Episode 1
Taco Cats & Chicken Butts: a Business Plan — How Exploding Kittens Remade Gaming
This Dumb Card Game Outsold Monopoly (And Made Shy People Yell “BUTTS!”)
What do you get when you mix a lasagna wizard, a screaming cat, and a burrito you’re legally required to throw at your cousin? You get Exploding Kittens — a card game so dumb it became one of the most successful indie games in history.
In this episode of Dumbify, David Carson dives into the dumb-fueled brain of Elan Lee, the game designer who turned nonsense into a multimillion-dollar game empire. With help from comic legend Matthew Inman (a.k.a. The Oatmeal), Elan didn’t just make a funny game — he rewired game night itself.
You’ll hear how they turned a sandwich bag full of scribbled index cards into $8.7 million on Kickstarter, why Elan believes the people should be the entertainment (not the board), and how this philosophy birthed everything from Throw Throw Burrito to Hurry Up Chicken Butt.
More importantly, you’ll learn the secret behind all great dumb ideas: stop trying to be impressive, and start creating spaces where other people can shine.
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Dumbify celebrates ideas so weird, wrong, or wildly impractical… they just might be brilliant. Hosted by David Carson, a serial entrepreneur behind multiple hundred-million-dollar companies and the go-to secret weapon for companies looking to unlock new markets through unconventional thinking. Dumbify dives into the messy, counter-intuitive side of creativity — the “dumb” ideas that built empires, broke rules, and ended up changing everything.
Transcript
[instrumental music plays] I once screamed, "I'm a lasagna wizard," at my in-laws. Not because I lost a bet or joined a cult, but because of a burrito, kind of. Hi, I'm David Carson, your head coach and cheerleader of dumb ideas. And today's episode is about one of the dumbest and most profitable ideas ever launched by a man with a cat obsession and access to industrial printing.
::Who knew that a game about kittens exploding, not literally exploding, could outsell Monopoly, spawn a burrito-based dodgeball empire, and make awkward people dangerously entertaining? Elon Lee didn't just design a hit game, he completely rewired game night. Welcome to the weird, playful universe of Elon Lee. Welcome to Dumbify.
::Dumbify let your neurons dance. Put your brain in a backwards pants. Genius lies and dumb disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes. So honk your nose and chase that spark. Smart is just dumb in the dark. Dumbify, yelling loud like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with juice.
::So yeah, Elon Lee is not your typical game designer. While most game creators are off crafting fantasy worlds, mapping lore, or obsessing over hit points, Elon's staring across the table at your Aunt Janet, wondering how to make her say something super inappropriate about a taco. That's his zone. He doesn't build worlds, he builds dinner parties. And not elegant, candlelit ones. The kind where someone knocks over a chair, accuses a toddler of cheating, and everyone ends up shouting, "Butts!" in unison. That was the genius behind Exploding Kittens [explosion]. A game so dumb it has no strategy, no learning curve, and no real purpose, except to make shy people loud, awkward people magnetic, and family game night feel like a low-budget improv show starring your friends or your weird Uncle Gary.
::Hey!
::Since launching Exploding Kittens in 2015 with The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman, Elon has gone on to create Throw Throw... Burrito!, You've Got Crabs!!, and yes, an app where a cat screams at you every hour on the hour. But his games aren't built to entertain you. They're designed to let you be the entertainment. Because Elon doesn't believe the fun lives in the game. He believes the fun lives in the people, and the game just lets it out. And maybe that belief comes from where he started. Elon Lee began in the land of big games, Xbox, Halo, alternate reality games with sprawling storylines and world-building so elaborate it required a Ph.D. in Reddit to keep up. Games with cut scenes longer than your relationships. Games that were brilliant, but exhausting. And somewhere in all of that genius and grandeur, Elon had a profoundly dumb thought. A thought so simple it sounded like a joke. What if the game didn't have to be fun, but the people did? Well, that would change how you go about creating a game. It would break pretty much every rule in the game designer's handbook.
