Think Like A Game Designer - Tim Ferriss — Designing Coyote, Playing to Learn, Publishing Truths, and Saying "No" (#89)

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

About Tim FerrissTim Ferriss is a category of one. His innovative approach to life and business has helped him to launch 5 New York Times Bestellers, build one of the most influential podcasts in the world with over one billion downloads, become an early stage investor in companies like Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo and more. His #1 New York Times Bestselling Book, The 4-Hour Work Week, was part of the inspiration for me to quit my job and start my own company (you can here more of that story in my appearance on Tim’s podcast here). And now he has taken all of those skills and brought them to game design with the release of Coyote. We dive deep on all of these topics and learn how Tim selects and approaches each new arena he seeks to conquer. Tim deliver’s on many insights that will apply to you regardless of your creative field.Think Like A Game Designer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Tim Ferriss. Tim is the author of five number one New York Times bestselling books, including the four-hour work week and Tools of Titans. He is a successful investor in early stage technology companies, including Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and more. And he is the host of the Tim Ferriss Show, which it has over one billion downloads. And in addition to that, he is now also a successful

game designer. His game Coyote is releasing worldwide just around the time this podcast airs. You can go to coyote game.com to pick it up or any major retailer or nearby. It is a really fun game and we talk about Tim's origins as a gamer and how Dungeons and Dragons helped him survive and thrive as a skinny, nerdy kid growing up. We talk about the nature of creative work in the age of AI and we give some practical tips on how you can reduce AI anxiety by becoming a category of one. We talk about Tim's process for learning and approaching a new project. We talk about how you overcome fear of launching something new and practical ways to chase energy to be able to manage your workflow and find things that matter to you and still learning about how to say no

to create space for things that matter to you. We talk about Tim's no book upcoming. We talk about how to design experiments in life that can't fail because you're optimizing for the right things. We talk about the power of constraints, the power of deadlines, and we get into very granular details about how Tim picks projects, what his sprints look like, and how to know when you have a winner on your hands. We also go into some nitty-gritty details about how to get into mass market retailers like Walmart and Target, how to get a book published in the process for writing a book and how that gets done, including talking a little bit about my upcoming book. We talk about undervalued promotional channels and how you can manage marketing and think about marketing,

which Tim has been really great at launching number one bestsellers in many categories. I got to tell you, it was so much fun to finally get to turn the tables on Tim after he interviewed me on his podcast last year. I had a great time playing his game. Coyote is really fun. There's a kind of rhythm-based social play dynamic where you're going around the table doing silly things and have to memorize them in order and then you can attack other people and the game gets more complex and fun. It's a really great game and it was really fun to be a part of Tim's process as he was early in his design career and asking questions about it to where he's ended up. So this is a really fun conversation. We have over two and a half hours of gold here for you. So without any further ado,

here is Tim Ferriss. Hello and welcome. I am here with Tim Ferriss. Tim, it is so awesome to have you here. That's so great and so surreal to be here. Yeah, man. This is full circle. I've been, you know, obviously I talked about it when I came on your podcast, how much of an influence you've had on me and to have you now here and to be able to talk about your projects that's in my domain. Very exciting. Very exciting. Yeah, it is, but it is it is really full circle. I remember very distinctly, I guess it was about two years ago, maybe a little bit more time has passed, but listening to your podcast and exploring every possible idea, format, and creator on your show, walking around in the mountains of your,

Utah and Colorado in the very, very early germination stages of thinking, huh, game design. That seems interesting. And here we are. Yeah, yeah. I remember from my perspective on this, like, I was, it was New Year's Day and I'm in Santa Marta and I get a message from you on, I think it was still Twitter at the time, but on X, it was like, hey, I've been listening to the podcast and I thought, for sure,

it was a scam. And then it was really fun. And we'll get into this as we go forward because the process that you, when we first started talking about game design and being kind of on the receiving end of your deconstructing of a project was really fascinating for me. And I want to kind of play that out for people. But first, I want to go on the way back machine a little bit because, you know, most people are going to know you as, you know, an author and podcaster and, you know, guru on a variety of subjects. But you actually have a deep background in gaming. And I'd love to just kind of like surface that. Let's talk a little bit about where you got your love for games.

and kind of why this is a project that was fun for you or you got excited about? Totally. So there were a few, I would say, cornerstones back in the day, and they were very different. So if you were to walk down the stairs from where I'm sitting right now, I still have all of my original D&D material. And I have the very, very old versions. I might even have a first edition of Players Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide. I've got all the hardbacks, all the modules. I still have my original kit when it comes to 20-sided dye and everything else.

Right downstairs, never ended up using the golf ball like 100-sided die much, but I do have that for just pure entertainment. We tried to use it. It didn't stop very well. In any case, that's what I'd say in a sense allowed me to bond with other nerds and puny kids. because when I was really young, I'm sitting on Long Island right now, as a result of being born, really premature, I had a lot of health issues and I was really, really small until sixth grade or technically fifth grade summer when I grew five inches, thank God. But prior to that, going out for recess,

not safe. I had a big hardcover book called Fishes of the World that we got at the remainder table at the bookstore here locally. And I would just sit inside and read the book. It was not safe for me to be outside with the bigger kids. And Dunstan's Dragons ended up being this huge creative outlet. And it was actually really complimentary to the other key obsession I had at the time, which was collecting comic books. I actually still have all my polybagged comic books. That's where I spent any of my money from busing tables or anything like that later.

And it was the first thing I collected. So the comic books and the desire to be a comic book penciler, which was actually intact all the way through the beginning of college, and still do a lot of digital painting and things like that on an iPad now, those went together really well. And Dungeons and Dragons is the contrast to the other games I would play, which were very simple, Commodore 64, load runner. or spy hunter, that type of thing. And you could play as long or as as as as as short as you wanted to play, right? Any given kind of round could be pretty short. Saving games wasn't always super reliable. Yes, as people might remember.

But just played tons and tons of games. When I was younger, I think in part also because I did well in school, but I was really, really bored. The schooling here was not good. I had some slack in the system. So that was it. That was it. Those are,

those are, I suppose, some of the original elements of the origin. Yeah, I want to key in on a couple of things there, right? One, I share that,

you know, all of the pages of my notebooks throughout high school and college and everything, all have little, you know, magic decks or different game ideas all scribbled into the corners. And so,

you know, you had some spare brain capacity to use while you're moving through classes, games are a great way for that. And I want to linger a little bit on the social aspect of this because I think it's just over time. You know, I got hooked on games. Originally I thought because the sort of intellectual challenge

and the puzzle of it and immersing myself in a world, but I realized that what really connected me to games and has made me stay connected. And really what I view is a biggest part of my job is building that opportunity for players to connect, that opportunity for players to build relationships. And the things that, you know, even when I was playing in tournaments for lots of money on the line, it wasn't that that got me, kept me going.

It was that I was going to go meet up with my friends at a different part of the world and we would all get together and play. And we still have D&D games that we play remote now with friends that I've had for forever. So even now that Dungeons and Dragons seems to have gotten bigger than it ever has, I think in part because people crave that kind of connection and that ability to, you know, just tell stories together, share together, laugh together. And I think things like not just Dungeons and Dragons, but also your game Coyote, which I have here, let's that happen.

But it feels like a pretty big shift, right? To go from like I love Dungeons and Dragons and Commodore 64 games to a kind of party style game like you did. So now I'd like to move forward into how you got from, hey, maybe I want to make a game. And you loved the idea of creating worlds to where we landed. So we can kind of start the story there. and pick apart pieces as we go.

Sure, I'll let you lead the way. I'll say one more thing that may have been obvious when I said it, but in case it isn't, with the comic book penciling, I could draw or I could practice drawing. I could even make really, really shitty comic books, which I still have downstairs also. They're not great, but they're a pretty good attempt. Then you think about, say, the computer games,

that just seemed impossible. I'm not a programmer. I don't understand how the inside of computers work. I'm not going to make a computer game. And then Dungeons and Dragons, certainly, at least from my perspective, then and even now, I'm like, this is so incredibly sophisticated and complicated.

This isn't, it wasn't even on the map of possibilities for something that a kid like me could conceive of making. So I think that's part of the reason why I leaned into the comic book side as opposed to leaning into the I should make a game side. It didn't seem possible, at least at that point. Yeah, there's an interesting tangent we could make here too

because I think that on the one hand, I think it's always good for you to start with something that's sort of you can wrap your hands around. You know, like the people who are like, oh, I want to make a game that's World of Warcraft plus Diablo plus Halo and they've never made a game or done anything. It's like, okay, well, let's slow down, right? and actually making a smaller box game or something that you can draw on.

I bought my first set of watercolors. Let's go make the Sistine Chapel. Exactly. Exactly. So there's a there's a real strength there. But also, you know, nowadays, that equation is shifting, right? I mean, I've started vibe coding my own games, right? Because I can't program. I usually have to pay engineers a lot of money.

And now I can like start that process. And it's not 100% there, but what a solo creator can do, whether that be for art or for programming or a lot of the tools that, I mean, I make my own music now. I make cool, you know, songs for my games and stuff, which is all stuff that was not even remotely possible or on my radar two years ago. So I wonder if you've, I'm sure you've thought about some of this stuff, but like how you think about that, whether people should be changing the scope of what they think they can do now or how to approach creative work nowadays. Is it any different in your mind?

Yeah. Yeah. And I love the hopping around. So I'm always game to it, the conversational parkour. On this particular point, I would say that I might back up and ask another question first, if you're hoping to do something professionally. I think as an amateur, literally the root of that is, at least in part, loving something, doing it for love, then I would say expand the scope. So, for instance, I want to make an... this is with various tools from Google and others, I want to say straightforward. I would

more say very, very possible, but to do it well still requires some skill. I want to make a movie trailer based on actually, believe it or not, like a full-length animated feature that I would like to make that is based somewhat. People can look this up. We might not have time to explain all of this, but on the last few chapters of fiction that I wrote for The Legend of Cockpunch. Yeah. Actually, it's related to the gaming conversation because some of the early ideas were tied into that world building. But to do that is something that would have been way too involved, way too expensive to be practical even two years ago. So that's the type of thing that I will play with.

But if you're hoping to do something, let's say you're already a game designer to expand the scope. I would just say that as someone who invests in a lot of tech startups, and for those who don't have the background, I was in Silicon Valley for almost 20 years and was very, very involved with companies incredibly early. first of three advisors to Uber in 2008, I suppose, first advisor to Shopify and when they had nine or ten employees, and on and on, and on. Lots of duo lingo, one of the first investors. And I get to see a lot of what's coming in AI, for instance. And even six months from now, things are going to be a world different. And that's exciting. What that also means is the and this is related to answering the question. The barriers to entry are going to be lower and lower and lower.

So if you're thinking of expanding your scope, everyone else is going to be thinking of expanding their scope as well. So I would also think about what you are uniquely positioned to do or uniquely capable of doing. And that doesn't mean that you have to be the best at something. It just means that you have to derive, for instance, as one alternative, more energy from something than other people, or find it easier to do or have more stamina, and then use that as the jumping off point to ask, like, where can I experiment with

either expanding my scope or constraining my scope and really like amplifying a smaller piece of this? I think you could use AI to do both of those things. So exciting times, there's going to be a lot of fucking noise out there. And a lot of of AI generated content, audio, video, deluge. So a lot of it will become also

how do you actually cut through the noise? And a good example, I'll just take a step back. I have a poster downstairs, and it is a poster of the first toy story characters

and then an overlay with these letters from John Lasseter, Steve Jobs, etc. Because the first stock I ever bought when I was much, much younger, was Pixar way back in the day. And when it was first possible to buy the stock. And what made Pixar good, yes, it was a huge, huge leap forward with respect to technological capabilities that people had never seen the likes of before. but fundamentally it was the storytelling. It really was fundamentally the storytelling.

Yes, without the tech, it wouldn't have happened the way it happened. But I do think that a lot of the core capabilities, if people are listening, they're like, shit, I can't even keep track of AI from one day to the next. Am I falling behind? It's like the basics and the fundamentals or the basics and the fundamentals for a reason. So if you're still really good at that stuff,

that'll be the key to succeeding in the attention economy when there's so much noise, I think. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, listen, nobody knows, but I find it really fascinating to speak to. And I try to think about, you know, how do you kind of skate to where the puck is going, right, on this, right? Because I also, while I don't have necessarily the access that you do, I see the trends where they're headed and where these tools are going. And so I just want to kind of underscore what I heard you say, which is that this is where the idea of passion,

like gets concrete, right? The follow your passions thing is kind of fuzzy. But what I heard from you, which I think is really true, is like the area where you have that passion, because you enjoy the thing, lets you have a competitive advantage, right? Because you can push past all of the natural discomfort. You can get yourself to an area

where you get enough of those reps and cycles in to learn and complete something that can really stand out, right? Is that that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I think that's fair. Fair way to put it. And also I would just say, look, if you have some anxiety, as a lot of people do, about falling behind about the disruption and job loss and displacement and so on and so on. But let's just say a fear of falling behind because the development is so rapid.

And by the way, the rate of acceleration is only going to increase for a whole host of reasons. I think it's worth looking at all of the many outliers who seem to not have worried about that along the way. Daniel DeLuis is not on TikTok trying to stay relevant. I know that may be an older example, but you just disappear for a few years, come back, win an Oscar, disappear for a few years, come back, best actor, disappear for a few years. And there are many examples of these types of people. Rick Rubin for decades would be another example. and sure he's been more exposed.

