#715: Chris Beresford-Hill — A Master Ad Man on Superbowl Confessions, How to Come Up with Great Ideas, Cold Emailing Mark Cuban, Doing Naughty Things, Poetic Mind Control, Creative Process and Insider Tips, How to Negotiate with Bosses and Clients, and The Power of a Stolen Snickers

Brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim high-yield savings account, LMNT https://drinklmnt.com/tim electrolyte supplement, and Nordic Naturals https://www.nordic.com/products/ultimate-omega/ Ultimate Omega fish oil. Chris Beresford-Hill https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisberesfordhill/ is one of the most sought-after creative leaders in advertising and has led brands with a combined market cap of over $1 trillion. He was recently named Chief Creative Officer of the Americas at BBDO Worldwide. Previously, Chris served as North America President and Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy and Chief Creative Officer at TBWA\Chiat\Day. His work for clients like Guinness, Mtn Dew, Dove, Workday, Adidas, FedEx, McDonalds, HBO, and Foot Locker has driven sales while putting dent after dent into pop culture. Chris and his teams have won every award for creativity and effectiveness many times over, including five campaigns in the permanent collection at MoMA. He has been named to Adweek’s list of best creatives — Adweek’s Creative 100 — Business Insider’s Most Creative People in Advertising, and the Ad Age 40 Under 40, back when he was under 40. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim! What is LMNT? It’s a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix http://drinklmnt.com/tim. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this and usually use it 1–2 times per day. LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or Paleo diet. If you are on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/Tim came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can get a free LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/Tim Sample Pack with any purchase. This special offer is available here: DrinkLMNT.com/Tim http://drinklmnt.com/Tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/tim! Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 5% APY—that’s the Annual Percentage Yield—with the Wealthfront Cash Account http://wealthfront.com/tim. That’s more than ten times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 5% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus http://wealthfront.com/tim with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim http://wealthfront.com/tim to get started. * This episode is also brought to you by Nordic Naturals https://www.nordic.com/products/ultimate-omega/, the #1-selling fish-oil brand in the US! More than 80% of Americans don’t get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body can’t produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor-recommended Ultimate Omega fish-oil formula for heart health, brain function, immune support, and more. Ultimate Omega is made exclusively from 100% wild-caught sardines and anchovies. It’s incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste. All Nordic Naturals’ fish-oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form—the form naturally found in fish, and the form your body most easily absorbs. Go to Nordic.com and discover why Nordic Naturals is the #1-selling omega-3 brand in the U. S. https://www.nordic.com/products/ultimate-omega/Use promo code TIM for 20% off your order of Ultimate Omega. * [00:00] Start [09:45] How Chris landed his first job with the help of Mark Cuban. [16:28] Lessons learned from first boss Lance Jensen. [20:37] Writing cold emails that work. [25:27] What Chris's dad taught him about workarounds. [34:41] A golf strategy that inspired Super Bowl aspirations. [37:07] Good taste and the Modernista style. [41:22] Portfolio building. [45:15] How Chris landed his first Super Bowl ad. [58:46] Editing and expectations. [1:02:58] Critical acclaim. [1:03:35] Working with BBDO's David Lubars. [1:06:51] Working fast and resisting the urge to "gild the lily." [1:09:45] Shining a light on the Super Bowl LIV Mountain Dew commercial. [1:15:48] The value of the vaguely naughty mindset. [1:19:35] Making less more with Tor Myhren. [1:21:59] The Adidas/Billie Jean King gambit. [1:32:34] A Napster campaign crashes. [1:38:54] Creative industry-related reading and viewing. [1:45:11] Overcoming creative roadblocks. [1:49:10] What Chris does in lieu of meditation. [1:53:34] Books and videos that save lives and inspire curiosity. [1:58:20] Best investments of less than $100. [2:00:46] Capturing and saving good ideas for later. [2:06:21] What words are worth. [2:11:26] If the idea is good enough, there's always more money. [2:13:00] Give Chris a Foot Locker and he'll take a mile. [2:18:40] An ego check. [2:23:16] Chris's billboard. [2:24:17] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals, the number one selling fish oil brand in the US. More than 80% of Americans, that's probably a lot of you listening, including me, because I do measure my omega-3s, do not get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body cannot produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor recommended, and in fact, this brand was recommended to me by one of my doctors, Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula. So the Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula for heart health, brain function, immune support, and more. It's incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste. So I have been taking Ultimate Omega for the last two months or so,

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  and this fishy aftertaste issue has been a problem for me. And it's actually with other brands induced some nausea after a few days. And Ultimate Omega has been as clean as a whistle. I've had no issues whatsoever. And if you are vegetarian or prefer to alternate, I ended up alternating two products. And that is number one, the Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula, and also the Algae Omega, which is plant-based EPA and DHA. That's also from Nordic Naturals. So I end up getting both of those products, and it has improved my recovery from workouts. It's improved my sleep. It has improved my mood. And I know that because I pulled out a lot of other variables. In any case, back to the read.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  All Nordic Naturals fish oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form, the form naturally found in fish, and the form your body most easily absorbs. Their Ultimate Omega Fish Oil is offered in soft gels, liquid, and zero sugar gummies. Nordic Naturals fish oils are Friend of the Sea certified and sustainably made in a zero-waste facility powered by biofuel. They're also non-GMO and third-party tested, surpassing the strictest international standards for purity and freshness. Want proof? You can visit their website, where they provide certificates of analysis for every one of their products. So go to Nordic.com, N-O-R-D-I-C, Nordic.com, and discover why Nordic Naturals is the number Number one selling omega-3 brand in the US.

• 2:12Tim Ferriss?

  And while you're there, use promo code TIM, T I M, for 20% off of your order. That's N O R D I C dot com and code TIM for 20% off of the fish oil with no fishy aftertaste. All upside, no downside. Try it out.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

• 2:37Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L M N T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike. And I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it. Or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 3:21Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L M N T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita, but for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R O B B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked and bam, company was born.

• 4:05Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And A lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams, as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. It's winter, folks, and in these colder months, it's snowing outside as I speak.

• 4:49Tim Ferriss?

  I also really enjoy Element's hot flavors. And you gotta do it hot, because it's cold outside. Chocolate caramel, chocolate chai, chocolate raspberry, and chocolate mint. I notice a difference in my mental and physical energy when my electrolytes are dialed in. And I'm doing a lot of skiing right now, for instance, getting out and hiking with my dog. I'm always taking electrolytes, especially if you're at altitude, or it's dry, or anything else, and you're losing a lot of water. And I highly recommend you check out Element. Element came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Simply go to drinkelement.com/tim. That's drink L-M-N-T dot com slash tim to claim your free Element sample pack. I literally have one on my kitchen counter right now that I've been using in the mornings.

• 5:33Tim Ferriss?

  So, go to drink L-M-N-T dot com slash tim to claim your free Element sample pack with any purchase and try every flavor. That's drink L-M-N-T dot com slash tim for this exclusive offer. One more time, drink L-M-N-T dot com slash tim. Check it out. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 5:56Speaker 03

  No, we're the soon appropriate time.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 6:13Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out the habits, routines, techniques, favorite books, so on and so forth, that you can apply in your own lives. And I interview people from all different disciplines. And guests could be from all different disciplines. They could be from the military, they could be from business, they could be from entertainment, they could be from academics, research, chess. In this case, I would say the creative arts. Now, the guest, Chris Beresford-Hill, is best known as a creative leader in advertising. He's an admin. He's a very, very good admin. He started off as an unpaid intern. The journey is wild.

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  His technique's highly effective, but he's not just an admin. This conversation is really about coming up with good ideas. How do you come up with original and good ideas that not only can, say, sell product, but also change narratives, change stories, change the stories people tell, change culture on some level? And I loved this conversation. So let me get to the bio and then I will give some teasers. Chris Beresford-Hill is one of the most sought-after creative leaders in advertising and has led brands with a combined market cap of over $1 trillion. He was recently named Chief Creative Officer of the Americas, BBDO. Previously, Chris served as North America President and Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy

• 7:38Tim Ferriss?

  and Chief Creative Officer at TBWA, Chi-Aid Day. His work for clients like Guinness, Mountain Dew, Dove, Workday, Adidas, FedEx, McDonald's, HBO, and Foot Locker have driven sales while putting dent after dent into pop culture. But it's not just these huge brands. We also get into the early stories of how a cold email to Mark Cuban changed the game for him completely. So we do talk about the super scrappy, bootstrapped, very, very novice days when he made a mark and slowly built his trajectory up to the stratosphere. Back to the bio. Chris and his teams have won every award for creativity and effectiveness many times over. They even have, and I didn't even realize this was a thing, five campaigns in the permanent collection at MoMA.

• 8:21Tim Ferriss?

  He has been named to Adweek's list of best creatives, Adweek's Creative 100, Business Insider's Most Creative People in Advertising, and the Ad Age 40 Under 40, back when he was under 40. And you can find Chris Beresford Hill on LinkedIn. That is the best place to connect. And we'll link to that in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast, but it is linkedin.com/IN/ChrisBeresfordHill, B-E-R-E-S-F-O-R-D-L-I-L-L. And this episode touches on just about every aspect of creativity, and also using positive constraints. How do you operate with positive constraints to make yourself more unorthodox, more effective? How do you find sort of the gap in what is right in front of you

• 9:06Tim Ferriss?

  to see what other people have not seen to create something that takes off, that goes viral? How do you do this? How do you develop a reliable toolkit for this? So we not only talk about the ad game, print advertising, Super Bowl ads, that type of thing. We also talk about Metallica. We talk about Conan O'Brien. We talk about South Park. We talk about every possible medium. We also talk about my longstanding interest in effective copy, which goes back decades, and how to use a swipe file and so on. So that's enough preamble. Now, without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation, a very practical conversation with Chris Beresford Hill.

• 9:46Tim Ferriss?

  Chris, welcome to Austin. Nice to see you, man.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  Nice to see you too. Thanks for having me.

• 9:49Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. So we are going to bob and weave and do some improv jazz in this conversation. We're going to wind all over the place. Let's start with a basic, which is how did you land your first job?

• 10:03Speaker 04

  My first job was at a very cool, very trendy ad agency in Boston called Modernista. And I convinced them to let me be an unpaid intern because they were so small, they didn't know how to say no to me coming in and offering to work for free. So I'd just graduated college and I got really lucky because there was kind of no high-speed internet or anything. I just found them in the phone book, literally. And I walked around and it was this cool office. And so I kind of... By virtue of that, I found my way there and they let me be an unpaid intern and they let me write website copy, very web 1.0 copy for General Motors for the Hummer truck when that was brought back with the H1 and the H2. And I decided this was my dream. Maybe write a ton of web copy and that was making me really excited. Maybe do a print ad back

• 10:48Speaker 04

  when there was magazines everywhere. Maybe you put an idea on the back cover of a magazine and that would really be massively fulfilling. So as soon as I got that internship, I just, I had to figure out how to get hired, but they weren't hiring. And it was very, at the time- To go from unpaid to- Unpaid to paid, barely paid. But at that time, and we could touch on this, it was much more competitive to get into the ad biz because they're just, you know, there weren't as many creative options for, for career. So we had an assignment for the Dallas Mavericks 2002 NBA program, like the magazine that, that people would buy when they went to Mavericks games. At the time, Mark Cuban was, was this very, besides just being Mr. Shark Tank, he was this very outspoken NBA owner. He was always criticized in the league

• 11:31Speaker 04

  and the officials and he was always getting fined and it was, that was a big theme. So I wrote an ad and it wasn't a particularly good one. It was okay, but I wrote, even Mark Cuban has nothing bad to say about it with a picture of the truck, which I thought was clever. I don't know if it's really standing the test of time, but I knew that getting a billionaire to give you the rights to their name was probably something that had to be thought through where there's probably some people that would weigh in on that. And I remember this urban legend, again, very like web 1.0, which was that Mark Cuban had an email address that if you could find it and you emailed him, he like wrote everybody back. So I kinda put together a very short, concise email pleading my case. I'm an unpaid intern. This would mean so much if he would let me put this ad into the world. And I made

• 12:13Speaker 04

  a little PDF and I attached it and like, true to magic, about an hour later- Oh wow. He just wrote back and he just said, "Go for it, -m." And so- He summoned the genie. I, he was, you know, he was right, he was there for it. Maybe it was because it was ad about him. He was waiting. Maybe there's other emails he didn't want to write back to, but maybe this, maybe this worked for him. And so I remember I printed out the ad and then I printed out the email from him and I put it underneath and I showed my boss Lance and he laughed at that ad and then said, you know, the requisite, like, we're never going to be able to do it, but thanks, kid. And then, you know, he turned the page and there was the email. And I think that, you know, more than any creative idea I'd ever shown him, and I was doing my best to show him everything, I think. I showed him that I was going to solve every problem with creativity, not just the assignment. And so we, we ran that underwhelming ad, but that

• 12:57Speaker 04

  was enough for him to give me a job offer for $22,500 a year, which was the best job offer I ever got.

• 13:05Tim Ferriss?

  So many follow up questions. So the first is, and you may not recall, but do you have any idea what the subject line was or the gist of the subject line?

• 13:15Speaker 04

  You know what? I don't remember the subject line, but I'll tell you this, I think it was good and considered because I, to this day, I receive a lot of email that's not from people I'm looking to hear from, and I know the power of a subject line. So I think very hard on these things because everything is the communication.

• 13:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  So for example, when I worked at TBWA Chiat Day, I would sometimes cold email clients. We'd have, we'd have an idea for Audible or an idea for IKEA and I would find the client and I would reach out. And I figured out the perfect email subject, which was, "Hi from Apple's ad agency." Because TBWA is Apple's ad agency and my response rate on that was killer. So I've definitely learned that, you know, your first impression is kind of your only impression. So maybe I appealed to his kindness, maybe it was desperate unpaid intern. I don't know. I don't know what, but it was something.

• 14:04Tim Ferriss?

  You appealed to his level of get shit done and he appreciated the chutzpah.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  I hope so.

• 14:11Tim Ferriss?

  It would seem to be the case if he gave you permission. So.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  So if I ever see him, I'll say a very big thank you.

• 14:16Tim Ferriss?

  He may end up hearing through the podcast. So coming back to the phone book, becoming an unpaid intern.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:24Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you choose to focus? Because the phone book has a lot of entries. It's a lot of different types of businesses.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:32Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you choose to pursue this particular company?

• 14:37Tim Ferriss?

  Or at least sector.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  Everything's luck. You can be prepared for it. You can have some gifts, but you're an idiot if you don't think that chance and fate and all those things, because there were a number of ad agencies in Boston and I was sure I wanted to be an advertising creative person. But again, Googling wasn't a thing to do, like the computer with the internet was at the library, you know, and I think, I think it was like yellowpages.com. And I think Modernista was the name of the agency. So that's like, kind of in the middle. That's not like the first one. I think I tried Arnold Advertising in Boston and they didn't want to meet with me. I think I just worked my way down and I think they were, it was just the right place, right time where they were like, yeah, we'll take free labor. You couldn't look up what the client lists were.

• 15:16Tim Ferriss?

  Did you have a pitch or was it, I will do anything if you let me in the door? Or was it more specific?

• 15:22Speaker 04

  It was, I will do anything because I had nothing to offer. And I think later I would get my second job and I would go to someone and now I'm a copywriter and I would say, I will write on your accounts in my spare time if you want. I would, you got to offer whatever you have, but I started out with nothing to offer. So I think I knew I was free labor and I said I would get coffee and I did and I got a lot of coffee.

• 15:44Tim Ferriss?

  We may come back to that. There's a lot of power in being willing to do the small things. Because a lot of folks feel like they're too good for it or too qualified, but we may come back to that. I want to ask you for the program and maybe you already said this and I missed it. Coming up with the even Mark Cuban has nothing bad to say about this particular car. Did they give that to you as an assignment or is that something you just did of your own volition?

• 16:08Speaker 04

  I think I graduated from website copy to the smallest of creative tasks. And so I think there was, you know, you could write the welcome signs for the GM convention and try to make that clever. So there's all kinds of like little things that weren't the big brand stuff and they weren't the big TV spot or any, and that's kind of where all the focus was and you kind of had to work your way up to those things.

• 16:28Tim Ferriss?

  You said that. You have to consider luck. I'm paraphrasing here, which is of course true. There are certain things you can do to increase your surface area for luck to stick to. I'm borrowing that concept from somebody else. I don't know the attribution. And you didn't get a yes from the first few spots or the first few companies you contacted. Did Modernista end up being a particularly good fit or particularly influential in a way you could not have predicted?

• 16:56Speaker 04

  So interestingly, when I kind of found, you know, my own quote unquote voice, Modernista was one of these ad agencies that was very stylish, very European. Everything was very cool and they would put out work that was very avant garde. I think I later became a little bit more mass, a little bit more comedic in the work that kind of came out of me. But what I got at Modernista is the owner was a guy named Lance Jensen. And he, for any ad nerds, you know exactly who that person is because he had written one of the best advertising lines of all time, which is on the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers, drivers wanted for VW. And so he had created that campaign while working in Boston at an agency called Arnold. And he'd done all these famous ads. I don't know if you remember, there was an ad,

• 17:40Speaker 04

  I don't know what the name was, but it's that da, da, da song. And a couple of guys just killing time, driving around in their VW Golf. I think they pick up a chair and they drive around a little further. They realize the chair smells because they picked it up off the street and they let it back out. And they drive around and the line said, you know, the VW Golf, everything you need for your life or your complete lack thereof, or things like that. So there's all these amazing ads and there was years and years of them. And so he had struck out on his own and opened this ad agency unbeknownst to me, Modernista. So when I walked in, they had accrued, you know, there may be 20, 25 people there. But I didn't know that I was going to effectively be interning for, you know, one of the best, most poetic writers in the industry ever.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  So that was dumb luck, but what I got out of that is the one thing you cannot quite step back and get from the start is your taste level. You know, at the end of the day, it is a skill, it is a muscle, it is an ability. But ultimately you're making choices on the ideas you're coming up with and the ideas you're approving and putting forward, and that's all on taste. And I don't think there's anyone on the planet that says they have bad taste. Everyone thinks they have good taste.

