Best of Design Matters: Tim Ferriss

0:00Tim Ferriss: This episode of Design Matters originally appeared in July of 2025. Ambition used to be the hallmark of an enviable life and a righteous path. I don't relate to it that way anymore. I think ambition is a jet fuel. Not everyone needs to be on a jet, but if you're going to be on a jet, you better make sure it's pointed in the right direction.

0:24Debbie Millman: From the TAT Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

0:31Tim Ferriss: On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Tim Ferriss talks about the pleasures and challenges of creating a game. Making a game is like choosing a sport at the Olympics. Curling is not exactly the same as high hurdles.

0:59Tim Ferriss: With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

1:53Debbie Millman: billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get wise. Download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply.

2:02Debbie Millman: This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. The Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Vail Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional. It's a philosophy that design changes everything. The Kohler Vail Smart Toilet is sleek with a rounded shape that's more like architecture than just plumbing. And it goes beyond looks. The touchscreen controls and customizable cleansing features offer a level of comfort and cleanliness that exceed expectations.

2:47Debbie Millman: It's all about elevating those ordinary daily rituals into something extraordinary through thoughtful design. Kohler has been pushing these boundaries for over 150 years, mastering that balance of stunning form and high-performance function. That's a long time to get it right, and it shows in every detail. Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out more at Kohler.com. Tim Ferriss is many things. Five times New York Times bestselling author, a podcaster with over a billion downloads, an angel investor, an experimenter, a teacher, and a risk taker. But above all, he's an architect of questions.

3:38Debbie Millman: This is the fourth time I'm interviewing Tim, and today we get to talk about something brand new that he's been quietly designing, a card game called Coyote. But before we shuffle the proverbial deck, I want to dig into the evolving mind behind it, the mind that's been asking better questions of the world and of himself for nearly two decades. Tim Ferriss, welcome back to Design Matters.

4:06Tim Ferriss: Thank you for having me. It's so nice to see you.

4:08Debbie Millman: Oh, it's such a joy to have you in this little studio. So I want to talk a little bit about questions. Do you remember the very first time you were asked a question that really made you stop and reconsider everything?

4:26Tim Ferriss: Ooh. I would say the first that comes to mind, and I don't remember the exact phrasing, but it was when I was in probably freshman year of high school. I could think of other examples, but this is the one that pops to mind. and my math teacher at the time asked something along the lines of have you ever thought about getting out of here and going somewhere else meaning going to a different school and that possibility that question had never entered my consciousness really at all and at that point in time there are very few things i can control and there are a lot of things in my life out of control outside of my direct influence.

5:10Tim Ferriss: But the one thing that I felt I could control was academics, right? Working really hard in school. So I did.

5:16Debbie Millman: Achievement.

5:16Tim Ferriss: And I did well. Yes. The curse of the achiever. Definitely some payoffs, but there are some trade-offs. And at that time, I felt very good because I was, relatively speaking, a big fish in a little pond, although I wasn't aware of that. And this teacher then suggested that I had the option, right? There was actually an item on the menu known as other school. And that led to all sorts of exploration, going to the public library back in the day when you needed to research schools by pulling these giant tomes off of a shelf that were revised every year or two. And ultimately led me to getting some scholarships and so on and going to a boarding school.

6:03Tim Ferriss: And that changed everything. You know, six months after getting there, I ended up being an exchange student to Japan, going from Long Island to Tokyo, Japan, and everything changed. Oh, that changed everything. So without that initial prompting from actually two teachers, but the math teacher is the one who comes to mind, great guy, also hilarious. He was very, very, very tall. And he had this older convertible Corvette that he would drive around. And he was so gigantic that it looked like half of his body was sticking out of the top of the car. This image has also burned into my mind. And I owe that man a debt of gratitude.

6:42Tim Ferriss: Without that, I think I would have unknowingly just followed this script that had been set out in front of me.

6:51Debbie Millman: We've talked a lot over the years about performance, reinvention, achievement, optimization. You've been evolving quite a lot in the last couple of years, and I'm wondering what has become less interesting to you over time?

7:09Tim Ferriss: what a good question you know that's a better question than i i sometimes try to edge into that territory with a handful of other questions and that's a much better question so i'm going

7:20Debbie Millman: to borrow that if you don't mind never at all do whatever you want with anything i would say

7:24Tim Ferriss: that and one could before i even say it rightfully push back on this answer saying that it's easier for me to say now than it might have been a few decades ago or even a decade ago but i would say the no pain no gain school of achievement has become much less interesting in the sense that one of the risks of self-improvement is you find someone to model whether that's something they write about or a person you have a parasocial relationship with, meaning you've read their book or you see them online, you don't get to see the whole person. So you might see someone on Shark Tank who is a billionaire or fill in the blank.

8:14Tim Ferriss: And in an attempt to copy that person, you take on, say, their business behaviors without seeing the possible side effects of those practices and behaviors and beliefs and so on. And for me, I suppose I have come to think, number one, if you were to ask a hundred people, what is Alexander the Great's full name? I mean, I couldn't even tell you. And this is one of the greatest conquerors the world has ever known. And you could go through history and pick out these

8:55Tim Ferriss: incredibly, by humankind's scale standards, important men and women who have all been forgotten, like the Ozymandias poem.

9:06Debbie Millman: I don't know many people that know Rembrandt's full name.

9:09Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. So to that extent, then, burning the candle at both ends in an attempt to leave the legacy, I think is the most hilarious, foolish thing imaginable. Like we're, we're just always, we're all going to be forgotten at least on a full name basis very, very quickly, but you, you can have an impact through starting with the small, trying to affect individual people or a small group of people. This is just, I suppose, a meandering way of saying that productivity or being effective with your goals is still important on some level, but eking out the bleeding of the stone for optimal fill in the blank, I think is less and less interesting.

9:58Debbie Millman: Why do you think people drive themselves in the way that they do to construct a life that is comprised of that mentality?

10:08Tim Ferriss: I think it's a very smart coping mechanism for a world that seems out of control and for a life that doesn't seem to have any clear mooring in certainty. right so you so you take away just went to the bathroom here maybe 15 feet from where we're sitting and there's this amazing cartoon on the wall of the 10 commandments being held up by a dog to this audience of dogs and it's like heal sit stay lie sick them you know fetch and when When you take away that type of certainty, this is how you build a good life. This is what makes you a good fill in the blank Christian, Muslim, whatever it might be.

11:00Tim Ferriss: And this is what happens in the afterlife. When you remove that, I think humans being, as far as we know, uniquely enabled slash disabled by our knowledge of our own mortality. You need something to keep your mind from staring into the abyss for too long, I think.

11:17Debbie Millman: I agree.

11:17Tim Ferriss: And maybe that ends up being veganism. Maybe that ends up being CrossFit. Maybe that ends up being workaholism, which is also very socially reinforced, particularly in the U.S. I think less so when you stray outside of the Protestant work ethic. Like history, when you get to like Spain or something, it's like, okay, it's a different situation by and large. I think that's it. I think it's coping with, for some people, the dizziness of freedom. It's like, okay, we used to have our village, have our hundred people. These were the options. What you did is A, B, and C. You got married at this age. You went through right of passage at this age.

12:00Tim Ferriss: You had 3.5 kids or whatever it was. and you work the farm and then the kids inherited the farm and that's it you know but in a world of infinite options even if that's just a perception you have the created illusion that you're constantly losing if you are not striving to grasp at more and more of them that's my perception at least and also watching my audience over the years it's like i've never seen such such a combination of like fear anxiety apathy nihilism and and it's really not uniform there are outliers who don't fit that bill but man is it prevalent and i don't think that's due to individual fault I think society has just become and life has become much harder to compartmentalize or conceptualize in a way that allows humans to kind of grasp things and operate day to day without worrying all the time.