I think he did his first podcast ever on my podcast many years ago, but not worried about staying relevant, keeping on top of all of the latest developments, right? So you don't have to do that as part of your path, I would just say. You can let other people worry about it and then have conversations with them and get up to speed. Yeah, yeah. I've heard you talk about this.

This is like, how do you focus on the thing that makes you uniquely you, right? Where's your category of one? the thing you want to get, like, I'm going to be really good at this specific thing. And then, you know, a lot of the other stuff, you can either catch up or, you know, find support, whether that be through AI or friends who know their stuff better than you do. You know, there's other ways to connect there. Yeah. Yeah, as one of my friends put it, you know, Chris Saka is his name.

He went from when I first met him, I don't know what he was making, 100K a year, 150K a year. And now he's like billionaire, maybe a decadillionaire. It's nuts at what he's done. And one of his mantras is embrace your weird self. And that ties into the D&D. I think part of the reason D&D is and continues to be so popular. And it also ties into how I choose projects and the actual end product of Coyote, right? It's like, how the hell do you end up at a casual party game?

it does tie into that. And it's also part of the reason why I took for me at least so long to land on the kernel of an idea that seemed workable and attractive enough to like put my name on because you're going to have to live with that stuff forever if your name is on it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a good good way to circle back into coyote and the process of getting there because again, I remember when we had some of our first conversations and I felt. for lack of a better term, the four-hour energy or the, you know, the dis energy coming in? Yeah, I would love to. Yeah, and diss for people who don't know. It's a framework that was explaining the four-hour chef, but it's sort of how I approach different skills, right? Deconstruction,

breaking into component parts, then selection, right? So this is applying 80-20 analysis and then sequencing and then stakes or incentives. And you can use that, the easiest place to explain how, to use that as someplace like language learning, but you can apply it to almost anything. So I would be super interested because I don't have a lot of recollection of, I remember certain components of it, but I don't remember all the details. Maybe I need more coffee. Could you like do a replay of some of those early conversations? Yeah. So there was what, from my perspective on a lot of it was like a very detailed breakdown of some of the fundamental questions, you know, both like, what does, you know, what, what, what,

what are the constraints for products? What does success look like? How long does it take to make a game? What are the phases? And, and you, but, but the thing that really stuck with me, and we did some back and forth on some of the specific ideas, which maybe I won't go all into, because maybe they'll turn into something someday. But yeah, the, the, the, that, you know, well, how could I get this done in 12 weeks, I believe, was the gist of it. And I was like, ah, I don't, I don't know that could be done, but here's some ideas that could accelerate, you know, and now it was two years or so from then to actually getting a game done. It probably was, yeah, I can imagine I might have applied the 12 weeks, because that is the amount of time that I had with a lot of slack in the system.

And for people listening, her, like, that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. It's deliberate absurd, right? So just in the same way that, for instance, Peter Thiel famously asked questions like, if you had to achieve your 10-year goals in the next six months, what would you do? If you had to, right? What would you do? And that's a forcing function applying these ridiculous time constraints. So for me, I was like, okay, I know this is almost certainly impossible, but it's like, if you had to try to do it with gun against the head. 12 weeks, what do we do? Yeah. Yeah, it's a way to let a lot of the superfluous or optional stuff drop away when you apply something that nuts. Yeah, and I do think, yeah,

I find a ton of value in that type of analysis. And again, it forced me to think, to think through some things. And I do a 12-week, like, game design intensive mastery class where I have people start and have something ready to pitch at the end. It's not the kind of thing that you would have a finished product typically, but it does force people to get the reps in and go through the whole pipeline. So I do think that there is real value in that. And so it's any of the ways, like, so there's a contrast between what I would perceive as the 80-20 principle, which is that, you know, you really want to focus on the 20% of the effort that does 80% of the results. And then the other principle, I think I heard you say it as like the last 30% takes 70% of

the time. And I would say it the last 10% takes 90% of the time, which is that the effort required to go from, okay, I got something that's pretty good. I got 80% of the way there to this rate is so hard. Maybe you could speak to that tradeoff, right? How do you know when you're switching from 80, 20 to the 90-10 or whatever, really just dialing in on that last granular bit? Yeah, so a couple of things I'll throw out there. And I want to make, hopefully, this conversation is interesting and useful for hoax as possible. So maybe I'll draw some parallels and expand. on what you said. So in marathons, for instance, I do not run marathons because I can't imagine anything I would like less just give my particular constitution than doing super long distance running.

But my friends who run marathons say it's like, yeah, your marathon starts at kind of like mile 20, right? Or 20, 20x. And similarly with books, it's like, oh, you're 90% done. Congratulations. You only have 50% left. And I'd say with my experience of my one game, right? But one game is zero to one. And I think zero to one is a big deal. It's going from never having made a game to having made a game. And very similar, right? Although I would say in this case, for me as a first timer, also,

since I'm putting my name on it, which changes everything. If I were putting it out semi-inonymously through a company and I was just somewhere in the credits on a website or something like that, it would be different because I wouldn't feel like I'm putting my reputation on the line. But it was really actually landing on the original basic concept and doing the original prototyping that took the longest. We went through so many different ideas and playtested so many different prototypes to get to that. Once there was the clear green light, things move pretty quickly. But then, as you said, on the tail end, it's like, okay, we have the basics. And maybe the game is sometimes fun to play, but it's not consistently fun to play. That's when how many cards should there be?

where should we have the sort of statistical probability that in any given round or in any given turn X type of card or Y type of card comes up, right? What's the right composition? That shit takes fucking forever. And playtesting also, right? Just when you think, and this is true with books too, you can write a book and go through it a hundred times, a thousand times until your eyes bleed. You have copy editors go through it and then you send it out to your first friend is a proof of it and they're like, yeah, I found seven typos. And you're like, what? How is this possible? Right? So as soon as you think you're done, you sent something out and they're like, this makes no sense. Or yeah, we got really confused on this part. You're like, really? How is it possible? So there is that. But I'd also come back to one thing, which is at least within, and I imagine for you with the styles of games that you're most familiar with, there's probably some transference in the sense that, all right, I did this the first time, and everything was new, or pretty much everything was new, although there's a lot of similarity to other projects and development,

product development that I've done, that now that I've done it once, if I did two or three more games, I think the fourth game, I could make a hell of a lot of progress in 12 weeks, or at least to make a go or no go decision, right? I was just fumbling around the dark, couldn't find my ass with two hands for a long time. But now that I'm like, okay, okay, okay, I understand some of the basics, at least in this particular genre of game. I, man, I think you can get a lot done in 12 weeks if you really, really, really focused on it, especially, and I think this is where maybe a solo creator or a very small group has an advantage, if you're working in a larger company that has to put out whatever it is, I don't know the number, pick a number, eight, 20

games a year, 10 games a year, whatever it is. That divided focus makes it, I think, harder to compress timelines. But if I'm just sitting in my house, like, and we certainly talk about this, but it's like, blank deck of cards, some markers and a couple of friends and maybe a bottle of wine, like, you can start playtesting the same day you come up with an idea. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I, yeah, I think there's a lot of value in that quick iterative. I mean, everything in my mind is about how quickly can you get through the iteration loops and how much can you learn on each loop, right? And experience with this doesn't change that process in my opinion. It just lets you make bigger leaps, right? You'll have some more intuitive jumps because you've made certain mistakes before.

And so your jump from loop to loop is a little bit bigger. Yeah. And initially, when I was thinking about making a game, we could talk about why I wanted to make a game. Certainly, I mean, there are a lot of reasons because much like writing books, it's like if your goal, is to get rich. You may, like, you know, streaming music on Spotify may not be the best path, right? Similarly, making a very low-cost game may not be the best path. Or even making an expensive tabletop game may not be the best path. It's like, why do it at all is something we can come back to.

But initially, I thought, well, D&D had such a huge impact on me and still hold such a special place in my imagination. And we can talk about, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on why it's bigger than ever. I mean, I have some speculations. But for so many people, it's just become this chapter in life. Maybe it's a continuing chapter. I want to try to make something like that. But I recognized, I don't have so much hubris that I was like, I can definitely create

another D&D. No, I didn't think that. I was like, maybe there's something with elements, right, where you could. could have some role-playing elements. And the world building that I played around with, by the way, which was a deliberate kind of precursor to possibly making a game. So I was already in the back of my head when I did this fiction experiment and put out a podcast called The Legend of Cockpunch.

The reason for the name is maybe too long and unnecessary now. Since has been kind of renamed Legends of Varlata, which, by the way, it's like, You just do a search or place, and it's a pretty viable world-building exercise and fantasy world. It was like, okay, you have these greater houses, you have these old alliances and enmities, you have a potential trading component and trade interdependencies, you have this event called the Great Games, which is effectively like a blood support kumate type thing that determines who gets the capital of this particular place and all of these various advantages. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I was like, this could actually be an interesting tabletop game, right? But holy shit, I just bit off way more than I could chew, right? I just got into it and I was like, yeah, this is going to be incredibly hard to pull off. I'm not equipped as a first timer to do this. And then started looking at deck building games, potentially. I was like, okay, well, maybe there's an easier way to do this with fewer pieces. I shouldn't say easier. A less convoluted way to do this with fewer pieces.

And then I realized, I just don't have any experience with this. My brother played Magic the Gathering. He actually competed. He went to Nationals at one point. And I played with this is around the same time that we were talking because I was like, hey, magic. Like that was such a big deal. There's so many people, I should play Magic.

And I tried it. And my brother and another friend named Mike were so good at it. I just got slaughtered. like, this is not fun. And then I played again, slaughtered. And it was like, okay, I feel like I'm playing chess against someone who's really big who's not even giving me a chance. I'm just getting killed. And I was like, okay. So one of the constraints for building a game, and I had this in the back of my mind from the outset, is there has to be, there has to be a chance for a weaker player or someone who's behind a comeback. It has to be closer in that sense to poker

or backgammon than to a game of complete information like chess. So yeah. So, so there's, there's a couple of interesting threads here. I want to pull on multiples of them. But so, you know, there's what I've, I've sensed, you know, you talked about reputation and fear of your reputation, you know, being hurt by a game that wasn't good or even by the IP that you create, though you're clearly passionate about both. And so, as I know from the backstory, you know, cockpunch was partially named in a funny way to provide some, some ego cover, right? And a game like this that's lighter. 100%. And, yeah. Like make funny yourself before people can make funny. So it's like, you know, I felt very fragile writing the fiction. So I was like, all right, let me just make this thing funny. Yeah. And give myself the cloud cover.

Yeah. And so I think that this is something that's, I think hard for a lot of people to, that there's this inverse, like this negative correlation that the more successful you get at something, in some senses, the harder it is to jump to another thing, right? Obviously, it opens doors for you. But this idea that when I move out of my lane, right, or I built a, reputation. I built an audience. If I jump to something else that's not in my lane or maybe doesn't isn't as perceived as good, I opened myself up to a lot more criticism. Right. So I'm in my,

you know, I've jumped from from my arena to yours, right? I wrote, I wrote a book on game design to think like game design. I wrote my next book is, is like how you apply game design principles to your life and to your business. And, you know, it's a, it's scary for me, right, to be able to jump out of that, that, that lane. So finding ways to to hedge psychologically feels, like a necessary thing. If you didn't have that, or maybe, well, let's take this in two directions. You can pick whichever you like, which is, you know, are there other tools that have worked for you in terms of how you've now given yourself permission to move forward on this or other

tools that could work for others? And the other path is the idealized one, right? You talk about making a movie. Like, what's the, what's the, if my ego wasn't on the line and I knew that I could be, you know, Fim terrorist or whatever, right? I could do anything I wanted. What would it be? You can pick either path there.

Yeah, let me start with the first one. So I think the fears of, so I want to make this relevant to as many folks as possible. So the fears that apply to someone who has had some success doing X, who really wants to try Y, are actually very similar to someone who is just getting started and is hesitant to put something out in the world. and I'll explain why. So in both cases, the person is worried about failing. There's an additional layer with someone who's maybe putting out their first thing into the world, which is, this is my big idea.

I don't know if I'll ever have another big idea. Maybe I've worked on it for a long time. Maybe it's become so precious that I don't want to be told if my baby's ugly. maybe I'm afraid this is my only my only real shot on goal. This is my big idea and I don't want someone to steal my idea. Quick note on that, like patenting, trademarks, that stuff doesn't protect you at all. It gives you the right to sue someone else.

So if you don't have the resources to sue someone else, just kind of get over it. You're going to have to get in the rough and tumble world of real commerce, which is a full contact sport. and see what you can do. Like, for instance, it can't trademark coyote, right? It's like, it's just a game of like, okay, you just have to have the awareness, right? You just have to build it.

You're not going to defend that. There's no way. So there are a lot of decisions around that type of thing. But the fears are actually, I think, closer than people might think. It's like a horseshoe. It's like if you're at the very beginning and you're at the very end, you're actually not that far apart. They like bend around, just like extreme political views on the right or the left. It's actually like, no, you guys are really close, in fact. And so I think what we're talking about applies to a lot of people. The way that I personally have trained myself, and it takes practice to push beyond this or not beyond it, just to contend with some of those fears. Number one is, I have no attachment, and this has been true for a very long time, to a long-term career plan.