::If you wanna understand how Elon Lee changed game design, you first have to understand how game design usually works. Because there is a playbook, and it's full of what sound like very reasonable, very grownup ideas. Things like, games should reward strategy. They should offer depth, replayability, clear goals, meaningful decisions with clear win conditions. The perfect game, according to that world, is one that feels like a well-oiled machine, where the smartest or best player wins, and everyone agrees it was a tight, well-balanced match. But Elon looked at all of that and saw something missing. He saw people sitting at tables playing technically excellent games and not laughing, not engaging, just calculating. And so somewhere along the way, he had a thought that most game designers would probably describe as heresy. He didn't want people to win a game. He wanted them to become the game. So he stopped designing for winners and started designing for weirdos. So he made the rules dumber, simpler, easier to pick up. And since he didn't want smart or clever players, he optimized for loud ones, nervous ones, players who would say, "I don't usually play games," and then accidentally become the most entertaining person in the room.
::That was his goal.
::Now look, I know what some of you are thinking. What about Cards Against Humanity?
::What about Cards Against Humanity? [instrumental music plays]
::What about Cards Against Humanity? humanity, humanity...
::Isn't that also a dumb, chaotic party game that makes your friends accidentally hilarious?
::Totally do. Do, do, do, do, do. Yes!
::Cards Against Humanity blew open the category. It gave permission for games to be socially reckless in all the right ways. It deserves every bit of its cultural icon status. And if I'm honest, I love Cards Against Humanity. It's probably my favorite game of all time. But here's the difference. That game was a one-off, one game, one box, one idea, expanded and repackaged and memified, but never fundamentally evolved. Elon, on the other hand, built a system. He created a way of thinking, a method for engineering games that make people fun. And he's used that method to create hit after hit after hit. Exploding Kittens [explosion] [cat screeches].... Throw Throw Burrito, Poetry for Neanderthals, Hurry Up Chicken Butt, which by the way, is his biggest selling game.
::Yay!
::Even bigger than Exploding Kittens. These aren't sequels, they're new worlds. Each one designed to unleash a different kind of delightful chaos. He didn't just make one viral moment, he made a repeatable formula. That's the difference. He built a new kind of dumb game engine, and it keeps printing magic. His company has now sold over 36 million games worldwide. How do you do that? How do you go from dumb little idea to super outsize success? We'll get into all of that after this. Because right now, it's time for Dumb Word of the Day.
::It's time for dumb. Time for dumb. Out the roof of your mouth.
::We don't know what it means yet. But we're saying it anyway.
::Could be old, could be French, could insult you on a bench. Time for dumb. Time for Dumb Word of the Day. It's dumb. It's a word used responsibly.
::All right. It's time for Dumb Word of the Day. And, you know, this is my favorite part of the show because I once used one of these words during a job interview, and got hired twice. Still not sure how that happened, but here we are. And today, this dumb word is flumadiddle. It's spelled exactly how it sounds. F-L-U-M-A-D-I-D-D-L-E. And it means nonsense. Baloney. Useless frippery. And it's perfect for today's episode, because what is Exploding Kittens if not weaponized flumadiddle? A box full of useless frippery that somehow outsold Monopoly. Elon Lee built an empire by taking flumadiddle seriously. He didn't sand it down or make it smarter. He doubled down, turned nonsense into game mechanics, turned ridiculous cats into test pilots, and turned a pile of doodles into a joy machine. Around here, we consider that a masterstroke. Try it in a sentence. "We were going to launch a real business. But then we added a fog machine, a screaming goat, and some light flumadiddle. Now it's perfect." Use it today. Misuse it tomorrow. Just don't underestimate it, because in the right hands, flumadiddle can make you millions, or at least make your in-laws scream-laugh at a card game about tacos. [laughs]
::[cat mews]
::Where were we? Oh, yeah. We were asking, how do you go from dumb little idea to super outsize success? You'd think a billion dollar buffoonery empire would start with spreadsheets and focus groups. But Elon Lee started with a sandwich bag of blank index cards from Amazon. He and Matthew Inman, yes, the oatmeal guy, whose doodles have broken more office printers than quarterly reports, sat at a kitchen table and hand-scribbled every idea that made them laugh. One card said, "Cattermelon." Another said, "Diffuse with a hypnotic butt wiggle." A third simply read, "Taco cat," because palindromes are funny, and tacos are sacred. There was no artwork yet, no balance testing, just a slapdash prototype you could spill salsa on and keep going. Elon's only metric was the replay test, which was basically, after a round of play, did his friends, normal non-gamer humans, lean in and say, "I want to play again"? When the answer was an immediate yes, Elon knew the dumb idea had a pulse. Most designers would take that pulse straight to a publisher. Elon took it to Kickstarter instead, the ultimate hold-my-beer move of board game launches. His modest goal was 10 grand. That number vanished in seven minutes. By lunchtime, his Kickstarter campaign was sitting on a million dollars like a confused house cat on a Roomba. By day 30, it had raked in $8.7 million from 219,000 backers. Still, the most backed game in Kickstarter history. And here's the genius. He used the platform itself as an extension of the game.
