurance that I treated my team properly in standing up against the unfairness and they in turn to stand against it too. It was really a sad end to the chapter.

I moved to PricewaterhouseCoopers for about three and a half years. I enjoyed the the different projects that we worked on, but I have an intense dislike of telling people that I supposedly know almost exactly what needs to be done, how long it will take, and what it will cost them, when realistically nobody really has a good enough idea of that. However, I learned a lot about consulting and that definitely helped me out.

And then I was eventually approached by by Nedbank where I became part of a wholesale quants team again.

Brendan Le Grange 7:47

So you worked for the bank, you worked for consulting firms, but six years ago, you struck out on your own as an independent consultant...

Gideon Griebenow 7:54

How I got to be a consultant is probably more interesting than any of the projects themselves. By that time. I'd negotiated a three day working week, since I just wanted to do more stuff that I was interested in, not necessarily working related, but I just thought I'll probably have enough money, one day, but I'll I'll buy myself out a little bit now so that I can do some of these things. Also, I wasn't as invested in the banking sector as I'd been at the start of my career anymore. It was still a great career, but I did feel myself becoming a bit bored with the repetition. And I had no real aspirations for climbing further up the corporate ladder. So I thought I tried to see how far I can push this freelancing thing.

And it was also a welcome change in terms of the variety of the smaller projects that I was suddenly working on. One unusual project outside of the financial sector that I got involved in was a project based in America, though I was recruited by a company in the Netherlands, that they needed to optimise the way in which they mixed certain source ingredients into different medicinal marijuana mixtures, such that each mixture contained what it needed to in the correct ranges, but for the lowest cost of the ingredients. Now, of course on my side, it was just a fairly complex optimization algorithm, and I never actually got to taste any of the products, but then suddenly, almost by accident, it became time for me to take the biggest offramp yet.

Brendan Le Grange 9:27

Yeah, so we've foreshadowed this a little bit but you were getting bored in lending, you were interested in lots of stuff.... We are not actually here today to talk about your career in lending, we're here to talk about how you gave up lending, put it all on hold to follow a very different dream. What is World Turtles?

Gideon Griebenow 9:49

World Turtles is the result of the nerdiest midlife crisis that I'm aware of.

It's a colony builder video game set on the back of a giant turtle floating through space. It started off as me watching a simple Unity tutorial, and gradually it grew into something with possibly enough potential to become financially viable as a new career for me. I don't think I'll make as much money as I could, but at a certain point the money alone is not necessarily the most important factor.

Brendan Le Grange 10:19

Okay, so let's take a step back now, you were obviously doing a lot of coding in your day to day job. And I'm no expert myself in what SAS and R and SQL can do these days but even I know that it's not the same sort of coding. So how did you get into that? Was it always a hobby of yours, or what got that spark going?

Gideon Griebenow 10:41

When I was young, I always dabbled in this. I remember at school, when we did Turbo Pascal, I tried turning it into a very rudimentary graphics engine, I even took a turn going into assembly language, and so on. I always played around with things like this, until I started university and then that became less and less, because my focus needed to be elsewhere. And I got married and I had four kids, so this basically almost came to a dead end for 10 years maybe. And then, in February of 2019, I stumbled across a Unity tutorial on Youtube for the first time. And I was just amazed that this game development software was available for free to anyone who just wants to spend some time tinkering with it.

I had no experience in C Sharp, which Unity uses, but I've done a lot of VBA in SAS, programming Delphi in the olden days, and so on. And most of this was focused on data handling and implementing complex statistical methodologies, but the fact that I had spent a lot of time coding, even if it was something different, helped me quite a lot. Actually there is a lot that can transfer to game development, the difficulty actually shifts towards how to make sure things work fast enough, especially if you want dozens of buildings and hundreds of units like like I do. It also helps a lot in identifying which tutorials are quality tutorials, and which ones you should rather just skip.

Brendan Le Grange 12:10

Yeah, it's a good thing to call out, having that ability to know is this lesson I'm being given worth the time?

Gideon Griebenow 12:17

I actually did attend a SAS training session on parallel processing at some point. And for game development, if you want a lot of things to happen, you actually need to really understand how to push things off to different threads, and get them back into the main thread without data clashing, to make sure that you could run billions of lines of data through a certain process, get it back and compile it all back together again into one result. At anytime in World Turtles, there's at least three threads running, it goes up a lot more if there's something urgent or something technically complex that needs to happen, but at least three threads are running.

Brendan Le Grange 12:58

Now I've played the demo myself, and I've added World Turtles to my Steam wishlist, something you may as well do now, too, we're just going to play an ad anyway.

But for those that are wanting to get a feel for the game play, what does it look like to play the game?

Gideon Griebenow 13:16

Yeah, we should add what does it sound like and what does it feel like? Since these factors are also extremely important to the whole - how they how they work together is the important part.

