guys. Welcome Thio Hustle Podcast is this episode 10 And today we have, ah, special kind of interesting story that we thought we would like to tell. Or at least Anthony and Natalie have a special story that they like to tell. And I'm very interested to hear this story. The content sounds very interesting. So eso Anthony and Italy share a story about working with David Blaine. That's right, the magician. And why treating people with respect and fair pay is critical to long lasting impressions. So Anthony Natalie, if you guys don't mind, would you set it up? Where are you, like, went? When was this?

Okay, so this was probably 2007. We were living in New York City at the time and one of the partners at the agency that I worked at New David Blaine from childhood. They went toe high school or college or something like that to get any. Anyway, they knew each other on a personal level, and David Blaine called up my boss and asked him if the agency could help him with some stuff. And he's like, No, I can't, but I'll ask him in my employees if they want help and we'll see Weaken do that. So my boss calls me. It's a Saturday and he's like, Hey, uh, I know it's a Saturday and I hate to bother you, but I have this interesting opportunity if you want to do it.

David Blaine is looking for some help with a new project that he has going on, and he's looking for help today and the work has to be complete today. Are you up for it? Crazy? Yeah, it was a little weird, but you know what? It's when David Blaine, when you have an opportunity to work with David Blaine and at least at that point in time, you know, You know, I thought David Blaine was kind of cool, and it was an interesting opportunity to do something different. So I went to Natalie and my brother. We all shared an apartment, and I said,

Hey, what would you guys think about working with David Blaine today? Yeah, it was pretty unanimous. We're all very excited about doing it. So we dropped everything we're doing and got ready and head over

there. And so is you. Natalie and your brother Matt, who also works of fun size now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so then what happened? So we met him at I think it was, like, six o'clock in the evening and he gave us an address. We got texted an address from Anthony's old boss and we walked. It was somewhere in Chelsea, 27th Street or something like that. And we walked there. We gave everything to call.

He came downstairs to kind of grab us, took us upstairs, and we were up this elevator with David Blaine. Probably all of us. And like on the inside, freaking out a little bit and then the gram. So he himself came to get you. Didn't seem like a henchman or something. He opened the door. Yeah, And then we got the elevator, and it was just this bookcase in front of us. And we're like, Okay, this is pretty neat. And he just opens the bookcase, and we're just walking through this maze of bookcases with books from Florida ceiling and walking through these little glass cases with things like things from Houdini. And like, I don't know, it was really

it was a entire floor of ah, New York City building.

It was in all his office. Brown Stoner's through regular

office building. It was more like an off. It was more of like, Can't like more of industrial kind of building. There's a lot of buildings in Chelsea, like old textile factories and stuff like that. But the visual I just so hard to describe I mean, it described what this is like. It's like a layer out of out of a book. Hidden rooms and wall the wall ceiling libraries. And he had his, you know, an assistant magician that was, like, 60 or 70 years old, it was running like a purple cape, and they were doing experiments and,

you know, way even got a demo of some of, you know, like, you know, some of the tricks they were working on. It was just one crazy. And and knowing how expensive things are in New York, I mean, this is a This was a really decked out, super secret place. You could tell like it had no labels on everything like weird. No signs

are, you know, is that it is a normal Saturday. Boss calls. You said Hey, David Blaine wants a word with you. You guys go meet him. You're suddenly in this strange fortress office way.

Didn't at this time we even know what we're gonna be working on. We were working on something

and it was designed. That's when Anthony Spot said, Well, that's good. Yeah, Wait, The tour and David's like, huh? He's like, Hey, let's go to Starbucks. Who wants coffee? So his little entourage, It was like the wizard guy and this girl that does most of his artwork for his posters. I guess six of us walk to Starbucks, and you could just tell people are like, safe plane.

That's so cool. And, you know, Anthony, myself and Matthew were probably like you were hanging out with David Blaine. This is so cool. Like we're going to start. It was, Yeah, We walked back, went through the whole maze thing again, sat down at this conference table. That was probably big enough for 10 people. Um, and he kind of just gave us a low down on what he wanted us to work on. And at the time,

you know? I mean, he called up and in his old boss, we're like, maybe he needs a website or something, right? Like let's bring our computers. But that wasn't what it was at all.

Okay, so I'll try. No, I mean, from my knowledge, he never launched this. I don't think it's confidential, but at the time,

we didn't

sign anything. Way sat down and he said, Okay, look, here's the deal. I'm opening a new restaurant, and my meeting with the investors is tomorrow. And so I need a I need artwork for a pitch that I can use to sell my concept. So our first impression of that we kind of looked at each other. I can't remember. We're like, Okay, this is not a website. What is it we're doing? He did it. We thought then, Okay,

maybe that was the night that if it wasn't a website, maybe it's a pitch deck. But then he gave us the pitch, and his this themed restaurant that he wanted to open was all magic based. So, like, this'll restaurant was toe have 12 rooms, and each room had completely different interior design with with crazy stuff like one room. Had a was gonna have a circular aquarium in the middle with an octopus that it appears that his tentacles are reaching out, grabbing people. And one room would have like a monkey on a on a cycle, you know, going, you know, tightropes. And

like a mermaid in shell or something like that that changes like more, since it's something else and serves you a drink.

