John Fio - Creating Magic for Consumers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.311]

My guest today is John Fiorentino. John is a product inventor and entrepreneur who, in the space of a few years, has bootstrapped four products; Gravity Blanket, Moon Pod, Moon Pals, and Birthdate Candles which have collectively sold hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. Our conversation is quite different than normal. Alongside his successful brands, John has had a range of life experiences – from starting as a Jazz musician to working for Justin Bieber - that give him an original worldview. I was especially interested in his points around product positioning, creating magic for consumers, not letting yourself become the product, and how to build enduring brands. Please enjoy this great conversation with John Fiorentino. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard-to-get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC, and helps you set up customized expert calls. It’s all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. I’ve been so impressed by the platform that my firm, Positive Sum, recently made an investment in Tegus. We did so because we feel that Tegus will be the gold standard platform for investing research for decades to come. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:02:25] - [First question] - The amazing story behind Gravity Blanket [00:08:51] - What he’s learned about positioning relative to product [00:13:17] - How fundamental truths drive creativity in commerce [00:16:17] - Real-world examples of magic as he defines it [00:19:50] - The investability of consumer businesses from his perspective [00:25:25] - His contrarian thoughts on venture-backed startups [00:28:00] - How unique personalities create compelling IP and monetize it [00:38:28] - The fine line between creative power and self-destruction for brand founders [00:45:13] - The importance of consumer business goals being larger than oneself [00:48:45] - The story of the Moon Pals weighted stuffed animals [00:53:15] - How investors undervalue IP and mythology [00:57:20] - Leveraging uniqueness as a founder to boost your brand power [01:00:53] - His eye-opening experience working on Justin Bieber’s team [01:05:20] - How he identifies potential magic-makers and enables them [01:09:16] - An odd commonality between high-level successful people [01:12:14] - Whether or not one could map out their own archetype framework [01:15:23] - The dangers of focusing on one’s own persona and image as the product [01:18:19] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I know firsthand how complex the tech stack is for asset management firms. And seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount and more risk. RidgeLine offers a better way forward. One unified platform that automates away the complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance and more, all at scale. RidgeLine is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter and stay ahead of the curve. See what RidgeLine can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.ai. This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Over the years of our partnership with Tegus, they have evolved from a pure expert network into a full company intelligence platform. I've been so impressed by the platform that my firm, Positive Sum, recently made an investment

• 0:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  in Tegus. We did so because we feel that Tegus will be the gold standard platform for investing research for decades to come. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard to get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BAM SEC and helps you set up customized expert calls. It's all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360 degree insight into any public or private company. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick.

• 1:25Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 2:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My guest today is John Fiorentino. John is a product inventor and entrepreneur who, in the space of a few years, has bootstrapped four products: Gravity Blanket, Moon Pod, Moon Pals, and Birthdate Candles, which have collectively sold hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. Our conversation is quite different than normal. Alongside his successful brands, John has had a range of life experiences, from starting as a jazz musician to working for Justin Bieber, that give him an original worldview. I was especially interested in his points around product positioning, creating magic for consumers, not letting yourself become the product, and how to build enduring brands. Please enjoy this great conversation with John Fiorentino.

• 3:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Where to begin this conversation? Long before I met you, I think I had a Gravity Blanket. It was one of those funny things that came out of nowhere. It seemed to be one of those things that if someone had one, they like told other people about it, it had that word of mouth thing to it. So what was the backstory behind it? And does that remain the most wild product experience that you've had?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  That one was totally wild because I really went from truly zero to having success literally overnight. And I created a brand new category of products that's like a billion dollar category now. There was literally nothing out there that was selling this idea of weighted products to help you calm down and fall asleep better. Don't get me wrong, that came from a crazy me jumping off of the cliff type of I have no fucking clue what's going on, what's gonna happen here. And I stumbled into that in a very funny way. That was a really funny, at my wits' end, you know, we're just gonna try this because

• 4:03Speaker 02

  I love it. I love it. I put the thing on my chest, I passed out, and I loved it. And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna see if other people like this. And the few people that I had try it freaked out. They laughed at me about, what do you mean, you're gonna put a 25 pound blanket on me? And then they put it on, they were like, oh my God. Again, that same sort of moment. This is something I like. And they were very, very vocal about it. So I put it on Kickstarter, and then literally, boom. Press ever wrote about it. We did a million bucks in 24 hours. I was running around on Good Morning America, flying all over the place to do these interviews. I had to jump on a plane to China. It was like the craziest whirlwind of all time.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  And yeah, it was cuz a new idea was discovered and positioned in a way that delivered an incredibly exciting promise to people at a time where they felt incredibly stressed. And here was this new invention, a 25 pound blanket that was going to help you sleep better, be less stressed and feel good. How did you find the idea? I tried to do a lot of stuff for a long time and it didn't work. I was at less than broke, like way more than broke. And I was working on a pillow. I was working on designing a pillow with a celebrity, by the way. And I was designing this celebrity a pillow and I had a very important meeting in New York.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  And I didn't have any money and I didn't know anyone in the city at this point. And so I had to spend the night on the subway. And I spent a few nights on there and then the third night I was gearing up for this meeting with the sleep scientist. Couldn't really see out of my eyes. I was so tired. It was like a slog. I was working at a Starbucks 24/7 and then slink into the subway. It was pretty funny. And I got into this meeting and she was like, oh my God, you look so tired. I was like, thanks. I made a joke. I was like, I had to sleep on the subway last night, but it's okay because I cuddled up with my bags and it was actually surprisingly pretty comfortable. And she goes, oh, you know, that's a very real thing. If you sleep with 10% of your body weight, it's an incredible natural anxiety reliever and it helps you fall asleep.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  I prescribe this to children with autism and people with PTSD all the time. And I was like, what did you just say? I was like, can you say that again? And she repeated it and I was like, okay, threw all the pillow plans off, quit that company. And I was like, oh my God, this is an opportunity. I've never heard of that. I want it immediately. That sounds real. I experienced a version of it and it helped me sleep on the subway. If that thing can help me sleep on the subway, this will help anyone sleep at night. I went home, tried to find something online and there was literally nothing. Which is again, this really weird moment of this is not how the world works. Do I see a bag of a million bucks on the street? There's no way. I thought I was going crazy. I was like, this isn't real.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  There was like two grandmothers on Etsy selling this shit. No one was selling this. I bought some beads on Amazon. I bought a blanket on Amazon. I literally put the beads in the middle of the blanket. I folded it up, stitched it and put it on my chest. And I passed out and I was like, holy shit, this is gonna work. Again, I've been running tests, started a handbag business. I started an art business. I started a T-shirt business. I started managing art. I was doing all of these things. You make these things, these ideas, and you put them out in the world and it's just flat. And I built my little landing page, did a little test. And I was getting emails for a $250 product for 50 cents. And I was like, this is bonkers.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  I either died on the subway and I'm in heaven, or this is real and I just found this. So I thought it was gonna do well. I went to Brooklyn, put the sample over my back, was walking around Brooklyn with this 20-pound blanket I made and was walking into factories saying, can someone help? Can we do 5,000 of these? I got someone in Brooklyn and then I was all set up. I made the video for like almost no money. I was working with this media company where they were gonna blast it out to their email list and all this shit. We launched and it was like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And then it was like, oh, well, that was basically everyone from the email list. It was all my friends and family that just bought. And then it was just like ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. Share, share, share. Lil Wayne share. I was like, what the fuck?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Lil Wayne just shared this? Good Morning America picked it up. Boom, boom, boom. Literally woke up the next morning, I had a million dollars in my Kickstarter bank account. And I was like, Okay, I can get a hotel. Literally broke down in the street was like, this is insane. I can't believe that worked. Like I took the leap of faith and I caught the last hook on the bottom of the ocean. And now I'm breathing and I was like, this is fucking awesome. I'm doing this for the rest of my life because I just found out it's possible. You can still find magic in the world where I was so ready to give up. I still get DMs all the time. People being like, my grandmother sleeps better now.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  This wasn't a thing that I tricked the market into. I actually found and created a thing that really helped people. And that's it. I'm locked up for life. That's what I'm going to be doing forever.

