If You Understand This About People, You Can Sell Anything

- April 21, 2025 (11 months ago) • 01:14:28

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Elan Lee	We launched this thing saying, "Alright—let's aim for $10,000." We hit our $10,000 goal in 7 minutes, and in the first 48 hours we had $2,000,000. After that is when the story gets really interesting.
00:20	Shaan Puri	Okay, well, Sam, do you want me to kick it off?
00:23	Sam Parr	"Yeah—wait. Well, yeah, I do. First of all, Sean, how did you guys even come in the same world?"
00:28	Shaan Puri	Craig — we invited Craig to the event because he's one of my favorite people. Even though he doesn't play basketball, we were like, "Craig, you gotta be there — you're the exemption. You're not the basketball guy, but we just want you there for sure." We told him what it was. He got excited and he said, "I have somebody who I think should come," and we were like, "Okay, great — who's the plus-one?" And he was... I guess, how long have you guys been friends? </FormattedResponse>
00:50	Elan Lee	It's got to be a decade now. It's so funny because he called me up and said, "Okay, I have the weirdest invitation ever — it's a basketball event but I'm not going to be playing basketball." I was like, "Okay, that's as weird as it gets." Then we started talking, and I'm so glad I went. It was amazing.
01:09	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's actually a big leap of faith for you because, you know, we know Craig, so obviously there's a personal connection there. What did he say that made you get off the couch?
01:16	Elan Lee	For that—I mean, random. He didn't... he honestly didn't give me many details. But in general, Craig is one of those people on this list I have where, if he says to try something, I just try it and don't ask questions. There's only like four people on that list, but he's on there. I'm so glad I did it. </FormattedResponse>
01:33	Shaan Puri	Exactly. Ever since we met you at that event, I was like, "Okay—we have to have you on," because you blew us away. Just to give people context: imagine a room full of about 25 people. We tried to invite the most interesting, ambitious people we could find who also love to play basketball in this case. The room was basically like 30% billionaire—so there were a lot of successful people there. I would say you blew us away the most. You gave a talk that really inspired us. I would say you blew us away for three reasons. Number one: your business is like a giant dragon, but it looks like a playful, cute dragon. People don't look at it and think, "Wow, this is a juggernaut." You have a board games company—if anybody's ever seen the games, like Exploding Kittens, that's your game. Not only is that your game, you were telling us—I'm not sure I want to paraphrase you exactly—but you said, "We have number one, two, four, and five of the top five sold games in the world." I just thought that was incredible. So you have this huge business, but you also have this artist spirit. You're the nicest guy and you're creatively driven. It didn't seem like you got into this for the money; you got into this to have fun. You gave this talk at night—a little ten-minute presentation—that blew us all away. That's why I wanted you to be here. You can respond to that, and then Sam, wanna hear your impressions too before we jump in?
03:03	Elan Lee	Well, first of all... even before that, I would just love to say that is so flattering. I showed up to that event as a fish out of water — impostor syndrome, you know, dripping out my ears. The room was filled with incredible people. Sean — I think it was you — in the very first few minutes I remember I asked you, "Why are we here? What is this thing?" You had the best answer ever: > "Everyone in this room is smarter than I am. I'm gonna spend the next three days learning as much as I can. I hope you're here for the same reasons." I was just like, "Holy crap — I have found my tribe. Here's where I want to be. This is so great."
03:50	Sam Parr	There was one moment when I was with you in the sauna, and you asked me—and maybe Austin Reif or someone—"Can I get you guys' opinion on something?" You expressed opinions about an investor conversation and said, "Can you just give me your take on this?" We gave you our opinions. You asked the question in a way where I thought I was helping you. Then I asked, "How big is your business?" You gave the numbers, and my reply was, "Why are you asking me this question? Like, you are—you are... it's so funny. You win the award for most humble person because you're acting like you are in this room of big shots when, like, of all the people there, you were the big shot." Are you able to give any numbers—whatever you're comfortable with—to give the audience a sense of how big Exploding Kittens is? Like valuation, games sold, revenue... anything you want.
04:42	Elan Lee	I have to be a little careful because we have investors who like to keep it under wraps, but I'll tell you this: we did the math — this was so ridiculous. We sell a game every four seconds, round the clock. We started our company on Kickstarter. In thirty days we were trying to raise $10,000; we raised almost $9,000,000 instead. Our first print run was 700,000 units, and that was mind‑blowing — like, how the hell do you print 700,000 games? For scale, I'll tell you: that is today such a tiny print order for us. I wouldn't even consider printing that many because they'd sell out so fast it wouldn't even be worth our while.
05:31	Shaan Puri	One of the coolest things was when you took us — we went to Target and Walmart — and we were walking around the store. You took us to the games aisle of a Target and you were just kind of breaking it down. You said, "This shelf" — a shelf that I've walked by hundreds of times and don't really pay much attention to. I either buy something or I don't; I don't think about the business of the shelf. You talked about this, like, six-foot space and how that shelf is worth, I mean, I won't use your numbers, but I'll give a generic idea: the shelf represents hundreds of millions of dollars. Every inch of this shelf, for Target, the way they think about it is sales per square inch. You were describing how that works, and then you said, "Yeah, you know, I'm trying to figure out our Walmart sales, so I'm going to go work as a Walmart associate for the next few weeks — just to get kind of an underground look." You clarified it wasn't a marketing stunt: "No, I genuinely want to know." So you said you were going to do that right after our event. Did you end up doing it? "Yeah." </FormattedResponse>
06:30	Elan Lee	They postponed it. Honestly, this tariff thing right now has turned everything into quite a bit of turmoil, but it looks like it's now scheduled for September. I'll be going to Arkansas to work at Walmart for a bit. But the whole reason—you're right—is that it's not a stunt. My goal isn't, "Hey, I want to tell the world about this and get publicity." To sell products at any retail location, you have to understand the customer. You have to understand when they're walking into a space: what are they looking for, what turns them off, and what turns them on? If they pick up a game and then put it back, why did they put it back? A lot of it is contextual. It's not necessarily the game—it's not necessarily, "I looked at this game and it wasn't for me." It's: I looked at this game and then something else caught my eye, so I put this down and picked that up. Those are the stories I need to hear in order to be as successful as possible. I figured the only way I'm going to get this is by living there and spending as long as it takes to talk to people and figure out, "Why'd you put that game down? Why'd you pick that one up? Why'd you walk in here to begin with?" I just think I have so much to learn. I'm really excited to do it.
07:39	Sam Parr	How big is the company in terms of employees, and how old is it?
07:42	Elan Lee	Company-wise, we just had our 10-year anniversary — we just turned 10. We have about 100 employees, a little less. We're based out of Los Angeles, although we've got offices in Canada and in Europe, and kind of all over the place. Everywhere we have a distribution center, we also have an office.
08:05	Shaan Puri	Alright, let's take a quick break because we got something for you. We pinned a survey to one of our videos and asked, "What's the biggest challenge you have right now in your business?" The number one thing you guys said was getting your first 100 customers. That was the most popular response. And of course that's the challenge—if you can't get to 100 customers, you're definitely not going to get to a thousand. So what the team at HubSpot did was go through all the old episodes and pull the stories where I talked about how I got customers for my first business, how Sam did it for his first business, and some guests who talked about what they did—how they scrapped and clawed to get those initial 100 customers to get the ball rolling. Then they put those together in a report. It's a PDF, it's totally free, and you can get it. It'll give you some inspiration and ideas around how you might be able to go get your first 100 customers. Check it out—it's in the description below. So give us the origin story. How did you do this? Why did you decide to create a board game? And how did you run this Kickstarter that blew everybody's socks off? You set out to raise $10k and said you raised $9,000,000 or something like that?
09:02	Elan Lee	Yeah, yeah.
