Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: My name is Ben Greenfield, and on

Ben Greenfield [00:00:02]: This episode of the Boundless Life podcast.

Elan Lee [00:00:05]: We ended up in the same place at the same time. And he said, hey, I heard you have this card game, and can you show it to me? So we played it for 10 minutes, and we finished the game, and he's like, that was awesome. Let's play again. And so we played again, and 10 minutes turned into an hour, and an hour turned into four hours. And before I knew it, like, this is all we were doing for the whole weekend. This is all we did, is played this game over and over and over again. And the more we played, the more we would change it, the better it got. And at the end of this, he looked at me and he said, listen, I have always wanted to make a game.

Elan Lee [00:00:35]: I've never found one that's as fun as this. I would love to be a part of this. And also, you really need to change the name of this game. At the time, I was calling it Bomb Squad. And he said, Bomb Squad is so obvious. Like, of course you're scared of the bomb. Bombs are scary. It's so on the nose that nobody even cares.

Elan Lee [00:00:53]: Instead of being scared of a bomb, what if you were scared of a cute, adorable, fuzzy little kitten? And we call the game Exploding Kittens instead. And I started a card game with a friend of mine. We put it up on Kickstarter trying to raise $10,000 and raised about 9 million instead.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:08]: Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist. And I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:30]: Well, folks, my guest today is Elan Lee. He is the co-creator of Exploding Kittens. Probably one of the first times I ever branched out from Monopoly. Sorry. And card games like Canasta and Hearts was when I found this game. I have no clue where I got it, but ever since then, I have been a fan and customer of Exploding Kittens. And Elan actually has a really great story, not only about how he went from quitting or at least backing out of Microsoft to launching one of the world's most successful Kickstarter campaigns to now bringing delight, I guess, sometimes disgust, and all sorts of dining room table and party battles to people worldwide like Exploding Kittens and Throw Throw Burrito and Poetry for Neanderthals. So you've heard me talk about it before.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:23]: We play games almost every night together as a family. There's a lot more to games than Just that though. And Elan and I are going to fill you in on how you can hopefully make your life a lot more fun. All the shownotes are going to [email protected]/ ElanLee by the way, that's E L A N L E E. Elan, welcome man.

Elan Lee [00:02:42]: Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:44]: Yeah, yeah. Before we start recording, I was telling you, my kids are super into games. They literally spend half their day just messing around with games and game design and, and throwing cards around. What about you? When you were a kid, was this something you thought you'd be doing?

Elan Lee [00:03:01]: Oh yeah. I mean this was my whole childhood. Right. Like, so I'm the oldest of four kids and we didn't have that much growing up. And so my parents, you know, the typical thing was, you know, get us all outside into the backyard. And then it was my job to figure out some way to entertain my siblings. And games just became the thing, you know, like we would, we would build games out of anything. Sticks and rocks and discarded toys and just literally anything we could find lying around.

Elan Lee [00:03:31]: And so game design just fell naturally right into my lap. It was always just a super fun thing to do.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:37]: Did you find yourself like modifying traditional games? It's something we've done as a family. Like you Sharpie markers to mess up Quiddler and add little Scrabble.

Elan Lee [00:03:50]: We have our collection of game modific for sure. But I'll do you one better than that. What we used to do more often than anything else was not me nor any of my siblings had the patience to read the instructions for games. So most of the time we would just open up boxes and play to the best of our ability without having any idea how the game actually works. And we would just sort of invent it as we go. And we had the absolute best time that way.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:17]: Find out later from a responsible adult, you were incorrect. I'm assuming prior to the advent of the life saving two and a half minute YouTube video versus the 15 minute.

Elan Lee [00:04:26]: Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know my favorite one, I actually just learned as an adult that my whole life I've been playing Monopoly incorrectly. And here let's. We're going to do a test. Okay. So you know Monopoly, right? All right, well, here's the test. You land on a property, you decide not to buy it.

Elan Lee [00:04:47]: What happens?

Ben Greenfield [00:04:48]: You continue with your doubles. You just continue on to the next person.

Elan Lee [00:04:56]: Yeah, right. That's how I played it my whole life. You know what that's the wrong answer. The way that the rules are written, which nobody ever reads, is it goes to auction, highest bidder gets that property. If you decide not to buy it.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:07]: A property nobody owns, no houses, no hotels, you land on it. Even, like, first turn of the game.

Elan Lee [00:05:13]: For some reason, you decide not to buy it, it goes up for auction to all the other players, including you. You can now jump into the auction. You might end up paying more than you would have otherwise, but, like, fundamentally changes how that game is played from the very beginning.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:27]: Yeah. Cash flush towards the beginning of the game, I could see that dramatically changing.

Elan Lee [00:05:32]: Yeah, yeah. This was. This was brand new information to me and I couldn't believe it. Literally, I've been playing this game for 40 years and I've been playing it wrong.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:41]: Wow. Amazing. That reminds me of how our family just discovered last week in Scrabble that the letters that the other people hold at the end of the game not only count against them, but go towards your point total.

Elan Lee [00:05:51]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:53]: Little asterisk at the bottom of the scorecard says it, but none of us realized it.

