November 3, 2025 • 48 mins
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I sat down with Dan Porter and we talked about building products people can’t stop using. We unpack how Draw Something went from a scrappy side project to number one in 60 countries with ~25 million daily players and ~250 million downloads, and why tiny tweaks can unlock outsized outcomes. Dan shares the simple design choices behind the streak mechanic, letting you only play with friends, and the live playback that made the game feel alive, plus the story of selling for $200 million. We also get into starting Overtime without live rights and scaling it to hundreds of millions of weekly views, why outsider thinking is a superpower, and how he spun Six Seven Water from a meme into a real brand. If you’re a builder, this one will push you to ship, observe, and iterate.
Find Dan here: https://x.com/tfadp
Enjoy!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You can either live somebody else's story, or you can write
your own story. Sometimes you're 1 tweak away
from $200 million, right? Yeah, if they don't say that,
the app doesn't blow up and the company goes out of business.
It's shot to #1 and stayed thereevery single day for six months.
25 million people a day were playing it.
So the number one game in 60 countries in the world.
(00:21):
And what did you end up selling it for?
$200 million. I mean, I was a high school
teacher. It is all of those little things
that make a difference, friends,but they all have to come
together. OK, well why don't you start by
just telling us who you are and what you do, Dan?
My name is Dan Porter, I was on an episode of the career ladder
(00:42):
on TikTok and I am the CEO and Co founder of Overtime which is
a big sports platform that we started in 2016.
OK. And what would you say makes you
different from your peers, your contemporaries?
There are a lot of answers to that, I'd say #1 The nature of
(01:03):
my career, like I've, I've been a public school teacher, I
worked in the music business, I run a gaming company, I'm in
sports. I've just done a lot of
different things. And so everything that I do is
almost like a combination of allthose different experiences.
It's really not a straight path.It's probably #1 I'd say number
(01:26):
two, I'm very relentless and focused and I don't give up.
I don't play a lot of games, butI try to only play games that I
can win. And I think #3 is that you could
say that maybe I'm an out-of-the-box or disruptive
thinker. And I'm not trying to compliment
myself in that, but more just like I don't know the way that I
(01:47):
think of things. Maybe I don't understand the way
things are supposed to be done. So I come up with my own ideas,
but I tend to approach problems probably a different way than
other people do. So probably those three things.
Plus, occasionally I'm very funny.
Do you think? Do you think you approach
(02:08):
problems differently because of your breath of expertise?
Are they correlated? It's a good question.
I'd say half of it is that like I just have so many different
experiences I draw from and halfof it is probably like I'm just
really stupid and I don't know the right way to do it.
So I just come up with my own way to do it.
Sometimes, like you see people who like play some musical
(02:32):
instrument in a really weird way, they play like the guitar
with both their hands or something like that, and they
create entirely new music and maybe they just never learned
the other way or that felt natural to them.
But I think in general, I don't know if through school and
college we do enough collectively to promote kind of
(02:58):
creative and different thinking.I think we tend to optimize
towards people who think alike. That's why we have tests in
school. Tests are like, tell me what the
right answer is. That's the right answer.
Everyone is like, they're like going right towards the tip of a
triangle. I love music.
I was a musician. I focused on improvisation.
(03:20):
I took a lot of creative writing.
I think just taking inspiration from writing and music and arts
and all the different way that people have thought about, you
know, recreating all kinds of music and, and even writing and
stuff like that is probably partof it.
But I don't think we do ourselves any favors as a system
(03:40):
in this country and promoting people who are either think
creatively or, or out-of-the-box.
And I think most people in college, I took painting, I took
photography, I took poetry, of which I was truly terrible at.
And luckily none of those poems survived.
And I took either two or three semesters of creative writing.
And I just think learning those things, if I ask kids today,
(04:03):
they take computer science and economics, and there's nothing
wrong with those. That's what I think.
Yeah, well, creativity, it's more important than it's ever
been, and it's more rare than it's ever been.
It's a differentiator. I, I, I think about like, you
know, when people apply for jobs, sometimes you interview
for a job, you interview people.If you're interviewing A
salesperson and it's like everybody worked at a similar
(04:27):
company, they all have the same title, they've all sold a number
of big deals, how are you going to differentiate like 10 people
who come in and have an interview with you or zoomed in
an interview with? And I think there's some element
where like a lot of times I'll ask questions when I, when I was
in the gaming business, when I ran on G Pop and I used to hire
(04:49):
game designers and, and builders, software developers, I
really used to only ask one question.
And the question I asked is like, what is your favorite
game? You tell me Final Fantasy or
whatever. And then I would say, why is
that a great game? And people would say it's fun or
whatever. And, you know, one out of every
five people would say something like, oh, the way that like this
(05:10):
mechanic works and they describesome intricate part of the game.
And you just think all those people really think deeply about
games and game design. And those were the people that I
hired. Someone that that looks at it
differently? Yeah, you're able to.
Understand why things are the way they are and is is a thinker
(05:33):
and some of that is creativity and some of that is thinking.
But I feel like those people, they can have an impact on you
and your company, but you can appeal to them to try to make
something bigger and better versus people who do less.
So. And I I think that even though
some of that is natural, we can all always be better at learning
(05:54):
how to do that. Yeah.
How did you get into the gaming business?
I was working for Richard Branson.
He was a very successful and famous entrepreneur, and part of
my job was kind of helping him make the Virgin brand relevant
to a whole new kind of generation.
(06:14):
And I just thought, let's go to the roots and do music.
So we did music festivals and other stuff like that.
And I kept reading at that time maybe 20 years ago, like the
gaming business is bigger than the movie business.
It's bigger than the music business.
And in fact, funny enough, I have two sons and I took them to
(06:36):
an outdoor concert that I put onand they spent the whole time
playing the Nintendo DS backstage.
And I was just kind of was like,wow, gaming is kind of relevant
to culture in a way that music probably was in the 80s,
nineties. Not that music isn't, but it's
gaming is. So it's so widely played and
(06:57):
it's so pervasive. I don't know, 90% of kids play
Roblox or anything else like that.
I just kept thinking about it. One day this investor said to
me, oh I know this guy, he's starting a gaming company, could
use some help. So I met with him and I honestly
didn't understand anything that he said to me.
(07:18):
I didn't understand his website.It literally made no sense to me
whatsoever. And so I quit my job and took an
80% pay cut and became the CEO of the gaming company.
That's a big leap, Yeah. You just thought, you just
thought this is a tidal wave that I want to be riding, so
it's worth taking this big pay cut to ride it.
(07:40):
Yeah. And also I was like, there's so
much I don't understand about this.
Like I want to figure it out. And I'm like, I was like, this
is hard. They they know a lot about
something I don't know a lot about.
I clearly get where gaming is going.
And it was it was before we had digital goods and everything
else. But he understood that stuff was
going to come from China and from other places in terms of a
(08:03):
business model and come here. So I just jumped and took a
risk. And what happened after that
point? How did you get from that point
to Draw Something? He was a really cool guy and
everybody worked at a company, was super cool and lived in New
York and Williamsburg and like went to coffee shops and like
made like really cool games for people like them.
(08:23):
And it was a really multiplayer game site.
It was one of the first chances that people could really play
online with each other as opposed to by themselves.
There was no iPhone or anything else like that.
And I said, who are the users? Who are the customers?
And they said people like us because that's what we make
games for. Got deep into Google Analytics
and so forth. And I realized that the
customers were actually almost entirely 14 year old girls in
(08:47):
California. They were just assumed, yeah,
and they were wrong. That's who was playing the games
for five hours a day and I was like, well, baby, that's our
customer. And then the name of the company
was I'm in like with you, which is really funny.
And I. Well, that matches with a 14
year old girl, I mean. Well, I realized that when
people typed it into Google, they misspelled it and we were
(09:07):
losing traffic. So we changed the name.
We understood who the audience was and we started to grow and
we added more and more games andbuilt just kind of like a a
gaming site where people came and played with each other.
And the guy who started it was enormously creative and just
just visually talented. Like everything about the games
(09:29):
were really great. I remember once we did a a talk
at a conference and he got up and he just said my goal is to
make a game that's so good that some kid mows lawns to make
money to pay for it. It was good.
And then we were successful and we had millions of users.
Average time on site was 4 1/2 to five hours.
(09:51):
And then Farm Bill came out and Farm Bill was built on top of
Facebook. All of a sudden they had 100
million users. We had like 3,000,000 users.
All of a sudden we were big and then we were small and the whole
world was playing FarmVille and other Facebook games, and the
iPhone had just come out and I was like, wow, we missed
(10:12):
Facebook. We didn't make Angry Birds.
You know, sometimes you wonder if it's too late.
Sometimes it is, but sometimes you feel like it's too late, but
it's not. We started to make some iPhone
games and then it's like there'sa hard part where you don't
fail, but you don't succeed. So you're somewhere in the
middle. Like it's not like you have no
users, but it's not like you have a zillion users.
(10:34):
It's kind of like the. Messy middle like.
You're not Uber. Valley of Death.
Or something like that. Or worse, yeah.
Long story short, we had a drawing and guessing game that
we had tried to make for Facebook and we've made for our
site. And I decided to try to be the
game designer and work with a couple people in the company.
And we just made it as an iPhonegame and we released it and it
(10:57):
did OK. And then it kind of bombed.
And then some of our developers were like, I think there's a lot
of people trying to play it. I think there's a technical
problem. And they worked all weekend,
They fixed it and it shot to #1 and it stayed there every single
day for six months. 25 million people a day were playing it.
So the number one game in 60 countries in the world and a
quarter of a billion people downloaded it.
(11:18):
OK, All right. I want to get to that before we
get there. I find it so interesting that,
you know, Facebook releases games and you suddenly feel like
a very small company and you arecompared to FarmVille.