09:02	Shaan Puri	And then, now it's this company that's making— I don't know exactly how much you're making, but you don't have to confirm or deny. I'll just put it out there: I think you've built a billion-dollar games company in a space where, I think, most people— the cool part is most people— think you either are going to choose something for the money: "I gotta go do this sweaty B2B business— HR tech, whatever," or, "I'm going to have fun; I'm going to build something cool that's fun that will give people delight and joy." And you got both. You did both. You did the fun thing, and you ended up with the money prize too. That's why I love your story. So how the heck did this happen? Can you just tell us the kind of origins?
09:40	Elan Lee	Sure. Yeah, it's a bizarre story. I've been designing games my whole life, but the most notable place I worked was at Xbox. I was the Chief Design Officer, building games for Xbox for years. I remember one day I went over to my brother's house—he's got two kids, my niece and nephew, Zeke and Kiki. I was so excited to see them. When I walked in, they were playing Xbox. I said, "Hey, how's everybody doing?" but they didn't even look up—didn't acknowledge my existence. To add insult to injury, they were playing a game that I had designed. I thought, "I've broken something so fundamental here." It just felt wrong. Within two weeks I resigned from Xbox. I told myself whatever I did next had to capture what I remembered from my childhood. When I think about playing games—other than the NES—there really weren't any consoles. We were playing around the table: cheating, kicking each other under the table, throwing food, making alliances and betraying each other. I don't even remember what the games were; I remember the relationships. We looked each other in the eye, could lie to each other's faces, or secretly conspire to make my younger brother lose—that was a favorite activity. Those moments were formative for me. So when I resigned, I decided I wanted to return to that. The first step was simple: design a very simple card game and put it on Kickstarter. I'll try to raise just a little bit of money.
11:37	Sam Parr	"What's a little bit—like $10,000, you thought?"
11:40	Elan Lee	$10,000 — and $10,000 wasn't an arbitrary number. Like, I called up a printer and said, "Look, I want to do this thing. What's the minimum print run?" He said, "You gotta print — you know, I think it was about 400 units." I asked, "Okay, how much does that cost?" It came out to just about $10,000, and I was like, "Cool. There we go." </FormattedResponse>
11:57	Sam Parr	And this was really all because you felt some type of guilt about your family using screens.
12:04	Elan Lee	Yeah, I felt like I was on the wrong path. I felt like I was part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
12:09	Sam Parr	Was that a big—were you getting wealthy from that? I mean, a cheap design offer sounds like you're... you're—that's a big deal.
12:16	Elan Lee	If you had asked me then, the answer would have been "yes." Now, my scale is a little bit different.
12:21	Shaan Puri	So, when you do this, you've never made a card game before, right? You've never—it's not something you grew up doing. You're a beginner at this stage. </FormattedResponse>
12:29	Elan Lee	Totally—literally my first try. But the stakes are so low, right? Like, if I'm just gonna be making a few hundred units, even if the thing is totally broken, that's okay. People are gonna pay $20 for this thing; they know this is my first time ever trying this. This will be easy, right? I showed the game to a bunch of friends, and one of those friends was Matthew Edmond. He is the creator of The Oatmeal, the online comic. He's like the funniest guy I know and he's the audience whisperer—he knows how to command a crowd, get their attention, and keep them engaged. Just this incredible, brilliant mind. I showed him this game and he said, "What's it called?" I said, "It's called 'Bomb Squad' because we got a deck of cards and there's a few bombs in the deck, and those are the bad ones. We try to avoid the bombs and all you're trying to do is get through the deck and not draw a bomb." He said a few things. He said, "One: this is the best game I've ever played. I would really, really like to work on this with you. Will you please let me work on this with you?" I was like, "Yes—hell yes." If The Oatmeal ever asks you if he can work on a game with you, your answer is yes. Holy crap, what an opportunity. He said, "Cool. Second: we can't call it 'Bomb Squad' because it's too obvious. Bombs are bad, of course you're scared of the bomb. There's bombs in the deck, you're scared of the bombs—it's called 'Bomb Squad.' Who cares? You're gonna forget that in five seconds. What if instead the thing that you were most scared of were cute, adorable, fuzzy little kittens? We'll call the game 'Exploding Kittens' instead." And that's really the origin story. One simple conversation, meeting the right person at the right time, and we decided to collaborate on this thing. Then we had the discussion with the distributor, and he's like, "Matt said we're gonna make—we're gonna do more than 400 units." I was like, "I don't know. I don't know. This is totally risky. Neither of us ever made a game before." A friend of mine, a guy named Dan Shapiro—he runs Glowforge—gave me this incredible advice when I was talking to him about what number to set our Kickstarter campaign. He said, "Look, when this campaign runs you have no control. There's gonna be stories written about your campaign, but you don't control any of them. They get to set the narratives and you just sort of hold on. But what you can control are the stories like 'tried to raise X, instead raised Y'—hit their goal in X minutes," and so on.
14:56	Shaan Puri	Right.
14:57	Elan Lee	All of these data-driven stories—you control those by setting that one number you have control over, and setting it in the appropriate place. He was totally right. So, we set it at 10,000, knowing this is probably a little low, but it is the truthful minimum we need for our order minimum. Now we can control those stories. </FormattedResponse>
15:17	Sam Parr	Were any of you guys, like, famous back then? I know what The Oatmeal is, but is that big enough that he's like, "Dude, I'll blow this up—just tell me when"?
15:26	Elan Lee	It turns out the answer is yes, but none of us really knew it at the time. We launched this thing saying, "Alright, let's aim for $10,000," because Matt made a single post saying, "Hey, Oatmeal fans — for the first time ever I made a game I'm really proud of. I hope you like it. Here it is." We hit our $10,000 goal in seven minutes, and it was because of Matt — 100% Matt. He made one post, hit $10,000, and then within the first twelve hours (maybe it was closer to 24) — ten years ago — we raised $1,000,000, 100% because of that. In the first 48 hours we had $2,000,000, 100% because of that. After that is when the story gets really interesting. Forty-eight hours in, all the Oatmeal fans who were going to back this thing had already backed it. They'd seen the post, they knew what it was, they were interested or they decided they weren't, and they'd either purchased it or not. And that's it — the sales pace on that was $2,000,000. Amazing. We were off to the races. We could do anything now. Matt and I sat down and said, "Okay, we now have a choice." Either we can say, "We have raised $2,000,000; that is one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history in the games category," and just kind of ride this thing out, knowing we're not going to raise much more than that — maybe we'll get to $2.5 million and declare that a huge victory. Or we can bet it all: what if we went absolutely crazy and deployed every marketing strategy either of us has ever heard of? We shook hands and said, "Let's do it. Let's try as big and as bold as this thing can possibly be." On Kickstarter they've got these things called "stretch goals," right? We've met our game, but if we raise, I don't know, $20,000, everybody gets a free carrying case. $50,000, we're going to add 10 more cards into the game. Stretch goals are meant to motivate people to back the project. I sat down and I thought: this whole thing is crowdfunding, and all of those stretch goal strategies — every strategy I've read, every YouTube video I've watched — is based on funding. They ignore the crowd part and are just laser-focused on funding, funding, funding. I thought that's backwards. I think instead we should ignore the funding — because we've already got $2,000,000 — and focus on the crowd part. So instead of doing traditional stretch goals, all of our stretch goals were based on the crowd. We said, "Look, we don't care about money anymore. Don't give us any more money. We don't want any more money. Nothing we talk about from now on is going to be about money, because the funding doesn't matter. Let's have a party and everyone is invited." We still offered the same things — a carrying case, 10 extra cards, all that fun stuff — but it wasn't based on how much money you give us. It was based on how much fun you have. Show us a picture of 10 Batmans in a hot tub, whatever the hell that means. Show us a picture of 100 people dressed up as cats. Show us the craziest, most interesting things you can come up with. Every time you do that, we're going to make the game better, and you're not going to pay us more — we're just going to make the game better because this is fun and we've already raised enough money. Let's have a party. We did that for the next 28 days and watched our numbers skyrocket. I'm going to focus on the crowd part here: we had, I don't know, let's say we had a thousand backers at that…
19:05	Elan Lee	By the end of this thing, we had 219,000 backers for this campaign. That is, so far, in first place of any Kickstarter campaign in history to date. It's been ten years, and no one's even come close to that record. It's because we said the funding is completely irrelevant — all that matters is the crowd. The funding was a really nice side effect, though. </FormattedResponse>
19:27	Sam Parr	But it was $8.5 million.