But there are just too many unknowns, too many curveballs, like exhibit A tariffs from applying, applied to every up. I mean, like, oh, yeah, that's a curve ball. That might change things, right? And for that reason, I choose my, and I feel fortunate in my ability to do this, but more people can do this. than you might expect, and you can certainly do it if you're moonlighting and doing this at night after your regular job or on weekends or whatever. So I wouldn't discount this at all. I choose six to 12 month projects, and within that six to 12 months, I have two-week experiments of various types. And we could definitely talk about this in the context of game design, because in the

beginning, I was like, all right, I'll spend two weeks and I'm going to try to make something in this genre. Okay, didn't work. All right. Let's do. try another two weeks, this genre. Let's see what happens. Okay, that didn't work. And I've committed, you know, six to 12 months to something. Here's the key piece for me. Number one, I view these as experiments. So experiments don't fail if the sort of study design, the experimental design is good. You're just getting feedback. Was your hypothesis true? Was it not true, et cetera, et cetera. and the way that I select in this world of a paradox of choice more and more so, right? People are exposed to, if you just scroll through your Instagram feed, you're going to have,

it's like, oh my God, I have 20 new business ideas. It's like, well, that's a good news, bad news situation. And the way that I choose is really simple. And you can look at how I did this with books, how I did it with the angel investing, how I did it with podcasting. was where can I maximize my learning, just learning new things, new skills, and developing relationships that even if this project, this experiment, doesn't work out, right? The book fails commercially, the game fails commercially. I lose all my money, Angel investing, that those

learnings and those relationships continue. They can transcend that project. So you're snow- balling over time with skills, knowledge, and relationships. It's really hard to lose long-term if you choose your projects that way. And if you can, give yourself a graceful exit. In the case of when I started my podcast 10-plus years ago, which has just for me become this crazy, crazy experience, resource and business and everything else, I told my audience, I was like, all right, I'm going to do six to ten episodes. If it doesn't work, I'm going to stop. That's it. And hopefully I'll become a better interviewer in the process because I have to interview people from my nonfiction books anyway. And I'll be able to get closer to my really good friends who are

going to be my softball interviews in the beginning. Right. So it's, it's even if you lose, you can win. Yep. Right. With the angel investing, I was like, okay, I'd always fantasized about going to like Stanford Business School. So I was like, all right, well, let me allocate at that time to me, was a huge sum of money, like 120K over two years, which would have been what I would have paid for tuition at a place like Stanford anyway. Over two years, 120K, I'm going to put small checks into startups, and I'm always going to optimize for learning and new relationships or deepening relationships, assuming, just like tuition, it's a sunk cost. I'm not going to make any money on those investments. It's just going to be the learning and the relationships.

and game design, same thing. And that takes the pressure off where you're like, even if this project itself as a single project does not work out, doesn't make money, doesn't whatever, I still win over time, I still win. Psychologically, that really provides you with a safety net.

And as far as I can tell, it works. And I have friends who approach it very similarly. Yeah. This idea of optimizing for learning and optimizing for relationships, I think is super powerful, or at the very least, knowing what you're optimizing for and choosing something that isn't determined solely by the whims of the marketplace, right? Whatever is happening out in the world, no matter how good your product is, book or game or

podcast or whatever, the circumstances outside of your control have a lot of impact into what the final success is. And so if you're building something that you can be proud of, either like, that, you know, that you learn from or that helps you move in a direction you want to go, you can. win regardless of the outcome, I think is really important. Can I explain also how this applies to me trying to make a game? Yeah, please. Or I guess I made a game.

So I'm making it. Success. But the key was, but the key was trying to make a game. All right. And all the, I was pretty late to like the therapy game. I could have used it earlier. I'm sure with the therapy. Yeah, yeah.

With like the therapy and the executive coaching and the this and this or just talking to friends over a drink or whatever. most of my friends, most people I even bump into, take things very seriously, right? If they hope to get anything done, you have to take certain, at least consider certain things serious. And so what do people say, ah, man, you know, I just really want to get outside more and play more. I want to have more play in my life. Like, this is, this is routinely, at least from all the type A people I know, will say some version of this. And then, And two weeks later, they're just back to autopilot doing their working dog stuff, whatever that is, chasing the rabbit around the Greyhound track.

And that's a great gear to have. But if that's your only gear, I don't think that makes for a very enjoyable life. And ultimately, we're a bunch of monkeys on a rock spinning in space. Yeah. If you're taking your projects too seriously, that perspective really helps a lot. Yeah, I think Bertrand Russell said the sign of an impending nervous breakdown is believing that your work is terribly important, right?

And therefore, I was like, well, if I try to make a game and I'd really take it seriously, what's that going to force me to do? Play a lot of games with friends, or at least other people. Get off of screens. Have a couple laughs. Right?

So I end, so there's just the pure fun of it. That's enough. But also, I'm going to be learning all about building my, you know, in art, they talk about a visual palette. Just building your library of different types of, in my case, drawings or paintings. So that, for instance, you're like, oh, all right. For the Legend of Cockpunch, I actually hired a bunch of the top, like D&D and Magic gathering artists to do a creative push for a weekend. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. This is how this particular artist handles like silhouette design as a first step. Cool. All right, you're building

your visual palette. Just like that in gaming, it's like, I didn't know what I didn't know. I had played some games, but I didn't really have a full spectrum of awareness of the many different permutations and types of games that exist. It's like, okay, well, I will be building that library of kind of game awareness. And I'll just add one more thing real quick, which is, and then

thirdly, like Alonle, love that guy. We've become really close friends. It's like, okay, I'm building that relationship. That guy is a genius, no matter how you slice it, like, as a polymath, who is incredibly good. It's so many different things. And then lastly, it's like at the very least, if I start pushing through this, I'm also going to really get to know big, big, big box retail for this type of game. Right? Like how do you actually interact with these giant behemots like Walmart or Target or Amazon I had exposure to through the books? But it's like, what do you do with that? Yeah. Right. What does that look like? Or distributing through a lot of smaller retails. What does that look like?

Sure. Lots of lots of steps. Understanding all of that stuff that I'm learning applies to creative sprints, creating something at a low cost that you sell with massive retail distributions. All of that stuff, I was like even if this game never gets published, even if it gets published and doesn't do well, it does not negate all of those other gains. Yeah. Okay. I want to get into the specifics of this because I think if I would do no just, to having you on my podcast if I didn't get really granular on some of these things. So when you say, because I want to talk about the marketing and the launch strategy and everything,

but I want to get into the game process in some detail. So you said you'd take a six to 12 month process, a commitment to a project in two-week experiment cycles. So walk me through that process as you're getting into Coyote or even the previous versions of it. Is it a few weeks of like, all right, I'm going to try 12 games this week? and then I'm going to take notes on what I like, what I don't like, is it I've got an experiment and I sketch out an idea. Like, what's those two-week sprints look like for you?

Yeah, yeah, I can tell you. So in the beginning, the sprint cycles were shorter. They're probably one-week sprints. And I was listening to your podcasts. You know, later on, we had conversations. But I would go to Salt Lake City, which has some great game shops, and I would buy just a, you know, not a carload full of games because I would chat with the owners and get their read on different options in a specific genre by half a dozen games, then play them, take notes on what I liked,

didn't like, what I felt maybe I would want to use or not use. And then at this point, I was lone wolfing it, which I think it's a fine place to start. But after, let's call it, a month of doing this and I ordered playing cards and chits and all of these things to DIY. After a while, I was like, okay, I clearly have no idea what I'm doing.

I'm trying to fumble around. I'm not making a whole lot of progress. I'm realizing that some of these will not work for me. And in many cases, I'd buy these games. They were beautiful. I'm not going to name any of them, but beautiful, sophisticated,

incredible games, ultimately when I played them. But I was like, my friends will never play this. Like my busy friends, after a dinner, if we sit down and it takes an hour for me to explain this

or for them to get a basic handle, they're not going to do it. It's just not going to happen. By that time, they're going to want to go to sleep or go home or whatever. And then during, during one of the test periods when I was testing more casual games, one of the games, which

was just a huge hit with my friends, was poetry for Neanderthals. And it's just a, it is a great game. It really is. I just think it's a fantastic game. And maybe that just underscores how kind of stupid and primitive me and my friends are. But it is a great casual game. And I was like, okay, this is the game that people want to play again, right? Like, this is the one where people are like, let's play again. I know it's late, let's play again. And that's one of the kind of core playtesting questions for families and so on too, right? It's like, did you want to play?

It is the most important question. It is the thing that if I want to release a game, I need my playtesters to independently tell me they want to play again without me prompting. Until that happens, I'm not done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So those were, let's just say, the one-week cycles. Then I was like, okay, Poeufth-Ferndanthals, this really worked. Who made this game? Right? It's Bloomington's. That's how I get to Alon Lee and have him on the podcast, which I thought would certainly in and of itself be very interesting for my audience because the story of Explained Kittance. It's kind of crazy, right?

It's pretty nuts. I mean, just the explosive blockbuster, Kickstarter, the collaboration, right, with Matt Enman of the oatmeal and Alon Lee, and then certainly building the company on the back of that. Because it's one thing to have a hit. It's a very different thing to build a company of that scale relatively quickly and do have continual success. with new games. That's just a different. It is such a different skill. Very, very difficult. And I'm,

I'm looking at, Alon's been on the podcast before as one of our earliest guests and he's amazing, but I'm looking to have him on again. I think it'll be a good follow-up to this episode and then really talk about that process because there are plenty, you know, if you've got a hit game and you want to make expansions to that game or keep growing it, that's one thing. But the, the different types of games that have come out, all of them like really brilliant, really funny, really like appeals to the same core audience, but different, really remarkable. Yep. Yeah. And so I'll, I don't want to, I don't want to, I mean, he'll have, like, he can talk about a million different things, but inventing new genres of types of games, alternate and augmented

reality stuff. And the fact that he was, he worked on the Xbox and Halo and all, it's like, he's sort of a full stack, because also the operational savvy that he has is, is just bananas and the creativity on the business side is something else. So after that, I was like, okay, well, we seem to like jive pretty well. If I'm going to take a serious stab, this is the game that my friends and I are playing. We've tried a bunch of others. And for instance, as an adult right now, I don't play D&D. Would I play?

Maybe. But it's just, it's such a commitment. and I remember how seriously I took it, which doesn't take anything away from the game. It's just a life circumstance and a maybe change in constitution. Who knows? But I'll still read long fantasy books and like scratch that itch. But will I play D&D?

I haven't played D&D in decades. You have to commit a three-hour session with a bunch of other friends all at the same time on a recurring schedule or more. It's not, yeah, it's a big commitment for sure. And there's also part of me that's like, not to quote Alcoholics Anonymous, but like if you don't want to slip, don't go where it's slippery. There's part of it's like, I remember how much fucking time I put into character development with my gray elf, chaotic, chaotic good.

Like I just remember how much time I put in. I'm kind of like, ah, you know, if I'm a recovering like opiate addict, I'm not like, you know, let's just one for all time's sake. I'm like, I don't know what's going to happen if I go down that route. So maybe I shouldn't go there. So ultimately, it was like, I had these various thoughts of what would or could be cool, but the game we kept playing was fast, casual, games last less than 10 minutes. And I was like, okay, I think this is the starting point.

And then just threw out to Alan after we had had a couple of interactions, I was like, hey, man, feel free to say no, because it's probably the right thing for you to do. but like any interest in talking about collaborating on something? And he was like, yeah, let's talk about it. And that's how it started, right? And then it was sort of, feel free to interject at any point. But we did a number of sprints. Yeah, let's get that.

This is where I'm interested. So now you've shifted focus from I'm doing my solo sprints. You did several things. I just want to kind of underscore here, right? Try a lot of different games, including ones you're not familiar with. find the things you like, you don't. Scratch your own itch, right? Like play a game that you actually want to keep playing.

And also, I think it's really beneficial. Picking a game that only lasts 10 minutes, let's make your iteration cycles way, way faster too, right? So you did a lot of things to set up for success coming in, but it's still pretty open-ended by the time now you're working with Elon. So now what does that, how do you zero in on the thing from there? What are your sprints look like now? Yeah, so what the sprints looked like,

to my recollection. I mean, it was a while ago. But the sprints were a combination of, there were sprints with a lot and also additional sprints now with groups of friends, bringing in a more focused type of game. Right. So now it's like, okay, we have a rough idea of a few constraints, like the beauty of positive constraints.

my feeling at least if I were to do another game I would have more constraints I just think it allows you to move so much faster and maybe paradoxically just allows you to come up with a much broader range of interesting ideas

so I was doing two things simultaneously I was doing sprints with friends we're like okay now I'm going to focus on like fast casual very fast to learn short duration games let's try that this is and the the circumstance in mind was, okay, you just had a long dinner with friends. You've had a little, I don't, I actually pretty rarely drink alcohol. Let's just assume like people had some wine.

