Adding the Right Amount of Mischief Can Make Anything GO VIRAL.

Gabe Whaley's art collective sells holy water sneakers, cartoon boots, a community-owned car and a wealth-ranking ATM. Here's what his customers buy, and how you can run the same play.

Gabe Whaley walked onto the TED stage and introduced himself as a traveling car salesman. Parked beside him sat a vintage PT Cruiser with faux wood side paneling. He was there to sell the keys.

"I have 5,000 of these keys, and every single last one of them works to that car," he told the audience. Buy one and you get access to the car. So do 4,999 other people. "Whatever happens beyond that is not necessarily my problem," he said. "Like I said, I'm just a car salesman."

The project is real. MSCHF, the art collective Whaley co-founded in 2016, released Key4All in the fall of 2022. Whoever found the PT Cruiser got to drive, until another key holder tracked the car down. For nine months, Whaley watched the PT Cruiser change hands hundreds of times, from New York to Philadelphia, across the Midwest, and out to the West Coast. Then the GPS went dark. Then a tow pound called. People kept showing up to claim the car, and every one of them held a working key.

MSCHF took the car back, no longer running, and put the PT Cruiser in a Los Angeles gallery. At the opening, Whaley noticed key holders who had flown in from around the country. They came to see the car. They stayed to meet each other, trading photos and stories about their own runs behind the wheel.

"This project was never about the car," Whaley said. "It was never about the keys. It was about the people."

His line holds the answer to the question I ask about every brand.

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

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

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

"Our constant feed is something the other people are wrong, you're the smart one, you are the only sane one in this group," he told me. "And we're all being told that."

Magic runs the other direction. "It makes you feel like an untainted human again," he said. "You don't know everything. And we don't. But we like to be told we do, and our phones help us think we know everything."

His answer holds a lesson for every marketer fighting for attention on a screen.

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

"He can't sleep without our product," Eight Sleep co-founder and CEO Matteo Franceschetti told me.

I first interviewed Franceschetti on Behind the Brand in 2021. His company had raised an $86 million Series C at a $500 million valuation. In March 2026, Eight Sleep raised $50 million led by Tether at a $1.5 billion valuation. On September 23, the company launched Pod 6 at a starting price of $1,999. Franceschetti puts the old entry price near $3,000.

At Goodbrain, I push founders to answer two questions at the start of any new project. The first works from the inside out. What business are you really in? The second works from the outside in. What am I really buying when I buy your product? Eight Sleep gives a clear answer to both. Neither answer is a bed.

The company has no foam experts on staff.

Franceschetti's origin story starts with a complaint. "Elon Musk was taking me to Mars, but I was still spending a third of my life on a piece of dumb foam," he said. "How is it possible that we are building reusable rockets, but then I spend a third of my life, which could be 30 years, on a piece of dumb foam? It makes no sense."

He holds a low opinion of the mattress business. "They all buy the same foam," he said, and then charge many times more for the finished product. In his view, the last real innovation in the category came from a NASA contract. Aeronautical engineer Charles Yost invented memory foam in 1966 to make airplane seats safer in a crash.

"We don't have foam experts because we don't treat foam and we don't care about foam," Franceschetti said. "You can buy any mattress you like, cheaper or more expensive. It's your call. You put our product on top of that and you will finally get better sleep."

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