It made me think like a lot of times we talk about platform
risk, like platform risk to watch out for those platforms,
you know, don't want to be relying on one platform, but
that same platform risk can put like non platform businesses out
(11:42):
of business because that platform is so big and strong
and scary, right? It's the other side of the
argument. You know, I'm trying to reach
young people. So I built this website and I
was like, who goes to a website?Like you think they're going to
your website? Like have you ever seen a young
person open a browser on their phone they don't go to?
Web only to do homework. Yeah, exactly.
(12:03):
Why didn't Draw Something for asa Facebook game work?
Do you think I know exactly why it didn't work?
It's kind of not working. Inspired.
The thing that made it work. So basically on Facebook, it's
like Pictionary. It's like a drawing guessing
game. So it's open.
You go into a lobby and there's three other people there, and
(12:24):
all of a sudden the word comes up and you draw it and people
guess. Well, if you put people in a
lobby with three strangers, they're either going to draw
anatomical body parts or they'rejust going to be rude.
And what could be really fun wasbasically kind of toxic most of
the time. Not all the time, but most of
the time. And so when we made it for the
(12:45):
phone, we only let you play yourfriends because we were like, we
can't stop people from drawing funny things or being annoying
phallic things. Yeah, but if you know that
they're with their friends, their friends are either going
to say knock it off or they're going to think it's funny.
And so I think what didn't work is kind of like a wide open
space. Worked amazing on a friend
(13:07):
basis. It's almost like a version of
niching down, like preventing other people from playing it.
Kind of like Facebook in the early days, right?
Like you have to be a Harvard student.
It's like you couldn't solve changing people's bad behavior
on the Internet. So it wasn't like you could then
penalize people and they could report them and everything else
like that, but you could solve just not having it open to
(13:31):
everyone on the Internet. So it was easier to solve that
than it was to solve the former.Yeah.
And then you you have a built invirality because you can invite
all your friends in your contactlist, right?
Yeah, I remember somebody told me I'm getting invites for Draw
Something on like people that I was on instant messenger with
that I haven't even talked to infive years.
(13:53):
Yeah. What aside from like the built
in virality of it from a base principal perspective, why do
you think it resonated so well? I think it was really simple.
I'm not a game designer, so I made something that was so easy
to understand and play. Number 1, I think it was very
collaborative. It was funny.
It was the first thing they use your finger on the phone.
(14:15):
It was tactile. It was what the phone was meant
to do, not be a joystick replacement.
We didn't make it based on winners or losers.
You tried to have a streak with the person that you were playing
with that made people feel like they weren't competing with each
other, but it just was like a little more social.
It was actually, in a weird way,it was just very it was social
(14:37):
at a time when most games were not social.
Yeah. Do you think at the time there
was less competition for people's attention on the phone?
At that time, I would say that maybe 7 of the top 10 apps were
games. I'd say now 0R, they're mostly
either Uber or Instagram or TikTok.
(14:58):
Short form video. Yeah, short form videos.
So that was a moment by from 2010 to 2015 when games just
dominated the phone. That's what you did.
And then I think social media really knocked that out and game
discovery was like, people be like, what are the new games all
the time? And there's not a lot of games,
(15:19):
there's not a lot of mobile games that like since then, like
people still play. They might play that they play
Words with Friends or Candy Crush or whatever.
But in the last five years, I'm not sure there's been a mobile
game that I can think of that's just like taking over.
And everybody's done it because most of their attention is on
social endeavors. I'm just continually amazed at
(15:42):
how innovative and addicting short form video is.
Not just the medium, but the algorithms that drive it and
just how accurate it is. It's showing me what I want to
watch. It's it's scary.
Yeah, I mean, you know, technology is good and it it
knows you. I, I uploaded 50 essays that I
had written into ChatGPT and I said, I want you to reverse
(16:04):
engineer my writing style. And then I'm going to give you a
prompt and I want you to write it like I write it.
And I'd say it was like 90% thatliterally sounded like I wrote
it. Oh.
Man, in your story I think you glossed over something quickly
and let me make sure I get this right.
You you were running the companyinitially, right?
Yeah, I was the CEO. You were not a a developer by
(16:26):
any means. I'm not a software developer.
And you had this idea and for some reason you said, I want to
build this one. Is that because you just wanted
to learn how to build games, or you were so passionate about it,
like you just wanted to own it? In the movie version, it's
because I'm so passionate. But in reality, I just think
like, we were starting to be like, we didn't make Angry Birds
(16:48):
and we didn't make FarmVille. Like, are we effed?
Like what's going to happen to us?
I was like, maybe we're going tofail.
Like if we're going to fail, at least maybe I could try to make
a game. Yeah, So it wasn't like this is
the best idea I've ever had. This is going to save the
company. Let me go on the front lines and
do it. It's more like. 90% of the
company was working on other games.
(17:09):
Yeah, So you're like, all right,We're kind of in flight mode.
We're in survival mode right now.
I have this idea. And you weren't thinking like,
this is genius. This is for sure going to work.
I'm fully confident. But it was kind of like, I think
there's something to it, but I don't want to distract my team.
They're just trying to keep their head above water.
So why don't I try to build it? I had no idea if it would work.
Also just was like, I don't know, I just want to try to make
(17:32):
a game. I do overthink some things.
In this case, I didn't really overthink that.
I just was like, I think I can make something that.
It's funny because the company that bought us was called Zynga
and they were the makers of FarmVille.
Ironically, I went to the offices in San Francisco when we
were in the process of contemplating an acquisition and
(17:54):
they had all the stuff on the wall and all these game
designers were reverse engineering the game and trying
to figure it out. Why was it successful?
And I went over and looked and they were like, oh, you made the
game. And it's like, I just have this
question for you. Like why didn't you use XP in
the game? Experience points?
And that woman, I thought I forgot, I didn't use it, but
(18:17):
it's just like totally slipped my mind and like that it's like,
and they just couldn't believe that that was the case.
And that was the honest answer. So it's like, I don't know,
sometimes things just work themselves out or it's good
enough as is. And sometimes you have people
(18:40):
who are from outside of an industry who are good at making
something. I had, I, I met up with a friend
of mine had been the Internet business and then he was in the
fashion business outside of the United States.
Then he came back to the United States and he's like I said, oh,
what, what are you up to? He's like, let's catch up.
He said, I'm making like a sparkling water, like a soda
(19:01):
stream competitor. I was like, you worked in
Internet and fashion. What do you know about sparkling
water? Like, and he goes, I'll know
anything about it, but I'm an entrepreneur.
That's what I do. I learn about stuff.
Yeah, whoa. It's pretty powerful.
Outsiders are powerful. Like you could have gotten hung
up on adding XP and that could have like held up the whole
(19:22):
project and then you move on to something else and maybe it
never happens or maybe you had. It less fun.
It could have made it less fun, could have changed the whole
dynamic of the game, the whole culture of the game. 80 year
olds played my game. It was so simple.
Yeah, I say this all the time, but people get so hung up on
researching and doing market research and talking to people.
And what features do I add when like the building of The thing
(19:44):
is the best research you can do.The building is the research I.
Think that everything is like, it's like an idea.
Like I'm going to make a brand new toothbrush.
I have an idea, but it's just a premise and it's just an excuse
to get started. Sometimes your assumptions are
wrong or sometimes you discover something else, but you need
something to get started. You need an idea and a premise.
(20:07):
People like I'm pivoting. I'm like pivoting is like, you
know, when you start out in the Internet business and all of a
sudden you're in the underwear business, like that's a pivot.
But like everything else, is just you're testing, you're
learning, you're getting visibility into.
What's happening? People are giving you feedback
on your idea and telling you what works and doesn't work, or
(20:29):
you're observing that and you know you're building it going
forward. And I don't think that's a
pivot. I just think you need that first
premise and you just need to payattention.
Yeah, what? What first gave you the idea for
Draw Something? What was that moment?
It was the 3rd iteration of the game that we had made for
ourselves and for Facebook. So I had thought a lot about
(20:50):
about why it didn't work. And then the inspiration really
was I went to park with my son and his friend and they were
playing catch. And I was like, if you guys can
catch the ball back and forth 50times, I'll buy you an ice
cream. And then I was like, oh, it's
like a streak. And then I was like, oh, a
streak is a way that two people can play a game and be on the
(21:10):
same team and not be competitive.
And that was like part of the core insight.
Like the triggering event for the idea was the feature of the
idea, and then you built the actual core idea on top of the
feature. It was fixing something that
other people had built and designed, but I had thought a
lot about, and it was that. And then there was one thing
(21:32):
that I didn't have anything to do with, but one of the
developers, Will Chen did, whichwas he figured out how to play
back the drawing. So if I drew a picture of a
house and I sent it to you to guest, you watched me draw it
and it felt live. You could see me erase with
money versus me just sending youa picture of something.
(21:56):
And that aspect of it, which I didn't create it at all.
It it just made it feel so aliveand so different.
And I think that a great game, agreat car, a great product, a
great jacket, whatever it is that you experience, like it has
to make you has to feel amazing.Like I own one suit that I've
(22:20):
owned for 12 years. Somehow I still fit into it.
And when I put it on, I'm like, this suit makes me feel amazing.
I've I look good. I feel like it's a great suit.
The cut still works. I have a car with a really nice
steering wheel. It makes me feel amazing.
And that aspect of the game justmade it feel great.
First question. How successful do you think Draw
(22:41):
Something becomes if you'd neverincorporate that feature of
like, seeing it drawn live? Do you think that was a core
part of it? 100%, I think it does not become
as successful without that, Yeah, all those things, streaks,
lack of competition, solving thetoxic part and that that
everything came together to makeit work.
(23:03):
And what did you end up selling it for?
$200 million. And I feel like if you don't
have all of those ingredients, right, it's not like take away
the streaks. We sell it for 160.
Take away the live feature, we sell it for 1:20.
It's kind of like if you missed one of those, it doesn't.
Yeah. If you take one of them away,
it's kind of like your bacon bread.
(23:24):
You take the yeast away, you're like, it'll just be a little
smaller because there's only 1% of this is yeast.
It's like, no, now you have flatbread and it sucks.