::Traditional Kickstarter stretch goals beg for bigger pledges. Elon flipped it. No more money, just more mayhem. Things like, "Post a photo of 10 people dressed like Batman in a hot tub. Everyone gets a new card." "Dress your rescue cat as a burrito." Another upgrade. One woman legally changed her pet's name to Taco Cat, and Elon rewarded her with eternal bragging rights and a shout-out that made the comments section purr. The Kickstarter became a worldwide pre-party before the boxes even existed. Kickstarter wasn't just funding the game, it was proof of concept at industrial scale. By the time the game shipped, a quarter million people already knew the jokes, knew the cards, and crucially, knew it was their job to be ridiculous. That's the lesson hiding inside all the fur and laser beams. Prototype, fast and filthy. Hand draw the madness, pass it around, watch what happens. Test for replay, not polish. If people beg for another round, you've struck dumb gold. And lastly, launch where the crowd can play along before they even own the box. Let them spread the joke one taco cat at a time. Elon's dumb idea wasn't just a hit game. It was a live rehearsal for making strangers the stars of their own living room improv show. And all it took was a fistful of blank cards, a comic artist who loves weird animals and the audacity to ask the internet to blow the whole thing up in the friendliest way possible.So what can we learn from all this? Because it can't just be that some guy used his dumb brain to make a dumb game that led to a huge dumb company that now makes millions. I mean, yes. That is what happened, but that's not what stuck with me. What I learned from Elan Lee goes beyond game night. He doesn't just remind us how to play. He reminds us how to let other people play through us. Whether you're leading a meeting, pitching a weird idea, or trying to get your dad to stop talking about crypto,
::ask yourself, "Am I trying too hard to entertain? Or am I building a space where someone else might shine? What if my job isn't to be the smartest, funniest, most impressive person in the room, but to be the one who sets the conditions for everyone else to get a little louder, a little weirder, and just way more alive?" Not building a show. Building a stage. So here's your big dumb challenge for the week. Don't be the star, be the stage. Find one small moment at home, at work, in a group chat, where you create just enough weirdness for someone else to get a little more playful without realizing it. Like,
::switch the group chat to reply only in emojis for the afternoon. Or bring a tiny trophy to dinner and hand it to whoever tells the worst story. Or quietly replace a coworker's mousepad with a laminated photo of Danny DeVito. No context. Never speak of it. You're not trying to make people perform. You're trying to build a tiny sandbox where they might surprise you, where they laugh a little harder than usual, or say something they didn't think they would, because sometimes the best way to get people to shine is to give them something just dumb enough to play with. So try it. Set the stage. And if you accidentally invent a new family tradition involving a picture of Danny DeVito and a pet beaver, definitely let me know. Unless it's illegal. In that case, lose my number. All right, that's it. Thanks for getting dumb with me today. If you want more weekly dumb stories, ideas, and brain vitamins dressed as nonsense, head over to david-carson.com and subscribe to the Dumbify newsletter. And if you've got any friends, foes, or family members who could use a little dumb in their lives, don't be shy about sharing this episode. Consider it a ridiculous act of public service. Until next time, stay curious. Stay dumb.
