106 – Cards Against Humanity with Max Temkin

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It's Sue and welcome to the gift biz on wrapped podcast,

whether you own a brick and mortar shops sell online or

are just getting started,

you'll discover new insight to gain traction and to grow your

business. And today I have joining us max Tempkin with cards

against humanity.

I really struggled with how to introduce max.

He's a man with numerous successes,

seriously, too much to mention in this intro,

but I'm going to highlight just a few.

Max is one of the creators of the wildly popular game

of cards against humanity.

He is a co-founder of black box,

which you guys might be interested in.

It's a shipping company that helps independent artists send physical goods

to their customers.

The boxes,

by the way are blue.

He's the guy behind crazy stunts,

such as digging a hole to nowhere and the 32nd Superbowl

commercial featuring a potato that simply says advertisement.

He's been featured on fast company business,

insider, and last year with Forbes 30 under 30 today,

we're going to focus on the development of cards against humanity

and the creativity behind what he puts out to the world.

I honestly have no idea where this talk is going to

go. So buckle up and let's take this ride together.

Max, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I like to start out as you have just found out

by having you describe yourself in a way behind a motivational

candle. So if you were to describe that for us,

what color would your candle be and what would be the

quote on your candle?

What's a motivational candle.

I know this is going to be a stretch,

but let's say you walk into a gift store and you

see a shelf full of candles.

And these candles have SANEs that relate to people that motivate

them or speak to who they are and they buy the

candle then because it has that sane on it.

So I'd be curious which candle you would pick based on

the sane.

I'd like to do the color too,

because colors indirectly describe people.

And it's kind of interesting what colors people will say.

Oh, I see.

Well, I don't know that this is a product that I

would license my name to.

Well, let's go with,

what is your favorite color?

Well, it's interesting because my trade is as a designer,

but I never,

I don't have any like formal education.

So I never went to art school and I almost all

of my work I'm pretty of color.

So I tend to work a lot with black and white

and then I'll,

if there's a color,

I usually pick one color as the brand color and a

work with black,

white, and one color.

So that's kind of a,

so I'd have to go with,

I'd probably have to go with white.

All right.

So you're a black and white kind of guy and white

would be your color.

Yeah. That's kind of the predominant color use in most of

my work.

All right.

So Let's talk about cards against humanity.

Yeah. We were undergrads in college and cards expanded.

He was just the latest in a long line of games

that me and a bunch of my friends from Highland park

made together.

We just have a long history of making improv games and

drawing games and card games and all kinds of different activities

to do.

And usually they were pretty bad.

So it was just something that would sort of fill an

afternoon and then we'd be done with it.

But cards was the first one where we made it for

like a new year's party.

And we woke up the next day and we were like,

man, that game was really fun.

We should probably keep working on that.

So you were just doing it on the side for fun.

And this is really helpful to our audience just to understand

how a concept can then lead into a product.

So you were doing this just for fun.

Did you all go to the same college then too?

Y'all have known each other since like elementary school,

but we all went to different colleges.

One of the main motivations,

honestly, of working on cards against humanity was everyone was going

to different schools living in different cities.

And we wanted a project that would bring everyone together so

that we would stay in touch and have a reason to

have a meeting every so often and,

you know,

have this thing that would continue to keep us in touch.

And it's been incredibly successful at that.

Like these are the,

all of these guys are still my best friends.

We have one business meeting a week for cards against humanity,

but we've had that meeting on Monday nights for six years

on interrupted.

Oh, Wow.

So you see,

after this new year's night that this is something that was

really fun.

Maybe this can turn into something bigger.

What are your next steps?

What did you start doing to build this actually into a

real physical game that people could buy?

We never anticipated that it would be something that people could

buy or be a physical game.

We just thought it was funny and it made us laugh.

And so we posted it for free online.

So, I mean,

there was even an intermediate steps of like,

we all brought it back to college with us and our

college friends liked it.

And you know,

we would get back together and be like,

man, this game that we're playing people really like it.

So Ben and I got together and just made a website

and we bought like cards against humanity.com

and put the game up as a free PDF.

We just posted on different,

you know,

whatever forums or wherever we were hanging out online.

And we'd be like,

Hey, here's the thing we made.

Maybe you guys will think it's funny.

So there was never any intention to sell it or produce

it in any way or have a company or anything of

that. But indirectly little,

did you know you were testing the concept,

you were seeing that there was a lot of receptivity to

it. People were enjoying it.

And then at what point then did it turn to wait,

maybe we should be doing something more with this.

So we had an email form on the website so people

could send us their card ideas or tell us what they

thought. And one of the most frequent messages that we got

was people would say,

Hey, I really want to play this thing.

Or I heard a good thing about this game.

I want to check it out,

but I don't want to print it out myself and cut

all the cards out.

Would you just print it and cut it for me?

And at that point,

that was where we started.

You know,

I don't know,

maybe a couple of hundred of those messages.

And then we were like,

this might be worth doing.

And we had always imagined it,

I think as like a one-time printing,

like something that we would do once for all the people

that had signed up.

And that would sort of put an end to the project,

but it didn't go that way.

I took some time off of college to work on the

campaign. And as a designer on the campaign and the design

this guy,

Scott Thomas was a mentor to me and someone I really

look up to at a time when I don't think a

lot of people appreciated how important the design of the Obama

campaign was and how extensive the work was.