13:06Debbie Millman: I wasn't planning on talking to you about this, but the conversation is leading me to consider that it might be an interesting thing to chat about. I don't know if you know Amy Griffin. I do.

13:21Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I do know Amy.

13:22Debbie Millman: So Amy is the CEO of G6 Ventures. She also just recently wrote a book called The Tell. And I don't know if you know how much you influenced her writing that book.

13:37Tim Ferriss: I don't think I have, I don't have the full picture. She sent me some very kind texts and we've spent a little time together and I have not read the book, but I've heard it's fantastic. was a little worried about maybe triggering stuff in my own past revisiting it yeah yeah there's a time for that but there's also a time when i don't want to do that yeah oh i i hear you but when i interviewed her she told me that when we had one of our last conversations

14:07Debbie Millman: about our own lives, that it triggered something in her that ultimately inspired her to write her book about her memoir, about her experiences growing up and some of the violence that she encountered. And it made me think about the way in which we identify young people that might need direction or help and the way that your teacher suggested, you know, have you considered a bigger world out there? And it made me realize, and the reason this came into my head is because in thinking about overachievement, you know, something you and I have in common, something that Amy has in common as well, I wonder if teachers, educators, guidance counselors, principals, you know, they're all taught what signs to look for in kids that might be having trouble at home or in their families.

15:09Debbie Millman: And it's usually the kid that's withdrawn or not getting good grades. I'm wondering if ever anybody's considered looking at the really intense high overachievers that seem to need to make up for something else. And I'm wondering if that's a...

15:28Tim Ferriss: Or control something.

15:29Debbie Millman: Yes, yes, that's better. Absolutely. Control. And also to feel good about themselves and feel like they have some purpose in the world. And it just makes me think about the ways in which we're all conditioned to view certain external stimuli. And what if we rethought how much more we actually might be able to support other people?

15:53Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. For sure. I mean, I'm not the first person to say this, but everyone's fighting a battle you know nothing about. And certain types of compulsive behavior just happen to be more socially rewarded than others.

16:07Debbie Millman: Yeah. I mean, I've been behaving this way since I was in junior high school, what's considered middle school now. Exactly the same. Yeah, me too. Exactly. And not only that, after many decades of therapy, I realized that something that I thought I wasn't doing anymore, I realized I still do every day.

16:26Tim Ferriss: And I will say that for my younger self, let's just say on Long Island, definitely focusing to an extreme extent on schoolwork and things like that. And I don't think that would have been the right time for me to try to sort of go to the cellar of my soul with someone's intervention to look at things because I wouldn't have had a safety net. I wouldn't have had a support structure. So at that time, I mean, I'm very grateful that I did have the compulsion to work.

17:03Debbie Millman: Yeah, same.

17:04Tim Ferriss: And it served me for a long time. But there is a point when sometimes you outlive the tools that serve you for a long time in the behaviors.

17:15Debbie Millman: What do you know about being public that you didn't during your four-hour workweek era?

17:22Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy. Well, I would say number one is being public-facing and recognizable, especially facially recognizable. has a lot of downsides from a privacy perspective, sometimes from a safety perspective. You don't need that to be quote unquote successful if we look at it from the point of financial stability. And I wrote this piece, this was a while ago, but the 11 reasons not to become famous, something like that. People can look it up.

17:59Debbie Millman: That's what I was referring to. I figured

18:01Tim Ferriss: good mention it yeah because many people experience a pretty good percentage of their lives on their phones looking at social media understandably what they see rewarded on those platforms often is some degree of fame chasing with various types of videos and behaviors and this that and the other thing which isn't to diminish all of it right there are some amazing educators on youtube and on instagram and so on there are also a lot of people who are falling prey being seduced by the vanity metrics of followers or this or that or fill in the blank right and that doesn't invalidate a short-term career path for some of these people to build a huge following get sponsors do this and that and the other thing but i would say that's pretty close to professional sports in the sense that you have a few winners make most of the money and then maybe the next 10 % do really well and then the bottom 80 % make next to nothing.

19:10Tim Ferriss: But they will still chase the vanity metrics, which can apply to startups as well. They're these seductive metrics to get you pulled away from the things that actually matter. so i haven't had and it's gonna make me sound like an old bastard but it's it's not an old thing i know younger people who've done this too i haven't had any social apps on my phone in two or three years wow because they are too well engineered i mean the teams that are working on these are going to beat your psychology that is their job and collective jobs i mean you are the product right if you're not being charged for the product you are the product what's the expression in alcoholics anonymous if you don't want to slip don't go where it's slippery so i just don't have the apps on my phone they're too compelling and the personalized algorithms and so on are so good now it's it's very easy to become lost and to become sort of this like mimetic desire mirror where you start to get trained to want certain things or to be perceived a certain way by virtue of the things that get put in front of you.

20:19Tim Ferriss: So I still go on social media. I can access it through my laptop, but there's enough friction that I can't sit on the toilet and get lost for 60 minutes on my phone. Right.

20:30Debbie Millman: I know people that do that. Did you go through withdrawal when you took it all off?

20:37Tim Ferriss: Short answer is no. Like no, no physical withdrawal. Very short psychological, I wouldn't call it withdrawal, but observation of my Pavlovian conditioning, right? You end up standing in a line for five minutes. What's your conditioned response to pull your phone out of your pocket and scroll through X, whatever I say, X, not the platform. I mean, X, any social media

21:05Debbie Millman: Pick your poison.

21:06Tim Ferriss: Pick your poison. And you begin to realize how many dozens of times a day you've been filling gaps or displacing more important work by getting lost in various things. I'm sure people have had this experience because I've had this experience. And, you know, the personal tends to be pretty universal, especially I would like to consider myself pretty focused. Like I can, and this is out of the box in the same way that LeBron James is built to jump and be tall. I can focus for long periods of time on one thing to an abnormal degree. Like I can do that. And on YouTube, I get immediately hijacked. I'll go to YouTube to find something specific, but my feed is so good.

21:49Tim Ferriss: Meaning for me personally, I'll get, I'll be like, okay, I'll watch a short before I get to the thing I was about to look for. And then game is lost. I completely forget. and 20 minutes later i'm like what why am i even here what was i looking for so they're very very very well designed they're just going to get better so for me the experience of noticing how many times a day i went to this digital pacifier was shocking once there was no way

22:18Debbie Millman: to access it right wow i like the term digital pacifier that's good yeah so i ended up uh i i

22:26Tim Ferriss: I just call friends more now, which is a much, I think, for a lot of people, I'm not saying for everybody, but healthier way to go about things.

22:35Debbie Millman: Did you find yourself when you were on something like Instagram comparing yourself to others? What was, was there any, like, one of the things that I've said a lot is nobody comes away from Instagram after a half hour feeling good about themselves.

22:51Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it's generally not. But I mean, unless the accounts you follow are all people like getting into skiing accidents and like crying because they ate ice cream late at night. I don't know where you find those channels. But also, if you had an account dedicated to those channels, I would have a whole different set of questions for you.

23:09Debbie Millman: Yeah, true.

23:09Tim Ferriss: But I would say I must. I mean, I must because I do follow channels or profiles that are aspirational. inspirational like i'm following for instance i mean it's not interesting to most people probably but uh like the chinese olympic weightlifting team and various athletes for instance judo i used to compete in judo i love judo but i can't do that stuff anymore so on one hand i love watching it on the other hand like it pains me and i come away like really my low back hurts now you can pull on that thread and i think unfortunately that type of comparison is a muscle that gets stronger with use yeah that's another reason why i took that stuff off my phone i'm just like hey look the goal is better not perfect and i know how to do that already i don't need the internet to tell me how to apply progressive resistance or whatever the approach might be let me just get those habits in place, talk to my friends via phone or video call as much as possible and meditate once or twice a day to train myself.