You take one of those four key ingredients away, then it's a
nothing burger. You never get off the ground
right? I agree.
On the pessimistic way of looking at that is like, well,
that's kind of depressing. I have to like put all these
ingredients together and I don'tknow what'll work.
(23:44):
And I look at that, it's like, that's freaking amazing.
You're a chemist in a lab. You were that easy to make a
great product. Everybody would make a great
product, but you've got to assemble all those things.
It's like you asked me about myself and my career.
I assembled all of those different things from my
different experiences. I mean, I was a high school
teacher. Every single thing.
You put something together like great products feel great even
(24:09):
around the edges. Like when you buy a shirt or you
buy like a really beautiful shirt, you'll notice the
stitching on the beautiful shirtand everything else like that.
Like it is all of those little things that make a difference,
but they all have to come together.
I mean, you said too like your developers are like, damn, I
(24:30):
think people are trying to play this, but something's broken,
right? What if that conversation never
happens? Like the, the optimistic way
that I look at your story is that all these little tweaks
make such a difference. And sometimes you're 1 tweak
away from $200 million, right? One tweak away if they don't say
that. The app doesn't blow up and the
company goes out of business. I feel like it's never been that
(24:52):
critical little tweaks and changes since before the age of
the Internet. Like if I'm running a Facebook
ad campaign with a big budget and I check a box that says
optimize for conversions, optimize for add to cart, that
could be the difference between me spending $10 to acquire a
customer and $100. That could be all the
difference. So in this Internet connected
(25:13):
age, these little tweaks are everything.
And so we don't want to over optimize everything and tweak
everything to death, but we wantto just keep testing everything,
right. Yeah, it's kind of like yoga.
Or if you work out, like most ofus end up doing it wrong.
So you're doing some pose and then the instructor comes over
and they say, actually your hipshave to be forward.
And you're like, oh, I was just wasting two weeks thinking I was
(25:34):
stretching when I wasn't really doing anything.
Yeah, yeah. So you sell for 200 million.
What do you do after that? What's next?
So I work for the company that bought my company for a year
because that's how those things go.
And then I end up meeting Sky Ari Emanuel, who's the founder
(25:55):
of Endeavour, William Morris Endeavour, famous talent agent.
And Long story short, he pitchesme and I say no and he keeps
pitching me. And I end up joining WME, as
it's called, which is biggest talent agency in the world, is
their head of digital. And I build the foundation of
the modern creator economy by signing, building, signing 20
(26:18):
agents and 250 Youtubers. And, you know, everything that
we think about creators now, who's doing 2013 to 2016?
And a lot of people who I workedwith, who worked for me and all
those are now run digital for companies all over the US.
What's an accessible version of that Business Today, if you were
(26:38):
to keep all your skills, you're 20 years old and you want to
make money in that way, kind of in that industry, how would you
go about it? Like I would try to be a creator
in a niche that I could own. So either you're broadly popular
or there's creators whose specialty is talking about how
to be successful on YouTube. There's finance, there's
(27:01):
cooking, there's health, there'sexercise.
I mean, they're all crowded, butthere's always room for people
who are creative and, and a lot of people under the age of 30
rely on other people to help them filter information.
So if I'm walking down the street and I see some restaurant
or coffee shop and there's a massive line, pretty much 100%
(27:23):
of the time someone's like, Oh yeah, that just blew up on
TikTok. This one person went there and
talked about it and now everyone's gone there.
So I, I would think about that. I mean, listen, what do they
say? 40% of Gen.
Z wants to be a YouTube? So it's just a different form of
being an entrepreneur. How do you think AI plays into
that with AI generated content? Do you think that makes like,
(27:44):
unique creators even more valuable because they stand out
even more or less valuable? I don't have a perfect answer
for that because a lot of what we see now is probably only the
tip of the sword. I do think that humans are able
to make connections about what resonates with people and what's
(28:10):
different and what's distinctly human better than AI, but I
think AI can accelerate their ability to create it.
I think like I'll teach a book in my class.
Let's say I've picked a book, I've assigned it and now we talk
about it and whatever the reality is, I could also just go
(28:33):
to ChatGPT and say, hey, I just read this book.
What do you think it's about that?
Does this ask me some questions?I can talk to him for two hours
and have a really in depth conversation about the book.
But does anyone want to go and just talk to ChatGPT to learn
books all day? Or do they want to go to class
with a professor and other students and feel different way
(28:53):
and body language and everythingelse like that?
So I think there's a role for both.
Yeah, And as you're reading thatbook, you're thinking, oh, this
character reminds me of my mother.
Or in ChatGPT doesn't know that your students, they want to know
from you without even knowing it.
They want to know from you like how that book ties into your
life experience, right? And you're able to deliver a
(29:13):
unique experience there. Whereas anyone could just
regurgitate the ChatGPT summary,just like SparkNotes, right?
Yeah. It it's.
I'm going to be more likely to have an opinion which they might
agree or disagree. I'm more likely to say, hey, in
my life when I made this game orI signed this YouTube, I was
(29:34):
reading this book and it made methink about XY and Z.
So I think we are trained to think in this world that B is
going to replace A and C is going to replace B.
But I think there are ways that it is additive in a lot of
different ways. So I think that human creativity
(29:55):
is still going to be important. I think there's a lot of AI
creativity. I mean, sometimes we'll be
working on a project at work andwe're like, we just don't have a
good name for this competition we're doing.
And sometimes the names that come out through AI are amazing
and everyone's like, that's perfect and sometimes they suck,
but it's just like, it's a tool.But I don't think we're all
(30:19):
going to just be sitting at home, boy, because AI is making
amazing YouTube videos and othercontent.
But I think it's, you know, it's, it's going to, it's going
to work together. Tell me about the genesis of
overtime and what overtime is. Overtime is a sports platform,
sports brand for next generationof sports fans.
(30:41):
I was working in sports at my job at the talent agency and I
heard from a lot of sports leagues that young people
weren't watching live sports. And I'm like, they're all
watching all the Youtubers that I work with, but they're not
watching live sports. I wonder if there's an
opportunity. So again, I just quit my job and
I was like, let's see if we can start a company to figure out
(31:03):
how to get every young person tocare about us.
Oh, by the way, we have no highlights, no live rights.
We can't cover any pro sports. But still, we're going to figure
it out. And that's ultimately what we
did. So today, every week, 1/4 of a
billion people watch a video that we make.
We have over 110 million followers.
(31:23):
We have a basketball league thatkicks off on Halloween this
Friday the 31st. We have a Football League, we
have a girls basketball league. We're in a bunch of different
league and event businesses, media businesses, and we've
created a really dominant brand and maybe the largest kind of
creator in sports. Tell me about the crowdsourcing
side of that. How do the How does a kid with
(31:45):
an iPhone play into your business model?
Yeah, honestly, it doesn't. I think it's a misconception
about our business and I don't know how to get people to stop
writing that. But I think the perception was
we just used UGC videos, but we did it.
What we did was we built our owncamera technology for the iPhone
and then we paid people $20 to go to certain games and film
(32:08):
stuff that we then published. So it was actually an end to end
network where we had a deployed army of maybe 800 iPhone
filmers. We used our software, tagged it
and did it. But for some reason people
thought that that was UGC and that part I'm, look, I'm
answering your question and I haven't even published a UGC
video like that for nine years. Over time of these 800 kids, are
(32:31):
you able to find ones that are just like, spectacular?
And you're paying them more, you're giving them more roles?
I feel like there's a lot of surface area for finding rock
stars. Yeah, some of them work for us
now, like full time, and they started when they were 16, just
like filming games for us. But over time we also ended up
starting our own league, so I didn't need to have 800 people.
(32:51):
But there's definitely people who work at the company and
that's how we know them. What kind of business ideas or
other opportunities has working within overtime shown you that
you're too focused on to chase after?
I think TikTok shop is super interesting.
I think that a lot of products are going to be driven by
(33:13):
creators. I think that product categories
are going to change over time. I think we're in a like a food
product world where functionality is a huge aspect
of that. So I think that's pretty big.
I think that second, colleges which engage NIL name, image,
(33:36):
likeness to to play a part in attracting athletes, There's
just going to be a lot of changein that space.
I mean, you know, Reggie Bush lost his Heisman Trophy and then
four or five years ago now wherepeople are making millions of
dollars in college playing sports.
I think it's an incredibly growing and disruptive space.
So those are two that I would think about where I it's not on
(33:59):
exactly for the business, but I think there's the opportunity
there. What about the genesis of 6-7
water? How did that come about and
where's it at today? Similarly, I.
Oh, there it is. You know, we built a water brand
off of a meme. I I picked water because it was
(34:21):
just easy to make and we didn't have to do testing and tasting
and stuff like that. We turned around the whole thing
in eight weeks and we've sold 10s of thousands of them with
41,000 people on our wait list. We're one of the most followed
water brands in the world. But right now we have a couple
interns who go to gas stations and bodegas in New York, and
(34:41):
they just talk to people and they're coming back and they're
saying, you know what? I think we need a flavor and
this why? So like, it starts as this kind
of instinct. We're sitting in a room and
we're like, this would be crazy,let's do it.
But now a lot of the decisions are being made because people on
the street are spending time with bodega owners and talking
(35:04):
to kids in middle school who come in to buy a drink and
seeing what they're buying and asking them why.
So I wouldn't call market research, but I'd call it like
customer development and a deep understanding there.
And that's going to drive the product innovation as it should.
Yeah. Are you still looking for
distributors and you're still trying to scale that?
I'm really focused on distributing it in Kentucky,
(35:26):
where Taylon Kenny, who is the main athlete who started this
and started 6-7 and everything else like that, lives.
A, because he's from there, and B, because I feel like everyone
who makes a product tries to launch it in LA, San Francisco
and New York, which is a really hard place to get traction.
So I just somehow feel like maybe Kentucky's the right place
(35:48):
to launch it. Yeah, it's so funny.
Like I thought that thing was going to die.
The 6-7 was going to die a monthago, six months, five months
ago, like a month after it came out.