It's a low poly style, low poly is a bit more forgiving than trying to go for realism or high detail. There is no way I'd be able to make my first game ever a graphical masterpiece. I know that and it's a limitation but I'm willing to work towards something that is realistic for me to achieve. It's just me and I'm definitely not an artist myself. So I had to take bits from here and there, but I think I understand enough of the technical side of graphics, sound, 3d modelling, etc. to allow me to have meaningful conversations with the people that do help me out from time to time with something. I think I've found enough that looks good together. And that works well together for a whole that feels real and feels authentic.

At heart, it's a colony builder. For the old people listening. I can say it probably plays most like Settlers 2. It's set on a turtle, a world turtle. I use this setting because I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fan and Discworld fan. I actually tweeted Rhianna Pratchett, Terry Pratchett's daughter, telling her when I had a trailer, I sent it to her and I told her I'm working on this game, it's not supposed to be a Discworld game, but it does use the setting, the age old World Turtle myth from the Hindu mythology and many other places on Earth had versions of this myth. And she said as long as it doesn't try to be Discworldy, if it doesn't use characters and locations and certain specific ideas from the Discworld novels, then she has no problem with it. And it keeps me motivated to work on the game.

And the turtle and space actually forms part of the game, it's not just a gimmick. You actually have to feed the turtle, for example, if you don't, it will die. And you can also use that same catapult that you use to feed it with huge balls of food to steer it around in space. So you'll fling the food to the left or the or the right of the turtle to get it to turn slowly to different parts of space. Some parts you may want to avoid, there are climate impacts, it will be hotter or colder, more rain or more drought. And that will impact the way that you play on the world itself. So your crops may not grow as well, certain crops like dry weather, certain crops, like rainy weather, all of that will play a part in the game. Otherwise, it's just a little gimmick that you smile at for two minutes.

There's no battles in it, I'd be dead if I had to design a nice fighting system as well. And people are very particular about battle systems and making something that works well and plays well is quite difficult. And I've got enough to do already. So I'm trying to build in mechanics that keep you busy, that are a bit alternative, like you build the catapult and you build up to the catapult, but you're not going to use it to kill anybody or take somebody's land, you're going to use it to save the world. There's also AI realms that play with you, again, you're not going to be against them, you're actually going to be like the Big Brother, you need to help them along at different points in the game to get them to be strong enough to help you out when you get to the big projects like expeditions.

Being positive, finding ways to make good things happen, instead of finding ways of killing everybody off. And being the sole survivor.

There's another game called The Wandering Village, which also has a lot of these ideas in them. And we actually got to these ideas completely separately, independently. They have pet dinosaur like creature where your village is on and this creature walks around on earth. And there are certain conditions that it walks through that also impacts your world. I've actually contacted the team leader for for The Wandering Village. And we've basically become online friends. She's given me a few shout outs here and there, and it's actually been quite a nice relationship. We're not competition to each other, we're actually friends with each other, and being compared to The Wandering Village is actually good for me.

Brendan Le Grange 17:27

We spoke by email as we were setting this up, we both grew up with the vintage Civilization games. And it's very much caught that joy of those early games, you know, maybe it doesn't have the cinema or real graphics that some games have these days, but it is immersive, it feels good.

And yeah, it's already out there, there's a live demo people can play - or if people just want to keep a track of news as you move towards your full launch - where should they go for that sort of information?

Gideon Griebenow 18:00

The two most important links are the Steam page itself, where you can wishlist and follow the game. If you follow the game, you get all updates that I posted to Steam itself, you can just search for World Turtles and it will come up. I also have a YouTube channel where I post development logs and a few educational videos that I put together while I was learning how to use Unity. And if you want to be more involved in the progress of the game, and give me feedback, to do so please join the Discord server. There are links to everything on the title screen of the demo Steam on Steam.

Brendan Le Grange 18:31

And I'll add those in the show notes here as well. What's it been like building that game? What have you learned? What have you experienced over those two years

Gideon Griebenow 18:39

What I find most appealing about game development is also one of the hardest things about it - it's the extensive variety of skills and knowledge and experience and involvement that is required to teleport you to somewhere else for a while.

There is no room for being disinterested, you really have to be prepared to learn a lot about the things that you don't know, necessarily. So at first, it was really only a hobby. Granted that when I take on a hobby, it's quite a serious endeavour. Then I started to spend more and more time on it and less and less time on new business. In my consultancy, actually, I eventually gave up my long term contract with ABSA.

I mean, it sounds like a silly little thing that you spend your time on, but it's actually a legitimate business. Many people try to make games, spend four months on it, try to upload it and hopefully get a few hits. But if you want to make a career out of it, if you have some ideas that you want to try out long term, it really becomes a business that you need to plan ahead for you need to get your stuff in place. You can't just head into it without planning and without being prepared. If you want to make this work long term, you need to do it the right way and there are certain ways to do it to allow it to take off.

There's definitely a lot of luck involved. Some huge YouTuber maybe sees your game and plays it without you ever being involved in it, that brings you 2,000 or 3000 wishlists, it's not something that you really could do anything about - except make a quality product so that you are ready for that luck when it actually comes, if it actually comes. At some time, I actually decided I'm not going to scrounge around Reddit and Facebook and post my stuff there anymore for I'm just gonna ignore that for a while for a few months and just work on my game and the quality of the product.

