Tim Ferriss is a five-time New York Times bestselling author, a legendary podcaster with over a billion downloads, a prolific angel investor, and a relentless experimenter. During his fourth visit to Design Matters, he shares the story behind Coyote, a new card game he’s quietly been crafting—and the mindset that brought it to life.
Tim Ferriss:
Ambition used to be the hallmark of an enviable life and a righteous path. I don’t relate to it that way anymore. I think ambition is jet fuel. Not everyone needs to be on a jet. But if you’re going to be on a jet, you better make sure it’s pointed in the right direction.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, Tim Ferriss talks about the pleasures and challenges of creating a game.
Tim Ferriss:
Making a game is like choosing a sport at the Olympics. Like, curling is not exactly the same as high hurdles.
Debbie Millman:
Tim Ferriss is many things: five times New York Times bestselling author, a podcaster with over a billion downloads, an angel investor, an experimenter, a teacher, and a risk-taker. But… all, he’s an architect of questions.
This is the fourth time I’m interviewing Tim, and today we get to talk about something brand new that he’s been quietly designing, a card game called Coyote. But before we shuffle the proverbial deck, I want to dig into the evolving mind behind it, the mind that’s been asking better questions of the world and of himself for nearly two decades.
Tim Ferriss, welcome back to Design Matters.
Tim Ferriss:
Thank you for having me. It’s so nice to see you.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, it’s such a joy to have you in this little studio. So I want to talk a little bit about questions. Do you remember the very first time you were asked a question that really made you stop and reconsider everything?
Tim Ferriss:
Ooh. I would say the first that comes to mind, and I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but it was when I was in probably freshman year of high school. I could think of other examples, but this is the one that pops to mind. And my math teacher at the time asked something along the lines of, “Have you ever thought about getting out of here and going somewhere else?” meaning going to a different school. And that possibility, that question had never entered my consciousness.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Tim Ferriss:
At all. And at that point in time, there were very few things I can control, and there were a lot of things in my life out of control outside of my direct influence. But the one thing that I felt I could control was academics, working really hard in school, so I did.
Debbie Millman:
Achievement
Tim Ferriss:
And I did well. Yes, the curse of the achiever. There are definitely some payoffs, but there are some trade-offs. And at that time, I felt very good because I was, relatively speaking, a big fish in a little pond, although I wasn’t aware of that.
And this teacher then suggested that I had the option, right? There was actually an item on the menu known as other school, and that led to all sorts of exploration, going to the public library back in the day when you needed to research schools by pulling these giant tomes off of a shelf that were revised every year or two, and ultimately led me to getting some scholarships and so on and going to a boarding school. And that changed everything. Six months after getting there, I ended up being an exchange student to Japan, going from Long Island to Tokyo, Japan, and everything changed.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, that changed everything.
Tim Ferriss:
So without that initial prompting from actually two teachers, but the math teacher is the one who comes to mind… Great guy. Also hilarious. He was very, very, very tall. And he had this older convertible Corvette that he would drive around, and he was so gigantic that it looked like half of his body was sticking out of the top of the car. This image is also burned into my mind. And I owe that man a debt of gratitude. Without that, I think I would’ve unknowingly just followed this script that had been set out in front of me.
Debbie Millman:
We’ve talked a lot over the years about performance reinvention, achievement, optimization. You’ve been evolving quite a lot in the last couple of years, and I’m wondering, what has become less interesting to you over time?
Tim Ferriss:
What a good question. That’s a better question than… I sometimes try to edge into that territory with a handful of other questions, and that’s a much better question. So I’m going to borrow that, if you don’t mind.
Debbie Millman:
Never. Not at all. Do whatever you want with it.
Tim Ferriss:
I would say that… And one could, before I even say it, rightfully, push back on this answer saying that it’s easier for me to say now that it might’ve been a few decades ago or even a decade ago. But I would say the no-pain, no-gain, school of achievement has become much less interesting in the sense that one of the risks of self-improvement is you find someone to model, whether that’s something they write about or a person you have a parasocial relationship with, meaning you’ve read their book or you see them online. You don’t get to see the whole person. So you might see someone on Shark Tank who is a billionaire or fill in the blank. And in an attempt to copy that person, you take on, say, their business behaviors without seeing the possible side effects of those practices and behaviors and beliefs and so on.
And for me, I suppose I have come to think, number one, if you were to ask a hundred people what is Alexander the Great’s full name… I mean, I couldn’t even tell you. And this is one of the greatest conquerors the world has ever known. And you could go through history and pick out these incredibly, by humankind scale standards, important men and women who have all been forgotten, like the Ozymandias poem.
Debbie Millman:
I don’t know many people that know Rembrandt’s full name.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, exactly. So to that extent, then, burning the candle at both ends in an attempt to leave a legacy, I think is the most hilarious, foolish thing imaginable. We’re all going to be forgotten, at least on a full-name basis, very, very quickly. But you can have an impact through starting with the small, trying to affect individual people or small group of people. This is just, I suppose, a meandering way of saying that productivity or being effective with your goals is still important on some level, but eking out the bleeding of the stone for optimal, fill in the blank, I think is less and less interesting.
Debbie Millman:
Why do you think people drive themselves in the way that they do to construct a life that is comprised of that mentality?
Tim Ferriss:
I think it’s a very smart coping mechanism for a world that seems out of control and for a life that doesn’t seem to have any clear mooring in certainty, right?
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Tim Ferriss:
So you take away… Just went to the bathroom here, maybe 15 feet from where we’re sitting, and there’s this amazing cartoon on the wall of the 10 Commandments being held up by a dog to this audience of dogs. And it’s like, “Heal, sit, stay, lie, sick them, fetch.”
And when you take away that type of certainty, this is how you build a good life, this is what makes you a good, fill in the blank, Christian, Muslim, whatever it might be, and this is what happens in the afterlife when you remove that. I think humans being, as far as we know, uniquely enabled/disabled by our knowledge of our own mortality, you need something to keep your mind from staring into the abyss for too long, I think.
Debbie Millman:
I agree.
Tim Ferriss:
And maybe that ends up being veganism. Maybe that ends up being CrossFit. Maybe that ends up being workaholism, which is also very socially reinforced, particularly in the U.S. I think less so when you stray outside of the Protestant work ethic history. When you get to Spain or something, it’s like, “Okay, it’s a different situation by and large.”
I think that’s it. I think it’s coping with, for some people, the dizziness of freedom. It’s like, “Okay.” We used to have our village, have our hundred people. These were the options. What you did is A, B, and C. You got married at this age, you went through rite of passage at this age. You had 3.5 kids or whatever it was. And you worked the farm, and then the kids inherited the farm, and that’s it.
But in a world of infinite options, even if that’s just a perception, you have the created illusion that you’re constantly losing if you are not striving to grasp at more and more of them. That’s my perception at least. And also watching my audience over the years, it’s like I’ve never seen such a combination of fear, anxiety, apathy, nihilism. And it’s really… Not uniform. There are outliers who don’t fit that bill, but, man, is it prevalent.
And I don’t think that’s due to individual fault. I think society has just become… and life has become much harder to compartmentalize or conceptualize in a way that allows humans to kind of grasp things and operate day to day without worrying all the time.
Debbie Millman:
I wasn’t planning on talking to you about this, but the conversation is leading me to consider that it might be an interesting thing to chat about. I don’t know if you know Amy Griffin.
Tim Ferriss:
I do. Yeah, I do know Amy.
Debbie Millman:
So Amy is the CEO of G6 Ventures. She also just recently wrote a book called The Tell, and I don’t know if you know how much you influenced her writing that book.