• 18:45Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  So I literally stumbled on the doorstep of just one of the most thoughtful, emotional writers ever. So I learned my taste from him and I learned the bar and the standard and I learned what was acceptable and making everything feel brand new and interesting. You know, he could write a line about a car and it would make a car, we know what a car is, but he could make a car sound like this really exciting thing that you really needed to get one of. And that, that's the art of it. So I learned that from him and the best gift you can ever get is a first boss that has great taste or high standards.

• 19:16Tim Ferriss?

  We will come back to taste.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 19:17Tim Ferriss?

  Almost certainly, but I'm going to bookmark that. I'll say a few things and this is context that you did not have before we started recording. But as I began to explore entrepreneurship, almost all of the books that I first read were on copywriting. So Capels and all of the classics. I also bought as many books as I could possibly find and afford on print advertising because at the time, this is, let's call it 2000, 2001, print was still a thing.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:49Tim Ferriss?

  And it is still a thing to a lesser and lesser level, but I was going to be doing a lot of direct response advertising in magazines. So I had swipe files. I had a three ring binder where I collected various advertisements. I also bookmarked a lot of advertisements, one of which was the VW campaign that you just mentioned.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:09Tim Ferriss?

  And I am endlessly fascinated by copy because it's effectively, at its best, I think sort of poetic mind control. The idea that I'm making these sounds that are coming out of my face that are instantaneously registering semi-instantaneously through your senses into your brain and then facilitating thought is pretty wild when you sit down and think about it. And no, I'm not on drugs, people, at the moment, just to be clear. So I suppose my next question is actually bridging the bookends of where we started, which is this cold email to Mark Cuban and then an email that you sent to my team.

• 20:49Tim Ferriss?

  And the reason I think this is perhaps fun to unpack is that a friend of mine asked me earlier today, she said, how many guests have you booked who have cold emailed you? And I thought, and I said, I honestly can't even think of three.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:06Tim Ferriss?

  But your email worked, which one would hope, given your track record, right? And I was like, okay, so like this guy knows how to play the game and he knows how to get my attention.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:17Tim Ferriss?

  He knows how to get it surfaced, at least to my attention. And now we're sitting here. So when you thought about that email, how did you think about crafting that? Or any email like it?

• 21:26Speaker 04

  Honest answer.

• 21:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  I think I have the muscle memory now, so I don't think I had to really sit down. I think I made the connection. I thought, boy, I really, I really want to talk about this with a broader audience and I want to get more people thinking about advertising and I want people to think about it as a career. So I had that thought and then I found my way to you via our mutual friend Zach, because that's the part of it. But you know, the muscle memory for me is not only coming up with ideas, the other muscle memory is actioning and executing them. It's one thing to have all these great thoughts. I know people that are so much smarter and more interesting than me. But it's also pairing that with this, knowing how to do it. So I hope I had a good subject line and I hope I was brief and didn't oversell because no one likes that. And I think that's probably what I would have stuck to.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  I think I was kind of doing what I do.

• 22:15Tim Ferriss?

  I have your email in front of me. So let me share my perception of my read of the ingredients. First thing is you get to the point. It's not six paragraphs of meandering life story. You sort of established that you know, the podcast very quickly, within the first two sentences. And you mentioned very quickly, your credibility. So 21 years chasing the dream to much success and far more failure. Okay. What kind of failure, right? So you're prompting sort of questions. Immediately sizzle reel of some of my career highlights, short sizzle reel, which you can accomplish in different ways, by the way, it could just be a few bullets, but like credibility upfront, in other words. And then, thanks for entertaining this, like here are some macro topics we could talk about.

• 22:59Tim Ferriss?

  So like immediately getting into topics which prompt questions in my mind, including several that I would want answered, not just for my audience, but for myself. As I would say, establishing credibility, yes, you have the connection, but that actually. Is just table stakes.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And particularly if I'm not extremely close to the person making the introduction. If it's someone close, I know they're putting their social capital at risk with me. So it gets, in some cases, elevated by someone on my team. But this is, it's very rare that something like this will convert. But I was interested in exploring, as you led to in the second paragraph of your email, not just the successes, but also the failures.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 23:43Tim Ferriss?

  But first, we're going to look at the nurturing and development of your ability to get things done on the execution side.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Well, before that, by the way, I think in that email, and maybe the big thing about it, because we also, when we pitch as an agency, we show up with 10 people and 100-page deck and our capabilities and the ideas we're going to bring forward. But the thing you never can lose sight of is whomever makes their idea easier to buy, will sell their idea, whoever makes their product easier to buy. So I think anytime either I position the work, or our company, or myself, I try to give you a couple of reasons for a yes, rather than relying on someone else to put together my Cinderella story for me.

• 24:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, you had different headings, too. You had macro topics, and then later on, techniques, truths, et cetera. And these were very well thought through. So in effect, you made it easy to say yes, because they're like, okay, you've done 50% of my research for me, in a sense, which makes the yes easier.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  That's right, there we go.

• 24:41Tim Ferriss?

  And by the way, folks, number one, this is not an invitation for thousands of people to cold email, because, trust me, it's not going to work. I'm giving you the exception to the rule. But what I would say, number two, is that, and then we're going to go to father-son trips, that's going to be next step. So I'm going to precede that by preparing this. And maybe you have discussed some of these bullets before in talks or in pieces you've written, but the work that you did, even if I had not said yes, would be useful in other places. Thinking about your career, your history, the techniques that you've used is not lost if the first person says no, or the second person, or the third person. So I'm just pointing out that it was well crafted and a good investment.

• 25:27Tim Ferriss?

  All right, father-son trip to California, I'm going to use that and let you run with it.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  Yes, this is something I, it is a formative experience that I only really put together a couple of years ago on Father's Day, when I kind of felt like I wanted to tell my father how inspiring he is for me, because, you know, Your dad's your dad, your mom's your mom. I don't often take a step back and let him know the things he showed me when I was young, how much I value them and how much they helped shape me. So when I was 10 years old, we took a father-son trip to California and it was the first time I'd ever been to the West Coast. My father's a teacher. It probably would have been a family vacation, but I think maybe it was like a, let's just send the two of you. And on the docket was we were going to go to Universal Studios and then we were going to go to a water park and then we were going to go to the beach or what have you. And obviously, Universal Studios was the big ticket item because those were really

• 26:14Speaker 04

  expensive and that was the highlight. So we go to Universal Studios and I, my mind was blown. I, you know, grew up a little bit of a shy, reclusive kid. So I did kind of, if I wasn't out playing with the other kids, I was watching TV, I was watching movies. So, so that world was extra important to me as a child. And I'd never been anywhere near where these actors were, where these things happened. And so we took the tram tour and I saw, you know, the actual house from Psycho and the real Mill Valley Town Center from Back to the Future, which was my favorite movie ever. And, and even the empty water tank that was, you know, I still remember this, that was also cross-purpose as a parking lot, but had a giant painting of an infinite ocean behind it. And that's where they filmed the water scenes for Jaws and a dozen other movies and, you know,

• 26:59Speaker 04

  all this stuff. So I was so excited and I just never, in many ways, I've been kind of chasing that rush to production and to sets and to where it's happening ever since. But I mean, the guy walking past the tram with the paint bucket, I wanted to be him because he was doing something. So anyway, it just blew my mind. How old were you at the time? Probably nine or 10. So it blew my mind. So we go home, we go to the hotel and call my mom and report on the day. And I said, look, I know, I know we can't go back, but I would give anything to go back. And, and that was that. And I appreciated it. And then the next morning, my father wakes me up, you know, maybe at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., which is really early to a nine-year-old. It's pretty early for a lot of people. Pretty early for a lot of people. And we get in the rental car and I don't really

• 27:41Speaker 04

  know where we're going. And we drive 20, 30 minutes and we wind up in some kind of a strip mall. And we go into like a storefront, I remember this, and there's like a row of chairs and like an old school projector. I guess the time it wasn't old school, it was just a projector because it was 1990.

• 27:57Tim Ferriss?

  Like overhead transparencies or something like that?

• 27:59Speaker 04

  All that stuff, like the sheets. And it was a four hour timeshare meeting for a new development in Anaheim. And they started, it was a hard sell. I mean, they were coming in, they were talking about, these are going to go fast. And people would raise their hand and get up and buy into it. And then after they left the room, they would like lower the price. And I mean, it was really, I was worried my, I didn't know what was going on. I was worried my father was going to buy one of these things. And so after this whole four hours is over, we go to the front to sign out. And, you know, we were rewarded with two super crisp day passes to Universal Studios. So my father figured out that that was another way to get access. And so we burned rubber, got to the park, and we rode the backlot tour, like until they literally kicked us out of Universal Studios. I think that was what we're getting at with this story was this is, my father kind of taught

• 28:43Speaker 04

  me the definition of creativity, which is really just looking at any situation and finding another way. Because he didn't overextend himself and buy tickets he couldn't afford. He didn't get mad or upset that he couldn't get them. He bypassed all of that. And he was just always going to figure out another way. And that's who he is. And that's how he lives his life. And my father is a guy who kind of has never let his situation ever determine where he was going to go. It rubbed off on me. And in a number of other ways, it kind of made me a little audacious or precocious. And so I was this very shy kid. You know, I was very little and we moved around a lot. So I was kind of, every couple of years, I was the new kid.

• 29:21Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you move around a lot?

• 29:22Speaker 04

  My father is a very ambitious teacher, and he became a headmaster and became a professor, and he pursued a doctorate. So we kind of would move around every couple of years to wherever fit. But it made me, you know, it kind of made me, I think I wasn't a great athlete. I wasn't a great student. I was small. So I felt like, okay, I'm not going to kill it in seventh grade. So I'm going to bide my time. So I probably spent a lot of time observing people, which helped me as a creative person. But what happened is I lived this double life where at school, I was this kind of quiet, nice, invisible kid. And then I would chase my passions and take these moonshots in my personal life. So I loved the New York Knicks. They were great in the 90s. I don't know if you're an old school hoops fan.

• 30:03Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I remember the Knicks.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Okay, Starks, Mason, Oakley, Ewing. I mean, they were, that was an incredible team. And I'd never been to a Knicks game, but I loved them and I never missed watching one. So as I watched it, I absorbed everything. So when Marv Albert would reference that the Knicks had a big day of practice at SUNY Purchase before the game, I banked that. And I happened to have a friend that I would go see. And I noticed that the SUNY Purchase was on the way to his house. So I convinced him to hitchhike there. And then we, no internet, we walked around the campus until we found a giant beige building with like eight Mercedes in front. So we're like, I think this is where the Knicks are.

• 30:41Tim Ferriss?

  Doesn't look like student transport.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Doesn't look like student transport, a giant Mercedes. And we staked it out. And when people started walking out, like trainers, they had those exit only gymnasium doors. I grabbed my friend and we ran for it and we slipped in and practice was just ending. And you could see people were filtering everywhere and a few Knicks were like staying with maybe to work on some stuff. And I don't know what possessed me, but I grabbed a ball and I started dribbling it. And I kind of figured, okay, maybe they're going to think I'm like a trainer's kid or something. And so my friend who I'm coaxing with me, because he's, my friend Steven did not want to do this. So we start shooting and then I swear on my life, Tim, maybe it wasn't as like pronounced or as dramatic as this, but in my memory, I heard a ball slap and I turn around and it's Anthony Mason and John Starks, who were the heart and soul of this Knicks team at center court.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  They go two on two. And so we played, you know, a five minute game. The day before they were playing.

• 31:33Tim Ferriss?

  Straight out of a Disney movie.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Straight out of a Disney movie. The day before they were going to be facing off against Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls at Madison Square Garden. And so I go to school Monday and I'm sitting at the lunch table and everyone's talking about that game. And I can't even tell them because they wouldn't even believe me that I played basketball with them the day before. But my parents supported that. They thought it was great. I know you've had Todd McFarlane on before. I'm a huge Image Comics fan. I grew up loving him and my favorite was Rob Liefeld, who I don't know if you know of. Yeah. He had Young Bloods, but he actually famously created Deadpool among many, many great characters. I would come home from school every day and I found out that the Image Office, I will remember this, was in Venice, California. And so I called 411 and I got

• 32:16Speaker 04

  the number. And I came home from school every single day and I called the number and a woman would pick up and say, "Image Comics." And I said, "Hi, my name is Chris. I'd like to speak to Rob Liefeld." And she said, "Okay, Chris, let me take your number and I'll give him the message." And so I did that and then the phone would ring and it'd be my mom's friend. It was never him. But I did it every day because I just wanted the off chance. Maybe that receptionist was going to be sick one day. Maybe she'd have some mercy. Maybe he'd pick up the phone himself, but I was, had to talk to him just for the contact. I just needed that. So later that year, we went to the Jacob Javits Center for the New York Comic Con, which was a very big deal. And this must've been like 1990 or 1991. Yeah. And instead of just, you know, going in with our tickets, I had to enhance my

• 33:01Speaker 04

  surface area for something magical to happen. So again, my poor friend Steven, I don't talk to him that much anymore. The voice of reason who is shackled to this. Steven, God bless you. Out of control. I think we convinced, I think it was my parents at the time should drive us in early and we, with like a few, like maybe 10 or 20 people, we went to the service entrance of the Javits Center where there were some barricades. And at this time, comics were big. Limousines were showing up and these guys were, you know, getting out with their teams. And so I was here for it. I wanted that chance to see them. And, you know, lo and behold, like the Image crew roll up and at this time, they were really the, you know, Marvel was the old school and Image were these, these bad boys and they'd all Exodus and it was Jim Lee and it was Todd McFarlane. It was Rob Liefeld or whatever. So they all

• 33:42Speaker 04

  walk out. So I start yelling to get attention, just like everyone else. And I swear to God, Tim, this woman walks up to me because I'm yelling and she goes, "Are you Chris?" And I was like, "Yes." And she was the woman that had answered the phone there. With the patience of a saint. With the patience of a saint. And this is when I said I was like little. She like lifted me over. So at the barricade. And they brought me in and I got to sit behind the table with those guys for the whole morning and Stan Lee came by, you know, and I got to shake hands with him.

• 34:14Tim Ferriss?

  Visit from the godfather.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Yes. So all that stuff, I found out where the Dave Matthews Band recorded their albums and I would send a self, a letter and a self-addressed envelope to make it real easy for them to say yes and write back. And he became a pen pal for a couple of years, but then I would go to school and I'd have my too big backpack and be a mediocre student, but I kind of was living this world where-

• 34:32Tim Ferriss?

  You're a superhero in your own way.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I just felt like I was able to create the life of my dreams, even if the day-to-day reality didn't totally match it. And that was fine by me.

• 34:41Tim Ferriss?

  So then we flash forward, you're getting coffee for people.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:45Tim Ferriss?

  At Modernista.

• 34:46Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:47Tim Ferriss?

  Then you catch a break with this amazing email that you get back from Mark Cuban. What is the next sort of quantum leap moment, which might've been at the time seemingly small, but some moment, some experience, some small or big win where you're like, okay, here we go. I think I can be really good at this. Or something that sort of marked as a milestone after that. Does anything come to mind? It doesn't need to be sequentially, immediately after that, but something that ended up being an inflection point, whether you recognized it as such at the time or not.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  It's a good question. I played golf with my father-in-law. I just learned it, so I'm terrible at it. I don't know if you play.

• 35:27Tim Ferriss?

  Terribly.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's fun. It's a nice place to, if you're on a golf course in the morning, life's not bad. But I was taught that when you putt, if the hole is 20 feet away, what you do is you measure 10 inches in front of the ball on the path to the hole. So you don't aim for the hole, you aim for that spot 10 inches in front. And I think that advice landed well with me because I think I kind of had a sense of my dreams, but I was only really looking at the incremental of, okay, I made a Mark Cuban Dallas Mavericks ad. Now what I really want is to write something that's going to be on the back cover of GQ, you know? And that was everything.

• 36:00Tim Ferriss?

  So you had a clear idea, though.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  And it was incremental. I knew that I was not gonna do the, the Super Bowl, you know, my first year. I accepted that. But every time it was, okay, now I'm regularly writing print ads and print headlines. Okay, now I really want to do a TV production. I really want to- Go learn that and do that. And that's bigger and that was that gave you more weight. And as I did that, you know, I slowly accrued a body of work and that's the beauty of this industry is, you know, you can have a resume and you can say whatever you want about yourself, but you actually have a basket of your ideas and you can be appraised on those. So I'd built up just enough to get a job in San Francisco at Goodby Silverstein, which was, I think that was my big break because that was, you know, I was learning my craft in Boston, but I didn't realize that when I went to Goodby, that was a then and now is still one of the greatest

• 36:45Speaker 04

  creative ad agencies in the world. They came up with Got Milk, for God's sake. So, you know, it doesn't get that much better than that. But when I got there, what I realized is I had, I had learned how to write in the modernista style. And that taught me a great lesson, which is that it's not totally about you. Like as an advertising writer, you've got to be a chameleon. You've got to understand, you're not, everything can be your voice. It has to be the correct voice.