I have 4 kids between the ages of nine and 15.
And so when I, when I heard you on MFM, like explaining to them
what it was and what it meant, like, doesn't everyone know
this? Like I hear it 10 times a day.
(36:10):
It's everywhere. Yeah.
I mean, you know, I think boys think like culture is at its
peak and then it gets to a higher peak and a higher peak
definitely when it's in the WallStreet Journal and on the Today
Show. We might be towards the end, but
when we started this, we were not there at all.
And I also think there's aspectsof culture that are exclusionary
(36:34):
if you know, you know, and thereare aspects that are
inclusionary. And I actually watched this
TikTok from this mom and she wassaying, like, the thing about
6-7 is everyone can say it and everyone is in on the joke.
And there's actually not a lot of things that are really
inclusionary, like on a broad level, where if you're cool or
you're not cool, if you sit in the front of the class or the
(36:55):
back of the class, if you're a jock, if you're not a jock.
I think that in a way, looking back at it, there's a deep
understanding that there was some power to it, that just, it
was just funny. And I, I think, you know, the
idea of like monoculture, like we're all watching the same
(37:16):
thing or everyone's going to seeTaylor Swift or whatever those
things are the Super Bowl. Like those things are less and
less than I think when we were kids, but when they happen, I
think it's just funny. I mean, my grandparents were
still alive. They would probably think it was
funny to say that I don't know those types of things on a
participation basis. Like people are too obsessed
(37:36):
with the fact that doesn't mean anything.
Nothing means everything. Everything is a word is just a
symbol with an arbitrary meaningattached to it.
So like, that's not the point ofit.
The point of it is it's fun, it's funny, it gives people a
way to be included. I wrote this on LinkedIn, but I
forgetting that it it like comeswith a hand gesture.
(37:58):
Like I can say what's up, but there's no hand gesture.
So it's like sometimes you like watch like a baseball game or
football game. People are doing this in the
background. You know exactly what they're
doing. Even with the sound off it just
it was meme so to speak That just was built for video, audio,
social school, camp, everything.Well it doesn't hurt that the 2
(38:19):
numbers are right next to each other, so we're going to be
hearing them together forever and it's going to be hard to
like untrain our brain to not hear it in that tone.
How many students have you taught, give or take, roughly?
Probably 400 to 450. When you talk to a student,
you're 5 sentences into the conversation.
What's something that you hear or notice that just signals to
(38:40):
you? This kids got it.
He's going to make it. He's going to be OK.
Interesting. I thought you were going to ask
me a different question, which is like, what are all the
misconceptions about life they have?
I'd like to hear that too, but. It's hard to know that unless
you're talking about like a specific assignment or anything
else like that. If you look at a class, most
(39:01):
people don't ask any questions. Some people ask bad questions,
and other people ask really, really good questions.
Some people ask good questions. You get it.
They're just people who operate at a different level.
Like they're confident about theknowledge, they're engaged.
They're not asking you if it's going to be on the test.
(39:22):
It's an in person class. So I'm biased because people
with interpersonal charisma, I make I, I run out of time every
year, but I try to make every student stand up and tell a
personal story about something that happened to them in their
first year in New York City. And sometimes you just realize
like some people are just reallygifted and or some people are
(39:42):
just really fearless and the rest of them are just like, is
it going to be on the test or I go to do the grading and I'm
thinking like, I don't even knowwho this person.
Is what's a category or an industry that you have no
experience in, but just kind of a you're obsessed over for some
reason, something you find interesting?
I pay a lot of attention to skincare and beauty.
(40:05):
I don't really know anything about it.
On the influencer side, it was the first business that
influencers were really, really successful in.
It feels like cutthroat competition, like this is the
brand now. It's not the brand.
I really like packaging and likevisual communication
information. It's fascinating to go into a
(40:26):
Sephora and look at all the design stuff.
I like functionality and health,so trying to understand what's
functional and what's not functional.
And then I like the idea of products that make like clothing
or makeup or that you know, they'll be like skinny leg, wide
leg. Like, it's not trends.
(40:47):
It's like, what are we all doingtogether to express who we are
or who we aren't? And I think those things are
super interesting. You mentioned early on that you
you're very focused, like you focus on things.
You also have a a a broad array of knowledge.
You've been in different industries.
How does that balance? What are your thoughts on focus?
(41:07):
When is the right time to focus?When is the right time to chase
the shiny object? I'm very obsessive so I'm a mesh
network in my house and sound like AD link in the basement
with like 18 different Ethernet cords that came in from when I
renovated my house and put jacksand everything and everybody
complaints the Internet sucks inour house.
(41:29):
It's too slow and this isn't working or whatever.
So I have this week probably spent 12 hours like so deep.
I just got one of those tools you stick in the wall and you
measure the 8 pins and whatever.And my son says to me yesterday,
he's 24. He's like, why don't you just
(41:49):
hire someone? Like like you're spending so
much time on like trying to figure out why the why these are
like full Gigabit and these are not.
And I was just like, I'm not giving up.
Like I just will not give up. And then last night he's like,
wow, the Internet, my room is really fast.
Everywhere else it's slow, but at least in his room is bad.
(42:12):
And I was like, no, I haven't figured out the other 8 rooms in
the house and I know I can always hire someone and then
I'll give up. But I'm I'm like crimping and
cutting the ends off and whole things and whatever and I'll
probably never use. I'm just like I will figure this
out. Yeah, well, and you're going to
appreciate the Internet even more when it's your Internet,
(42:34):
right? That part I just don't.
I don't want to lose like I havelike hundreds of chats with
ChatGPT where I take pictures ofthe back of the thing and I'm
going with this wiring. Is it this end or that end or
the other thing? I walk around with my laptop.
So it's like, it's like startinga company or something like
(42:54):
that. You just get so obsessed that
you have to figure it out and make it work.
And that's what it requires whenpeople are like, oh, I own 4
businesses. I'm like, well, you own them
maybe, but like, I don't know how they can be great because
like for me, I, I just got to beobsessed and all in and thinking
about it non-stop to make it great.
(43:16):
Yeah, regardless of the industry, you don't care.
Regardless, I mean, I, I care like there, there's a limit.
I, I'm not going to do anything in, in like chemistry, for
example, like I will never understand it.
And there are things that I tap out on, but other things,
especially things that are consumer oriented or culture or
like I always say, like I learned so much.
(43:39):
Like a lot of what I learned about business, I learned from
culture. Like I was a big watch of The
Wire and Breaking Bad. And it's not like, oh, I learned
tactics about how to start my own lab or how to sell drugs and
projects. But I'm like, what is compelling
about these stories and why do they resonate with people?
And what do they have in common?And even if you look at now,
like K Pop, Demon Hunters and Stranger Things are actually the
(44:01):
same story. They both have an underworld.
They both have kids who alert adults to what's going on in the
world. They have all of these things
that are very similar, even if they didn't watch each other's
shows. So it says to me like, oh, we
live in this time of anxiety where young people don't trust
that grown-ups are going to be able to figure that out.
And when was that true? Also in the early 80s, like war
(44:25):
games with Matthew Broderick, Like those themes don't always
exist, but they come and go at times when young people are
like, I don't really feel that. And I tie that to like my
overall thinking about like why a lot of young people really
into wired headphones right now versus Airpods.
Like I love Airpods. Well, I think to some extent
they're just like, how long am Igoing to trust that technology
(44:47):
is better for me? Like what if I just have a bunch
of headphones I don't need to charge and one doesn't fall out
when I'm writing my like and like good.
And so those to me are cultural indicators that I pay a lot of
attention to and I try to feedback into what I'm creating
or working on. Yeah.
Was there something that I should have asked you that I
(45:08):
didn't? Anything you want to get out
there to the world or anything interesting?
What are the things that your students ask you?
That or misconceptions or whatever.
I'd be curious to hear that as well.
Whatever you major in does not matter.
Your grades do not matter. And whatever your parents tell
you, you should probably not listen to them because it's your
life. And I also say that saying that
most people's parents still haveprobably had one or two jobs
(45:31):
their whole life. And most young people are going
to have 10 jobs given everythingelse, Like when you're 21 or 22
or you're graduating, like you can either live somebody else's
story or you can write your own story.
And it's way scarier to write your own story.
And it's way easier to do what everyone else is doing because
(45:53):
the rules are really explicit and you know exactly how to do
that. And it's way more risky to try
to write your own story. But if you are connected enough
to the world, it can be also waymore rewarding.
And I think like the beginning part of our conversation, school
and education and a lot of, you know, functional things that we
(46:18):
experience growing up, they tendto go like this.
We tend to like like 5 year oldsare crazy creative and into
dinosaurs and trains and I don'tknow what your kids were into
but like it's all that stuff andit's just kind of all goes like
this. We beat it.
Out of all, in this little realmwhere we want to do this, we
want to do that. And I'm just like, if you can
(46:39):
break out of that, there's so much crazy potential in the
world. Yeah, beautifully said.
That inspires me to get my kids to do more weird things,
honestly. 100% or just, I mean you, you probably do it, but
it's like we'll do his parents, you indulge them.
I mean, I used to know the name of every Thomas the Tank Engine
train and whatever else. I can barely remember them.
(47:02):
But like the passion of like a 5year old who's so emphatic over
something, it's like, it's incredible.
Yeah. So with that in mind, my final
quiet question, passion or profit?
Follow your passion, follow the profit.
There's two aspects of passion. One aspect is like, I'm into
poetry, I'm into music, I like sports.
(47:22):
I don't think you have to followyour passion for that that that
your passion may not correlate with a high likelihood of
gainful employment. You might love poetry, but
there's no job. You might love books, but you're
not going to be a writer and that that industry is small.
But I think you can have passionfor things that you do,
accounting, marketing, talking to people, sales, live events,
(47:45):
like as you get out in the worldand you just like, and you know
what drives that passion? A lot of times you're good at
it. Like I know people who have
changed careers in their emergency room doctors and
they're just, you know, they're so good at it that that's what
that's what the passion is. And I just think separating that
idea that the passion has to be your interest versus the thing
(48:07):
that you might actually be really good at, because we're
all really good at something andit's just a process of unpacking
that. And thank you, that was amazing.