• 9:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What have you learned about positioning relative to product and like their relative importance?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  To me, the way that I think about this is that the positioning is the product. It is a part of the product and actually dictates the actual design of the product. Gravity is a great example. Birthday candle is probably my favorite example. So my partner on that one, co-founder Ajay, my best friend. We were at his office one day just shooting the shit about ideas. And we stumbled on a few candle businesses. And we were like, wow, those are crazy businesses if you can get one. Collectively, we're like, what's something that's going to be big? And then we both were sort of like, wow, astrology. And we worked on the positioning of an astrology candle for about a year and a half. And it was brutal.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  And we both just could not give up. We tried to throw out the idea like 12 times, but there was just something there about this intersection of there's something there and we just kept on going. And it ended up being a positioning exercise where the light bulb hit where we came across this idea of it's not an astrology candle. It's a personalized birthday candle. We're going to position it as a birthday candle. And holy shit, positioning it like that. Now you're not buying a Leo candle, you're buying your candle. Now you can buy your jewelry. You can buy your book. You can buy your whatever. That slight sentence change literally changed the entire business. I know the numbers that other astrology companies are doing.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  We are crushing. Starting a candle company that sells 12 candles for your signs is not interesting. Positioning it as a personalized gift. That is based off of your birthday. That is a positioning exercise. And that changed the design. That changed the product. That changed the roadmap. That changed the customer. That changed the promise. The way I like to describe it, there's like a 12 hexagonal orb of inputs and outputs. If you start messing with that, it really starts to change everything. If you try to force that or you try to neglect a piece of it, you're missing the big prize, which is getting all of it right together at once.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Because if you get all of it right together at once, you have something new and unique that lights up the customer's imagination. And it takes a long ass time. But shaping it in someone's mind, again, like the blanket, 25 pound blanket. That product exists. It's out there. There's a 25 pound blanket. Let's position that. It's a gravity blanket for sleep, stress and anxiety. 10% of your body weight helps you relax. Boom. You just invented a brand new product because you positioned it a little bit differently. How you craft the description of your product is going to change the product, the brand, the company, the customer. And then how you do that literally defines how it sits in the customer's head,

• 12:27Speaker 02

  which is an actual different product experience. One of my favorite brand stories of all time. Sorry if I'm butchering the story, but something like this happened where Coca-Cola had hundreds of thousands of taste testers and they put the same Coca-Cola formula in a bunch of different bottles and cans and cups. And the thing that they realized was that when someone drank the same Coca-Cola formula from a white cup, and then they drank that same Coca-Cola formula in a can that had the Coca-Cola logo on it. Not only did different parts of their brain light up, different parts of their brain that was triggered by taste buds lit up. So positioning that product around,

• 13:10Speaker 02

  it literally changed the way that your brain experienced taste. When people say that ideas are not valuable, the idea of getting to this place where you are just flicking someone's brain 10% to make them imagine something different while they engage with the thing is a completely different product. And that is competitive. You can compete on that. And if you own that positioning in the consumer's mind, that is what I would like to call a real moat. Do not underestimate the power of the positioning and the ideas that come around how to position something the right way. Because in my opinion, that is the product.

• 13:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'd like to spend some time talking about that concept. So we're going to talk a lot about consumer companies, content, media companies, investing today. But I think it all will rest on top of this notion of the most successful of these stories, whether that's an entrepreneur, a product, a business, is that they're tapping into something that is fundamentally, I don't know, human or even deeper than that. Maybe just say a bit more about how you've thought through that substrate is what I'll call it, or truth, or that's the other word you used for it. What has been your experience with that substrate? What is it that we're all craving? Is it something universal? Is it something more multifaceted where different people crave different things? How do you think about the substrate that we're going to then spend the rest of the time talking about? How can we all tap into it?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  I think if I were to say this in an annoying one liner is that I like deeply believe that magic is real. And you can't quantify that. You can't buy that. You can't put that on a graph. You can't plan for it. The things that shape the world are these anomaly things, these events that no one ever could ever see coming. And they happen and then the entire world is different. You can't plan for these things and you sort of have to get to that magic by throwing out every rule and exposing yourself to this. The only rule is that there is no rules. You actually have to jump off of that cliff.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  And anyone who's made anything that has truly resonated with another human being, I think when I try to explain this to them, they really, really understand it because they've been there. And that's unbelievably scary because your brain immediately wants to have these rules that lead you to a specific outcome. When you start to build something in that way, it feels really good and it makes you feel calm and secure. But I can almost guarantee that if you can quantify your plan with a certain number and a certain step, there will be no magic that emerges from that.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  And I think you can see that over and over and over again, which is why I'm pretty optimistic about not really ever being beholden to gatekeepers or needing a certain amount of money or something, or having to ask permission. It's like if you are actually incredible at what you do, that will find its home in the world. And if it is true, that home will be gigantic. And no one, no power at B, no bank, no amount of money, no person can take that away because it resonates on such a true, deep level with the human spirit that it's gravity.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  It gets sucked into the market and no one can stop that.

• 16:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Were there other examples of magic that you think are maybe across domains or something that come to mind for you? I want to nail home this point because I think what you're trying to say is people can create magic. We'll talk about Walt Disney, we'll talk about Pokemon, we'll talk about Hello Kitty. We'll talk about all sorts of things like this Red Bull. Maybe all of these are little examples of magic, but give a few more just to like, make sure that the point is really drilled home.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  In history, I think if you look at these paradigm shifting moments and ideas and creations and inventions and people, the through line is that there is a really fucking weird non-through line. If you tried to get there by doing their morning routine, you gotta go a little deeper than that. And if you look at Leonardo da Vinci, you read about how he used to spend his day. I read his book. One of the craziest things that stood out to me was that like, he just spent six months taking notes on how the woodpecker's tongue worked. I was like, what? That is what

• 17:54Speaker 02

  got his attention? And then the guy who invented Pokemon was just out collecting bugs. And James Cameron was just a truck driver that fell into taking over a movie that was about to fail. And then he just basically fucking invented Terminator. What are the things that are actually driving those people? It's not some quantifiable thing. It is some undeniable spirit that they have this fearlessness where they are able and comfortable to just follow in a cheesy way. They're following their heart. And they are so committed to that truth that it leads them down these windy insane

• 18:36Speaker 02

  paths that that path actually ends up having these paradigmic discoveries or inventions. What is the through line there? It is this unbelievable commitment, obsession, transcendent infatuation with, in my opinion, finding something that is true. And I think things that are true aren't really quantifiable, which is why if you talk to most people and what they're doing with their day, they're trying to get money. They're trying to make a lot of money. That doesn't really stand the test of time. I don't think money rules the world. I think this undeniable magic rules the world. And I think the people that are able to tap into that and shape that rule the world. And then I think money follows that.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Money is not the thing. Money is the measurement of the thing. And we've kind of forgotten about that. I call it money worship or number worship. We've become obsessed with this idea that truth is quantifiable. I just don't believe that that's true. And the second that you can't quantify it, you're sort of measuring the measuring stick. You're missing the point. The point is not money. The point is to make incredible things for the world that then gets you money. That subtle difference is unbelievably important. And if you misstep that, how you're building your company, how your brain works, what you're incentivized for, what you're communicating with the people around you on what the mission is.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  All of that gets convoluted where you are missing the magic moment of walking the crazy fucking trail and seeing the woodpecker because you're worried about, is this a quantifiable thing with a return? The biggest returns come from jumping off of the cliff.