Tim Ferriss:
I don’t have the full picture. She sent me some very kind texts, and we’ve spent a little time together. And I have not read the book, but I’ve heard it’s fantastic. Was a little worried about maybe triggering stuff in my own past, revisiting it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss:
There’s a time for that, but there’s also a time when I don’t want to do that.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Oh, I hear you.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
But when I interviewed her, she told me that when we had one of our last conversations about our own lives, that it triggered something in her that ultimately inspired her to write her book about her memoir, about her experiences growing up and some of the violence that she encountered. And it made me think about the way in which we identify young people that might need direction or help, and the way that your teacher suggested, “Have you considered a bigger world out there?”
And it made me realize… And the reason this came into my head is because in thinking about overachievement, something you and I have in common, something that Amy has in common as well, I wonder if teachers, educators, guidance counselors, principals, they’re all taught what signs to look for in kids that might be having trouble at home or in their families. And it’s usually the kid that’s withdrawn or not getting good grades. I’m wondering if ever anybody’s considered looking at the really intense high overachievers that seem to need to make up for something else. And I’m wondering if that’s-
Tim Ferriss:
Sure. Or control something.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Yes. That’s better. Absolutely. Control. And also to feel good about themselves and feel like they have some purpose in the world. And it just makes me think about the ways in which we’re all conditioned to view certain external stimuli, and what if we rethought how much more we actually might be able to support other people.
Tim Ferriss:
Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, I’m not the first person to say this, but everyone’s fighting a battle you know nothing about.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Tim Ferriss:
And certain types of compulsive behavior just happened to be more socially rewarded than others.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I mean, I’ve been behaving this way since I was in junior high school, what’s considered middle school now. Exactly the same.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, me too.
Debbie Millman:
Exactly. And not only that, after many decades of therapy, I realized that’s something that I thought I wasn’t doing anymore, I realized I still do every day.
Tim Ferriss:
And I will say that for my younger self, let’s just say on Long Island, definitely focusing to an extreme extent on schoolwork and things like that. I don’t think that would’ve been the right time for me to try to sort of go to the cellar of my soul with someone’s intervention to look at things because I wouldn’t have had a safety net, I wouldn’t have had a support structure. So at that time, I mean, I’m very grateful that I did have the compulsion to work.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, same.
Tim Ferriss:
And it served me for a long time, but there is a point when sometimes you outlive the tools that serve you for a long time and the behaviors.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah. What do you know about being public that you didn’t during your four-hour work week era?
Tim Ferriss:
Oh, boy. Well, I would say number one is being public-facing and recognizable, especially facially recognizable, has a lot of downsides from a privacy perspective, sometimes from a safety perspective. You don’t need that to be “successful” if we look at it from the point of financial stability. And I wrote this piece, this was a while ago, but the 11 reasons not to become famous, something like that. People can look it up.
Debbie Millman:
That’s what I was referring to. I figured you’d mention it.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. Because many people experience a pretty good percentage of their lives on their phones looking at social media, understandably, what they see rewarded on those platforms often is some degree of fame chasing with various types of videos and behaviors and this, that, and the other thing, which isn’t to diminish all of it. There are some amazing educators on YouTube and on Instagram and so on. There are also a lot of people who are falling prey, being seduced by the vanity metrics of followers or this or that or fill in the blank, right?
And that doesn’t invalidate a short-term career path for some of these people to build a huge following, get sponsors, do this and that and the other thing, but I would say that’s pretty close to professional sports in the sense that you have a few winners make most of the money, and then maybe the next 10% do really well, and then the bottom 80% make next to nothing. But they will still chase the vanity metrics, which can apply to startups as well. They’re these seductive metrics to get you pulled away from the things that actually matter.
So I haven’t had… And it’s going to make me sound like an old bastard, but it’s not an old thing. I know younger people who’ve done this, too. I haven’t had any social apps on my phone in two or three years-
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Tim Ferriss:
… because they are too well-engineered. And the teams that are working on these are going to beat your psychology. That is their job. And collective jobs. You are the product, right? If you’re not being charged for the product, you are the product. What’s the expression in Alcoholics Anonymous? If you don’t want to slip, don’t go where it’s slippery. So I just don’t have the apps on my phone. They’re too compelling. And the personalized algorithms and so on are so good now, it’s very easy to become lost and to become sort of this mimetic desire mirror where you start to get trained to want certain things or to be perceived a certain way by virtue of the things that get put in front of you.
So I still go on social media. I can access it through my laptop, but there’s enough friction that I can’t sit on the toilet and get lost for 60 minutes on my phone. Right?
Debbie Millman:
Yes. I know people that do that. Did you go through withdrawal when you took it all off?
Tim Ferriss:
Short answer is no. No physical withdrawal. Very short psychological… I wouldn’t call it withdrawal, but observation of my Pavlovian conditioning. You end up standing in a line for five minutes. What’s your conditioned response? To pull your phone out of your pocket and scroll through X, whatever… I say X, not the platform. I mean X, any social media app.
Debbie Millman:
Pick your poison.
Tim Ferriss:
Pick your poison. And you begin to realize how many dozens of times a day you’ve been filling gaps or displacing more important work by getting lost in various things. I’m sure people have had this experience because I’ve had this experience, and personal tends to be pretty universal, especially…
I would like to consider myself pretty focused. And this is out of the box in the same way that LeBron James is built to jump and be tall. I can focus for long periods of time on one thing to an abnormal degree. I can do that. And on YouTube, I get immediately hijacked. I’ll go to YouTube to find something specific, but my feed is so good, meaning for me personally, I’ll be like, “Okay, I’ll watch a short before I get to the thing I was about to look for,” and then game is lost. I completely forget. And 20 minutes later, I’m like, “What? Why am I even here? What was I looking for?” So they’re very, very, very well-designed. They’re just going to get better. So for me, the experience of noticing how many times a day I went to this digital pacifier was shocking once there was no way to access it.
Debbie Millman:
Right. Wow. I like the term digital pacifier. That’s good.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. So I ended up… I just call friends more now, which is a much, I think, for a lot of people, I’m not saying for everybody, but healthier way to go about things.
Debbie Millman:
Did you find yourself, when you were on something like Instagram, comparing yourself to others? One of the things that I’ve said a lot is nobody comes away from Instagram after a half hour feeling good about themselves.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, it’s generally not… I mean, unless the accounts you follow are all people getting into skiing accidents and crying because they ate ice cream late at night… I don’t know where you find those channels. But also if you had an account dedicated to those channels, I would have a whole different set of questions for you.
Debbie Millman:
True.
Tim Ferriss:
But I would say I must. I mean, I must because I do follow channels or profiles that are aspirational. I’m following, for instance… I mean, this is not interesting to most people probably, but the Chinese Olympic weightlifting team and various athletes, for instance. Judo. I used to compete in judo. I love judo, but I can’t do that stuff anymore.
So on one hand, I love watching it. On the other hand, it pains me. And I come away like, “Really? My low back hurts now?” You can pull on that thread. And I think, unfortunately, that type of comparison is a muscle that gets stronger with use. That’s another reason why I took that stuff off my phone. I’m just like, “Hey, look, the goal is better, not perfect, and I know how to do that already. I don’t need the internet to tell me how to apply progressive resistance,” or whatever the approach might be.
Let me just get those habits in place, talk to my friends via phone or video call as much as possible, and meditate once or twice a day to train myself. I mean, there are a million different ways to do it. I use an app called The Way with Henry Shukman. Use that once or twice a day so you get comfortable sitting with some empty space. And lo and behold, after a week or two, you’re fine. So there is, though, that, let’s call it detox period.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It’s like giving up sugar.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Crave it for a whole bunch of days.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, about two weeks.
Debbie Millman:
Tim, one of the many things that I’ve admired about you is your curiosity, not just in what you do, but how you do it. You’ve optimized routines, reverse-engineered habits, deconstructed mastery, but now you’ve done something entirely different. So I want to talk to you about your new card game called Coyote. The first question I have for you about it is, is the name an homage to Joni Mitchell’s great song about Sam Shepard Coyote.