He had made this book called designing Obama.

That was sort of an art book showing the process of

everything that got made and the fan art and the whole

Obama movement as a visual identity.

And he made this thing that it was literally the most

important book in the world.

To me,

I would do anything to have this book.

It was the thing that was the most important to me

in my life,

but there was like no market for it,

right? No one is trying to buy a coffee table,

book of the style guide of,

you know,

Obama for America and the sort of nerdy inside baseball information

about like the fonts that we used.

He knew that he guys who started this website Kickstarter,

which is the first crowdfunding site and Scott put the book

up on Kickstarter.

And it was pretty amazing that this niche book that like

really was appealed to like me and a few thousand other

people, it found this fan,

following people could say how much they loved it.

And most importantly,

they could put their money into it so they could put,

you know,

I don't remember what it was,

but like 50 bucks on and get a copy of the

book. And then Scott was able to produce it to this

day. It's one of the most beautiful art books that's ever

been made.

It's, it's an incredible piece of work.

So I saw from Scott's Kickstarter,

I was like,

this is an amazing tool because it gives you a couple

of things.

It lets you take a really niche product that most people

won't like and connect with an audience that's willing to pay

for it.

And more importantly than that,

it puts you in total creative control.

So nobody can say no.

So like the other thing I learned from Scott was we

were constantly plagued on the Obama campaign by that deep blue.

I don't know if you remember,

there was like a deep,

like a Royal blue color that was the primary brand color

And it's a notoriously difficult color to print when you print

it using process colors,

it comes out as a Brown.

You could never predict on your home printer for example.

And so it was a really striking color.

You don't see it all that often in the world because

it's so hard to work with.

But also it meant that most of the time when people

were using it on the campaign,

it was wrong and it constantly plagued us,

drove us insane.

So when Scott was doing the book,

he decided he wanted to bind the book in a fabric.

That was the correct color of Royal blue.

And there was no one in the market who made that

fabric. So he did a backer update in his Kickstarter one

day and he said,

I'm flying to Japan to go to a silk factory.

And they're going to make the silk binding for the book,

just for the book,

with the exact shade of blue,

that's the official brand color for the Obama campaign.

And I'm going to go there myself to supervise to make

sure that the color is correct.

And I was like,

that's no publisher would let him do that.

No one who is investing in this book would say that

that makes financial sense or that that's a good decision.

But like,

of course that's the whole point of the book.

That's why the book is good is because the book is

the art object that exemplifies principles of the campaign design.

So that was the other piece of Kickstarter that blew my

mind was I was like,

well, this puts you in the driver's seat creatively.

Like nobody can tell,

you know,

you're able to creatively express this project in the most authentic

way and there's not any,

you know,

no suit or business person or producers going to come in

and say,

Oh, you have to save a nickel here,

a nickel there and compromise the idea.

So I had just seen Scott do that.

And that's where my head was as we were getting these

emails of people saying,

Oh, we really want to play cards and we're going like,

well, this is games,

never going to get a publisher.

Like no one's ever going to put it's too crazy for,

for any sort of like mass market audience.

But maybe Kickstarter's the tool where we can connect with the

audience and not have to creatively compromise it or give up

ownership too much.

Kickstarter was just to put it.

It was just a first printing.

So it was to take the game that we,

that was already done and,

and free online and just print it out for people.

Got it.

And so then,

as I recall,

because you'd only print it up when you finally got there

to the point of printing,

a limited amount,

people were trying to buy this on eBay and such for

the couple hundred dollars,

And this was never any part of a strategy or anything.

We just,

you know,

like I said,

when we did the Kickstarter,

we were like,

well, that'll put this to bed,

we'll print it out for people and we'll do a printing.

We never,

again, there was never any intention of this being a business

like, well,

we didn't even plan a printed on playing cards.

Like it was originally going to be printed by like a

local printer in Chicago on business cards,

because it was much cheaper.

And I knew how to do it from working on campaigns.

I knew specialty printers.

And after the Kickstarter,

there was just continued demand.

Like we just could not make enough of these things for

people. And for most of the history of cards against humanity,

we've been sold out.

I mean,

it's been very difficult to get the game.

So people have had to go to the website,

join a mailing list,

wait for the new printing to come out and then like

jump on Amazon or jump on our website really quickly to

get a copy.

So demand because you had unintentionally created scarcity was huge.

The one thing if biz listeners that I want to make

mention of,

and max is demonstrating this perfectly here is how one thing,

when you start with one thing now,

they weren't even thinking of cards against humanity as a business.

But one step leads to another leads to another.

I talk about this all the time.

They recognize different areas like Kickstarter might be something let's just

print this up and get it out.

Then there's the demand and it keeps going and it keeps

going. Max,

give us kind of an overall summary of where cards of

humanity is today.

Oh, I don't even know where to begin with that.

I mean,

we have an office and people work there every day and

I don't know,

we write jokes and people buy the jokes.

The business model is we sell a game for money and

then we spend less than we make.

And it's,

it's going well.

Like we'll be able to work on this for a long

time. Perfect summary of the right business plan,

sell something and then be making more than you're putting into

producing it.

Of course.

All right.

So let's move on to black box.