Where can people find you if they want to reach out or sell
some water? TFADP on Twitter and on pretty
much every social platform all. Right, what do you think?
Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on
the Kerner office.
You can either live somebody else's story, or you can write
your own story. Sometimes you're 1 tweak away
from $200 million, right? Yeah, if they don't say that,
the app doesn't blow up and the company goes out of business.
It's shot to #1 and stayed thereevery single day for six months.
25 million people a day were playing it.
So the number one game in 60 countries in the world.
(00:21):
And what did you end up selling it for?
$200 million. I mean, I was a high school
teacher. It is all of those little things
that make a difference, friends,but they all have to come
together. OK, well why don't you start by
just telling us who you are and what you do, Dan?
My name is Dan Porter, I was on an episode of the career ladder
(00:42):
on TikTok and I am the CEO and Co founder of Overtime which is
a big sports platform that we started in 2016.
OK. And what would you say makes you
different from your peers, your contemporaries?
There are a lot of answers to that, I'd say #1 The nature of
(01:03):
my career, like I've, I've been a public school teacher, I
worked in the music business, I run a gaming company, I'm in
sports. I've just done a lot of
different things. And so everything that I do is
almost like a combination of allthose different experiences.
It's really not a straight path.It's probably #1 I'd say number
(01:26):
two, I'm very relentless and focused and I don't give up.
I don't play a lot of games, butI try to only play games that I
can win. And I think #3 is that you could
say that maybe I'm an out-of-the-box or disruptive
thinker. And I'm not trying to compliment
myself in that, but more just like I don't know the way that I
(01:47):
think of things. Maybe I don't understand the way
things are supposed to be done. So I come up with my own ideas,
but I tend to approach problems probably a different way than
other people do. So probably those three things.
Plus, occasionally I'm very funny.
Do you think? Do you think you approach
(02:08):
problems differently because of your breath of expertise?
Are they correlated? It's a good question.
I'd say half of it is that like I just have so many different
experiences I draw from and halfof it is probably like I'm just
really stupid and I don't know the right way to do it.
So I just come up with my own way to do it.
Sometimes, like you see people who like play some musical
(02:32):
instrument in a really weird way, they play like the guitar
with both their hands or something like that, and they
create entirely new music and maybe they just never learned
the other way or that felt natural to them.
But I think in general, I don't know if through school and
college we do enough collectively to promote kind of
(02:58):
creative and different thinking.I think we tend to optimize
towards people who think alike. That's why we have tests in
school. Tests are like, tell me what the
right answer is. That's the right answer.
Everyone is like, they're like going right towards the tip of a
triangle. I love music.
I was a musician. I focused on improvisation.
(03:20):
I took a lot of creative writing.
I think just taking inspiration from writing and music and arts
and all the different way that people have thought about, you
know, recreating all kinds of music and, and even writing and
stuff like that is probably partof it.
But I don't think we do ourselves any favors as a system
(03:40):
in this country and promoting people who are either think
creatively or, or out-of-the-box.
And I think most people in college, I took painting, I took
photography, I took poetry, of which I was truly terrible at.
And luckily none of those poems survived.
And I took either two or three semesters of creative writing.
And I just think learning those things, if I ask kids today,
(04:03):
they take computer science and economics, and there's nothing
wrong with those. That's what I think.
Yeah, well, creativity, it's more important than it's ever
been, and it's more rare than it's ever been.
It's a differentiator. I, I, I think about like, you
know, when people apply for jobs, sometimes you interview
for a job, you interview people.If you're interviewing A
salesperson and it's like everybody worked at a similar
(04:27):
company, they all have the same title, they've all sold a number
of big deals, how are you going to differentiate like 10 people
who come in and have an interview with you or zoomed in
an interview with? And I think there's some element
where like a lot of times I'll ask questions when I, when I was
in the gaming business, when I ran on G Pop and I used to hire
(04:49):
game designers and, and builders, software developers, I
really used to only ask one question.
And the question I asked is like, what is your favorite
game? You tell me Final Fantasy or
whatever. And then I would say, why is
that a great game? And people would say it's fun or
whatever. And, you know, one out of every
five people would say something like, oh, the way that like this
(05:10):
mechanic works and they describesome intricate part of the game.
And you just think all those people really think deeply about
games and game design. And those were the people that I
hired. Someone that that looks at it
differently? Yeah, you're able to.
Understand why things are the way they are and is is a thinker
(05:33):
and some of that is creativity and some of that is thinking.
But I feel like those people, they can have an impact on you
and your company, but you can appeal to them to try to make
something bigger and better versus people who do less.
So. And I I think that even though
some of that is natural, we can all always be better at learning
(05:54):
how to do that. Yeah.
How did you get into the gaming business?
I was working for Richard Branson.
He was a very successful and famous entrepreneur, and part of
my job was kind of helping him make the Virgin brand relevant
to a whole new kind of generation.
(06:14):
And I just thought, let's go to the roots and do music.
So we did music festivals and other stuff like that.
And I kept reading at that time maybe 20 years ago, like the
gaming business is bigger than the movie business.
It's bigger than the music business.
And in fact, funny enough, I have two sons and I took them to
(06:36):
an outdoor concert that I put onand they spent the whole time
playing the Nintendo DS backstage.
And I was just kind of was like,wow, gaming is kind of relevant
to culture in a way that music probably was in the 80s,
nineties. Not that music isn't, but it's
gaming is. So it's so widely played and
(06:57):
it's so pervasive. I don't know, 90% of kids play
Roblox or anything else like that.
I just kept thinking about it. One day this investor said to
me, oh I know this guy, he's starting a gaming company, could
use some help. So I met with him and I honestly
didn't understand anything that he said to me.
(07:18):
I didn't understand his website.It literally made no sense to me
whatsoever. And so I quit my job and took an
80% pay cut and became the CEO of the gaming company.
That's a big leap, Yeah. You just thought, you just
thought this is a tidal wave that I want to be riding, so
it's worth taking this big pay cut to ride it.
(07:40):
Yeah. And also I was like, there's so
much I don't understand about this.
Like I want to figure it out. And I'm like, I was like, this
is hard. They they know a lot about
something I don't know a lot about.
I clearly get where gaming is going.
And it was it was before we had digital goods and everything
else. But he understood that stuff was
going to come from China and from other places in terms of a
(08:03):
business model and come here. So I just jumped and took a
risk. And what happened after that
point? How did you get from that point
to Draw Something? He was a really cool guy and
everybody worked at a company, was super cool and lived in New
York and Williamsburg and like went to coffee shops and like
made like really cool games for people like them.
(08:23):
And it was a really multiplayer game site.
It was one of the first chances that people could really play
online with each other as opposed to by themselves.
There was no iPhone or anything else like that.
And I said, who are the users? Who are the customers?
And they said people like us because that's what we make
games for. Got deep into Google Analytics
and so forth. And I realized that the
customers were actually almost entirely 14 year old girls in
(08:47):
California. They were just assumed, yeah,
and they were wrong. That's who was playing the games
for five hours a day and I was like, well, baby, that's our
customer. And then the name of the company
was I'm in like with you, which is really funny.
And I. Well, that matches with a 14
year old girl, I mean. Well, I realized that when
people typed it into Google, they misspelled it and we were
(09:07):
losing traffic. So we changed the name.
We understood who the audience was and we started to grow and
we added more and more games andbuilt just kind of like a a
gaming site where people came and played with each other.
And the guy who started it was enormously creative and just
just visually talented. Like everything about the games
(09:29):
were really great. I remember once we did a a talk
at a conference and he got up and he just said my goal is to
make a game that's so good that some kid mows lawns to make
money to pay for it. It was good.
And then we were successful and we had millions of users.
Average time on site was 4 1/2 to five hours.
(09:51):
And then Farm Bill came out and Farm Bill was built on top of
Facebook. All of a sudden they had 100
million users. We had like 3,000,000 users.
All of a sudden we were big and then we were small and the whole
world was playing FarmVille and other Facebook games, and the
iPhone had just come out and I was like, wow, we missed
(10:12):
Facebook. We didn't make Angry Birds.
You know, sometimes you wonder if it's too late.
Sometimes it is, but sometimes you feel like it's too late, but
it's not. We started to make some iPhone
games and then it's like there'sa hard part where you don't
fail, but you don't succeed. So you're somewhere in the
middle. Like it's not like you have no
users, but it's not like you have a zillion users.
(10:34):
It's kind of like the. Messy middle like.
You're not Uber. Valley of Death.
Or something like that. Or worse, yeah.
Long story short, we had a drawing and guessing game that
we had tried to make for Facebook and we've made for our
site. And I decided to try to be the
game designer and work with a couple people in the company.
And we just made it as an iPhonegame and we released it and it
(10:57):
did OK. And then it kind of bombed.
And then some of our developers were like, I think there's a lot
of people trying to play it. I think there's a technical
problem. And they worked all weekend,
They fixed it and it shot to #1 and it stayed there every single
day for six months. 25 million people a day were playing it.
So the number one game in 60 countries in the world and a
quarter of a billion people downloaded it.
(11:18):
OK, All right. I want to get to that before we
get there. I find it so interesting that,
you know, Facebook releases games and you suddenly feel like
a very small company and you arecompared to FarmVille.
It made me think like a lot of times we talk about platform
risk, like platform risk to watch out for those platforms,
you know, don't want to be relying on one platform, but
that same platform risk can put like non platform businesses out
(11:42):
of business because that platform is so big and strong
and scary, right? It's the other side of the
argument. You know, I'm trying to reach
young people. So I built this website and I
was like, who goes to a website?Like you think they're going to
your website? Like have you ever seen a young
person open a browser on their phone they don't go to?
Web only to do homework. Yeah, exactly.
(12:03):
Why didn't Draw Something for asa Facebook game work?