Elan Lee [00:05:59]: Yeah, I love it.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:02]: So in terms of how you actually went from playing games as a kid to designing games as an adult, I've heard you on a couple of podcasts. I know you have a great story. My audience might not be that familiar with it, though. So walk me through this, how you went from computers, I believe, into gaming.

Elan Lee [00:06:18]: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So let's see. I. Early on, I've always been fascinated by computers. Honestly, my first job out of college was at. I did an internship at Industrial Light and Magic doing special effects for movies. And it was like this perfect mix of storytelling and technology.

Elan Lee [00:06:39]: And I was completely enamored. And I thought, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. And I remember one day I sat down and was talking to my manager and she's like, yeah, you're really good at this. You've got a long career ahead of you. You know, if you really, like, buckle down and do a lot of work, you can make up to $65,000 a year. And I remember looking at her thinking, holy crap, I got to get the hell out of here.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:03]: Well, I mean, to her credit, that's just $5,000 short of what they say buys happiness.

Elan Lee [00:07:08]: Yeah. Hey, all right, well, maybe she knew something. I really thought, like, that kind of creativity was beautiful and amazing, but it clearly wasn't a long term career for me. And so I started looking around. Luckily, that internship got me a bunch of other jobs and one of them was working for Microsoft. And at the time, Microsoft had this secret project. It was called the Direct Xbox. And DirectX was this platform they had.

Elan Lee [00:07:43]: It was like this hardware software interface and they wanted to make a game console around it. And of course, as we all know, it eventually became. They dropped the Direct and just launch it as the Xbox. But they hired me out of college and said, hey, we read about you. You've done all this neat work on movies and Star Wars. I got my name in the credits of Star Wars, which is like, you know, the coolest thing for a 19 year old in the world. And they called me up and they're like, come over. We just need creative people.

Elan Lee [00:08:10]: We want to all sit around, we want to talk about games, we want to figure out how to build the world's best game console. So come on over. And they made me lead designer. That was my title. Literally having no idea what the hell I was doing. They put me on a team with five other people. So there were six of us. They said, here's $200 million, don't screw it up.

Elan Lee [00:08:28]: And like that was it. Like it was, it was insanity.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:33]: Especially relative to 65k.

Elan Lee [00:08:35]: Yeah, yeah, there you go. I worked for this guy named Jordan Weissman, who to this day is the smartest man I know. And he just mentored me. And he started instead of me just randomly saying, I think this is fun. I don't know why. Here we go, let's develop this. He was really disciplined and he really forced me to think hard about what's fun and why it's fun and what kind of things we enjoy and why we enjoy them. And.

Elan Lee [00:09:03]: And that launched my career. I was the lead designer on the first six games for the Xbox. So the launch portfolio. And then I thought I was going to be doing that forever because I was having a blast. And the team kept growing and it was just so, so, so much fun.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:20]: Yeah, wait, I'm going to stop you right there. Random question. What was the first game on the Xbox?

Elan Lee [00:09:25]: Halo.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:26]: Halo.

Elan Lee [00:09:27]: Okay, yeah, yeah, that was a nice. That was a nice game to have my name on the credits because you can basically pick your job after that. So that was a fun one. And I remember the day all of that changed. I went over to my brother's house and he had two young kids at the time, they're much older now, and he had this Xbox, right? He had an Xbox. He had it set up for them. I walked in the door, I was so excited to see my niece and nephew. And I walk in and I'm like, hey, how's everyone doing? And they are staring at the screen, controllers in hand, and they don't even look up to say hello.

Elan Lee [00:10:05]: And I remember thinking, like, something's broken here. Like, something very fundamental has gone wrong. And to add sort of insult to injury, I look at the game they're playing and it's one of the ones I designed. And I thought, like, there's no way to avoid the statement I am part of the problem. Like, I am. I built this, I made this happen. And so within about two weeks of that experience, I resigned and really started like, I wanted to just focus on like these entertainment products, be them digital, physical, whatever they are, they should be bringing us together instead of building barriers between us. And that was really my mantra.

Elan Lee [00:10:49]: And I started a series of companies. I actually started five different startups. One after the other. I would build them up to about, you know, 10 to 15 people and then sell them off because that was about the point where I started forgetting people's names and thought, okay, let's move on to the next thing. I then went back to Microsoft for a minute to help them launch the Xbox One. And then right after that, I said, all right, enough, enough, enough, enough. No more digital. Nothing.

Elan Lee [00:11:16]: And I started a card game with a friend of mine. We put it up on Kickstarter. So trying to raise $10,000 and raised about 9 million instead.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:24]: Incredible. And of course, I want to get into that story. I'm curious with the digital part of things. When you started this analog card game, were you one of those early adopters of a stupid phone? Or were you beginning to back out of your social media profile? Or for you, was it largely just not wanting to create environment for kids or adults anymore?

Elan Lee [00:11:48]: Yeah, yeah, I am completely addicted to technology. I try to apply a lot of discipline to it. I'm not allowed to touch my phone two hours between when I wake up. Like for the first two hours of my day, I don't touch anything. I try very hard to turn it off at night. I try to spend as much face to face time with my kids as possible. I really try. But also I know I'm addicted to this screen right now in front of me.