I understand that black box kind of came as an extension

of a need that you found from cards against humanity in

terms of being able to ship quickly.

Yeah. So a lot of this comes from our ignorance and

not really knowing how things were done when we started cards

against humanity.

You know,

we didn't completely understand all the resources that were out there

and how you're,

you know,

quote unquote,

like supposed to ship a product when you make something.

And part of the fun of cars is we just figured

all that stuff out for ourselves.

We liked the challenge we liked figuring out like,

okay, we're going to print our game in China.

Like how do we get it to the U S and

once it's in the U S how do we get it

on a truck?

And how do we get it to the warehouse?

And how is the customer going to buy it?

We liked working through that in a kind of a systematic

way. The main place that cards is sold is we use

FBA fulfillment by Amazon.

So we own the inventory.

It's our product,

but it's sold on Amazon.

So you can find if you just search Amazon for cards

against humanity,

we show up and you can buy it.

But what's nice is you're buying it directly from us and

Amazon is shipping it.

So we don't have to answer any customer service emails.

We don't have to put anything in any boxes.

We don't have to pay for any postage.

The issue with this is since the company started to get

bigger and bigger,

and we had employees and it was becoming a bigger part

of our lives.

We were like,

we don't necessarily want a 100% dependency on Amazon.

That's a pretty crazy core competency of our company to completely

outsource to Amazon.

And Amazon is not known for their consistent policies and loyalty

to their Right.

I mean,

if something changes that you don't like,

you could be in big trouble,

There's nothing you can do.

Right. So changes on Amazon every day.

And it's like,

well, there's not even a phone number to call.

It's just like,

Oh, okay,

well that's my life now,

Amazon changed it.

So we were like,

well, this is a pretty bad total dependency for our company.

That if Amazon kicked us off the platform,

we'd just go out of business.

It became a pretty high priority for us.

We were like,

all right,

we got to figure out how to also sell stuff on

our website.

So if something ever happens with Amazon,

we have a solution.

We didn't want to operate a warehouse that seemed like a

really bad business.

So we figured out how to use commercial warehouses and build

software that communicated to the warehouse and sent the orders.

And we built this whole network.

And we sort of did it as a challenge because we

wanted to learn how it all worked and do it ourselves.

But it turns out I think that we built it in

a much better way than exists in the market.

Currently. Now we've spun that off as its own company called

black box.

It's just a service that,

I mean,

we use it for cards,

but it's open to anyone else who is an independent artist

who makes a product and wants to sell it to their

customers. So,

you know,

the name black box has meant to communicate that it's pretty

opaque. You don't have to worry about a lot of the

details. You send us your products,

and then we send you a button and you put the

button on your own website and the customer uses the button

to buy your product.

And then we handle everything else.

We ship it.

We do the customer service.

We pay your sales tax.

I mean,

all those little details of doing online commerce,

our philosophy with black boxes,

that artists shouldn't have to worry about.

That stuff you shouldn't be worrying about.

What's the best postage rate or what kind of labels should

you buy,

or how to deal with an angry customer.

When to issue someone,

a refund,

as we say,

a cards that's like a buy,

not to make decision fabulous,

because as artists,

People want to be focusing on their art,

not on all that logistic behind the scenes type stuff,

is there a minimum of product that goes through and is

accepted when you want to sign up for Blackbox?

The company is very young and we're sort of figuring out

all these policies as we go.

So there's not a number in place right now.

We've figured out with people on a case by case basis,

if it financially makes sense for them to use black box

based on the costs.

But I would say like,

if someone is making one of something,

so like,

if you have an Etsy shop where you're selling a handmade

thing, Blackbox is not a good solution because the cost and

time to integrate each product and the black box would not

be worth it for something where there's only one of them.

If you're making a thousand of something,

that's certainly enough.

So I would say the number is somewhere in between one

Okay, perfect.

I'm guessing a website for that is black box.com.

Is that right?

No. It's black box dot.

Cool. Ooh,

black box dot.

Cool. So gift is listeners.

If you're interested in learning more about that,

jump over to that website and see what that's all about.

Max. I know you do nothing traditional,

which has already been demonstrated as we've been talking.

Why is the black box blue?

Or we thought it was funny,

that's it?

Yeah. Well,

so the other thing is on cards.

You know,

now I'm very lucky.

We have an unbelievable design team.

It's a,

it's actually like for me,

it's like one of the greatest guilty pleasures of getting to

work on cards is I've gotten to hire designers that are

much better than myself and learn from them.

It's cool for me as a designer to get to work

with them and improve my own skill,

but also to see things and opportunities and possibilities that never

would've occurred to me.

So the blue Blackbox brand was put together by our design

team and it's something I would have,

you know,

like I said,

I don't like working with color for me that comes out

of not having gone to art school.

Like I don't really understand color theory.

I don't know.

It's just a comfort level thing,

but it's been a fun experience.

And so the cards brand is all it's completely black and

white. There's no color in it,

but for black box,

like it's full of color.

And the blue was,

it was just really lively and exciting and different than everything

else we did.

And it was an opportunity for me to like push myself

and get to learn from all this amazing design team that

we have some new skills,

some new tricks,

Perfect. And give biz listeners.

Remember you don't have to know everything.

I mean,

max is talking about how he reached out to other people

because that's a way for him to learn as well.