19:29	Elan Lee	You got right. Well, yeah, there was that, too.
19:31	Shaan Puri	So wait — give us an example. You said "10 Batman in a bathtub." What were the other things you did to get the crowd to...?
19:37	Elan Lee	Do—yeah. We said: one of our characters in our game is called Taco Cat, which is my favorite character, right? "Taco Cat" is a palindrome: spell "taco cat" backwards and you've still got "taco cat." We had this adorable character and we said, "Look, we don't actually know what Taco Cat is, but show us 25 pictures of real Taco Cats and we'll make the game better."
19:54	Sam Parr	When you say "show us," do you mean, like, post in the comment section? Post? Yeah.
19:58	Elan Lee	Post. So it was.
19:58	Sam Parr	Basically, just like an online message board that you were using, and what we...
20:02	Elan Lee	You used whatever social media platform you wanted. We just said, "Tag us on it," and that's all we care about.
20:08	Shaan Puri	And so that was the virality. They were posting a goofy image that didn't make any sense in the feed, and they tagged you guys. That got people curious to go check you out.
20:16	Sam Parr	Yeah. Is that... what the hell?
20:16	Elan Lee	It's working. "Why have you stuffed your cat into a burrito? What is happening here?" And on and on—those pictures just kept coming. We had this veterinarian who worked in an animal shelter. She showed us a picture of her holding this adorable cat on a piece of paper. The piece of paper showed that she had legally changed the cat's name to "Taco Cat"—for real. We're like, "Alright, that's about as real a Taco Cat as it gets," so we gave credit for that one as well. And it just went on and on like that for thirty days. Every time we thought, "Here's a challenge way too hard," they absolutely smashed them. Then our challenge every day was, "How do we come up with five new challenges that's gonna keep everyone entertained?"
20:57	Shaan Puri	You have these little one-liners that are like, "What if instead of the funding, we focused on the crowd?" It's this simple idea that you then run with. If I were going to describe you, I'd say he takes silly ideas very seriously... there's... </FormattedResponse>
21:12	Sam Parr	Old Charlie Munger.
21:13	Shaan Puri	"Take a simple idea and take it seriously." I think yours is "take a silly idea and take it seriously." You do that with your games, with your marketing campaigns, and you did this when we were at the event. We do this thing where we put everybody on the hot seat. Let's say somebody's a real estate mogul—we'll just, instead of saying "Hey, tell us about your business," say, "Alright, so how do you make a billion dollars in real estate? What's the secret?" In your case, what's the secret? How do you make hit game after hit game after hit game? In a hits business that normally sounds like a game of chance, you're doing it again and again and again. You must know something, and you said a great line. Can you describe your philosophy around games, because you said it in a one-liner that just stuck with me?
21:56	Elan Lee	Yeah. Oh, I love that you focused on this one. So the line is: > "Games should not be entertaining. Games should make the people you're playing with entertaining." That simple line is a very silly line. I remember the first time we pitched it to our investors — we said, "We're not going to make entertaining games," and they said, "Never say that again. Never put that in any piece of writing ever." Instead, we put it as the first line on our web page. Because if you're making an entertaining game, you're trying way too hard. It's you versus the audience, which means when you're done entertaining them, they're going to go away and never come back. If instead your goal is, "I'm just making a toolset. My toolset is going to make the people that you are playing with the entertainment," suddenly you've got an engine. Every time they play it's different. They constantly want to come back. They want to play it over and over again. They want to take it to a new friend's house. You make a piece of cardboard — a deck of cards — you've turned that into a viral engine. And that's the secret to success in the board game industry.
22:59	Sam Parr	But that sorta is like going to The Met and seeing a Picasso and being like, "Dude, it's just, like, scribbly lines — this is unimpressive." You dismissing it as just a— it doesn't explain why your company is potentially worth billions of dollars and makes potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. What is actually happening? Because, like, we've had all these rich and successful billionaires on the pod [podcast]. I’ll meet them and I'm like, "Oh, you're really nice," and then I start thinking, "Well, no — this guy's a shark. You must be a shark to be this successful." So, like, what else are you not telling — what are you not telling us that has allowed this company to become a potentially, allegedly, multibillion-dollar company?
23:43	Elan Lee	Well, one is you have to do it consistently, which is hard. But how do you tell if your game is a toolset to make people entertaining and liked? Unless you have the litmus test—unless you can quantify the data that you're putting in those boxes—then it's just a theory. I remember we started taking submissions from external inventors. I eventually started rubber-stamping them with, "Here's why we're rejecting you: you're trying too hard to be entertaining." It was incredible—of these submissions, every game designer was making the same mistake: "I am building an entertaining thing." I kept having to remind them, "We're not buying entertaining things." Eventually we found one or two inventors we could work with, and then I had to design all the others, which is totally cool because I know what I'm looking for. But how do you test it? How do I know that I'm hitting that mark way before the thing hits the market? By then we could have already screwed it up. So I figured out one bit of quantifiable data that lets me back up the claim: when I say a game is not entertaining, it makes the players entertaining, I can prove it. The way I can back it up is in our testing procedure. We have this group of 400 families called the Kiddie Test Pilots, and all we do is send them games all day long and ask for feedback. It used to be we would send them this crazy Google form: "How long did you play? How many players? How old are they? What was your favorite part? What was the part you hated? What part needs work?" Thirty, forty questions. I realized nobody's reading these. By the time I finished reading their answers, I hadn't actually learned anything about whether or not this game had made the players entertaining. Now we send out a questionnaire with one question—just one, start to finish. That question is: "Do you want to play again?" I have found that this question is the most direct, heat-seeking missile to answer whether you've made the players entertaining. If a game is entertaining, you have extracted almost all the entertainment from it on your first trip through. But if the players are entertaining, you want to play again. We only ship games where 100% of that question's answers are "yes." If we get even a single "no," we dive into that person's submission, watch the videos, and figure out what happened—because they should want to play again. If they don't, we've got something to fix.
26:21	Sam Parr	I think the most successful people—Sean, have you ever studied personality tests and read about agreeableness? I've heard that people who are most successful rank very low on agreeableness.
26:35	Elan Lee	Right.
26:36	Sam Parr	That what you're...
26:36	Shaan Puri	Disagreeable is a positive trait for founders.
26:38	Sam Parr	Yeah, because a very simple example is: you don't accept how things are done. You disagree with that, so you want to go make your own. Oftentimes, people who rank high on disagreeableness are jerks. Elan, you do not — you are not a jerk. You are objectively a sweet person. But you seem to be hiding this disagreeableness. For example, you have incredibly high standards, or you just made a survey where, if it's a large staff, they might say, "Well, we have to ask 10 questions; we can't just ask one question," but you're like, "No, no, no — you see, this makes sense for this reason." Do people enjoy working with you? I'm fascinated by how you're able to be disagreeable but also polite — and it seems very effective.
27:31	Elan Lee	It depends on who you ask. I think my team likes working with me, at the very least—very few people ever quit. But if you ask our printers or our distribution partners, I think they hate working with me—despise it. The reason is that I am absolutely a perfectionist. What I do for a living is make little "boxes of joy." For example, in Exploding Kittens you don't know which card is an exploding kitten; it has to be a surprise. That means the backs of every card have to be identical. If I can detect one degree off in the Pantone registration of this card versus that one, I'm sending the entire shipment back—no matter how many millions are in it. I'm not paying a penny; you are going to reprint them for me. They hate me, and I get it. But I don't think the company would be where it is today if I had said, "Yeah, we'll just ship it that way and the next run will be better."