Maybe they're a little sleepy, but it's not quite time to go to bed. It's like, okay, you have one to two hours before everyone's going to split or go to sleep. And maybe they want to do some other stuff. So it's like, it's got to fit into that. And I was doing sprints with friends with games that would sort of fit those parameters. And then the sprints with Alan, we did, he's busy, a busy, busy, busy guy, right? He's running a real company with plenty of employees. So, but we would block out maybe one or two days on a weekend, sometimes during a week, and these took place all over the country. Like, I would fly to him in L.A., we would end up coinciding in New York, etc, et cetera, et cetera. It was all over the place.

Did one in Austin where my home base is. He would bring games that were off-the-shelf games to experiment because he and I did a lot of talking, and I shared with him some of the things I had liked, disliked, gravitated towards, been repelled by. And he's like, okay, all right, let's try. A couple of off-the-shelf games. and then here are a couple of prototypes.

And then also it's like, well, look, you liked poetry for Neanderthals. What might it look like to have poetry for Neanderthals that has a special set of rules that we come up with? Right. So let's play with that. And each of the sprints was effectively some version of that. And for myself, I was like, well, we could do, the lightest lift would be poetry for Neanderthal's, but I really want to get my hands dirty with making a game. And I just don't feel like that's enough, right?

Like I want it, not because I want to make it hard for myself, but coming back, and look, that game probably would have done pretty well, right? Like, we already know the backbone of it works. I was like, I kind of feel like that's cheating. And I'm in this for the learning. And it's like, you got to roll up your sleeves. And I want to do more with it. Then there were prototypes.

Some of them were good, None of them were like, oh, shit. Oh, okay. There wasn't that response. And I was like, until I've got that response, I mean, I'm sure you've experienced this too. It's like, if you'll playtester and they're like, yeah, it was fun. With that exact tone, with that exact tone, with that delivery, you're like, oh, fuck.

That's the worst, the worst thing you could have said. That is not good, right? So I was like until you have that, and I use this word sometimes because I feel it with startups, I feel it with books or particular chapters from writing or aiming to create something. There's like a quickening. There's like this nervous system response. We're like, ooh, hold on, hold on, hold on, that. And I will say this should be hopefully applicable to a lot of.

of folks listening. It applies to every project I've ever done. We did not have a clear, tight deadline. We had some like loose guidelines for timing, but it effectively was when we had time, we would try to coincide and do a sprint. But nothing was sticking. Nothing was sticking. Nothing was sticking. Nothing was sticking. But with each sprint, we were realizing, okay, let's scrap out like an existing game with a different set of rules. Okay, let's push out this type of game. Let's push out this type of game. For instance, one of the things that was important to me from the very beginning was something that, where luck does play a role, right, where a weaker player could have an easier time. And ideally where it's like people of almost all age ranges can play,

right? So it's like, is your eight-year-old or ten-year-old going to play, like, terraforming? Mars, awesome game, but probably not. So there were these types of thoughts moving around. I was like, eh, this doesn't quite work. This doesn't quite work. And then ultimately, I reached out to Alana. I was like, hey, we are both really busy with a bunch of other stuff. How about this?

I'll fly to meet with you. He happened to be in Canada at the time. And let's just do a final sprint. This is the final sprint. And it's like, we either come up with something and we proceed. sue it or we just call a spade a spade and say like, look, we're both, we both are juggling too many things and this just isn't likely to happen anytime rather than limping along in this semi-unfocused way, which was totally my fault, right? I mean, like, it's not my responsibility or it is my responsibility

to be more focused. Yeah, well, focus, focus and then the power of a deadline matter so much, right? That's the power of the deadline. Yeah. So applying this pressure was important because a few things happened as a result. Number one, it was like, okay, this is it. This is like the last dance, potentially. Now you also have stakes. So I did write stakes.

So I did a lot more prep thinking about stuff. Alon brought in an amazing guy named Ken Gruhl, who's very, very good game designer. Yeah, Ken on the mechanic's side, it's really, really sharp in particular. And we just got hyper-caffeinated. And instead of playing like a gazillion games, we went on a lot of walks and just talked and talked and talked and talked and talked. Asking questions.

I'm asking them questions. They're asking me questions. And where the breakthrough came, people are listening here, I'll be like, are you fucking kidding me? But I'd been asking the wrong question, right? And your answer is only going to be as helpful, as useful, as good as the questions that you serve up. And the question that I had really been asking myself was, what type of board game do I like?

What type of tabletop game or card game do I like? And I think it was Alon who expanded it. And he said, you know what, forget about tabletop, whatever. what games of any type whatsoever have you liked? And I thought about it, came up, I was like, all right, well, I guess when I was younger, like at least when I had my five inches of growth spurt, like dodgeball or kickball, both like the, okay. And brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm.

I was like, okay, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this. Because I'm like, I could just feel like the head shakes coming before I even said it. their credit, they didn't shake their heads. I was like, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this. They're like, what? And I was like, I think rock paper scissors is really fucking fun. Particularly if you're with my like very smart slash dumb friends who are pretty easily amused. And again, I keep invoking the booze. It's not that frequent. But like I have played rock paper scissors for like an hour straight with a couple of friends. It's embarrassing for me to say this even now. But what came of that? It was like, okay, no judgment. Like, yeah, I mean,

there's a reason that game has existed for a really long time and it's played all over the world. Okay. What is it about the game? Right. Let's dig into it. And we got into it. And ultimately, I don't think the reasons are that important, but where that led was, okay, right, I don't know who. I can't remember who asked this. Maybe it was me. Maybe it was one of them. But it's like, all right, well, what does rock paper scissors look like in a group of four, in a group of five, in a group of six?

And can we make it more interesting? Okay. Sure, of course. I was like, yeah, you come up with these gestures. You can come up with this. And it's hard for me to recall the exact way that it unfolded. But it was like, okay, how do you get a group to do this? Well, you could have like potentially, potentially you could have color coding,

potentially you could have like gestures and a word or something you have to say where there's like an interference effect where you start to make it more interesting. Are there teams? Probably not teams. Okay. Like if you have to go around in a circle as per usual, right, with this type of game, like what does that look like? Or at least a lot of casual games. And when we started to talk about it, I just got that feeling.

And I think people all get this feeling. You just have to learn to like listen to your nervous system. And we just went for super caffeine. We had so much coffee walking. This feeling wasn't just the caffeine jitters. It wasn't just the caffeine. It was like, wait, wait, wait. And this is where also is so valuable for me to have both of those guys,

but especially Alon, who has just seen so many reps of this type of thing. Right. And he's like, okay, this is actually potentially interesting. right because what do I know? I don't have any pattern matching. I've never done this before. And we went back to his place and had a bunch of blank cards and just started mocking up cards. And literally within 30 minutes, we were trying to play like a super rough, super rough version. And there was, most of it didn't work at all. Of course, it's not going to work at that stage. but now I see the seeds of it and I see where you're at.

I want to double click on something before we go further because this, I think this is really profound and not easy, right? Listen to your nervous system, right? Because even tying back to our early like AI conversation and like what's happening in the future, like in fact, that nervous system responds, that like personal taste, I actually think it's one of the most important skills to develop going forward. If you imagine, if you extrapolate out and you imagine a world where anyone can create anything and there's tons of stuff that's out there, your ability to, like, viscerally identify something

that could work is, I think, a really important skill to double click on. So, like, how do you, how did you get good at that? How could other people get good at it? What, like, what helps someone to be better at listening for that, that whole body, yes, or that nervous system twitch? Yeah, so you use a phrase that I think is worth underscoring, whole body, yes. So there's conscious leadership group. There are other people who have written on this, but by Diana Chapman and Jim Detmer, but Diana Chapman has written quite a lot

and spoken a lot on this whole body. Yes, what does that mean? That means that sort of mentally, like analytically, you're a green light, often in your gut, right? You're a green light, and they'll often talk about chest or heart. green light, I've always had trouble with that.

So as someone who basically cauterized their emotions for a few decades, because I was like emotions, get in the way. This like limbic system monkey mind liability, I was like, no, this should be data driven, right? Everything should be data driven. And sometimes that works, but you can also really steer

yourself in the wrong direction. I remember ages ago to give you an example of how kind of toned if I was at the time and there are many examples of this. I really, really, really wanted to do, this is before the book, before everything, do a TV show. And I got approached at one point to do this TV show based on martial arts around the world. I was like, oh, my God, this is a dream. And the production company seemed good based out of Asia. And I was going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And they put forward a deal. And on paper, the deal seemed okay. It wasn't great, but I'm

agonizing over it. Didn't have any money really at the time, but I'm paying lawyers. I'm like, fuck. And my girlfriend at the time, I was just agonizing and I had my spreadsheets and pro and con lists and all this stuff. And based on my analysis, it was like, yeah, do it, go. But I was hesitating for some reason. And over dinner one night, my girlfriend at the time was like, do you even trust this guy who was like the head producer? And I was like, no, not really. She's like, yeah, don't do the deal. And I was like, fuck, I think she might be right. Right. But it took me, that was a very pained, protracted, and frankly, lucky instance, right, where I had someone who was like, hey, dummy.

What about this very, very basic thing that isn't reflected on paper? And I found a lot of Diana Chapman's writing helpful. I had her on the podcast to talk about this and many other things for people who are interested, but I'll tell you how important this has become for me. So I currently have, this is book that I have tabled multiple times. There is some irony here. The sort of code name for the book is the no book. It's an entire book on how to say no and block out noise and the trivial many.

But it's really a book about how to make decisions and choose wisely. That's really what the book is about. But you need to have this ability to say no and to, push things out of your mind and to set boundaries. That's really important. Without that, you can't say yes and vice versa. So there are multiple chapters in this book dedicated to this, and I'll come back to how do people develop it? So for me, with this whole body yes, the yes mentally is easy to figure out. That's easy. Like the head yes is easy. What I have realized is that you also just have to look for any no sign, like constriction.

the chest or like just a weird feeling in the gut, that's a no. If it's not full green lights, it's a no. And this is very easy advice to give and it's very hard advice to implement sometimes. But the way you develop that is, for instance, one thing you can do that I recommend people do is every year I do something called the past year review where I go through, you know, around New Year's, but it can be any time of year, your entire last year in your calendar. week by week and you identify sort of peak, like the 20% of activities or people or projects that produced your key, your most impressive positive emotions, and then you look for the opposite, right, negative emotions. The things that you would love to do more of, the things that you would

pay not to do more of, right? And when you have this list, you can go back and just like revisit something in your mind and then be like, okay, like what's happening? Pay attention, right? Like what's happening in my head? What's happening in my thoughts? What's happening in my neck? What's happening in my chest? I often feel a lot of, like, when something's funky, I get a constriction in the neck.

I don't feel it in the chest. Sometimes I don't feel the gut. I have like also just like an iron gut. and don't always feel it in the gut, but I get constriction in the throat. But it's not overwhelming. It's not like I'm choking or having an anaphylactic shock. It's like you do have to kind of pay attention to it. And you can go through like awesome experiences that you'd love to do again.

What does that feel like? Go to something you absolutely hated. What does that feel like? And then you can start going in towards the middle because that's where it gets harder, right? So let's just say you have a certain type of meeting every week where you're like, oh, God, please shoot me now. Like, this should be a 20-minute meeting and it always takes an hour and why isn't this person organized, right? See what that feels like and start to pay attention to it.

If you sit down, this is going to sound so silly, but there is something to it. Like sit at a restaurant. If you go out to a restaurant, you look at the menu instead of just like deciding however you normally decide whatever that process is, it's like actually go through the menu and like see ask yourself how how does my body feel when I'm looking at these different things and try to make the decision based on that even if it's something you're quote unquote not allowed to have okay you're trying to avoid pasta I was like you get to it and you're like what you might be surprised to learn is like when you get to the thing you think you want you're

like oh I'm not allowed to have pasta I know I'm really going to want to have pasta I'm just going to have pasta and then when you actually check in with your body you're like yeah my body doesn't want to eat that you know or like there or there's no response but there's like a little bit. Yeah, I don't think that's the thing. So it's like, look, we've evolved to have these senses. We have millions of years of evolution that predate this fancy thing called language. And it's like we've all heard stories or maybe experienced directly like pregnant women,

like knowing what they need to eat, having really, really overpowering sensitivity with smell. Right. Right. It's like, yeah, we're very well evolved to feel all of these things because we needed it for most of our existence on this planet. So this could sound pretty like woo-woo to panga Canyon, you know, like swinging a dream catcher over your head. It's, but it's not actually. It's very much trying to take real evolutionary biology and learn to use it as a compass of sorts. Well, I find this really fascinating because I'm going to make the parallel back to game design here because the thing I tell novice game designers and even everybody, but like when you're first getting started, the way to become a better game designer,

the first step is that when you play games and you notice, like pay attention to your emotional reactions, like pay attention to the, like normally we just get lost in it. Like you get lost when you're watching a movie or reading a good book. You're just in the experience. But as a designer, you want to step back and pay attention to like, oh, wait, hold on, I'm getting excited here. I feel this in my chest and I'm shaking a little bit or I'm leaning in. I'm leaning in. or where that's happening. And so when I train designers to do, it's like, hey, connect that to what's going on in the game.

And now you can start to parse and say, okay, what is it about this mechanic or this theme or this moment that evoked that reaction, positive or negative? And I actually, I had never made this connection before, but I think it's actually really interesting that that, just doing that in life, right?