But as an entrepreneur,

you don't have to know everything nor can you,

so one of the reasons to reach out and have other

people help you with your business is what max is describing.

The other is so that you can stay with your product

or with your art.

Particularly if you're an artist,

you can continue doing what you love and then have other

people come in and take care of some of the business

end. All right.

I have to ask you and understand what is behind some

of these crazy stunts.

You're doing talk a little bit about the digging the hole

to nowhere.

Sure. So cards has a long history now of doing funny

things on black Friday,

sort of stunts on,

on black Friday,

mainly as a protest of black Friday.

We really hate black Friday,

but we're sort of forced,

you know,

if you're,

if you're in the retail business and you're making toys and

games, yeah.

The holidays are to put it lightly.

It's an important time of the year and you kind of

have to sell stuff then,

but we truly hate having to compete on black Friday for

attention with everyone else.

And it's,

it's really,

it's a disgusting holiday.

Like if you've ever stopped to think about what black Friday

is, it comes after this day where you're supposed to spend

time with your family and be thankful for the things that

you have.

And then there's this repulsive orgy of like people elbowing each

other in the face to get $10 off of TV at

best buy.

It's really shameful and disgusting.

Some that comes from Americans with black Friday is crazy.

I totally,

yeah. I agree with you also,

like how dumb are people who are these deals for obvious,

like, listen,

that's my it's not losing money.

Like it's meant to get you in the store.

So you spend money.

I don't understand the whole logic of these like coupons and

deals and doorbusters.

You understand you're part of their strategy.

They're making money on you.

Anyway, the whole thing is insane to me.

So we just resent like having to participate in it.

But we have to sort of do something to get attention

on black Friday.

So these black Friday pranks just come out of our,

it's sort of like our protest of black Friday.

And sometimes it works for,

you know,

it gets some attention for cards.

Sometimes it doesn't work that well.

The first one we did,

we did like a special sale work cards against humanity was

$5 more.

It was cards against humanity is black Friday,

one day only $5 more sale.

And everything in our store costs $5 more on black Friday

only what happened to the sales.

And they went way up,

people loved it.

And then the next day it was hilarious.

People were complaining.

They were like,

I can't believe I missed it.

I wanted to spend $5.

That is crazy in a way you got it.

How did you think of this?

And I want to hear a couple of the other black

Friday things,

but from a creative standpoint,

did you guys on your Monday night call brainstorm ideas or,

I mean,

cause you have the craziest most fun,

interesting ideas.

How do they come to be?

I mean,

the honest answer is it's a lot of hard work,

so there's eight of us who make cards against humanity together.

And we discovered early on that we like working together in

sort of short bursts of intense energy.

And that came about just sort of organically because we would

all come home from college and,

you know,

work in our parents' basement over like winter break from school.

And then,

you know,

we, we knew we had this deadline of like,

we've got to go back to school so that week or

whatever we had to work together,

it had a kind of intensity to it that we really

liked. And we all live in different cities.

We're all over the country.

So we do these retreats now about four times a year

where we pick a city somewhere interesting.

We try and go somewhere remote,

not like in the middle of a city.

And we get like an Airbnb and we go stay at

a house for like a week.

And then we have,

you know,

whatever, five or seven days.

And we have these projects,

it's like,

we got to get these projects done,

but it's also all we're doing.

We're very intensely working on these problems.

So the first black Friday sale came out of one of

these retreats.

And you know,

we were trying to figure out,

we've got to do something for black Friday,

but like we have a long standing policy that we'll never

do any coupons or discounts or deals on cards against humanity.

And to this day we never have,

we decided early on the price of cards against humanity is

$25 and it's worth $25 and it's never worth another price.

Like it's always worth that price.

So if we sometimes sold it for $23,

then we felt like,

well, that undercuts the belief that this is the value of

it. So we just sort of planted our flag in the

ground and we were like,

that's what we're doing.

So it made it really tricky.

So we were like,

well, what do we do on black stuff?

We can't do a dealer,

a discount.

Like, what do you do on black Friday?

So we came up with the idea of doing a coupon

for 1 cent off and it was funny.

It kind of made us laugh,

but then we were like,

yeah, it's still like a coupon.

It's not a good one,

but it's still a coupon though.

It's still a deal.

So then we,

I don't know that just sort of,

we, we just sort of went down that road and we

were like,

what's an even worse deal.

And we're like,

what if we charge More?

And it worked,

clearly it Worked.

Yeah, it did really well.

We got a lot of attention for it.

The other thing I was gonna mention is just in terms

of the creative process of this,

we'll come up with 30 ideas and say no to 29

of them.

Like most of coming up with a funny idea or something

surprising is not stopping at the first thing you come up

with. That sounds plausible.

And also nobody likes walking into a new problem where you

don't know the solution.

And then going through that,

like dark night of the soul,

where you have no idea what you're doing and there's no

clear answer and you have no idea.

If you're going to come out alive on the other end,

it's horrifying and scary and uncomfortable and makes us nauseous.

Like every time we sit down and do it,

and we've been doing this for,

at this point,

almost a decade,

working on the game and we go into the problem and

we're like,

okay, well we don't know what we're going to do,

but here's what we're trying to accomplish.

Let's talk about it for a couple hours.