Elan Lee [00:12:15]: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I've got six screens in this room staring at me like, and. And I need them and I wouldn't want to lose any of them. And I get that. But I try very hard to say there's a time and a place for all of this stuff. And it's getting easier and easier to walk away from it when I'm in that, like, time compartment of, okay, enough. Let me go do something else.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:37]: Yeah, you're. You're. You're kind of a. A shitty Luddite who would. Maybe Amish, but you at least understand where the boundaries are.

Elan Lee [00:12:47]: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Or at least I try to convince myself that I do. But I'm always also the guy with the newest tech just because I love it.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:55]: Right, so this guy that you met.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:58]: And the card game that developed from that. Tell me about that.

Elan Lee [00:13:01]: So that's Matthew Inman, and he is the creator and artist behind The Oatmeal, the online comics, one of the most popular online comics in the world. He's been doing it for 15 years now.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:14]: I think, by the way, remotely familiar because I live now in Moscow, Idaho. Lived in Spokane, Washington before this. And I believe, if memory serves, he is from Hayden, Idaho.

Elan Lee [00:13:24]: Yeah. And then. And then lived in Seattle. So, like, you know, you kind of moved around with him. But he's basically the funniest person I know. He is essentially an audience whisperer. Like, he knows how to deliver messages to audience with better effect than I think anyone on the planet. Like, he's so, so good at it.

Elan Lee [00:13:45]: And I've always been a huge fan of his. And I met him through a friend of a friend, and I sat down with him and I was like, you know, I had just resigned from Microsoft. I was basically planning on, like, just doing nothing for a year, just trying to find myself. I was really unfocused and lost and just thought, I've been doing the wrong thing for too long. And I got to figure out how to do the right thing and what the right thing is. And I had this little game design. I literally took a deck of cards, poker cards, and took a Sharpie and just started scribbling on them. And like, well, this card is called Diffuse, and I would write defuse on it.

Elan Lee [00:14:19]: And this card is called Bomb, and I'd write Bomb on it.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:22]: You hadn't yet discovered the blank cards you can order on Amazon?

Elan Lee [00:14:25]: Yeah, no, I hadn't discovered any of that. I had a deck of poker cards and a Sharpie, and that was my arsenal. And we ended up in the same place at the same time. And he said, hey, I heard you have this card game and can you show it to me? And I was like, yeah, but we were actually in Hawaii at the time. We were on this little group vacation. A bunch of, like, four different families all convened at Hawaii. And we're like, we're just going to get away for a while. And I was like, look, man, I would love to show you this game.

Elan Lee [00:14:52]: I'm so excited about this game. But we are in Hawaii, and we should be surfing and we should be playing in the water, and we should be playing volleyball, and we should be doing all this stuff that is not sitting inside playing a card game. And he said, okay, why don't we just play it for 10 minutes and then after that we'll go outside? I was like, cool, deal. So we played it for 10 minutes and we finished the game. And he's like, that was awesome. Let's play again. And so we played again. And 10 minutes turned into an hour, and an hour turned into four hours.

Elan Lee [00:15:20]: And before I knew it, like, this is all we were doing for the whole weekend. This is all we did, is played this game over and over and over again. And the more we played, the more we would change it, the better it got. And at the end of this, he looked at me and he said, listen, I have always wanted to make a game. I've never found one that's as fun as this. I would love to be a part of this if you'll have me as a partner. And also, you really need to change the name of this game. At the time, I was calling it Bomb Squad, right? Because I thought it's Russian roulette with a deck of cards.

Elan Lee [00:15:51]: There's a deck of cards and there's a few bad ones. Those are the bombs. Avoid the bombs. Don't explode. That was my idea. And he said Bomb Squad is so obvious. Of course you're scared of the bomb. Bombs are scary.

Elan Lee [00:16:02]: It's so on the nose that nobody even cares. Instead of being scared of a bomb, what if you were scared of a cute, adorable, fuzzy little kitten? And we call the game Exploding Kittens instead?

Ben Greenfield [00:16:11]: By the way, for anybody who actually has seen his work, the oatmeal.com, i believe you get the idea of an Exploding Kitten.

Elan Lee [00:16:18]: Yeah, it's right up his alley. It's exactly the way he speaks to his audience is kind of like gross and cute mixed into one. And so we immediately hit it off. We changed the name of the game. Within two weeks, we put the thing up on Kickstarter, and that's literally, literally how the company was born.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:38]: Wow.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:39]: So the Kickstarter thing was that new territory to you? The idea of crowdfunding a game, it.

Elan Lee [00:16:45]: Was brand new for me. Matt had done two previous crowdfunding campaigns much, much smaller, like in the tens of thousands range. And so he at least knew how to pull an audience in the door. But for me, I was just looking at it as game design. I was like, look, we're going to put up a page and we're going to ask people to come and back this project. But what if there was stuff for them to do? What if there was an experience built into the page? And ultimately that's how we built our page. And I think, you know, arguably. I don't know.

Elan Lee [00:17:17]: I can't. I don't have an AB test here, but I think that's a lot of why it had such staying power and why everyone told their friends about the page.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:25]: Yeah, what's that look like when you say an experience built into the page?