Like just doing that same thing in life. It's like, hey, when you're feeling it about, when you're in an experience, take a step back and just like be the observer and say, okay, wait,

what is going on in this situation that's making, me this way. Maybe it's the meeting is where I'm feeling uncomfortable, but it's not necessarily because the meeting's long. It's because actually that guy is not someone I should be working with. That person is giving me a bad vibe here or I shouldn't be working on this project. So I think there's there's a real value to just sort of triggering those reaction moments and understanding that you can design your life in those ways the same way you know, you might design a game. Yeah, I'll give a couple of other practical tactical, tactical recommendations related to this. So a shortcut for some of this is energy in or energy out.

That's it. And when you're around someone, when you're doing something, do you get energized or do you get slowly drained or quickly drained? How do you feel after? How do you feel during? So energy in versus energy out. That's it. That's a shorthand, imperfect, but very helpful way to approach this. And I would imagine with, like, let's say with playtesting, so for instance, with Coyote, like we playtested this with at least 100, maybe hundreds of families before ever considering releasing it and or at least pressing go on full manufacturing and everything.

And this is going to sound very presumptuous because I am not aware of anyone who's ever tried this, but maybe when you have bigger budgets with like the really major. video games and so on. Maybe they do something like this. It wouldn't surprise me. It's like if you had a tabletop game and all you did was attach like trackers for galvanic skin response and heart rate and so on, that might tell you all you need to know. I mean like before the game, after the game, like are they, you get some of it verbally, right? If someone's like, yeah, I can't wait to play your game. And then afterwards, like we said, they're like, yeah, that was fun. You're like, Ooh. Yeah. Ooh. Just just the energy level is already like 20, 30 percent down. You're like, that's not going to work. What people tell me is way less important than what they show me.

Right. And so this is where, yeah, I've never, I certainly haven't done the hookup for a galvanic response yet, but I would love to. But it's a fascinating. But like you could potentially do that or something like it. I think it would tell you a lot. And then I would say when you're doing these tests, certain things will distort your signal. So one is too much caffeine. or other substances, right? Obviously, but people are like, yeah, duh, but maybe not yet, duh. Because, for instance, moderate amounts of caffeine make it more likely you're going to say yes or overcommit to things. And then much more caffeine and you get like creepy, crawly and your jittery and so on, you're going to have less patience. You're more likely to say no to things that you should say yes to.

and also one way you can fool yourself here, you're looking for ideally, for instance, with the body outside of the mind, a animalistic spider sense response. But if you're sitting there and somebody told you, yeah, so-and-so, like did that thing again, and you create a story about that person, and then you get on the call and your body's like,

fuck this guy, well, it could be that that was all driven by the cognitive piece. So it's just being aware of this type of thing. Honestly, I mean, not to really sound like I'm going off into Venice to Pangaland again, but it's like a very simple meditation practice, like 10 minutes a day with something like the Way app or any other option. helps you with this type of thing. I'm 100%. I think you and I come from a similar background.

We start super analytic. We started in our heads. We had a lot of success by focusing in our heads. And a lot of the process of my kind of maturing as a human has been figuring out ways to get out of my head. And things like meditation, things like going for walks in nature, things like just taking that time to pause and quiet the incessant analytical thing to be able to hear what's going on in your body, to be able to tap in.

into even just the subconscious information you're processing because we're processing so much more information than we're consciously aware of your body and other parts of you will react to that. And so I don't think any of this is, even if it sounds woo-woo, I just want to underscore like this is real practical like on-the-ground advice that I think everybody can benefit from. But I want to, I want to, because I'm sold already on that, you know, the value of that. what I have trouble with, and I imagine a lot of people that are in the no book audience, all I have trouble with is being able to pull the trigger on that feeling. And how you tell the difference, because you identify this, sometimes it's the story, right?

So let's say I'm involved in a big project and I've got a lot of resources in it. We've been moving forward. It's really tough. I'm in the pit, right? I'm in the dark forest of figuring out what to do. It feels terrible going into that project. It feels terrible at that moment, right? And we've all been there.

And so sometimes because there's something wrong with the project and I should get out of it and I'm wasting my energy. And sometimes it's no, you're in the pit, you're in the dark forest. You've got to keep going and you've got to push through it. Or the story you're telling yourself about your fear or failure or fear or whatever is not, it's just a story. It's not the moment. How do you know when you're in one path versus the other? Like how do you differentiate to get the courage to pull the trigger but not cut out too early? I would say fundamentally for me, it's having a, having someone, not necessarily a Sherpa,

but someone to tell you what this process and arc looks like, right? And then you can predict with a decent amount of accuracy, like when the trough of despair is going to happen. Or when the plateau is going to hit you, right? This is true with athletic training. This is true with language learning, where if you think it's just going to be a gradual line from bottom left to upper right-hand side of the graph, you are going to quit. You are going to quit, right? Because let's just say you figure out the basic grammar and you can do present tense and maybe in Spanish, right, you can find a workaround. So instead of using like, Iry, like, voyair.

trick your way with a shortcut into using future tense. But then when you, and you're doing great, feeling great, you're like, wow, man, I'm making so much progress. I can actually hold a conversation of some type. And then you add in slightly more complex grammatical structures. All the gears are going to get gummed up for a while. And you're going to be worse. And if that lasts for a few weeks, for some people, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm not good

of languages and I'm never going to learn this and I quit. But if, but if you know, you can actually draw this on a graph, it's like, yeah, pretty likely if you approach it this way, like there is going to be this period of time. Maybe it's around, if you're taking it really seriously, like between kind of weeks, let's just say six and ten that are probably going to suck. And that's just part of the process. So embrace the suck and then it's going to tip back up. If you know that in advance, I think it is tremendously helpful so that you don't pull the rip cord because you think you're getting a signal that this should not be done. As far as I can tell, that applies to books, that applies to game design, that applies to

startups for sure. There's actually a graph on the wall or they used to be at Y Combinator, which is like the most successful incubator of all time, that had. I think they called it the trough of sorrow or the trough of despair or something, which is like after you have that early adopter bump from people who were like playing inside baseball with you, and you're like, we're going to win, this is going to be billion dollars, $20 billion. And then it's like, crickets, uh-oh, what happened? As long as you can have someone who's been through it before tell you about this, right? Just like hitting the wall in a marathon, right?

It's like, yeah, there's going to come a point. You might outstrip your glycogen, and then, boy, are you going to hate life? So I think that's a key part of it is understanding that. But for instance, with the no book, this is the second time that I've put it down. And there is something to be said also. It's like if it's all pushing a boulder uphill, and I'm not saying that's true with this book. This book is just like, I think I feel some performance anxiety because all my other books have been so success. more or less, right, that I'm like, oh, I want to get it just perfectly right. And I think I'm

applying too much pressure to myself in the case of that book. But also there are a lot of instances where I'm just like, Jesus, like I feel like I'm pushing a rock uphill. And as Seth Godin would say, and he gave some great examples of entrepreneurs, it's like, where could you potentially push a rock downhill? Right. And the game felt more like pushing a rock downhill, then the book did. And so I was like, okay, look, I've put so much time into this book. I literally have like an 800-page rough draft. It's gigantic.

That's after cutting a bunch of stuff, by the way. And I was just like, you know what? I don't have to do this right now. There's something in my body that really doesn't want to do this right now. Let me try something totally different often. Well, yeah, there's a couple of things there, right? One, no, doesn't have to mean no. It can just mean not now, right?

Like that sometimes removes the pressure of a no. I think it's actually really powerful. A lot of my game, I mean, I have a giant library of games that are in the graveyard, but they can always be resurrected. And those mechanics and ideas have always, you know,

sometimes 10 years later, I'll pull something back. And so that removes some of the psychological pressure of a no, I found. And I think that there's some value, as you said, if like you know ahead of time there's going to be some trouble, so then not,

you know, to kind of gird yourself against that. So that's why I think your tactic and something I do as well where you set a time, it says, all right, once I've committed to this, I'm going to give it three months, six months, whatever, and I'm going to commit to that for that time. And then if it's not working after that,

the experiment's over, it didn't work, that's fine, right? And that gives you both the strength to push through that gap in the middle, which is painful and the psychological out at the end, because you said, hey, look, if after six months it's not working, it's not working. So I think those are all like pretty good little hacks to help with that type of thing as well. Yeah, a few things real quick. So I would say one is also, it's like if you run out of energy, game over. It doesn't matter what the causes are.

So some of that is just straight self-care. Like I've got my non-negotiables. It's like, you know, today, and you don't have to do this. It could be a totally different set of things. But like setting my state, it's like, okay, I got my cold plunge, did that this morning, 43 degrees for like five minutes. Very interesting for a bunch of stuff. We don't need to get into it.

exogenous ketones for just brain fuel, a little bit of coffee, because why not? Everybody loves a good cup of coffee. And I fast until 2 p.m. My mind is going to be sharper. And I had to train for that. The first week sucked. It was terrible. Grumpy, sent a bunch of emails I shouldn't have sent.

But after that first week, there's a certain mental acuity that gives you really sustained energy. So then exercise and all sorts of other things, right? I'll be doing exercise right after this conversation. So you need to do that stuff to sustain your kind of battery charge and recharge and reserve. But also, no matter what the factors are, it's like if you are going to run out of energy, just like really you see some footage of people like crawling across the finish line in marathons. It's like, okay, you can potentially crawl across, but if it's like DNF did not finish, it's like that's a problem, right?

So I do think just really the energy game is where it is. And I don't want to get too esoteric. I'll talk about some of the things that were hard for me with Coyote because it didn't, there wasn't really a period of suck. I wouldn't say. There was always energy ad that also had a lot to do with the people I was working with. I'll talk about some of the harder things. But if you have, let's just say, okay, money.

is a currency, something you trade for other things, is interesting. Okay, fine. But then there's time, non-renewable, but below time, like on a, let's just say a pyramid, right, sort of as foundations, but like below time is attention, right? If you're distracted, if you have notifications, if you're constantly self-interrupting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you don't really have that time if you don't have any attention, right? If you're sitting on the floor, quote-unquote, playing with your kids, but you're on your phone, are you really playing with your kids? Did you really have QT with your kids? Maybe not, right? Are you really working if like, you know, bullshit memes from my friends are popping up every two seconds on WhatsApp and I message? Like, maybe you're not

actually working. And then below that, you have energy. And like, energy is where the buck stops. That is what everything else depends upon. So I've just, particularly as I get older, I really think of that as the the game is energy management. And I would say with the difficult periods for any project or more difficult parts are going to really vary. Right with the books, it's like there's also the aspect of being isolated, which I didn't have with Coyote, thank God, because the team in next Splend kittens is great and very, very game to improvise and try things that are out of the box.

But, I mean, we had to cut, I had to cut a ton of stuff that I wanted to put into this game. Okay. Right. So it's just like killing your darlings and letting go and not being a bull into China shop from a creative perspective, particularly if someone else has a lot more experience. That's sometimes a tricky equation just because like, well, what if your gut is telling you X, but the person more experience is telling you why? I mean, that can, that's like a whole separate podcast. But it's like, okay, you have this game. Like, what are the economic realities of shipping a game?

How do you make, and I may not use this term technically correctly. So please feel free to yank it from my bag of words, a bag of expressions. But to create a balanced deck in the sense that the types of cards you want to appear with a certain frequency are appearing with a certain reliable frequency, that certain types of cards are not overly present because they make the games too difficult or too short, right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to drop cards, for instance, like, look, you can sell a lot of things at mass retail, but if you have anything related to God or gods or anything that seems profane or sexual, I don't think so, right? Most of those are going to get yanked, or you should yank them because, God forbid, you have a couple of parents come back and be like, did you realize this huge retailer that this is in this game? You could have a gigantic disaster on your hands, right? And I have a very adolescent sense of it.

So is the guy who created cock punch. Yeah, right. Yeah, precisely. So there were a lot of cards that playtested so well. People thought they were hilarious, right? some of the favorite cards from playtesting. And I was like, we can't use that. So those were some of the compromises that were hard for me. And we went back and forth endlessly. I mean, spreadsheets with tons of tabs, everything's rated, every card based on like observed response, but also stated impression. I mean, like, there's a lot of analysis.

But at the end of the day, look, if you want to play on the big field, with the big retailers. And it's easy, I think, for someone like me who's mostly a cord cutter who orders a lot of my stuff online to misunderstand just how big these retailers are. It's like, I think 90% of the U.S. lives within 10 miles of a Walmart.

Like the food security of this country depends on retailers like Walmart target. If they go out of business, it is a national crisis, right? I mean, not that they're going to go out of business. Yeah, well, let's use that as a pivot then, because I wanted to talk about the choice to go exclusive with Walmart, which I think is ending soon.

It might be over by the time we air this. Yeah, by the time this comes out, it'll be. And so the marketing for a game like this and the launch, you know, one of the lessons you want to learn was how to deal with these big boys, but one of the strengths you bring to the table is, you know, you've always been kind of at the forefront. of innovative marketing and finding channels and optimizing channels. So I'd love to kind of maybe some lessons that you learned and some maybe lessons that you

could apply that other people could apply in terms of how to approach a game launch in general or trying to approach one of these kind of mass market style launches. Yeah, so I'm going to watch myself a little bit on this answer. I'll share what comes to mind that I think is fair to share. But on the inside baseball of say how to be a diplomat with the politics and everything involved with huge big box retail, I'll let, you can ask a lot about that because he is a Jedi with all of it. He is so good. I have, I have, I used to be obsessed with infomercials because I had insomnia as a kid. So I was up really late and I would watch these commercials. And in person, demos at like trade shows and state fairs obsessed with this kind of thing, like live pitches. And Alon might be the best I've seen, like him in person in pitch meetings.