24:18Tim Ferriss: I mean, there are a million different ways to do it. I use an app called The Way with Henry Shookman. Use that once or twice a day so you get comfortable sitting with some empty space. And lo and behold, after a week or two, you're fine. So there is though that, let's call it detox period.

24:37Debbie Millman: Yeah, it's like giving up sugar.

24:38Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Crave it for a whole bunch of days. Yeah, about two weeks.

24:42Debbie Millman: Tim, one of the many things that I've admired about you is your curiosity. Not just in what you do, but how you do it. You've optimized routines, reversed engineered habits, deconstructed mastery. But now you've done something entirely different. Right. So I want to talk to you about your new card game called Coyote. The first question I have for you about it is, is the name an homage to Joni Mitchell's great song about Sam Shepard, Coyote?

25:16Tim Ferriss: It is not, but I need to look up this song because this is not the second time that it's come up.

25:21Debbie Millman: Really? The first line of the song is, No Regrets, Coyote. And I was like, I can see Tim thinking that was a message.

25:28Tim Ferriss: I need to find it. Maybe this song is meant for me. Coyote has a lot of symbolism, not just for me, but around the North American continent. I mean, Coyote is, in some respects, uniquely American. American, right? It is a, okay, for the people in South America, yes, North American. But I would say, fundamentally, if you look at creator myths, and if you look at folklore from different First Nations and indigenous groups in North America, there are a couple of trickster entities that come up over and over again, right? You have coyote, you have ikhtomi, spider you have raven comes up quite a bit but there's a great book called trickster makes this world by lewis hyde it is a dense read i'm going to warn people in advance the the hermes stuff is really long uh so i hope you have some patience for greek greek stories but the trickster is not necessarily automatically bad right so the trickster is sort of the tester of assumptions also gets his or herself uh often he into trouble like a loki character like a loki character also in some cases like a prometheus stealing fire from the gods giving it to humans and they often get themselves into all sorts of trouble but they they also do a lot of good but coyotes are boundary walkers as described by lewis hyde so they they sort of walk between different worlds and i feel that way quite a bit in the work that i do but just also in my curiosity i end up kind of weaving through meandering in like a slalom kind of across the boundary from one world into the next into the next into the next and introducing people making these connections trying to copy and paste or transplant things from one field to the next.

27:33Tim Ferriss: So I, I find that element of the coyote folklore really appealing. It's also just a fun character and coyotes are amazing. There's a, there's a book I am going to butcher it, but I think it's just American coyote by Dan Flores. And it's the story of the evolution of humans and coyotes in parallel. We share a lot in common. The The extents to which the U.S. government has gone to, which they did very effectively, of course, first, gray wolves eliminate. But coyotes, they couldn't do it. They put out millions of bait traps with poison, tons of collateral damage, all sorts of stuff.

28:17Debbie Millman: Why? Why do they want to eliminate coyotes?

28:19Tim Ferriss: Well, they were successful at eliminating wolves. And then to keep the department alive and fed, meaning lots of employees employed, they needed a new public enemy, number one. So they decided to create the coyote as public enemy number one. And it's a wild story. It's very sad on a lot of levels, but coyotes are incredibly adaptable. They can hunt as a single animal, in pairs, in packs. Wolves are much more constrained as an apex predator. They didn't have anyone really to worry about above them. whereas coyotes had to be wary because they had wolves and other creatures that could kill them for that reason they're much harder to kill with traps and poison they can survive almost anywhere i mean we're sitting in new york city like there are coyotes in new york city right there are coyotes in central park they are just very very crafty clever creatures and i mean the reason for using coyote for the game is you know i wanted something that would be short and iconic there were a lot of debates around this name this is a game that is going to be sold internationally right as of like july 21st or so there were certain distributors and so on have said hey coyote don't exist here so nobody's going to know what this is and so i had and whenever i end up in a situation like that i'm like okay i'm open to that but we should always stress test these types of convictions and so i sent texts to friends of mine and all a bunch of european countries and then in australia and i'm like hey do you do what percentage of your friends know what a coyote is and almost all of them were like hey dummy we've seen looney tunes like all of us and i was like okay that's what i thought oh good yeah so uh that's the time with the coyote the more you learn about this animal, the more interesting they are.

30:20Tim Ferriss: Like as a predator that has been able to bob and weave and not just get through a mass annihilation by humans, but actually circumvent and thrive, it's wild.

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32:05Tim Ferriss: Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. Hi, I'm Adam Grant, host of the podcast Rethinking, a show where I talk to some of today's greatest thinkers about the unconventional ways they see the world. On Rethinking, you'll get surprising insights from scientists, leaders, artists, and more. People like Reese Witherspoon, Malcolm Gladwell, and Yo-Yo Ma. Hear lessons to help you find success at work, build better relationships, and more. Find Rethinking wherever you get your podcasts.

32:46Debbie Millman: The game emerged from, I believe, two years of collaboration with former Xbox game designer Elon Lee, who is now the co-creator and CEO of Exploding Kittens, a company with a mission to inspire people to connect, laugh, and play fun games in the physical world. Now, I believe you met Elon after you interviewed him for your podcast. I'm wondering, did you always have aspirations to create a game, or did the inclination take shape after the podcast interview?

33:18Tim Ferriss: The inclination was there beforehand.

33:21Debbie Millman: So tell us when that started heating up.

33:23Tim Ferriss: I very often will dip my toe in the water with the podcast or maybe a blog post. Maybe it's a late night post on social media through my laptop to just see, like, what do people think about this? How do I feel about this when I see how people engage with this? Which is not to say I'm letting the audience dictate what I do. that's that's i think it's very important to say that i i don't for fear of audience capture meaning your audience turning you into basically some caricature of things that they want which you will like you become the mask you wear that's dangerous but if there are three or four things i'm really excited about and let's just say i'm i'm more or less equally interested in all four then i'll start dipping my toe in the water maybe seeing how a small audience or a large audience respond to it or taking a test drive right maybe i have a weekend sprint i go on a long hike with a game designer and i'm like you know hypothetically if someone asking for a friend asking for a friend one game like what's step one and i grew up very very small i was born premature and i know you know some of this already but was really the skinny wimpy kid who would stay in for recess so he wouldn't get his ass kicked like you know i had this book the the world of fishes i still remember this hardcover and that was my that was one of my escapes so i wouldn't get bullied another one was dungeons dragons so i played dnd with a couple of other fellow nerds and this game just blew my mind like the fact that you know carrie guy x the tsr team and so on could sit down and build something like this was just it was unbelievable to me it's so sophisticated and comprehensive and i still have all of my modules and everything to this day they're actually sitting at home.

35:30Tim Ferriss: That game meant so much to me. It taught me teamwork. It gave me an escape from pain. It allowed me as a relatively socially inept nerd to nerd bond with other nerds, which is a start. By the way, resolve conflict also. Some pretty wild things can happen in D &D, especially if your dungeon master is a prick uh so i feel like there's some history rolling up well yeah i mean dungeon masters have a lot of power i'll just say and this is one of my friends he was a great dungeon master but if he was in a bad mood and he was pissy he could be spiteful and like do terrible things to other characters so that was such a formative experience that i've always been into games but there was a point probably when i transferred to that school right talk about trade-offs with the curse of the achiever as i was like okay time for me to do adult stuff and be serious time for me to be serious i can't do this kid stuff anymore and that was it that was the end of stuff like dnd and you know i played video games and stuff too when i was younger thankfully that was like spy hunter and not world of warcraft because i could have gone you know 60 hours a week with world of warcraft which i probably would have done in any case i would intermittently every few years picking up casual games because i'd be like you know what i take stuff too seriously sometimes i take myself too seriously i definitely take my work too seriously so i would notice that i'd be like okay i am really stressed out and in the grand global scheme of things like this is ridiculous let me play some games and i would always enjoy the games but I never quite found the game that stuck.