Tim Ferriss:
It is not, but I need to look up this song, because this is now the second time that it’s come up.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
The first line of the song is, “No regrets, Coyote.”
Tim Ferriss:
Oh. Okay.
Debbie Millman:
And I was like, “I could see Tim thinking that was a message.”
Tim Ferriss:
I need to find it. Maybe this song is meant for me.
Coyote has a lot of symbolism, not just for me, but around the North American continent. I mean, coyote is, in some respects, uniquely American, right? Okay, for the people in South America, yes, North America. But I would say fundamentally, if you look at creator myths, and if you look at folklore from different First Nations and indigenous groups in North America, there are a couple of trickster entities that come up over and over again. You have coyote, you have Iktomi, spider, you have raven, comes up quite a bit.
There’s a great book called Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde. It is a dense read. I’m going to warn people in advance. The Hermes stuff is really long, so I hope you have some patience for Greek stories. But the trickster is not necessarily automatically bad. So the trickster is sort of the tester of assumptions, also gets his or herself, often he, into trouble.
Debbie Millman:
So like a Loki character.
Tim Ferriss:
Like a Loki character, also in some cases like a Prometheus of stealing fire from the Gods, giving it to humans. And they often get themselves into all sorts of trouble, but they also do a lot of good.
But coyotes are boundary walkers, as described by Lewis Hyde. So they sort of walk between different worlds. And I feel that way quite a bit in the work that I do but just also in my curiosity. I end up kind of weaving through meandering in a slalom kind of across the boundary from one world into the next, into the next, to the next, and introducing people, making these connections, trying to copy and paste or transplant things from one field to the next. So I find that element of the Coyote folklore really appealing. It’s also just a fun character. And coyotes are amazing.
There’s a book I am going to butcher, but I think it’s just American Coyote by Dan Flores. And it’s the story of the evolution of humans and coyotes in parallel. We share a lot in common. The extent to which the US government has gone to… which they did very effectively, of course, first, gray wolves eliminate. But coyotes, they couldn’t do it. They put out millions of bait traps with poison, tons of collateral damage, all sorts of stuff.
Debbie Millman:
Why? Why do they want to eliminate coyotes?
Tim Ferriss:
Well, they were successful at eliminating wolves. And then to keep the department alive and fed, meaning lots of employees employed, they needed a new public enemy number one, so they decided to create the coyote as public enemy number one.
And it’s a wild story. It’s very sad on a lot of levels, but coyotes are incredibly adaptable. They can hunt as a single animal, in pairs, in packs. Wolves are much more constrained as an apex predator. They didn’t have anyone really to worry about above them, whereas coyotes had to be wary because they had wolves and other creatures that could kill them. For that reason, they’re much harder to kill with traps and poison. They can survive almost anywhere. I mean, we’re sitting in New York City. There are coyotes in New York City, right?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss:
There are coyotes in Central Park. They are just very, very crafty, clever creatures. And, I mean, the reason for using Coyote for the game is I wanted something that would be short and iconic. There were a lot of debates around this name. This is a game that is going to be sold internationally as of July 21st or so.
There were certain distributors and so on said, “Hey, coyote don’t exist here, so nobody’s going to know what this is.” And whenever I end up in a situation like that, I’m like, “Okay, I’m open to that.” But we should always stress test these types of convictions. And so I sent texts to friends of mine in a bunch of European countries and in Australia, and I’m like, “Hey, what percentage of your friends know what a coyote is?” And almost all of them were like, “Hey, dummy, we’ve seen Looney Tunes, like all of us.”
Debbie Millman:
Oh, of course.
Tim Ferriss:
And I was like, “Okay. That’s what I thought.”
Debbie Millman:
Oh, good. There you go.
Tim Ferriss:
So that’s the tie-in with the coyote. The more you learn about this animal, the more interesting they are. As a predator that has been able to bob and weave and not just get through a mass annihilation by humans, but actually circumvent and thrive is wild.
Debbie Millman:
The game emerged from, I believe, two years of collaboration with former Xbox game designer, Elan Lee, who is now the co-creator and CEO of Exploding Kittens, a company with a mission to inspire people to connect, laugh, and play fun games in the physical world. Now, I believe you met Elan after you interviewed him for your podcast. I’m wondering, did you always have aspirations to create a game or did the inclination take shape after the podcast interview?
Tim Ferriss:
The inclination was there beforehand.
Debbie Millman:
So tell us when that started heating up.
Tim Ferriss:
I very often will dip my toe in the water with the podcast or maybe a blog post, maybe it’s a late night post on social media through my laptop, to just see like, “What do people think about this? How do I feel about this when I see how people engage with this?” Which is not to say I’m letting the audience dictate what I do. I think it’s very important to say that I don’t… for fear of audience capture, meaning your audience turning you into basically some caricature of things that they want, which you will, you become the mask you wear, that’s dangerous.
But if there are three or four things I’m really excited about, and let’s just say I’m more or less equally interested in all four, then I’ll start dipping my toe in the water, maybe seeing how a small audience or a large audience respond to it or taking a test drive. Maybe I have a weekend sprint. I go on a long hike with a game designer, and I’m like, “Hypothetically, if someone-“
Debbie Millman:
Asking for a friend.
Tim Ferriss:
Asking for a friend-friend. “… want to create a game, what’s step one?” And I grew up very, very small. I was born premature. And I know you know some of this already, but was really the skinny, wimpy kid who would stay in for recess so he wouldn’t get his ass kicked.
I had this book, The World of Fishes. I still remember the hardcover. That was one of my escapes so I wouldn’t get bullied. Another one was Dungeons & Dragons. So I played D&D with a couple of other fellow nerds. And this game just blew my mind. The fact that Cary Gygax, the TSR team and so on could sit down and build something like this was just… It was unbelievable to me. It’s so sophisticated and comprehensive. And I still have all of my modules and everything to this day. They’re actually sitting at home.
That game meant so much to me. It taught me teamwork. It gave me an escape from pain. It allowed me as a relatively socially inept nerd to nerd bond with other nerds, which is a start. And by the way, resolve conflict also. Yeah, some pretty wild things can happen in D&D, especially if your dungeon master’s a prick.
Debbie Millman:
Ooh. I feel like there’s some history bubbling up here.
Tim Ferriss:
Well, yeah. Dungeon masters have a lot of power, I’ll just say. And this is one of my friends. He was a great dungeon master. But if he was in a bad mood and he was pissy, he could be spiteful and do terrible things to other characters. So that was such a formative experience that…
I’ve always been into games. But there was a point, probably when I transferred to that school… Talk about trade-offs with the curse of the achiever. I was like, “Okay, time for me to do adult stuff and be serious. Time for me to be serious. I can’t do this kid stuff anymore.” And that was it. That was the end of stuff like D&D.
And I played video games and stuff, too, when I was younger. Thankfully, that was Spy Hunter and not World of Warcraft, because I could have gone 60 hours a week with World of Warcraft, which I probably would’ve done. In any case, I would intermittently, every few years, pick up casual games, because I’d be like, “You know what? I take stuff too seriously.” Sometimes I’d take myself too seriously. I definitely take my work too seriously.
So I would notice that. I’d be like, “Okay, I am really stressed out. And in the grand global scheme of things, this is ridiculous. Let me play some games.” And I would enjoy the games, but I never quite found the game that stuck.
Debbie Millman:
What were you trying? What kind of things were you trying?
Tim Ferriss:
I was trying basically any game that you… There were a few mistakes I made in the beginning. The first was not really accepting my constraints. What I mean by that is there are some amazing, say, board games out there that take an hour and a half to learn. You have to play three or five times to start to get the hang, and then you can begin to enjoy it.
And I was, as I am in a lot of things, very ambitious. I’d be like, “Of course I’m going to do that.” And lo and behold, never happened, right? Because the setting is I have dinner, I’ve had two glasses of wine, not always, but two glasses of wine with a bunch of friends. It’s 9:00 p.m. Maybe we have an hour and a half. There’s no way I’m going to subject them to sitting down and dealing with instructions and a hobbled unfun attempt at a game. There’s no way.