It's, it is like watching Yo-Yo Ma or like Steph Korea at three points. You're just like, wow, that's something I can't do. Right. But here's what I can say is that when you're dealing with any kind of distribution, where you have different retailers or distributors vying for position, if you're lucky enough to be in that type of circumstance, or if you help create that circumstance, you're going to have to think about channel balance, channel conflict,

and how to negotiate and how to position all these things. So you could ask a lot why we did it this way, but ultimately ended up with Walmart for whatever it was, I think a two or three month window. So it's been a bestseller at Walmart. It has done super, super well. And that's why, even though basically the large and international launch is happening right now, like when people are listening to this, so it's everywhere,

we had also the traction with social media. Like the gameplay itself has 300 million plus. social views now. It's insane. And we can certainly talk about that and some of what we learned there. But the rollout and how you approach it, a lot of it was new for exploding kittens too, because they typically make their own games, they put out their own games, and they do everything internally. Whereas in this case, I'm coming in with certain marketing capabilities and a platform and so on. So that was certainly part of the pitch, right? Absolutely part of the pitch. And I would say that managing channel strategy is something that I think is really undervalued.

And this can happen also within a company that's just making the decision, like, how do we think about going direct to consumer versus selling wholesale to retailers versus selling it even lower margin to distributors? which is something I had to do way back in the day when I was doing consumables and sports nutrition when I created and ran that company. It's like, okay, if I'm shipping hundreds of thousands of units of these things, I don't want to build out a huge company. What do you do? Yeah, it's not easy. And there's a lot of tradeoffs in every field. And obviously I can speak to games more. But, you know, when we have products that we sell direct to our customers or through a crowd fund versus when we do, we did a mass market exclusive with Target. for you got to be kidding me, which is awesome.

But it's also like our margins are ditty bitty, itty bitty margins, you know. And so trying to figure out where that tradeoff is or working with like local hobby stores and local, you know, mom and pop game stores. There is a lot of different tradeoffs. And yeah, we probably could go go very deep down the rabbit hole here. But yeah. Yeah.

So here's what I would say would add to all of that. So the first is there's no one right way to do it, particularly if you run your own company, if you're doing this for fun and quality of life and an annuity that is low maintenance where you don't have to build out a company of 20, 30, 100 people, lower margins are fine. If it reduces the overhead and logistics you need to manage, right? That is a perfectly viable solution. Also, and maybe this is obvious, but just in case it isn't, if you are a game design, you make the best game that has ever been made

and you try to sell it into a Walmart or a target yourself, it's never going to happen. Because think about it from their perspective. They do not have the capacity, certainly not the desire, to deal with thousands of different people who don't have supply chain experience, manufacturing experience,

know how the game is played and how it works within something like a Walmart or Target or anything else for that matter. That's true with certainly with say even a Barnes and Noble for books. If you're like, here's my self-published book and I'm going to do X, Y, Z print, there's no way they're going to carry it. It's just a, it's a manpower issue. So it is very beneficial and also part of the reason that I want to work with exploding kittens to piggyback on someone who already has shelf space. That's right.

And there are ways to kind of zig and zag with that if you have brokers or agents who are very, very familiar with how these retailers work. And they might be able to actually facilitate a deal with a publisher if you have got a tiger by the tail. So there are many different ways to approach it. But I would just say to take it off the table in a hopefully helpful way, it's like you're not going to sell into this retailers. As a solo, as a solo, even as a small company, I had to work with one of these brokers as well, even at my size of company. You don't You don't do it on your own. But I do want to double click on the social share aspect because I think this is actually

really important. And I know you've talked about this with books too, where, you know, the, the best marketing you can do is getting people that actually will quote and share your book, right? Like that's what real, that's what real success looks like. And the same is true for games, right? It's all about word of mouth. I want to bust this game out with my friends. In fact, it's even more so for games because you intrinsically want to need other people

to play them. So you're going to share it if it's. Yeah, yeah. Totally. And creating something that's, that's, you know, could go viral and create these moments, which Coyote definitely does, I think is really important. So maybe if there's some principles or, you know, distillations from that of like, what went into your thinking for Coyote to make it that way?

What could people potentially do if they want to make games that could succeed in that, you know, that channel and encourage this kind of sharing in moments that people talk about? Sure. So in the case of this game, I don't want to say it was designed for social from the outset, because that's not true. But one consideration or open question was, how interesting is this to watch? Absolutely part of the consideration, right? Because there are plenty of games that are super fun to play and very boring to watch. Right.

That's just, it's like, look, I love shooting archery, but it's like the woman I'm dating now has watched me do so. much archery and I'm like, I am so sorry. This is the most boring thing in the world for you to watch. It's fun for me to do, but it's boring to watch. No offense, archers. I love archery. But every wife or husband of an archer knows what I'm talking about. They're like, oh, God, please, don't make me watch another thousand arrows. So in the case of this game, from the beginning, there was some thought around, at least in the open question, like how can we make this more interesting to watch because that will make it more interesting to play. And one, I may be slightly getting this wrong, but the maximum of exploding kittens is something along

the lines of we don't make, we don't make entertaining games. We make games that make players entertaining to one another. Elon talked about that on our episode here, which is great. Right. So it matches exactly what we're talking about, which. is part of the reason why there are games in general do well on social media, right? Make the players entertaining, not the game, right? And so we have that as, let's just say, a design parameter from the outset on some level. And then secondly, is, as usual, a lot of experimentation. And I need to give a lot of credit to Daisy and everyone else at Exploiting Kittens who spearheaded this. They did a lot of experimentation on different social platforms, and they produced them, a lot of

them internally, with employees and so on, trying different types of camera work. And like everything else, it is throwing a lot against the wall and seeing what sticks. and when people look at some of these videos, they'll see now there is a certain formula that works. And the game is very action-packed. It's like, boom, boom, boom, gesture, boom, boom, gesture, boom, boom, gesture. As it goes around the table, people need to perform a gesture, say the corresponding word, and not screw up any of the elements of the game.

It's called Coyote because of trickster god mythology. And you can play these coyote cards, and you have to at some point, that throw a monkey wrench in the works and makes the game a lot harder, like, cognitively to perform. Skipping players, you have to do it by whispering instead of doing that. You have to bounce on the table three times instead of twice, et cetera, et cetera. And you can cripple people who are naturally much better at the game by hitting them with attack cards. So that's how you play competitively. That was a really important addition to the game. that came in pretty late actually. In any case, that's roughly the game. And moving the camera angle, having it low angle, and moving it from player to player very quickly in a sort of stuttering fashion, that's what worked.

And length matters, at least for certain platforms, right? And I, as someone who has like 27-hour conversations, have a visceral aversion to really short-form stuff. But I will tell you, and this relates to the learning again, but TikTok moves games, it really does. And TikTok for me has never had any impact on anything I have done. But with games specifically, it really moves it. If I were to experiment again, so here's a great example of transfer of

learning. When I launch something, anything, I always try to pick one or two new channels or types of media, platforms, experiments, which even if they don't work for this project, might have some application to something in the future. So for instance, when I launched the four-hour chef, which just about killed me in terms of doing a massive, massive project in an absurd, absurdly short period of time. What did I do at that time? I asked a bunch of my friends who had launched books and other things, what is an undervalued promotional channel that punches well above its weight class? What is that? Because there's always something. And they said, well, this is 2012. There are these things called podcasts. So when I did the promotional tour for For Our Chef,

I went on all of the big podcasts at the time, which was a tiny ecosystem, but Rogan, Mark Marin, nerdist, et cetera, et cetera. And they smashed. They did so well. And it was by experimenting with that that I was like, huh, I like this format. I like long form. Maybe I'll try this. That's how that started. So with the launch of coyote, approaching it very similarly. And part of the reason I was excited of many to work with Explian Kids is they have a very strong social media team. It's like, okay, cool. And they work with many different platforms, but they seem particularly strong at TikTok. And I was like, okay, I suck at TikTok, or I haven't figured it out at this point.

And they seem to be very, very, very good. I mean, 300 million plus views. That's amazing. It's a lot of views. A lot of views. It's an outlier, even for their games. It's an outlier. And by the way, poetry for Nandathals also does very well.

And then separately, I'm looking at a bunch of other eyes. I don't want to let the cat out of the bag just yet, but I'm looking at a bunch of other sort of tech innovations that are very much at the cutting edge that I think are going to be really, really, really important in three to five years. And I'm like, okay, well, let's get there early while it's a blue ocean and not a red Ocean. Blue Ocean Strategy also, I recommend everybody read. Great, great book for everything we're talking about.

But let's get there early, where it's not totally prototype stage. It's not, it's showing a lot of traction, just like Joe Rogan in 2012. He was showing a lot of traction. It just wasn't Joe Rogan and Markey lights that everybody knows. But if you looked closely enough, there was a lot

of traction. Like the growth trajectory was insane. It's like, there are things right now that show that most people have never heard of. So it's like, okay, let me learn about that. And again, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But at the very least, I will have some relationships with hopefully some people at those companies.

I will know more or less how they work. Could be applied to something else. So, you know, maybe we don't want to reveal the specific things that you found. But maybe we can talk about the process of like, okay, let's say somebody wants to go through the same exercise and say like, all right, I'm ready. I'm going to find the next. channel, right? You said for, you know, for four-hour chef, you asked friends. Now it sounds like you've got a more data-driven way to find these channels. Like, how could somebody say,

okay, should I, should I be jumping on TikTok or should I go to, you know, how should somebody look at now? I don't have a very, my approach has changed very little, which will be reassuring, I hope, to people, because, for instance, with the four-hour work week, nobody knew me. I didn't have a platform. I didn't have an audience. I had nothing. So, Even at that time, I reached out cold emails to authors I really respected and took my time crafting a really thoughtful but short email asking effectively, what do you think publicists and publishers are missing about undervalued promotional tools or channels that punch above their weight class? Like which types of media or motion are becoming more important and which are becoming less important. Those are the questions I asked. And a lot of folks were like, yeah, we think TV is becoming less impactful. I've launched a couple of books and it seems to drive less. Meanwhile, these things, blogs, these weird things called blogs,

dates myself a little. But the book launched in 2007. And there were enormous, enormous blogs that drove a lot of sales, a lot of sales. I mean, more so than a lot of what we work with today because it was just one click, right? Everyone's reading, click, link, buy. That's it. So in a sense, it was a lot faster than much of what we work with today. And I've done that for every book.

So it worked when I had no platform, no fancy friends, no nothing. And it still works now. The only difference now is that I reach out to people I know. Right. But people will respond to cold emails. I mean, some people, you don't need everybody. I mean, I probably emailed 20 people and I got four responses. Okay, email another 20.

Yeah. And I got really actionable information. And particularly now with chat GPT, it's like, okay, well, once, for instance, if I had had chat GPT then or LLM, as soon as I figured out, okay, blogs are a thing. I'd go into chat GPT. I'd be like, what are the 10 most popular blogs based on page views or fill in the blank? And I would just do a deep dive for an hour and I would have my answers. Back in 2007, there was a lot more network involved.

But even with Google, I could figure out pretty quickly. What are the big events that relate to blogs? and my assumption then was, which I think was correct, the most crowded channel is trying to email these bloggers. They're going to be completely deluged. Social media wasn't really a thing that would be effective for outreach, in person, the least crowded channel. So I spent all of my launch budget flying to a few events

and meeting these people in person and hat in hand, buying them a couple of drinks and asking them about blogging. That was the effectively sum total, at least we're doing the 80-20 analysis of the 4-hour work week. And with this coyote game, very similar. I'm asking the same questions. I'm asking basically the exact same questions. And by the way, still trying to do in person.

I mean, is it any less crowded now in someone's inbox? No, they just have 12 new inboxes for every messaging app and all the sorts of noise and bullshit that's constantly on all our phones. So the approach I'm very relieved to say continues to work. And I got to tell you, I wrote this blog post a while back that was like basically how everything I did to launch the four-hour body, which was my second book, which was number one near times and like still sells super well. I wrote out the exact playbook.

And it is still shocking to me how few. people will just follow the playbook. They won't do it. It's right there. It's right there. And similarly, it's like I'm saying, just like craft a really good cold email, send it out to 20 people. Maybe you get two responses. Fine. Once you get two responses, if they give you a response, then maybe you don't, don't abuse it. Keep aim for long-term relationship if you can. But you might ask them, you know, is there anybody, are there any other authors? in the case of a book. Who really knows, has launched something recently you think might be interesting for me to reach out to. Boom. There's your next email.

I mean, that's what I did when I was at South by Southwest launching the four-hour work week. I would go up not to all the panelists, right? At a busy panel, panelists are all getting mobbed. I'd go to the moderator. And I talked to them. Moderators are often just as impressive, but they're getting ignored. Go up and just say, hey, it's my first. time at a conference like this. I'm launching my first book. In this case, it would be my first

game. Don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm hoping to meet people who might be able to teach me about A, B, or C, do you have any idea? Is there anybody here I should meet it? I don't know anybody. People will help you out. Everyone's been helped out. And the game industry is one of the nicest places that you could possibly be. I mean, everybody is here because they love it and they want to connect. And so, yeah, I'm actually going to GenCon next week. I'm coming back to the States for GenCon next week, which is our 15th anniversary for Ascension.