Elan Lee [00:17:29]: So a typical Kickstarter campaign is, you know, you're trying to raise $10,000, right? There's your goal. If you hit it, great, off you go. You collect your money, you build your product. If you don't, the campaign is canceled. Along the way, what you do is there's basically one tool you've got. They're called stretch goals. And they basically say, okay, we're trying to raise $10,000. If we can somehow raise 20,000, instead, we are going to add 10 extra cards to the game.

Elan Lee [00:17:54]: The game just got better because we made more money. And if we raise $50,000, we're going to put it in a fancy carrying case or whatever it is. They're stretch goals, right? Like, help us earn more money and we'll make the game better for free. And that's the one tool you have as a Kickstarter creator to entice audience members to tell their friends about your campaign. Matt got us so much money on day one. Like, we tried to raise $10,000. We got that in seven minutes. By the end of the first 24 hours, we had a million dollars.

Elan Lee [00:18:27]: By the end of the second day, we had 2 million. By the end of the third day, we had 3 million. It was out of control. And the tricky part is that on day four, it started to fall off a cliff because all of Matt's fans, anyone who was going to back the game, had backed the game. He pulled everyone he possibly could in the door. It was one of the biggest successes of all time. And then crickets. So we sat down.

Elan Lee [00:18:52]: I had this conversation with him. I was like, look, we got two choices here. We can either sort of ride off into the sunset and say, we raised 3 million bucks. That's incredible. Let's go build our game. Or we can try something that no one's ever done before. And Matt, of course, said, what's something no one's ever done before? And then I explained to him this idea of stretch goals and that we could do them differently because when people think of crowdfunding, they keep focusing on that funding part. Like, everyone, like, you know, you want more cards in the game, Great, let's get 20,000 instead of 10,000.

Elan Lee [00:19:21]: Funding focused. I hate that. I hate that. I think it's the wrong approach. And I said, what if instead we were crowd focused? It's not crowdfunding. It's just crowd. Right? Like, let's focus on the crowd. That's the most important bit.

Elan Lee [00:19:36]: And he agreed. And what we did instead was we said, okay, stretch goals. We're going to add 10 cards to the game. We're going to give you a fancy carrying case. We're going to do all the fun stretch goal stuff, but each one is no longer tied to a dollar amount because we do not care about money. We've already made more money than we could possibly spend than we need to make the game. We're fine. Instead, all we're going to do is throw the world's largest party and everyone's invited for free.

Elan Lee [00:20:03]: Here's how this works. If you want 10 more cards in the game, show us a picture of 10 Batmans in a hot tub, whatever the hell that means to you. We want to see a picture of 10 Batmans in a hot tub. And within, like, 10 minutes, we had that. It was incredible. Everyone wants to participate. That's funny. What the hell does that mean? I can do that.

Elan Lee [00:20:22]: And they would send us their pictures. And finally, like, somebody sent us a picture of 10 fully dressed cosplay characters in a hot tub, smiling and giving us a thumbs up. So we're like, cool. 10 more cards. Done. All right, now for that carrying case we want to see. One of the characters in the game is called Taco Cat. And Taco Cat is amazing.

Elan Lee [00:20:41]: Taco Cat is a palindrome, right? Taco Cat spelled backwards, still Taco Cat. Incredible. My favorite character, we said, okay, show us 10 pictures of real Taco Cats. And the fans went nuts. They started putting their cats in burrito shells. They started sprinkling lettuce on top of their cats. Back then, before AI it was incredible because you actually had to take the photos. One person, this woman, worked in an animal shelter, and she showed us a picture of her holding a cat and the adoption papers for that cat.

Elan Lee [00:21:12]: She had legally renamed that cat Taco Cat. So she's like, this is clearly a real Taco Cat because it's literally its name. And so we started just playing. We ended up writing, I think, 30 different challenges like that, and they were incredible, and everyone really loved them. And eventually we went from that, like, $3 million mark to 4 million to 5 million to 6 million. And eventually, to this day, we actually hold the record for the highest number of backers of any campaign in history. We had 219,000 backers for that project. And it's all because we stopped focusing on funding and we only focused on crowd.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:59]: I've heard you say, because, believe it or not, I stalk people a little bit before I get them on the podcast, that something like games, not that games should be entertaining, but games should make the people you're playing with more entertaining or something to that effect.

Elan Lee [00:22:15]: That's right. Yeah. That's my favorite quote. We had to write a mission statement for the company once we started forming a real company and once we had to actually get investors, they all said, what's the mission statement? What is your company here to do? And the one that Matt and I wrote is we do not make entertaining games. We make games that make the players entertaining. And that has been fundamental. That has changed everything about the way.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:46]: We work, making the players more entertaining. What's an example of that?

Elan Lee [00:22:51]: So we get pitched games all the time, like, well, okay, I won't go into the specifics because I don't want to embarrass anybody, but a typical pitch for us looks like, here's a game. There's a whole bunch of cards on the table. Everyone's trying to achieve this goal, and you're trying to do it before the other players. If you look at that game, and I'm sure you've played a game like this, every single player at the table is actually playing solitaire. They happen to be playing solitaire simultaneously. They happen to try, be trying to race to the finish, but they're trying to race to the finish of a game of solitaire. They're trying to finish their game of solitaire before anybody else finishes their own game of solitaire.