• 37:07Tim Ferriss?

  I want to come back to San Francisco, so bookmark for a second. But I've made a promise earlier that I've not forgotten, which is coming back to taste. And I think this may tie into the modernista style. So could you say a bit more about what characterized the modernista style? And just a little bit more about being introduced to good taste? Because there seems to be, this is an overstatement, but a religious divide among creatives where on one side, you have people who think that taste can be taught or cultivated. And on the other side, it's like that is nature and not nurture. You either have good taste or you do not. Now, that might be like two people with different definitions of God debating the existence of God, which is going to go nowhere because they're talking about different things.

• 37:51Tim Ferriss?

  So could you tell us a little bit more about modernista style? What is that? And then good taste?

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Well, the first thing I'll say about it too, is I don't know the nature nurture answer, but I have personal thoughts. But I think Lance, who's still in my life now, by the way, he's still, he was a great first boss, but, but someone I, you know, still talk to regularly. He had a good way of saying, he's very self-effacing, like, like many, many really talented, but the most talented person is usually the Person that's, you know, least boastful and least sure of anything. I've definitely learned that over time and also radically open minded versus. And Lance would say that the Modernista style was kind of, you put an idea out there and the vibe of it is like, that's cool. They really did know how to do one of the hardest things, which is cool is is or isn't. And it's hard to convince of cool, but there was just a way of writing.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  You know, there's an ad for the big H2 Hummer truck at a three quarter angle that made it look like, almost like a piece of jewelry. And then the line on it said, perfect for rugby moms. But it was smart, but it was just kind of badass, kind of, kind of sexy, kind of those things. And so that was

• 38:53Tim Ferriss?

  Succinct also.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 38:54Tim Ferriss?

  Very, very succinct.

• 38:56Speaker 04

  You know, it was very art and copy. It was very tight writing and it was beautiful art direction and that was the hallmark. And that was the box there. And if you came with something that was too wacky or too dry or too intellectual, too much like, maybe like The Economist. Or too much like a big broad Super Bowl ad, it just didn't fit into the kind of clients that were attracted to Modernista and that Modernista serves very well. So I really learned how to find that voice and write in it. And then when I went to Goodby, the four ends of the box just fell down. And I realized like, okay, you could go to Jeff with something that makes someone laugh out loud. Or you could go to him with something profound and the color palette there because of who Jeff and Rich are.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  And because of the amount of the scale and size of the agency and the amount of talent they'd had through the halls over the years. The aperture was just wide, but at that point, I think some level of taste, some level of maybe standards came of like, it has to feel fresh. It has to feel interesting. It has to be succinct, like those kind of lessons were learned. And then you could apply them to goofy things and profound things. But I think it's like the taste and the skills kind of were merged.

• 40:12Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now, a lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can, but I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings, and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. And right now you can earn 5% APY, that's the annual percentage yield with the Wealthfront Cash Account. That's more than 10 times more interest than if you left your money in a savings account at the average bank, according to FDIC.gov.

• 40:52Tim Ferriss?

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• 41:23Tim Ferriss?

  Part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation, and we were talking before we started recording, or you asked me rather, like, what would you be interested in, or what do you think an audience would be interested in hearing? And we discussed a few past podcast guests who are very iconoclastic and have sort of painted a unique path for themselves with seemingly very few constraints, like recruitment would come to mind, one of a kind. And part of my answer was creativity within constraints, because the reality for most people, and the reality for me, more than a lot of people would assume, is that I'm operating with a team, or with contractors, or with deadlines, I have constraints. I think

• 42:08Tim Ferriss?

  a lot of good creativity flourishes with constraints. But when you have a team, when you have a boss, when you have clients, you have to navigate a whole host of different hurdles and challenges than if you're a solo operator trying to be a creator on, say, Instagram or TikTok, which has its own challenges, but they're very different. And I thought that would be fun to explore. So one of my questions, as someone who doesn't know the business at all, really, or very little, as you're building the portfolio, you could have a portfolio that...

• 42:41Tim Ferriss?

  Doesn't pull its weight after a few years. There's the possibility you assemble a portfolio that doesn't get you to the back cover of GQ.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:48Tim Ferriss?

  That doesn't get you to Super Bowl ads. How did you think about, and I'm not sure how much agency you have with this, I guess, pun intended, building a portfolio that would get you closer to the hole. It's like, okay, you can measure 20 inches out for that putt, or whatever it might be. How did you think about portfolio construction and making progress towards bigger and more interesting things?

• 43:09Speaker 04

  I suppose it's what you're attracted to and what you love. And I'm not here to say that all of advertising, when you drive past a billboard or flick on Instagram or turn on a TV, it's mostly not good. And in fact, most of it is not even ideas. I think oftentimes it's just information. So there's a lot of it. And I think for whatever reason, my interest in the industry latched on to somewhere in the top 20%, you know, because I don't think I wanted a job in advertising. I think I wanted to express myself in an interesting way and I wanted to put provocative or interesting ideas into the world. So I think I was obsessed with the best of the best. And so I would, in my early years, spend time with award show annuals and look at what the industry said were the best. And I'd form my own opinions and I would say, okay, I think that's okay, but I love that. You know, so I started to shape where I wanted to go with it.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  And then of course you figure out, okay, well, what are the places or who are the people that are doing that and how the hell do I get near them?

• 43:59Tim Ferriss?

  And are those people who are on the creative side? Are those clients? Are those both? How much control do you have over what you do next? One thing you said that surprised me was you came up with an idea for a client and then sort of pitched it to a client who is not already signed with the agency. So I was like, oh, okay, that's interesting. So I would assume in a big agency, it's like, we have these clients and like, here's your assignment.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 44:22Tim Ferriss?

  So I don't know how much control you have in sort of forging your own destiny with new clients, being around new people.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  You know, like anything, I think it's if you are being challenged and if you have all the opportunities under the sun in your current roster, or whatever your workload is, then you. Give your all to that. But if you're feeling like maybe there's a lower ceiling on some of the things in front of you, then naturally, I think you've just got to get proactive. Because again, at the end of the day, when the clock runs out, or when the year is over, whatever you made is what you have to show for it. So if things start to go south, I mean, sometimes there'll be maybe a host of great clients, but maybe the CEO has very questionable taste, doesn't like ideas that are too big or bold or creative. And you've got to account for that. And you've got to kind of hedge on that. You've got to have a lot of irons in the fire. And when you're feeling like things are stagnating or going south, you've got to

• 45:12Speaker 04

  almost invent your own opportunities. So it's a mix.

• 45:15Tim Ferriss?

  How did you get your first Super Bowl ad? How did that happen?

• 45:18Speaker 04

  It's a little bit of the, it may be a nature nurture thing as well. The nurture is my dad, who kind of figured out how to remove obstacles to where he was going. To get a Super Bowl brief is and was a very big deal. But I think maybe 10, 15 years ago, things were much more hierarchical. I think today, it's not uncommon to give big opportunities to all levels of creative people, or any strategist or account people, anyone in the agency. But back then, it was very hierarchical. And I went, and again, this is like the most 1A thing. But I went and I asked for the assignment.

• 45:52Tim Ferriss?

  Can you place us in time? Like, where are you?

• 45:54Speaker 04

  So this would be 2005, in San Francisco, at Goodby Silverstein and Partners. And the previous two years, they'd done a Super Bowl ad for Emerald Nuts. And so I went to the creative director of it. And I said, I very much love this campaign. It's one of the reasons why I was so excited to be here. If you would have me, I will, it doesn't even have to be formally assigned. I would just give anything to work on it. That was it.

• 46:19Tim Ferriss?

  That's a smart way to word it.

• 46:20Speaker 04

  Make it an easy yes.

• 46:21Tim Ferriss?

  Doesn't have to be formally assigned. I mean, that probably simplifies the political slash approvals.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 46:28Tim Ferriss?

  Dynamic.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  And it gives that creative lead. I was scoped for two teams. I just found a third writer. So I did that. And I was fortunate. It was a guy named Steve Simpson, who worked, it was him and Jeff Goodby together. And we got the brief. And the brief was win the Super Bowl ad meter. And that means, you know, to win the popularity contest. So we, peanuts are parody. So just do our peanut ad and make it amazing. And I remember we were sitting in a conference room on the sixth floor and everyone kind of funneled out and I felt like I was so close to this chance to do a Super Bowl ad that I just, I needed it. I had to give myself the best shot to win. So the strategists was one of the last people to leave the room and the strategists are the ones that work

• 47:14Speaker 04

  with the client and they align on like what needs to be communicated, what are the core elements and what do we know about our audience and that kind of stuff.

• 47:20Tim Ferriss?

  So this is not to diminish the role, but it's kind of like an account manager, like they work with that specific client.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 47:26Tim Ferriss?

  To translate their needs and preferences and so on to the in-house creative.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  That's right. To kind of translate the ask from the client into something that might be inspiring in a brief that would get the creatives thinking. And it was a guy named Matt Herman and I remember I kind of grabbed him and he was a nice guy and I knew him socially and I just said, he just tell me, is there anything that I could put in this that would make the client like it even more? And he had said, well, you know, we're having these conversations about maybe thinking about peanuts as like a source of energy, not just like a snack, but something that can give you like a pick me up. And so I took that and then I ran and I wrote 20 scripts, but every single one of them had the peanuts as this source of energy that gave you something, that got you out of something, that protected you from something, but I made them feel like more of a utility, you know, and as

• 48:15Speaker 04

  a result, I kind of gained the system. And then all the ads I wrote were the ones that went forward because they just, they did more. And if table stakes are table stakes, if you can, in anything, creativity or whatever your job is, if you can figure out one more thing that what you're being asked to do could do and you cover everything and that, you're more attractive, you're more appealing, always.

• 48:39Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to highlight also that first you have to have the chops, like you have to have the ability, the skill set to execute, but so much is left on the table by not asking targeted questions. You asked the question, which was like the spell.

• 48:56Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 48:56Tim Ferriss?

  That provided you with the information you needed to use the hook that the client would respond to. All right. What does the approval process or production process in brief look like? All right. So you send off these 20 different scripts.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  I think I had a chance.

• 49:10Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know how long the spot is.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  30 seconds.

• 49:12Tim Ferriss?

  30 seconds.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  So it's, you know, fits in a page. The average 30 second spot is like three quarters of a page in a script.

• 49:18Tim Ferriss?

  How much does a Super Bowl ad cost these days?

• 49:21Speaker 04

  These days, oh, boy, oh, boy. I want to say like a 30 is like six or seven million.

• 49:27Tim Ferriss?

  Six or seven million.

• 49:27Speaker 04

  I think a 60 is somewhere in like the 10 to 12. At this point, I think Super Bowl was the Super Bowl, but I think it was like $8 million in 2005, 2006.

• 49:38Tim Ferriss?

  Non trivial though. I mean, this is a big bet.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  It was a big, also reputationally a big deal for people within the client company.

• 49:44Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 49:45Tim Ferriss?

  So 30 second spot, obviously a huge investment for the company. If not in capital, certainly in reputation.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 49:54Tim Ferriss?

  What happens?

• 49:56Speaker 04

  So I wrote a lot of them and we can chat a little bit later about the techniques, but I spilled my brains and I wrote. The trick when you're coming up with creative ideas, I think everyone has slightly different techniques, but I think the one consistent thing is you have to cajole yourself to release every possible thought you can and get it all out of your head. And then when you think you're empty, you have to trick yourself into coming up with more ideas. You've got to mine yourself. You've got to say, what is the ad I think we should make? What is the absolute wrong ad to make? What is the worst ad to make? What is the ad my hero David Fincher would make? What is the ad Peter and Bobby Farrelly would make?

• 50:38Speaker 04

  My friend Jason has one where he says, what would I do if the laws of gravity and physics were not in place? Like you have to fuck with yourself. And it's almost like trying to make yourself vomit. Basically, I mean, I've never said it that way before, but you got it. You got to get it all out. And then essentially, you know, when you're a babe, when you're young, you bring all that raw material and a creative director tells you what's good. That's how you learn some taste. A good creative director says, these three are the interesting ones. As you get better, you start to be able to sift your own material, but you've got to get all the material out now. 20 plus years in, I think I can vomit in my head and extract the bits. But I think the journey is get everything inside of you out. And then in the beginning, someone tells you what it is. In the middle, you get it out and then you work through it yourself.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  And then in the end, you can have your private vomits. But anyway, so I wrote all kinds of them. And the one that went through, I trapped myself to write it. And a few years ago, I was reading something or I saw an interview, The Artist Kaws, K A W S. I'm sure you have seen his stuff. He does those big kind of vinyl, like Disney looking characters with the X's for eyes. I'd have to check it out. Yeah. All right. Got it. It's really good pop art and he sometimes uses these crazy color combinations. And I, I think someone, it must've been a written question. Someone asked, how do you make sense of these colors? He kind of reverse painted himself into a corner. He would start in a corner with a bunch of colors that didn't make sense. And then he used the rest of the canvas to make sense of it.

• 52:03Speaker 04

  So he forced himself to make sense out of what he did here, all the way here. And that I learned later, but that was just something I would do to myself. So I started writing a sentence and I didn't know what the end of the sentence would be. And I would do that to myself a lot, just to force myself. I would start an answer without knowing what the answer was. And then I would, so. How would you pick the beginning? I would start logically. So I thought about the brief I got to with my friend, Matt, was there's an afternoon energy slump and peanuts are a good pick me up. So I wrote around 3pm when your blood sugar and energy are low. And then I sat there and then I wrote, Robert Goulet appears and messes with your things. And I, I didn't have that idea.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  I just started a sentence and I said, finish it fucker. And so that was again, one of a bunch of ideas, but that was the, the idea was basically to turn Robert Goulet, the now passed, but the iconic crooner and singer of the impossible dream, to turn him into an afternoon poltergeist. And so basically, I think I had also seen that incredible Fatboy Slim Spike Jones video with Chris Walken.

• 53:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  You know, I think many of us saw that and went, oh, my God, I want something like that. So I kind of had the the sentence I wrote, and then I thought, let's make this like a weird kind of dance around an office where everyone's asleep and Robert Goulet is pouring coffee on keyboards and taping people to chairs and just doing whatever. So it's written, and I think another thing, obviously, I show my bosses, and it's Steve, and it's Jeff Goodby, and Jeff Goodby is, in the advertising world, one of the Mount Rushmore kind of figures. So I also learned, if he's 10 times better than me, don't try to sell him on anything. He knows. So I, you know, so I read it. I didn't, I didn't.

• 53:46Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning, let him judge for himself.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, this one's crazy. Oh, you're gonna love this. No, I just, I just, I just said, okay, here it is.

• 53:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, pro tip, don't ever say that.

• 53:54Speaker 04

  No, it's, it's true.

• 53:55Tim Ferriss?

  You're gonna love this.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  No, don't do that.

• 53:57Tim Ferriss?

  Don't laugh too hard at your own jokes. I had a time either.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  So they liked it. I don't think they, you know, I mean, I think they liked it, and they're like, okay, that's cool. And then, you know, what ended up happening again is, you know, the craziest ad ideas are really highly, highly rational strategies brought to life in highly, highly surprising, memorable ways. Because when we went to the client with it, and it was a guy named Andrew Burke, who was the CMO of Emerald Nuts at the time, we had a very literal idea. We had an idea about a little Mick from Rocky kind of coach that would keep you awake in the afternoon and tell you to eat. You know, we had stuff that was a little bit on the nose, but to his credit, he didn't see this weird poltergeist thing. He's like, oh, I get it. We're gonna show people that there's actual danger in being sluggish in the afternoon, and we're gonna make up what that is, and we'll position ourselves.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  So he immediately saw past the kind of insanity of the execution to the strategy. And that, you know, ultimately, a great client does that, and great work does that. And I was talking to my friends Eric and Craig, who did the Old Spice, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. And that is also, you know, a completely batshit idea, but the strategy was, we make body wash for guys, but their lady friends buy it for them.

• 55:11Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  And they said, great, we're just gonna have a hot guy talk to ladies about it. And again, and then they made it entertaining, but it's almost like

• 55:19Tim Ferriss?

  There's a rationale behind it.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's simple and it's bone simple. And then the creativity and the surprising connections you make and surprising things you write, that's the magic, but it's always magic on top of something very simple and easy to understand. It has to be. So to go back to this, so, okay, so we go through it. So it's sold and I will say to this client's credit, it was not over researched or heavily researched. So what they did is they put it in to some quantitative research to show the storyboards. We made some storyboards and a moderator, you know, shared it with a panel of people and it was not

• 55:50Tim Ferriss?

  Panel meaning almost like a focus group?

• 55:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like people there are like, okay, people roughly in the demographic and they, you know, were kind of read the script. It wasn't performed, it was read by a third party. And instead of saying the dreaded, do you like it? Which is how many a great idea gets unraveled. They just said, okay, so what did you see? What did you understand from it? What did it make you understand about peanuts? And, you know, what do you think of Emerald Nuts now? It was very, again, it was asking customers the right questions.

• 56:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  I think sometimes when you, you know, the Henry Ford asked people what they want and they'll say a faster horse. I think sometimes when you ask your audience to tell you what it should be, you get a lot of mirroring, but when you make the conversation about what are you getting from it? Then you can give them something unexpected and you can push yourself. So we did that kind of research. Thank God.

• 56:39Tim Ferriss?