We launched the game there. And I love helping people there. I love meeting up with people there. And so it's a, it's a great thing to just do. Like get out of your screens, go to a place where the other people are that are doing the thing you want to do. There's just no substitute for it. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So those are some of the approaches. I mean, it's been almost 20 years. The same stuff still works. And you don't have to do in person. You do not have to do in person. So that's going to be a constraint that's going to be, or that would be a requirement that's too hard for some folks.

But cold outreach, it still works. Yeah, amazing. I mean, listen, it's a great thing to kind of, as we move towards wrapping up here, right? We talk about how rapid change is and how AI's coming and how there's so much in the marketplace now. But like the same core tactics that have worked for 20 years still work. The same core principles.

You know, we talked about Pixar as, you know, the core principles of storytelling, the core principles of outreach and building long-term relationships and finding, you know, finding the new, you know, unused channels or not as well, not as crowded channels. Like that stuff, you know, doesn't change and doesn't seem like it necessarily will change. So I think highlighting those universal principles is a really, really powerful takeaway here. Yeah, yeah, totally. And if you want, if you want to go for another, I know we're coming up on time roughly, but if you want to go for another like 10 minutes, I'm happy to do it. So whatever you know, hey, listen, I'm happy to keep chatting because I, I, listen, I find this stuff fascinating personally in general. But I also think for me, I'm going to use, I'm going to use my bonus time a little selfishly then. Because I, as I said, I've, I've got my next book, which is level up a gamer's guide to life, right? Trying to take the principles that like how, why are games fun? Why can we play? 50 levels of an RPG over hundreds of hours and get through the end. But achieving goals in life is difficult and we get lost in,

et cetera, right? How do we apply those principles? But for me, and believe me, I was taking notes through this whole section, taking that jump to launch a book is like that, right? It's not just core game design. It's pretty scary. And so when I think about, one, how you've chosen to publicly test chapters of the Nobook and lessons learned from that is one channel I'm interested in because I talk to

our mutual friend, Neil Strauss, your co-author, and he's like, yeah, this was all Tim's idea. I didn't, you know, the public testing thing was like he didn't have much insights for me. And two, the choice of working with a publisher versus and kind of going that route versus more, I don't know if you're doing this one on your own or not or like how to think about those decisions as well. So those are two things that are top of mind for me, which I'd love to get your insights on. sure yeah so with the no book i've been so close to this material for so long that i have conceded it is very hard to look at the material with fresh eyes and uh neil who i brought in after i'd written

75 000 or 100 000 words which is like two books right already in a lot of instances uh I wanted to collaborate with Neil, have him come in and basically, we ultimately decided that I would effectively try to teach him because he wanted the book for himself, which is why he ended up involved. It's a bit of a long story. He was like, when are you going to finish that damn book? And I was like, if you want to read the goddamn book so much, come and help me finish it. And I'd never done that before. He's a great collaborator. So it worked out super well. But I wanted to apply some external pressure because neither Neil. nor I need to publish this book. There's no financial pressure. There's no real time pressure. And that can hurt you. So things were kind of dragging in a few ways. And totally my fault. But I was like, okay, look, let's start to put this out publicly or semi-publicly into like we ended up using circle as a community and putting chapters into circle and getting feedback and then revising the chapters. And that helped us to push forward in different types of edits and refining. Super helpful. The feedback cycle ended up being a little more time-consuming than expected because I would do

an edit round and make all my edits, then take it, put it into circle. You'd have to collate all the feedback. And we tried AI summaries of the feedback. Frankly, it didn't work very well. They're better. Gemini in particular was quite good at the time that we were really, experimenting with a lot of these. I just went back to rating all the comments. So you might have 90 comments of worth of feedback responding to specific questions I asked. The questions I asked were

things like what most resonated, what didn't resonate at all, right? What was anything unclear or confusing? If you had to cut 20% of this, what would you cut? Those were some of the key questions and people would respond to those to give them a framework, right, for responding. Otherwise, if it's just like, hey, give me feedback. Terrible idea. Terrible question. So that, I think, ultimately will be a huge contributor to a very, very, very strong book. The book is already strong. I'm just being an idiot in applying like this crazy unreasonable perfectionism to the book. Anyway, so does that. Then traditional versus alternative options, I would say, traditional is beneficial on a lot of levels. If you want the advance, right? If the advance is

helpful on sales, then that's helpful. I would say up until maybe a few years ago, I would have said if you want to hit the bestseller lists and have the distribution, the varied distribution required to do that, then you should go through a traditional publisher. And I say that because But a lot of people don't realize, and this was a point of deep frustration for me, is the New York Times bestseller list is basically an editor's choice list. It is not a true reflection of copies sold. And we used to have, I think it may have been retired, but say the Wall Street Journalist, which was a compiled list. There are others as well that track Nielsen BookScan. And it's like, hey, if this gets pushed through any sales channel that is tracked, It counts, and that's the ranking. That's a true bestseller list. In the case of the New York Times, for instance, when the Four Hour Chef came out, it was the first major book that came out through Amazon publishing,

which meant Amazon was going to be competing head-to-head against their partners and customers, meaning the publishers for author talent, everybody freaked out outside of Amazon, and it got boycotted everywhere. Barnes & Noble wouldn't carry it. The big box retailers wouldn't carry it. and what that meant was almost all my sales came through Amazon. Not good enough for the New York Times list. So I got crushed.

Should have been number one, ended up at number four. I suppose because I couldn't like totally ignore it. But I think it was a very strong slap on the wrist. Based on Nielsen Book Scan, clearly should have been number one. So this is all to say that if you want to be on the best, give yourself the best shot of being on the New York Times best seller list, you do want presence at Barnes & Noble, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In the last handful of years, some hybrid models have come out that are pretty interesting. The big publishers do offer profit share arrangements, but I will say they create a lot of

very sneaky Hollywood accounting type nonsense in their agreements, that a lot of which is pretty insulting. I read contracts every week. I do a lot of deals of different types, mostly on the investing side, but it's pretty sneaky and pretty bad. They'll be like, okay, we're going to charge you and, you know, I'm making this up, but like a two or five percent promotional fee for marketing the book and this, this, this and this. But really, they only do that for the first two to four weeks, but they take that big in perpetuity, right? Or we're going to charge you a 15 percent distribution fee. and when you really dig into you, you're like, wait a second. This is just coming right off the top,

and most of this is profit for you guys. So actually, this profit share, the numbers that you're telling me I'm signing up for are not the numbers. There's a lot of fuckery that I find really unappealing. So there is a company that I think is doing this the right way, and they've had a bunch of bestsellers so far called Authors' Equity. So if you wanted to chat with them,

I'm happy to make the introduction. but author's equity was founded by a group of very experienced publishing folks, including the former CEO of Penguin Random House USA. And they have the retail distribution, right? So they can get into the right places. They know how the kind of pro-high-level publishing game is played. And they do profit share agreements that are, as far as I know, I mean, I haven't done to deal with them yet,

but I would consider it, right, for something like the No Book, that are reasonable, straightforward. I think someone like that is worth talking to. And then there are questions around, let's just say, like, do well, do I reserve the ebook rights and the audio rights and only sell print? Most publishers are not going to do that first, I would say.

But separately, you might be surprised to learn that as an independent, for instance, with audiobook. and audio may or may not apply strongly to your book. I just don't know how much is dependent on visuals. For instance, like 4-Hour Chef, yeah, I recorded some stuff for audio, but it requires a lot of photographs, right? So it's not really native to that. But let's assume that it is very much portable to audiobook.

You used to be able to get, I want to say, up to like 75% royalties as an independent through ACX and Audible and so on. As expected, and this is true everywhere, so it's like, look, kudos to Amazon for creating such a behemoth that controls the market. But as they got more and more market share,

the royalties came down and down and down and down. I don't know what it is currently, but I think it's maybe a max of 25%. Could be even lower. And the big publishers, on the other hand, and I believe probably also authors' equity with the relationships that they have

are able to negotiate better deals. So even if you give some of these publishers a percentage of the upside on the audio, you still end up making more per unit because they have the economies of scale where they have this kind of collective bargaining power to get better rates from Amazon and audible. So those are some of the considerations

that I would keep in mind, I do think it's helpful to have pros involved for your first, let's call it, mainstream book because there's so much that's invisible to you right now, potentially, just like with the game, right? Just as making the game, I got through parts of it and they're like, well, there are certain aspects of this I could have predicted. Then there are all of these different steps.

I was like, oh, my God, I never would have guessed in a million years that this is something that we would need to spend a lot of time on. And I'm glad to have some pros who are able to break ground in front of me as we're doing this because this would have been a nightmare for me to try to figure out on my own. So things like that. I think it can be helpful to have a partner. It'll just be a lot of brain damage otherwise, which isn't to say it can't be done,

but it's very, very rare for someone to do it all. themselves and hit the bestseller lists, which I think is not necessarily, it's not the only goal, but it's kind of like a nice, discrete goal where you can reverse engineer it and figure out how many copies roughly. You need to target selling for each week, say, of the first several weeks of launch. And that provides a focus that I think is helpful, even if you don't hit the list. So I'll stop there. What is that number of nowadays, if you don't mind my asking? It depends on the week. It depends on the category. So you can look at things like I think publishers marketplace might have some numbers.

You can certainly try to find somebody who has access to Nielsen Bookscan to look at historical data. Part of the reason that I launched the four-hour work week in April of 2007 was I wanted a softer period. I didn't want to come out in the holidays. I didn't want to come out at New Year's. I didn't want to launch when it would be maximally competitive because it is a ranked list. Right. Right. And that stuff matters. It's like if you're if you want to, I'm just using this as a counter example, but I've since launched things during the holidays, but it's like, oh my God, in advice how to, which is where I would be slotted, which at the time, maybe they've expanded it.

But I think that at the time, nonfiction was 10 spots in the print edition of the New York Times. and advice how to is five or something like that. And you just have the biggest cookbooks of the year. You would have the hugest behemoths come out that time of year. And you're just, you're done. You're dead. Dead in the water. Or there might be some incumbent, like let's just say a year or two ago, probably even still today.

I mean, good for him too. James Clear, who's one of the largest investors in Authors' Equity, by the way, atomic habits. It's like, okay, that thing owns a position. on advice how to. You're not going to take out atomic out. It just ain't going to happen, right? And at any given time, you might have two or three of those that just own spots. So the softer the week that you can target, the more likely it is that on a ranked list, you will perform better. And even still, look, I mean, the four-hour work week was rejected by something like, I'm not exaggerating, guys. like 26 to 29 publishers, meaning imprints, like editors, were like absolutely not.

And then when they bought it, it was like next to no money, paid out over four to five installments over a year and a half to two years, right? Definitely not enough to live on. And then when they did the initial print run, the initial print run of the four-hour workweek was like 10,000 copies. People couldn't buy it. Like it did not have full distribution at all. And so even though I got a lot of the promotion right, I think it ended up number 13 on the extended list, which people in the publishing world saw, but nobody in the real world saw.

And it took from April until August for it to hit number one. Yeah. It was a slow build. But hopefully some of that's helpful. I would also say, I would also say just for some inside baseball, books tend to be published at least for a long, long time. I think this is still the case on a Tuesday or a Thursday. You want to come out on a Tuesday. If the New York Times is still tabulated Sunday to Sunday, because think about what happens if you come out on a Thursday. Your pre-orders all hit on Amazon and so on, and then you have Thursday, Friday, Saturday, basically. You don't even have, you have a small portion of a week. And then it's a bit of a mess from a tabulating and calculating perspective.

So you want to come out earlier. Exactly these kinds of things. Exactly where we talk about moving into a new category, these little details that you've learned and that are little tricks to trade. It is so helpful to have expertise and have somebody on your side. I love the, you know, knowing that authors equity has like, you know, generally speaking good, you know, reliable people and actual authors behind it and, you know, deals that are not trying to screw you over the vibe I've gotten from other

publishers or people I've talked to have done publishing deals is very often that they're going to screw you every way they can screw you. Well, and by the way, like, publishing is publishing is publishing, right? It's like you're going to run into a lot of these issues in music. I would imagine that you can run into a lot of these issues in the game world, right? Publishing is publishing is publishing. Like, everyone's trying to figure out how to make things work. There are profit share deals, there are advanced deals, there are hybrid deals. And do not be your own lawyer. do not be your own lawyer. There are certain places to spend money.