Elan Lee [00:23:33]: I hate those games.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:34]: Example comes to mind. A Ticket to Ride, right? You're trying to put your ticket, build your tracks, and there's a little bit of a defense component against the tracks other people are building. But for the most part, you're in your own head along with three other players at the table.

Elan Lee [00:23:46]: I think that's true. But in Ticket to Ride's defense. Because I can think of way more guilty examples than Ticket to Ride. Because everyone is competing for the same resources, those tracks. And because you are screwing other people over inadvertently every move you make, I would argue that it is less guilty than many other games of this particular problem. So what I realize is the games that I remember most from my childhood, the games that I love playing the most just in life in general, are the ones where I don't even remember the games. I remember the interactions. I remember, hey, we're going to form an alliance or growing up.

Elan Lee [00:24:27]: I remember my sister kicking me under the table to try to communicate stuff to me. I remember throwing food and cheating. I remember the interactive nature of the game because it was my siblings and my friends that were actually entertaining. And those are my absolute favorite memories. And so I thought, if we're going to make games, let's make sure that every game is a tool set to make the players the entertainment value. If you look at Exploding Kittens, right, Our first game ever, every single card, when you play it, every single card is designed to create an interaction between you and, and another player. There are no solo cards in that game. There is no solitaire in that game.

Elan Lee [00:25:05]: Every action you take is an invitation for another player to have an interaction with you. And I think that's why that game has, has lasted and been the top selling game for so long now.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:16]: I love it. I've made a half assed attempt on my show before to try to describe to people, especially parents, the, the value of gaming as a way to bring families together or even learn, you know, whether it be conflict resolution or argumentation or logic sequences, et cetera. Have you ever found yourself making a case for the. I don't think health aspects of gaming is necessarily the word I'm looking for, but the ability of gaming to kind of solve in a way this loneliness epidemic that we seem to be venturing farther and farther into.

Elan Lee [00:25:54]: I think it is one of the most effective tools, um, because, well, first of all, like when we play games, the first rule is you gotta put your phone away. Like no screens allowed.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:05]: Unless it's the Scrabble Word Checker App.

Elan Lee [00:26:10]: Yeah, yeah. And you know what I mean? Even guilty of this, I just actually released a game that uses your phone as a timer. So sorry, I. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but you're not flipping through social media, you're not disturbing. Like the idea is let's play a game that requires us to make eye contact. Let's play a game that requires us to form a relationship, a temporary alliance, and let's play a game that a betrayal is even encouraged. And now we're going to deal with that betrayal, and we're going to do it face to face. And it's going to happen right now.

Elan Lee [00:26:43]: And the next 45 minutes are going to be us dealing with each other in order for one of us to cross the finish line before the other one. And I think that is the antidote to loneliness. I think that is the requirement of those interactions is other people. That is the one and only ingredient to those nights being successful. And so my family, like yours, we play games every single night. Because that's the time when we're talking, that's the time when we're interacting. That's the time when we're making eye contact and smiling. And you walk away from those nights just thinking, like, we love each other.

Elan Lee [00:27:23]: We're part of this thing where we fight and complain and cheat and do all that stuff. But ultimately, we're gonna look forward to it the next night where somebody else is gonna win, and it's gonna be glorious.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:34]: Yeah. Our rua games during dinner, before dinner or after dinner? Family, the reason I ask is you can eat off of most of our game pieces and cards.

Elan Lee [00:27:42]: That's so good. We play word games at dinner. My kids are very young. My kids are 7 and 3. So if I were to give them game pieces during dinner, they would eat those game pieces. So that wouldn't work. But, yeah, we play a lot of word games, a lot of question and answer games, a lot of storytelling games at dinner and then after dinner, when we sit around and play real games, we actually. This is funny.

Elan Lee [00:28:08]: I hate kids games. Hate them. I think they're the worst. Like, if I have to play Candyland again, I am going to kill someone. Like, it's just. They're mindless, and you might as well not even be in the room. Right. Like, a computer can play that game the same way you can.

Elan Lee [00:28:22]: Right. It's like the equivalent of roll a die, move a piece. Roll a die, move a piece. It's not interactive. It's not interesting. You're not making decisions. You're not deploying strategy. You're not watching your kids get smarter.

Elan Lee [00:28:32]: Like, none of that is happening. And when my daughter, she's now 7, when she turned 4, she was finally old enough where I could, like, play real games with her. And I, you know, we went. I was so excited. We went out to the store and we bought all the games. Like, all of them. And we sat down and one by one we would play through these games because I was so excited to finally play games with her. And they sucked.

Elan Lee [00:28:55]: Like just every single one of them was such a disappointing experience. And she looked at me and she could see like how crestfallen I was, and she's like

Ben Greenfield [00:29:01]: This game does not make you entertaining.

Elan Lee [00:29:04]: Yeah, that's right. It was the opposite. It was the opposite. It was just draining. It was so. Oh, it was so bad. And she looked at me and she's like, why? Why are you sad? Like, I want to play again. Why don't you want to play again? And I was like, this is just broken.