28:38	Shaan Puri	I love that you also have an approach to marketing that I think is very different than most founders. It was really inspiring to me when I started to hear these stories. Can you talk about some of the unconventional hustle things? If I'm listening to this right now, I'm like: okay, cool — he had a cool, sick job at Xbox, he quit, and his first-hit wonder was Exploding Kittens, which has been the number one game in the world for — I don't know — how many years now. His buddy happened to be The Oatmeal, so he had instant distribution. Must be nice, right? I'll — I'll — I'll just be the YouTube comment guy for a second: "Yo, must be nice to have connected, powerful friends. That's why I'm not successful," right? I think that's where most people land. What they don't know is that first, there's all this: that person's not just your friend. There's actually luck that you create along the way to create those types of opportunities. So either you could talk about that, or you could talk about some of the hustle tactics you guys did — like the vending machine and other stuff you guys have done — where you were not just handed the keys to the castle, but you actually scraped your way there.
29:47	Elan Lee	Yeah, yeah. I mean, look — the company you've just described is a company that would disappear in eight months, right? There's no longevity at all. Once you have a hit game — which requires a lot of luck but also a lot of skill — once you've gotten that, the skill really has to kick in. Now you have to make sure that thing doesn't disappear. You have to make sure your next ten games are also successful. You need to ensure the profit margin on each game is where it should be. You need to make sure you build a community. On and on and on. So I'll give you a few examples, and they're all kind of marketing. Once you have a company — once you have any degree of success — you have to be able to double down on that and get your audience to care passionately. We used to go to this convention in Seattle called PAX (Penny Arcade Expo). We were a tiny company. We had no money for marketing. We'd had this one successful Kickstarter campaign; we spent literally every penny producing the product and building the company, and now our bank account is empty. We show up to this thing and we've got no ability to get people's attention. Advertising is expensive — they literally rent out every square inch of the walls there — so anything you want to do costs money, which we don't have. So I had this idea...
31:04	Sam Parr	And this convention is to impress other game makers or vendors to carry your game.
31:09	Elan Lee	Exactly—that. All of the above, right? You're building a fan base, you're building other relationships, you're trying to get distribution, and you're trying to get into retail stores. The only thing we had ever sold was a single product on Kickstarter, and now we have nothing left.
31:24	Shaan Puri	If you go to one of these exhibits, you become an exhibitor. Your booth—like the big games—people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars ($100,000s) just on the booth, right? Then you sign up to be a booth, but you're just a fold-out picnic table in Section F—over, you know, past the bathrooms. That's right: just sitting there, hoping somebody walks by your shitty table. And you're like, "How am I supposed to compete with that?"
31:47	Sam Parr	It's like Michael Scott in the "Job Fair" episode, where he's like, "You literally just have a table and you're trying to convince people to do the good idea."
31:54	Elan Lee	I had a crappy sign that I printed on my little inkjet printer, and that's on the folding table — that's it. The very first year I was actually very proud of it. I knew we had to have marketing space and I couldn't find any that we could afford, so I made these little kittens. I cut them out — little adorable kittens with our logo. The kitten was holding a bomb and it said "Exploding Kittens," with a fuse. I secretly put one of those inside every urinal in the convention center [convention: PAX?], so you had to pee on them to extinguish the bomb. It mobbed our booth — people wanted to see who made these things so much that the organizers came to us and said, "You can't do this." I was like, "Well, show me the part of my contract where it says I can't do this. I understand you don't want me to do this, but show me where I can't." They said, "Alright, well we're not going to prohibit you from doing this because you're right — you found a space that is just nowhere in our guidelines. But we'll tell you this: next year we're going to start charging for that space." I haven't checked because we haven't been back to PAX, but I think they now charge for urinal advertising space thanks to this little stunt.
33:09	Shaan Puri	"We pull. You have to—do you want to go get them out of there, or are you expecting me to?"
33:13	Elan Lee	Do extract a.
33:14	Shaan Puri	Single one of those—that's actually genius.
33:16	Sam Parr	"The second year is when you did the vending-machine thing."
33:18	Shaan Puri	Because the...
33:18	Sam Parr	The vending machine thing is insane.
33:19	Elan Lee	Yeah. Okay, so the vending machine was trying to solve the problem on a more permanent basis. Like, I do this urinal thing and they shut it down, and honestly it just wasn't big enough. That got us a few hundred people every day, but how do I get tens of thousands of people every day? I looked at our little folding table and thought: people come up to this thing, they give us money — they give us $20 — they get a box and walk away. They have no memory of that transaction because all that really is is a vending machine. You go, you put money in the vending machine, you push a button, you get your soft drink, you walk away, and you have no lasting memory of the interaction. There's nothing remarkable about it. So I thought, alright, if we're going to be a vending machine, what if we were the world's coolest vending machine? The most spectacular vending machine the world has ever seen. I took an old refrigerator box I had in my garage — this big, eight-foot-tall cardboard box. We cut some holes in it and covered it with fur and giant googly eyes so it looked like a cat. We built an eight-foot-tall, fur-covered cat. We cut out a hole for a screen to put a display, and it had little buttons and a little credit card reader. It had everything a vending machine should have. The experience was: you walk up to this thing, put in your money, push a button, and a game comes out. Very, very simple. We weren't talking anything crazy expensive or really remarkable yet — other than, okay, it's fur-covered, it looks like a cat, that's kind of adorable. Nobody's ever seen a vending machine like this before, and that attracted a crowd. But then we had to push it over the top. I put in an extra button labeled "random item $1" — way cheaper than a game. What the hell does that mean? Enough people were willing to try this experiment: what happens if I put a dollar in this and push "random item"? They put a dollar in, pushed random, and out came a pineapple from the vending machine, or a hot burrito, or a bag of rocks, or a plumber's...
35:22	Shaan Puri	And it's just you behind it, just sticking your hand.
35:24	Elan Lee	"Out with a pineapple, or..."
35:25	Sam Parr	"What? What?"
35:25	Elan Lee	So this was the thing. This is what we didn't tell anybody: everyone assumed this was the world's most sophisticated vending machine because it can deliver 2,000 different objects. People literally brought up chairs and built little bleachers around it, just to watch for hour after hour after hour to see what the hell was going to come out of this thing.
35:42	Sam Parr	And basically, for the listener it looks like just a box. But the box backed up to a curtain, and behind the curtain I would imagine you had a whole team of people.
35:52	Elan Lee	So, the punch line: instead of it being a vending machine, it was just a vending machine costume. There was no robotics, no computers—nothing. There were eight of us sweating our asses off for ten hours a day backstage. Every time someone pushed that random-item button, we were literally pulling a random item and throwing it out the front of the machine. We had a line so long it blocked our aisle. It blocked all the other super-expensive, million-dollar booths. Nobody could walk up to those anymore because our line was so long. It went out the door, out of the convention center, down the street. The line for a silly little fur-covered vending machine was longer than the line to get into the convention itself. All of that was just because we had no money and had to think creatively about what it means to build a community around a transaction. That's what we came up with.
36:50	Sam Parr	"Sean, have you ever read about Dr. Feynman?"
36:53	Shaan Puri	Richard Feynman
36:54	Sam Parr	Richard Feynman. Yeah — sorry. Yeah, have you read about him?
36:56	Shaan Puri	So, yeah — a little bit. Why? What comes to mind here?
36:59	Sam Parr	He would get super hands-on with the problem and question everything. He would start at the very foundation of the question and basically not accept any "truths" before him. He would have to question each one in order to solve a problem. One big example of this is he helped create the atomic bomb. They questioned all these previously held rules that he broke. Elon kind of has that same approach, and I admire it because I work really hard to have this mindset, but I still don't have it entirely. It doesn't come naturally to me and I don't excel at it. I think that, for everyone listening, this skill set is really important: how do you be really creative? The framework is to question everything at the very beginning and don't assume anything you've ever been told is true. Is that right?
