Behind the Brand with Bryan Elliott

Your Phone Taught You to Trust Nothing. Justin Willman Fills Theaters by Fooling You Honestly

A week before Justin Willman sat down with me for Behind the Brand, a stranger cornered him with a theory about his career. The man kept pushing one idea. "Come on, you do this just to make people feel stupid, right?"

Willman didn't get the logic. He has fooled people for a living since he was a teenager. Then he traced the idea back to the ...

Every afternoon during the 2026 Tour de France, a small crew from Eight Sleep raced the riders of UAE Team Emirates XRG to the next hotel. The crew, which the company calls the Night Shift, carried eight Pods into eight rooms, calibrated each one, and set the temperature before the riders walked in. The next morning the crew packed up and drove to the next stage. Twenty-one stages. Three weeks. One of those eight beds belonged to T...

Vanessa Van Edwards studied hundreds of Shark Tank pitches and spent nearly 20 years on her new book, Conversation. Her verdict on smart founders is blunt. Here is what her playbook says about winning the room, and how she built a business where the book is the smallest piece.

Vanessa Van Edwards walked into a PTA meeting at her daughter's school and saw the problem in one glance. Every parent in the room was staring at a phone.

"Now...

She sold her first AI startup, then started posting TikToks. Her mom asked if she had run out of money. I believe the best way to learn anything is to model the people who are doing what you want to do at a high level. 

Steal a page from Sabrina’s playbook and your chances of making your first million with AI are high. 

When Sabrina Ramonov started posting TikTok videos, her mom had one question. Had she run out of mo...

James Dumoulin built one of the biggest interview brands on the internet by walking up to strangers and asking how much money they make.

He co-founded School of Hard Knocks in 2021 with his brother Jack and friend Joshua Smith. The early channel gave business advice and stalled around 25,000 followers. So James flipped the format. He started cold-approaching millionaires and billionaires on the street, pointed the camera at them, an...

Brendan Kane built a social media following of one million people in 30 days. Not with a big budget. Not with a team of 40 like Gary Vaynerchuk. Just relentless testing and a framework most people overlook entirely.

Kane is the founder and CEO of HookPoint and the author of three books: "1 Million Followers," "Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a Three Second World," and "The Guide to Going Viral." He has spent over 20 years decoding w...

Robert Greene has sold over twenty million copies of The 48 Laws of Power. His books are favorites of rapper 50 Cent and millions of people trying to get a grip on the dynamics of power. They've also been banned in prisons. He doesn't lose sleep over any of it.

In this episode, Greene takes me through the winding road that led to his first bestseller: 60-plus jobs, years living across Europe, a brutal rejection from a magazine edito...

Most executives treat sleep as a variable. Something to compress when things get busy. Something to fix later. That’s the ROI brain talking: Sleep is overhead, not output.

The science disagrees. One in three people globally struggle with sleep, and the effects are not limited to grogginess. Poor sleep is linked to cognitive decline, impaired decision making, elevated anxiety, weakened immunity, and early onset dementia. If you...

Life Advice That Doesn't Suck  aka "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" flips the self-help script. Instead of telling you to think positive and chase happiness, Mark Manson argues that life is full of problems and always will be. The goal isn't to avoid struggle. It's to pick the struggles worth having. What you choose to care about defines who you are.

Manson builds his case around a simple idea: you have a limited amount of...

Perhaps one of the most aptly named individuals I’ve met, James Clear possesses a clairvoyant ability to articulate his understanding and mastery of habit formation.   

His book Atomic Habits, which eclipsed the sales speed of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has sold nearly 20 million copies and is one of the top books recommended by high performers. 

However, he didn’t set out to write bestsellers...

Jocko Willink’s story reads like an adventure novel that takes us from the serene landscapes of a small New England town into Navy SEAL training, the Iraq War battlegrounds, and a multifaceted civilian life of entrepreneurship and leadership consulting. “I always wanted to be a commando of some kind as soon as I realized that you could actually get paid to carry a machine gun,” he says.

Joining the Navy out of high...

Seth told me, "It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction." He's right. 

Here’s my attempt to create a hierarchy for this idea:

1. Strategy = This is your approach, given all the factors, systems, games, players, and environments. It’s about who, how, and why.

2. Objectives = To-do items or steps on the path to help you achieve the goal. It’s about how you&r...

Do you ever stare at a beautiful product and wonder what stories are hidden behind its journey?

The culinary poetry of the HexClad brand products begins with a hypnotizing hexagonal pattern with an intricate layer that looks like a futuristic industrial honeycomb. The brand’s hallmark design isn’t just for style points but is the result of countless refinements, merging non-stick convenience with the resilience of stainl...

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Chad Smith is betting that music education is key to preserving the creative thinkers businesses need most...

In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson stood on a TED stage and asked a simple question: Do schools kill creativity?

76 million people have watched that talk. It’s still the most-viewed TED Talk in history. It was my honor to sit down with Sir Ken in 2014 and talk about this subject at length, and i...

Alex Hormozi built a portfolio of companies worth over $200 million before he turned 35. No outside funding. No famous co-founder. No viral moment that handed him an audience. He did it by studying the math of business more seriously than almost anyone in his generation, then teaching everything he learned in public. That last part is what separates him from most founders. He gave away the playbook.

The question worth asking is whet...

Nobody warns you about the first time…

One morning you wake up, look in the mirror, and your face has started doing something on its own. You have hair! It starts by looking like peach fuzz or dirt above your lip. But it’s not a problem and you’re proud it’s there. 

And usually without anyone showing you what to do or handing you a manual, you pick up a razor.

Just like that—...

In 2015 Todd Meleney, a young inexperienced newcomer, helped build Nobull from a three-person startup to $250 million in annual revenue. Then just 18 months ago he walked away to do it again, from scratch, in one of the most competitive markets on the planet.

The result is While on Earth, a performance wellness footwear and apparel brand he launched in fall 2024 out of Providence, Rhode Island. Less than two years in, the brand is i...

Eugene Alletto went from making cold calls in a Wolf of Wall Street style boiler room to building bedgear into a top-10 sleep industry brand serving 33+ million customers. In this episode, he shares the counterintuitive strategies that turned bedding from a commodity into a personalized science.

Key Topics:

• Why he avoids big box stores and focuses on trained salespeople instead
• The "$20 shirt vs $2,500 suit" approach to testing bu...

In both business and life, endurance, not speed, is of the utmost importance. Jesse Itzler's first book was rejected by 15 publishers before number 16 gave him a shot. 30 is how many years Jesse’s been running races without winning a single win. And 100 is roughly how many miles Jesse covered in his longest ultramarathon, races that taught him the one business lesson most entrepreneurs never learn: you don't have to be the fa...