37:23Debbie Millman: What were you trying? What kind of things you tried?

37:25Tim Ferriss: I was trying basically any game that you, there were a few mistakes I made in the beginning. The first was not really accepting my constraints. What I mean by that is there are some amazing, say board games out there that take an hour and a half to learn. You have to play three or five times to start to get the hang and then you can begin to enjoy it. and i was as i am in a lot of things very ambitious i'd be like of course i'm going to do that and lo and behold never happened right because the setting is i have dinner i've had two glasses of wine not always but like two glasses of wine with a bunch of friends it's 9 p.m maybe you know we have an hour and a half there's no way i'm going to subject them to sitting down and dealing with instructions and a hobbled unfun attempt at a game there's no way uh and then there were other more casual games i mean some examples like contemporary examples would be i think it's one night werewolf and uh you know monopoly go i believe is another good example that are really fast easy to play all right so i started exploring more of the casual gaming side and then it wasn't until funny enough, one of your students who we just interacted with before we began recording was talking about what exploding kittens and poetry for Neanderthals.

38:47Tim Ferriss: And I found the game poetry for Neanderthals. And I was like, Oh my God, this is it. Like, this is the kind of game I want. And my friends wanted to play again and again and again and again. And that got me thinking about not just playing games but i was like you know i've been doing the podcast a long time been doing the writing a long time and every four or five years i let's just say roughly i i try a hard left turn somewhere i try a new thing and i was like you know i've always wanted to make a game who made this game exploding kittens okay what does that mean who runs exploding kittens and that's how i found elan lee looked at his background i was like okay this guy's done everything.

39:32Tim Ferriss: He's done video games, super big video games, Halo, et cetera. He's done interactive alternate reality or augmented reality games in the physical world. He's done, he creates the craziest spectrum of games. He can't stop also. And I'd say that as a compliment because like his day job is running a big company that makes games. And when he's not doing that, he's thinking about how to make other games, like just for fun. So I reached out and I was like, well, what's a good, you know, a good pretext for having a long conversation as a podcast. So let's try that. And then we really hit it off and became kind of thick as thieves quickly, which is, I'd say pretty unusual for me as an adult, fairly guarded, but we became close friends.

40:22Tim Ferriss: And I was like, okay, this momentum feels good. How can I force myself to have some degree of like accountability? What is it? Okay. It's the next conversation. And Alana had mentioned, he's like, yeah, like kind of in passing, if you've ever thought about making a game, like, yeah, that's definitely a chat. And I was like, you know what? I think I should have that chat. And that's, that's how it all kicked off. And that was, I guess about two years ago. but games for me are like the vitamin you know you should take but that you forget to take a lot and then you take it for like a month and you're like wow i feel better and then you take a trip you get busy you forget about it and then you have a little more anxiety a little more this a little more that and then when you start taking it again you feel better and i was like okay let me try to make this more of a constant and i think that's also become more and more important And it's not limited to gaming, but getting off of screens.

41:22Just getting off of the Internet writ large and technology for a whole lot of reasons.

41:31Tim Ferriss: I mean, eye health, mental health, physical health, and games are an easy way to do that.

41:40Debbie Millman: elon suggested that if you had an idea let him know how hard or easy or neither is it for you to ask for something when you were thinking oh i really want to make this happen were you comfortable to say to elon i have a game idea let's do this oh man i wish that's how it started

41:58Tim Ferriss: it took us forever to figure it out uh but in the spirit of your question i would say I am very comfortable asking for small things in a way that is very unattached to a yes, if that makes sense. Right. So in the case of Elan, he goes, Hey, remember that thing you said, if that's offer still stands, would you be open to hopping on the phone and just talking about what that might look like? Because I have a pretty big audience. I love games. I would want to be super, super, like, I'm very excited by the prospect, but would you be able to do like a 15 minute chat? Okay, cool. You start there. And I wasn't withholding in the sense that I was like hiding my cards and not showing them my agenda, but it's, it's, I want to make sure I also test this belief that as I want to make a game.

42:59Tim Ferriss: Is there a lot of things where you ask someone, they're like, yeah, if I had known a, B or C, I never would have done this.

43:03Debbie Millman: What was the hardest part to get right?

43:05Tim Ferriss: The hardest part to get right was, I'll tell you what's not hard. What's not hard is producing a mediocre fill in the blank, right? So producing a mediocre game, like a game that people will be like, yeah, it's kind of fun. That is challenging, but it's not super hard. That's true with a lot of things, right? I mean, I'm sure it's true in design. I'm sure it's definitely true in books. uh what's also not hard is if i were willing to which i've never been just to put my name on something and have someone else do all the work that's pretty easy to get going but what i knew is it's like okay i have to love this game and this is going to be the one and only game with my name on it so i better be excited to talk about this a lot and it's going to reward me or haunt me for a while so i really need to be incredibly confident and with that type of bar what was hard was arriving at the concept and then figuring out game mechanics so like name theme artwork design i mean i was involved in all of that the copy on the box like the design of the but the lifeblood of it is and look guys if if any professional game designers who've done dozens of games are listening i am a beginner right i'm a i'm a i'm a low blue belt in game design but you got to figure out the mechanics right and there are many different ways to approach games but for a casual game like this and i should say also the ethos of exploding kids which i like a lot is that they don't make entertaining games.

44:54Tim Ferriss: They make games that make the players entertaining. And if you sit with that for a second, it's a really profound and important focusing maxim, right? We do not make entertaining games. We make games that make the players entertaining to one another. And with that also as a non-negotiable criteria, I was like, okay, how are we going to do this? And Alana and I are both very busy. We've got a lot going on. And we did a bunch of jam sessions, like two or three day jam sessions in New York City, on Long Island, in Utah, in LA, all over the place. And then finally did one in Canada. And I was like, okay, we're not figuring this out.

45:41Tim Ferriss: Right. We tried a million different games, looked at some that were early prototypes. We looked at, well, like maybe there's the possibility of doing a variant where there's like the Tim rules of poetry for Neanderthals, right? And then there's like do it from scratch, which is the hardest option in a sense. And I really want to do it from scratch because I want to be involved in every step. So we decided that, all right, this particular sprint in Canada is going to be the make it or break it. like we've kind of been trying it but like let's do it 100 out of 100 for the this period and if we can't figure it out let's just call it like we're not actually that serious about making game or we can't figure it out so and it was on that particular trip and he brought in one of his game mechanic experts named ken who's who's a wizard and we just went for long walks drinking lots of coffee and it was on one of those long walks it was very hot i remember i was getting sunburned and we started expanding not what board games do i like or have i liked but like what games in general and i was like well you know it's gonna sound stupid but i think rock paper scissors is pretty amazing game if you get into a rhythm and you have the right group of friends what if you could do that as a group but make it more interesting that's how it started and you can imagine because you've played the game it's like okay it's like it's pretty yeah i could see like it rhymes with relation yeah like it rhymes with that okay all right and then i would say that was the hardest part was and this is true so many things it's like making the decision on a direction for me that's so often the hardest part it's like making the decision and then once you're committed you're like all right i'm walking through this particular door then instead of considering everything and anything you get this very productive set of blinders it's like okay like we walked through this door and here are our positive constraints now right it's going to be a deck of cards all right do we want a bunch of other stuff okay well you have to think about not just the playing but playing in multiple languages if you're going to do it internationally cost of goods all that stuff matters too so it's like okay how do you it i mean it's so for my brain it was just like getting a candy store to play with all this stuff but once you step through that door with like okay here is the fundamental concept and here are a few constraints then oh man then it's fast it's kind of like i should write a book and then you're like okay i should write a book no longer than 150 pages about this very specific subject okay now i can start writing.