That is one of them. Awesome. Well, I appreciate this, this divergence into my new area of interest here. And it's so fun to have you in this world. The game you've made is super fun. Is there anything that you can tease or want to tease in terms of like what you're working on next in this space or excited about as a follow on? To be honest, idea. The way that I think about something like Coyote is available everywhere, folks,

coyotegame.com. It's everywhere. So you know, you can go to Amazon, Target, Walmart, wherever. It should be everywhere. The reason that I don't know what's next is, and coming back to my statement earlier that I don't have a 10-year plan professionally, is that my assumption is if I go fully all in on my six to 12 month project, which in this case, yeah, okay, it took two years. But I mean, it's still pretty, I feel proud of that from the zero to one. Like, it got done, you know? And if you go, if you just try to do your absolute best job on that one thing, you cannot predict the types of doors and interesting opportunities that will open in front of you. The types of people who might come out of the woodwork and send you an email, the serendipity that

will surface. And for that reason, I don't want to commit to what's next. Could I see very easily a bunch of different possible expansion packs? Yeah. I mean, for sure. You just take Tim's director's cut with, I want the R-rated or X-R-R version that you couldn't bring into Walmart. Yeah. Yeah, just the R-rated version or for a lot of good reasons. You have to, for instance, I mean, I'll give you one that people might not expect, but it's like, okay, if there's an action where we want people to stand up and do something, why is that problematic if you're going mega mass? It's problematic because you might have people who can't stand up, right?

So it's like you have to, these are things that I was like, oh yeah, duh, obviously that makes sense. But it's like there are all sorts of opportunities with expansion packs or doing a print to play. Like, hey, guys, look, here are a bunch of cards. Just print them out. You can use them. Since you're not hiding your cards in this game, in fact, explicitly, it's like pull three cards off the deck, show everybody what you have and then pick one to add to the deck. Right. So I want to add one more thing, just because we didn't mention it, is that I've had so much fun designing a game.

There are 10 blank cards in every deck. And the real hilarity, I mean, it's already very fun and funny, but when you can create your own cards. So, for instance, I was playing a game with some friends and this one, this one woman, her card that she created was giving everyone the finger around the table and just going, I like, right? It's like, like, like, and every time she, every time anyone, every time anyone, hit that card, it was fucking hilarious. And so you can't do give everyone the finger and say, I like in your mass retail ready kit. You can't do it.

But you can definitely do that for your game at home. And the other thing is because this is like such a cognitive mental memory game, like if you have insomnia, I play this game a few times. Like you'll find it much easier to go to sleep. But you don't even necessarily because, all right, this will get into the weeds for a second. I wanted to have a racable marker potential, right? So people wouldn't just use a Sharpie on a car, and then it's like, uh-oh, now we're out of cards.

Right. A blank cards. It is so complicated to make that work because as soon as you shuffle the deck with any type of the shelf, then you're screwed, right? So what do you have to do? Then you would have to have a marker that you put it on, you have to wait 15 seconds, for it to set, right? And then you have to remember to wipe it off at the end of the game or similarly, similarly,

you're screwed, right? So it just adds so much complexity to the game. I was like, all right, forget it. But I'm going to be recording some like, hey, this is like some Tim twists on Coyote to make it interesting. But since it's a memory game, you can just say, look, we're playing this blank card. Everyone has to remember that it's, I like, you know, with the middle finger. And then you get to reuse it.

It's just like, okay, this is actually a future of the game that just makes it harder. Because one of the coyote cards is you have to flip one of the cards over and remember what it was. So there you go. I like that idea. The idea that, you know, because you give people that, and we, you know, we didn't, we get super into the weeds on this. But the amount of choice and control that you give people in the game, I think is super interesting. Like that ability of like, all right, you look at three cards and add one. It could have just been you flip the top card and add it and then the deck is just happening to you.

It could be that if you're obviously, if you were selecting anything, it's too overwhelming. Like that that flip three, pick one, I think is a really great choice that matters a lot and how the flow of the game goes. Yeah, it's fun to talk to you about this because you picked up on it. I mean, the amount of testing we did on that. Oh, my God. Like, just pulling one card and playing, it doesn't work, right? Because you could end up with a really, really boring game if it's all gestures and no curveballs with, say, coyote cards. and the if you pick five cards because we tested it at one point with a different sized deck

because too many gesture cards were getting played because what would happen? People would look at it, but it takes a while to learn how to play the game. So in the first game they would play, the simplest choice was to always play a gesture card. So you would end up with a really long lineup that wasn't that interesting. So we and then we played around with, say, five cards. Okay. And really encouraging people to play the coyote cards. What's the problem there? There's a lot of dead space where when they pull five, they're considering each card and reading each

card and it made it slower paced and less fun. So, yeah, all that reminds me also. I forgot to ask you. I did want to talk about the cooperative versus competitive versions because there's making a mark there. My guess is knowing you that you were really pushing for the competitive version. But what was the decision there if there's time? Yeah, there's time. I actually wanted to have both from the very outset and had played some games like the mind or any number of others. I know that's kind of a controversial one, which I think is pretty hilarious that it gets

people so fired up. But I played a number of games that were, I think, What is it? Is it called Pandemic? There's something with a name like that that's also collaborative. That you're trying to stop the disease and run around the world. Yeah. Yeah.

So collaborative, cooperative game. So I enjoyed both for different reasons. And honestly, one of my friends was kind of responsible for the cooperative slash collaborative mode. Because he's a former Olympic athlete, meddled, total stud. And he is the soreest, most. pain in the ass loser you have ever played a game with. He is such a petulant child. This is a grown man who has like also amazing professional pedigree. And he is such a petulant whiny child that it's just a huge pain in the ass to play with him. You're just like, bro, come on. Like, are you serious right now?

And while there is something to be said, like we played poetry for Neanderthals and his now wife, her native language isn't even English, and she smoked him at poetry for Neanderthals. And he was so angry, so, so angry. There is, like, it is sometimes entertaining to watch someone who gets that upset.

Not when it's your significant other. Let's just say it. But maybe that's just my time. Yeah, not when it's your significant other. Yeah. Yeah, so in a family, though, let's just say, right? I do think the cooperative mode is a nice way to warm up. It's also a way to include everyone if someone's really weak at the game so that everyone's playing together.

And with this particular deck, it also wasn't that hard to do, right? It wasn't that hard to figure it out. The gameplay is still very, very, very similar. and you're just not necessarily going to use the attack cards as much, for instance, right? But to win the game cooperatively, I think right now it's like 12 cards, three of which have to be coyote cards or attack cards, something like that. And once you have that and you complete it successfully, you win the game. So it wasn't that hard. It was easy enough to include the instructions.

but for me, absolutely, if I had to pick one, competitive all the way. It's just, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the way. I enjoy that. And I think that similarly,

the attack card mechanic, I think it's also, one, it's just fun to kind of screw over your friends and have that, like, that competitiveness to it. But as the, as the social balancing aspect to what's otherwise a parallel game, it's actually really nice, right?

As you said, that somebody's really good at this game. Well, okay, we're just going to throw attack cards on them, make it harder for that. person specifically. So it's another nice way to balance a differential of skill within a group. Absolutely. That's why it was made. And that came from me playtesting and having some of my employees playtest. And there were a few patterns that came up. People who are very good at mathematics

or chess. And in some cases, music, musicians crush people at this game. Left unfettered, they just tend to win every time and it's very annoying. It just ceases to be fun, right? So that is how the attack cards came to be. And it was like, okay, everybody can just like tie that guy's ankles together, you know, put a blindfold on that woman, make it a lot harder. Not literally, but just to handicap them and make it harder. Although if you do want to add, put a blindfold on your blank cards and you're in game of coyote, go ahead and post a video on social media. Let us know how it goes. That's, yeah, that's going to, yeah, that's going to be an interesting one. You have to, yeah, you have to have someone with a very good memory to pull that one off.

But some of the videos also that have gone super crazy include cards that people have created, which makes me so happy, makes me so happy. Like one is just random noise. Like somebody created a card, which is like, random noise. with the gesture. It's pretty funny, especially when you're moving quickly and people's brains just glitch. Yeah,

I really, I encourage for anybody that has this game to do, just put some inside jokes onto the cards ahead of time and don't tell the other people in the room when it shows up. I think there's just like whatever funny thing that other person says or, you know, like I think there's the opportunities for that are, are, I think,

great. And just to kind of full circle it, right? It comes back to, I think, a lot of what makes D&D great and a lot of, in a lot of these games where you know, like you grew up playing magic,

whatever, we're like, there's that ability for you to customize and, like, show off who you are and show off parts of your personality that I think Coyote does really well here because it's, it forces you into a frame of being silly right away, right?

The art does it, the style, everything. You know, what you're doing is kind of ridiculous. Um, but it allows you to, if you're super competitive, you could get super competitive with it.

If you're just, you know, want to be playful with it, you can be playful with it. And then the, the, the, the,

starring it, it feels like it hits a lot of, a lot of genres for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, totally. And I wrote this whole mythology and the story. Of course you did. Of course you do. I wrote this whole thing, which I haven't shared yet, but I thought at some point, I was like, this might be fun. Well, I, listen, I, Tim, I mean, I love the way that your, your mind works. I'd love to see you in these different creative expressions. And if I could give, you know, kind of any, any piece of advice for you is I think, you know, these, you could tell, like, don't be afraid to lean in to this. Like, leaning into the badass story world you want to do, lean into the thing. Like, you, you've shown that you have this skill set across this board.

Like, you can absolutely do the, you know, not, not joke, not even pretending to joke. Like, here's the cool world. Here's the cool story. Here's the deep game thing. Like, I want to see it. I know you want to make it. Like, I want to see that come to life. Yeah, I do. I do. Yeah, thanks, man. I'm going to be meeting up with some of my friends who are actually. working in the feature film world focused on building like these tiny kind of seal team six teams within film studios with new tech and uh i think i want to make a legends of a lot of movie trailer based based on uh tyrian and some of these not tyrian with uh tyrolean and some of the characters in the last few chapters of the fiction that I started building out.

Because I have the entire, I have the entire story. Eric, it's already there. I still like, and we won't talk about it on the recording, because I still like the core concept we were kicking around back in the day with those characters, like the sort of like little whatever, more slightly, you know, mid-tier kind of complexity game where it's like it can get people invested and you can have the characters with the stories associated with it. I think that there's, yeah, there's a fun world to explore there.

but I will I'll save that for for offline for now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And look, I'm having fun with this game. I could see doing more games for sure. I mean, it also feels like after you've gone through the hard knocks of bumping into walls and tripping over the carpet, metaphorically speaking, to figure out like just how to handle the basics and figure out the process for round one, it's like, yeah, you should probably should try around too.

Now that you've got your yellow belt, at least. That's right. You know, that's right. Try around two. So, so we'll say. I'm getting a little ahead of myself, obviously. I'm super excited about the launch. And we'll see where it goes.

We'll see where it goes. I'm not attached. And at the same time, I'm super hypercompetitive. You know, you're playing, you're playing this, you're playing the game of business and the game of product launching. And that's a fun game. You want to win. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's super, super excited. So, TVD, I hope people check it out. So everybody can go to coyote game.com, any major retailer by the time this airs, where anything else that they can do to help promote the game or should that you want to, you want to pitch here?

I would say just, I mean, and this isn't just for like social promo. I want to see it. Like, if you create some house rules and new cards, like, just record the gameplay and throw it online. And there's, there's a letter from me in every box that's just, like, hey, this is just throw up, like, tag me and Exploding Kittens, and we'll find it. I want to see the most fun I've had so far as watching people create new cards and new types of gameplay. Like, anything is fair. And you'll get the game very quickly. Like, people will figure out the game

in a handful of minutes or 10 minutes. A friend of mine was like, yeah, within three minutes, we were playing. And share that. Just share that. I would love to see it. I would love to see it because at some point I would also like to take kind of my favorite of those new cards and incorporate them into the next print run or just do an entire deck that is from people who've created cards. How much fun would that be? And I think you can unlock a lot of stuff too, even just like a promo pack, right? Like something that's small, easy to make. You can sell it direct if you don't want to deal with the retailer problems of it. Like there's a lot of things that unblock you from the particular restrictions. of being in mass market, even like print on demand things are for the kinds of cards you're making are easy to do now. So there's like so much fun that can come with this. We do print on demand for Ascension. You can actually build your own Ascension card through the website, order it, print it, have it sent to you. And it's all, it's all handled automatically. There's a lot of tools that

let people have a lot of fun, which I think would be perfect for a game like this. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, we'll we'll know very shortly, right? I mean, we're going to know in the next, like month or two. I'll have an idea. Now, as of having this conversation right now, it's being released into the wild at all these retailers. So I'm very excited in the next few weeks. Things will start to come out of the woodwork.

Things will start to bubble up. I mean, I already had this video game designer from a very famous video game, reach out and just be like, congratulations. That's awesome. He's like, you made a game. And blah, blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay, like never would have reached out to this person myself because I had no idea they paid any attention to my podcast or newsletter or whatever, right?

And so who knows? It could lead a lot of different directions. But I'm excited. I could just see, I can feel how giddy you are. And I absolutely love it. So this is wonderful. We'll use that as the opportunity to wrap up here. Thank you so much for coming on, Tim.

It was so great to get to chat through this and all the things. And the little part I got to play in the journey was a real honor for me too. So this is super fun, man. Yeah, thanks for this. Thanks for all the inspiration with the podcast and the conversations. And it's surreal, kind of hard to believe that, you know, I'm looking at boxes of coyote on my shelf. It's like, wow, it's actually, it's actually a real thing. That's wild.

It's a real thing. And we'll have you on when you release the sequel of the expansion packs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll take good notes as I always do. so I'll have more lessons hopefully to share. And appreciate the time, man. My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for listening.

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