  Those are good questions. It makes me think of something that is maybe only tangentially related, but something Kevin Kelly, who's a friend of mine, who's been on the podcast, who's very wise in a lot of ways, and he has a book of advice, short, pithy lines that started as a list of lessons learned on his, I believe, 68th birthday to give to his kids. And one of them was if people tell you something is wrong, they're almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they're almost always wrong. But people have a gut sense. So I mean, these questions pair well with that insight, I think. Okay. So those questions are asked.

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Those questions are asked and it passes, people say what we wanted them to say. And I think of course, again, maybe the reason why this one sailed through, I have many a horror story was again, Because they got a natural energy message when they had convinced their board they were just gonna entertain. So it was, it was already in the bonus round. So it was, so it was favored. And that gives you that lift so you can move through. So then we hired a director. It was a duo called the Perloren Brothers out of Toronto, Canada.

• 57:41Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing name.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  I don't know where it, Ian and Michael.

• 57:43Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like an acrobatic act from the 60s.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. No, I know. And, uh, and there are these two, you know, former ad creatives that became directors and they got into it and we did a call with Robert and his wife Vera. We can talk a little bit about celebrity advertising because this was my greatest experience because normally celebrities are very, they're very specific on what they will or won't do. And, and there's always some pushes from their team. But Robert just wanted to know if he could choose his own wardrobe and we said, absolutely, sounds good. So we filmed it in Toronto over two days and it was very fun. Again, the client was, um, and this is, you know, probably maybe inside baseball in the industry, but I think sometimes clients become so creative that they mirror the job. But sometimes the best clients are, let the creators be creative and you're

• 58:31Speaker 04

  there to say like, I think this is okay. I'm not comfortable with this. Here's a note on why making this change would actually be more effective, not less. But our client Andrew was just there to supervise and make sure that we were getting the right stuff in the can, protecting his investment, but giving us liberal room to play. So it was, it was a magical shoot. It was right before Christmas and then you hire an editor separately. And so there's an editor named Ian McKenzie who's cuts a ton of Super Bowl ads and he's very good at it. Early January, we go into his suite in the Flatiron in New York City and I'm super excited and he plays it and I'm super disappointed because it's not, didn't live up to all my dreams. I don't know, it feels flat. Is it funny? You know, I could see nothing but the problems with it. And what you end up doing, you know, with the editors, thank, I think back in the

• 59:16Speaker 04

  day, when you had to cut film with a razor blade and use tape, you, you would debate an edit. But because you're doing things and, you know, at the time, final cut, you know, you can try anything. You can make it.

• 59:25Tim Ferriss?

  You can ready fire M.

• 59:27Speaker 04

  You can make it backwards. In some ways, it allows you to explore anything, but maybe in other ways, it takes some of the thinking out of it, which could be a shame. But anyway, we go through a couple of days where we try a whole bunch of different things. We try some different music. We change the order of this little. Afternoon maraud, we experiment. And then what I've learned with Ian, because I've now been working with him for 15 years, ultimately, we start to feel really good about it. Me and the art director I was working with and our producer.

• 59:52Tim Ferriss?

  How much of that was the product changing versus your psychology adapting to the fact that perhaps nothing could live up to the swirling dream of perfection in your mind?

• 1:00:03Speaker 04

  It's the latter.

• 1:00:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's the latter.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're exactly right. And what I've learned with Ian, and I just, for a Super Bowl ad we made this year, I brought a young team for the first time to work with him. So how fun, I'm seeing them get to do what I did 15 years ago. And the advice I gave them is I said, just know, whatever Ian shows you first is going to be closest to where you end. Because that's what I know about you. So we kind of walked around the moon with him. And of course, it was like, maybe some music tweaks, maybe a little bit of tightening up a few moments here, but ultimately he had it. But we had to get our brains to catch up with reality.

• 1:00:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  And of course, at the end of the day, when someone has never seen it, they're going to kind of see the best version of it. But you torture it.

• 1:00:46Tim Ferriss?

  Editors are magicians. I mean, the good editors in any medium are so important, yet so frequently semi-invisible. I think I am getting this roughly right enough, but I believe if you look at Steven Spielberg's films and his greatest hits, the greatest constant, I believe, is his film editor. Yet, how many people could name his name? I wish I could name his name. I've read the story. I've researched this guy. And he is one of the masters at work, again and again.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  More happens in the edit than people think, because it's not lining it up in order. It's speeding up shots, it's arts and crafts, it's punching in, it's the amount of raw stuff we do in the Avid, where we'll split the screen, take this take from that, and the amount of experimentation that happens there. And that's really, in many ways, that's the most important moment. So we walked with this edit. I showed it to Jeff Goodby and Steve Simpson, and they liked it, and it was good. And then a very interesting thing happened. I had the QuickTime on my computer, and I showed a couple people in the office, and I played it for a couple people, and they went, huh.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  And I distinctly remember this, it showed two or three people. And by the way, like, you know, I think some people respond as professionals, they immediately think what they would have done with the opportunity, maybe, or I don't know what. But for some reason, and I don't know why, it didn't bother me at all. And in many ways, I started getting a little excited by the fact that people didn't get it. And I, I've not really unpacked this, I'm talking about this kind of long form for the first time in a long time, but I kind of felt like there was something more special happening if it wasn't an easy get for people.

• 1:02:30Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  And I started to think that it might be more original. And I think that was the case. And I kind of learned a great lesson there, which is once you take feedback and, and definitely share your ideas, but once you've, once you've kind of locked in and you're sure you're good with it, you really don't have to look back. It didn't rattle me and I'm glad it didn't. And I think to this day, if there's something that I believe in, if I get lukewarm results, it just does not faze me at all. And usually you'll find your audience, people will like it, people will respond differently than your inner circles.

• 1:02:58Tim Ferriss?

  What happened when the ad came out?

• 1:02:59Speaker 04

  It did well.

• 1:03:00Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  It did really well. It was the ad age, the next morning ranked at number one. They had an ad critiquer named Bob Garfield, who was-

• 1:03:08Tim Ferriss?

  He was like the Siskel and Ebert of ads.

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  And I feel like Jeff Goodby and him had went head to head a few times and Jeff wasn't a big fan and, but he, he liked it. And I think it was, you know, kind of early days of YouTube. And I think it was like for a day or two, it was like the number one comedy video on YouTube or something, something crazy like that. So it, so it worked and the sales went up.

• 1:03:27Tim Ferriss?

  I saw it back then. I remember seeing it.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  It was weird.

• 1:03:29Tim Ferriss?

  Because it got sent to me.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Tim Ferriss?

  And it was on YouTube. I recall this.

• 1:03:32Speaker 04

  Oh, nice.

• 1:03:33Tim Ferriss?

  Very, very specifically. So I want to unpack a couple of concepts slash lessons from a few different people and I want you to-

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Tim Ferriss?

  -explain them. And then we're going to go to lying to the CMO of Adidas, if that's the right way to put it. That's what we call cliffhanger. After this commercial break, no commercial break. But the first is from David Lubars.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:59Tim Ferriss?

  I'm getting that right. And I'd love for you to share what advice or lessons you took from him. Now, one that I have in front of me.

• 1:04:09Tim Ferriss?

  Which could be a starting point, or maybe it's the point. Make as many decisions as possible. I'm not clear on what this means, but it does pique my curiosity. So who is David? And what does this mean? And any other, any other lessons learned or principles?

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  So David is the Worldwide Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of BBDO. I worked for him for eight years. And I've kind of not shy of saying he was the best boss I ever had. He was the best boss I ever had because he, he was very clear and he was very consistent. And that's what you need in leadership. And so you could show him a bunch of work and he would tell you what he liked and what he chose right away. And that was that. And he didn't need to split hairs. He would, he would come give you his response and he knew that he would make a bigger impact in this giant company by going around and saying, I think this is the most right thing, the most creative thing, the most interesting thing. And just go and do that and not be afraid to make decisions, create progress. And by the way, you know, if he picked something that was wrong, what'd he do?

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  We'd, we'd have to go back and do it again. Or maybe we had one that, that wasn't as good as it could have been. But he never inhibited progress. He always facilitated progress by doing that.

• 1:05:19Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning sort of catalyzing some type of forward motion?

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  Exactly. He never would say, let me take this back. Let me think about it, or let's pull more people into it. He would just give you these gut reads and it always gave you permission to go forward. And it really taught that someone who's really pushing everyone and keeping everyone in motion just happens to always be at the center of so much. And that's why, you know, for that eight years, I mean, the agency was one of the most awarded in the world. And there was my little corner of the universe, but there was all these other corners. And he just amplified himself by empowering his people and saying a lot of yes, sometimes a no, but he was, you know, he was always game to move forward.

• 1:05:55Tim Ferriss?

  Were you able to emulate that at the time in some? Small way, or is that something that you were only able to implement later as you had more and more direct reports?

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  I used it. I used it then because BBO at that time was David's place. So David said to do it. David said, let's go. I don't think we ever got to look at an org chart or reporting structure. I don't think we ever knew that that carried muster, but a lot of us loved the decisions he was making. And so enough of us would constantly say, that's what David wants. And so whether or not that was be all end all, it became be all end all. And so we were all emboldened to make moves. I myself couldn't, there wasn't much I could do with it at the time.

• 1:06:38Tim Ferriss?

  In terms of making your own decisions?

• 1:06:39Speaker 04

  No, no, I was kind of probably working through my own process, but it was invaluable later because you do see people that in a high creative role, you've really got to make things happen. And you will see some people in very senior roles that really gild the lily and that really obsess over.

• 1:06:55Tim Ferriss?

  Such a great expression.

• 1:06:56Speaker 04

  It is. And by the way, the gilding the lily of, of someone who's looking at a two-minute case study for an award show and changing the mix on the music eight times. And you're like, listen, doesn't really matter. And there's times to craft the hell out of it, but there's also this step back. And I think in our industry and in creativity, fast decisions are really stepping back, you know, as opposed to getting in the weeds.

• 1:07:21Tim Ferriss?

  Can you say more about that? What I'd like to hear you riff on a little bit is how you think about fast decisions? This is a source of constant fascination for me. It's something I revisit a lot. To what extent do I prioritize like speed and just catalyzing things happening versus honing, minimizing mistakes? I think that's what it comes down to for a lot of people. It's like, what error rate are you willing to accept? Right? Is it 10%? And I know it's hard to track these things, but is it like you're willing to accept kind of breakage of making the wrong call 10% of the time because the speed net, net over time is just a huge competitive advantage and good for what you're doing? That's a long question, but fair amount of lead up. How do you think about that?

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  I remember that at the end of the day, it's subjective.

• 1:08:09Tim Ferriss?

  It's not mathematics.

• 1:08:11Speaker 04

  It's not mathematical. And so, you know, I've learned to trust myself and I've learned that if you A B something too long, you're lost. So I think the more I get stuck in something, the more I realize I need to make a fast decision because I don't think. Obsession, when you're really deciding go, no-go, good idea, bad idea, excited about this, not excited about this. I don't think time is your friend. I think time pulls everything. It slows everything down. It takes the energy out of it. So I think sometimes you just gotta let it fly. And then, by the way, you can correct and you can change as you go. I mean, you know, I've approved ads that wound up being completely different ads that we're really proud of. So that's the other thing is that, you know, nothing is totally fixed.

• 1:08:57Tim Ferriss?

  It also strikes me that there are so many things, just pulling from my own experience, that get worse with time and more deliberation, like deals and just deal structures, right? Negotiating, often in my experience, it's like the longer it takes, the more that is a harbinger of pain to come, right? Or just a bad wasteful outcome that ends up stalling out. There are so many things like that where it's like, okay, if there isn't some speed to this, likely the outcome's gonna be worse.

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  For sure. Time kills all deals.

• 1:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 04

  For sure. And it kills momentum and it kills energy and it takes people. So if you've got people going, if you need to take something offline for yourself, just know that their muscles are gonna cool. They're gonna take a break and they're gonna, you know, restart. And, and many times, you know, the wrong decision can become the right decision. You know, if, if it's actually an okay time, I'd love to tell you a little bit about a Mountain Dew Super Bowl.

• 1:09:50Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do it.

• 1:09:51Speaker 04

  Ad we did because um, it started out as one thing and it became something totally different. And there's kind of a beauty in that sometimes the nonlinear way it really works. So this would be, I wanna say it's like 2018 and we are Mountain Dew's agency of record. I'm working at TBWA Shite Day. At the time, I'm the chief creative officer and I have these incredible executive creative directors named Amy and Julia that run the Mountain Dew business. So we, we got the Super Bowl brief. And the idea we landed was something about how it was for Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. And this is like the zero that they really got right. Like this one tastes so close to the original that we needed to do something that was gonna cause like a real reappraisal. And so I jotted down before we started talking, I was like, that's right, cause I couldn't remember what it was.

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  So our original idea was it's impossible taste. So that was like the core thought we were executing against. And Amy and Julia had this. Really gutsy idea. And the idea, and I'm caveating here, this idea never happened, was never purchased by PepsiCo. So I'm getting this behind the scenes in our house at the agency. We had the idea that for this impossible drink, we were going to do the impossible Super Bowl ad. And so what we were going to do is we were going to announce, make a press release, billboards, you know, front page of Variety, that Daniel Day-Lewis had agreed to star in Mountain Dew Zero Sugar's Super Bowl ad. And we're going to do it without telling him.

• 1:11:18Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so in quotes, continue.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  And, you know, for sure, he would say, go away if he acknowledged it. And for sure, he would probably cease and desist if not sue. And our whole idea was going to be, we were going to let this play, but we were going to say, because this Mountain Dew Zero Sugar was so impossibly good, you deserve an impossibly hard to make Super Bowl ad. So we're going to do it. And we were going to even have like a live cam of a limousine parked in front of his last known address on the day of the Super Bowl. And we're going to have the set ready. And we were going to basically film and livestream like, is he going to come and do it? So as I'm working with Amy and Julia on this, we're loving it. We're having fun. And this is when the best ideas are when you're like, we can never do this. We're going to get in big trouble. This is so wrong. When you feel that, you've got to stay there. You absolutely, that's where all the interesting stuff happens. So

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  then we started saying, okay, well, what, so what happens when he doesn't show? And so we're talking, we're like, okay, we made this up. We were gonna, the whole pre-campaign, all the buzz, Daniel Day-Lewis sues Mountain Dew, because he's, he doesn't want to be part of this, he's not going to participate, but we still had the TV ad. So a camera kind of winds through a set from like in There Will Be Blood and finds its way into this chapel and finds the back of this cloaked character. And it's Daniel Day-Lewis's character.

• 1:12:36Speaker 04

  Turns around and it's Will Ferrell in a mustache and a hat. And he does the, the beautiful performance piece of like, I take my straw and I drink your milkshake. And he just goes nuts yelling about how I take my straw and I drink your Mountain Dew Zero Sugar and I drink it up. So then the rug pull becomes insane. So he's not going to do it. And then Will Ferrell does an insane Daniel Day Lewis screaming about Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. So we know it's probably, probably a long shot, but we go to Pepsi, we go with a bunch of ideas and we go and the client was a woman named Nicole and, and there's the CMO Pepsi guy named Greg Lyons, who's been there a long time. And he's great. He's, he knows creative. Again, when you talk about the kind of clients you can work with that understand creative people, but also understand their own business

• 1:13:20Speaker 04

  and can bridge that. That's why Pepsi marketing is consistently been so strong. And so we show Greg and Greg's like, I love it. I love it. We had, there's no way we can do this. And he goes, but I, but he said, but you know, but I will bring it to our legal because look, I look, I love it. I just know we can't do, I love it. Uh, and sure enough, and I won't even get into the myriad of reasons, but basically there was like a potential legal precedent that would have been like, would have altered Pepsi stock price forever if we pissed off Daniel Day Lewis or whatever. So it was, it was a

• 1:13:47Tim Ferriss?

  Hold on. That's too tantalizing. If you can't get into it, but just a little bit.

• 1:13:53Speaker 04

  Let me, I'll give it. And look, because, because nothing happened. Yeah. Nothing happened. So I think there was a case that perhaps if this went wrong, he may be entitled to a royalty on every Pepsi product sold forever.

• 1:14:05Tim Ferriss?

  I can see why legal would push back.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  I'm talking about like a bag of Frito Lays in Bangkok, like, is like still, Daniel Day Lewis gets money. Would have been the best thing that ever happened to him. Um, but anyway.

• 1:14:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's like that guy who had a phone thrown at him by Russell Crowe.

• 1:14:18Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:14:19Tim Ferriss?

  Man, on the lottery.

• 1:14:20Speaker 04

  And if he

• 1:14:20Tim Ferriss?

  Powerball.

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  And if he put that money into Apple stock, now how good is he doing? Um, but anyway.

• 1:14:26Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So legal's like, I, I love it. We think not.

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  So we think not. So this is how it really happens. So we go back to the office and we're kicking, there's new ideas and stuff and we're sitting, the three of, Amy and Julie are great. They're working with their teams. And then we would get together for an hour or two. And we're saying, you know what? There's just something about that weird ass scene with like the wrong actor just screaming about Mountain Dew that we just loved. We just loved it. So then you just go, okay. I don't know how you'd ever get to that without the Daniel Day Lewis thing, but let's cut off the Daniel Day Lewis thing and make sense of this. And so then we said, okay, well, what if it's? About Mountain Dew Zero Sugar is like almost as good as the original. Or what if it's like as good as the original, if not better? And then we, that's our idea.