48:27Debbie Millman: And that's interesting. I was going to ask you how did you approach creating Coyote in the way that you might write a book or produce a show?

48:36Tim Ferriss: I approached it in some respects very similarly. The big difference, I would say, is that the possibility scape for games was much more confusing to me.

48:48Debbie Millman: Why?

48:49Tim Ferriss: Because there are so many different types of games. So did I want it to be some competitive type of collectible card game right along the lines of magic the gathering where people are building decks did i want it to be something because i tried this early on before i met a lot i was like okay i'm gonna make a dnd like game which is so complicated it's not it's not impossible but it's very very very very involved i was also at that time started listening to a podcast called how to think like a game designer by justin gary which is great and so I would just, anytime I went for a walk, anytime I was in the bathtub, anytime I was washing the dishes, I would listen to this podcast.

49:29Tim Ferriss: And you realize that making a game is like choosing a sport at the Olympics. Like curling is not exactly the same as high hurdles. Not that one's better or worse. And like biathlon, yeah, biathlon is very different from long jump on skis or pick the example. They're so fundamentally different. And the people who sell them are different, like the shops, the people who buy them are different. It's all different. So figuring out where to focus within that giant menu of options was very hard for me. Whereas within books, it's like, look, maybe I could write a great, you know, magic surrealism novel, but boy, oh boy, that's going to be a risk.

50:18Tim Ferriss: Like it's probably going to be prescriptive nonfiction after I do a bunch of experiments on myself meeting experts. Like that's kind of what I do. So I start with a pretty good idea of the set menu. But with the game, it was really quite challenging. I would say the similarities that I'm looking at, like, what am I good at? What do I have access to? Sort of like Robert Rodriguez, the filmmaker, when he made his first film, El Mariachi, for like, I don't know what it was,$6 ,000 or something. he basically figured out what he had access to he's like all right my friend has an old school bus this guy has a tortoise this guy has a pit bull he's like all right now i'm going to write the script including all of these things that i have access to and then it's going to look like

51:01Debbie Millman: it cost a lot more right it's like one of those food shows where you get five yeah iron chef yeah

51:06Tim Ferriss: exactly so i think for me i did also think about that with this game and most importantly the question was what is going to give me energy time is important yes tension is also important because that kind of dictates the value of your time in a sense but you need energy and as one gets older you realize man oh man that that battery is critically important so like who i might work with the type of game i might make what might be entailed in making that and then promoting it all of those things had to be something that would not be overly draining but ideally recharging in some way and i will tell you boy this is true with so many things but when you get from like simply like overly simplistic to complicated to then on the other side kind of hopefully some type of elegant simplicity when you have gone through that process yourself you look at things very differently afterwards so if i go to the toy aisle in a store now And I see these games that have been successful for years, and they're really easy to learn, hard to master.

52:15Tim Ferriss: People like to play them a lot. It's like, OMG, do I have much more appreciation for how much work goes into that. It's a tremendous amount of work.

52:25Debbie Millman: Yeah, one of my favorite card table games is Milbourne. I don't know if you know that game. Oh, you would love it. It's a car race game. Okay. And that's just my little gift to you today. i'll write it down was there ever a moment in the process where you thought this just might not work oh yeah there were many points where i was like i don't know it's like until the game clicks

52:51Tim Ferriss: it doesn't click i mean to state the obvious and um what is nice about i'll just give an example of another reason why i want to do a game that's i mean it's like i can hold the game basically in my palm, right? It's a deck of cards with a small box around it. When we came back from that over-caffeinated walk in Canada, we went back to Alain's kitchen table and had blank index cards with markers, colored markers of different types, and just started mocking up cards. And so within, let's call it 20 minutes, we had a V1 deck of cards. And then we tried it, we're like oh like this is kind of interesting this definitely didn't work at all it's too slow in this way okay well like let's make another 30 cards and then you try it again and then you try it again and then you try to get things you're just you're just using hundreds of these blank cards to iterate but you can do it really quickly over the span of hours so i would say there was the question of game mechanics what does it mean to win right how does one what does it done mean how do you complete the game how do you design a game so that it takes 10 minutes and not 40 minutes how many cards should you have in a deck these are all surprisingly big questions then there are other points where it's like all right you're developing the game are you ever going to land on a name that was one where i was like oh man like if and even if i land on a name i like am i going to be able to convince everybody else to be interested and commit to that name there are definitely a bunch of kind of disagree and commit moments where it's like, okay, I know we disagree on this, but we got to keep moving.

54:34Tim Ferriss: So can we do X? But I would say that the greatest amount of doubt was when there was not yet a concept that had a kernel of something that worked. So it was, it was everything leading up to, I mean, it was, it's got to be at least nine months of doing these sprints and just coming up with nothing that felt good. And I was like, okay.

54:56Debbie Millman: So that you just kept pushing and had faith that you'd get there or?

55:01Tim Ferriss: I think there was faith, but I mean, this is going to make me sound terrible. I'm like, really, I'm thinking how to wordcraft this, but I don't think faith is my strong suit. I don't think like, oh yeah, everything's going to be totally peachy keen in the end. Don't worry about it is my default. I run pretty hypervigilant and just effectively I'm like prepare for the worst, hope for the best, but mostly prepare for the worst. And then have a safety net. We share that. Yeah, put on your eight-point harness. But when I had that podcast with Alon and I was like, oh, wow, this guy's really cool. This is somebody I could really be friends with.

55:43Tim Ferriss: I tend to choose projects these days based on number one is developing new skills, learning a lot. Number two is developing or deepening relationships, both of which should transcend any given project. For instance, if I were to write another book much along the same lines of a prior book, maybe not going to learn a lot. I mean, the subject matter will be different, so sure. Am I going to develop new relationships? Maybe. But I have the podcast for that also. whereas in the game world it's like okay i'm going to learn an entirely new skill set i'm going to learn about human interaction i'm going to learn about big retail i'm going to like big big retail like walmart and target and amazon and so so on well beyond the scope of book retail and alan is awesome his team is fantastic i mean i could go through a long list of names i don't do that right now but his whole team has just been awesome to deal with and i'm like okay these are good people we were able to craft a deal that felt good and made sense that's also non-trivial that's a very important thing right like make sure you know sort of you know when to hold them when to fold them when to walk away when to run right so like the making sure you have for me at least graceful exit options for ideally all sides is really important right which is where i I think maybe my hypervigilance is helpful or it can sometimes not be helpful.

57:16Tim Ferriss: But in that case, I do think it's helpful. So all of that meant I went into this and I was like, even if these sprints where we're trying to figure out a game do not result in a game. I'm spending time with Alon Lee, who I consider genius and is just such a great human being. I'm having fun with these games. it's giving me an opportunity to invite people over to play games with me and they get to experience what it's like to play test stuff so i don't regret a minute of any of those sessions even if they ended in no game but yes there was definitely a point hence the all right we're going to do this final sprint let's go or no go where i was like i don't think we're going to do it.

58:01Tim Ferriss: Like, maybe this is a Tim problem. Like, I'm usually, I feel like I'm usually good at coming up with lots and lots of ideas, but it's not happening right now. And then on that walk, it did happen. I just, quite coincidentally, I've been reading a lot of Daniel Kuhneman lately.