And the temptation is you get to the first idea.

That sounds pretty good.

It works,

it solves a problem.

And it's like,

the relief is palpable.

You're like,

Oh my God,

a solution we're done.

And you have to not stop there.

Then you have to go back into the darkness and be

like, okay,

we need to like rethink this.

That solution's not good enough.

We've got to keep going.

Sometimes you do come back to that first solution,

but usually we'll try to get 20 ideas on the table

before we commit to anything.

And sometimes some of those ideas are useful later.

Sometimes we throw them all out.

Sometimes we never solve the problem.

And then we just don't do it.

But to me,

I think that's like the thing that's like emblematic of like

the cards against humanity process.

It's true of our writing too.

Like for every card that makes it in the game,

cards that don't make it into the game.

No kidding.

Yeah. That's a lot of writing,

testing, arguing evaluation,

and then you put that one idea in the game,

but then when you play it,

the cards that are,

there are really special.

They're one in a thousand ideas,

they feel really sharp and funny to be Right now for

a while.

You were doing custom cards too.

Are you still doing that?

Tell me what you mean.

One of my girlfriends has a card.

It's either a card or a response.

That's her name.

Oh, Okay.

So this was the thing we did.

And it's like a subscription where you give us $10 and

we just send you 12 mystery gifts for the 12 days

of Christmas.

Or we did like the eight days of Hanukkah last year,

or what was that two years ago at this point.

And one of the days that we did for one of

these was we sent everyone a card with their name on

it. Got it.

But it was just a random gift that they got it.

Wasn't like a product that anyone could buy Really interesting and

really valuable information max,

in terms of how you go and continue driving down,

driving down,

you know,

not stopping at the first idea to get to some of

these crew really super creative things.

And I would suggest now you guys are known for,

you know,

it's like,

what's the next thing that they're going to do.

That's crazy,

I guess.

Yeah. The best thing to do,

gift biz listeners,

if you're interested in knowing a little bit more about digging

a hole to nowhere or this other one,

which I do want to get into for a second,

but you can Google most likely these names and then the

whole story will come up.

If you're interested in hearing more max,

give us just a little bit of the behind the scenes

of how you came up with and why you did the

Superbowl commercial first.

Explain it.

And then what was the purpose?

Sure. So we are in a super commercial this year.

That was just a picture of a potato.

That's an advertisement.

And then the next day we did a medium post that

was got wire,

Superbowl commercial failed,

a medium post.

And this came about because someone from Fox Chicago emailed us

a rate sheet for the super bowl and it was pretty

cheap. I think it was 50 grand or something like that.

And we were like,

Oh, for a media buy that scale that we do.

Like that's actually a fairly good price.

And we didn't really care that anyone sees the ad.

We just want the publicity,

you know,

after the super bowl,

there's this whole cottage industry of the ad analysis.

I'm sure you've seen this of like the 10 best Superbowl

ads. So the winners and losers of the Superbowl,

they're playing right into the strategies of all of these companies,

but there's this huge after the fact analysis of all the

advertising and the super bowl.

And we were like,

we could probably get into that for pretty cheap if we

do this ad on Fox Chicago.

So we bought an ad during the super bowl and we

plan for it to be sort of bad and confusing.

And then we're at a whole sort of satirical blog post

about the mistakes we made and what we learned from it,

which was also fun.

It was also sort of a parody of the,

all the,

like, why,

I don't know if this is as much of a thing

in the gift business,

but in startups,

it's basically a genre at this point of the why my

startup failed posts.

And these posts are hilarious because they're people who have failed

because they didn't know what they were doing.

And they have no humility from the experience they come out,

the other end of failure and then they presumed lecture everyone

again. And they're like,

no, no.

Now I know exactly what I'm talking about.

And here's the 10 lessons that you can learn from how

my company failed.

That's like,

wow, I actually take a break for a minute.

You know what also,

I mean,

this is all about attention too.

I mean,

the interesting thing that you're just talking about now is you

are doing this for a purpose,

obviously to get the attention afterwards and it's all about attention

and the way you're doing it is just challenging the systems

and doing something that is notable that's worth talking about.

And then you're following up and doing all the analysis,

like with the medium post and all that.

Yeah. I mean,

that's the business of cards.

That's how found out about cards is just people talking about

it. Honestly,

I don't actually believe that advertising really works.

Like I don't think it's actually worth anyone's time or money.

I don't think anyone really pays attention to advertising.

I don't actually think it sells products.

Okay. Yes.

Gift biz listeners.

You heard that,

right? Max does not think you need advertising to sell product.

We're going to take a break right here and get back

to this conversation in just one minute.

But before we do,

I have a question for you.

Do you know that you should be out networking,

but you just can't get yourself to do it because it's

scary. Are you afraid that you might walk into the room

and not know anybody or that you're going to freeze?

When you get up to do that infamous elevator speech,

where you talk about yourself and your business,

while I'm here to tell you that it doesn't need to

be scary.

If you know what to do to help you with this,

I would like to offer you a coffee chat for the

price of buying me a cup of coffee.

We can sit down through an online video and I'll tell

you everything that I know about networking and how I have

personally built two businesses,

primarily through networking to learn more about this opportunity.

Just go over to Bitly forward slash network Ninja.

That's B I T dot L Y forward slash network Ninja.