• 20:23Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Say a bit about the investability of consumer businesses from your perspective. Like, it seems like if this kind of moments of magic, I want to come back to Disney in a minute because I know you studied the person Disney, I guess, the company too, and its many products. But like, literally the Magic Kingdom. The story of that was his brother was fighting him over how much they were spending on it. And he just didn't care.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  His whole net worth on the line. Mortgage his house. He sold everything and just started a new company. It was like, okay, cool. Nine million bucks, boom. I'm going to build this fucking adult playground. That's insane. And again, to be very clear for this being a business podcast, what I am talking about and the things that I'm talking about is mostly specifically for consumer businesses. And consumer businesses, my belief is that they act totally different.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  They are inquantifiable. The second that you try to start to put those constraints on it, you ruin it. They are a completely different breed where I think for the past thirty, forty years, there's endless, endless examples of this. When you try to fit that magic consumer business into something that is constrained by what would breed a profitable outcome for a SaaS business, you kill the soul. I have a rule. I really don't invest in almost any consumer businesses because I kind of think for ninety-nine percent of consumer product businesses, if you need an investment, you don't have a

• 21:54Speaker 02

  business because all of my businesses have been profitable on day one. On day one, there is enough of a demand for it where if I show it to a thousand people, two hundred of them are buying it. If you don't have that metric, you don't have a business. And if you can't convince the consumer that the thing that you're selling is so compelling that they should wait six months for you to deliver the thing that you are describing, you either don't have a good product, you can't describe it well enough, or the market doesn't give a shit. And I can tell that in ten seconds. And that is something that makes people unbelievably uncomfortable and terrified because again, that's scary.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  That is a path that you can't tell me, there is no step-by-step path to get you out of that. The step-by-step path is throw the fucking playbook out and go run around on the street and talk to a thousand people and see what they say and maybe be open to the fact that we are trying to sell socks right now, but the conversation about socks might actually lead you to realizing that you have the best idea of all time for a new winter jacket. That is how you find product market fit with a consumer business, and that's fucking terrifying. The thing here that's really, really funny is I test hundreds of ideas all day, every day in different ways. I'll tell you or someone that I meet be like, oh my God, did you hear about the new, you know, weight loss pill? I'll see how they react to it.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  If they don't react to it and they aren't asking me more questions about it or texting me about it, they don't give a shit. And there's almost nothing that I can do. I learned this the hard way after getting beaten down over and over and over again by trying to force what I thought was my cool idea into the market. The market doesn't care. The market revolves around this immeasurable truth that they respond to. And when you throw that truth into them, they react and that reaction is undeniable. And the terrifying part is that it's very, very obvious, very, very quick. And no one wants to admit that their idea sucks, which almost all of them do. My favorite question, because I'm now the idea guy on Twitter.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  It's my little rebrand right there. I've been saying this for years that ideas are like the most valuable thing that there is. And everyone for the last 10 years, it's all execution, execution. Absolutely not. And my favorite question to ask those people are, oh, ideas are really easy. What's your best idea? Someone replied to me on Twitter about this when I tweeted some stupid thing about ideas are the most valuable thing. She goes, no, they're not. I have the best ideas. I go, amazing. What's your best idea? Well, I'm not going to argue with you right now. I'm like, yeah, because you don't have any. Because they're unbelievably hard and they're unbelievably scarce and they're very, very rare. And when you have one, you know it because the market pulls you into it and the execution happens.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  You don't get to choose. The weighted blanket thing, when I found that in the corner of the world that no one else saw, and I called it a 25 pound gravity blanket for sleep, stress and anxiety. I literally did not have a choice. I put that on Kickstarter, boom, we did like a million bucks in 24 hours. And I was on a plane to China to go convince whatever manufacturer I possibly could that this thing was real. And that we had to set up a new manufacturing line to go make 40,000 blankets or I'm going to jail. That idea pulled any thought out of my brain and pulled any free will that I had inside of me and forced me into that execution.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  And I'm just a huge believer that those are the best, most powerful places to spend your time and energy on is when you don't have a choice. But to find that true sentence that is so in demand that people are literally banging at your door for it, that forces you into action. I always like to start from that standpoint rather than, hey, let's get some great action and see what happens.

• 25:58Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I think the idea that the great consumer product ideas don't need funding is really, really interesting. I'm curious what you think about the classic venture backed software consumer companies. Mostly the social networks poppin' most immediately to mind, maybe a few others. I guess flesh out a little bit more of the relationship between investors, early stage investors most specifically, and consumer products. Is there anywhere that that can work? When is it smart? Maybe it's that you can't fund the zero to one, but you can fund the one to N. Whereas in B to B, I think you can fund the zero to one pretty reliably. Is that the line of delineation?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  I've always had my problems with venture and I've always just from a first principle standpoint. I went and raised a round of venture and ended up giving the entire round back before I spent a dime of it because I learned what venture was. And I was like, no, this is not for me. This does not make sense to my brain. I thought that I wasn't smart enough to play in that game. And what ended up turning out to be more true is that the model is just very strange and doesn't really work for almost anything. And in my opinion, the fool at the venture backed table, great for venture capitalists, the fool for the most part at that venture backed table is the entrepreneur. But again, like Snapchat, Facebook, these ones that are gigantic and around and ended up sustaining a real use case and building a real network.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Their servers were shutting down before they took their first check. There was such a demand for that. I remember opening up Snapchat for the first time and putting my finger on the picture and it opened it. And then it disappeared and I like teared up. I was like, oh my God, what the fuck just happened? And I told everyone about it. That is a tiny, tiny idea that fundamentally changed how we interact with our phones. You had wait lists out the door to download that app so everyone could experience that magic. Same thing with Facebook. It was like, holy shit, someone poked me. You never really had that before and the demand is just so obvious.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Teal didn't write the $500,000 check until they had millions of users. There's a different argument of is that good? Is that a business that should exist? Have these tools and these products that are basically only scaled and existing on a venture model? Is that actually helping things?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  I think there's a pretty good case that the answer is mostly no. I deleted my Instagram a couple of months ago and I've never felt better in my life.

• 28:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Say a bit about this notion of how to monetize intellectual property that gets created. Cause what I've heard so far is you need to tap into something that's real. Something that's real comes from a great idea. The great idea is often rooted in bizarre experience, collecting bugs or watching hummingbird tongues or whatever. Where the drive to collect that experience comes from is maybe a topic for another day. But probably everyone has some weird gravitational pull towards some odd thing that they would spend more time on if they could. Maybe one of the lessons is to go do that. But let's say we walk that chain, someone's generated a unique experience, they've uncovered some sort of truth. They've built something on top of that proprietary experience and knowledge and they brought it to the world.