58:21Debbie Millman: and so I've been going into deep, deep wormholes of game theory and so forth, but not game theory about games. I think a lot of people think that game theory is about literal Scrabble, Wordle, etc., but it's really about psychology and choice-making and decisions and so forth. And so it was very serendipitous that I started to talk to you about this. On the surface, Coyote is a card game. But like most things you create, there's something deeper humming underneath. This isn't just a game about rhythm or memory. It's a symphony in a lot of ways, because there's a lot of things happening at once.

59:09Debbie Millman: There's rhythm, there's speaking, there's psychology, there's presence, there's permission. There's a lot of things happening at the same time. This is a game where you are fully immersed. You can't look at your phone. You can't text somebody. You can't have a snack. You're just immersed in the game. And depending on how many people you're playing, you're all in this together. And you have to pay attention to each other. It's a very focused game. So I want to dig into the psychology a little bit about how you approached making this in this way. The game seems designed to push people, and maybe it was just me because I have a sort of very fixed comfort zone, but the game seems designed to push people just out of their comfort zones.

1:00:02Debbie Millman: Would you agree with that?

1:00:05Tim Ferriss: it is and what is fun about that is that the players are in charge of how hard they make the

1:00:12Debbie Millman: game right you have a cooperative version and then you have a competitive version and the players

1:00:17Tim Ferriss: themselves can pull the levers on how easy or hard they want the game to be and let me if it's okay with you i'll just let me just paint a picture for folks yeah please what is this what the hell is this game? So I can explain it really quickly. Coyote is a game that involves putting out a sequence of cards in front of you like you would see in a poker game. And let's say you're playing with three or four players. Okay. In the case of three players, you'd turn over six of these cards and you'd put out these action cards first. And the action cards have an action you need to perform, a physical action, and a thing you need to say.

1:00:52So an easy one might be ballet and you do a little

1:00:58Tim Ferriss: fingertips on the top of the head like you're doing a pirouette okay or a mustache yeah or a mustache and you put your finger under your nose exactly and there are lots of other goofy ones that tend to get a laugh like making a fart noise and having to lean to the side i mean there there's tons of stuff and there are a bunch that we had had to remove because i have a quirky sense of humor and the big retailers didn't always agree with my sense of humor so a bunch had to safe for work yeah there's there are some not safe for work that got yanked so well i'll probably make those available at some point but the point is let's just say you have ballet mustache and then a couple of other things in the simplest example of the game you all hit the table with your hands like boom boom so if you think of the we will we will rock you like boom boom boom boom so you go boom boom ballet and you make the movement that'd be one player and then it goes to the next player and it's boom boom right mustache boom boom whatever it is boom boom whatever it is okay you finished the four cards congratulations now each person takes out a new card or they they take like three cards from the deck and they choose one to play in addition to the action cards which are the types of like a physical movement plus a thing you have to say at the same time you have coyote cards which mix things up so you could you could and the cards are all colored differently green purple whatever so you might have a card that you play and it says players must whisper every green so instead of saying it in your normal voice it's boom boom boom boom mustache right and so on and so forth or and then there's somewhere a card will come up

1:02:39Debbie Millman: and it'll say just tap once when it's a green card yeah and that really oh that that that It messed me up because I was so kind of paying attention rhythmically. And then it's also before and after.

1:02:52Tim Ferriss: Changing. Yeah, that's a very hard card. So they're also noted for difficulty. That's definitely a three out of three hard. And so in the cooperative version, you're trying to get a certain number of cards on the table and then you win as a team. In the competitive version, you can also sabotage people with attack cards. And the reason that's important is that in early playtesting. uh all right well let me let me share a story from my life uh i have a family member i'm not going to mention who they are they're very good at chess they love playing chess because they like beating people at chess and i'm decent at chess i'm not great but i was playing with them and about i don't know four moves in i was like oh i'm screwed i'm dead and so and so i said to him or four or five moves i was like oh oh yeah i'm totally dead and x number of moves and so i said to him i was like yeah i'm done and he's like no no no we have to finish i'm like i don't want to like euthanize myself slowly it's like i see that you're gonna win and that's the risk of a game that is sort of complete information for everybody right whereas if you're playing like backgammon there's an element of chance where even someone inexperienced might end up doing really well and with very early versions of coyote what i noticed there was one guy who played with one of my employees who was playtesting an early deck and this guy was a computer programmer mathematician and he just killed everybody right like nobody could beat him like he he was just so good at this game it stopped being fun because like he he won every single time i was like okay well So how do you work around that?

1:04:27Tim Ferriss: Well, you could have cards that when everybody sees like, oh, John's going to smoke us. Okay, well, we need to gang up on John. So now we can play these attack cards where it's like, okay, now John has to do everything. He has to say everything with his lips curled over his teeth.

1:04:43Debbie Millman: Ah, so it has a little bit of survivor in there.

1:04:46Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. And what that allows is somebody who might not be as good naturally at the game to compete with someone who is very, very, very naturally good.

1:04:59Debbie Millman: So the competitive still has some of the collaborative aspect of it.

1:05:05Tim Ferriss: It does. Part of what makes it fun is, yeah, you can have these temporary alliances, but ultimately there's only one winner. In the competitive, it's the last person standing. You each get three lives and that's it. And if you mess up, if you say the wrong thing, if you don't whisper when you're supposed to whisper, if you tap twice instead of once or whatever the rules are. And the game starts very, very, very easy. And then it abruptly gets quite difficult.

1:05:32Debbie Millman: Yeah, it does.

1:05:33Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So, but you mentioned Kahneman, and I don't know if I've ever mentioned this to you. I, to make ends meet when I was an undergrad, volunteered as a test subject in a bunch of his studies. And now, by association, that sounds awesome, right? I mean, this is super genius, Nobel Prize laureate, amazing. In practice, what that meant is I was sitting in front of one of those really old computer terminals, like black screen, green font type thing. Yeah, I would sit there for hours and it would basically have instructions along the lines of, if you see a blue square in the upper right-hand corner, hit the space bar.

1:06:10Tim Ferriss: If you see this, hit the up arrow. And just sit there and stare at a screen for hours on end. But these were various types of attentional studies.

1:06:19Debbie Millman: Did you learn anything about yourself?

1:06:20Tim Ferriss: I learned that it wasn't worth $6 an hour to me to do that. So I found other jobs.

1:06:26Debbie Millman: Did you ever work with him directly?

1:06:28Tim Ferriss: No, no, I didn't. He was the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain in the tower. I mean, I've heard only wonderful things about him. I mean, he's since passed, but what a brilliant man.

1:06:41Debbie Millman: What do you think the sabotage aspect of the game reveals about our relationship to control or to rhythm or to failure?

1:06:55Tim Ferriss: Well, I think that—let me say a few things. So the first is that part of what I find really fun about a game like Coyote is particularly Coyote because you're dealing with what is at least one piece of it, what is called interference effect.

1:07:16Debbie Millman: What is that?

1:07:16Tim Ferriss: In neuroscience. So you might have – so people may have seen something like the Stroop test, for instance, which is one of the things I'm very, very, very good at. And then for like digit recall, I'm terrible, which might surprise people. And by digit recall, I mean like four and five number of strings, not very much. But the Stroop test is where you have to, I'm going to get this probably a little bit off, but it's something like this where you have to indicate the color of the phrase that pops up on the screen. But you might have red in red color, in which case that's easy.

1:07:52Debbie Millman: Right.