37:51	Elan Lee	Yeah, yeah. I think that's accurate. And never take "no" for an answer. It makes no sense to ever have someone shut you down for any reason. The vending machine is a great example—one of my favorites. We installed this thing in a convention center where we were handing out pineapples, watermelons, and other ridiculous objects. We were putting googly eyes on them, giving them mohawks, and all kinds of fun stuff. We got to a convention in Indianapolis and they said, "You can't do this because we cannot let you ship the produce backstage to your space on the convention floor." I asked why, and they said, "You've exceeded what we call a casual purchase. The only way that we can accept that much produce is if you're a registered grocer, and you're not a registered grocer, so you can't do this anymore." My whole team thought, "Okay, here's a dead end—we need to think through what objects we can do instead." I got frustrated and said they were just accepting a dead end, and I didn't think we needed to. It turned out to be trivial to become a registered grocer. I went to a website, filled out a form, and paid about $100. Today, Exploding Kittens is a registered grocer in Indiana—and in 14 other states—because it's that easy. So every convention we go to, we can now accept shipments backstage because Exploding Kittens is also a grocery store.
39:29	Shaan Puri	I love that when we were doing our event, MrBeast — Jimmy Donaldson — and his production documents... like his training document for his team. It's an older one, but it had leaked online. It's really fascinating to read, because here you have a guy who wrote this probably when he was 22, 23, 24 years old. So it's kind of like he's an expert at 24. But he is an expert in YouTube; he'd actually been doing it for over a decade. He's the most successful YouTuber on the planet, and he's like, "I know how to make videos that people watch." One of the things he talks about in there: he goes, "push past the no." Just because you receive an initial no from somebody absolutely does not mean that it's a no forever, that it's a no under any circumstance. There are some caveats. If you come back and you just say, "I asked; you said no," that's not an acceptable answer in our organization. He gives an example: he wanted the pyramids for a video — the Egyptian pyramids — and his team told him no. He goes: > "What do you mean, like who told you no? Egypt told you no? Who'd you call? What did they say? Why'd they say no? Did you call the other guy? Who's the other guy? Give me the number — let's call them. Do they have kids? Let's FaceTime their kids, let's see if that works. What are the different ways that we could do this?" To just accept an initial no is basically out of the question. Is it culturally unacceptable at the company?
40:51	Elan Lee	I think that trait, more than anything, is what I've seen in successful business owners. I don't know if it can be taught. It's more just that—when you hear the word "no", there are two possible reactions. One is, "Damn it." The other is, "I didn't hear that properly—let me dig deeper." It has to be instinctual. Every time you hear the word "no", you have to think, "Okay, I didn't hear that properly; let me dig deeper," over and over and over again. I love that.
41:19	Shaan Puri	Like, it's not just being a jerk and saying, you know, just pushing—just pushing on them. It's about being curious, or clever, or playful, and trying to figure things out. For example: "If I had a trillion dollars, maybe you'd say yes." Okay, so let's just agree it's not physically impossible to do this.
41:34	Elan Lee	Right.
41:35	Shaan Puri	Okay. Once it's not physically impossible, that means there is a way. Let's just see what that way might look like.
41:40	Elan Lee	It's so good. Maybe the better way to phrase it is: when someone tells you "no," instead of assuming that's the answer, assume you asked the wrong question.
41:47	Sam Parr	Hey, Sean. We did this thing. I was talking to David, the guy who hosts the podcast Founders, the other day, and we did a show called "The Anti-Business Billionaires." There are a handful of billionaires who shockingly don't care about revenue and profit. They're very passionate about whatever it is they're making. The guy who started Patagonia is one of them — he just doesn't seem to care about money. James Dyson, who started Dyson, is another; oddly, he's obsessed with making vacuums. Do you care at all about revenue and profit, or do you just see it as... do you care about business?
42:27	Elan Lee	I didn't originally. Now, once I figured out how to look at business as another game that can be won, I suddenly started caring passionately about business. I used to think, "Alright, I don't actually want to be CEO of this company. What I want to be is lead designer — I'm going to hire a CEO." We tried that for a while, and what I realized is everyone we hired into that spot was playing the game the wrong way, and I wanted to play instead. So now I actually love strategy meetings. I love business meetings. I love when we go in and talk about the next ten years, or how we're going to solve a very particular problem about a convention, a game launch, or a partnership. That is such a fun game. In high school I loved physics. Physics was my favorite subject until I realized I needed to switch to computer science. The reason I needed to switch was that in physics everything they were teaching had the answer in the back of the book. If you had a problem, you could just flip to the back of the book. Computer science was very different. It was cutting edge — there were no answers in the back of the book at all. You had to figure everything out as you went, and that was really exciting for me. That was a life-changing moment when I was 16. That's what business is to me: there are no answers in the back of the book. If you want to win this game, you have to figure out what the rules are, invent your own where you need to, and get to that finish line before anybody else.
43:59	Sam Parr	Look at Sean's hands, and look — I just realized that whenever we do this, you got us. Yeah. </FormattedResponse>
44:08	Shaan Puri	You got, like—you know when you're talking to a girl and she puts her hair behind her ear? There's an indicator of attraction. When you're talking about this, I'm like, "This is beautiful." I mean, just the way you're describing it... there's no answers in the back of the book. Like, dude, that's inspiring. I... I love that. I love that stuff. I also think there are other things we can learn from you, so...
44:28	Sam Parr	You know, I've learned from...
44:29	Shaan Puri	You on the marketing side — maybe we'll just close the loop on the marketing idea. It's one thing to hear the idea of the vending machine and think, "Oh wow, that's a great idea; I'm interested." But what is the mindset that creates that idea? What are the questions you ask? How do you brainstorm? What are you doing differently that's leading you to those crazy answers that actually work? I don't know if you can describe it, or if this is like asking Steph Curry how to shoot a jump shot. He might say, "I don't know, just kinda flick my wrist — it just goes in," when actually a thousand little things are happening that he's not even attuned to. For example, you said something like, "what if..." — what if questions are a great tool in the toolbox for a creative thinker. It's very different than saying, "we should..." The language changes everything. What are some other things you do when you brainstorm?
45:21	Elan Lee	I love parameters. I hate blue-sky brainstorming—the idea that, like, “Hey, let's sit down and create a game” is the most terrifying experience in the world for me. Or, “Let's sit down and brainstorm anything and we don't know what it is.”
45:36	Sam Parr	So, what are the parameters for the last handful of meetings that you've had?
45:39	Elan Lee	Yeah, so... okay. Let me back up and say: you asked about marketing for a convention, right? I told you the story about the vending machine, but I also said the parameters are baked into it. We didn't start by saying, "What's the coolest experience we can have at a convention?" Right. We started by saying, "This is a vending machine transaction — there's our parameters. What is the coolest vending machine experience we can craft?"
46:05	Sam Parr	We also said, "How do we get tens of thousands of people to come without spending money?"
46:09	Shaan Puri	Instead of 300, right? A sort of an unreasonable target.
46:13	Elan Lee	"Unreasonable is totally reasonable." It's fine to set your goals that high as long as you understand the parameters of the problem. If I were to sit down and say, "How do we get 10,000 people to come to our booth?" I'm not going to get anywhere. I just have no chance of success there. But if I sit down and say, "I am going to build a vending machine that must attract 10,000 people," now I'm running — now I'm busy for the next ten months building that thing because I know what that...
46:41	Sam Parr	Dude, is that shockingly a useful tip? Because I do the other thing, where I just say, "How do I get..."
46:46	Shaan Puri	How do I get the 10,000?
46:47	Elan Lee	How do...
46:47	Sam Parr	I get 10,000 people to come.
46:49	Elan Lee	Yeah, no. There are people who are great at it. Like—you mentioned MrBeast (Jimmy); he is exceptional at that. I listened to your interview with him, and you're spitting out random nouns while he's coming up with incredible ideas. He is exceptionally talented at that. I suck at it. I need to know exactly the shape of the box, and I will build you the coolest contents for that box in history. But unless I understand what that box is capable of holding, I just—I have no chance of success.