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  And we put the wrong person in an iconic scene and have them go nuts and make it. Because we knew that when we saw the Will Ferrell idea, we're like, I just want to see that. So then we knew, okay, if you have something you people want to see, don't leave it. So then we said, okay, maybe, maybe it's Cast Away, maybe it's There Will Be Blood, maybe it's The Shining. That's how we landed The Shining, where we recast with Bryan Cranston and Tracey Ellis Ross remaking The Shining. But again, he's just, he's ranting and looning about Mountain Dew Zero Sugar. And so that's how we got to that. But we would have never got to that if we didn't just go on a weird journey and stay creative the whole way.

• 1:15:48Tim Ferriss?

  I want to come back to something you said in passing that I'd love to hear more about. And maybe you have another example. And this ties into Jeff Goodby. Make sure you always feel like you're doing something vaguely naughty. So that feeling of like, oh, we're never going to get away with this. Or like, ah, you use slightly different wording, but could you tie these things together? Because that type of indicator, I want to understand what that feeling is and how you actually use it. Because for instance, this is not 100%, but for me, there is a certain like physiological quickening that I experience, have experienced before almost all of my best investments.

• 1:16:30Tim Ferriss?

  There's an obvious signal that I've learned to tune into. It's not right 100% of the time, but the hit rate is very high. So what is this?

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it's, you know.

• 1:16:41Tim Ferriss?

  How do you use it? Any way you want to tackle it?

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  The thing I love, by the way, about asking people advice is they give you advice, but the people tell you who they are when they give you advice too. And that, and that's Jeff. You know, Jeff is. A super smart guy who went to Harvard and wrote for the Harvard Lampoon and he he happened into advertising, but he is just a vibey, really smart guy. And I think he kind of behaves like he wants to fuck around. And he's a serious businessman and he can talk to the CMO and CEO of any brand he works with and totally explain why he's doing what he's doing. But he has this way about him where it's going to be fun. And some days you go to work and it's, you know, your deadlines are tough and the client pressure is tough, but he's always behaved like it was, it was fun, like he was having fun, whether he was or wasn't. And that kind of vibe is great.

• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  And that does embolden you to say, okay, we should be thinking about this as, as a form of play. In the day to day, you don't. It's about engineering and it's about, we have to get this just right and we have to hit this timeline and we have to, you know, make everything neat and tidy. But it's really our responsibility to make it closer to art, because that's what people respond to. People don't respond to tons of rational drivers. People don't respond to things that have been focus grouped to death. It's our job to sort of find the line and find like the edge and stay there. And that kind of attitude gives you that permission that like, if you're feeling like this could be wrong, you're probably on to something. And if it feels dead right, you're probably dead in the water.

• 1:18:08Tim Ferriss?

  Are there indicators for that? Right. So for instance, I'm making this up, but you're going blue sky. You're coming up with a lot of bad ideas, getting things out of your head so you can hopefully sift.

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  Sift the vomit.

• 1:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, sift the vomit, exactly. That's a good commercial visual for you. Somebody vomiting into their own gold pan over a river. And then, guys, in terms of doing something wrong or that type of characteristic, it's a scent trail for something promising, right? What are some indicators? Is it that people around you are like, oh God, oh, or like they break out laughing or somebody above you is like, oh, I love it, but I don't really want to say I love it. I don't know how to really express what I'm trying to ask, but I think you get what I'm grasping for.

• 1:18:54Speaker 04

  And there's different feelings. I was a very good kid, but like sometimes when you're presenting an idea and you think you might get it through. If you feel like maybe what you think you'd feel like if you were shoplifting a Snickers bar, that's one tell is when you're like, oh, boy, if I get out of this meeting. So if you know you're getting away with something and if you feel that in your bones, that's something. If people are nervous and they start to scenario, like we all love the idea of a scenario plan. And the other is if you just can't get it out of your head, if you become a dog with a bone and like us creatives, you know, we are dying to get our best ideas into the world. And so if you, you know, we become insufferable when we attach to one. And that actually is a pretty good segue to the Adidas story, if you want, because that that's one where we, we got away with one.

• 1:19:35Tim Ferriss?

  So we are going to get to the Adidas.

• 1:19:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to put one thing in between, which is, and you may have to help me with the pronunciation here, Tor Myron?

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:19:46Tim Ferriss?

  Getting it?

• 1:19:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:19:47Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Executive at Apple, Apple CMO specifically, has said what a world-class agency partner does is quote unquote, reduce things.

• 1:19:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:19:58Tim Ferriss?

  What does this mean to you?

• 1:20:00Speaker 04

  Well, it's the case for creative agencies because if I'm a soap company, I could hire us or I could just make our own ads. Well, I'd say our soap's the best soap, obviously. And we put love into it and our people are, you know, you, you start to want to say everything and you want to say your polyanna version of it. And I, and I think an agency partner-

• 1:20:22Tim Ferriss?

  You said polyamorous version of it for a second.

• 1:20:24Speaker 04

  Yes, polyanna version of it. No comment on polyamore. That's a whole other topic.

• 1:20:30Tim Ferriss?

  We are in Austin, the land of plenty. Anyway, continue.

• 1:20:34Speaker 04

  But I think, you know, what an agency does is the clients come and say, we want to say this and this and this. And we say, no, no one's going to care. No one's going to care that you think your soap makers are the best soap makers. No one's going to care that you're saying that everyone says the ingredient. Look, we show you, everyone says ingredients. So what you get from us is your jumble of all the things you want to do and we strip it down to like the most compelling core truth about why your product or service or offering is compelling. So- Everyone adds and really what you want from us is to subtract and come to you with the one thing and passionately and say, we know and we know communication and this is what you have to do to make your point. So it really is the art of editing and just down, down, down, down, down.

• 1:21:14Tim Ferriss?

  Any examples that come to mind? I mean, this is not exactly a statement, but you know, Got Milk is a pretty good, I mean, it's an attention grabbing distillation for messaging purposes, but do any other examples come to mind of reducing?

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, anything good. I mean, anything good. I think-

• 1:21:31Tim Ferriss?

  Thousand songs in your pocket?

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  A thousand songs. I mean, talk about a brilliant way to get at the benefit.

• 1:21:36Tim Ferriss?

  Nobody gives a shit how many megabytes.

• 1:21:39Speaker 04

  It's not about speeds and feeds. It's about, show me what about this is magical. It's about finding the one magical bit. I think you can just look at any great execution or any great ad and say, okay, that, that was focused. That was reductive. So no, I don't even, I think it's kind of, that's the difference between the good ones and the bad ones.

• 1:21:54Tim Ferriss?

  Inherently present.

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:55Tim Ferriss?

  Where's, where's the beef? We could go on and on.

• 1:21:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:58Tim Ferriss?

  Drivers wanted, on and on. All right, Adidas.

• 1:22:00Speaker 04

  This is a good, this is like a good landing spot because it's like the Mountain Dew one. It's a bit of a tale.

• 1:22:06Tim Ferriss?

  Love tales here.

• 1:22:07Speaker 04

  Okay, good. And I'll say every bit of it as much to not get in trouble. Everything ended well for everybody. So I'll start there. We are given an Adidas assignment, not the big brand Adidas assignment. That's, there's, Adidas works with a number of agencies on a number of projects, but we were granted an awesome opportunity to do something for tennis for the US Open, what Adidas calls heartbeat sports, which is like tennis, fencing, swimming. So we had this opportunity and we thought, okay, for our motley crew, for our squad to get to do something for a brand like Adidas, we're gonna, we're gonna show up at our very best. So we invited the client and I'll refer to the client as the client and we invited the client to visit us-

• 1:22:46Tim Ferriss?

  Capital T, capital C.

• 1:22:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:22:48Tim Ferriss?

  The client.

• 1:22:49Speaker 04

  Eighteen point and a good client. We had the client in and we brought our strategist. We brought a strategist from another region that had worked on Adidas. We brought a creative team. You don't normally, when a client is going to tell you about a project, you don't normally bring the creative team. Normally you kind of understand the project and decide what you want to do with it and then bring in the creative team. But we did, we kind of-

• 1:23:08Tim Ferriss?

  Full court press.

• 1:23:09Speaker 04

  We went for the full court press. And by the way, the, another lesson certainly in advertising, but anywhere is the more ground you can cover in a room, the better because you start further ahead than if you constantly come together and split off and come together and split off. So our intention was like, let's land a brief together.

• 1:23:25Tim Ferriss?

  When we say land a brief, you're basically getting the gig.

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, getting the gig and also and the strategy and like what we want to do and what our objective is and the challenge that we're going to meet with creative ideas. So we're having this day and you know, we're talking a lot about how and this, by the way, is I think the statistic is still valid, but like something like 80% of the time of young girls would drop out of sport due to body confidence issues or you're not feeling like athletics were for them because obviously the kind of media biases towards male athletes. And so kind of an initiative, not only with Adidas, but also with Nike and all these companies is about keeping young girls in sport because it obviously has great benefits, not only that they could go on to be professional athletes, but for confidence and all, you know, all kinds of teamwork and all the great things that come with it. So our client was excited about the idea of like, let's do something about girls in sport.

• 1:24:13Speaker 04

  Okay, we're talking and then our client says, you know, we have Billie Jean King, you know, and she's going to work with us. And we're thinking, Billie Jean King is awesome. I mean, she's a total rule breaker, trailblazer. She played the Battle of the Sexes. So how exciting. And so we had the very obvious idea, we're like, well, okay, for the US Open, we got to take her blue suede shoes. We got to bring them back. We got to bring them back and sell them. So obvious, done. And then, as it turns out, it's a little more complicated than that. They've got to make that in a factory somewhere else in the world and then ship that volume of shoes on a big, slow ship. So that wasn't going to happen. And so one of the creators we brought into the room, his name is Ricardo Franco. He says, why don't we just change people's shoes into Billie Jean King shoes? And it was just that.

• 1:24:54Speaker 04

  And we went, okay, that sounds like a, something I haven't heard before. And we didn't know what it meant. And we said, okay, so would we have like felt applications that we could stick on? You see if you came in, you know, wearing a pair of New Balance, you could like affix them. And we kept talking, I said, what about spray paint? What if we get like shoe artists, there's these people like the shoe surgeon and all these people. So what if we got some of those people? And so we started thinking, okay, maybe this is possible. We should figure this out. And even someone in the room said, oh God, imagine if someone comes in like a pair of Nikes and everyone was rubbing their hands together. This is great. A great lesson is when you get what you want, get out of the room. Don't like let the vibe dip and you start thinking about all the reasons why it might not work. Don't oversell it. I've learned this lesson, as many of us have, and seen it in practice.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  So leaving the room, you know, normally we'd say, okay, we'll come back in two weeks. Let's put it in a deck and let's draw out the comp. But in this one, we just knew that the more we sat on it, time would kill this deal. Time would give people time to think about the pros and cons. So our team was just go do it, just go, we've got money. Nancy, our president in New York, loved the idea. So we said, can we just get like 10 grand to start paying people to test? Don't get client money, let's just do it. So we started setting this whole thing up. That's an important point. Let's get a little internal money just to Start it. Jump the gun. Yeah, let's make progress because we saw a green light. This is not the kind of idea that gets greenlit. I had a stolen Snickers in my pocket and I wanted out of that store. And so we, we start R and D-ing it.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  We find someone that blends a cool kind of pearl blue paint and we make these stencils and we start doing these tests and we have, so we're spray painting like Converse and Air Jordans and we're doing them around the agency and they look awesome. I mean, anyone who sees them goes, holy shit, what is that? I want that, I'm so into that. So we get, you know, maybe about a week and a half away from the US Open and this client didn't live in the States, it was a global client. And the phone call comes and I knew the phone call was coming. And we get on the phone and the client says, I just want you to know though, that we can only have people wearing Adidas shoes, that we can spray any Adidas shoe you want, but we can only have people spray Adidas shoes. And so this is a moment where, no, because then it takes all the coolness out of the idea.

• 1:27:04Speaker 04

  But if I say no now, I mean, she's got a week and a half to like lock us out of everything. And, you know, this is the client and they hold the purse strings and they have the ultimate say. They're the brand, so I can't argue it because if I lose the argument, it's over. So I lied. And so I said, absolutely. And I knew what I was doing and I knew that I was straddling a third rail. Where if you do something like this and it doesn't work out for you, it can be very bad for my network's relationship with that giant company. But there comes a moment where it's not even, is it worth it? You say, okay, I understand lawyers are there to avert risk.

• 1:27:47Speaker 04

  But in my gut, I know that when someone at Nike sees a shoe of theirs defaced to look like a Billie Jean King shoe, I know as a human being that that brand will not come after Billie Jean King's legacy or empowering young girls in sport. I just knew it. Now, the lawyer would not sign it, but I knew it. So that's the moment where you say, fuck it. So our team is still going and our client is not at the US Open. Our client is still in Europe. And so I'm in Beverly Hills at the Hilton, at the Beverly Hilton with my partner Nancy, my president, and we're filming a big campaign for Hilton. And the morning

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  of the first day of the US Open, my phone buzzes and Amy and Julia are sending me these shots of like, we stacked the line with a pair of Converse All-Stars and Air Force Ones and Sauconys and with the first five are the things. And they took pictures of them and they sent them to Ad Age and to Hype Beast and to Sneaker Freaker and to everywhere. That's the one where I didn't have the Snickers bar. I was like, felt like I was gonna vomit, but it was so good. And I knew it was so-

• 1:28:55Tim Ferriss?

  No vomiting ideas. This is like actually-

• 1:28:57Speaker 04

  No, actual vomit, like bile. It was like a bile one. So anyway, I go back and I sit down at set and I show Nancy and I'm like, look at these. And she goes, oh, that's cool. Actually, she always says the word babe. She talks like a Hollywood producer. She goes, that's cool babes. And I was like, thanks. And then my phone rings and I see the number and I say, I think I'm about to really get unloaded on. And she goes, good luck. And that's, by the way, but that was the, she was in on it, you know? And I was like, okay, I got my anchor here. So I walked outside, called the number back and the client said, please hold, I'm patching in our global legal. And I was like, fuck it, here we go. This is it. And I got yelled at. I got screamed at. I got, you said that this wasn't gonna happen and this happened and how did this happen and who would have done this and this

• 1:29:42Speaker 04

  and that? And I said, I told you this wasn't gonna happen. It happened. So I accept responsibility. I did not volunteer that I had endorsed it, but I accepted the responsibility. And I said, I will have our PR and the toothpaste is out of the tube. Once it hits the internet, it's done. So I said, I will have our PR reach out to all the publications and ask them to take it down because I, I know a thing or two about journalists and journalists will say, no, thanks. It happened, so I'm going to cover what I want. But I said, we're going to do that. And I said, I'm very sorry and I understand you're very angry with me. So it happens. And then the little hype beast community love it. And then, you know, and then it all goes away. And there was no problem and people thought it was really cool and they got some tip of the spear cred for doing something really innovative.

• 1:30:27Speaker 04

  And all the hardcore sneaker nerds loved it and they started going for thousands of dollars on eBay. And we made a great case study out of it and that client was included in juries to evaluate the biggest brand ideas of the year for notoriety for the highly disruptive Billie Jean King, your shoes idea. So the lesson there, or not even the lesson, but the thing about it too, is when you're in a position where you can gatekeep or put yourself out there. It's like driving a car or something where you've gotta, you're gonna change lanes and in between two, and you gotta say, I think I can do this. And sometimes you gotta pump the brakes and then sometimes you gotta gun it.

• 1:31:07Speaker 04

  But really like it's a lonely decision, but you gotta make it and you gotta have confidence that you're gonna thread the needle. And that's the getting away with it.

• 1:31:16Tim Ferriss?

  So to use the racing metaphor, I mean, very few race car drivers who have consistency over long periods of time are routinely reckless. They do have to make those decisions, but they're not routinely reckless. And you don't strike me as someone who's routinely reckless. So what I want to ask you about this particular decision, right? This calculus in your mind, if you did, how did you rehearse the worst case scenarios? Where you're like, okay, I'm going to make this decision. And you gave me a little bit where you're like, I don't think, it seems very unlikely that Nike is going to come after a campaign that is trying to foster youth women's participation in sports. That's going to be a bad look. It's not a hundred percent.

• 1:31:57Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 1:31:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right? But it would be a bad look. So how did you think about the calculus? And just like, okay, worst, worst case, this is what happens, but like, I'm not going to get killed.

• 1:32:08Speaker 04

  Here's what I thought. The truth is, as you talk about what it feels like to get away with it, it's like a dog with a bone. It was like, I just knew the idea was so good and I just saw so much upside. And then the only question I asked myself was, could someone be hurt by this? So could you do something that would marginalize a person or a community? Or, you know, and no, it would have been really pissing off a marketer. And that, no one ever died from that. That was that.

• 1:32:34Tim Ferriss?

  So swinging big is a prerequisite for home runs, but it doesn't always work out.

• 1:32:38Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:32:38Tim Ferriss?

  Babe Ruth.

• 1:32:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39Tim Ferriss?

  Lot of home runs, lot of strikeouts.

• 1:32:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:41Tim Ferriss?

  So what would be a, for you, your personal Hall of Fame failure list? If you had to pick out one that was important in some way? Whether it was just like a very strong lashing that you got that you learned from? Or maybe you took something away from it, maybe it set the stage for something later? Any failures come to mind?

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  Obviously way more failures than successes. But I think, by the way, you know, you just have to have a short memory. So I don't think about them very much. Actually, I was thinking about when I was coming to talk to you, I was like, well, probably that will come up. And I had to dig around, not because I haven't had a million of them, but because I just, I wash them out quickly.