1:07:52Tim Ferriss: Right. But then you might have red come up in blue font and so on and so forth. So the Stroop is presenting you with interference between the stated color in the text and the color of the text. And there's more to it. But being able to very quickly hone in on the element that matters while ignoring this completely opposite direction to your brain is interference or contending with interference. And there are many different ways you can look at this. I think there's something called the Wisconsin card sorting test. So we were chatting about this a little bit earlier, but part of my hope is that this can actually be used as a cognitive training tool, which is not proven at all.

1:08:34Tim Ferriss: But I'm talking to some scientists about maybe doing a study. The reason I mention all that is that people fail in different ways. So, for instance, I remember doing playtesting with six or seven people. It works with three people, but the more the merrier, for sure. It ends up being very fast also when you have more players. but some people cannot for instance if there's a card that modifies and says okay now instead of going boom boom card boom boom card now it's boom boom boom card boom boom boom card you have to do three times there's some people who just cannot do that like the replacing two beats with one or three they cannot do it and then there are other folks and i happen to be one of these players where if there's a coyote card that that makes every player play a certain card so what that means is for me and for most people as they're watching the game go around the table you can keep track of whose turn it is but if you play a coyote card over let's say ballet and then everybody goes boom boom and everyone does the ballet sign and says ballet it basically resets oftentimes you're not going to know whose turn it is.

1:09:52Tim Ferriss: And that's when you make a mistake.

1:09:54Debbie Millman: Yeah, you're just explaining every single thing that I did. First of all, I loved playing it. Roxanne, my wife, was particularly good at it. Yeah. As you can well expect, she has that focus. And then I was playing with my niece and her girlfriend, and they were also good at it. I was not good at it. But I had a lot of fun. But I do have to tell you that even if you're not playing the competitive set or the competitive way, it still gets competitive.

1:10:27Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it still gets competitive.

1:10:29Debbie Millman: We were playing cooperatively, but then I got really competitive. But then the more competitive I got, the worse I was doing. And so I was the first one out, even though we kept playing. Like, technically, I was the first one out because you get three outs, you're out. But my family let me keep playing and ultimately ended up with, I think, four or five outs.

1:10:46Tim Ferriss: Yeah, house rules are the way to go. I would say the most entertaining people to watch lose are the people who are really good at it when they get sabotaged. Because they are expecting to win and then they don't. So that's pretty entertaining. I would say that...

1:11:02Debbie Millman: That's the case with everything, though. I mean, that's what I like about this whole conversation and about this whole idea of game theory is that this is a microchasm of how we engage in the world.

1:11:13Tim Ferriss: Oh, sure. Or how do adults respond when kids beat them handily? Because this is also designed, it says age 10 and up. I don't think anyone's going to get upset for me saying this, but it's like you can modify the rules. We encourage, like I encourage house rules. Like modify. Like you are in charge of how hard or easy it is. And like I got a, my son's daughter wanted to send me like a video with her feedback about the game. And she's four. Right. They had to modify it. It was more of a like Simon Says kind of thing. But you can find certainly like eight year olds who will smoke most adults. And so seeing how adults who think they're really composed and even killed respond, like if they lose once, they're like, ha ha ha.

1:12:02Tim Ferriss: Good job. Like if they get smoked three times in a row.

1:12:04Debbie Millman: That says something about who you are. So were you thinking about cognitive overload in a deliberate way? I mean, you said you were talking to cognitive scientists. Are you measuring that? Is there a limit?

1:12:19Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I haven't done all too much in terms of measurement yet because I want to – I'll say a few things. The first is forward-looking. So forward-looking, the study design would determine how to measure. What are we actually measuring? because i suppose we we might use a term broadly like attention but there are actually many fine slice types of attention and i need someone who's far more sophisticated than i to help figure out exactly what we're going to measure uh and it could have a null effect right maybe it doesn't do anything it certainly helps you sleep i will tell you that if you have an active mind and you play this a couple games you are going to be wiped out great for sleep uh so i can say that but i would say as it relates to the origin story i do think that as we become more and more dependent on digital tools naturally we have abilities at atrophy example given google maps right and i would like to preserve and cultivate and train my mind in the same way that i train my body but there are most of the tools that are sold for that purpose are pseudoscience at best this i don't know if it does anything in terms of adaptation but i do know that it is very very like cognitively challenging i did like the idea of developing something that seemed to hit for instance there's a coyote card this trickster card that you put above one of the cards and the card gets flipped face down so now you have to remember what that card was so i wanted to incorporate as many different types of sort of cognitive training that as a lay person look i did some neuroscience as an undergrad but i'm not a neuroscientist i wanted to incorporate as much as possible so that hopefully and who knows this is still tbd but while people are having fun there's this kind of trojan horse of also brain health like who knows right i mean but i have neurodegenerative disease on both sides of my family i take that stuff really seriously and just to give people a little scooby snack i would say there's there's a protein called clotho that's naturally produced k-l-o-t-h-o discovered by a japanese researcher it is produced by the body you can increase production through exercise so do not skip the physical exercise for brain health specifically But in addition to that, I was like, well, if I can make something that feels like I just did a little bit of cross training for the brain, like fantastic.

1:15:02Tim Ferriss: TBD if it actually does anything.

1:15:03Debbie Millman: If someone plays coyote really well, what do you think that says about them? Is it about memory, presence, mischief?

1:15:12Tim Ferriss: Whether it's coyote or anything else, on some level, this is cliched. But I do think if you're really trying to pay attention and you can overread things, but how people do anything can tell you a lot about the person. Right. I often think that about driving.

1:15:27Debbie Millman: Oh, yes.

1:15:28Tim Ferriss: Like if you watch somebody driving. Anger management. You can learn a lot. Yeah. Right. And if you talk to them about finances, I think you can learn a lot about someone's psychology just by how they, what their beliefs are and how they think about money. What they're afraid of. What are their stories that they tell themselves about it? so in a game like this i mean there are going to be some people who just want to make they're kind of the i mean they're sort of the the arc coyote of the group and they just want to make it as hard as possible they're like lf go let's do this you know and they just like to stir the pot so i would imagine that says something about that personality type then i would say there are some folks who seem very good at multitasking like visual input and physical behavior so i would imagine for instance that musicians some musicians would be quite good at this oh yeah drummers yeah for sure yeah i would imagine they would be quite good at doing this bass players yeah what's going to mess

1:16:26Debbie Millman: them up is going to be the verbal part yeah it's true i mean you anybody can have like a lead gene in terms of their senses that combines a whole bunch of them and the the other piece of this

1:16:39Tim Ferriss: that i have not seen done before i'm sure that somebody else has done it but i couldn't find an example is the deck and i felt really strong about this the deck comes with 10 blank cards because i want everybody to design their own cards as they play i can't wait to see what people make to become a game designer yeah it's within the framework of the game it's surprisingly easy like if you play five games you're ready to make your own cards you can create stuff that is as not suitable for work as you like because this is this is your home deck you can kind of do with it whatever you want and people come up with some hilarious stuff just doing play testing and seeing what people have thrown in there so it's been a real journey and part of my hope in doing this because it's so out of left field is just to offer to people that that type of left turn is available to more people than you might think.

1:17:39Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And there are always going to be trade-offs, always going to be costs, but there are always costs with everything, including inaction, including continuing on your current journey.

1:17:47Debbie Millman: Including regret.

1:17:48Tim Ferriss: Yeah, including regret. Maybe it's just a story I tell myself, but my feeling is if you choose based on the learning potential, the density of learning, and the relationships that will transcend any given project, it's very hard to lose over time it's very hard to lose and it's just more fun

1:18:10Debbie Millman: designing a game seems like a joyful act but also an incredibly intentional one and i know that intention is something that runs through everything that you do i'm curious what does a game like coyote say about where you are now creatively and personally i would say for sure it says

1:18:34Tim Ferriss: that I am in a place where I want to double down and really invest on social connection versus isolation for sure. Books are pretty, or at least for me, a very solitary experience. And I've had enough of that, I think for a while, you know, a few decades of mostly working by myself. I hit pause on it for right now. I mean, I have an 800 page draft and I'm just like, oh God, 800 page draft. That's so much rewriting and reworking. So I hit pause. I got a lot of raw material, but it's like, I know how to do the solitary thing. I'm not, I can do it. That does. And I'm good at it, but that doesn't mean I should do it.