And then there were other more casual games. I mean, some examples, like contemporary examples, would be… I think it’s One Night Werewolf and Monopoly Go, I believe is another good example, that are really fast, easy to play.
All right. So I started exploring more of the casual gaming side. And then it wasn’t until, funny enough, one of your students, who we just interacted with before we began recording, was talking about what? Exploding kittens and Poetry for Neanderthals. And I found the game Poetry for Neanderthals, and I was like, “Oh my God. This is it. This is the kind of game I want.” And my friends wanted to play again and again and again and again.
And that got me thinking about not just playing games, but I was like, “You know, I’ve been doing the podcast a long time, been doing the writing a long time.” And every four or five years, let’s just say roughly, I try a hard left turn somewhere. I try a new thing. And I was like, “You know, I’ve always wanted to make a game.” Who made this game? Exploding Kittens. Okay. What does that mean? Who runs Exploding Kittens? And that’s how I found Elan Lee. looked at his background, I was like, “Okay, this guy’s done everything.” He’s done video games, super big video games, Halo, et cetera. He’s done interactive, alternate reality, or augmented reality games in the physical world.
He creates the craziest spectrum of games. He can’t stop also. And I say that as a compliment because his day job is running a big company that makes games. And when he’s not doing that, he’s thinking about how to make other games just for fun.
So I reached out, and I was like, “Well, what’s a good…” A good pretext for having a long conversation is a podcast, so let’s try that. And then we really hit it off and became kind of thick as thieves quickly, which is, I’d say, pretty unusual for me as an adult. I’m fairly guarded. But we became close friends. And I was like, “Okay, this momentum feels good. How can I force myself to have some degree of accountability? What is it? Okay, it’s a next conversation.”
And Elan had mentioned… He’s like, “Yeah,” kind of in passing, “if you ever thought about making a game, yeah, that’s definitely… Let’s chat.” And I was like, “You know what? I think I should have that chat.” And that’s how it all kicked off. And that was, I guess, about two years ago.
But games for me are like the vitamin you know you should take, but that you forget to take a lot. And then you take it for a month, and you’re like, “Wow, I feel better.” And then you take a trip, you get busy, you forget about it. And then you have a little more anxiety, a little more of this, a little more of that. And then when you start taking it again, you feel better. And I was like, “Okay, let me try to make this more of a constant.”
And I think that’s also become more and more important. And it’s not limited to gaming, but getting off of screens, just getting off of the internet writ large, and technology for a whole lot of reasons, I mean, eye health, mental health, physical health. And games are an easy way to do that.
Debbie Millman:
Elan suggested that if you had an idea, let him know. How hard or easy or neither is it for you to ask for something? When you were thinking, “Oh, I really want to make this happen,” were you comfortable to say to Elan, “I have a game idea. Let’s do this”?
Tim Ferriss:
Oh, man. I wish that’s how it started. It took us forever to figure it out. But in the spirit of your question, I would say I am very comfortable asking for small things in a way that is very unattached to a yes, if that makes sense.
So in the case of Elan, it was, “Hey, remember the thing you said? If that offer still stands, would you be open to hopping on the phone and just talking about what that might look like? Because I have a pretty big audience. I love games. I would want to be super, super… I’m very excited by the prospect, but would you be open to a 15-minute chat? Okay, cool.” You start there.
And I wasn’t withholding in the sense that I was hiding my cards and not showing my agenda, but it’s I want to make sure I also test this belief that is I want to make a game. Because there a lot of things where you ask someone… They’re like, “Yeah, if I had known A, B or C, I never would’ve done this.2
Debbie Millman:
Well, what was the hardest part to get right?
Tim Ferriss:
The hardest part to get right was… I’ll tell you what’s not hard. What’s not hard is producing mediocre fill in the blank,. So producing a mediocre game, a game that people will be like, “Yeah, it’s kind of fun,” that is challenging, but it’s not super hard. That’s true with a lot of things, right? I mean, I’m sure it’s true in design. I’m sure it’s definitely true in books.
What’s also not hard is if I were willing to, which I’ve never been, just to put my name on something and have someone else do all the work. That’s pretty easy to get going. But what I knew is it’s, like, okay, I have to love this game, and this is going to be the one and only game with my name on it, so I better be excited to talk about this a lot.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Tim Ferriss:
And it’s going to reward me or haunt me for a while, so I really need to be incredibly confident. And with that type of bar, what was hard was arriving at the concept and then figuring out game mechanics, so name, theme, artwork, design. I mean, I was involved in all of that, the copy on the box, the design of the box, so many different aspects of this, but the lifeblood of it is…
And look, guys, if any professional game designers who’ve done dozens of games are listening, I’m a beginner. I’m a low blue belt in game design. But you got to figure out the mechanics, right?
And there are many different ways to approach games, but for a casual game like this… And I should say, also, the ethos of Exploding Kittens, which I like a lot, is that they don’t make entertaining games, they make games that make the players entertaining. And if you sit with that for a second, it’s a really profound and important focusing maxim. We do not make entertaining games, we make games that make the players entertaining to one another.
And with that also as a non-negotiable criteria, it’s like, “Okay, how are we going to do this?” And Elan and I are both very busy. We’ve got a lot going on. And we did a bunch of jam sessions, like two- or three-day jam sessions in New York City, on Long Island, in Utah, and, God, all over LA, all over the place.
And then finally did one in Canada, and I was like, “Okay, we’re not figuring this out.” We tried a million different games, looked at some that were early prototypes. We looked at, well, maybe there’s the possibility of doing a variant where there’s the 10 rules of Poetry for Neanderthals, right? And then there’s do it from scratch, which is the hardest option in a sense. And I really wanted to do it from scratch because I want to be involved in every step.
So we decided that, all right, this particular sprint in Canada is going to be the make it or break. We’ve kind of been trying it, but let’s do it a hundred percent out of a hundred percent for this period. And if we can’t figure it out, let’s just call it. We’re not actually that serious about making game or we can’t figure it out.
And it was on that particular trip, and he brought in one of his game mechanic experts named Ken, who’s a wizard. And we just went for long walks, drinking lots of coffee. And it was on one of those long walks… It was very hot. I remember I was getting sunburned. And we started expanding not what board games do I like or have I liked, but what games in general. And I was like, “Well, you know, it’s going to sound stupid, but I think Rock Paper Scissors is pretty amazing game if you get into a rhythm and you have the right group of friends. What if you could do that as a group but make it more interesting?” That’s how it started. And you can imagine, because you played the game.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss:
It’s like okay. It’s pretty-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I could see-
Tim Ferriss:
It rhymes with that.
Debbie Millman:
… correlation.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, it rhymes with that. Okay. All right. And then I would say that was the hardest part, was… And this is true of so many things. It’s making the decision on a direction. For me, that’s so often the hardest part. It’s making the decision. And then once you’re committed, you’re like, “All right, I’m walking through this particular door,” then instead of considering everything and anything, you get this very productive set of blinders that’s like, “Okay. We walk through this door, and here are our positive constraints now.
It’s going to be a deck of cards. All right. Do we want a bunch of other stuff?”
Okay, well, you have to think about not just the plan, but playing in multiple languages, if you’re going to do it internationally, cost of goods. All that stuff matters, too. It’s like, “Okay, how do you…” I mean, for my brain, it was just like kid in a candy store to play with all this stuff.
But once you step through that door with like, “Okay, here is the fundamental concept and here are a few constraints,” then… Oh, man. Then it’s fast. It’s kind of like, “I should write a book.” And then you’re like, “Okay, I should write a book no longer than 150 pages about this very specific subject. Okay, now I can start writing.”