Do you think I know exactly why it didn't work?
It's kind of not working. Inspired.
The thing that made it work. So basically on Facebook, it's
like Pictionary. It's like a drawing guessing
game. So it's open.
You go into a lobby and there's three other people there, and
(12:24):
all of a sudden the word comes up and you draw it and people
guess. Well, if you put people in a
lobby with three strangers, they're either going to draw
anatomical body parts or they'rejust going to be rude.
And what could be really fun wasbasically kind of toxic most of
the time. Not all the time, but most of
the time. And so when we made it for the
(12:45):
phone, we only let you play yourfriends because we were like, we
can't stop people from drawing funny things or being annoying
phallic things. Yeah, but if you know that
they're with their friends, their friends are either going
to say knock it off or they're going to think it's funny.
And so I think what didn't work is kind of like a wide open
space. Worked amazing on a friend
(13:07):
basis. It's almost like a version of
niching down, like preventing other people from playing it.
Kind of like Facebook in the early days, right?
Like you have to be a Harvard student.
It's like you couldn't solve changing people's bad behavior
on the Internet. So it wasn't like you could then
penalize people and they could report them and everything else
like that, but you could solve just not having it open to
(13:31):
everyone on the Internet. So it was easier to solve that
than it was to solve the former.Yeah.
And then you you have a built invirality because you can invite
all your friends in your contactlist, right?
Yeah, I remember somebody told me I'm getting invites for Draw
Something on like people that I was on instant messenger with
that I haven't even talked to infive years.
(13:53):
Yeah. What aside from like the built
in virality of it from a base principal perspective, why do
you think it resonated so well? I think it was really simple.
I'm not a game designer, so I made something that was so easy
to understand and play. Number 1, I think it was very
collaborative. It was funny.
It was the first thing they use your finger on the phone.
(14:15):
It was tactile. It was what the phone was meant
to do, not be a joystick replacement.
We didn't make it based on winners or losers.
You tried to have a streak with the person that you were playing
with that made people feel like they weren't competing with each
other, but it just was like a little more social.
It was actually, in a weird way,it was just very it was social
(14:37):
at a time when most games were not social.
Yeah. Do you think at the time there
was less competition for people's attention on the phone?
At that time, I would say that maybe 7 of the top 10 apps were
games. I'd say now 0R, they're mostly
either Uber or Instagram or TikTok.
(14:58):
Short form video. Yeah, short form videos.
So that was a moment by from 2010 to 2015 when games just
dominated the phone. That's what you did.
And then I think social media really knocked that out and game
discovery was like, people be like, what are the new games all
the time? And there's not a lot of games,
(15:19):
there's not a lot of mobile games that like since then, like
people still play. They might play that they play
Words with Friends or Candy Crush or whatever.
But in the last five years, I'm not sure there's been a mobile
game that I can think of that's just like taking over.
And everybody's done it because most of their attention is on
social endeavors. I'm just continually amazed at
(15:42):
how innovative and addicting short form video is.
Not just the medium, but the algorithms that drive it and
just how accurate it is. It's showing me what I want to
watch. It's it's scary.
Yeah, I mean, you know, technology is good and it it
knows you. I, I uploaded 50 essays that I
had written into ChatGPT and I said, I want you to reverse
(16:04):
engineer my writing style. And then I'm going to give you a
prompt and I want you to write it like I write it.
And I'd say it was like 90% thatliterally sounded like I wrote
it. Oh.
Man, in your story I think you glossed over something quickly
and let me make sure I get this right.
You you were running the companyinitially, right?
Yeah, I was the CEO. You were not a a developer by
(16:26):
any means. I'm not a software developer.
And you had this idea and for some reason you said, I want to
build this one. Is that because you just wanted
to learn how to build games, or you were so passionate about it,
like you just wanted to own it? In the movie version, it's
because I'm so passionate. But in reality, I just think
like, we were starting to be like, we didn't make Angry Birds
(16:48):
and we didn't make FarmVille. Like, are we effed?
Like what's going to happen to us?
I was like, maybe we're going tofail.
Like if we're going to fail, at least maybe I could try to make
a game. Yeah, So it wasn't like this is
the best idea I've ever had. This is going to save the
company. Let me go on the front lines and
do it. It's more like. 90% of the
company was working on other games.
(17:09):
Yeah, So you're like, all right,We're kind of in flight mode.
We're in survival mode right now.
I have this idea. And you weren't thinking like,
this is genius. This is for sure going to work.
I'm fully confident. But it was kind of like, I think
there's something to it, but I don't want to distract my team.
They're just trying to keep their head above water.
So why don't I try to build it? I had no idea if it would work.
Also just was like, I don't know, I just want to try to make
(17:32):
a game. I do overthink some things.
In this case, I didn't really overthink that.
I just was like, I think I can make something that.
It's funny because the company that bought us was called Zynga
and they were the makers of FarmVille.
Ironically, I went to the offices in San Francisco when we
were in the process of contemplating an acquisition and
(17:54):
they had all the stuff on the wall and all these game
designers were reverse engineering the game and trying
to figure it out. Why was it successful?
And I went over and looked and they were like, oh, you made the
game. And it's like, I just have this
question for you. Like why didn't you use XP in
the game? Experience points?
And that woman, I thought I forgot, I didn't use it, but
(18:17):
it's just like totally slipped my mind and like that it's like,
and they just couldn't believe that that was the case.
And that was the honest answer. So it's like, I don't know,
sometimes things just work themselves out or it's good
enough as is. And sometimes you have people
(18:40):
who are from outside of an industry who are good at making
something. I had, I, I met up with a friend
of mine had been the Internet business and then he was in the
fashion business outside of the United States.
Then he came back to the United States and he's like I said, oh,
what, what are you up to? He's like, let's catch up.
He said, I'm making like a sparkling water, like a soda
(19:01):
stream competitor. I was like, you worked in
Internet and fashion. What do you know about sparkling
water? Like, and he goes, I'll know
anything about it, but I'm an entrepreneur.
That's what I do. I learn about stuff.
Yeah, whoa. It's pretty powerful.
Outsiders are powerful. Like you could have gotten hung
up on adding XP and that could have like held up the whole
(19:22):
project and then you move on to something else and maybe it
never happens or maybe you had. It less fun.
It could have made it less fun, could have changed the whole
dynamic of the game, the whole culture of the game. 80 year
olds played my game. It was so simple.
Yeah, I say this all the time, but people get so hung up on
researching and doing market research and talking to people.
And what features do I add when like the building of The thing
(19:44):
is the best research you can do.The building is the research I.
Think that everything is like, it's like an idea.
Like I'm going to make a brand new toothbrush.
I have an idea, but it's just a premise and it's just an excuse
to get started. Sometimes your assumptions are
wrong or sometimes you discover something else, but you need
something to get started. You need an idea and a premise.
(20:07):
People like I'm pivoting. I'm like pivoting is like, you
know, when you start out in the Internet business and all of a
sudden you're in the underwear business, like that's a pivot.
But like everything else, is just you're testing, you're
learning, you're getting visibility into.
What's happening? People are giving you feedback
on your idea and telling you what works and doesn't work, or
(20:29):
you're observing that and you know you're building it going
forward. And I don't think that's a
pivot. I just think you need that first
premise and you just need to payattention.
Yeah, what? What first gave you the idea for
Draw Something? What was that moment?
It was the 3rd iteration of the game that we had made for
ourselves and for Facebook. So I had thought a lot about
(20:50):
about why it didn't work. And then the inspiration really
was I went to park with my son and his friend and they were
playing catch. And I was like, if you guys can
catch the ball back and forth 50times, I'll buy you an ice
cream. And then I was like, oh, it's
like a streak. And then I was like, oh, a
streak is a way that two people can play a game and be on the
(21:10):
same team and not be competitive.
And that was like part of the core insight.
Like the triggering event for the idea was the feature of the
idea, and then you built the actual core idea on top of the
feature. It was fixing something that
other people had built and designed, but I had thought a
lot about, and it was that. And then there was one thing
(21:32):
that I didn't have anything to do with, but one of the
developers, Will Chen did, whichwas he figured out how to play
back the drawing. So if I drew a picture of a
house and I sent it to you to guest, you watched me draw it
and it felt live. You could see me erase with
money versus me just sending youa picture of something.
(21:56):
And that aspect of it, which I didn't create it at all.
It it just made it feel so aliveand so different.
And I think that a great game, agreat car, a great product, a
great jacket, whatever it is that you experience, like it has
to make you has to feel amazing.Like I own one suit that I've
(22:20):
owned for 12 years. Somehow I still fit into it.
And when I put it on, I'm like, this suit makes me feel amazing.
I've I look good. I feel like it's a great suit.
The cut still works. I have a car with a really nice
steering wheel. It makes me feel amazing.
And that aspect of the game justmade it feel great.
First question. How successful do you think Draw
(22:41):
Something becomes if you'd neverincorporate that feature of
like, seeing it drawn live? Do you think that was a core
part of it? 100%, I think it does not become
as successful without that, Yeah, all those things, streaks,
lack of competition, solving thetoxic part and that that
everything came together to makeit work.
(23:03):
And what did you end up selling it for?
$200 million. And I feel like if you don't
have all of those ingredients, right, it's not like take away
the streaks. We sell it for 160.
Take away the live feature, we sell it for 1:20.
It's kind of like if you missed one of those, it doesn't.
Yeah. If you take one of them away,
it's kind of like your bacon bread.
(23:24):
You take the yeast away, you're like, it'll just be a little
smaller because there's only 1% of this is yeast.
It's like, no, now you have flatbread and it sucks.
You take one of those four key ingredients away, then it's a
nothing burger. You never get off the ground
right? I agree.
On the pessimistic way of looking at that is like, well,
that's kind of depressing. I have to like put all these
ingredients together and I don'tknow what'll work.
(23:44):
And I look at that, it's like, that's freaking amazing.
You're a chemist in a lab. You were that easy to make a
great product. Everybody would make a great
product, but you've got to assemble all those things.