Now we're going to get back to the show,

but first a caution max has some very interesting thoughts that

are a lot different than what we've ever talked about here

on the show.

He also definitely has his own political opinion.

Although gift biz unwrap does not support one position or another

politically. I elected to keep some of this in here because

the underlying points that he shares are really valuable.

We're going to pick pack up here as max is talking

about his thoughts on advertising.

Yeah, someone who's needs the internet to work for like my

career and my happiness.

It actually greatly concerns me the sort of current ad tech

bubble that we're living in because people don't understand how much

advertising doesn't work.

If you're purchasing Facebook ads or purchasing Twitter ads or purchasing

Google ads or any,

whatever, any of this stuff,

it doesn't work like it does not convert.

It doesn't do.

It does not.

Ultimately it's not worth your time and money.

The only thing that works and convinces people is people talking

about it.

You have to do something good enough.

That's worth being talked about.

And everybody intuitively knows the kind of things that people talk

about when you go to a dinner party and people are

like, so what's new.

And you're going to tell them some story of what's happening

in the world.

People sit down and they go,

Oh my God,

did you hear the crazy shit that Donald Trump just did?

Or they go,

I saw the craziest product online or whatever.

And you just have to think to yourself,

well, what can you do that is interesting enough or meaningful

enough that people would mention it in that setting.

You know,

when they're standing around the water cooler at work or in

the car with their friend,

how do you do something that's being talked about?

We put a hundred percent of our energy into doing something

worth, being talked about and 0% of our energy into buying

ads. In fact,

other than for the purposes of the joke,

like the Superbowl ad cards against humanity has never purchased advertising.

We've never spent any money on advertising in the history of

our company.

And I can see why,

because exactly what you're saying,

you know,

doing something that's worth being talked about when people are at

the dinner parties to use a similar scenario,

they want to have good information to share.

I mean,

that puts the attention on them.

It spreads the word about you.

And that's a great filter and give biz listeners,

think about that.

What are you doing that is making you stand out and

be different?

And a lot of the things you're doing Macs don't even

relate to the game at all.

You know,

it's interesting now that I think about it,

I hate to give it up to the guy,

but Donald Trump is so good at this.

He says these crazy things,

but he does it for attention.

He does it because you know that we'll talk about it.

They don't want to give anything up to that guy for

doing good job,

but it's an incredibly effective strategy.

It again,

proves the point that you're just talking about is giving people

something to talk about.

They're not going to create something themselves as a business.

You have to present that to the world.

That's absolutely right.

You've got to have some story to tell,

like I said,

in cards,

we come up with a thousand ideas and say no to

999 of them.

And when we're evaluating an idea and we're like,

should we do this idea or not like one of the

questions we say is why would people talk about this?

Why would people tell their friends about it?

Why would anyone post on Twitter about that?

And if there's not a sort of a clear answer,

if we're like,

Oh yeah,

like I,

it would actually be pretty hard for me to see people

posting on Twitter about that.

We don't do it because that's not a good use of

our time.

Also. I'll say sometimes the reason people post about something or

talk about something is because they don't like it or they're

mad and that's okay.

Anything that's worth being talked about,

anything that's worth doing in life,

anything that's meaningful at all.

Some people will hate.

That's why it's meaningful.

You're putting yourself out there.

And you're saying,

this is what I believe about the world.

And this is how it is.

When we do jokes about black Friday,

it pisses people off.

They say,

why aren't these people playing by the rules?

Why are they being disrespectful during this important day for the

U S economy and for commerce?

You know,

if people get mad at us,

but we don't care.

It's just not that they're not our customers.

They don't have to like us.

It's okay to risk.

Disapproval. The thing is the only things you do are the

things that everybody likes will,

no one will care about them.

You're then vanilla.

Exactly. If it's everything to everyone,

then it means nothing to anyone.

I absolutely agree with you.

They're really,

really great information,

max. I really appreciate all of that and the direction you've

taken this.

I want to get a little bit more information from you

that could be helpful to our listeners,

right? As we're winding down here,

you have your Monday night calls with your original eight.

You have a team now I think you're downtown Chicago.

So you've got,

I don't know how many people you have working for you

at this point.

So you're working a number of different angles all the time.

Is there something that you use like a tool or some

way that you keep everything organized or communicate some type of

thing that you can share with our listeners that helped you

keep everything together?

Sure. Do you mean me personally or the whole team?

Either one,

whichever you think is the most valuable.

Sure. So the company On Slack,

I dunno if you're familiar with Slack,

but it's pretty,

yeah, it's pretty,

pretty big in the,

in the tech world.

And Slack is kind of just like a chat room that

your whole community can go in and there's a free version

of it.

That's fine for anyone.

And you know,

until you need to basically do like records or compliance and

you're making money and then you should buy it.

Slack is great.

Like if you have a small team and you need to

stay in touch with each other,

it's just a chat room.

It goes on your computer,

your phone,

we use Slack a lot.

One thing that's important is we don't make important decisions in

Slack. Like Slack is really just for little,

check-in staying in touch,

like sharing links,

whatever. During the day,

Slack is a really bad repository of information because it just

scrolls, you know,

we're in our co-working space and we have like a hundred

people in the Slack.

And it's just like,

if you go in the main room of flack at the

moment, it's just like immediately gone,

whatever you type.