• 29:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What are the most interesting things you've seen about the businesses around these concepts? There's this amazing slide that you and I send back and forth now and again, or send to somebody that shows the sources of revenue underneath some of the famous brands. Like the Cars franchise in Pixar or Pokemon or Hello Kitty, or some of these other ones that we've mentioned. Say a bit about what the business models that have been, I guess, pulled out of by the market around some of these genius concepts.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  I think where we're going is we're kind of going back to the beginning. The thing in consumer in the beginning was a traveling circus or something. There was nothing to buy or do, except for like this thing. And you would get someone into a place and you would have all of these magical insane experiences. And you would guide them on this journey and charge, charge, charge, charge, charge. One of my favorite examples is one of the most profitable lines on Disney's balance sheet is their chicken fingers. They're charging seven X on their chicken fingers. When you think about it, they're telling children's stories about cars racing to then put the consumer on a path where they are actually then making money off of them.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  When they get to the park, they ride a ride, they buy a toy and then they're making money off the chicken fingers. The way that I think about brand is there's many levels of brand. It's a funny word because no one really knows what that means because it kind of means. Everything at the same time. My entire life, I've basically been making something and presenting it to an audience. And as I get older, it's very clear to me that there are infinite ways to make that experience more and more complex and more and more multi-dimensional. And the more complex that you can make that and the more multi-dimensional you can make that while putting it under a singular brand that compounds, that's where you get the behemoths.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  That's where you get Disney. That's where you get these forever sort of worlds that spin out these stories and experiences and moments that just make it bigger and bigger and bigger.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  So I think we're headed to this really interesting place where if you are going to be in the business of getting the consumer's attention, it's shifting to a very interesting place. I was talking to Gabe about this the other day and I was like, can I tell you about Theo's number? In the world where attention is so scarce and that that is basically the leading indicator of success in the consumer business world, how are you going to compete across every category with every audience to get into that mind of the consumer? What if we're moving towards a world where like you have Dunbar's number, 150 friends that you can have? It kind of feels like we're moving into a world where we're going to be playing with

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Theo's number, where you have 150 spots in the consumer's head to be a brand or an experience. And then it's like, okay, well, what actually sticks in a consumer's head and heart the most? That's actually basically like being their best friend. And when you look at these media properties, they're 100 billion dollar properties, but when you interact with them, it feels like you're interacting with a long-lost best friend that you are familiar with and it never gets old. And I think we're going into a world where like basically every consumer company is going to have to figure this out and compete on this level. So then you're playing this game of what does it look like to build a brand where the compounding factor is to be the consumer's best friend?

• 32:47Speaker 02

  And now you have to create a character. You have to create a world. You have to create a story. You have to create a game. You have to create a physical experience. You have to create merchandise and you need something at the core of that where you're guiding that customer through the experience 24/7. And you can see this happening. Five, 10 years ago, I was screaming about brands are over. It's just going to be celebrity personalities. And that ended up being super true, like Kylie Jenner and Mr. Beast. Unbelievable gigantic audience. How is his audience engaging with him? They all think he's their best friend, so they're just going to him and then they're getting what they need. We're moving from this jobs to be done world where like the way that you would seek things out is you have a problem, you go find that product for that problem.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  We're getting so bombarded with all information and telling us that there is a fix for every problem possible, that we've actually stopped listening to everything and we just want to spend time with our friends. And if your brand can archetype itself around being that best friend, now you're Mr. Beast. And because Mr. Beast gets into that top 10 of that 150 spots, you're just with him every day and then you're buying his burger. And don't get me wrong, that burger still has to be the best burger of all time because it's pretty easy to make the best stuff of all time now because of the cost of this and the access to all this. You actually have to compete on every single level and deliver extraordinary value across

• 34:14Speaker 02

  multiple dimensions of that product to basically just be relevant now. I think Kanye did this. Kanye is really funny. If you watch him, he's always been almost right about everything. He had kanyewestuniversity.com. That's basically just the pokings of this metaverse thing that's happening, which is not that real. Kanyewest.com was essentially Instagram. I remember I was like in middle school or something and I would go home every day and check kanyewest.com because he would post his five favorite images. No, anything, just his five favorite images. That basically turned into Instagram. What Kanye has done, this is just a critique on his work, not on anything other than his work in the past 10 years.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  He is the personality that You have gotten to know over the past 20 years that now he has delivered so much value with a singular thing of his music where then it just became really easy to trust him and understand that that context that he built through delivering magic on one pillar, then he became the guy that delivered it across seven pillars. And that happened really slow and then it was all at once. It felt like in a year, Yeezy was the most searched brand of all time. It was doing billions of dollars in revenue. It came out of absolutely nowhere, took over an entire sector of the fashion industry, the streetwear, the sneaker world. All of a sudden, he was just this thing that was this shepherd to

• 35:43Speaker 02

  all of these pieces of a consumer's wants and needs. And he was delivering them, in my opinion, pretty perfectly. He designed a new silhouette for a shoe. We haven't seen a new silhouette for a shoe for like a long time. And he delivers that and then he delivers a brand new aesthetic for clothes. He's not just a musician. He's built this world where he's become this personality that then takes you through each of these pillars in his world. And in my opinion, he's doing it 20% in the wrong way. He's doing it boomer-y. There's no unifying thing there. They're not super connected. They're scatterbrained and a little bit throwing stuff at the wall. But where I think things are going is that

• 36:27Speaker 02

  that is going to be tied together in a very, very deliberate way. And the way that you tie those things together is going to have to be very, very deliberate. And I think that's the new game in consumer that's going to be won and lost of how intricate can you create an experience around a thing that delivers value to the customer that is not just a product. It has to be a belief system. It has to have rules. It has to have personality. It has to have a different world. It has to have an aesthetic. It has to have taste. And then on top of that, it has to actually give something to the consumer that is magical. And if you can get, I think the winners of the

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Next 10, 20, 30 years in consumer are going to be the brands that figure out how to operate on each one of those because now you can't because it's easier. It's cheaper, you can move quick. If you told someone 30 years ago that you were going to be able to start a billion dollar business with five people running a Shopify site, no one would believe you. And now you can't. If you said that you could create a Grammy award winning album with a microphone in your living room, no one would believe you, but now you can't. I think where we're headed with all this AI stuff, when all this stuff gets really, really cheap and it moves. I think the next Disney and the next Pixar is probably like seven people. I don't think it's thousands of people and then the speed changes, the cost changes, the profit changes.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  All of these things shift and the way that you compete is going to be this new layer of expert generalized magic makers. That can move into these different realms really, really quick and capitalize off of moments really, really quick. And then retain that value underneath a compounding story that is essentially a brand. But that again is very, very, very different than what we just saw in the last 20 years. That crazy famous Disney flywheel. I think everyone's going to have to do that and I think they're going to be able to, and I think you're going to be able to compete with Disney pretty quickly and pretty easily. You're not going to need hundreds of billions of dollars to go compete with them.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  I think you can compete with them with a couple hundred million. And that starts to get into a crazy landscape where essentially the layer of value and the skill and the timeline and the understanding that you are operating on as a consumer business completely changes.

• 39:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I want to take a little bit more on this apparent fine line between genius, people able to create these elements of magic. Let's call it, stick with that word. And something opposite genius. I think five years ago, if you polled everyone, is Kanye a genius? Most people probably say yes. Now I think probably more people would say he's a psychopath. He said awful and seems to deeply believe some really terrible things. And then to invoke a name like P T Barnum, for example, who I'm sure was some form of genius. But normally, if you hear that, it's someone saying something negative about you, like you're sort of a con artist. Even people like Elon, there just seems to be this fine line between these magic makers having history write them one way or the other.