It's like you asked me about myself and my career.
I assembled all of those different things from my
different experiences. I mean, I was a high school
teacher. Every single thing.
You put something together like great products feel great even
(24:09):
around the edges. Like when you buy a shirt or you
buy like a really beautiful shirt, you'll notice the
stitching on the beautiful shirtand everything else like that.
Like it is all of those little things that make a difference,
but they all have to come together.
I mean, you said too like your developers are like, damn, I
(24:30):
think people are trying to play this, but something's broken,
right? What if that conversation never
happens? Like the, the optimistic way
that I look at your story is that all these little tweaks
make such a difference. And sometimes you're 1 tweak
away from $200 million, right? One tweak away if they don't say
that. The app doesn't blow up and the
company goes out of business. I feel like it's never been that
(24:52):
critical little tweaks and changes since before the age of
the Internet. Like if I'm running a Facebook
ad campaign with a big budget and I check a box that says
optimize for conversions, optimize for add to cart, that
could be the difference between me spending $10 to acquire a
customer and $100. That could be all the
difference. So in this Internet connected
(25:13):
age, these little tweaks are everything.
And so we don't want to over optimize everything and tweak
everything to death, but we wantto just keep testing everything,
right. Yeah, it's kind of like yoga.
Or if you work out, like most ofus end up doing it wrong.
So you're doing some pose and then the instructor comes over
and they say, actually your hipshave to be forward.
And you're like, oh, I was just wasting two weeks thinking I was
(25:34):
stretching when I wasn't really doing anything.
Yeah, yeah. So you sell for 200 million.
What do you do after that? What's next?
So I work for the company that bought my company for a year
because that's how those things go.
And then I end up meeting Sky Ari Emanuel, who's the founder
(25:55):
of Endeavour, William Morris Endeavour, famous talent agent.
And Long story short, he pitchesme and I say no and he keeps
pitching me. And I end up joining WME, as
it's called, which is biggest talent agency in the world, is
their head of digital. And I build the foundation of
the modern creator economy by signing, building, signing 20
(26:18):
agents and 250 Youtubers. And, you know, everything that
we think about creators now, who's doing 2013 to 2016?
And a lot of people who I workedwith, who worked for me and all
those are now run digital for companies all over the US.
What's an accessible version of that Business Today, if you were
(26:38):
to keep all your skills, you're 20 years old and you want to
make money in that way, kind of in that industry, how would you
go about it? Like I would try to be a creator
in a niche that I could own. So either you're broadly popular
or there's creators whose specialty is talking about how
to be successful on YouTube. There's finance, there's
(27:01):
cooking, there's health, there'sexercise.
I mean, they're all crowded, butthere's always room for people
who are creative and, and a lot of people under the age of 30
rely on other people to help them filter information.
So if I'm walking down the street and I see some restaurant
or coffee shop and there's a massive line, pretty much 100%
(27:23):
of the time someone's like, Oh yeah, that just blew up on
TikTok. This one person went there and
talked about it and now everyone's gone there.
So I, I would think about that. I mean, listen, what do they
say? 40% of Gen.
Z wants to be a YouTube? So it's just a different form of
being an entrepreneur. How do you think AI plays into
that with AI generated content? Do you think that makes like,
(27:44):
unique creators even more valuable because they stand out
even more or less valuable? I don't have a perfect answer
for that because a lot of what we see now is probably only the
tip of the sword. I do think that humans are able
to make connections about what resonates with people and what's
(28:10):
different and what's distinctly human better than AI, but I
think AI can accelerate their ability to create it.
I think like I'll teach a book in my class.
Let's say I've picked a book, I've assigned it and now we talk
about it and whatever the reality is, I could also just go
(28:33):
to ChatGPT and say, hey, I just read this book.
What do you think it's about that?
Does this ask me some questions?I can talk to him for two hours
and have a really in depth conversation about the book.
But does anyone want to go and just talk to ChatGPT to learn
books all day? Or do they want to go to class
with a professor and other students and feel different way
(28:53):
and body language and everythingelse like that?
So I think there's a role for both.
Yeah, And as you're reading thatbook, you're thinking, oh, this
character reminds me of my mother.
Or in ChatGPT doesn't know that your students, they want to know
from you without even knowing it.
They want to know from you like how that book ties into your
life experience, right? And you're able to deliver a
(29:13):
unique experience there. Whereas anyone could just
regurgitate the ChatGPT summary,just like SparkNotes, right?
Yeah. It it's.
I'm going to be more likely to have an opinion which they might
agree or disagree. I'm more likely to say, hey, in
my life when I made this game orI signed this YouTube, I was
(29:34):
reading this book and it made methink about XY and Z.
So I think we are trained to think in this world that B is
going to replace A and C is going to replace B.
But I think there are ways that it is additive in a lot of
different ways. So I think that human creativity
(29:55):
is still going to be important. I think there's a lot of AI
creativity. I mean, sometimes we'll be
working on a project at work andwe're like, we just don't have a
good name for this competition we're doing.
And sometimes the names that come out through AI are amazing
and everyone's like, that's perfect and sometimes they suck,
but it's just like, it's a tool.But I don't think we're all
(30:19):
going to just be sitting at home, boy, because AI is making
amazing YouTube videos and othercontent.
But I think it's, you know, it's, it's going to, it's going
to work together. Tell me about the genesis of
overtime and what overtime is. Overtime is a sports platform,
sports brand for next generationof sports fans.
(30:41):
I was working in sports at my job at the talent agency and I
heard from a lot of sports leagues that young people
weren't watching live sports. And I'm like, they're all
watching all the Youtubers that I work with, but they're not
watching live sports. I wonder if there's an
opportunity. So again, I just quit my job and
I was like, let's see if we can start a company to figure out
(31:03):
how to get every young person tocare about us.
Oh, by the way, we have no highlights, no live rights.
We can't cover any pro sports. But still, we're going to figure
it out. And that's ultimately what we
did. So today, every week, 1/4 of a
billion people watch a video that we make.
We have over 110 million followers.
(31:23):
We have a basketball league thatkicks off on Halloween this
Friday the 31st. We have a Football League, we
have a girls basketball league. We're in a bunch of different
league and event businesses, media businesses, and we've
created a really dominant brand and maybe the largest kind of
creator in sports. Tell me about the crowdsourcing
side of that. How do the How does a kid with
(31:45):
an iPhone play into your business model?
Yeah, honestly, it doesn't. I think it's a misconception
about our business and I don't know how to get people to stop
writing that. But I think the perception was
we just used UGC videos, but we did it.
What we did was we built our owncamera technology for the iPhone
and then we paid people $20 to go to certain games and film
(32:08):
stuff that we then published. So it was actually an end to end
network where we had a deployed army of maybe 800 iPhone
filmers. We used our software, tagged it
and did it. But for some reason people
thought that that was UGC and that part I'm, look, I'm
answering your question and I haven't even published a UGC
video like that for nine years. Over time of these 800 kids, are
(32:31):
you able to find ones that are just like, spectacular?
And you're paying them more, you're giving them more roles?
I feel like there's a lot of surface area for finding rock
stars. Yeah, some of them work for us
now, like full time, and they started when they were 16, just
like filming games for us. But over time we also ended up
starting our own league, so I didn't need to have 800 people.
(32:51):
But there's definitely people who work at the company and
that's how we know them. What kind of business ideas or
other opportunities has working within overtime shown you that
you're too focused on to chase after?
I think TikTok shop is super interesting.
I think that a lot of products are going to be driven by
(33:13):
creators. I think that product categories
are going to change over time. I think we're in a like a food
product world where functionality is a huge aspect
of that. So I think that's pretty big.
I think that second, colleges which engage NIL name, image,
(33:36):
likeness to to play a part in attracting athletes, There's
just going to be a lot of changein that space.
I mean, you know, Reggie Bush lost his Heisman Trophy and then
four or five years ago now wherepeople are making millions of
dollars in college playing sports.
I think it's an incredibly growing and disruptive space.
So those are two that I would think about where I it's not on
(33:59):
exactly for the business, but I think there's the opportunity
there. What about the genesis of 6-7
water? How did that come about and
where's it at today? Similarly, I.
Oh, there it is. You know, we built a water brand
off of a meme. I I picked water because it was
(34:21):
just easy to make and we didn't have to do testing and tasting
and stuff like that. We turned around the whole thing
in eight weeks and we've sold 10s of thousands of them with
41,000 people on our wait list. We're one of the most followed
water brands in the world. But right now we have a couple
interns who go to gas stations and bodegas in New York, and
(34:41):
they just talk to people and they're coming back and they're
saying, you know what? I think we need a flavor and
this why? So like, it starts as this kind
of instinct. We're sitting in a room and
we're like, this would be crazy,let's do it.
But now a lot of the decisions are being made because people on
the street are spending time with bodega owners and talking
(35:04):
to kids in middle school who come in to buy a drink and
seeing what they're buying and asking them why.
So I wouldn't call market research, but I'd call it like
customer development and a deep understanding there.
And that's going to drive the product innovation as it should.
Yeah. Are you still looking for
distributors and you're still trying to scale that?
I'm really focused on distributing it in Kentucky,
(35:26):
where Taylon Kenny, who is the main athlete who started this
and started 6-7 and everything else like that, lives.
A, because he's from there, and B, because I feel like everyone
who makes a product tries to launch it in LA, San Francisco
and New York, which is a really hard place to get traction.
So I just somehow feel like maybe Kentucky's the right place
(35:48):
to launch it. Yeah, it's so funny.
Like I thought that thing was going to die.
The 6-7 was going to die a monthago, six months, five months
ago, like a month after it came out.
I have 4 kids between the ages of nine and 15.
And so when I, when I heard you on MFM, like explaining to them
what it was and what it meant, like, doesn't everyone know
this? Like I hear it 10 times a day.
(36:10):
It's everywhere. Yeah.
I mean, you know, I think boys think like culture is at its
peak and then it gets to a higher peak and a higher peak
definitely when it's in the WallStreet Journal and on the Today
Show. We might be towards the end, but
when we started this, we were not there at all.
