(BONUS) Exploding Kittens CEO’s “walking with AI” ritual to unlock ideas.

The secret to using AI well might actually be teaching it to shut up. 

In this bonus episode, I’m joined by Elan Lee - the brilliant mind behind Exploding Kittens and Throw Throw Burrito. While you might expect someone like Elan to use AI to design wild new worlds or characters, that’s not what he does at all. 

Instead, he’s found a way to make AI his creative sparring partner - one that never interrupts, never judges, and somehow helps him think more clearly. 

In this chat, Elan shares how he uses AI to stress-test ideas, solve tricky design problems, and even guide his morning creative walks. His approach flips the script on AI - using it not to generate answers, but to ask better questions. 

Elan and I discuss: 

• How Elan uses AI to uncover blind spots in game instructions 

• Why he treats AI as a creative sparring partner, not a substitute for imagination 

• The surprising way he uses AI to fix in-game economies and balance point systems 

• His daily three-hour “thinking walks” with ChatGPT - and the prompt that changed how he works 

• The one mindset shift that turns AI into a powerful tool for creativity and reflection 

KEY QUOTES 

“When you are working with AI, you don’t let it answer questions for you - you let it ask you questions.” 

“The best ideas come from combining old ideas in new ways. AI just helps me see those connections.” 

Explore Elan’s games at explodingkittens.com and connect with him on Instagram, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn.  

 

If you haven’t yet listened to my full conversation with Elan - where we dive into creativity, failure, and how he built a global game company that thrives on iteration - you can find that episode here. 

 

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/  

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)  

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)  

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I sh

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
The secret to using AI well might actually be teaching
it to shut up. In this bonus episode, I am
joined by Elan Lee, the brilliant mind behind games like
Exploding Kittens and Throw Throw Burrito. And while you might
expect someone like Elan to use AI to design wild
new worlds or characters, that's not what he does at all. Instead,

(00:24):
he's found a way to make AI his creative spiring partner,
one that never interrupts, never judges, and somehow helps him
think more clearly.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
When you're working with AI, you don't let it answer
questions for you. You let it ask you questions.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
In this bonus chat, you'll hear how Elan uses AI
to stress test his game ideas, solve tricky design problems,
and even guide his own creative walks. Welcome to How
I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for

(01:04):
optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba. I'm
curious now that the GENII is such a part of
our work lives, and you know, really has been for
like three years now, how has that changed your creative process?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
If it all, we don't use it as part of
the creative process, I have asked A. I've said, hey,
I want to come up with a game that has
a duck of cards and it's themed fish, and it
involves something that you throw up in the air and
have to catch it, and the junk that it spits
back is the worst, most awful stuff imaginable. So we've
learned very you know, we tried all those tests and

(01:45):
realized like, okay, this is not what AI is for.
Then we tried it for art. We're like, okay, so
here's a final game. I don't have a good theme.
Come up with one and create all the art, and
it comes up with well you've seen it comes up
with AI art, and so that's useless. So now what
we use it for is kind of an augmentation process.

(02:05):
We'll say, like, here are instructions that we're ready to
send out to these four hundred families. However, once we
do that, we can't test those four hundred families anymore.
So I want to make sure this has the best
chance of success. Dear AI, please read these instructions and
you ask me any questions that will help with clarity,
and it will find edge cases that I never would

(02:27):
have come up within one hundred years. And that's really
really helpful because now I get the most out of
these families because I can only use them each once. Now,
anything that could possibly come up within reason AI has
usually flagged. We've modified the instructions and now we get
wonderful test results that are to the quality of gameplay

(02:48):
and not to these weird edge cases that just distract
from gameplay. So we use it a lot. There. We
use it a lot when we get into a bind
with points. Points in games are this whole weird eCos
It's an economy. It's this miniature economy that exists within
the game, and if inflation gets too high, the game breaks,
and if a recession happens, the game breaks, and if

(03:09):
you run out of resources, the game breaks. Right. Points
are weird because they have to abide by all the
rules of economics, but in this very very micro sense,
and it's different from games games game. So oftentimes we'll
find ourselves in a bind where it's like we hit
this thing where everyone had to get points, but nobody
won because there weren't enough points. And I don't want
to put in infinite points in this game, So how