• 39:44Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Is Disney a con artist or a genius? In what ways is he different from P T Barnum? Is he different from Elon? There just seems to be this really delicate line. So maybe talk about that line. I think about Justin Bieber, too. We haven't really even talked about your own history, which we will. I think he was one of the first people that you firsthand saw as having this magic ability. But how have you seen people with that ability flirt with this line?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  There is a hierarchy and a formula that you spiritually have to stay within, or you get crucified. My way of describing that is you need an idea, something bigger than yourself. And then you need to be the shepherd of that idea. And then the way that you spread that message needs to have a product. And then that product goes to an audience. So this is a very real hierarchy in my mind, where it makes a lot of sense, where if you start to mess those things up, it either becomes extremely less valuable or it blows up.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  The cardinal sin where you can get really, really far, really, really fast is if you turn yourself into the product, which then makes you the idea. And when you become your product and idea, you get crucified. It's like a very cause and effect formula for human psychology. You see the scapegoat thing. You see this story over and over and over again of the crowd turns against the hero and basically crucifies them. You see this, it's the oldest story of all time. You can really, really see that play out. Again, do these little tests around the world. Do you think more people know Elon Musk or the word Tesla?

• 41:33Speaker 02

  There is a line where he's crossing where it's becoming Elon. That's dangerous. Now you are the thing. Look at what happened to Trump. If you break that order, you go quick. You can create insane momentum and you become this crazy passionate leader. But if you aren't doing it for something bigger than yourself, you get sniffed out and you just get crushed. The audience is like, they don't trust you and they throw you out. Trump got there really, really quick, unbelievably effectively, and then he's gone. Maybe that's powers that be, maybe that's the audience, maybe that's people just got sick of him. My critique on someone that doesn't get that formula right is like, remind me of the bigger thing.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  With Trump, it felt like he was for Trump. It didn't really feel like he was ready to rebuild America and put heart and soul back into this country and unify us. It was like, no, no, I'm gonna win. And you can see in his tweets, search query of how many times he says me or I or something, which by the way, is a leading indicator of serious depression and suicide. If you start saying I and me, it is the highest leading indicator that you're about to fall into depression. You put yourself first, you go to hell. It's just a law that I think exists where if you can use that as a guide of like, it keeps everyone in check. No one wants to worship a guy. They want to worship a guy that is sacrificing himself for something bigger.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  And he is showing the world that it's possible to commit himself to something bigger than yourself, which I think is a very human struggle. It's a daily quest to find the ways in which to get outside of yourself and help someone else. For whatever reason, a lot of people are fearful of that. They don't want to do it and they're scared and it's vulnerability and whatever. But when you do, you just automatically feel better. You don't feel necessarily more powerful, which can be unbelievably addicting and intoxicating, but you definitely feel better. Again, there's a very real reason why our heart, brain and soul acts that way.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  And I think that when you tap into that and you understand that there is this real hierarchy of truth and value and you submit to that, now you can be trusted.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  And don't get it wrong. Consumers, people are unbelievably smart. Unbelievably smart. You cannot trick them. You just can't trick them. In the D to C world, it's really funny. It's like me, you and Gabe always talk about, and Gabe said it on your podcast about how he's like, it's funny that when I hire people that want to build games, it's very clear that everyone hates games. Very similar in my world where like 98% of people that I talk to that are selling a product, they kind of have this hint, nudge, nudge. I'm pulling one over on everyone and I'm like, guess what? You're not. They know it. You can pull the wig over yourself. You're not ever going to be able to trick the consumer.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  You're not ever going to be able to buy or spend your way into getting them to believe a thing. They believe the truth. And they can be swayed to believe lies, but I have a deep belief that on a long enough timeline, those lies fall and the truth prevails. And if you build a company, a thing, or you live your life in that way, you will win on a long enough timeline. And I've seen it in my own professional career. People who have deviated from the truth around me, they fall. And I might not be as big as them, or I might not have as much as attention of them, but shit, they got that attention on lies and that shit crumbles.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  And it's sweet for a little bit, but like, I think again, that is the temptation that you can't break the idea that you are in service of something bigger. And if you aren't, the consumer will know and you will not survive. I think that's really beautiful. I think that's a humbling truth for me. Actually makes me feel very calm. As long as I can find the moment for someone and deliver that to them, I'll be okay.

• 45:46Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think Disney is the most perfect exemplar of this? Even though he was obviously ultra eccentric and you can kind of blindly recommend a Disney biography because it's impossible to screw up. The guy's life was just so interesting. And he was so willing, you already said the story about Magic Kingdom, bet it all, risk it all, put himself at risk in service of this thing. It seems like he checks a lot of the boxes and is one to study. Is he the right archetypal exemplar of this hierarchy that you laid out?

• 46:16Speaker 02

  He's probably one of the best examples of it. It's like this yin and yang in someone, and I've described it in myself as wanting to be a warlord and an artist and never knowing which one I am. And now I'm realizing that the 40-year goal is to be both at the same time. How do I not compromise my creative artistry while still knowing how to scale and build infrastructure and manage capital? And I think when you look at the best of them, they've figured out how to do both of that pretty incredibly, very balanced. And what's funny is that that doesn't happen overnight. When you think about when everyone started to know Jeff Bezos' name, he was already the third richest person. No one

• 46:59Speaker 02

  knew who that guy was. You can start to see it happening right now with Bernard Arnault. Literally no one knew that dude's name. Now he's one of the richest, not like, he didn't make a billion dollars. One of the top two richest people on earth, and now people are talking about him. If he tried to go make the conversation about him first, he would have never gotten anywhere. He would have gotten somewhere pretty quick and then he would have fallen off the cliff. But he has built an unbelievably complex, compounding art machine that just gets bigger and bigger and better and better over time. It's unbelievable

• 47:42Speaker 02

  to watch. And I think you can definitely say that about Disney. You can obviously say that about Steve Jobs. You can say this about a lot of different people in different ways. But again, there's only a few of them that really did it. Both have figured out how to take that soul and put it into a machine that is going to last a lot longer and actually exist in the physical world, whereas you take someone like Nikola Tesla, or Leonardo da Vinci, or someone like that. In my opinion, that's artistry and ideas. And again, unbelievably valuable. But I think the Holy Grail is, who's a little bit more like that? Like the Marcus Aurelius type of thing, where he's a philosopher. I read his book and shit, and like, he was

• 48:27Speaker 02

  leading an army. He conquered shit. He did both, and I think that you have to hold yourself to that standard to do both all the time. Those are the two inseparable muscles that I try to hone in focus on. I think I've gotten decent at it. I want to know right now if I'm one of the greats. The scary part is that if I do, it's a lie because it's not possible and that it has to happen. I'm only going to know this when I'm 65 or 70, if I was actually capable of operating on that level. And again, that's what the world wants. That's what the world is built for. That's what stabilizes things. That's where truth exists and thrives and grows. When you don't

• 49:12Speaker 02

  have that, you just have these, you get on the Forbes magazine for a second and then you're in jail.