Elan Lee [00:29:18]: Like, it's just not that this isn't fun. And she looked at me and she said, let's fix it. And like it was this, like, you know, the clouds parted and the sunbeam came right down. And I just thought like, this is it. Let's fix it. You and me. Let's fix it. And so for the next year, I sat down with my daughter and we got out the markers and the stickers and we got out the little cards and scissors and when we cut up little pieces and we built, it's got to be like 12 different games.

Elan Lee [00:29:48]: And most of them were garbage, but four of them were really good. And we eventually actually published all four of those. And one of them is currently the best selling game in the world.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:00]: No kidding. What is it?

Elan Lee [00:30:02]: It's called Hurry Up Chicken Butt and it's a game designed by a four year old. But here's the thing, here's why I love it. You will play this game against your 4 year olds and you will not let them win and they will beat you anyway.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:14]: You have solved the problem that I often hear from adults who I recommend play games with their children.

Elan Lee [00:30:20]: It's a real problem.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:21]: Okay, but it's kind of like reading the same Story Time book over and over again.

Elan Lee [00:30:25]: That's right. No, the reason that eight of the games never got published is because they didn't meet the criteria of I want to play again. I want to get better at this. My kid, my 4 year old just beat me at this thing. And if I play again, I'm pretty sure I can beat her. But I'm not positive I want that experience. And that's what we built. And it's amazing.

Elan Lee [00:30:45]: It's amazing. And now we walk through Target and Walmart and my daughter gets to see her name on the box of a game designed by Avalon. It's the best thing in the world.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:55]: Incredible. Maybe you've given me a good segue into you and your own personal wellness or fitness routine. With the moniker Hurry Up Chicken Butt. You're obviously somewhat aware of health and its role. And when I get a successful entrepreneur like you on the show, I always like to kind of see a little bit inside what goes on with your own routine, like how you take care of yourself. So do you have a wellness routine or a daily routine that you rely on?

Elan Lee [00:31:28]: Yeah, very much. I mean, I do a lot of the normal expected stuff. So after I drop my kids off at school, I go to the gym, I'll do that for an hour. Then I'll usually go for like a four or five mile walk. As I do phone calls, I like to stay active during that. But unlike the next expected line I know is. And I meditate for an hour a day or whatever. But I found a better alternative.

Elan Lee [00:31:58]: I have become addicted to efoiling. Do you know what efoiling is?

Ben Greenfield [00:32:03]: I have nearly killed myself on an efoil in the Bahamas last month.

Elan Lee [00:32:07]: Excellent. I love to hear this. I'm gonna go through the 22nd version. For those who don't know what efoiling is, imagine a surfboard and there's a mast. But instead of the mast going up, the mast goes down like three feet into the water. And at the bottom of the mast is a giant set of wings, like airplane wings, like wings in the water. And you're holding your hand, a controller that controls a very small motor on those wings. And when it gets to a certain speed, not very fast at all, it lifts up into the air.

Elan Lee [00:32:39]: Here's why I love this. It is essentially like doing first of the workout part is it's like doing a sit up for two hours straight. Like if you stop working your core at all, you will fall in the water. So it's an incredible. It has gotten me in some of the best shape in my life. Just doing this literally every day at this point. And it's silent. There's no.

Elan Lee [00:33:05]: Because you're above the water. There's no water noise, there's no wake. The motor is tiny, so it makes almost no noise at all. And all you can hear is the wind, the birds, anything, other people in the water. And it feels like flight. It feels like you are floating above the water. The board is so small that even if you look straight down, you can almost not see it. You can just see the water swishing by.

Elan Lee [00:33:30]: And it is peaceful and meditative. And what I love about it is it's really hard like, truly, truly hard, as, you know, from almost killing yourself. And what that does for me is it makes it so that if I am stressed, if I think about work, if I think about family stress, if I think about any of that stuff for even a moment, I'm in the water immediately. All I can do is focus on. I'm flying. I need to keep flying. I'm going to focus on that for the next two hours.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:01]: Obviously, levels of competence and body awareness differ by user, but how long did it take you to get to the point where you could just cruise on that thing?

Elan Lee [00:34:09]: It took me about eight hours of falling. So, like, I don't have a teacher. So for me, this was just watching YouTube videos, trying again, failing miserably, watching another one, failing miserably. I actually watched this one YouTube video that changed everything for me. Anyone who's ever tried efoiling, the one thing you need to know. This one guy changed my life. He said, I've been teaching this thing for five years. I don't know why I'm a teacher.

Elan Lee [00:34:35]: I've only ever said two things to every student. So I don't know why people pay me. The only two things I've ever said is, you're not far forward enough and you're not going fast enough. That's it. I just repeat those two lines over and over and over and over again. And for some reason, people pay me. And so next time I got out on the board and I was like, okay, I'm going way too fast. But the guy said, I'm not going fast enough.

Elan Lee [00:34:56]: Okay, I'm way too far forward. But the guy said, I'm not far forward enough. So, okay, so I changed those two things, and suddenly I popped right out of the water and floated there for two hours.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:05]: I am mentally noting this for the next time I make it to a tropical locale.

Elan Lee [00:35:09]: There you go.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:10]: My wife has probably already increased the value of my life insurance policy. She witnessed it. She saw it. Wow, that's incredible. What a routine.