And I also think there's aspectsof culture that are exclusionary
(36:34):
if you know, you know, and thereare aspects that are
inclusionary. And I actually watched this
TikTok from this mom and she wassaying, like, the thing about
6-7 is everyone can say it and everyone is in on the joke.
And there's actually not a lot of things that are really
inclusionary, like on a broad level, where if you're cool or
you're not cool, if you sit in the front of the class or the
(36:55):
back of the class, if you're a jock, if you're not a jock.
I think that in a way, looking back at it, there's a deep
understanding that there was some power to it, that just, it
was just funny. And I, I think, you know, the
idea of like monoculture, like we're all watching the same
(37:16):
thing or everyone's going to seeTaylor Swift or whatever those
things are the Super Bowl. Like those things are less and
less than I think when we were kids, but when they happen, I
think it's just funny. I mean, my grandparents were
still alive. They would probably think it was
funny to say that I don't know those types of things on a
participation basis. Like people are too obsessed
(37:36):
with the fact that doesn't mean anything.
Nothing means everything. Everything is a word is just a
symbol with an arbitrary meaningattached to it.
So like, that's not the point ofit.
The point of it is it's fun, it's funny, it gives people a
way to be included. I wrote this on LinkedIn, but I
forgetting that it it like comeswith a hand gesture.
(37:58):
Like I can say what's up, but there's no hand gesture.
So it's like sometimes you like watch like a baseball game or
football game. People are doing this in the
background. You know exactly what they're
doing. Even with the sound off it just
it was meme so to speak That just was built for video, audio,
social school, camp, everything.Well it doesn't hurt that the 2
(38:19):
numbers are right next to each other, so we're going to be
hearing them together forever and it's going to be hard to
like untrain our brain to not hear it in that tone.
How many students have you taught, give or take, roughly?
Probably 400 to 450. When you talk to a student,
you're 5 sentences into the conversation.
What's something that you hear or notice that just signals to
(38:40):
you? This kids got it.
He's going to make it. He's going to be OK.
Interesting. I thought you were going to ask
me a different question, which is like, what are all the
misconceptions about life they have?
I'd like to hear that too, but. It's hard to know that unless
you're talking about like a specific assignment or anything
else like that. If you look at a class, most
(39:01):
people don't ask any questions. Some people ask bad questions,
and other people ask really, really good questions.
Some people ask good questions. You get it.
They're just people who operate at a different level.
Like they're confident about theknowledge, they're engaged.
They're not asking you if it's going to be on the test.
(39:22):
It's an in person class. So I'm biased because people
with interpersonal charisma, I make I, I run out of time every
year, but I try to make every student stand up and tell a
personal story about something that happened to them in their
first year in New York City. And sometimes you just realize
like some people are just reallygifted and or some people are
(39:42):
just really fearless and the rest of them are just like, is
it going to be on the test or I go to do the grading and I'm
thinking like, I don't even knowwho this person.
Is what's a category or an industry that you have no
experience in, but just kind of a you're obsessed over for some
reason, something you find interesting?
I pay a lot of attention to skincare and beauty.
(40:05):
I don't really know anything about it.
On the influencer side, it was the first business that
influencers were really, really successful in.
It feels like cutthroat competition, like this is the
brand now. It's not the brand.
I really like packaging and likevisual communication
information. It's fascinating to go into a
(40:26):
Sephora and look at all the design stuff.
I like functionality and health,so trying to understand what's
functional and what's not functional.
And then I like the idea of products that make like clothing
or makeup or that you know, they'll be like skinny leg, wide
leg. Like, it's not trends.
(40:47):
It's like, what are we all doingtogether to express who we are
or who we aren't? And I think those things are
super interesting. You mentioned early on that you
you're very focused, like you focus on things.
You also have a a a broad array of knowledge.
You've been in different industries.
How does that balance? What are your thoughts on focus?
(41:07):
When is the right time to focus?When is the right time to chase
the shiny object? I'm very obsessive so I'm a mesh
network in my house and sound like AD link in the basement
with like 18 different Ethernet cords that came in from when I
renovated my house and put jacksand everything and everybody
complaints the Internet sucks inour house.
(41:29):
It's too slow and this isn't working or whatever.
So I have this week probably spent 12 hours like so deep.
I just got one of those tools you stick in the wall and you
measure the 8 pins and whatever.And my son says to me yesterday,
he's 24. He's like, why don't you just
(41:49):
hire someone? Like like you're spending so
much time on like trying to figure out why the why these are
like full Gigabit and these are not.
And I was just like, I'm not giving up.
Like I just will not give up. And then last night he's like,
wow, the Internet, my room is really fast.
Everywhere else it's slow, but at least in his room is bad.
(42:12):
And I was like, no, I haven't figured out the other 8 rooms in
the house and I know I can always hire someone and then
I'll give up. But I'm I'm like crimping and
cutting the ends off and whole things and whatever and I'll
probably never use. I'm just like I will figure this
out. Yeah, well, and you're going to
appreciate the Internet even more when it's your Internet,
(42:34):
right? That part I just don't.
I don't want to lose like I havelike hundreds of chats with
ChatGPT where I take pictures ofthe back of the thing and I'm
going with this wiring. Is it this end or that end or
the other thing? I walk around with my laptop.
So it's like, it's like startinga company or something like
(42:54):
that. You just get so obsessed that
you have to figure it out and make it work.
And that's what it requires whenpeople are like, oh, I own 4
businesses. I'm like, well, you own them
maybe, but like, I don't know how they can be great because
like for me, I, I just got to beobsessed and all in and thinking
about it non-stop to make it great.
(43:16):
Yeah, regardless of the industry, you don't care.
Regardless, I mean, I, I care like there, there's a limit.
I, I'm not going to do anything in, in like chemistry, for
example, like I will never understand it.
And there are things that I tap out on, but other things,
especially things that are consumer oriented or culture or
like I always say, like I learned so much.
(43:39):
Like a lot of what I learned about business, I learned from
culture. Like I was a big watch of The
Wire and Breaking Bad. And it's not like, oh, I learned
tactics about how to start my own lab or how to sell drugs and
projects. But I'm like, what is compelling
about these stories and why do they resonate with people?
And what do they have in common?And even if you look at now,
like K Pop, Demon Hunters and Stranger Things are actually the
(44:01):
same story. They both have an underworld.
They both have kids who alert adults to what's going on in the
world. They have all of these things
that are very similar, even if they didn't watch each other's
shows. So it says to me like, oh, we
live in this time of anxiety where young people don't trust
that grown-ups are going to be able to figure that out.
And when was that true? Also in the early 80s, like war
(44:25):
games with Matthew Broderick, Like those themes don't always
exist, but they come and go at times when young people are
like, I don't really feel that. And I tie that to like my
overall thinking about like why a lot of young people really
into wired headphones right now versus Airpods.
Like I love Airpods. Well, I think to some extent
they're just like, how long am Igoing to trust that technology
(44:47):
is better for me? Like what if I just have a bunch
of headphones I don't need to charge and one doesn't fall out
when I'm writing my like and like good.
And so those to me are cultural indicators that I pay a lot of
attention to and I try to feedback into what I'm creating
or working on. Yeah.
Was there something that I should have asked you that I
(45:08):
didn't? Anything you want to get out
there to the world or anything interesting?
What are the things that your students ask you?
That or misconceptions or whatever.
I'd be curious to hear that as well.
Whatever you major in does not matter.
Your grades do not matter. And whatever your parents tell
you, you should probably not listen to them because it's your
life. And I also say that saying that
most people's parents still haveprobably had one or two jobs
(45:31):
their whole life. And most young people are going
to have 10 jobs given everythingelse, Like when you're 21 or 22
or you're graduating, like you can either live somebody else's
story or you can write your own story.
And it's way scarier to write your own story.
And it's way easier to do what everyone else is doing because
(45:53):
the rules are really explicit and you know exactly how to do
that. And it's way more risky to try
to write your own story. But if you are connected enough
to the world, it can be also waymore rewarding.
And I think like the beginning part of our conversation, school
and education and a lot of, you know, functional things that we
(46:18):
experience growing up, they tendto go like this.
We tend to like like 5 year oldsare crazy creative and into
dinosaurs and trains and I don'tknow what your kids were into
but like it's all that stuff andit's just kind of all goes like
this. We beat it.
Out of all, in this little realmwhere we want to do this, we
want to do that. And I'm just like, if you can
(46:39):
break out of that, there's so much crazy potential in the
world. Yeah, beautifully said.
That inspires me to get my kids to do more weird things,
honestly. 100% or just, I mean you, you probably do it, but
it's like we'll do his parents, you indulge them.
I mean, I used to know the name of every Thomas the Tank Engine
train and whatever else. I can barely remember them.
(47:02):
But like the passion of like a 5year old who's so emphatic over
something, it's like, it's incredible.
Yeah. So with that in mind, my final
quiet question, passion or profit?
Follow your passion, follow the profit.
There's two aspects of passion. One aspect is like, I'm into
poetry, I'm into music, I like sports.
(47:22):
I don't think you have to followyour passion for that that that
your passion may not correlate with a high likelihood of
gainful employment. You might love poetry, but
there's no job. You might love books, but you're
not going to be a writer and that that industry is small.
But I think you can have passionfor things that you do,
accounting, marketing, talking to people, sales, live events,
(47:45):
like as you get out in the worldand you just like, and you know
what drives that passion? A lot of times you're good at
it. Like I know people who have
changed careers in their emergency room doctors and
they're just, you know, they're so good at it that that's what
that's what the passion is. And I just think separating that
idea that the passion has to be your interest versus the thing
(48:07):
that you might actually be really good at, because we're
all really good at something andit's just a process of unpacking
that. And thank you, that was amazing.
Where can people find you if they want to reach out or sell
some water? TFADP on Twitter and on pretty
much every social platform all. Right, what do you think?
Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on
the Kerner office.
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