• 49:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This whole set of ideas really comes home with the idea of Moon Pals, which I think if you only listened to the first part of our conversation and then laid out these four products and said they were created by four different people, like which one did John create? They'd probably pick Moon Pals because it's much more of building this holistic universe where there's story, where there's characters, a world where there's lots of things that you talked about. But I think it was the last thing that you created. Describe what it is. And then I'm going to ask, where do you go from here? Do you focus on one? You've developed this knack for positioning for searching for this source of consumer truth. Let's close with the Moon Pal story and what you've learned from it.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  So Moon Pals are weighted stuffed animals that hug you. They're five pounds. Their arms wrap around you, mostly for children to help them sleep and feel better at night, but just an incredible little toy. Turns out everyone really loves. To take it a little step further, where again, the progression of my creating consumer brands and consumer experiences, this was the one where I finally was in a position financially to build the chops to a point where I was like, okay, I can actually take a swing with this. So I was like, all right, what's the deepest, most interesting paintbrush I could use for this product that I think is really amazing? So I didn't want to do just teddy bears that were weighted. I wanted to create this whole world. And so Moon Pals are this idea. The

• 50:37Speaker 02

  story is magical creatures that live on the moon. They watch over earth and they sort of are in charge of being everyone's guardian angels while they sleep at night to make sure that they're coming down and giving kids hugs and dreams to keep the world a peaceful, loving place. They're really loving it. It took me like two or three years, hundreds of different sketches to find this little cute alien that I kind of created. It's a new product no one's ever really used before. And it comes with a children's book that I wrote. People are really loving the story. I think when you ask, where does this go? My favorite answer is it never stops. It goes anywhere and everywhere. This is such a universal truth with delivers on such a great promise with people that use it.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  I get calls all the time with people being like, my kid throws out every new toy ever, but the moon pal stays. When you have something that is hinting at something that's so true that people are kids, which is one of the best tests of all time. You want to do a good test, throw your product at kids because they do not know how to lie. And they will tell you if they think it's interesting or not. And this one's passing the kids test. I'm selling a lot of stuff to animals right now, learning a lot about the toy business. We're doing Comic Cons, we're doing pop ups. Maybe I make a movie, maybe like a game, maybe I make a soft drink. There's a bunch of different ways that I can go and scale this story. I went into monk mode the last six months.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  I just wrote a script that I love that really tells this story about how important it is to do a lot of what I was just trying to explain here of follow your heart. Don't listen to the voices in your head that are constantly telling you all these things. Hey kids, it's okay. Follow your heart. Getting back to this idea of doing the right thing, the right true thing and leading with love and getting back to this super deep core universal truth. And I think that's something that's like really, really missing in the world of children's stories right now. I have four other worlds that I'm characters and stories that I'm building out. And I've set myself up to follow this path in a very unique way.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  You know, I had no investors, no board, no anything. They're all bootstrap companies. We can do whatever we want, whenever we want. I think to go make a movie or go do the next big thing of a game or a circus or something, capital will come into play at some point. But I think right now, my biggest competitive advantage is that. Moon Pals will sell forever. There is always going to be someone, a kid that picks that thing up, hugs it and says, mommy, I want one. That will not ever change. It will never go away. The story of, hey, there are magical creatures that live on the moon that are gonna watch over you and protect you. I'm pretty sure that one's not ever getting old. I can let this magic moment that I believe I've created

• 53:31Speaker 02

  exist in its true form and I don't have to taint it and I don't have to grow it. And I don't have to artificially inflate it and I can let it live pure and truly until the right moment comes along where it's like, hey, let's go make an Oscar winning movie.

• 53:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think that investors in general undervalue IP? A lot of this, what we talked about today, something about IP as like a through line. Do you think that people just have this concept? They underestimate how powerful it can be?

• 54:02Speaker 02

  I think they have, and I think when I was talking about this five years ago, no one really believed me. Now it's becoming a lot more clear, especially where we're at in the world of technology. Nothing is really being invented. So the thing that you invent is myth and character and experience. People are figuring out that this is an incredibly valuable layer to invest in. I still think people are dramatically underestimating it. All this stuff with what happened with NFTs and blockchain, the capital went and chased these infrastructure plays and it's like, okay, cool. Show me the thing that the five year old sees and loves.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Oh my God, Ford ape went crazy and billions of dollars are traded. Amazing. That's cool for three months. If the Charizard card no longer trades at $300,000 and goes to zero, I don't give a shit. Because it was the best game I've ever played growing up and I fell in love with the Pikachu card without anyone ever telling me anything about it. And there's hundreds of millions of kids that agree with me. So this whole idea of, oh my God, there's value here. That cat got out of the bag. I think people are still dramatically underestimating where that value exists, how to capture it and how to build on it. I think the way that people are building these consumer companies and the things that they're building around is still, they're not hitting the nail on the head.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  And if you do hit the nail on the head and you're able to operate on not a 10 year venture bet, but you're saying, hey, I'm going to make things that are going to last forever. That is not only going to compound on your balance sheet while you're alive, but your kids and your kids' kids are going to be getting a royalty check forever from this. Do you want to sign up for that? That starts to be interesting. And I actually think that's where the world is going to be going a little bit more. And it's going to be fairly obvious. I truly believe IP in the way that I'm describing it. And who figures this equation out is actually a trillion dollar opportunity. It is going to be the magic makers over the next 10, 15 years.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  It's not going to be the coders, in my opinion, or at least in this slice. I am less interested in winning the lottery. And to me, that's a lot of what this short term deliver value to shareholders, this and that. And I want to actively avoid playing the lottery. Cause everyone that plays lottery goes fucking crazy and loses it and it's not good for anyone. And I think those mechanics are going to become less interesting to investors. And it's going to be a little bit more clear that playing on a longer timeline, attracting this new form of talent that is incredibly unique. Everyone on my team can run basically the entire company. They are expert generalists.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  I have the most talented people because I've set up this environment that enables this new form of execution around this really light, malleable, quick lean.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Organism and that's selecting an entirely different type of talent. And I think that's going to be the most valuable thing going forward or people that understand that the person who stays the closest to the consumer is going to capture the most value. And how you do that is going to be creating things that people really love. And how you create things that people really love is you have to make these really magical experiences that have a personality, a thing, a experience, a world, a rule, a belief system, a myth. And the existence of all of those things is going to be a character IP.

• 57:53Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What do you think about, you said a little bit about it earlier in terms of like the role of the founder as a character in the story, but that the cardinal sin is mistaking the role of shepherd for the role of idea or product. Say a bit more though, about what you think is the right or effective role of the entrepreneur, the artist, whatever label you want to put on the creator of different types in this new world, because it does seem like some of the most successful people have figured out that if the founder or the artist or something is a bit more a part of the story themselves. It's like a force multiplier. Maybe say like, if you were advising, let's say your friends who are starting a company, how would you tell them to build and engage with an audience, if at all?

• 58:37Speaker 02

  I think this is where we're heading to a really interesting time where it's like, the things that are going to be valuable are the things that you can't really teach or copy. And that's just going to be like, how do you teach someone how to be someone's good best friend that's entertaining? I don't know. Can you? I would say if you are an intelligent, personable, funny, charismatic person, that is an unbelievably unique asset that is more and more rare in the world that we are headed in. And you better figure out how to insert yourself into the organism of the company that you're building, because that can be a very valuable force multiplier to get you attention in very unique ways that did not really exist. But I would say caution, because if you let that get out of whack, you're going to get killed.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  I think it's a very, very delicate balance. And I also think it's going to be really obvious when people are doing this. With the intention of coming up with a formula of how to maximize shareholder value, it's so obvious when someone starts a podcast because they think it's going to help them build their audience. It's just so obvious. You're one of the only podcasts I listen to. Why? Because you're the best interviewer ever. You have a very, very unique ability to interview and make me feel incredibly comfortable to explore these things in my head and ask these very, very poignant questions. That's super rare from an interviewer, which is why you have one of the best podcasts out there. If you tried to teach me how to do that, you couldn't do that. But because you can do that, I would

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  say, holy shit, I'd druple down on that. That will give you, because no one else can do this, this will give you an advantage on being everyone's best friend. That's the best person at asking questions to the most interesting people. And oh, by the way, I want to meet X, Y, and Z. Now you're in that top 150 range that I was talking about, and you're going to get that deal flow. So it's like, how do you position your strengths in a way? And yeah, I think personality, and I think how you make someone feel is an incredibly unique attribute that everyone has. And if you can figure out how to inject that into the company, it's going to make your company way more valuable. And I don't think it's something that people have the choice to. I've been running away from this.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  I don't want to be famous. I actively do not want to be famous. If I create something big enough, will I be forced to be a part of that narrative? Yes. But do I want to be? I'm trying to make Moon Pals. I want everyone in the world to know what Moon Pals are. I don't care whether or not they know who I am. I think having a couple hundred thousand followers on Twitter is pretty powerful. That's not fame. That's a nice edge. That's a nice tool that can get you into some pretty interesting places that can give you a really interesting leg up. But that's not the thing.