So it's a horrible place for retaining information.

So I definitely recommend that people use some sort of form

of to-do list.

That's basically the most general term I can come up with

for it.

That's not Slack and not your email.

A lot of this I've learned from my friend,

Merl, man,

who's written and spoken about this a lot,

but it really was life-changing for me,

it's like kind of the only way I can keep my

head on.

But you know,

most people inadvertently use their email inbox or their Slack as

their to-do list.

And what I mean by that is when you don't know

what to do,

if you have some free time or you have a break

in your day,

you open up your email,

you open up Slack and then you do whatever.

The top thing in there is.

Well, this is no way to live a life.

If I said this to you,

if I said,

would you accept an office where you sat in the middle

of the office?

And at any point during the day,

it literally anybody who knows who's ever met you or knows

you could come up behind you and tap you on the

shoulder and tell you to do something for them.

Would you like working like that?

Every single person would say it would be unbearable,

but that's what you're doing.

When you work out of your email list,

when you open up your email and you do the top

thing in your email,

literally any single person,

any more on can send you something in your email,

just because it's in the top of your inbox or they're

complaining the most,

does not mean it's the most important thing in your day

or what you should be spending your time on.

Going through my email for me is like,

it's not something I do.

Ideally like throughout the day,

I actually have a calendar appointment.

I make time at,

I sit down for an hour or two every day I

do my emails and I just like process the inbox.

I take everything in the inbox and I turn it into

to do items.

So if it's quick,

if I can do it in five seconds,

I reply back to someone with like a quick reply.

But if it's a lot of work,

you know,

solve this problem for someone or write this memo or do

with this thing,

it goes on my to-do list.

And then every morning when I wake up,

I can look at my to-do list and I can ask

myself, what am I going to do with my wife today?

I can take a holistic look at all of the projects

that I need to do.

I sort of exercise some control of my life and have

some priority and say,

okay, I know this person is yelling at me the most,

but actually the most important thing is this.

And if you're just working out a Slack or your email,

you'd never realize that.

And then in terms of like specific tools,

like I'm a hundred percent Mac ecosystem,

there's very powerful and somewhat intimidating tool on Mac called OmniFocus

OmniFocus is based on the getting things done system.

But it's just a very robust to do List.

Is that what you're using for your to do's?

I use it for my,

to do's and my whole life is an OmniFocus.

I have just have too many things going on to hold

it in my head.

So whenever anything comes into my head,

I immediately put it in OmniFocus and then I have different

context projects,

ways to file things and focused so I can decide every

day what's urgent.

What do I need to do today?

Highly recommend people check out Omni focus.

If you sort of have the business case for it.

In addition to that,

there's David Sparks at max barky has a great field guide

that will teach you how to set up OmniFocus and show

you how to use it.

It's like a page,

a video tutorial,

but that was how I learned how to use it.

That's probably my most important app across all of my technology

that I use.

And where do you go for business advice?

What is business advice?

Well, it's something that you are going to try and contradict

with your black Friday or something like that,

but you know,

is there someone you look up to in the business world

or you listen to,

or any books that you've read or anything like that,

where you're getting additional information that you might contest,

but, Well,

I mean,

I have,

so I've read some business books and stuff.

Okay. So there's basically like two books that I've read that

I think were worth my time or interesting or honest in

any way,

the co-founder of base camp,

Jason freed wrote this book rework that was really valuable to

me. It's a lot of,

sort of counter-intuitive but interesting business advice.

So one thing that was in there,

he talks about stopping to ask what's the ideal size of

your company before you get too big.

And that was a really important thing for us to understand

as we were growing cards against humanity.

And the other book is ed Catmull's book creativity,

Inc, about how Pixar works,

their history and what their creative processes.

And I thought that was very helpful.

Listen, nobody knows anything about business.

Everyone is doing poorly.

So don't listen to anyone like if they're so smart,

why isn't their company doing so well,

just figure it out yourself and make the decisions contextually based

on what serves the artistic ends of your work.

It's not rocket science And everyone's different too.

So you can't just take one space and say that that

is actually cookie cutter going to go and work for you.

That's awesome.

Noxious genre of business writing or whatever is anyone who succeeded

in business basically got lucky.

That's the truth of that.

Nobody knows what they're doing.

If they were so smart,

they'd keep doing it over and over,

but they can't because they're not that smart.

And they don't know what they're doing.

You're in the right place at the right time.

That's what happened with cards.

Like we got extraordinarily lucky,

but then these like business guys,

they make some money and they're like,

I am a genius because I made the money.

And the secret to my success is that every morning I

wake up and have a bowl of oatmeal.

And if you wake up and have a bowl of oatmeal,

U2 will build a successful business.

Like you have no idea why you showed up.

Usually when people are successful at business is inherited a bunch

of money or someone gave them some opportunity.

I love the oatmeal analogy.

That's perfect.

No, and I don't.

And that's applies to me to listen.

All the co-creators of cards against humanity were extraordinarily privileged.

We all went to great public schools.

We all got a college education for me personally,

what allowed me to work in cards against humanity?

The true business advice of cards against humanity is that I

was working on political campaigns and going broke.

So there were two things.

And I was able to stay on my parents' health care

for just a couple extra months.