Debbie Millman:
That’s interesting. I was going to ask you, how did you… Did you approach creating Coyote in the way that you might write a book or produce a show or…
Tim Ferriss:
I approached it in some respects very similarly. The big difference, I would say, is that the possibilityscape for games was much more confusing to me.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Tim Ferriss:
Because there are so many different types of games. So did I want it to be some competitive type of collectible card game along the lines of Magic: The Gathering, where people are building decks? Did I want it to be something… Because I tried this early on before I met Elan. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make a D&D-like game,” which is so complicated. It’s not impossible, but it’s very, very, very, very involved.
I was also at that time started listening to a podcast called How to Think Like a Game Designer by Justin Garry, which is great. And so I would… Anytime I went for a walk, anytime I was in the bathtub, anytime I was washing the dishes, I would listen to this podcast. And you realize that making a game is like choosing a sport at the Olympics. Curling is not exactly the same as high hurdles.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Tim Ferriss:
Not that one’s better or worse. And biathlon-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, curling’s better.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, biathlon is very different from long jump on skis or… Pick the example. They’re so fundamentally different. And the people who sell them are different, like the shops, the people who buy them are different. It’s all different. So figuring out where to focus within that giant menu of options was very hard for me. Whereas within books, it’s like, look, maybe I could write a great magic surrealism novel, but boy, oh boy, that’s going to be a risk. It’s probably going to be prescriptive nonfiction after I do a bunch of experiments on myself meeting experts. That’s kind of what I do.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Tim Ferriss:
So I start with a pretty good idea of the set menu. But with the game, it was really quite challenging.
I would say the similarities that I’m looking at, like what am I good at, what do I have access to. It’s sort of like Robert Rodriguez, the filmmaker. When he made his first film, El Mariachi, for like, I don’t know what it was, $6,000 or something, he basically figured out what he had access to. He’s like, “All right, my friend has an old school bus. This guy has a tortoise. This guy has a pit bull.” He’s like, all right, now I’m going to write the script including all of these things that I have access to, and then it’s going to look like it cost a lot more.”
Debbie Millman:
Right. It’s like one of those food shows where you get five strange-
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, Iron Chef.
Debbie Millman:
… ingredients. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss:
So I think for me, I did also think about that with this game. And most importantly, the question was, what is going to give me energy? Time is important, yes. Attention is also important because that kind of dictates the value of your time in a sense. But you need energy. And as one gets older, you realize, man, oh man, that battery is critically important.
Who I might work with, the type of game I might make, what might be entailed in making that and then promoting it, all of those things had to be something that would not be overly draining, but ideally recharging in some way. And I will tell you, boy, this is true with so many things. But when you get from overly simplistic to complicated to then on the other side, hopefully some type of elegant simplicity, when you have gone through that process yourself, you look at things very differently afterwards.
So if I go to the toy aisle in a store now, and I see these games that have been successful for years, and they’re really easy to learn, hard to master, people like to play them a lot, it’s like, OMG, do I have much more appreciation for how much work goes into that. It’s a tremendous amount of work.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, one of my favorite card table games is Mille Borne. I don’t know if you know-
Tim Ferriss:
No.
Debbie Millman:
… that game. Oh, you would love it. It’s a car race game. And that’s just my little gift to you today.
Tim Ferriss:
I’ll write it down.
Debbie Millman:
Was there ever a moment in the process where you thought this just might not work?
Tim Ferriss:
Oh, yeah. There were many points where I was like, “I don’t know.” It’s like until the game clicks, it doesn’t click, I mean, to state the obvious, right? And what is nice about… I’ll just give an example of another reason why I want to do a game that’s… I mean, I can hold the game, basically, in my palm. It’s a deck of cards with a small box around it.
When we came back from that over-caffeinated walk in Canada, we went back to Elan’s kitchen table and had blank index cards with markers, colored markers of different types, and just started mocking up cards. And so within, let’s call it 20 minutes, we had a V1 deck of cards. And then we tried it, and we’re like, “Oh, this is kind of interesting. This definitely didn’t work at all. It’s too slow in this way. Okay. Well, let’s make another 30 cards.” And then you try it again. And then you try it again. And then you try it again. You’re just using hundreds of these blank cards to iterate, but you can do it really quickly over the span of hours.
So I would say there was the question of game mechanics. What does it mean to win? What does done mean? How do you complete the game? How do you design a game so that it takes 10 minutes and not 40 minutes? How many cards should you have in a deck? These are all surprisingly big questions.
Then there are other points where it’s like, all right, you’re developing the game. Are you ever going to land on a name? That was one where I was like, “Oh, man.” And even if I land on a name I like, am I going to be able to convince everybody else to be interested and commit to that name?
There were definitely a bunch of kind of disagree and commit moments where it’s like, “Okay, I know we disagree on this, but we got to keep moving, so can we do X?” But I would say that the greatest amount of doubt was when there was not yet a concept that had a kernel of something that worked. So it was everything leading up to… I mean, it’s got to be at least nine months of doing these sprints and just coming up with nothing that felt good. And I was like, “Okay.”
Debbie Millman:
Wow. So you just kept pushing and had faith that you’d get there, or-
Tim Ferriss:
I think there was faith, but… I mean, this is going to make me sound terrible. I’m thinking how to wordcraft this, but I don’t think faith is my strong suit. I don’t think like, “Oh yeah, everything’s going to be totally peachy keen in the end. Don’t worry about it,” is my default. I run pretty hypervigilant and just, effectively, prepare for the worst, hope for the best, but mostly prepare for the worst and then have a safety net.
Debbie Millman:
We share that.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, put on your eight-point harness. But when I had that podcast with Elan, and I was like, “Oh, wow. This guy’s really cool. This is somebody I could really be friends with.” I tend to choose projects these days based on… Number one is developing new skills, learning a lot. Number two is developing or deepening relationships, both of which should transcend any given project.
For instance, if I were to write another book, much along the same lines of a prior book, maybe not going to learn a lot. I mean, the subject matter will be different, so sure. Am I going to develop new relationships? Maybe. But I have the podcast for that also. Whereas in the game world, it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to learn an entirely new skill set. I’m going to learn about human interaction. I’m going to learn about big retail.” Like big, big retail, like Walmart and Target and Amazon and so on, well beyond the scope of book retail.
And Elan is awesome. His team is fantastic. I mean, I could go through a long list of names. I won’t do that right now. But his whole team has just been awesome to deal with. I’m like, “Okay.” These are good people. We were able to craft a deal that felt good and made sense that’s also non-trivial. That’s a very important thing. Make sure you know when to hold them, when to fold, when to walk away, when to run, right?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss:
So making sure you have, for me at least, graceful exit options, for ideally all sides, is really important, which is where I think maybe my hypervigilance is helpful or it can sometimes not be helpful. But in that case, I do think it’s helpful.
So all of that meant… I went into this, and I was like, “Even if these sprints where we’re trying to figure out a game do not result in a game, I’m spending time with Elan Lee, who I consider genius and is just such a great human being. I’m having fun with these games. It’s giving me an opportunity to invite people over to play games with me, and they get to experience what it’s like to playtest stuff.”
So I don’t regret a minute of any of those sessions, even if they ended in no game. But yes, there was definitely a point, hence the, “All right, we’re going to do this final sprint. It’s go or no go,” where I was like, “I don’t think we’re going to do it. Maybe this is a Tim problem. I feel like I’m usually good at coming up with lots and lots of ideas, but it’s not happening right now.” And then on that walk, it did happen.
Debbie Millman:
Just quite coincidentally, I’ve been reading a lot of Daniel Kahneman lately, and so I’ve been going into deep, deep wormholes of game theory and so forth, but not game theory about games. I think a lot of people think that game theory is about literal Scrabble, Wordle, et cetera, but it’s really about psychology and choice-making and decisions and so forth. And so it was very serendipitous that I started to talk to you about this.