47:24	Shaan Puri	So it sounds like one way to put it is: "creativity loves constraints." You use the constraint—you start with the constraint rather than starting with just the desired outcome, right? The desired outcome is there; it's part of the goal, it's the parameters. But you actually start with a constraint in order to get yourself to think a little bit differently. Do you have any other examples of this constraint-style of thinking?
47:47	Elan Lee	We're asked to build a board game for a few different NFL teams. What does that mean? How do you get an NFL audience to play a board game? If you were to just leave it there, you kinda don't have a chance. You're basically saying, "Build a good game — go." Me, personally, I'm gonna suck at that task, but what we started to do was... and you're...
48:13	Shaan Puri	Like the best in the world at doing this, yeah. And so, if you're gonna suck at it, we're all gonna suck. </FormattedResponse>
48:17	Elan Lee	At a chance of success, I promise you: zero chance of success. So instead, we sat down and said, "Okay, what is football like? What are the best moments?" I started writing a list. My list was the magical moment where a player catches the ball against all odds — everyone's covering them; it's impossible. Somehow it was a perfect throw, a perfect catch, and off they went to score. I personally really focused on that. </FormattedResponse>
48:48	Sam Parr	Do... do you even care about football?
48:50	Elan Lee	Football matters very little to me. But that's only because it's very hard for me to watch people having fun without wanting to do the same thing myself.
48:59	Sam Parr	"That's pretty funny, but the reason I'm asking is because this is your perspective as a total outsider, where you just created the rules and..."
49:08	Elan Lee	Yeah, well, it's watching other people, right? My family is obsessed with it, so I watch them watch football and I'm like, "Oh, that moment there. Okay, that moment there." So we eventually built this game. It's called Catchables. All it is: we made these cute little foam figures and we had an increasing series of challenges defined by the other players, because the other players have to provide the entertainment. You have to throw an object — this little character — in the air and just catch it. So simple: "throw it, catch it." Really easy. But now players are going to start throwing cards at you. You have to be blindfolded. You have to spin around before you catch it. You can only use one hand. You can only use two fingers. And what if I give you 10 of those cards at the same time? Now that very simple "throw and catch" has become really, really entertaining for everyone to watch. You defy the odds and at the last moment pull it off despite everyone's expectation, and the crowd goes...
49:57	Sam Parr	This sounds so trivial — this is actually pretty groundbreaking. So let's give a very specific example that's not related to you. Sean works in the e-commerce industry. Let's just say that Sean sells shoes and owns a shoe company. Let's say growth has stagnated. He comes to a meeting and says, "We need to... our company needs to improve. We have to be better." What would be interesting constraints in order to make Sean's company better and make the meeting productive?
50:27	Elan Lee	Yeah. What you'd want to do with a shoe company — I've never worked in shoes before, so bear with me — is anything you throw at me, I'm going to try to tie back to a community. I'm going to try to tie it back to: how do I, by wearing these things, form more lasting, reasonable, exciting connections with other people? So, what if you started printing out beautiful, incredible shoes that you'd be proud to wear — you'd love every single shoe that you make — but everyone has half a secret message on it and somebody else has the other half. Put your shoe next to theirs to read it. Suddenly you have a reason not only to tell your friends to buy some (or buy more yourself), but you also have a reason to go seek them out in the world. You're walking through a crowded airport and you see someone with those shoes. Walk right over to them, put your foot next to theirs, right — match. "Yeah, exactly." So now there's a very low percentage hit there, and you'd have to probably redesign it to have a much higher percentage hit. That's very achievable. But again, the first thing I'm going to do is define a constraint and say: a successful shoe equals a reason to look for more of those shoes out in the world, because then more of those shoes are going to sell.
51:43	Sam Parr	"That's pretty great."
51:43	Shaan Puri	Wow. Just yesterday I was with my wife and we were walking out somewhere, and this woman had a little Trader Joe's bag. She goes: > "Hey, sorry to bother you, but is that that bag that everyone's going crazy about online?" And I— in my mind I'm like, "People are going crazy about Trader Joe's bags nowadays... what’s going on?" I guess there's a certain design of a Trader Joe's bag, and it's not even like limited edition or luxury. I don't know the full story, but it kinda highlighted to me that you could take any moment—it's the moments in between the moments—and if you do something interesting there, you give people a reason to feel special, a reason to connect, a reason to collect, a reason to do one of those things. It's like, damn: how much wasted surface area is there in my businesses where, by just applying creativity, we could create magic? We create—it's alchemy, right?—we create value for people if we were just a little more intentional versus just going on autopilot. And I think 99% of the time I'm just on autopilot in my businesses.
52:43	Elan Lee	I totally get it, and I've been there as well. Can I tell you a story? I'm so proud of a particular solution to that problem.
52:52	Shaan Puri	Okay, go.
52:52	Elan Lee	Ahead, my daughter's Exploding Kittens is not the number-one selling game in the world; it's the number-two best-selling game. Number one is a game called Hurry Up, Chicken Bite—I designed that with my daughter. When she turned four, I was so excited, because most games are labeled ages four and up. We went out and bought all the games: Candy Land, Zingo, all the classics. We took them home and started playing, and I immediately noticed a problem: I was having a miserable time. She was happy—playing with her dad, seeing bright, flashy colors—everything designed for kids. But I was bored out of my mind. What resulted was two things. One: I let her win, because if I tried at all I'd crush this poor four-year-old. Two: when we finished, she would say, “Hey, Daddy, can we play again?” and all I was thinking was, “Oh God, no. I am so miserable. I did my time. We played the game; I'm going to go do something fun now.” I remember having that reaction, and it must have shown on my face. My daughter asked, “What's wrong?” I said, “I think this game is broken.” She said something brilliant: “Let's fix it.” Fireworks started going off in my head—why are we not fixing this? We spent the next month working on it. We split the work: my daughter drew pictures of all the fun things she wanted in a game, and I started writing a list of what success looks like. For me, success meant: - My daughter has to beat me without me letting her win. - I have to look forward to playing again. - The game cannot be luck-based. - I have to watch my daughter get better at the game every time we play. - I have to feel like she's learning something. - There cannot be any losers: she can win, but nobody can lose.
54:55	Sam Parr	So, those are your constraints.
54:56	Elan Lee	Those are my five.
54:57	Shaan Puri	And by the way, did you start with just things you hated?
55:00	Elan Lee	Yeah, for sure. I'm saying it like, "Oh, overnight I came up with these five things," but the list was about 25 items long, and I narrowed it down to those five, which were the most important.
55:08	Shaan Puri	I'm writing this book on creativity right now. Jerry Seinfeld has this great quote: "Irritation is what causes innovation." He basically created Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee because he just hated going on late-night talk shows and doing the same thing every time. He's like, "All right—a talk show that has none of those things. In fact, my irritation is gonna be my source of innovation." Sounds like...
55:27	Sam Parr	You good?
55:28	Shaan Puri	All of those things you talked about were sources of personal irritation for you.
55:32	Elan Lee	Every one of them.
55:32	Shaan Puri	For.
55:33	Elan Lee	Sure. Everyone—these were the things that everybody was doing wrong and that were the industry standard. Nobody had raised their hand and said, "This is broken. This is not fun for half the players who play this game," that half being the adults.
55:46	Sam Parr	Did you present those well? Did you present those five things to your daughter?
55:50	Elan Lee	Or did you know she didn't care about those things... so you?
55:53	Sam Parr	"You were the one — you were the one who... What I'm trying to get at is: can you present those five things to people at your company and have them be just as creative in effect? Like, could they make hit games? Is this a transferable, teachable skill?" </FormattedResponse>
56:07	Elan Lee	Absolutely yes. As long, again, it's not that you're teaching problem solving—you're teaching problem identification. Then creative people will be able to solve those problems. But if you try to solve—if you try to teach how to be creative, you never get anywhere. All you're really teaching is how to identify a problem, how to know what success looks like, and then you just hire creative people to work within those constraints.