Brendan Le Grange 20:26

Yeah, and I think the 'business' label is a really good one to use. Because we obviously live in content creation world now and you can get into YouTubing, get into podcasting - and sure you'll learn as you go, and you'll get a bit better, hopefully - but the barriers to entry are really low. And your feedback cycles very quick. You can record an episode, put it up, and you immediately see if people like it or people do not. If you can get people to watch. But with a game development, you've got this huge development cycle, which is much more like a business where you do have to invest for two years, put all that work in and then launch, there are a few points along the way, you've won some awards and things that maybe we should talk about as well, but you get the feedback points along the way but you really are much more like a startup where you're sitting in your room at home, coding away, coding away, with this two year, three or four year cycle.

So yeah, maybe we should let you brag a little bit, I see you've got some early recognition from the Steam community, the gaming community.

Gideon Griebenow 21:26

At first, the the feedback and the wishlists and the positive feedback really came in quite slowly. I mean, there are 1,000s and 1,000s and 1,000s of people putting their stuff onto Reddit and making YouTube channels with two or three views each and there are just hordes of people thinking they can make a game and become successful and be the next superstar. But that happens for a handful of people. For the rest, I think you need to be realistic. I did this because I just quite enjoyed doing it, I had this idea in my head and I wanted to be a bit creative and see what I could do. And the more I did, the more I realised that I can make it faster by working with threads, I can add more stuff, everything that I thought about adding I found a way to do it, and I did it and it made the game more complete and more immersive and more whole that point that you made that you use sit there in your little room and you spend hours and hours doing this thing because you actually enjoy it.

But you also realise that you can't just spend three years doing this because you need to make some money to keep you going. I spent about two years on the game before I decided to give myself one year off from my career and focus solely on Well, turtles, it's now been seven or so seven or eight months of that year that has passed. And if I look at my wish list graph, there's a flat part in there that that the wish list just didn't come in. But that was a conscious decision to have a good quality product to show someone when they eventually become interested in it. So after about 16 months, I had fewer than 4,000 wish lists, which is not enough to have a good launch - you need 10,000 minimum - but I was happy with the quality of the product.

And then I was accepted into an event. Yeah, two months later, there was also the Steam Next Fest to which you can enter your game once. And in this two months and two weeks, my wish lists jumped up from below 4,000 to above 11,000. So in two months, I made twice as many wish lists as I had in the previous 16 months combine! I'm convinced it's because I spent that time on the game, making it better, making it look better and play better and sound better. Of course, at the beginning, there were people that were very passionate about the game as well and saying that they can't wait for this game to come full circle and be released. And I'm, I'm happy for those people being there. Because it really kept me going. And it showed me that if I can just get enough people to see this, it could actually work one day, as that kept growing. I got this feeling that maybe I should just give myself a year off, live off my savings.

It's a risk, yes, but it's also a risk not to do it.

Brendan Le Grange 24:12

Yeah. And I think there's a great message in there. I mean, there's really good numbers on that front. So I've got two books, and arguably anyone who's read them is gonna say they're not that great, and there's a fair judgement of them, but my first book is free on Amazon. And I think most days I'll get one or two downloads. Over its life. it's got 20,000 downloads, which is a free product you're trying to give away. I think it's good value for free at least! Yeah, you do get YouTube videos that will get a million people in a day for most people, the struggle is to get noticed the first time and it sounds like you're generating some real buzz.

Gideon Griebenow 24:47

It's also quite difficult to figure out which contacts are actually worth it. Early on, I made the decision that I'm actually going to meet with many of these people, most of these people, because I had no idea how the industry works, and I wanted to learn from someone, and I thought this was a good way to learn for free, basically, even if I never go with any of them, I would still have learned a lot about how they do things and you get an idea of the playing field.

Brendan Le Grange 25:18

Yeah, it sounds somewhat overwhelming. I think that's probably the most valuable thing you're going to come away with this ability to, to see the whole big picture. And it's a huge all encompassing picture you're having to wrap your head around. Seems like it's on a good path, but yeah, I wish you the best of luck. I think it's probably a good time again, to remind everybody, where should they go to stay up to date with what's happening.

Gideon Griebenow 25:40

If you go to steamgames.com and you search for World Turtles, you can download the free demo there and the demo contains links to everything.

Brendan Le Grange 25:48

Gideon, thank you again for your time. I've loved having you on.

Gideon Griebenow 25:51

Thank you for this opportunity. It's it's always nice to talk about the game and the dream.

Brendan Le Grange 25:57

And thank you all for listening. If you enjoyed that, please do rate and review on your preferred podcast platform and share widely including on LinkedIn, and while you're there send me a connection request. The show is written and recorded by myself Brendan Le Grange in Brighton, England. Show music is by Iam_Wake and you can find full written transcripts, show notes and more content at www.HowtoLendMoneytoStrangers.show

And I'll see you again next Thursday