• 1:33:18Tim Ferriss?

  Don't dwell on them.

• 1:33:19Speaker 04

  No, no, you learn what you can, you take that nugget. But going all the way back to that agency in Boston, Modernista, we had Napster as a client. So for.

• 1:33:28Tim Ferriss?

  Brings back memories.

• 1:33:29Speaker 04

  Yes. So any, any of your listeners that are too young for this? So probably when Tim and I were in college, maybe you were just like finishing college and I was just in college.

• 1:33:38Tim Ferriss?

  I was in college at some point, yeah.

• 1:33:39Speaker 04

  And it was a file sharing app or thing. I don't remember how the hell we got it. I guess it was like a plugin or a.

• 1:33:46Tim Ferriss?

  I can't even recall, but it was, I would say to my mind at least, there may have been some predecessors or parallel tools like LimeWire.

• 1:33:54Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:55Tim Ferriss?

  But Napster was the first time that suddenly, at least in the popular zeitgeist, that people can get music for free.

• 1:34:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:34:03Tim Ferriss?

  Including new music.

• 1:34:04Speaker 04

  And we, we were, and I'll, the statute of limitations has run out, but we were stealing. But what Sean Fanning, the founder said is, no, no, no, we're sharing. And that was the big soundbite. And I, we all remember that it was, he said, sharing. And that was like, it became a bit of a joke, but that way it was synonymous with that. So Napster. Turns out it maybe wasn't sharing and it goes away. And then I think someone buys the naming rights or something and it relaunches a few years later. So it relaunches in maybe 2002 as a kind of a like a way too ahead of its time streaming platform where it was, the proposition was 10 bucks a month and unlimited plays, a million songs. And it was a streaming database that you could subscribe to, again,

• 1:34:47Speaker 04

  way ahead of its time. So we had been given the assignment to work on it at Modern East and of course, we were a tiny agency and it was way too busy. So I got to take a big swing. And the idea we had that I had come up with as a 21 year old or 22 year old was what if our campaign was instead of buying media, we share media. And what if we took a million dollars and we just put bounties and had regular people crash live broadcasts of every sort, wearing Napster shirts and holding signs. So it was called crashster.com. And, you know, the bosses at Modern East loved it because they were

• 1:35:28Speaker 04

  kind of cool and subversive. So we somehow, and I, this is, you know, I'm talking 2002, 2003, this would have been pretty ahead of its time. And we built a website with this cool design, crashster.com. We made a bounty list and it was all the way from $250 for a local radio show. If you said 1.5 million songs, unlimited downloads, napster.com, all the way to if you crashed a presidential address, you got a million dollars. And I think we had two and a half million dollars if you said that line during a live televised spacewalk. So, and there was everything in between of like getting a sign on college game day or doing this, that. So, so anyway, this was kind of crazy stuff. Lawyers were okay with it. I know, I know, I know. We just said something about lawyers, but this

• 1:36:10Speaker 04

  thing was done. We had insurance. We built the site. We had, we even did an inaugural practice crashster where two interns from the company crashed a morning interview in Boston and interrupted a live interview with a little known comic named Bill Burr. So young Bill Burr was playing, you know, some crappy comedy club and was promoting it on, you know, Good Morning Boston. And we, these guys came up with the big sign and they're like, what the hell's going on? They get escorted out and then Bill Burr's like, what the hell's going, the Napster sign? What are these guys doing? It worked like a charm. So this thing was gonna go and it was like within a week of going and you know, I'm 22 years old and this thing would have been, this overshot the GQ magazine cover that I dreamed

• 1:36:50Speaker 04

  of or whatever. So anyway, so the, the client has to go to the Napster board to give them a progress update and the Napster client is under no responsibility to share like launch ideas or activations this fell under. So the client goes to the board and says, okay, here's our strategy. We're going to go to market and we have a new positioning and this and the other. And then he says, oh, one more thing. We're gonna do this next week. And he brings it up and I'm not in the room, but this is the report we got back that he shares craster.com, walks through it and the chairman of the board just interrupts him and says, I'm gonna, I'm gonna interrupt you before you finish, just to let you know, we are not doing that. And that was it. This thing could not

• 1:37:29Speaker 04

  have been more firmly dead. But that was for 21, I learned that if you get what you need, get the hell out of the room, which has served me well, served many people well, to not get into lily gilding and see, see what happens when everyone starts thinking about it.

• 1:37:45Tim Ferriss?

  Don't linger.

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  Don't linger. But the other great thing is the best thing for me, because this industry is full of a lot of heartbreak and rejection. You have a million ideas to sell one. And I think if that had happened for me, I would have been very successful at 21 or 22. And I liked my climb. I liked working my way up slowly and learning my craft and not doing something that might have made me very sought after and might have gotten me a, a bigger, better job faster. So it kinda, it was a heartache, but it kinda put me right on the path that I needed to have, which was the long path.

• 1:38:19Tim Ferriss?

  So many what ifs in life, right? Like what if it had happened?

• 1:38:21Speaker 04

  What if someone died during it? I'm glad we didn't do it because it could have been bad.

• 1:38:25Tim Ferriss?

  Could have been messy.

• 1:38:26Speaker 04

  Could have been very messy.

• 1:38:26Tim Ferriss?

  What was the, just out of curiosity, if the lawyers, if legal had given the okay, do you know what the substance of the objection was by the chairman?

• 1:38:35Speaker 04

  It was so long ago. I don't exactly remember, but I think it was just, I think he just did not want a problem. He did not want it to either, maybe it was because something bad could have happened or maybe because he was on other boards and he didn't want to like wreck NBCs, you know, or I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:38:49Tim Ferriss?

  Who knows?

• 1:38:50Speaker 04

  But someone had to kill that thing. It was too, it was too scary.

• 1:38:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that was out there. Question for you, coming back to process and technique, you mentioned a whole bunch of questions. What if David Fincher?

• 1:39:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Tim Ferriss?

  Made this. What if, I'm making this up, but what if, what's the commercial my mom would respond to? Whatever these questions might be. I think about questions a lot, not just in podcasting, but in certainly writing the nonfiction books that came before the podcast, interrogating myself when I'm journaling, I think about questions a lot and the power of questions seems to be a fundamental piece of creating creativity, right? Looking at something that a million people have looked at and seeing something different or seeing a way to position it differently. Are there any books on the ad game, on creativity, that come to mind if

• 1:39:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Tim Ferriss?

  somebody were sitting in front of you, like you're much younger self, you're like, okay, this kid's got some balls, gender neutral, and is willing to step out of his or her comfort zone. Okay, I want to help this kid. What might you recommend?

• 1:39:55Speaker 04

  I have a prescription for that. There's a book called Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, that's authored by Luke Sullivan. You know it?

• 1:40:02Tim Ferriss?

  This is one of my books that I read.

• 1:40:04Speaker 04

  So it is the most perfect one because it's

• 1:40:07Tim Ferriss?

  I gotta go back and reread this now.

• 1:40:09Speaker 04

  It tells you what an ad agency does.

• 1:40:11Tim Ferriss?

  Does it have a, does it have a photograph of a roll of toilet paper on it?

• 1:40:15Speaker 04

  Yes, so Whipple was a grocer in like some 1970s campaign, and I think he was selling toilet paper to customers. And so the logo is written on a double roll of paper. So I think it's a weird title, but one you don't forget. And Luke just lays out what an agency does, what every job is at the agency, and then specifically as a creative, what are the types of things you're being asked to do? And what do those outputs look like? It's an amazing book. It explains to you what a headline writing assignment is and what headlines look like and why some might be better than others. So it's really, it's a really smart micro apprenticeship. So I read it and I said, I'll be damned if I don't do this because I read it and I was like, I'm in, that's it. That told me what the job was and I said, that's the only job I want to do.

• 1:41:00Speaker 04

  But you know, now I think these days, people do ask to hop on and do informational interviews, but people will sometimes, even these days, ask you to like describe your job to them, which I always thought was a little crazy because I, you do want people to do some level of legwork where they might know what your job is and ask you a question about it. But I just feel that constantly with just please go read this book and if you Can't live without doing what's in this book, then we'll get time, you know? But that book is perfect. But then for like the creative journey or like even to understand what it's like, there's three video bits of content. We were chatting about them earlier. Number one, South Park, Six Days to Air. You know, looking at the pressure these guys are under to come up with and do a show. I don't know if it ages well. I think, cause you know, the humor can be, so please don't judge me if the subject matters. Not PC.

• 1:41:43Tim Ferriss?

  You can judge me. It's pretty funny.

• 1:41:45Speaker 04

  Judge Tim. So that one goes to Tim, cause he likes that show too. But it was.

• 1:41:48Tim Ferriss?

  I will say that it's an amazing doc slash mini doc. There are a couple of points where it drags a little bit, but there are so many payoffs. There's so many payoffs.

• 1:41:57Speaker 04

  No, but even just the thing of like when, um, which one is the blonde ones at Trey?

• 1:42:02Tim Ferriss?

  I can't remember.

• 1:42:03Speaker 04

  He's like the, the writer, writer out of the two of them. And once they've got the story down and he has to like write the script, he has his assistant go get him an extra value meal from McDonald's because it's just so hard after all that to sit down and then hammer it out. And you know, as a writer and I know as a writer, sometimes you're like, I know I have to do it, but I don't want to. So even watching him like bribe himself, watching like one of the most dynamic, prolific, edgy writers, like he has to fool himself into it. And by the way, sometimes when we make commercials, we have to make little animatics, like little boredomatics, like rips. That's considered a chore. That whole show is a boredomatic when you watch how they make it. So it's so inspiring to see those two power through. And there's just a ton of stuff that you can relate to.

• 1:42:46Speaker 04

  The two other ones I love, I love the Metallica doc, Some Kind of Monster, because it gets into, you know, doing creative within a team and chemistry, and how challenging that can be. And that documents Metallica almost breaking up and, and working out their shit as they come up with the Black Album. And it's amazing and you don't have to like Metallica to love it, to see, are you more of a Lars? Are you more of a James? Who do you side with here? You know? So that's an amazing study on high performing creative team dynamics. And then the last one, and the most underrated is Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.

• 1:43:22Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:43:23Speaker 04

  So he made, after that really painful departure from The Tonight Show, he had a non-compete, so he threw a comedy tour. And so he allowed it to be documented. And you see that this guy is a creative animal that coming out of what he just came out of, where you must be so damaged and wounded, but he's throws himself right into another enterprise and they're writing bits and skits and they're staying up late at night, the night before a show to rewrite it and just seeing the obsession in the craft of it. You're like, I watched a thing and I'm like, I do not work hard enough. And you see the euphoria and like slap happiness around all of it. When you really push yourself to that man really pushes himself to his limits. And you watch that and you're like, I just want to go and write something after I see that.

• 1:44:05Speaker 04

  So those things, they inspire me so much that I've just got a bank that someone else will get something out of them.

• 1:44:10Tim Ferriss?

  Can't wait to watch Some Kind of Monster and Can't Stop. I've seen the South Park, Doc, and can you guess my favorite part? Where did I laugh hardest?

• 1:44:20Speaker 04

  Well, Tim, I don't want to be bawdy, but would it be the Apple user agreement, Human Centipede?

• 1:44:26Tim Ferriss?

  It was the voiceover session that was related to that.

• 1:44:31Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:44:32Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, there's a lot of good stuff. There's a lot of good stuff.

• 1:44:34Speaker 04

  It's crazy stuff.

• 1:44:35Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. Hey, Whipple, squeeze this. I haven't thought about that in ages. I used to have that book when I was really cutting my teeth on copy and spending a lot of my own money, doing very expensive testing because the lead time and the turnaround time for any type of quantitative feedback on magazine ads. I mean, oh my God, how painful. I had that book deliberately cover out on my shelf as a reminder of some of the contents. It's been a very, very long time, but it's wild that that has now resurfaced in my life. What fun. When it comes to the prompts and the questions, are there any other questions that come to mind?

• 1:45:16Tim Ferriss?

  If you're stuck and you're just like, man, we've been banging our head against the wall. We're not there. This is going to lead into some of the less glamorous, maybe aspects of the job, right? Where it's like, okay, you got to come up with X number of ideas. This is important and you're getting close to deadline and you don't have it. What do you do to? Mix things up and I suppose just broadly speaking, what do you do in a situation like that?

• 1:45:42Speaker 04

  Well, you know, writer's block doesn't really exist. You think it's blocked, but you clearly you can. It really is like a game of tricking yourself. So like, say Sally is trying to come up with ideas. Sally, what are your five favorite movies or directors or writers? Okay, what would each one of them do? It's just coming up with a new challenge or a new way to approach it. That fools you into coughing something up. And then again, I'll go as far as then what's the absolute right thing to do? What's the absolute wrong thing to do? What would I do if I thought this whole thing was a big joke? If I wanted to make fun of it? And again, and then even the cause technique of just start writing sentences and finish them. But I think it's knowing yourself and knowing your interests and then using avenues.

• 1:46:24Speaker 04

  So what things you're into, put it through that lens, but it's just, it's a forcing exercise and it's really uncomfortable. It's really, really uncomfortable because the more you get out, you will find, the one thing I have found, and I don't think it's just me, I've talked to friends about it, is that four hour, five hour, whatever your big dump is, later you will have new ideas and things, but the biggest treasure trove you'll ever have is when the challenge is fresh, when your brain is first trying to put it together and the more you get out of that moment, the more you're paid back later.

• 1:46:54Tim Ferriss?

  What do you do when you're, say overwhelmed or unfocused, right? Because this is a game of creativity and we're all playing different games, right? So all of our careers on some level are games of different types of rules. Some you can bend, some you can break, but endurance is important. The ability to not just flame out, burning the candle at both ends. Some people are superhuman and can bank all sorts of crazy work weeks and sleep four hours a night because they happen to have the right genetic profile for that. But what do you do when you're overwhelmed or unfocused?

• 1:47:27Speaker 04

  Interesting that you bring that up because I, I work with some of those people that are, I don't know if they sleep and I am, I'm sensitive and I need sleep. And so I'm, I'm very aware that I'm not like a full beast. So there's two, actually, the question is, you phrase it, there's kind of two answers that are different, but I read a book, I know you know, this book called Bird by Bird.

• 1:47:45Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, so good.

• 1:47:46Speaker 04

  So.

• 1:47:47Tim Ferriss?

  An amazing book and it's gonna, some people will ignore it because it's intended at face value for fiction writers. It does not matter. It does not matter.

• 1:47:58Speaker 04

  I had to read it at school. So talk about, I must've had a good teacher or whatever. So I had to read it.

• 1:48:02Tim Ferriss?

  What a gift.

• 1:48:02Speaker 04

  I don't remember a single thing in the book, except for the titular story. And that story was, and I, you know, I think about it all the time. So the author's little brother had to write a report on the birds and he had books open and printed out essays everywhere. And he was in a full meltdown and panic.

• 1:48:21Tim Ferriss?

  And he pushed it off until the last minute.

• 1:48:23Speaker 04

  Last minute.

• 1:48:23Tim Ferriss?

  He had all semester to do, or something like that.

• 1:48:25Speaker 04

  That whole thing, everyone has a version of that. And he's there. And I think in my version of the story, he's like crying at the table with all that stuff. And then good old dad comes in and goes, just take it bird by bird, but, but take it bird by bird. And you're like, wow. So I like, I have an imaginary father that comes in and says that to me every time, because that's just, it's permission, permission to stop thinking about the totality of it and permission to do the littlest bit. The other quotation that I love, I don't have a ton of quotations, but the great Arthur Ashe said, start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. And that's so fantastically empowering because it's saying that you're in a good enough spot and you're, you're off the hook for anything more than that, you know?

• 1:49:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:10Speaker 04

  But then the other part of it about being a beast and the constant pressure is I've figured out that I can't meditate. It's something I'll get to later in life, but I think I'm too, I can't sit still. I can't be alone in my thoughts. And so I discovered that instead of turning the dial down to zero, I found also that hard fitness is another meditative. Instead of going down to zero, it just puts me at a 10. And so every morning I go do a similar workout that gives me almost like an existential crisis. So that by the time I show up at work, this, whatever this kind of fog of anxiety that I used to live in, it just burns it off. And I just, I'm so calm for the rest of the day because I've already been through something tough in the morning.

• 1:49:53Speaker 04

  There's a gym in New York City called Tone House and there's just one of them. And I used to exercise in college and I was in pretty good shape. And then I got to doing a lot of writing and drinking beer and doing writing. And I kind of let it slip. And I think around 2015, back when people would upload Facebook albums the night after you did anything. I went to a New Year's party and there was like a picture of me on New Year's day. And I was leaned over like a table of food. And I swear in my head, I looked like Alfred Hitchcock or something like, it was like the way my jacket lapel was open. It came out on this huge thing. And I got so upset that I looked up hardest workout in New York. And then like being there was like this one, one off gym called Tone House. And I went that day on New Year's day, they were open.

• 1:50:37Speaker 04

  The founder's a guy named Alonso Wilson and he played D1 football and played a little pro football. And when he stopped playing, he missed the practices. So it's a lot of, the way I describe it to friends is it's like a one hour Under Armour commercial that you're in. Where you're just dropping the deck and jumping over stuff and banging ropes and the heart rate stays up the whole time. And so the first time I did it, I stepped out of class after 10 minutes. Cause the warm up is really intense cardio and I vomited in the locker room. And I stayed up at night staring at the ceiling, being like, I can't let this thing get me. And so I came back the week later and the week later and it kind of pulled me in. And now, you know, me and a fairly regular group are there five days a week, six days a week. And then we do other stuff, but that has been such a gift for me. Because I'm just, you know, I used to walk around in between meetings and I'd be like, should I run?