56:32	Sam Parr	But then, do you, as the leader, define if you have a hit?
56:36	Elan Lee	Yes. Well, "Hurry Up, Chicken Butt" is an easy way—it's an easy definition. Because, again, as soon as it went out to testing party, this was one of those games where, when we sent it out to testing, not only was it a 100% "Yes, I want to play again," nobody sent the games back. This is a huge problem for us. We send them out; we want you to send them back so we can tweak them and then send them back out again. Nobody would send that game back to us. It was ridiculous—we lost so many copies of that game.
57:02	Shaan Puri	So, bridge the gap there. So, because I play this game — I play it literally with my daughter who's five. I bought it after we met, and I was, yeah, [unclear transcription: "carry up chicken bite"]. We play it at home with my son and my daughter. It's a great time. But I've seen the end output, and now you've described your initial conditions. Is there anything else interesting in how you kind of figured out how you bridge that gap?
57:19	Elan Lee	So we go through tons and tons of versions. I sit with my daughter and I'm like, "Look, I know we want a game." She's like, "I wanna run around." Cool — that's going to be part of the game: running around. "I wanna act silly." Cool — that's going to be part of the game: acting silly. And then, in the back of my mind, I'm like, "I need tension." A game without any form of tension is a broken game because you need something to push you forward. In most games, it's competition with the other players, but here that's not going to be present. So I need something else to insert the tension — the pulse of the game. We did that with an electric timer. It's essentially hot potato. The way the game works is: you've got this adorable, cute little chicken that clucks and eventually screams, and you pass the chicken around. If you're holding the chicken when it screams, you have lost. Everybody else proceeds. The tricky part is it actually works so that the person before you wins the whole game. Again, our users are the winners.
58:16	Sam Parr	Are you like Pixar, where you have five or eight trustworthy people in a room and you're just banging this out?
58:22	Elan Lee	Absolutely.
58:23	Sam Parr	Yes. How long are the meetings, and how many meetings were there between idea, iteration one, and the final iteration?
58:30	Elan Lee	Okay, so we sit down. We'll meet for about two hours and just discuss parameters — what success looks like. Let's brainstorm in that space. We'll usually come up with, I don't know, five or six interesting things to explore. Then everybody goes off and does their own thing. Everyone's got an assignment: "play with this one." We're going to come back and try all these games. In this case, we actually had, like, fifteen or sixteen different ideas we were playing around with, and they all sucked. Everything fell apart in one regard or another — except for this one. That's not true — except for four games. Four games made it out the door. Two were almost immediate failures, and two of them... one was Hurry Up Chicken Butt, and the other is called The Best Worst Ice Cream, which I think is ranked number eight in the world right now. So it's up there. I only look at the top five because that's the scoreboard I like to keep, but it's doing great.
59:26	Sam Parr	"Could this—could this apply, let's say I owned B2B SaaS software? Could I use this process in my company?" </FormattedResponse>
59:36	Elan Lee	I'm tempted to say yes. I—look, I don't know definitively the answer, but I believe that the best ideas come out of constraint and defining success. I can't imagine there'd be many creative-based endeavors that would not benefit from that approach.
59:54	Shaan Puri	You just did a game with Tim Ferriss, and I think he was part of creating it. I'm curious: what was that like? What were the main things you taught Tim? And did Tim teach you anything, or did you modify any of your processes because Tim is such an interesting guy who might bring a different approach to what you were doing?
01:00:13	Elan Lee	Yeah, so I went on Tim's podcast about two years ago. He just wanted to know what the game industry is like—what you would do for a living. We talked for a while, and at the end, after we finished recording, he said, "I've always wanted to make a game. Can we talk about making a game?" I was like, "Absolutely." It's like when Matt asks you if he can be your partner—the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes. Let's do it. So we started talking. He is obsessed with one of my games called Poetry for Neanderthals. It's a really simple, really fun game. It's in the top five, and he just loves, loves, loves that game. He plays it with all his friends, plays it all the time, and he's constantly sending me pictures of him playing that game with his group of friends. He keeps saying, "I need a game at least this good." The first few meetings were me going over to his place with suitcases full of games—all my favorites. But they all tried to scratch that same itch. I knew what's great about Poetry for Neanderthals: there's a creativity component, it's heavily about players entertaining other players, and it's fast and funny. You can learn it in one minute and play it in ten minutes. I knew that was his version of what success looks like. We started playing a bunch of games like that and began honing in on what things he liked most—what games he liked and which ones he didn't. It quickly became clear: none of these were right. I must have shown him a hundred different games, and the answer was, "Yeah, none of these at all."
01:01:47	Elan Lee	We were on this walk. We'd been walking for like six hours and, at one point, I was like, “Okay, let's start as basic as it gets: what if we started with rock-paper-scissors?” Tim happens to like rock-paper-scissors, and I was like, “Okay, rock-paper-scissors is actually no fun at all until you play it a bunch of times.” Playing rock-paper-scissors once is stupid. But playing it again — now we're playing a game, because I'm thinking, “What did he do last time? What am I going to do this time?” He knows that I know that he knows that I know, right? All that stuff starts to kick in at game two, and it's not present at all in game number one. So I was like, what if we start there, really, really basic? And instead of three activities — rock-paper-scissors — what if we had 25? What if there was a hierarchy between all of those things? What if we're all playing at the exact same time? We just started with crazy statements like that. I didn't know what that game was. I didn't know how those things made sense, but his eyes lit up and my eyes lit up and it was like something. Okay, what if also we made it rhythm-based? We ran to the house and we just started scribbling on cards as fast as we could. My buddy Ken Gruel was there too; he's an incredibly talented designer. Between the three of us we just started crafting cards as fast as we could. The first version of the game, of course, sucked, but it was at least something. It was at least like, “Hey, we are playing a game where every single person playing this game has a task. You have to do this symbol; you have to do a peace sign; you have to pretend you're a ball, a ballerina; and you have one second to do the right thing.” We started playing around with, “All right, that's a little too easy — what if we made that harder? What if we had to switch roles? What if every role had a color and now we have to skip all the red ones? What if we had to go twice as fast? What if we had to whisper? What if we had to shout?” What if, what if, what if... and we started writing all these cards fast and furious until we eventually got to this thing where we had been playing for four hours. I looked around the room and I was like, “Hey, anybody wanna play again?” Both of them were like, “Hell yes.” So we kept doing that. Then we started to invite other friends over and they started playing and we said, “Do you wanna play again?” and they said yes. So we just kept doing this thing — rinse and repeat: remove a card, write a new card. I use these blank cards where I can create them super fast. I buy these by the truckload — those blank cards.
01:04:04	Sam Parr	"When we were at Sean's event, you were basically on your hands and knees, literally dealing out cards."
01:04:10	Elan Lee	That's... and?
01:04:11	Sam Parr	Then you were like, "You know, I don't like this one," and you pulled out a blank card, had a pen, and wrote new rules.
01:04:16	Elan Lee	I live and breathe those cards because, you know, what's beautiful about them is they're not just cards. Obviously, you can use them to make any game you want. But let's say you need a six-sided die and you don't have one. You've got six cards — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 — on the cards. Shuffle them up and draw one. Now you've got a six-sided die. If you need a board, you can make it out of a grid of cards. If we can do a spinner, you can make that out of cards too. I walk around with my backpack so much heavier than it should be because it's loaded with blank cards. I never know when the next idea is coming.
01:04:49	Sam Parr	You have this great, great quote you said: > "Took a week-long skydiving course, and at the end of it I asked the instructor, 'Do you ever get bored of this?'" > > And the guy said, "Do you ever get bored of having sex?" I thought, that's exactly it. This is how I feel about games. That's how I feel about this job. It's not a thing with an expiration—it's a little dopamine factory for me and for the people who get to have these experiences. I don't know how you can get bored of that; it's just eternal. So that was a quote that you had, and I read that. It's like—I want to feel that way about just anything in my life.