• 1:01:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Maybe now's the chance to ask you about Beaver. So this was your first encounter, I think, with personal magic. Maybe just describe why that was impactful on you and what you learned working for him.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  That sounds a little bit random, but it wasn't as random as it sounds. I was a jazz drummer my entire life. I went to NYU on a jazz scholarship. I was playing music. I was a musician. And then when I figured out there was a bigger world out there in New York City, I was like, okay, who's doing this? Who's making the music that's gonna last forever? Clearly wasn't the 10 people that I was playing with at the basement of Smalls. Love jazz clubs in New York, but people have moved on. And I put my finger on two people. I was like, okay, 20 year careers. I think it's probably gonna be Bieber. I think it's probably gonna be Kanye. So literally every night I went out and tried to meet their teams. I was emailing them nonstop. And then one night I literally ran into Scooter, who was Justin's manager. And I was like, yeah, come on, dude. Answer my email.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  And we had a very fun conversation. He was like, I love this. This is gonna be a great story. Is literally what he said. He goes, this is gonna be a great story someday. I'll give you a job if you can get to LA tomorrow or whatever. And I was like, deal. I dropped out of school, went to LA, and then I was just driving Scooter and Bieber and Usher around and like cooking them burgers and everything. And immediately got sucked into this crazy vortex of a global presence. I kind of had this idea that I was stepping into the manufacturing machine of pop. One of my jobs was to go find new artists. I tried to find a few new artists. I was managing an artist at that point.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  I found another artist and I would bring them into the office and I'd be like, let's do this. Let's sign this guy. And it'd be like, no. And I'd be like, wait, why? You have the machine. Just put it through the machine. I had met Bieber at that point. I was there for like a couple of weeks before I actually met him. One of my jobs was to throw Scooter a barbecue every Sunday where he would have this nice little fun thing where gathering and business and fun and play and all this. That was when I first met Bieber and he walked in.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  And came up to me, never met before, came up to me, dot me up, was like, bro, instantly I was like, yo, are we best friends? We just ran to the beer pong table and we started playing beer pong together. I had this crazy immediate connection with him. And I was like, oh my God, no, no, this is not manufactured. This is real. I was like, this kid is the most charismatic, talented kid, and I'm witnessing it. He felt like a different presence and it was like, oh, oh, this is not fake. This is true magic. What this kid does, no one can do. No one can do what he can do in the way that he does it.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  The intensity and the competitiveness, all while being wrapped up in this energy where I immediately felt like I knew him forever and we were best friends. Guarantee you, if he walked past you on the street today, you have no idea who it was. But like in that moment, I felt like I knew him forever and it was very clear that magic was real. What Scooter always says is, you have to believe. Again, my cynicism at that point in my life, you know, I was an asshole 19 year old. I was like, oh, this is just marketing. And he's like, no, you have to believe. And I was like, huh? And then I left there and was like, why isn't any of this stuff working? Cause I don't believe in it.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  I'm trying to be the master puppeteer to pull one over on the market, but the market is super real. I remember I didn't sleep for like two nights when I had this realization where I realized why Beaver was who he was and why Scooter had built what he had built. And the reason why was that because it was such an anomaly of magic coming together that they had something that no one else in the entire world had. It was the scariest realization I've ever had in my entire life. I didn't sleep the entire night. I remember pacing around my room, writing on chalkboards and literally on my wall being like, I have to find something that the world has never seen before. And I need to make something in a way that they've never experienced.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  And if you don't have that, you don't have anything. That's really, really, really scary. When Gravity Blanket happened, that was the first time I had something that the world really had never seen before or experienced in that way. And it was just so obvious.

• 1:05:53Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You've talked to a million people that are, would be magic makers. Is there anything shared in common across them that you find yourself now looking for? Like if you're sussing somebody out, meeting them for the first time, that makes you think, ah, this person might have this in them, this person might not. Is it something that some people have and others just don't? If that's the case, for the ones that do, what are the signposts of it that you've uncovered?

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Unexplainable. And that's what I think is super interesting. You know, you know. I actually think that this is something that we've convinced ourselves on a larger scale to convince ourselves not to believe in that. When you see something, magic, you know. You're taught to say, no, no, no, no. Find the thing. Give me the rules. And it's like, no, man. Have you ever felt this before? You haven't? Is he making something new? Is he saying shit that's making you feel something that you've never felt before? If that's the case, then he's probably going to be able to do that with a lot of people on earth. Does he feel like every other Ivy League founder that's doing this because

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  they found a spot on a whiteboard that met at the crosshairs of market opportunity? That sure feels safe. That doesn't feel like fucking magic. I think a lot about this. I don't think about this stuff in terms of myself. I think about this in terms of, a lot of it comes down to hiring a team. If you meet everyone on my team, they all have very similar energies and they're all incredibly talented in very, very similar ways. I said it to Brett the other day where I was like, if I can have a conversation with them and I don't see a sparkle in their eye when I talk about how Shad A is a thousand year artist and why doing X, Y, and Z on a supply chain saved the company $200 million?

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  And how amazing is that? If their light isn't beaming on both of those conversations, they are not for me. And I can't tell you. That is an inhuman conversation that I have to trust my gut that they have this unique soul. And I want to take those bets over and over and over again. And I want to find those people and I want to enable those people and I want to create a thing for those people to thrive in. Whereas the conversation I have all the time with my employees, I actually think I'm a really bad boss in a lot of ways because I don't think I really have any titles for these guys. My conversations with them is, what are you the most excited about? What are you the best in the world at? How do we do that over and over and over again and build systems where that shit works? Those moments are where the magic comes from.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  If I gave them a script and said, I want you to do this, this and this and this. And this is going to be your role and you are this and that, it gets squandered. Why should a thousand year artist? Oh my God. Simple, simple test. Listen to her albums. It's crazy. If you actually listen to her music, it's really hard not to like, lose yourself and kind of tear up and have the like out of body experience. Very simple question. When was her music recorded? Was it recorded yesterday or 70 years ago? It was recorded a half a century ago. It sounds like a new thing that came out yesterday. You show me a Beatles record? I know that that was recorded in the 1960s.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  You know who else is like this? Bob Marley. I think Bob Marley is one of the best artists of all time ever because what he did, he embodied love. His music is literally like sunshine and love. There is not a place on earth where you can play a Bob Marley song and people get sad. Everyone's just like, you know what? I love you, man. It just brings that out in people. And again, same thing. When did Bob Marley record those tracks? If you told me yesterday, I'd believe it. If you told me 100 years ago, I'd believe it. There's this transcendent magic that happens. That type of framework is how I try to make decisions when I'm designing my beanbag.

• 1:09:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I was talking about all these different domains, whether it's music or we haven't talked about athletes so much, but entrepreneurs, artists, singers, it's cool how many different domains there are examples in. Are there any other people that really have animated you like studying regardless of domain that we haven't talked about?