1:19:14Tim Ferriss: And my tendency when I am feeling stressed is to isolate, suffer in silence, figure it out. I think that stratagem has outlived its usefulness for me. So the game, whether i like it or not to offset my conditioned impulse to isolate i have to work with people to make a good game to play any game you you unless you're playing solitaire or something you're playing with other people i also spend too much time sitting right in front of computers so creatively it's like i want to find outlets that allow me to hopefully do something other than peck at a keyboard do things that are visual crack my knuckles and get out some procreate or some pens and actually do some sketching right um which which was a really fun part of of this game as well and where i am creatively i would say is also taking more risks that are outside of the categories that i might be comfortable with which i have some history of doing in the sense that I went from the book stuff to angel investing and then after that to podcasting.

1:20:33Tim Ferriss: But if you look at those, each one of those shifts in some way was informed by like an ultra meltdown, like just a burnout situation. And so I found myself in the, I suppose, very luckily fortunate position, but very confusing position for me, unpracticed position of saying to myself, I want a new chapter. I'm not burned out. So I'm not forced to do it. It's not pushing me in a certain direction in the way that podcasting was kind of served to me on a silver platter. Because when I launched the four hour chef, which was just, just about killed me when I launched it, I did a lot of podcasts in 2012.

1:21:15Tim Ferriss: And I was like, Oh, this is fun. Maybe I should try this and that's how that started but when i was considering all the different options games being one of them i didn't have that feeling of kind of the burnout gun against the head so it was harder it was harder it didn't feel like a necessity so it was actually psychologically much harder for me to do it because the podcast is doing well like the other things are doing well Like, it's not like I hit some big stumbling block.

1:21:45Debbie Millman: But you have changed the way in which you do certain things. You just talked about pulling back on doing the book, at least for now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You took a little bit of a sabbatical from the podcast.

1:21:57Tim Ferriss: I did, yeah.

1:21:58Debbie Millman: You came back with a new set of criteria about how you were going to be doing the podcast.

1:22:03Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the new rules for the podcast, for sure.

1:22:05Debbie Millman: And now you have a whole new chapter.

1:22:08Tim Ferriss: That's true. That is true. So, yeah, I suppose I should. I never really. I'm not very good at patting myself on the back, as you know. But if I hadn't done the new rules, if I hadn't taken the sabbatical, if I hadn't made the new rules for the podcast, which were intended just to make the podcast as fun as possible for me, economic consequences be damned. because a lot of those rules did hurt in terms of I'm not chasing the crazy over a moment thumbnails with clickbaity headlines and big red arrows.

1:22:42Debbie Millman: But the podcasts are more heartfelt, more sincere.

1:22:45Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very heartfelt.

1:22:45Debbie Millman: They weren't before, but they just feel more soulful.

1:22:48Tim Ferriss: I feel very good about it. And what did it do? The new rules gave me energy that I could then apply where to this game. The new rules for the podcast enabled me to be more creative with guest selection and creativity. Again, I'm not coming up with this quote, but creativity, it's like courage. The more you use it, the more you have. I feel like the little sabbatical I had after the 10th anniversary of the podcast and then the new rules gave me a reservoir for energy upon which this game depended. I don't think it would have happened otherwise.

1:23:27Debbie Millman: And also, you might not even be aware of this, but it does inspire other people to rethink how they're doing things. This is my 20th year. And because you did that with your sabbatical, I've been thinking about a way for me to keep doing the show, but doing it in a way that also gives me a little bit of time to rethink. So watch this space. I have two last questions for you. Second to last. What does ambition mean to you now?

1:23:59Tim Ferriss: You know, I'll say as a preface to buy myself time. I mean, ambition used to be the hallmark of an enviable life and a righteous path. I don't relate to it that way anymore. I think ambition is a jet fuel. Not everyone needs to be on a jet, but if you're going to be on a jet, you better make sure it's pointed in the right direction.

1:24:16Debbie Millman: And that you have a parachute.

1:24:18Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Make sure you have some means and option, ideally, of a graceful exit if you're going to decide to go after. But at the same time, it's like, look, the game, Coyote right now, it was exclusive at Walmart. By the time this comes out, it's going to be everywhere. Target, Amazon, International. It has 180 million plus social video views of gameplay alone, which is nuts. So it's going, it's doing incredibly well. And I do want, I'm competitive and I like the excitement of this happening after two years of kind of being in the cave, right? And doing the playtesting and working with the Exploding Kittens team.

1:25:03Tim Ferriss: i suppose you could say i'm ambitious about this game but it's it's also a very focused ambition that is not a personality trait it's more like i mentioned that fuel that i am adding to this particular project and there is in a sense an expiration date what i mean by that is like i commit to go all guns blazing for x period of time and that's it and if it's going to hit escape velocity, it will. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. But I think open-ended ambition that is not very focused can be incredibly corrosive. So I would say that's probably how I relate to it. It's tricky. Ambition is a tricky thing.

1:25:50Debbie Millman: It is. Slippery slope.

1:25:52Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It's like making a deal with a genie or something, right? It's like you really got to mind your P's and Q's.

1:25:59Debbie Millman: So my last question is one that I'm actually borrowing from Roxanne. It's a signature question she asks at the end of every interview. And I really thought, you know what? This is such a wonderful question for me to ask him. I think he's going to love the question and I think I'm going to love hearing his answer. And so the question is, what do you love most about what you do?

1:26:22Tim Ferriss: Oh, that is a good question. Being inspired and learning from people who are passionate about what they do. honestly it's broader than that like passionate about life right? just having the chance to interact with people, this is not a very scientific term, but who have a high degree of stoke about something anything cynicism and nihilism are not always enlightened I imagine like a French woman with a cigarette who's like, life is shit you know and I just I feel like the internet is mostly turned into that there's a place for letting off steam and there are a lot of problems in the world but while being cognizant of that and certainly being aware of what you can affect and what you can't affect right cue serenity prayer i think that you i'll personalize it i really benefit from focusing on the sources of light i really really need it as much as i need water as much as I need sleep.

1:27:30Tim Ferriss: Like I need those sources of light because we've talked about this, but like I can, I can default to dark. Like I tend to think like human nature is pretty dark and especially right now. Yeah. I mean, just read any history too. It's like, look, it's this whole human business is pretty rough. So when you find somebody who works at cultivating that light in themselves and shares it with other people. Like Lonely is a great example. Man, like value that. For me, like value that. Spend time around that. Learn from it. So I would say that's what I love most about what I do.

1:28:14Debbie Millman: Tim Ferriss, thank you so much for bringing both rigor and mischief into the world. And for making so much work that matters. And once again, thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

1:28:27Tim Ferriss: I love it, Debbie. Thank you so much.

1:28:30Debbie Millman: You can find Tim Ferriss' brand new game, Coyote, at ExplodingKittens.com and wherever games are sold. And of course, The Tim Ferriss Show remains one of the most thoughtful, wide-ranging, enlightening podcasts out there. You can find that wherever you love your podcasts. This is the 20th year we've been broadcasting Design Matters, and I'd like to thank you for listening. and remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I'm Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon. Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective

1:29:07Tim Ferriss: by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

1:29:53Tim Ferriss: We'll see you next time. one dot com slash bank capital one na member fdic