Elan Lee [00:35:21]: It's so fun. It's the best thing ever. Go. Anyone who's never tried this, go rent an efoil for two hours. The first hour is going to suck, but if you have a good teacher, the second hour will be absolutely magical.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:34]: As somebody who has come up with titles like Taco Cat and Throw Throw Burrito that I don't know if your diet is purely Mexican, but I'm curious if you follow a specific nutrition routine.

Elan Lee [00:35:47]: Yeah, so for nutrition, I have have high blood pressure and I have high cholesterol so I'm trying very hard to keep the medications to a minimum which means I have to focus a lot on diet. So carbs, sugars almost non existent in my world. I, I try to not. I try to fast for 18 hours a day also. So I'll stop eating somewhere at around 6PM and I won't pick it up again until noon the next day. This is very tricky with a workout routine cause I need protein so badly after working out. But I try to time my workout so that I can end somewhere within an hour of 12 so that I can start to eat when I need to and when I need it most desperately.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:35]: That's actually a pretty compressed feeding window. I mean 18 hours is a chunk of. Have you been doing that a while?

Elan Lee [00:36:41]: I've been doing it for about three years now and it has 100% fixed my cholesterol problem. That with, with the diet being very careful of what I'm eating in, in that, in that small eating window and eliminating sugar has completely changed my life. Like I have energy, I am awake, I am alert. I know I don't get sluggish anymore. I don't understand how I spent so many years putting that poison into my body. It's insane.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:12]: Yeah, obviously you've, you've heard the idea that it's not necessarily fat that would make cholesterol atherosclerotic or appreciably increase it. It's more the, the sugar or oxidation inflammation from, I don't know, something like seed oils that renders the cholesterol atherosclerotic and makes it an issue. So cutting sugar and carbs is, is one of the better things to do versus say, you know, cutting out extra virgin olive oil and avocados.

Elan Lee [00:37:37]: Yeah, yeah, totally agree. I've been, I have a really supportive doctor who essentially walks me through new ideas like constantly. He's the one who introduced a pseudo keto diet, intermittent fasting, being very careful about what goes into my diet, building plans for me. It's incredible. It has been so life changing. I was really, really struggling. Like I was right, I was right at this point where like my stress level was through the roo roof. And he was like, look, you have two choices.

Elan Lee [00:38:09]: I'm going to either have to write you six prescriptions and you are going to take these pills for the rest of your life or you're going to pay attention to me and we're going to change how you sleep, how you work, how you exercise and how you eat. And I was like yeah, option B. Let's do that one. And it's been amazing.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:26]: What'd you change for sleep?

Elan Lee [00:38:28]: I am not great about this, but I will tell you the goal at least, which has been very effective. No screens in bed. If I can get. I'm pretty good about getting to bed at a decent hour. And if I can just read or have a conversation with my wife and resist the urge to pick up that screen, I will have such a good night's sleep. Oh, the other thing is, I bought an Eight Sleep mattress so my side of the bed stays freezing cold. I've got it maxed out to the coldest temperature it possibly gets, and that has been incredible.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:03]: Yeah, that is a game changer. Like no hard exercise, no heavy, spicy meal, and some type of cooling mechanism in the bedroom. I laughed when I installed this mattress because it said it was made of virgin sheep's wool. I thought it was a sheep, had never had sex. It turns out it's the first of the sheep and it's like this natural cooling system. And since getting this bed, I haven't yet put a cooling topper on it. But I also have not owned the bed in the summer. So it's June 2nd when we're recording this.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:31]: A little past that. We'll see.

Elan Lee [00:39:34]: You'll have a report soon.

Ben Greenfield [00:39:35]: Yeah, yeah. And then. And then, of course, with the phone, sometimes funny YouTube videos or something like that, you know, they help to turn off my brain. But I am the. If you Google red phone or iPhone red light trick, you can program your phone with a triple click to suck a lot of the blue light and the dopamine out of the phone by just shifting it to a. To a night mode that you can't get in the native os.

Elan Lee [00:39:59]: Yeah. You know what I did for a while, speaking of that, I don't do it anymore because I don't think I need it. But when I was really having trouble falling asleep, I bought construction glasses, which are just orange tinted glasses. And I would wear those for about an hour before I went to sleep. Every night it does this exact same thing, right? It's cutting out all the blue, but not just from my screen, but from everything. It would knock me right out. Like, it was very. A very effective trick.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:24]: I call them birth control for your head.

Elan Lee [00:40:25]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:29]: You guys. You guys are obviously constantly iterating at exploding kittens. What's coming down the pipeline right now?

Elan Lee [00:40:34]: There's two games. There's three. All right, there's three games. There's like so many games, but there's three that I'm really excited about. One is I have been the biggest Survivor fan forever. The TV show Survivor, they're currently filming their 50th season. I've had the incredible, incredible privilege to write for that show for the last 10 years and help them out with a bunch of themes, specifically the host, Jeff Probst. He and I become really good friends.

Elan Lee [00:41:03]: And so this year we released a Survivor game. And this has been years in the making. It is so hard to write a Survivor game because I've got like 20 minutes to simulate low blood sugar, insect bites. Being cranky with your fellow tribes mates, like, all of that stuff that happens over 30 days I got to do in 10 minutes. And that has been the toughest design challenge of my career. And we finally did it. And the reviews are through the roof. Everyone seems to love this game.