(03:32):
do we restrict this one little thing? AI is very
good at those problems solving microeconomic issues. Turns out AI
is lovely at that in a way that I don't
want to study, I don't want to get good at.
I'm going to just throw the problem at AI. It
feels a lot like math. Let somebody else solve it.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
I love those two examples. Are there any other ways
that you found personally II to be quite useful in
the role that you do.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah. I use AI every day for about two to
three hours a day, and what I do is primarily
I use chatch EPT and I'll put it on voice mode,
and I have this prompt that I used to have
to refeed it, but now it's learned to remember this prompt.
But the prompt basically says, I'm going to go for
a three hour walk and I want you to stay

(04:18):
on the whole time, and I'm going to describe just
what's going through my head. Might be a game design issue,
it might be a company policy issue, it might be
an HR issue. Whatever it is, here's what I'm thinking
about today. And one every time I tell you to
take notes, just record the last thing I said, and
later on give me a transcript of just the parts

(04:38):
that I've said to record, and then two, don't be
scared of silence. Please please please do not fill silence.
Is if I stop talking, that doesn't mean you talk,
that means just hang out. I'm processing and if I
ask you a question, please help me. And if I
ask you for other ideas for something, then please answer.
But your job is not to be the other half

(04:59):
of this conversation. Your job is to let me think
and facilitate that thinking process. And I do that every
single morning, and it's glorious. It's such a wonderful practice
because I come back with this note file that it
generates of exactly how I want to handle the problem
that I was working on.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
I want to know more about this, Like with every
walk that you're going on in the morning, are you
starting with a predefined problem or is it sometimes fuzzier
than that.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
Yeah, I used to think I had to I would
list out exactly the problem, but I found that as
the engine gets better and better, I can come to
it with some pretty nebulous ideas and sometimes it will
guide me through brainstorming. Again, this is some modifications I
made to the prompt where I'll say, like I'm looking
for a new game idea. I'm vaguely interested by X, Y,

(05:49):
and Z, So help me figure out what I'm trying
to figure out. Don't answer it for me, just ask
me leading questions that will help me work through my
own design process. And it's quite good at that I'm
able to approach it with much less data than I
thought I had to and still come out with a
great result.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
That's really interesting how you don't ask it for input.
You're just using it as someone to question you and
extract information from yourself.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
If you were.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
Giving advice to someone who was looking for help being
more creative, improving their own creative process, and they're not
you and they're not math, like, what advice would you
give them on how to work with AI?

Speaker 2 (06:31):
First, you have to fill your own head with raw materials.
You don't have to remember everything, but like you need
to go watch all the movies, and you need to
listen to all the podcasts, and you need to read
all the books and watch all the TV shows and
play all the games. Because you don't have to have
instant recall of these things, but you do need a
lot of raw data in your head kicking around in

(06:53):
there somewhere, and then when you're working with AI, don't
let it answer questions for you. You let it ask
you questions that all of that raw material might be
the answer for, and in particular, you train it to
encourage you to combine things together. I feel like all

(07:15):
my best ideas are really the combination of other people's ideas,
just combined in new and interesting ways. And if you
can get AI to help you focus on those individual
nuggets that are kicking around in your head because you
filled your head with all those things, and then encourage
you to start combining them together, not how to combine them,

(07:36):
just hey, what if you mix those two ideas together?
Suddenly you're brainstorming in a whole new capacity.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
What I love about Alan's approach is that he's flipped
the script on AI. Instead of asking it to come
up with ideas, he uses it to ask him better questions,
to help him see what's already in his head and
connect the dots in new ways. So the next time
you're feeling stuck, try this open chat JPT and ask

(08:05):
it to interview you about your problem instead of solving
it for you, you might be surprised by what surfaces,
and if you haven't yet, heard my full conversation with Elan.
I'd highly recommend it, or you dive into creativity, failure
and what it really takes to make great ideas happen.
There is a link to that in the show notes.
If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow

(08:28):
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the warrangery people, part of the Cooler Nation.