• 1:51:22Speaker 04

  Am I like, am I using my time well? Like what, I would just ruminate on all the things I could be doing, wasn't doing. And something about really beating myself up in the morning. I don't expend the energy worrying about all those things. I just focus on what I'm focusing on. So it's made me normal.

• 1:51:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you're inspiring me to double down. I've recently, knock on wood, largely addressed this kind of crippling lower back issue that has sidelined me for the better part of the last year. And I'm really excited to get back into serious exercise. And this might sound strange because I'm not built like a Border collie, but it's kind of like, if you can't have a working dog and like put that dog in an apartment all day long. The dog's going to go crazy. And I remember when I was. Training my dog Molly and taking it super seriously, going like full deep dive on dog training. And one of the lines has stuck with me is a tired dog is a happy dog. I think that is true, not for every person, but for people who

• 1:52:21Tim Ferriss?

  have a certain hardwiring and it sounds like you're one of them. I am certainly one of them. If you're not putting that creature to work physically, all sorts of strange things are going to creep out of the cracks.

• 1:52:33Speaker 04

  And not the best things. Well, because you want to get a lot done and you need to be tired out a little bit to be a little bit normal about it. Yeah. Because if you're going full energy, you're doing what's in front of you and you're freaking out about all the other things you could, should, might. And when you're just a little taken back a little bit, you're more present. It's great.

• 1:52:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think a lot of kids end up getting into trouble in school because they have idle cycles. They don't know to, and they don't know how to apply those idle cycles. I mean, I remember in school for me, it's like, I needed to draw nonstop in grade school. I got very good grades. I did really well, but I would get so bored in class. I had to draw all the time, even though I was listening to exactly what the teacher was saying, because I had to occupy myself. And I was fortunate that I'd somehow chanced upon drawing. But a lot of other kids who were very smart got into all sorts of trouble, got kicked out, suspended, ended up getting involved with drugs because they didn't know how to occupy or consume those cycles. Yeah. And exercise is an amazing way to do it.

• 1:53:35Tim Ferriss?

  Any other favorite books that you have, or put a different way, books that you have gifted or recommended a lot to other people outside of what we've discussed already?

• 1:53:44Speaker 04

  Yes. And I love this question because I find like, those are the things I always jot down when I hear what people gift. Two of them. One of them is called The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr. Have you heard of this?

• 1:53:56Tim Ferriss?

  This is so weird. All of these things are coming up in this conversation. I listened to a derivative of that, but it's based on the same method, the easy way to quit caffeine. I listened to the audio book, somebody had recommended to me and I stopped, I went 30 or 40 days without any caffeine, which is the first time I've done that since I was like. God only knows 16. So please keep going, but this is-

• 1:54:18Speaker 04

  In my twenties, I smoked cigarettes and I was hopelessly addicted to them. And I don't know how I found the book, but I read it and it told me bit by bit, all the reasons why I thought I had to keep or why I would hang on to it. And it dispelled them one by one and it was kind of romantic. And then there's like a chapter and it says, go outside and have your last cigarette. And I went outside and I did. And then I finished the book and I never smoked again. And I talk about it sparingly because the easy way is kind of usually a red flag of anything. But that's what I love about it. If you look it up on Amazon, the reviews are in, it is like five star for thousands. But I've given it to like four or five friends and all four or five of them just read it and never smoked again.

• 1:54:54Tim Ferriss?

  So wild.

• 1:54:55Speaker 04

  So that book is probably a life-saving book. And then the other one that I love, and I know you know this book, but The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.

• 1:55:03Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I know the book and I have not read it and it's been on my to read list forever.

• 1:55:07Speaker 04

  I think you would not only love the book, but you would love talking to Daniel about that book because, you know, I don't like business books and especially when things become dense and theoretical, I get lost. But he went and spent time in like 10 incredible, high-performing cultures that are all different from like IDEO to the San Antonio Spurs, to the Navy SEALs, and just identified what makes people feel like they belong in those and what gives people the psychological safety to do their best in those environments. And you read it and you'll, you'll get confirmation bias, like I do that, that's great. Or, or you're reminded, I need to do that. Or there's things you never thought of.

• 1:55:42Tim Ferriss?

  Now, do you recommend this book to people who are individual contributors, like operators on the front lines? Or do you give that to people who are running companies? Like, who do you give that to?

• 1:55:52Speaker 04

  I think for leadership for sure. So if anyone's stepping into management, but I also find it's good, I would imagine I would have loved the book if I wasn't a manager, just to understand the kind of culture that I want to be part of. You know, obviously we're all students all the time. So I think there wouldn't be any harm in imagining if you were to lead something or if you were to have total control, what kind of culture you'd want. But, but definitely if you're in leadership or you're stepping into leadership, or if you're stepping into a new role, you know, there's just the simplest things you could do to show that- Everyone you meet, that there's a long-term potential future there. And that's like a thing you would forget to do. But if you reference something in the future, some minor things like that, that you're like, oh, that can make all the difference. And I understand, having been on the receiving end of those kinds of behaviors, it's just great stuff.

• 1:56:37Speaker 04

  But that one, like, that's one of the few things that I reread every year for the last two, three years.

• 1:56:42Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, I need to read it, and I will. Side note, just because I made a mental bookmark to mention this to people listening. Conan O'Brien is so impressive to me. The more I learn about that guy, the more I see, the more impressed I am. So Conan, if you're listening, or a friend of yours is listening, would love to chat sometime, publicly or privately. There's a video that I found, actually it was sent to me because I went to Seoul for the first time recently, became deeply enamored of Korea and the Korean people, started learning Korean, studying the Korean language. And there's a video called, something like Conan O'Brien Learns Korean and Makes It Weird, which is like eight minutes long. Trust me, folks, find it on YouTube. It is beyond hilarious.

• 1:57:24Speaker 04

  I've seen it. It's so good. It ends with him in the class, he's in the classroom, right? And he kinda-

• 1:57:28Tim Ferriss?

  He's with the teacher.

• 1:57:29Speaker 04

  And he's, oh yeah, and he's amazing. He's-

• 1:57:33Tim Ferriss?

  So fast. So fast on his feet. Unbelievable. And another, just quick side note, because this is what I do. Arthur Ashe, another legend, iconic figure on so many different levels. And to take that word a step further, levels, there's a book called Levels of the Game by John McPhee, which is about one tennis match, a single tennis match involving Arthur Ashe, but it becomes this study of the macro through the micro and the structure of the book, the narrative. It is not a long book, it's something like 170 pages. And if you want to see why John McPhee is as famous as he is for being a master of nonfiction, a staff writer for The New Yorker for 1,000 years.

• 1:58:15Tim Ferriss?

  This is an amazing way to get a taste test. It is so, so good. You mentioned before we started recording that you had an answer for the under a hundred dollars kind of best investment. Best investment is one way to put it, but device, gadget, service, anything that you've spent kind of less than a hundred dollars on that has had a material impact on you. What is your answer for that?

• 1:58:39Speaker 04

  My first tone house class, thirty four dollars. That was the one. That was the thirty four dollar purchase that changed everything.

• 1:58:46Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything else that comes to mind? Maybe it's a second place, but just best investment. That could be investment of time, investment of energy, investment of money.

• 1:58:54Speaker 04

  Well, I think sometimes you ask about what something you bought for under a hundred dollars that had a big return. And you know how work is, you get caught up in things and you have your plan for the week, but then you wind up responding to real time and conditions. And you just never know where it's going to go. But I go to Balthazar Restaurant in Manhattan on Spring Street.

• 1:59:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:13Speaker 04

  And I take one of my mentees. I go with one of my mentors. I go with a peer who I get a lot of energy from, or an old friend that I haven't caught up with. The bill, no matter how you do it, is always under a hundred bucks with tip. And it's always the best hundred dollars I spend every week. It's the best thing and I'll never change it. And I'll, even if I'm down to my last hundred dollars, I will go have breakfast with someone.

• 1:59:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's a great location. I haven't been in a million years, but that is.

• 1:59:41Speaker 04

  Okay. So the reason I went, by the way, too, was like, like everyone, the pandemic really was challenging. And I used to like Balthazar, but I didn't love Balthazar. And when New York reopened, a lot of restaurants kind of popped out there, al fresco, their outdoor cafes and things like that. And I would always walk by Balthazar and it was boarded up, boarded up, boarded up. And the owner, Keith, waited until you could do full occupancy indoor before opening it. And when he opened it, he did a post and I didn't realize how much I missed it, but his post said, "Balthazar is open and it will never close again." And I just, you know, like coming out of that pandemic when everyone's like, everything's going to be different. It'll never, just that statement. Talk about communication, that kind

• 2:00:24Speaker 04

  of a subject line on an email. I'm like, I will go there every week then. As long as you're open, I'll go.

• 2:00:29Tim Ferriss?

  This is gonna sound like such a newbie question, but I'm curious, do you in any way keep track of the ads or the messaging or the copy that snag you, right? Because that's a hell of a line.

• 2:00:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:42Tim Ferriss?

  Like, it's a good line.

• 2:00:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right? It worked.

• 2:00:44Speaker 04

  It absolutely worked.

• 2:00:46Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any, and these could be ideas that you come up with too, but do you have any way of capturing ideas, whether they're yours or things you come across in the wild where you're like, ooh, wow, that's good?

• 2:00:57Speaker 04

  No, I'm an idiot. And I forget, no, and I probably, probably 10 times a week, I see things where I'm like, that's good. And then I remember one of them. And if I was a smart man, I would have a notebook with me at all times, or I would put it in my stickies. And after this conversation, I'm gonna collect them. Cause now I'm conscious, cause I see things all the time. And I'm like, and that's, you know, they come up at random times, but I can't call on them. So I would like to collect better.

• 2:01:19Tim Ferriss?

  What I used to do, because I suppose to invoke Glengarry Glen Ross, "You must get them to sign on the line that is dotted." You can ask people if they're gonna buy something, but people are nice, a lot of the time, too nice. And they will tell you what they think you want to hear. Getting someone to actually buy something is a different level of commitment, right? It's a different type of signal. So when I would find myself compelled to buy something, especially when I didn't have very much money, and I was just getting started, cutting my teeth, trying to build this direct response business and sports nutrition, if I bought something, or if I got close to buying it, I would save the ad.

• 2:01:59Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 2:02:00Tim Ferriss?

  I would take a video of the infomercial or the commercial, or I would take notes on what, what it was that I thought got me to buy.

• 2:02:08Speaker 04

  What closed you.

• 2:02:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Like, was it, was it the like, but wait, there's more, there's an installment? Was it some, was it the timing, right? Like, what, do I think it was?

• 2:02:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  Just pure fatigue on my part, where my defenses were low at 3am, because I'd been watching Animal Planet and God knows, some Ginsu knife thing came up. And I would try to figure out, although this was a secondary thing, what had moved me to buy, especially as someone who is not stingy, but Had a really tight budget for most things. I no longer do that, but What did you learn? I learned a lot about copy. At the time, I was reading a lot of magazines and also newsletters and mostly text because text was easier to freeze and study. Yep. Just like for yourself, journaling is thoughts trapped on paper. If you're trying to figure something

• 2:03:00Tim Ferriss?

  out by sitting there and staring off into space and thinking, sometimes it works. Often it doesn't because it's too ephemeral, right? These bits and pieces, the floats and jets, um, it's just like being thrown out of the boat in the Grand Canyon and getting kind of tossed. Like you don't really, it's hard to orient to up when you're in that type of chaotic mental state with, even if it's just too much going on, right? If you have high energy states. So, but for me, journaling for introspection, but for external studying, it's not that text was the best medium. It was just the easiest for me to study as like a fly locked in the amber. So what I learned was what kind of headlines got me to look at anything. Yeah.

• 2:03:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right? So if I'm reading a magazine and especially, I would read magazines I wasn't even interested in, just to see what got my attention. Not to like really beat the drum on Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, who's actually a very depressing movie on a lot of levels when you get to the bottom of it. But, you know, attention, do I have your attention? Yeah. Interested? Are you interested? The A I D A. The first thing is attention. So I would pick up, say, a fashion magazine. I'm like, all right, this is going to be half ads. And I would just riff through and I would see what would get me to stop. And I'd be like, okay, why did I just stop? And I would tear it out of the magazine. It might even be at like a dentist's office or something.

• 2:04:26Tim Ferriss?

  If I had downtime, I would just try to see what would grab my attention. And that was step one. So you learn a lot of things. I mean, this is, I don't want to go into a full monologue here, but I actually haven't talked about this publicly. I don't think, the first thing you realize is how important art direction is. Composition, right? Do you have a dominant element? Or is everything the same? If everything's the same, your eye isn't going to necessarily be drawn to any one component and you're going to skip over it generally. There are some weird exceptions where like the jumble is the branding. For instance, I have used unscented baby soap from Dr. Bronner's forever because it's just like the least offensive to my system and it's, I really like it. Their branding, if you look at the bottle, it's like size two font with like a million

• 2:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  words covering the label.

• 2:05:12Speaker 04

  I know that was very, super old timey. Is that the?

• 2:05:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's not. There may be some old timey aspect, but it's very small font. It's kind of like Unabomber ransom letter-y stuff. Like if you actually dig into it, it's not very easy to follow all of it, but it's full of text, but it's kind of like a horseshoe where it's, or horseshoe is not the best way to explain it, but it's like you get to such a point of clutter that it becomes a clear signal again, almost as like a gestalt form of branding. So there are some exceptions to that, but you realize like, oh, okay. If you look at the Volkswagen ads, if you look at some of the old classics.

• 2:05:47Speaker 04

  Very reductive.

• 2:05:49Tim Ferriss?

  Reductive. You're like, okay, now I'm not going to get the ratio totally right, but it's like, all right, the top two thirds or three quarters of this ad is a bold visual, often black and white. There's one tagline that's like three to seven words. And then you've got some copy at the bottom and like a clip out coupon or something for a lot of these direct response ads. So I studied the visual element because I was actually buying and in fact, at the time I was designing a lot of my own print ads. So I was going into Photoshop and Illustrator and doing a lot of the art.

• 2:06:20Tim Ferriss?

  I was doing everything myself. I couldn't afford to hire anybody.

• 2:06:21Speaker 04

  You were an advertising creative before I was.

• 2:06:25Tim Ferriss?

  I learned a lot about clarity and also converting speeds and feeds into benefits.

• 2:06:33Speaker 04

  But you said the two things, and I mean, these are the power of art direction, right? To pull you into a world, to show you something that's interesting or attractive is. Incredible. And it still feels like art. People, you know, great art directors do not do it scientifically. They have principles, but they're expressing and exploring. And then the other thing is also the magical set of words that can sell you. Someone I used to work with, one of my mentors, Rob Schwartz, used to be the chief creative officer at TBWA in Los Angeles back in the day. He has a saying that I repeat to everyone, which is clients buy words. You know, we can come to clients and assure them that we can deliver across every social channel and every asset and do all the strategy research, but ultimately, we're going to give them a set of words that tells them who they are, who they can be,

• 2:07:17Speaker 04

  and who they are to their consumer. And those magical words are kind of everything. And no matter what changes in the industry, clients buy words and consumers like me buy words, too.

• 2:07:27Tim Ferriss?

  Totally. And I feel like even if you aren't planning on playing offense in the sense that you're not a writer, you're not crafting ads, I feel like everyone, certainly everyone who's listening to this, should make a deliberate study of words for defensive purposes. Because if you're on social media, or in any media, and of course, you are exposed to advertising all the time, you're exposed to communications all the time, you can be manipulated very easily if you're not aware of how your mind is being controlled. Or it is being controlled, informed, right? If I'm not, if I say, and this is cliched, like, don't think of a pink elephant, pink elephant, pink elephant, right? It's, your mind is very

• 2:08:11Tim Ferriss?

  reactive in a lot of respects. So I feel like the study of words is the study of thoughts, and the malleability of thoughts, which then leads to the malleability of behavior. And if you really want to see how crazy that can get, you can watch these Netflix specials like The Push from this illusionist, who's also an amazing graphic artist, or I should say visual artist, painter, Darren Brown. And these are long Features that are mostly about social engineering, but just what you can get someone to do. If you profile them properly, have a delay, hire Confederates. And in this particular case, the push is can you get someone off the street and get them

• 2:08:56Tim Ferriss?

  to the point where they push someone off a building, they commit murder, just by scripting everything out from start to finish. It is horrifying. I have very mixed feelings about it from an ethical perspective. Nobody gets hurt. He has many more. Miracle, I think, is another one, which is very well done. The point of all this is part of my fascination with the Whipple book, part of my fascination with ads is for playing offense, building a business and so on. A lot of it is just wanting to understand how humans work. And the practitioners are always going to be ahead of the scientists and the theoreticians, right? That's true in exercise, where it's like the coaches, they're going to get a lot wrong.

• 2:09:40Tim Ferriss?

  They're going to get a lot right and they are going to be able to see the state of the art before the academics ever get their hands on it. So if you want to understand how humans work, one approach, and these are not mutually exclusive, one approach is to study psychology and so on. Another is to just look how people are affected and persuaded. So there are many books that I've read, like, and I'm blanking on his first name, but Luntz is the last name, Words That Work, who is a, I believe, a Republican political strategist. And if I'm not mistaken, I read this a long time ago, it was recommended to me by a very famous entrepreneur. Neither of us would say we have much in common politically with this guy at all. Yeah. But he came up with, as one example, the death tax instead of inheritance tax, right?