Elan Lee [00:41:33]: It's regularly the top seller on Amazon in the games category. And so I'm so, so proud of that game. It's really beautiful. If you've played, if you've watched Survivor or even if you've never even heard of Survivor and you want to just prove to your friends that you can do things that they cannot do, try this game. The next one is we did a partnership with Tim Ferriss. So we launched this game called Poetry for Neanderthals. We launched it about six or seven years ago. It is, I don't know, number six game in the world.

Elan Lee [00:42:08]: It's great. It's great. Everyone loves it. It's been an evergreen title for us. It's so, so, so good. The game is you have to get your friends to say a word on a card, but you can only speak using single syllable words. So Tim fell in love with that game. He played it all the time with his friends and he called me up and he said, I love this game.

Elan Lee [00:42:26]: I've always wanted to make a game. Can you help me make a game as good as this one? I said, I don't know, but let's try. So we spent a year working on game design and finally released a game just a few months ago. It's called Coyote and it is rock, paper, scissors on steroids. It is the most insane little hand gesture, physical activity game. You play it around the table. It makes everybody's brain melt because it's so hard. But I shouldn't say it's hard like in you can't play way.

Elan Lee [00:42:58]: It's so hard in that the game escalates sporadically throughout the course of 20 minutes. And it starts out easy and then gets a little challenging, and everyone thinks they've got it. And then suddenly, the game twists itself in this knot, and you have to pay such close attention to survive. This incredible challenge game. And then finally, unreleased, but coming out in just a few weeks to celebrate the 10th anniversary. Holy crap. 10 years of Exploding Kittens. We wanted to release a new Exploding Kittens game.

Elan Lee [00:43:30]: And I didn't want to do just another card game because we've done 60 of those now. And I thought, what if we did an exploding kittens board game? And if we're going to do an exploding kittens board game, it's got to be the best damn board game that's ever been created. And so we have built what I think think is the best damn board game that's ever been created. It's not released yet, but the engineering that went into the construction of this game is staggering. I have never worked so closely with papercraft artists, with digital artists, with mechanical engineers. We had to invent a new way of folding paper in order for this board to be constructed. Everything that has gone into this is magic. And the end effect is this board game does something that you have never seen before.

Elan Lee [00:44:25]: And I don't want to ruin the surprise. I will just say it is a magical, magical board that when it does its magic trick, your jaw will fall open and you will think, holy crap. How the hell could this have been built?

Ben Greenfield [00:44:37]: Oh, my goodness. Have you seen the. I think they're called Magic Puzzles. I believe they're puzzles that you put together that kind of have an Easter egg.

Elan Lee [00:44:46]: Oh, the Magic Puzzle Company.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:48]: Yeah. Magic Puzzle Company.

Elan Lee [00:44:49]: Yes. Right. And you can re. And when you're done, you move them and then extra pieces. Yeah, yeah. Love, love, love. I actually know the founders of that company. I think I've done, like, six of theirs, and I've got the next three sitting on my shelf, so I got to get around to those.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:02]: Okay. All right, so we got Coyote, Survivor, Exploding Kittens, and then, I suppose, like, efoil magnetic chess might.

Elan Lee [00:45:09]: Yeah, we need an efoil game. Yeah. That's what the world's missing right now. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:16]: Yeah. Well, Elan, you are an inspiration. Not only your backstory, the fun that you brought to many families, including ours, around the dinner table. I think some of your games have been an inspiration to my sons. They were homeschooled, taking them through the book the Art of War, two and a half years. They came up with their own idea for a game called the Fart of War.

Elan Lee [00:45:40]: I love your sons. That's so good.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:43]: In between farm chores and work, they're dabbling away on their computers on their schemes for Fart of War.

Elan Lee [00:45:50]: Oh, oh, they are destined for greatness.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:52]: Yes, I know it's coming down the pipeline and I'm sure they'll regret the title when they're 20 and out on a date until they're future to be that they're a Fart of War game inventor. But anyways, I really appreciate you doing this. For everybody listening in, I will link to Elan's games, the oatmeal.com maybe even efoiling videos with two pieces of instruction if you go to the show [email protected]/ Elan Lee. E L A N L E E. Yeah, thank you so much for doing this, man.

Elan Lee [00:46:32]: It's my pleasure. And as one quick side note, I was recently invited to do a masterclass on how to build games and I thought I can think of no good reason for that content to be behind a paywall. So I'm doing a masterclass and it's totally free on. I've just started publishing it on YouTube. So if you've ever wanted to learn how to build a game, what goes into design, find me on YouTube and you can watch all the content for free. And if there's other things you have questions about and want to know what's going on behind the scenes, I'm happy to share those as well.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:10]: All you need to do is send him a photo of you and 11 friends dressed up like Mexican food in a cold therapy tub.

Elan Lee [00:47:18]: That's definitely a win.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:20]: All right, Elan, thank you so much folks. I'll get that link from Elan and it put that in the Show Notes as well. And thank you so much for listening. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Exploding Kittens Elan Lee signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an incredible week.

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