On the surface, Coyote is a card game. But like most things you create, there’s something deeper coming underneath. This isn’t just a game about rhythm or memory. It’s a symphony in a lot of ways because there’s a lot of things happening at once. There’s rhythm. There’s speaking. There’s psychology. There’s presence. There’s permission. There’s a lot of things happening at the same time. This is a game where you are fully immersed. You can’t look at your phone.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, no.
Debbie Millman:
You can’t text somebody. You can’t have a snack.
Tim Ferriss:
[inaudible 00:54:54].
Debbie Millman:
You’re just immersed in the game. And depending on how many people you’re playing, you’re all in this together. And you have to pay attention to each other. It’s a very focused game. So I want to dig into the psychology a little bit-
Tim Ferriss:
Sure.
Debbie Millman:
… about how you approached making this in this way. The game seems designed to push people… And maybe it was just me because I have a sort of very fixed comfort zone, but the game seems to be designed to push people just out of their comfort zones. Would you agree with that?
Tim Ferriss:
It is. And what is fun about that is that the players are in charge of how hard they make the game.
Debbie Millman:
Right. You have a cooperative version-
Tim Ferriss:
Yep. And then you have competitive.
Debbie Millman:
… and you have a competitive version.
Tim Ferriss:
And the players themselves can pull the levers on how easy or hard they want the game to be. And if it’s okay with you, let me just paint a picture for folks who are like-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, please.
Tim Ferriss:
… “What is this?”
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss:
“What the hell is this game?” So I can explain it really quickly.
Coyote is a game that involves putting out a sequence of cards in front of you, like you would see in a poker game. And let’s say you’re playing with three or four players. In the case of three players, you’d turn over six of these cards, and you’d put out these action cards first. And the action cards have an action you need to perform, a physical action, and a thing you need to say. So an easy one might be ballet. And you do a little fingertips on the top of the head like you’re doing a pirouette. Okay. Let’s see.
Debbie Millman:
Or a mustache and you put your finger on your-
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, or a mustache, and you put your finger under your nose. Exactly. And there are lots of other goofy ones that tend to get a laugh, like making a fart noise and having to lean to the side. I mean, there’s tons of stuff. And there are a bunch that we had to remove because I have quirky sense of humor, and the big retailers didn’t always agree with my sense of humor. So a bunch had to get-
Debbie Millman:
Not safe for work?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, there was some not safe for work that got yanked. So I’ll probably make those available at some point. But the point is, let’s just say you have ballet, mustache, and then a couple of other things. In the simplest example of the game, you all hit the table with your hands, like boom, boom. So if you think of the, “We will, we will rock you,” like boom, boom… boom, boom… So you go boom, boom, ballet, and you make the movement. That’d be one player. And then it goes to the next player, and it’s boom, boom, mustache. Boom, boom, whatever it is. Boom, boom, whatever it is. Okay. You finished the four cards. Congratulations.
Now each person takes out a new card, or they take three cards from the deck, and they choose one to play. In addition to the action cards, which are the types of a physical movement plus a thing you have to say at the same time, you have Coyote cards, which mix things up, so you could… And the cards are all colored differently, green, purple, whatever. So you might have a card that you play and it says, “Players must whisper every green.” So instead of saying it in your normal voice, it’s, “Boom, boom. Boom, boom, mustache,” and so on and so forth.
Debbie Millman:
And then there’s somewhere a card will come up and it’ll say, “Just tap once when it’s a green card.”
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And that really-
Tim Ferriss:
Oh, that messes people up.
Debbie Millman:
That messed me up because I was so kind of paying attention rhythmically.
Tim Ferriss:
Yep.
Debbie Millman:
And then it’s also before and after.
Tim Ferriss:
Changing. Yeah, that’s a very hard card. So they’re also noted for difficulty. That’s definitely three out of three, hard.
So in the cooperative version, you’re trying to get a certain number of cards on the table, and then you win as a team. In the competitive version, you can also sabotage people with attack cards. And the reason that’s important is that in early playtesting…
All right. Well, let me share a story from my life. I have a family member. I’m not going to mention who they are. They’re very good at chess. They love playing chess because they like beating people at chess. And I’m decent at chess. I’m not great. But I was playing with them, and about, I don’t know, four moves in, I was like, “Oh, I’m screwed. I’m dead.”
Debbie Millman:
That was bad.
Tim Ferriss:
And so I said to him… Or four or five moves. I was like, “Oh. Oh, yeah, I’m totally dead and X number of moves.” And so I said to him… I was like, “Yeah, I’m done.” And he’s like, “No, no, no. We have to finish.” I’m like, “I don’t want to euthanize myself slowly. It’s like I see that you’re going to win.” And that’s the risk of a game that is sort of complete information for everybody. Whereas if you’re backgammon, there’s an element of chance where even someone inexperienced might end up doing really well.
And with very early versions of Coyote, what I noticed there was one guy who played with one of my employees who was playtesting an early deck. And this guy was a computer programmer, mathematician, and he just killed everybody. Nobody could beat him. He was just so good at this game it stopped being fun because he won every single time. I was like, “Okay, well, how do you work around that?” Well, you could have cards that when everybody sees like, “Oh, John’s going to smoke us. Okay, well, we need to gang up on John.”
Debbie Millman:
Oh.
Tim Ferriss:
Now we can play these attack cards where it’s like, “Okay, now John has to do everything. He has to say everything with his lips curled over his teeth.”
Debbie Millman:
Ah. So it adding a little bit of Survivor in there.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, exactly. And what that allows is somebody who might not be as good naturally at the game to compete with someone who is very, very, very naturally good.
Debbie Millman:
So the competitive still has some of the collaborative aspect of it.
Tim Ferriss:
It does. Part of what makes it fun is, yeah, you can have these temporary alliances. But ultimately, there’s only one winner. In the competitive, it’s the last person standing. You each get three lives, and that’s it. And if you mess up, if you say the wrong thing, if you don’t whisper when you’re supposed to whisper, if you tap twice instead of once or whatever the rules are… And the game starts very, very, very easy, and then it abruptly gets quite difficult.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it does.
Tim Ferriss:
But you mentioned Kahneman, and I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this to you. I, to make ends meet when I was an undergrad, volunteered as a test subject in a bunch of his studies.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, Tim.
Tim Ferriss:
Now, by association, that sounds awesome, right? I mean, this is super genius, Nobel Prize laureate. Amazing. In practice what that meant is I was sitting in front of one of those really old computer terminals, like black screen, green font-type thing. Yeah, I would sit there for hours, and it would basically have instructions along the lines of, “If you see a blue square in the upper right-hand corner, hit the space bar. If you see this, hit the upper arrow,” and just sit there and stare at a screen for hours on end. But these were various types of-
Debbie Millman:
wow.
Tim Ferriss:
… attentional studies and so on.
Debbie Millman:
Did you learn anything about yourself in it?
Tim Ferriss:
I learned that it wasn’t worth $6 an hour to me to do that, so I found other jobs.
Debbie Millman:
Did you ever work with him directly?
Tim Ferriss:
No. No, I didn’t. He was the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain in the tower. I mean, I’ve heard only wonderful things about him. And he’s since passed, but what a brilliant man.
Debbie Millman:
What do you think this sabotage aspect of the game reveals about our relationship to control or to rhythm or to failure?
Tim Ferriss:
Well, I think that… Let me say a few things. So the first is that part of what I find really fun about a game like Coyote is… Particularly Coyote because you’re dealing with, at least one piece of it, what is called interference effect-
Debbie Millman:
What is that?
Tim Ferriss:
… in neuroscience. So people may have seen something like the Stroop test, for instance, which is one of the things I’m very, very, very good at. And then for digit recall, I’m terrible, which might surprise people. And by digit recall, I mean four and five number of strings, not very much.
But the Stroop test is where you have to… I’m going to get this probably a little bit off, but it’s something like this where you have to indicate the color of the phrase that pops up on the screen, but you might have red in red color, in which case that’s easy.