Things like this and there's 12 of these rooms, and here it is. By this time it's like seven o'clock. So we're thinking, OK, it's seven o'clock.

It's been all day, just like hanging out with him.

Well, we only maybe hung out for an hour to before we got the pitch, But by this time, it's probably, you know, it's probably eight o'clock or so and you know, it's Ah, it was a weekend. It actually wasn't a Saturday. I think it was a Sunday. We go to work the next day, so we're like, Okay, it's eight o'clock. We need to be back in Brooklyn by 11. So we got, like,

through three hours, right? What are we gonna do with these 12 room things? Um, what he was wanting

with art work like hand drawn painted console, injuring

pencil and paint in color pencil

like masterpieces. And you guys are like you know, we're designers, right? Like architects,

even even his employees That was an artist was like, This is impossible. This is an impossible task. And we're like, Yeah, this is this is pretty impossible. And I remember us telling telling him, like, Look that, you know, there's no way we can do this. And why did you wait to the last minute and like, you know, like, there's not gonna be much we can do. But I said, You know what?

We can pull a trick from the agency world, induce a mood board work for electric way. So, you know, we explained to him what a mood board was. We said, you know, we could take the inspiration that you have for these rooms, and we can put it We can do some Internet research, and we can pull together some images and build a collage so that your investors get an idea of what the feeling of these rooms were gonna be. And we can supplement that with written bullets and maybe a little bit of hand drawing.

Yeah, that's yeah, and

I don't remember exactly what he said, but that's how we proceeded.

Yeah, well, I mean, we didn't go that route, so I would assume that he said No problem. Because I remember just sitting there staring at a pen and paper and just not knowing what to do. So I started drawing this couch, and I'm not an artist, you know? So I drew this couch and looked like a doughnut. I don't know. It was just not a couch. Wasn't going very well. Matthew is also trying to draw like the mermaid didn't go very well. So we went through all this paper and two hours later, really didn't have anything. E he's asking you to do something that's not your

profession. Are so young. And so they would take weeks or months

to do even if we wait right

on. Investor meeting? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It was really difficult. Like, you know, I was kind of crying inside because you know that you're, like, on the spot on, And, you know, at this moment in time, we didn't even know what we were gonna get paid. We didn't really care.

We just thought it was an opera with what we thought honestly, and our hearts was that we were helping a friend of a friend. Do something. You know, we felt like we were doing. We took a Sunday out of our weekend, out of the kindness of her heart to help someone. We were only thinking about money. Really? What? Look, I wasn't

So how did this all, like, end up? Like you did this stuff and it just didn't really work out just, like awkwardly left way. It was We stayed past 11. For sure was one o'clock in the morning and we were all getting tired. And David Blaine kind of came out from behind his book case and summoned Anthony. It was like, he please come back here and present the work that you've done so far. I'll leave that to Anthony to tell you what happened behind the booth.

So, yeah, I mean, so keep in mind, You know, at this time, you know, I was Natalie was, like, 21 years old. I was, You know, I wasn't that old either. It was maybe 27. Didn't have a lot of experience like presenting work. You know, this year was my first year really being a creative director.

So I was a bit worried not only presenting it to someone like this, but also knowing that we did not. We could not do what he was asking us to do. So I was trying to, you know, in the best way I could convince him that what we did was better than nothing. And so he sat down to my right, and Natalie and Matt and everyone else were to my left, and I'm I'm gonna lay each page down and he says, I can't use it. Shit doesn't work. Piece of crap. Not gonna don't want to look at it like, pretty much no discussion at all. He literally just made me go through the stack of papers and each, you know, newpage landing on the table. You know, we were told how much of a piece of shit it was. Basically,

How should he? Yeah, our work was even after we told him that we that wasn't what we did. Yeah, that's

mean. Yeah. And, uh, he, uh he came, he went, he disappeared for a little bit, came back, and he handed us each $100 or $200 escorted us out the building. And you know, after telling us that you know that you know, he couldn't use with anything we did. You know, we I don't remember whether I was thinking this or actually said it, but I want to believe that I told him that, you know, that he waited way too long to do to do something like this. I don't remember if I if I really defended, you know, the professional sort of stands on the mistake that he made.

Yeah, because I mean the mystic Yet the mistake that he made waas I have a meeting tomorrow, right? And I maybe I better have some visuals for this. Jeez. And he made that your problem. He's probably just like, I'm David Blaine, and I can get this in six hour, man.