And that was what I needed to get a company off

the ground.

And to my parents,

like gave me money so I could buy groceries.

I mean,

it wasn't,

I didn't get like a business loan,

but I got,

I had that network where I could be like,

I cannot afford food.

I need help.

That was it.

I mean,

now there would be no cards.

You know,

I would've gone back to working at radio shack or whatever

I was doing before,

if that was not available to me.

So that's not me being a smart businessman.

That's having access to money.

That's privilege,

it's wealth and opportunity.

That's not available to most people.

So this is the whole advice of like,

Oh, like you got to take risks and believe in your

dreams. It's like these people had so much opportunity that to

not count that as even the primary factor of their success

is just intellectually dishonest and not,

not helpful to anyone.

Good point.

And the idea of just taking it yourself and figuring it

out for yourself is going to produce in the end a

different type of a business too,

because you're not,

like I said before,

just mimicking what someone else said with the hope that you're

going to get the same result,

because rarely would you.

Other piece of this that's very important to me is there's

been a boom in my worlds of technology and art and

games in the last five to eight years,

there's been an unprecedented boom in independent artists being able to

make a living.

Like I think that's been pretty well covered in the media.

The idea that there's all these kids who were able to

make a start-up or there's this whole independent games and like

art games movement that didn't even exist five years ago,

that's now become like a pretty big deal.

Tabletop games obviously are becoming a thing and people are starting

to buy and play tabletop games.

I would say there's really one factor that made that possible,

Let's say that you're the best game designer,

the best comedian,

the best artists of your generation,

but you have some minor medical condition that would lead you

to be denied health coverage.

It's not an option for you to quit your job at,

you know,

your nine to five at like whatever.

It doesn't matter what you're doing at Starbucks to go make

art. I agree with you there.

You know,

you can't do anything unless you're physically stable,

have your health,

et cetera.

And there's a lot of factors that lead into that.

For sure.

Before we finish up here,

I just want to make mention that I will have links

to many of the points that we've talked about here over

on the show notes page to access that you just go

to gift biz on rapt.com

forward slash cards against humanity.

All right,

max, at this point I would like to have you dare

to dream.

Are you ready?

Probably not.

Okay. I'd like to present you with a virtual gift.

It's a magical box containing unlimited possibilities for your future.

This is your dream or your goal of almost unreachable Heights

that you wish to obtain.

Please accept this gift and open it in our presence.

What is inside your box?

Have you ever seen Aladdin?

Yep. This is where Jafar went wrong as he wished to

become the most powerful Jeannie,

but then he was a slave to the lamp.

So have we learned nothing from Aladdin?

You can't open the box.

So the box just sits there,

I guess.

I mean,

I don't even know.

What does that mean to have your craziest dreams or are

in the box?

Are you looking for five years down the road?

I don't know.

I like reading a good book and taking a bath.

Somehow I expected this type of answer from you max.

Right? What do people say for this?

What do they say?

Like a big diamond?

I don't know.

No. A lot of people will talk about going back to

their businesses and some of the things like they,

a lot of people actually want their businesses to be so

successful that then they can give back all different types of

answers. But really,

No, I don't know.

I mean,

what do I want to,

I mean,

I don't know.

I hope that I get to wake up every day and

decide what I do that day.

That's, what's meaningful to me and I've had a lot,

most of my life.

That's not the case.

I would wake up during the day and someone else would

decide what I had to do that day.

And I don't feel happy with that.

So it's an incredible privilege for me right now to get

to wake up and decide what I do today.

I just hope that that continues.

That's a perfect answer.

And that goes right back to the whole conversation we just

had about goal setting and doing what you think you should

be doing.

Not what's the first thing on the top of your email

list or whatever.

Max, thank you so much.

I really appreciate your taking the time.

I'm super excited to see what other crazy things out of

all the hundreds of ideas you actually bring to the world

so much success to you as you continue and may your

candle, that white candle of yours continue to burn bright.

Okay. Still confused about what a motivational candle is.

Okay. Okay.

Well, when you figure it out,

come see me in Highland park,

come drop by and say hi anyway.

I'm right in downtown Highland park.

What's your favorite bagel in Highland park?

My favorite bagel is an everything bagel with type cheese.

Oh, once upon probably.

Yeah, that got to go with once upon.

Have you ever had the,

okay, hang on a second.

We can't finish it out.

Have you ever had the egg white salad at once upon

a bagel?

No, it's I,

I, it does not sound like a good food.

It's like not a food I would ever pick to eat,

but it's inexplicably the best thing at that restaurant.

I'm obsessed with the egg white salad at once on a

bagel. It's one of the greatest foods anywhere in the world.

All right,

I'm going to have to try it now.

I usually go for breakfast and I get their Spanish omelet,

which is to die for it's the best time I've ever

had. I've literally never had an anomaly once upon.

Alright, new goal.

I got to try it.

Yeah, you should.

W w so you tell me how that is and vice

versa. How about that?

Okay. All right.

Where are you in your business building journey,

whether you're just starting out or already running a business,

and you want to know your setup for success.

Find out by taking the gift biz quiz,

access the quiz from your computer at dot L Y slash

gift biz quiz or from your phone by gift best ways

to four four,

two, two,

two. Thanks for listening and be sure to join us for

the next episode.

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