Debbie Millman:
Right?
Tim Ferriss:
But then you might have red come up in blue font and so on and so forth. So the Stroop is presenting you with interference between the stated color and the text and the color of the text. And there’s more to it. But being able to very quickly hone in on the element that matters while ignoring this completely opposite direction to your brain is interference or contending with interference.
And there are many different ways you can look at this. I think there’s something called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. So we were chatting about this a little bit earlier, but it’s like part of my hope is that this can actually be used as a cognitive training tool, which is not proven at all, but I’m talking to some scientists about maybe doing a study.
The reason I mention all of that is that people fail in different ways. So for instance, I remember doing playtesting with six or seven people. It works with three people, but the more the merrier, for sure. Ends up being very fast also when you have more players. But some people cannot… For instance, if there’s a card that modifies and says, “Okay, now, instead of going, ‘boom, boom, card. Boom, boom, card,” now it’s, ‘Boom, boom, boom, card. Boom, boom, boom, card.’ You have to do it three times.” There’s some people who just cannot do that. Like the replacing two beats with one or three, they cannot do it.
And then there are other folks, and I happen to be one of these players, where if there’s a Coyote card that makes every player play a certain card… So what that means is for me and for most people, as they’re watching the game go around the table, you can keep track of whose turn it’s, but if you play a Coyote card over, let’s say, ballet, then everybody goes, “Boom, boom,” and everyone does the ballet sign and says ballet. It basically resets… Oftentimes, you’re not going to know whose turn it is, and that’s when you make a mistake.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You’re just explaining every single thing that I did. First of all, I loved playing it. Roxanne, my wife, was particularly good at it. As you can well expect, she has that focus. And then I was playing with my niece and her girlfriend, and they were also good at it. I was not good at it, but I had a lot of fun. But I do have to tell you that even if you’re not playing the competitive set or the competitive way, it still gets competitive.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, it still gets competitive.
Debbie Millman:
We were playing cooperatively, but then I got really competitive. But then the more competitive I got, the worse I was doing. And so I was the first one out, even though we kept… Technically, I was the first one out, because you get three outs, you’re out. But my family let me keep playing, and ultimately ended up with, I think, four or five outs and…
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, house rules are the way to go. I would say the most entertaining people to watch lose are the people who are really good at it when they get sabotaged.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I get it.
Tim Ferriss:
Because they are expecting to win, and then they don’t. So that’s pretty entertaining. I would say that-
Debbie Millman:
That’s the case with everything, though.
Tim Ferriss:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, that’s what I like about this whole conversation and about this whole idea of game theory is that this is a micro chasm of how we engage in the world.
Tim Ferriss:
Oh, sure. Or how do adults respond when kids beat them handily. Because this is also designed… It says age 10 and up. I don’t think anyone’s going to get upset for me saying this, but it’s like you can modify the rules. I encourage house rules. Modify. You are in charge of how hard or easy it is.
My son’s daughter wanted to send me a video with her feedback about the game. And she’s four, right? They had to modify it. It was more of like a Simon Says kind of thing. But you can find certainly 8-year-old who will smoke most adults. And so seeing how adults who think they’re really composed and even-keeled respond… If they lose once, they’re like, “Ha, ha, ha. Good job.” But if they get smoked three times in a row-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that says something about who you are. So were you thinking about cognitive overload in a deliberate way? I mean, you said you were talking to cognitive scientists. Are you measuring that? Is there a limit?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, haven’t done all too much in terms of measurement yet, because I want to… I’ll say a few things. The first is forward-looking. So forward-looking, the study design would determine how to measure. What are we actually measuring? Because I suppose we might use a term broadly, like attention, but there are actually many fine slice types of attention. And I need someone who’s far more sophisticated than I to help figure out exactly what we’re going to measure.
And it could have a null effect. Maybe it doesn’t do anything. It certainly helps you sleep. I will tell you that. If you have an active mind and you play this, couple games, you are going to be wiped out. Great for sleep. So I can say that.
But I would say as it relates to the origin story, I do think that as we become more and more dependent on digital tools, naturally we have abilities at atrophy. Example, given Google Maps, right? And I would like to preserve and cultivate and train my mind in the same way that I train my body. But most of the tools that are sold for that purpose are pseudoscience at best. This, I don’t know if it does anything in terms of adaptation, but I do know that it is very, very cognitively challenging.
I did like the idea of developing something that seemed to hit… For instance, there’s a Coyote card, this trickster card, that you put above one of the cards, and the card gets flipped face down. So now you have to remember what that card was. So I wanted to incorporate as many different types of cognitive training that as a lay person… Look, I did some neuroscience in undergrad, but I’m not a neuroscientist. I wanted to incorporate as much as possible so that hopefully, and who knows, this is still TBD, but while people are having fun, there’s this kind of Trojan horse of also brain health. Who knows, right?
But I have neurodegenerative disease on both sides of my family. I take that stuff really seriously. And just to give people a little Scooby Snack, I would say there’s a protein called Klotho that’s naturally produced, K-L-O-T-H-O, discovered by a Japanese researcher. It is produced by the body. You can increase production through exercise. So do not skip the physical exercise for brain health specifically. But in addition to that, I was like, “Well, if I can make something that feels like I just did a little bit of cross-training for the brain, fantastic.” TBD if it actually does anything.
Debbie Millman:
If someone plays Coyote really well, what do you think that says about them? Is it about memory, presence, mischief?
Tim Ferriss:
Whether it’s Coyote or anything else, on some level, this is cliche, but I do think if you’re really trying to pay attention… And you can overread things, but how people do anything can tell you a lot about a person. I often think that about driving.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yes.
Tim Ferriss:
If you watch-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yes.
Tim Ferriss:
… somebody driving-
Debbie Millman:
Anger management.
Tim Ferriss:
… you can learn a lot. And if you talk to them about finances, I think you can learn a lot about someone’s psychology just by what their beliefs are and how they think about money.
Debbie Millman:
What they’re afraid of.
Tim Ferriss:
What are their stories that they tell themselves about it? So in a game like this, I mean, there are going to be some people who just want to… I mean, they’re sort of the arc coyote of the group, and they just want to make it as hard as possible. They’re like, “Let’s go. Let’s do this.” And they just like to stir the pot. So I would imagine that says something about that personality type.
Then I would say there are some folks who seem very good at multitasking, like visual input and physical behaviors. So I would imagine, for instance, that musicians, some musicians, would be quite good at this.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. Drummers, for sure.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. Yeah, I would imagine they would be quite good at doing this.
Debbie Millman:
Bass players.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. What’s going to mess them up is going to be the verbal part.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s true. I mean, anybody can have a lead gene in terms of their senses that combines a whole bunch of them.
Tim Ferriss:
And the other piece of this that I have not seen done before, I’m sure that somebody else has done it, but I couldn’t find an example, is the deck. And I felt really strongly about this. The deck comes with 10 blank cards because I want everybody to design their own cards as they play-
Debbie Millman:
I can’t wait to see what people make.
Tim Ferriss:
… to become a game designer.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Tim Ferriss:
Within the framework of the game, it’s surprisingly easy. If you play five games, you’re ready to make your own cards. You can create stuff that is as not-suitable-for-work as you like, because this is your home deck. You can kind of do whatever you want. And people come up with some hilarious stuff just doing the playtesting and seeing what people have thrown in there.
So it’s been a real journey. And part of my hope in doing this, because it’s so out of left field, is just to offer to people that that type of left turn is available to more people than you might think. And they’re always going to be trade-offs, always going to be costs, but there are always costs with everything, including inaction, including continuing on your current journey.
Debbie Millman:
Including regret.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, including regret. Maybe it’s just a story I tell myself, but my feeling is if you choose based on the learning potential, the density of learning, and the relationships that will transcend any given project, it’s very hard to lose over time. It is very hard to lose, and it’s just more fun.