You know, it was it was demoralizing way. Thought we were there to help help someone. It clearly wasn't appreciated. And, you know, it was a challenge that we tried to take on to push ourselves to do something different, which I think was cool. But way walked away. And, of course, the you know, it took an hour to get home on the train. And we're our own, Really.

I mean, The good thing is that even though it wasn't ideal like an ideal situation, we did walk away with it with some learnings. I think that we still kind of talk about seven years later, you know, get into another

situation. Nothing. Only the only thing I remember after that is that night I wrote an email to my boss and I said, Hey, David Blaine's and ask I told him, I just want This is a terrible experience

So what would you say? You know, you guys say you always think back to this experience when you're like, Well, remember we learned that. What would you like? One of the eyes? The lesson, Yeah, in summary, like one of those, I think, is just even though a project maybe really enticing. And it may be with, like, one of the best clients or your dream client or what not, you know,

like don't jump in headfirst. It's not excuse just to kind of that's true. I I think that's a good point. I am very easily like excited. It's hard not to be,

but one into the other. Another point is when someone is that behind schedule, it's about there's a reason why it's because they're they're they're not prepared. And, you know, it doesn't matter what you do or how good you are. It's not. It may not end, right, you know, So and that happens a lot in our industry. You know, it may not be a matter of 24 hours, but a lot of people come, you know, two agencies asking for something that they need in one or two weeks or a month for, you know, something similar.

And, you know, he could have, at least like even if, Like, he waas like, not excited about the work. You know, you could have at least just said thanks. I know this is hard for you guys. I know you gave your whole weekend day or whatever. You know, that's what made it worse, right? He didn't say that. Like, thank you for your effort.

Yeah, he said this work something, and we're like, you guys are like and then I got escorted. Hey, make sure they don't steal anything way. Make sure I'm not Houdini books. Make sure none of mine just might. Houdini books disappeared. Well, on also one thing. Another thing too is like another takeaway from that. It's just kind of knowing what you're doing before you actually try to do it. Because we wanted it to be like, Hey, what does he want versus just,

like, you know, jumping in headfirst? Maybe we wouldn't have, you know, gone

through with it. Yeah, it's important to you know, in that case, we could have done a simple 15 minute discovery phone call to make sure that we were the right people for this thing. Because maybe, if not, maybe he would have had time to find someone. Maybe not. But at least we could have avoided this situation altogether.

Well, well, this has been a very interesting life lesson that don't don't go to strange location with David Blaine. Magicians. Layers

are very definitely changed. Definitely changed my opinion of him.

You know, that's there's something to be said there for sure. I mean, public image is not Thomas. You really have behind the scenes there. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. And what? One of the things I just popped into my head is don't underestimate or don't undervalue the time that your time. Your time? Yeah, especially on your weekends. You know, It means it should mean a lot to have that time

Every time that we have ever approached Pretend like a situation where we say, Oh, where we want to do this for someone of the kindness of heart or we're gonna do this free where we're gonna do this on the weekend. We're gonna do this at night. It's always more often than not, it bites us in the ass because people really just don't appreciate something. It's free. I don't

think I mean, actually, no, you think about ft. Think of a time where some work has come to you in that setting. Like you have no idea. Hey, I need you for a day. Come, come do this right now. Can you think what time we're actually did work out like, well, you know, like, is that it just sort of, like, unavoidable to fail? Yeah,

I think so. Yeah. You know, a lot of I'm sure a lot of freelancers that come from places like the credited group, whatever suffer from that because they're just put on site out of nowhere out of the blue on for a day or two, you know, and that they don't have enough time to really look at the problem. They just executing or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, if there's no strategy or anything like that, like No, like this is, you know, experiment like there's no experimentation of discovery and understanding the problem and then understanding why all of these first ideas are not good at not good ideas. And then, you know, how do you know it's just

someone that looks at it that way, though from the client side is it's a red flag, right, because they don't appreciate the, you know, the practice of design. Then there's no way you're gonna get anything good from someone who understands designed. I understand that there's gonna be time for ramp up, time for discussion and a process to whittle it down. Had David Blaine looked at this a little bit differently, he could have taken the things we did and took them to an actual artist. Saved thousands of dollars on getting really things done using our work Is the discovery artifact,

right? Um, you know. Well, there you have it. David Blaine. Excellent street magician. Terrible creative director. Today's episode is brought to you by paying board on employee directory that will supercharge your team. Today's best companies use people to help their growing team continue to feel small. Pink Board Company directory lets your team learn about each other in a way that's fun and engaging managers that they always have about their team wherever they are. With being bored, you have one place to organize everything from private employee data. Thio shared photos, contact info and fun fax. Now, with the teen board vacation calendar, your team will always know when someone's out with a few taps of the ping board mobile out. Anyone can share that they're working remote sick or that they'll be in police scooted ivy. Next, show your team how much you love them by trying.