The presentation argues that "bad ideas," those initially dismissed due to practicality or convention, can lead to unexpected, profound, and community-building outcomes when explored without inhibition.
Good morning everyone.
My name is Gabe. I'm a traveling car salesman.
So today, I'm here to sell you the keys to this car,
this beautiful vintage PT Cruiser.
I mean, look at that faux wood side paneling.
I'm told it's got turbo.
Look. It's a work of art. Trust me.
Now, when I say that I'm selling the keys to this car,
I really mean it.
I have 5,000 of these keys,
and every single last one of them works to that car.
You click the key fob once, it unlocks the door,
you click it twice, it starts the engine.
If you buy any one of these 5,000 keys from me,
naturally you get access to the car, but so do 4,999 other people.
Whatever happens beyond that is not necessarily my problem.
Like I said, I'm just a car salesman.
(Laughter)
So you're probably wondering at this point, is this real?
Is this guy just making this stuff up?
Well, it is real.
My name is Gabe, and I'm actually the founder of an art collective
based in New York City, called Mschf.
These are our logos.
Mischief is a bit of a difficult beast to explain,
and I'm not going to even try to describe it.
Let me give you a couple examples to help paint that picture
or confuse you even further.
Handbags. Handbags are really expensive,
and incredibly, the smaller they get, the more expensive they become.
So a few summers ago,
we actually endeavored to make the world's smallest handbag,
microscopic, in fact,
and somehow it ended up selling at auction for 63,000 dollars,
incidentally making it the world's most expensive handbag per volume.
Here's another one. This is nothing like a handbag.
You’ve probably seen those Boston Dynamics Spot dog robots
that do TikTok dances with K-pop stars on YouTube.
Well, we managed to get one.
Instead of making it dance, we strapped a paintball gun to it
and we connected it remotely to a website
where people could take turns driving it and firing it
at an art gallery that we constructed.
Boston Dynamics did not like that one very much.
So you've probably figured out by now
that I'm not actually here to sell you keys to a car.
Today I'm here to talk to you about bad ideas.
The kind of ideas that typically die on the vine
because reason or work colleagues
get in the way.
But to me, these are the most exciting ideas
because you just never know what might happen.
Take these crazy-looking shoes, for example.
I think it was like the spring of 2023.
My colleagues and I were sketching out
the initial prototypes of the Big Red Boot.
I remember us being equal parts terrified
because, of course, like, who's going to wear these,
much less spend money on them?
But at the same time,
the moment that we put on the initial prototypes ourselves --
(Laughter)
We were filled with such a chaotic sense of glee
that we were like, you know what, we just got to do it.
So we committed to making a couple hundred pairs,
we priced them at 350 dollars
and we just prayed that there would be a few hundred people
out there in the world who would spend money on these crazy-looking things.
So a week before the drop,
we leaked this image through a friend's Instagram account.
Again, just hoping that people don't hate it,
or even worse, that they don't ignore it.
In hindsight, we needn't have worried.
The algorithm smiled quite fondly upon the Big Red Boot,
and all of a sudden this thing was everywhere.
Like, I don't even, I can't even.
It's basically like a blur.
I don't understand what happened.
All of a sudden, people were wearing them courtside at NBA games.
I saw Lil Wayne wearing them in a music video.
I remember my dad calling me
and saying, "Hey, Gabe, there's a professional WWE wrestler
wearing your boots on live pay-per-view TV.
And he just curb stomped another guy."
It's incredible.
And yet we almost didn't do it.
This is almost where it ended.
Just as an internal project on the cutting room floor.
People told us it was not a great business decision.
And honestly, I get it.
But what started as a bad idea ended up becoming a very interesting idea.