• 2:10:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right. The death tax. Makes it. And just these, a handful of rebrands that became almost impossible to sort of overturn in the zeitgeist. You should study that. There's a goldmine there if you study that kind of thing. So you asked what I'd learned. I mean, I continue to learn. I continue to study these things. Yeah. And maybe I'm a weirdo, but I just, it's so fundamental to the existence, the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month of existence of anyone listening to this. Yeah. And by the way, you're going to have to get a lot better at defense. Because

• 2:10:59Speaker 04

  Because everything's going to get sharper.

• 2:11:01Tim Ferriss?

  About to get so much more overwhelming, so much more personalized. The number of pitches that I get, the number of pitches my friends get now, just in the last few months, where intro paragraphs are clearly crafted using AI, where it's

• 2:11:15Speaker 04

  It's going to take away my email writing gift.

• 2:11:17Tim Ferriss?

  I think it'll take a while. It'll take a while because I can see, you can still pretty easily discern, but you're going to have to get better at defense if you want to preserve your sanity and your ability to function. Let me ask a question that has been sort of in the hopper for a little while. It's been gestating and it comes back to blue sky thinking and creative brainstorming and then constraints, right? Because I'm listening to some of your stories and I'm like, man, it'd be great to sit down for my own business and be like, you know what? I want to get Bill Murray doing this in an ad. I want to have him in the cockpit of a space shuttle.

• 2:11:50Speaker 04

  Yes, I already, I already want to watch this ad. I like it.

• 2:11:54Tim Ferriss?

  And then there are certain, eventually, real world considerations like budget, like legal. And I'm wondering if there are examples of like overriding these constraints where it's worked out, or at what point you kind of bring things back to earth, right? Because if you do it too early, you, it would seem like you

• 2:12:12Speaker 04

  Stifles it.

• 2:12:12Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 2:12:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, you know, there's no hard and fast rules. I think the nice thing about working at big agencies with big brands is my experience has always been if the idea is good enough, there's always more money. I think I can say that without getting in trouble, but it's true. And then I think creative people, we need the constraints to push off against, to have ideas that have tension and that are going to be effective. So I think we try to know as much about that going in as possible. And sometimes you'll have a $10 million idea for a $1 million budget and it's tragedy because it would be amazing and they would probably get great ROI on it and it might make economic sense. But sorry, I'm quoting everyone and their mother, but my, another one of my mentors, Rob Riley, who's the chief creative officer of the WPP Holding Company, always says,

• 2:12:56Speaker 04

  no client ever fired you for bringing extra ideas. And so I think

• 2:12:59Tim Ferriss?

  It's a great line.

• 2:12:59Speaker 04

  You know, some of the best things we've ever gotten away with have been a lucky strike extra or saying, okay, here's the thing you asked for, but by the way, I know this would involve getting a few celebrities or opening the coffers, but what about this? And, and I think once you've taken the defenses down by showing what's within possibility, you buy yourself goodwill and permission to bring a crazy idea and you're going to be sharing that crazy idea with someone who's not nervous about what's to come. They're going to enjoy it. And so by and large, You can get there with that. But yeah, I think you've got to cover your bases first, or else, yeah, they'll be pissed at you.

• 2:13:33Tim Ferriss?

  TBS is funniest ad of the year.

• 2:13:35Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:13:35Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give us some context on this?

• 2:13:37Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:13:37Tim Ferriss?

  On this prompt?

• 2:13:38Speaker 04

  This is, it's like you're in my head, Tim, because this, you've just connected it, and maybe you already know where it's going. But we, my creative partner, when I was at BBDO, was a guy named Dan Lucy, and he and I, he's my best friend, and, you know, and for eight years, I spent more time with him than I spent with my wife, sharing an office and finishing each other's sentences and fighting all the time, too. And we had a new client in Foot Locker, and their aspiration was to not be this kind of transactional house of brands, but for holding the Foot Locker bag to mean something. And so that, we knew there was big ambition there that we had to, it wasn't just about like the shoes that were in stock, it was about trying to make the brand cultural. So we, we worked together on Foot Locker for about five or six years, and we created an ongoing campaign where we got celebrities

• 2:14:20Speaker 04

  and athletes to make fun of themselves and, you know, kind of play it close to the bone. So part of this is we had a great client, a guy named Jed Berger, who, he didn't come up from traditional marketing. He'd come from Modell's, which is an East Coast sports store.

• 2:14:32Tim Ferriss?

  I know Modell's.

• 2:14:33Speaker 04

  You know Modell's.

• 2:14:33Tim Ferriss?

  We're all up on Long Island, yeah.

• 2:14:35Speaker 04

  He also founded a basketball magazine called Dime Magazine. He had other interests besides just marketing. So he was, kind of came at things from a cultural place. So sometimes we would show him ideas that got to the bone of sports issues or athlete issues, and he always championed it. So this was our first kind of big campaign, and we overswung the fences like crazy. Like, there was maybe, you know, money for a cameo in an ad, and instead, we came up with this cockamamie idea that for this one week, Foot Locker was putting out the very best shoes. They were just gonna stack it one day after another, and the client had called it the week of greatness. And so we had written an ad that said, you know, basically, what's happening at Foot Locker, it almost feels like with all these shoes coming out, it feels like all is right in the world. And then we leave that scene, and

• 2:15:19Speaker 04

  we go and we see a bunch of wrongs be righted and impossibilities happen. And so we wrote the script, and it had Mike Tyson answering the door, and Evander Holyfield is there. With a box and he's returns that Mike Tyson returns the piece of the ear that he bit off of Ander. So already we're showing that to the rest of the team at BBDO and they're like, that's never going to happen. And then we're like, don't worry, it keeps going. Uh, you know, Dennis Rodman, this is But wait, there's more. 2012 kind of joke, Dennis Rodman, what did we all want to see? He was at an airline counter and he buys a one-way ticket to North Korea. They're like, that's never going to happen. And then, and they're like, but wait, there's more because Brett Favre would refuse to retire. So Brett Favre is going to make a joke about retiring. You know, he's at

• 2:16:02Speaker 04

  a diner and he's got a piece of pie and he hands it back to the lady half eaten and says he's time to stop. So one or the other, everyone said that you can't bring this to them because this is going to cost a bajillion dollars. They're never going to do it. This is not, they asked us for something simple and you've given something incredibly complicated. And, you know, this is, I would say, kind of halfway through my journey. And, you know, there's probably a period, usually around the halfway point where you're like, maybe a little more arrogant than you, than you are later and in the beginning. And so Dan and I just went, nah, we're going to do it. And so we got in such a blow up fight with our account lead that he said, well, you know what? You're going to tank this whole thing and I'm not going to go to the meeting. And so we went, sounds good. So we went down

• 2:16:42Speaker 04

  to the meeting by ourselves without our business partner who forsook us as a matter of pride at principle. And we presented it to this guy Jed and he went, I fucking love it. Let's do it. So, you know, you've, you've got to take your chances. There's no shame in it. And we would have had the, and you know, and he knew, and Jed knew, we would have had the back, we can write him a cheap ad, but we have a great one. And then, and so he, you know, he went to Badger and he went and he negotiated, our client negotiated with all those athletes and people. And a little side story, which for any sports nerds will be really fun, is we filmed the Brett Favre segment in Hattiesburg, Virginia. So Dan went down there with the camera crew to pick that up. He gave us half an hour because he was a high school football coach in his first season retired. And he famously had,

• 2:17:26Speaker 04

  you know, hung on to things in Green Bay and kind of, as the story goes, prevented a young Aaron Rodgers from ascending and taking the starting quarterback spot year after year. And so there was tension there and that was famously or in the press, a bad relationship.

• 2:17:40Speaker 04

  And Dan calls me from set and he says, I was just standing next to Brett Favre in between shots and I saw him open his fantasy football on his phone and Aaron Rodgers is his starting quarterback. And I was like, God, that is such fun intel to get from the frontline. And I swear, we were like, should we call like Bleacher Report and tell them this? It's so, people, sports fans would love to know that.

• 2:18:03Tim Ferriss?

  I really have two questions. There are 50 more. I'm just going to give some teasers that we won't get to.

• 2:18:08Speaker 04

  Yes. What's the, why, why that? Why? What if it's something that someone really wants to know about and then we didn't do it?

• 2:18:13Tim Ferriss?

  Then maybe we do a round two.

• 2:18:15Speaker 04

  Okay, fair enough, fair enough.

• 2:18:17Tim Ferriss?

  So the time Kanye tried to get you fired.

• 2:18:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, we're not going to do that. Although I really, I really do at some point want to talk about that because just the limited context that I have makes it seem really hilarious.

• 2:18:31Speaker 04

  It was pretty good. Okay.

• 2:18:33Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Actually, I'll let you choose. You know what? This is going to be not dealer's choice. This will be your choice.

• 2:18:37Speaker 04

  And gambler's choice.

• 2:18:38Tim Ferriss?

  So that's gambler's choice. This is one option. Another option is you on the cusp of taking your name off of the Guinness wheelchair basketball ad.

• 2:18:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:48Tim Ferriss?

  And what that was all about and just how that unfolded.

• 2:18:53Speaker 04

  The Kanye is easy, but we'll save that for another time. The wheelchair basketball one, because there was a good lesson in it, which is, so Dan, the partner I mentioned, and another guy named Tom Kramer and I pitched that ad.

• 2:19:03Tim Ferriss?

  What is the ad?

• 2:19:04Speaker 04

  So in the ad, a group of, it's almost like you start in like a Nike ad or in a scene from the movie Murder Ball, which is a movie that features wheelchair basketball. You're just in a really intense game, a wheelchair basketball, and you get seduced into it. You follow the team down one end of the court to the other and you think it's all about performance or drive or what these guys are doing. And as the game resolves, the surprise is that nine out of the 10 guys get up out of their chairs to leave the gymnasium and then one friend is still in the chair. And you understand that this group of friends all participated in wheelchair basketball so that they could play with their friend who's in a wheelchair. The way we got to that, so the line we had was made of more for Guinness and it was, it's simple. It's one of those great lines where the beer itself

• 2:19:47Speaker 04

  is complicated, but also it's maybe a drink, maybe someone who, who wants to feel like they're of more substance or that there's something more substantial in that moment would choose. So the brief we gave ourselves was, what's a story you would tell that you Would wish you could do that for a friend. Or if your friends did that for you, that would mean everything. So it was just kind of writing that way. So it's very simple, and that was what was pitched. And that's probably what anyone who saw the ad saw. But what happened was our experience making it was not great. We were pretty hard headed at that. It was right, right around the, the Foot Locker time where we were maybe a little more rambunctious and a little fighty.

• 2:20:29Speaker 04

  And we had a client that also was a little rambunctious and fighty. And I think early on, for whatever reason, I think there was like a sense of distrust that wasn't solved when we were going to produce the ad. And for whatever reason, we didn't quell it, we fought it. So we brought forward the director we wanted and the client didn't like something about the director's treatment. The director will write a synopsis of how they plan to tell the story. And instead of saying, okay, we hear you, let's go back and rewrite it. We tried to push back. We tried to win the fight. And as I think I mentioned from my Adidas experience, you know, you, you can't really win these fights. You've got to play it collaboratively and forward. But we ended up basically just, every single thing was a fight. And ultimately we lost every fight.

• 2:21:11Speaker 04

  And it got to the point where, you know, the director was challenged and the casting was challenged and the wardrobe of one of the actors that wasn't even the lead actor was, why would you choose green shoes? And we like green shoes, but it didn't matter. But we lost and then they weren't green shoes. And there was a red stripe in the gym and why is there a red stripe? That's Budweiser's color. And we're like, it doesn't matter. And then instead of just saying, we'll change it, we'll paint it out. So we fought everything, we lost everything and we just felt like such losers by the time we were done. The music wasn't the track we liked. The set of words had to be rewritten because it wasn't right. And we were so down and we were so miserable and sad that when it got released, the three of us said, look, we're going to take our names off it because this is, it's garbage. Because maybe of our egos, the 30 battles we lost along the way, that must've meant

• 2:21:56Speaker 04

  it was crap, you know? And so maybe it was subconscious, but we never made that phone call, even though we intended to, I think we got busy. So we didn't ask for our names to be taken off of it, but we intended to. And then it aired with no fanfare on a playoff baseball game in October that I wasn't watching. The ad was not on YouTube. Someone videoed it on their phone, maybe on their DVR, uploaded it to YouTube. And by the morning it had over a million views. I don't even know how anyone found it. I don't even know how you could search it, but it just kind of went. Through the roof because it touched the thing that we wanted to touch where everyone felt, "God, I would do that for someone," or "I pray I have people around me that would do that for me." But we missed the whole point because we were so caught up in the 30 things we lost, we missed. The story was still intact and it was still good, but we were obsessed about our own personal experience on it

• 2:22:41Speaker 04

  that made us lose faith in it. And so it's just that constant reminder, like, step back, ask yourself if you're feeling a certain way, "Does it really matter? Is it really changing things or are you just caught in the weeds?" So that was a big lesson for me to get outside of my own attitude about stuff.

• 2:22:56Tim Ferriss?

  Were you able to change your behavior in future projects because of that?

• 2:23:02Speaker 04

  I think so. I think it was a clear lesson that a lot of things we thought mattered don't matter. So maybe we need to be a little more, a little more amenable to feedback and suggestion, you know?

• 2:23:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:23:14Speaker 04

  But it was good. It was a work lesson and a life lesson.

• 2:23:16Tim Ferriss?

  So, lessons. Not that you have to impart a lesson, but the billboard question. So if you could put a message, a quote, an image, anything on a billboard, non-commercial, metaphorically speaking, just to get something in front of a lot of people, what would you put?

• 2:23:30Speaker 04

  First thing is I would request the billboard location would be at my house because I want to see it every day. Whatever matters to me is probably the thing that I need to be reminded of more than I need to broadcast. But I would just say, "In the spirit of creativity and living an interesting life, see what's possible."

• 2:23:44Tim Ferriss?

  See what's possible.

• 2:23:45Speaker 04

  See what's possible.

• 2:23:46Tim Ferriss?

  What would that mean to you if it were in front of your house? How would that be helpful to you?

• 2:23:51Speaker 04

  It would remind me every day that I'm not living a routine, but I'm here to see what I can do and what people around me can do. And how can we, I don't like the word maximize because that sounds maybe a little functional, but like, how can you fully express in life? By taking chances, by believing in yourself, by trying new things. And it can mean anything to anyone, but it's just that reminder of, "I'm not here to do what the plan is today. I'm here to see what's possible."

• 2:24:17Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. Chris, we are winding to a close. Is there anything else that you would like to? Well, first of all, any websites, places to point people to that you'd like to mention? And then is there anything you'd like to say before we come to a close?

• 2:24:31Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, thank you. The best place to find me is LinkedIn because I tend to post a lot about creativity and work and work that we're doing and work that I find inspiring. So it's a good place to engage. And I hope anyone out there, we were talking before we started, that when I was 21, a career in advertising was one of the few options for a creative person. Today, you can self-publish, you can become an influencer, you can write your own movie, you can publish your own novel. It's not as attractive, but I hope we continue to attract the best talent and I hope people do pursue it because it's a really fun job. You learn about all kinds of different businesses. They tell you all their secrets about why things aren't working, how good their product really is, and you get to come up with ideas

• 2:25:13Speaker 04

  to solve it. And if you hit it, you know, you get to put them out into the world and get your ideas in front of hopefully millions of people. And I think it's probably a career that doesn't seem as illustrious as it used to be. But my hope is that we continue to bring great people in because that's the only way it's going to be vibrant and exciting. And by the way, otherwise, you're just going to have horrible ads on TV or whatever screen we look at. So it's kind of like, let's get good people in this industry so that we don't have to look at horrible marketing in the future.

• 2:25:41Tim Ferriss?

  And you also get to collaborate, right? It's a big, it's a big one. I mean, a lot of people out there, I think, have lost sight of the possibility of collaborating in these types of environments and these types of companies because the shiny object for a lot of young people is running your own ship as an influencer. But there are a lot of trade-offs. And one of them that I know from having spoken to a lot of people who are creators independently is you can end up being or feeling very isolated and very lonely. And one of my top priorities, in fact, I just finished an offsite recently for my whole team, was sort of fast creative collaborations with world-class people. Because you can do a lot as a solo operator, even

• 2:26:24Tim Ferriss?

  with a team, but if you're in isolation, you're not going to be broadening, at least, I don't think, for me personally, your horizons. You're not going to be bending and testing your perception of the world in a way that you could in a collaborative environment. So we will link to your LinkedIn in the show notes for everyone. And we will link to everything we've discussed in the show notes, everybody, at tim.blog/podcast. So that'll be easy to find. And until next time, please be a little bit kinder than is necessary, not just to others, but to yourself. And until next time, thanks for tuning in.

• 2:27:02Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric

• 2:27:46Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 2:28:11Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike. And I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of... Endurance exercise, mountain biking, etc. Another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 2:28:55Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:29:39Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:30:21Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:31:02Tim Ferriss?

  I literally have one on my kitchen counter right now that I've been using in the mornings. So go to drinklmnt.com/tim to claim your free Element sample pack with any purchase and try every flavor. That's drinklmnt.com/tim for this exclusive offer. One more time, drinklmnt.com/tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals, the number one selling fish oil brand in the US. More than 80% of Americans, that's probably a lot of you listening, including me, because I do measure my omega-3s, do not get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body cannot produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function.

• 2:31:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:32:27Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:33:11Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:33:51Speaker 01

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