Debbie Millman:
Designing a game seems like a joyful act, but also an incredibly intentional one. And I know that intention is something that runs through everything that you do. I’m curious, what does a game like Coyote say about where you are now creatively and personally?
Tim Ferriss:
I would say, for sure, it says that I am in a place where I want to double down and really invest on social connection versus isolation, for sure. Books are pretty, or at least for me, a very solitary experience.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, they are.
Tim Ferriss:
And I’ve had enough of that, I think, for a while. Few decades of mostly working by myself.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think that you were going to write another book and then…
Tim Ferriss:
I hit pause on it for right now. I mean, I have an 800-page draft, and I’m just like, “Oh God. An 800-page draft, that’s so much rewriting and reworking.” So I hit pause. I got a lot of raw material, but it’s like I know how to do the solitary thing. I can do it, and I’m good at it, but that doesn’t mean I should do it.
And my tendency when I am feeling stressed is to isolate, suffer in silence, figure it out. I think that stratagem has outlived its usefulness for me. So the game, whether I like it or not, to offset my conditioned impulse to isolate, I have to work with people to make a good game. To play any game, unless you’re playing Solitaire or something, you’re playing with other people.
I also spend too much time sitting in front of a computer. So creatively, it’s like I want to find outlets that allow me to hopefully do something other than peck at a keyboard, do things that are visual, crack my knuckles and get out some Procreate or some pens and actually do some sketching, which was a really fun part of this game as well.
And where I am creatively, I would say, is also taking more risks that are outside of the categories that I might be comfortable with, which I have some history of doing in the sense that I went from the book stuff to angel investing and then after that to podcasting. But if you look at those, each one of those shifts in some way was informed by an ultra meltdown, just a burnout situation. And so I found myself in the, I suppose, very luckily, fortunate position, but very confusing position for me, unpracticed position of saying to myself, “I want a new chapter.” I’m not burned out, so I’m not forced to do it. It’s not pushing me in a certain direction in the way that podcasting was kind of served to me on a silver platter.
Because when I launched The 4-Hour Chef, which just about killed me, when I launched it, I did a lot of podcasts in 2012. And I was like, “Oh, this is fun. Maybe I should try this.” And that’s how that started. But when I was considering all the different options, games being one of them, I didn’t have that feeling of the burnout gun against the head, so it was harder. It was harder. It didn’t feel like a necessity. So it was actually psychologically much harder for me to do it because the podcast is doing well. The other things are doing well. It’s not like I hit some big stumbling block.
Debbie Millman:
But you have changed the way in which you do certain things. You just talked about pulling back on doing the book, at least for now.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You took a little bit of a sabbatical from the podcast.
Tim Ferriss:
Did. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You came back with a new set of criteria about how you were going to be doing the podcast.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, new rules for the podcast, for sure.
Debbie Millman:
And now you have a whole new chapter.
Tim Ferriss:
That’s true. That is true. So, yeah, I suppose I should. I’m not very good at patting myself on the back, as you know. But if I hadn’t done the new rules, if I hadn’t taken the sabbatical, if I hadn’t made the new rules for the podcast, which were intended just to make the podcast as fun as possible for me, economic consequences be damned… Because a lot of those rules did hurt in terms of I’m not chasing the crazy over-moment thumbnails with click-baity headlines and big red arrows and stuff.
Debbie Millman:
But the podcasts are more heartfelt, more sincere?
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, very heartfelt.
Debbie Millman:
Not that they weren’t before, but they just feel more soulful.
Tim Ferriss:
I feel very good about it, and what did it do? The new rules gave me energy that I could then apply where? To this game. The new rules for the podcast enabled me to be more creative with guest selection, and creativity… Again, I’m not coming up with this quote. But creativity, it’s like courage. The more you use it, the more you have. I feel like the little sabbatical I had after the 10th anniversary of the podcast and then the new rules gave me a reservoir for energy upon which this game depended. I don’t think it would’ve happened otherwise.
Debbie Millman:
And also, you might not even be aware of this, but it does inspire other people to rethink how they’re doing things. This is my 20th year. And because you did that with your sabbatical, I’ve been thinking about a way for me to keep doing the show, but doing it in a way that also gives me a little bit of time to rethink. So watch this space. I have two last questions for you.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Second to last, what does ambition mean to you now?
Tim Ferriss:
I’ll say as a preface to buy myself time. I mean, ambition used to be the hallmark of an enviable life and a righteous path. I don’t relate to it that way anymore. I think ambition is jet fuel. Not everyone needs to be on a jet. But if you’re going to be on a jet, you better make sure it’s pointed in the right direction.
Debbie Millman:
And that you have a parachute.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Make sure you have some means, an option, ideally of a graceful exit if you’re going to decide to go after. But at the same time, it’s like, look, the game Coyote right now, it was exclusive at Walmart. By the time this comes out, it’s going to be everywhere, Target. Amazon, international. Has 180 million-plus social video views of gameplay alone, which is nuts. So it’s doing incredibly well.
And I do want… I’m competitive, and I like the excitement of this happening after two years of being in the cave and doing the playtesting and working with the Exploding Kittens team. I suppose you could say I’m ambitious about this game, but it’s also a very focused ambition that is not a personality trait. It’s more, like I mentioned, that fuel that I am adding to this particular project, and there is, in a sense, an expiration date. What I mean by that is I commit to go all guns blazing for X period of time, and that’s it. And if it’s going to hit escape velocity, it will. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But I think open-ended ambition that is not very focused can be incredibly corrosive. So I would say that’s probably how I relate to it. It’s tricky. Ambition’s a tricky thing.
Debbie Millman:
It is. Slippery slope.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. It’s like making a deal with a genie or something, right?
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss:
You really got to mind your P’s and Q’s.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So my last question is one that I am actually borrowing from Roxane. It’s a signature question she asks at the end of every interview. And I really thought, “You know what? This is such a wonderful question for me to ask him. I think he’s going to love the question, and I think I’m going to love hearing his answer.” And so the question is, what do you love most about what you do?
Tim Ferriss:
Ooh. That is a good question. Being inspired and learning from people who are passionate about what they do. Or, honestly, it’s broader than that. Passionate about life. Just having the chance to interact with people, this is not a very scientific term, but who have a high degree of stoke about something, anything. Cynicism and nihilism are not always enlightened. I imagine a French woman with a cigarette who’s like, “Life is shit, you know?”
Debbie Millman:
Swinging her hair.
Tim Ferriss:
And I feel like the internet has mostly turned into that. There’s a place for letting off steam, and there are a lot of problems in the world. But while being cognizant of that, and certainly being aware of what you can affect and what you can’t affect, cue Serenity Prayer, I think that you… I’ll personalize it. I really benefit from focusing on the sources of light. I really, really need it. As much as I need water, as much as I need sleep, I need those sources of light because, we’ve talked about this, but I can default to dark. I tend to think human nature’s pretty dark and-
Debbie Millman:
Especially right now.
Tim Ferriss:
Yeah. I mean, just read any history, too. It’s like, “Look, this whole human business is pretty rough.” So when you find somebody who works at cultivating that light in themselves and shares it with other people… Like Elan Lee is a great example. Man, value that. For me, value that. Spend time around that. Learn from it. So I would say that’s what I love most about what I do.
Debbie Millman:
Tim Ferriss, thank you so much for bringing both rigor and mischief into the world and for making so much work that matters. And once again, thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Tim Ferriss:
Aw. I love it, Debbie. Thank you so much.
Debbie Millman:
You can find Tim Ferriss’s brand new game, Coyote, at ExplodingKittens.com and wherever games are sold. And of course, The Tim Ferriss Show remains one of the most thoughtful, wide-ranging, enlightening podcasts out there. You can find that wherever you love your podcasts.
This is the 20th year we’ve been broadcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.