01:05:19	Elan Lee	"I know, right? I know."
01:05:21	Sam Parr	You know... you see kids play with bubbles. You're like, "I wish I felt any way about this kid—how he feels about bubbles." I see this, and I'm like, "Eli's the—he found bubbles. He's got the answer."
01:05:31	Shaan Puri	This guy.
01:05:32	Sam Parr	And this is the answer to life. Go ahead.
01:05:35	Elan Lee	I was at an airport and our flight had just been canceled. It was so terrible because everyone was miserable. It was the last flight out; they started to hand out hotels, but then they'd say, "Hey, the flight might come back," so everyone had to stay in the terminal for hours and hours. Every hour they delayed us again, and it was awful. People were frowning, grumpy, and screaming at the poor gate agent. Everyone was miserable — except for this group of six kids sitting in the corner, giggling and laughing. I could not help myself; I had to walk up and see what they were doing. Of course, they were playing Exploding Kittens. I remember thinking, "This is it." All the chemicals going through my body right now — this is why I have this job. This is the greatest feeling in the world, and I just want to keep delivering this at every opportunity I have.
01:06:26	Shaan Puri	That's so good. I was gonna say—I have these kinds of people I admire for different reasons. You can admire a great athlete for how disciplined they are: how they train the body and never give up. Or you can admire Elon for thinking big, defying the odds, and going all in on his bets. That all-in mode is something I value. You're, to me, on that very short list of people because you build things for the joy—from a place of joy. You're a more pure artist. I see you not as a CEO with a ballpoint pen, but as an artist with a brush. The second part is the limitless thinking. There's kind of nothing out of bounds: “Okay, I can register myself as a grocer,” or “What if we create this vending machine that distributed any item?” I would be scared to go there—how would it work, what if things go wrong? You just think about things a little differently, and that inspires me. The last bit is simplicity. You figure out the core insight. The game is fun not because the game itself is complicated, but because it makes the players fun. That explains Charades and Pictionary and all the games I grew up playing thousands of times, not just once or twice. Instead of doing focus groups and surveys, you're like, one question: “Do you want to play the game again?” So to me, those are the three big things you do: building from joy, limitless thinking, and simplicity. If I could get even 10% of what you're doing there, I'd level up.
01:08:04	Elan Lee	I love to hear that. But I'll also say it doesn't just have to apply to games. I remember during COVID, all of our plants shut down. Once stuff comes in from China, it goes into these giant warehouses; it has to be unboxed, repackaged with all the correct labeling, and then off it goes to all the retailers. During COVID, no one could go into those facilities— they just wouldn't allow anybody in. That was going to tank our business. There was no way for us to survive: zero sales for, you know, six, twelve, or two years—right? No way to do it. Most games companies shut down for at least a little while there. I remember thinking, like, this is a no—people are telling me no. So, to use the earlier quote: "I must be asking the wrong question." Instead of calling these warehouse owners over and over again saying, "When are you opening your doors? When are you opening your doors?" I finally asked a different question: "What are you doing with your parking lots?" The answer was nothing, because nobody's at work—our parking lots are empty. I was like, cool: can I park three 18-wheeler trucks in your parking lot? They said, sure, why not. So I brought the games over in these 18-wheeler trucks and had one person per truck go inside and repackage our games. All I needed was the space. It occurred to me I didn't need the warehouse—I just needed the square footage, and they've got that in their parking lot. There's no restrictions there; the restrictions were inside the facility. The reason I bring that up is because that's just a game—somebody saying, "Here's a roadblock," and everybody else saying, "Ah, a roadblock; I can't get through this roadblock; it's time to shut down my business." The reality is: just ask a different question. There's a different way through this roadblock if you're willing to play the game.
01:10:06	Sam Parr	I used to have this high school cross-country coach who said, "I'm going to teach you all about running and everything, but I'm really trying to teach you about this other pastime that we have called life." That's sort of how I feel about you and this podcast. You came to talk a little bit about business, a little bit about creativity, but we're really learning, like, a good way to live.
01:10:28	Elan Lee	You know, too — that makes me so happy. Yes.
01:10:30	Sam Parr	To be passionate — to be passionate about what we're doing, about certain things we're doing; to find the positive, to look positively at things that could potentially be negative, and to solve problems in creative ways. "You're awesome. We appreciate you."
01:10:44	Elan Lee	"Thank you so much for saying that."
01:10:46	Shaan Puri	Hey, where should people follow you? Because I'm following you on TikTok — you're doing, like... it's amazing. I don't understand. Have you seen his TikToks?
01:10:53	Sam Parr	No, I'm not 12, so I don't use TikTok.
01:10:55	Shaan Puri	This is... well, you should.
01:10:57	Sam Parr	Because I need to live more like him and be positive-thinking.
01:11:01	Shaan Puri	Here's what's happening. Basically, the world's best game designer is on TikTok teaching people how to design games—little, simple tricks and tips in 30-second nuggets. And it'll get like two views because TikTok's algorithm doesn't know yet who they're messing with. I can't believe it. You couldn't pay me for this type of information.
01:11:22	Sam Parr	"Dude, you only have 177 followers."
01:11:25	Elan Lee	I know what I'm saying. I just started doing this, and here's what I realized. I teach these classes at my company once a week. We tackle whatever topic: here's how we write instructions, here's what we put on the front of the box, here's what we put on the back of the box—game design, over and over again. And we don't record any of them. I realized this is all going to just disappear. Nobody's recording it, and I had no motivation to record it. So I hired a social media team. It's like hiring a trainer at a gym: they come over once a week and force me to have a camera on me and give the same class that I gave at the company, just for free online. We've been recording them and posting them. Yeah, like you said, nobody knows they're there yet. But if you've ever wanted to learn how to make a game—or, more importantly, how to apply those lessons to anything in the whole wide world, because it's all applicable—I'm going to keep posting these things.
01:12:22	Sam Parr	Because you give your team some constraints, like, you know, "without any money" and only teaching creativity lessons... figure.
01:12:30	Shaan Puri	Out without making me dance on TikTok.
01:12:32	Sam Parr	"Totally... get this to 500,000 views per video."
01:12:35	Elan Lee	Yeah, I should absolutely do that.
01:12:36	Sam Parr	Is that what the constraints would be?
01:12:38	Elan Lee	That, basically—that's what the constraints would be. It would be, yeah, how to stay true to what I want to deliver, right, without "dancing." But, yeah: how to increase the viewership on this. To be fair, nobody has been tasked with that yet. My goal for the last... I don't know, probably two months, has just been: let me create the content and put it in a place. Once it's there, then it's probably worth promoting, because now there's enough there to make it worthwhile.
01:13:07	Sam Parr	You're—you're—you're badass. You're awesome. You got the googly eyes from us.
01:13:13	Shaan Puri	"Alright — shout out. Where—where—where should people follow you? Just shout out your handles."
01:13:15	Elan Lee	Yeah. If you just search for "Ilan Lee" on YouTube, that's the hub of everything. That's where I'm putting the long-form stuff. From there it links out to all the TikToks, Instagrams, and everything else where you can find the shorter-form content.
01:13:28	Shaan Puri	Awesome — thanks for coming on, dude.
01:13:30	Elan Lee	It's such a pleasure—thanks for having me. And, yeah, just a huge fan. I'm so, so grateful that you wanted to chat with me. What a thrill.
01:13:39	Shaan Puri	Of course. By the way, look at how many games are behind them—just within sight, right there.
01:13:44	Elan Lee	Isn't that ridiculous? Yeah, that's one of two shelves. There's another one over there that's equally packed. We've got 90 games now—60, sorry. We have 60 games, but 90 total because there are weird expansions, variations, and stuff. Yeah, it's stupid. It just... it doesn't make any sense to me anymore. Love it.
01:14:05	Sam Parr	Alright, thank you, man. That's it — that's the pod.

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