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  I've always said I don't care what I do or what it is that I do. I care that I am operating in the stratosphere. And if you look at the people in the stratosphere that make it to that crazy, universal truth level, they all act in very, very similar ways. And they all sort of have this really similar energy. And it's really fun meeting them because it's like very lonely to exist on this path in this way. It's very hard to like be around people and rub them the right way and still be yourself. And I guess to go back to your other question, what do you look for? I look for this feeling of just, I can finally say what's in my brain. I can finally have a conversation with them.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  And you feel like you tapped into this box that's so much bigger than you, this fractal version of what you've been trying to do your whole life, speaking a language that they sort of understand. One of the first dudes that I met, it was one of my idols. I went up to him and was like, super scared, like, oh my God, how do you know? How'd you do this? How'd you do this? And he just giggled, literally threw his head back and laughed and then looked at me and goes, look, kid, you got it. And you'll either figure it out or you won't. And then threw his head back and laughed again. And I was like, oh my God, that was the scariest shit I've ever heard in my life. They just have this sort

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  of paradoxical energy of nothing matters. And because nothing matters and nothing can hurt you except for death. We're going to do everything perfectly. But I think that would probably be the through line of the similarities that I feel with these types of people is this overwhelming sense of paradox. They exist on total polar opposites where you're constantly asking yourself, are they genius? Or are they insane? Are they an idiot? Or are they the smartest person I've ever met in my life? Are they lying to me? Or is this the truest thing I've ever heard in my fucking life? This idea of polar opposites on an archetypal sense that sort of just zooms you in.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  I think you can say the same thing about Mickey Mouse. You can say the same thing about these characters that transcend time and space forever. Superman, there's total paradox in him. That's the thing that you can't look away from. He's this scared dude that turns into this guy that's trying to figure out who he is and where his place in the world in, while his place in the world is to be the one that saves it. That paradox that he's constantly torn by is the thing that gets your attention.

• 1:12:46Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think that everyone could productively do this archetype mapping for themselves or their thing? Like when you said Marley equals love, maybe if it's two words, it's sunshine and love. Have you done that exercise?

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  I think these archetypal frameworks are interesting to create. I don't think that they're interesting to try to put on yourself. I think this idea of self and identity and self-love is similar to practicing schizophrenia. It is not real. It is not healthy and it does not help you become who you become. You become who you become through movement and motion and following a set of beliefs that puts you in motion. You don't get to become great by saying, I'm great. I identify as great. That's not for me to decide.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  All of this shit that I'm saying, we'll look back on this in 20, 30 years and it'll be super clear if I am actually a creator or if I just was a fanboy.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  And I won't be able to convince you. We both will just know. It'll just be so obvious. And to me, that is identity. These things that people try to put themselves into, to me, it's so much pent up energy in the wrong direction. Don't look inwards. Look outwards. Serve something bigger than yourself. Do not try to make yourself happy. Try to make someone else happy. And paradoxically, that is what's going to make you the happiest. You're not going to find love by figuring out what love language you are and who's going to give you that love language. It's like, no, you find that by making a choice to love someone every single day. I've

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  spent the last five years or so, as I'm getting to this point in my life, spending tons and tons of time finding people like yourself who I really, really admire, who in my mind have it all. They have the family, they have the wife, they have success and they're on this path that doesn't look like it's going to end. And they all say very, very similar things. Every 75 year old billionaire that has their family together just sounds like the exact same person, which is a contrarian view that I have, which I design and create for is that we are all the exact same. Everyone is the exact same. We're all playing the same game. We're all trying to find love. We're all trying to eat.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  We're all trying to survive. And when those incentives are at the core of our daily life, everyone plays very, very similar games. Think about how different everyone could act. Everyone is doing the exact same thing. If you're focusing on these differences, you're splitting hairs that are just meaningless. And if you start to create, you try to work every day around the core assumption that we are way, way, way, way, way more similar, if not almost entirely identical, than different. In my opinion, you're going to have a lot more success.

• 1:15:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So just to play that back to you, the notions of a personality typing or a focus on one's own identity as a unique thing to be cultivated and cherished in contrast to others, all of these things are actually dangerous.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Yes, I think they're mostly fools errands that have very quick feedback loops. You're kind of breaking rule number one, don't turn yourself into the product. You can't craft yourself. You can submit to something and serve that, but you can't craft yourself. Being in the Hollywood world, it was a lot of these conversations where it was like, the product should be a blanket. When I would try to manage my artists, it was like, I don't want to make you the product. This is weird. I don't want to tell you how to do certain things. That's a weird thing, like you are becoming the product. And that's a super, super dangerous thing. And what you're talking about with these things, like you're trying to craft yourself. And that is essentially what celebrities do.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  And just really pay attention to celebrity. How many people go on these crazy runs where they are the thing for like a year? There's 50, 60 new names that come up every year where you're like, oh my God. And then they're gone. So what is that guy doing? Was that really worth it? Was that the game that he wanted to play? Was that the game he should have played? Or should he try to do something a little different, a little bigger? All these artists that ride these fame waves, they all crash until they come out with a hit again. So if they lose sight of that, it really doesn't matter what the personality game is they're playing. If they make a hit, they're back on top. So does it really matter what games?

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  I think like Frank Ocean and Adele do this really well. They go into a hole for 10 years and then they just emerge. They drop literally generational defining music and then they disappear. It's like, wow, that dude is a light maker. That dude is making magic and he's not the product. He's cool. I want to hang out with him. I was in LA the other day and I had lunch next to him. There was not a bone in my body that would let me go up to him and be like, dude, can I get a picture? Because he was not the thing.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  He did the honorable thing of making himself smaller to a larger thing he believed, which is the art. And when someone makes that humble decision, I trust them and I treat them like a real person. And if he's sitting there crafting these archetypal things of what he's gonna do to make himself stand out as a personality, this and this and this, I don't trust him. He might get my attention for a year, but I'll, I'm not messing with that guy on a 10-year timeline. Until he comes out with a generational defining hit, and the second he's capable of doing that, he's gonna realize that the other shit doesn't matter at all.

• 1:18:52Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So this has been so much fun. Tons of ground covered, very, very, very different conversation from the ones I usually have here, which makes it much more interesting. You know, my traditional closing question, what's the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Kindest thing anyone's ever done to me, I would say, is moments where someone blindly took a leap of faith and trusted me and sort of opened up their world to me. And I would say there's two defining moments that really stand out for me. I would say Scooter taking a chance on a kid that walked up to him on the street and said, "Hire me." The next day, I was in his home, and that really, really, I bet he barely remembers a word, a moment that we had together. But just being let into his world and him trusting that I could handle that, him being in the position that he was and letting literally a kid off the street, when I look

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  back on that, I'm like, whoa, that is crazy. That was unbelievably nice and special. And then, at the same time after that, how I sort of existed for about a year and a half was, I basically made a deal through a fake website that I made that described if I could stay on your couch for more than a month, you'd win a prize when I made it, that we would all go on vacation together. And I think it was like 18 dudes who were friends of friends, signed up and literally let me stay on their couch for a month, which is the only reason why I was able to survive for a year and a half to find Gravity Blanket the first success.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  Again, dudes who were just down for the cause, who were just like, you know what? This kid's trying. I'm gonna open up my house to them, and they literally just let me stay in their house for a month. I made good on the promise. We all went to Mexico. We had the best weekend of our lives. Eighteen strangers were immediate best friends in like 10 minutes. It was the best thing ever. The Bermuda list shout out. You inviting me on stage. We don't know each other. You had no idea, but you giving me a spot on that stage at your conference and just taking a chance on me. Like, I can literally say that moment inside, that really changed me. And I would say, I've had a few moments with Gabe like this. I think when

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  another person openly opens their arms and sort of lets you into their secret thoughts and house. When they let you in in that way, I think that's super, super rare. And I think that that would be the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you. Besides, you know, parents.

• 1:21:31Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Parents.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  Obviously.

• 1:21:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  John, thanks so much for your time.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  Dude, thank you so much. Thank you for having me, man.

• 1:21:38Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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